The True Texture of the Somme
‘The German artillery, with targets no gunner could resist concentrated on the British. For long minutes this line or that of the many waves succeeding each other was completely invisible in the smoke of explosions a mile long, and when seen again, though showing gaps of hundreds of yards where there had been men before, was perceived to be slowly advancing at the same even pace. As a display of bravery it was magnificent, as an example of tactics its very memory made one shudder. ’
(Major-General Sir Edward Spears, ‘Prelude to Victory’)
‘The extended lines started in excellent order, but gradually melted away. There was no wavering or attempting to come back, the men fell in their ranks, mostly before the first hundred yards of No Man's Land had been crossed.’
(Official History)
‘And to Private Ball it came as if a rigid beam of great weight flailed about his calves, caught from behind by ballista-baulk let fly or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walker below, below, below When golden vanities make about, you've got no legs to stand on. He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering the fragility of us.’
(David Jones, ‘In Parenthesis’)
The literature of 1 July 1916 is endless. Salutary at first, a proper corrective to the streams of pro- paganda clap-trap about ‘laughing heroes’ and ‘the Great Adventure’ which had previously gushed forth, after a time it developed into a most mischievous mythology. To concentrate so single- mindedly on one day of battle on one front in a war of many fronts lasting over 1,500 days cannot fail to be mischievous. To continue to do so when six decades have gone by is not only mischievous but morbid too. In any case, since no war has a monopoly of disaster, the day to look at is not 1 July, but 2 July; what matters, in the end, is how the disaster is taken, what the response to it is. July the 2nd, 1916, was a ‘make or break’ day; the British Army decided to ‘make’, not ‘break’, to its eternal honour.
Nobody, of course, on 2 July, could really assess the dimensions of the catastrophe of the previous day, but, on the other hand, nobody at or near the battle-front could escape the awareness that something awful had taken place. Nothing like those 57,000 casualties had ever happened before, and, contrary to popular mythology, nothing like it happened to the British Army again in that war. Indeed, in the army's whole history there is no other day so tragic until 15 February 1942, when 85,000 officers and men surrendered to the Japanese in Singapore, to begin a captivity fatal to many and vile for all. On 1 July 1916, British divisions sustained casualties which later in the battle they would only expect to incur in a week, a fortnight or even a month of hard fighting.’ Certainly no single day in the whole Third Ypres (‘Passchendaele’) battle can begin to compare with the first day of the Somme; not even the calamity of the German break-in on 21 March 1918 produced such losses. I have said already that 1 July was a freak; one eighth of the total loss for the whole battle, with 141 more days to go; need one say more?
The reason for the disaster, unfortunately for mythology, is not to be found in any single, simple fact - such as an imprecise order (as at Balaklava), running out of ammunition at a critical moment (Isandlhwana), over-confidence (Maiwand), failure to reconnoitre (Spion Kop), or stupid generalship (popular myth). It is, as in most large affairs, rather in a complex of causes that we may find the key to the tragedy. The first of these deserving consideration,I would suggest, is one that British insularity and a certain unconscious but unpleasant arrogance have obscured and often neglected entirely: the quality of the German Army. Because the Battle of the Somme was the first great test of the Kitchener Army - the Citizen Army of Great Britain - British accounts generally dwell upon the enthusiasm and elan of these high-spirited, patriotic and physically elite volunteers. Often such accounts ignore or play down the almost complete lack of experienced officers and NCOs, and the consequent low level of practical training and tactical clumsiness of these formations, contrasted with the BEF of 1914 or the German Army of mid-1916. It is revealing that British units habitually used three or four times as many officers in action as their opponents usedz- with the natural result that British officer casualties were three or four times as high, thus preventing the accretion of experience. The Germans, on the other hand, took care to preserve their officers as a precious asset (without apparently, provoking adverse reactions from their disciplined rank and file).
The main reason why the Germans were able to economize on officers in this way was that there still remained, in the German Army, a fair proportion of those 100,000 highly trained NCOs with which they began the War. It was, among other things, the training and discipline imparted, at the depots and at the front itself, by these invaluable men that enabled the German infantry to endure the miseries and losses of the eight-day preliminary bombardment, during which they received from the British artillery no less than 1,732,873 shells of all calibres. Admittedly, owing to British inexperience in munitions production, the disgracefully high proportion of about 30 per cent of the shells turned out to be ‘duds’. Nevertheless, the remainder constituted a severe and novel ordeal for the Germans, a foretaste of the ‘material-schlacht’ (battle of material) of the later stages. But on 1 July discipline and courage (which rarely failed them) enabled them to leave their shelters, deep or frail, man their shattered parapets and defend bitterly the ruins of their village fortresses. Those who would truthfully seek reasons for the slaughter of the advancing British regiments should look first towards their enemies, down the steady, levelled rifle barrels of the German infantry, and note the calm purpose and cool nerves of the well-trained German machine-gunners, and the quick, accurate reactions of their artillerymen.
That said, giving credit where it is overdue, one may turn to the faults on the British side -and these were certainly many. We have remarked the shocking results of inexperience in the munitions factories. The same defect made itself apparent on the battlefield; it began with the troops themselves. A very young officer in July 1916 later wrote: ... enthusiastic amateurs when the fighting began, the British were soldiers at the end.’3 He means, of course, the ones who survived - though even the dead had lessons to teach. The cruel loss of regimental officers which so appalled Lloyd George was largely due to inexperience, to officers having to expose and expend themselves in attempts to compensate for the inexperience of the other ranks - in other words, by doing jobs that corporals and sergeants should have been doing.* with the ironical results that very soon sergeants and cor- porals were having to step into the shoes of dead or wounded officers. And so the errors compounded.
But inexperience stretched upwards far beyond the regiments. The level of generalship in closest contact with the front line was that of brigadier. In August 191 4, the six infantry divisions formed for war contained eighteen brigadiers. The fifty-six infantry divisions of the 1916 BEF required 168 (the BEF as a whole, of course, required far more). Hastily promoted from all arms, it would be to ascribe to these officers superhuman qualities to pretend that their performances were not variable. Here is a portrait of one under whom it would have been better not to serve, though fortunately there were many who did not resemble him:
It must be admitted that our Brigadier was exceedingly brave, and therefore he retained our respect to a large extent, in spite of his schoolmaster's manner. Unfortunately, he could not consent to delegate authority, and he left no initiative to his subordinates; he treated his colonels like company commanders, and they supplied him with any amount of eyewash. He had a terribly symmetrical mind, and symmetry and good organisation rarely go together; also, he loved blood, and he seemed callous as to whether the blood was German or British; danger excited him but blood intoxicated him, and his eyes would glow when a show was on. Possibly this more or less homicidal mania took the place of other vices, for both wine and women were a dead letter to him.
So we come to the major-generals commanding the divisions. These were very important people; indeed, a theory developed (and won continued advocacy after the War) that the division had replaced the regiment as the Army's basic unit, which is really to misunderstand the functions of both. That apart, it is fair to say that in 1916 the most effective level of battle control was divisionaI;6 this was the nearest point to the front where co-ordination of all arms took place, where reserves could be committed, held back or redirected, where plans could be significantly modified. It was also the key point for the collection and transmission of information to higher formations, Corps, Army, GHQ. Fifty-six good major-generals to command the infantry divisions (plus five for the cavalry, more for the staff, then those required for other theatres - Egypt, Mesopotamia, Salonika, East Africa, and others besides) was a lot to ask of an army which had begun its operations with only six. A year earlier, when he was commanding the First Army, and Mr Asquith had come to lunch at his headquarters, Haig told the Prime Minister (among other things) of the ‘necessity for promoting young officers to high command. To make room some of the old ones must be removed. We went through the lists of Major-Generals, etc in the Army List. I said it was important to go low down on the List and get young, capable officers. He agreed.” No doubt he did; but, as most wars show, such matters are easier to agree than to implement. When we consider the Somme on 1 July, we need to remember that of the twenty-three divisional commanders present, only three had commanded as much as a brigade before the war. Such are the penalties of making do with a small peacetime army.
Above the divisional commanders stood the eighteen commanders of army corps: lieutenant- generals, lofty potentates disposing of two, three or more divisions. Before August 191 4 there was only one formed army corps in the British Army, the one at Aldershot; II and III Corps only came into existence at the outbreak of war, though their commanders were designated. Everything above that was an ‘ad hoc’ wartime creation. Of the eighteen corps commanders in 1916, two had com- manded divisions in peacetime. Yet each of these generals might now be entrusted with 60,000 men or more, powerful artillery, aircraft, and important administrative functions requiring staffs which together totalled well over 400 officers. These were in addition to the staffs of brigades, divisions, armies, GHQ and the lines of communication. Such numbers of staff officers take some finding; as far back as 1902 Field-Marshal Lord Roberts had warned: . .
it seems clear that the entire staff should be thoroughly trained; that a definite system of carrying out staff duties should be laid down; and that we should have enough trained staff officers to supply in case of emergency, a large army ... staff officers cannot be improvised; nor can they learn their duties, like the rank and file, in a few weeks or months, for their duties are as varied as they are important. I am decidedly of opinion that we cannot have a first-rate army, unless we have a first-rate staff, well educated, constantly practised at manoeuvres, and with wide experience.
Yet in August 1914 there were only 447 officers in the entire Army List who could put ‘p.s.c.’ (passed Staff College) after their names;° the staffs did have to be improvised, after all, and, as may be supposed, their quality was correspondingly uneven.
So we come to the two British generals who actually ‘fought' the Battle of the Somme (in the sense that Wellington ‘fought’ Waterloo, Montgomery ‘fought’ the Second Battle of Alamein, or Slim ‘fought’ the Battle of Meiktila-Mandalay): General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding the Fourth Army, and General Sir Hubert Gough, commanding the Reserve (later Fifth) Army. For both, this was a first time: the awesome first experience of responsibility for hundreds of thousands of their fellow men, in circumstances completely unfamiliar, with no blueprints, no clear rules. Both these officers were to display, at various times, high qualities. It is generally agreed that Gough's dismissal in 1918 was politically inspired and most unfair; Rawlinson, in that year, was a considerable architect of the final victory. If they made mistakes on the Somme in 1916 it was certainly not because either was stupid; if they had made no mistakes they would not have been human. It was their fate that any mistake, in a war of such masses, very quickly becomes a dreadful affair.
Two more people were intimately concerned with the British attack on 1 July: General Sir Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief, and General Foch, commanding the French Northern Army Group, whose Sixth Army attacked alongside the British. A week before the battle opened, Haig's Advanced Headquarters came to the Somme area, to occupy a hutted camp near Amiens The C.-in-C. himself was lodged at the Chateau de Valvion nearby, roughly equidistant from the headquarters of Rawlinson and Gough.
The correct position for a C.-in-C. at such a time is not easy to decide. Obviously, the great offensive, the biggest thing the British Army had ever undertaken, was going to occupy a great deal of his time and attention. However, his responsibility for the sectors of the Third, First and Second Armies, stretching up into Belgium, remained undiminished (just as General Alexander in Cairo remained responsible for the Middle East as a whole while Montgomery was fighting his battle at Alamein, and General Leese - with his headquarters in Ceylon - carried the responsibilities of South East Asia Command Land Forces Commander while Slim was advancing down Burma in 1945). Grant, in a similar situation in 1864, had chosen to establish his headquarters alongside that of the Army of the Potomac; no doubt, in a war fought without benefit of telephone or wireless (though the electric telegraph did already exist), this was correct; for communicating with distant theatres Grant might have found Washington more convenient - but he hated the atmosphere of Washington. Joffre and his opponents, Falkenhayn and later Hindenburg and Ludendorff, were content to keep their head- quarters a long way from the front, and pay visits to the armies engaged in battle.
As a national chief, Haig was rather more than just the commander of a group of armies. He could expect to have to receive and transact business with many very important people: the King, the French President, other Allied heads of state, Ministers, notabilities of the Dominions, Allied officers from Joffre (whom he regarded as in practice Generalissimo of the whole front) downwards. Hence the chateau - but Haig too was learning. The following year he found that a properly equipped train made a more satisfactory Advanced GHQ when battles were in progress; in the next war Montgomery and others would use caravans.
Haig kept a close eye on all the planning of the Somme attack, but he suffered from certain serious inhibitions. He believed firmly in the principle of leaving decisions to the ‘man on the spot’, the man who would actually have to carry them out. In this particular case, this belief was reinforced by the fact that Haig himself was a cavalryman, while Rawlinson was an infantryman, and it had become perfectly clear by July 1916 that the infantry would always bear the brunt of battle in this war. Con- sequently, though Haig drew attention to the German probing methods at Verdun, which had impressed him, when Rawlinson and the other infantrymen settled for linear attack (in order to obtain simultaneous impact), Haig did not feel that he could override them. Later in the War he would be less diffident. And when Foch demanded an attack in broad daylight (in accordance with the French doctrine that the gunners should have the benefit of maximum visibility) instead of the dawn half-light that many British officers would have preferred, once again Haig gave way to his more experienced partner. The resulting contrast of style and performance has been harrowingly described by General Spears, watching at the junction of the two armies: .... my memory was seared with the picture of the French and British attacking together on the Somme on July 1st 1916, the British rigid and slow, advancing as at an Aldershot parade in lines that were torn and ripped by the German guns, while the French tactical formations, quick and elastic, secured their objectives with trifling loss. It had been a terrible spectacle.’’°
So at every stage, from the Commander-in-Chief himself to the humblest devoted soldier ‘doing his bit’, right back to the munitions workers in the factories at home and a general public which had never brought itself to consider such ghastly scenes, we see inexperience and sheer novelty playing their parts in the tragic drama. Of course, no one and no nation is born with experience. In 1915 the French had conducted two major offensives in Champagne and two more in Artois, buying their experience of such matters at a price of some 1,430,000 casualties. They, too, had attacked in lines, wearing red kepis and red trousers; the ‘horizon-blue’ uniforms and elastic formations of 1916 were belated afterthoughts. In the autumn of 191 4, when the Germans threw enthusiastic but untrained volunteers into the First Battle of Ypres, the result was what they called the ‘Kindermord'- the ‘massacre of the innocents’. Now it was Britain's turn.
Significant though this inexperience was, there were other factors present on 1 July that were equally so. There was above all, technology, and in particular, at that stage of the War, communica- tion, urgently awaiting a technological breakthrough. It never came; this was a problem never really overcome during the entire War, though inroads were made into it. What was required was apparatus which did not become available until the next war. The result was that, from 1914 to 1918, at the moment when troops were committed to battle, the moment when they left their trenches to make their footings in the complex of enemy positions, usually lost to sight behind a curtain of shell-bursts, they almost certainly passed out of the control of their generals. Generals, in fact, became quite impotent at the very moment when they would expect and be expected to display their greatest proficiency; as Haig ruefully remarked in 1918, ‘This is really a platoon com- manders’ war.”’ Meanwhile, attempts were made to cure the evil by a long list of devices; one single one, of course, would have done the trick: the two-way portable radio set, the ‘walkie-talkie’. But it did not exist. And because it did not exist, no one, on 1 July and many other days of murderous battle, had the slightest idea of what was happening at the front, where the troops were, or where the enemy was; and there was no chance at all of doing anything about it. So one forlorn attack followed another, because no one could stop them, and to the lines of dead and wounded from the first sickening repulse were added line upon line of those that followed along mile after mile of front.
The British preliminary bombardment amazed the Germans, and as the battle continued their con- sternation at the ever-increasing weight of British artillery fire grew. To the British gunners and their commanders came a sense of luxury, after the penury of 1914 and 1915, when guns them- selves had been few and every shell precious. Now, they believed, they had at last the power to unlock a defensive front. In fact they had not. It seemed prodigious, in June 1916, to fire off 1,732,873 rounds in eight days, but a year later, in June 1917 at Messines, the Second Army artillery fired off 3,258,000 rounds in the same period. And in September 1918, in the course of the assault on the Hindenburg Line, the British artillery fired off 943,847 rounds in twenty-four hours. It was an artillery war; the British were still learning what that meant, and the failure of so much of their ammunition in 1916 did not make matters easier for them. That, like inexperience, was some- thing that time would correct; meanwhile the infantry would bleed still more.
There was not much, then, to brag about on 2 July, in the way of success. Along a great deal of the front, no gain had been made at all - or, if made, not held. The remains of the units in the first attack were pulled out, and replaced by divisional and corps reserves; the awful task of collecting the wounded and, where possible, doing something about the 19,240 dead, went forward. The Germans, oddly enough, made little attempt to interfere with the British activities; even their shelling, both on the British front line and on the congested rear areas, was light. No doubt they, too, had their problems. Anyway, it was, in the words of the Official History, ‘an almost peaceful scene’.
On the extreme right, however, next to the French, for whom 1 July had been a day of spectacular success,’2 a different pattern established itself. There the British XIII Corps had gained almost all its objectives - and as a result became the first formation to learn what the true texture of this battle was going to be. Between 3 and 4 a.m. on the morning of 2 July, four large groups of infantry, belonging to the German 23rd Reserve, 18th Reserve, 5 1st Reserve Regiments and 16th Bavarian Regiment, counter-attacked on both sides of the captured village of Montauban and the junction of the British and French Armies. These attacks failed, as most of the British attacks had failed on the previous day; but they were a warning of things to come, a sign of what was going to make the Battle of the Somme the turning point of the War.
What modern students, misled by myth and deafened by sixty years of lamentation, often find difficult to grasp about 2 July 1916 is that despite everything that had happened during the previous twenty four hours, nowhere does one find any hint or suggestion of not continuing the fight. It was clear that the German positions had not fallen like ripe plums - but the British Army was not in any case accustomed to a diet of ripe plums. As early as 10 p.m. on 1 July, Rawlinson was giving orders for the resumption of the battle along the whole front, and on the same evening he handed over the two left-hand corps to Gough, for easier control. The next day, as more, but still very incomplete, information came in, Haig was at Fourth Army headquarters and told Rawlinson: ’The enemy has undoubtedly been severely shaken and he has few reserves in hand. Our correct course, therefore, is to press him hard with the least possible delay ...’“
Rawlinson concurred, but they disagreed about how it should be done. Apart from his insistence on the early capture of Fricourt in the centre (the hinge of the whole front, now forming a sharp and dangerous re-entrant in the British line), Haig's idea was to concentrate on exploiting the success on the right beside the French. Rawlinson, he says, ‘did not seem to favour the scheme’ - probably because of the awkward congestion of Franco-British communications on the north bank of the Somme. But Gough's appalled discovery of the extent of the disaster on the left put a swift end to Rawlinson's idea of a general attack. ‘In one day,’ says Gough, ‘my thoughts and ideas had to move from consideration of a victorious pursuit to those of the rehabilitation of the shattered wing of an army.’ As a result, the next fortnight's operations of the Fourth Army took on a disconnected look, each of the three corps attacking strong localities (Fricourt, La Boisselle, Ovillers, etc) with varying success. The hard grind had begun; nobody could dream how long it would continue.
What made it certain to continue, however, was the frame of mind of the enemy. The ‘motor’ of the War, the German Army was also the ‘motor’ of the Somme. On 2 July General von Falkenhayn paid a visit to General von Below, whose Second Army held the Somme front. Falkenhayn told von Below that ‘the first principle in position warfare must be to yield not one foot of ground; and if it be lost to retake it by immediate counter-attack, even to the use of the last man.’" Von Below accordingly issued an Order of the Day on 3 July, saying:
The decisive issue of the war depends on the victory of the Second Army on the Somme. We must win this battle in spite of the enemy's temporary superiority in artillery and infantry. The important ground lost in certain places will be recaptured by our attack after the arrival of reinforcements. For the present, the important thing is to hold our present positions at any cost and to improve them by local counter-attacks. I forbid the voluntary evacuation of trenches. The will to stand firm must be impressed on every man in the Army. I hold Commanding Officers responsible for this. The enemy should have to carve his way over heaps of corpses. '°
These were the orders that gave the Battle of the Somme its texture. It is always referred to as a ‘British offensive’, and quite correctly: there were few days when some British unit, large or small, was not attacking the enemy in some fashion. From time to time these assaults were undertaken on a grand scale, such as the dawn attack on 14 July (contrasting so vividly with the debacle of 1 July), or the famous sub-battle of Flers-Courcelette in September, when tanks made their debut in war. In between these big occasions there was a constant struggle for particular objectives during which the British inched their way forward over what rapidly became the landscape of a dreadful nightmare, marked by place-names which became signposts on the roads of Hell. By the end of July, at a cost reported by British GHQ of 7,920 officers and 156,789 other ranks, they had won the splintered stumps of Trones Wood, but they had not won Guillemont, less than a mile beyond, for all their trying. They had got Longueval, but they still could not claim the whole of Delville Wood, ‘Devil's Wood’, which seemed veritably to be the home of the Devil. They had got Bazentin-ie-Petit, and they had just got Poziéres; the 1st Australian Division alone suffered 5,278 casualties in a week to put that name into history. They had got Ovillers at last, but they had not got Thiepval, where the Ulstermen had lost over 5,000 on 1 July; another three and a half months were going to have to pass before they would get Beaumont Hamel, where the Newfoundland Regiment had been literally annihilated on that opening day.
That was the British record for July. The French, of course, had also been busy, as their increasing losses show. From the French point of view, however, something far more important had been gained than patches of soggy ground along the River Somme. The first of July, a ‘curtain-up’ for the British that they would never forget, was, as I have already said and cannot say too often, for France the 132nd day of the Battle of Verdun, the ‘mill on the Meuse’ where Falkenhayn had planned to grind down the French Army. On 11 July, because of what was happening on the Somme, he had to order a ‘strict defensive’ at Verdun. He needed every man he could lay hands on to carry out the orders he had given to von Below.
By the end of July, responding to every British or French advance or attempt to advance, the German infantry had made not less than sixty-seven counter-attacks, large or small, that I can identify. Probably they had made a great many more, now lost in time's obscurity - possibly twice as many. This was the texture of the battle: attack, counter-attack; attack again, counter-attack again. This was why the Germans, both in the army at the front and at home, began to talk with horror about ‘the blood- bath of the Somme’. This is why it is so utterly pernicious to dwell constantly on the freak of 1 July, and to associate the whole battle with the image of that day. The picture of the British infantry rising from their trenches to be mown down is only a true picture of the Battle of the Somme when set beside that of the German infantry rising from their trenches to be mown down. Those military historians of the 1930s who did not perceive this were seriously at fault; those who, like Captain Liddell Hart, preferred to lend support to the Lloyd George-Churchill version of the battle did grave disservice to the men who fought on from 2 July, to history, and thereby to a nation which would shortly have to gird itself for another war.
The texture of the battle continued unchanged through August.” The Official History displays it in its sketches and maps by endless thin lines like fish-hooks: they are the attack arrows, going out, curving round, and coming back again, sometimes because the thing never stood a chance, most often because of counter-attacks - each hook the outline of another tragedy. In the chronologies, based on the contemporary communiques, the texture comes through in the endless repetition of place-names: counter-attacks at High Wood on the 1st, Delville Wood on the 2nd, Mouquet Farm on the 4th; High Wood again on the 12th, 17th, 18th and 19th; Delville Wood again on the 18th, 23rd and 24th, and then four times in one day in the big German counter-stroke on 31 August; Mouquet Farm again on the 11th, 12th, 18th and 26th.
A German regimental history, writing of this period, says: ‘The days on the Somme were the worst in the War.’ British officers with much battle experience on the Western Front said afterwards that the Germans never fought better than they did during this period on the Somme. For both sides it was, in the words of the Official History, ‘a grim test of endurance’.’° Yet such are the boundless resources of the human spirit that a young officer in the British 48th Division could write to his mother on 30 August ‘The battle is going awfully well ...’
September brought the crisis. This was not, as generally represented in British accounts, ‘the month of the tank’. These were a brand-new British invention in 1916; controversy surrounded their development after the War; in the Second World War British tanks did not, on the whole, do well. So September 1916 is often written about as though a whole history of error began then; thus Lloyd George:
‘So the great secret was sold for the battered ruin of a little hamlet on the Somme, which was not worth capturing.’“
The truth is, however, that the forty-nine Mark I tanks which appeared in battle on 15 September were no war-winners; neither were any others of First World War vintage. What made that day important was not the use of a new weapon by the British; it was that this was the only occasion in the entire war when the whole strength of the Entente was thrown into battle against Germany at the same time. On 12 September the Russians and Romanians attacked in Transylvania; on the same day the French Sixth Army also made a fresh, successful attack. On the 15th the Italians opened their Seventh Battle of the lsonzo. The British effort on that day was thus part of a concerted Allied endeavour, whose purpose was no less than to win, and so end, the War. Had this succeeded, ‘saving’ the tanks would have had little point indeed.
As we know, it did not succeed. One reason for this was, I suggest, the seventy-eight German counter-attacks which I have counted in the first fortnight of the month. They signified the last sacrificial exertion of the old German Army; High Wood attacked four times on 1 September, again on the 3rd, 8th and 15th; Mouquet Farm attacked on the 3rd, 4th, 8th, 9th, 1Oth, 11th and 12th; Ginchy attacked twice on the 3rd, twice on the 6th, several times on the 9th, three times on the 10th - and so on. Then came the big Allied attack on the 15th, with heavy loss to the Germans, and in the remainder of the month I can only identify forty-eight counter-attacks. Only! This massive counter-offensive effort by Germany in September 1916 seems to have escaped the notice of British historians; yet this was the very essence of the battle. This was what wore down the splendid German Army.
When at last the bastion of Thiepval fell to the British 18th Division on 27 September, a German soldier wrote: .
it was absolutely crushing. According to my idea, every German soldier from the highest general to the meanest private had the feeling that now Germany had lost the first great battle.’
Every indication - soldiers’ letters, letters to the soldiers, reports from inside Germany - was that he was right; that the Germans were weakening at last; that the time was at hand for the Allies to reap the reward of all their effort. Now, at last, one more big heave might finish the iob. But now a new enemy was in the field; in the ominous words of the Official History: ‘As September wore to a close, the troops of all arms began to regard the mud as their chief enemy.”° By mid-October, ‘the British front positions and the approaches thereto were a maze of water-logged shell-holes and flooded trenches’.2* A British officer describes the act of physical movement on the Somme in November:
It was like walking through caramel. At every step the foot stuck fast, and was only wrenched out by a determined effort, bringing away with it several pounds of earth till muscles ached in every leg. No one could struggle through that mud for more than a few yards without rest. Terrible in its cling- ing consistency, it was the arbiter of destiny, the supreme enemy, paralysing and mocking English and German alike. Distances were measured not in yards but in mud.’
By the end of the battle conditions were indescribable - worse than ‘Passchendaele’, according to some survivors of both:
‘Our vocabulary is not adapted to describe such an existence, because it is outside experience for which words are normally required. Mud, for the men in the line, was no mere inorganic nuisance and obstacle. It took on an aggressive, wolf-like guise, and like a wolf could pull down and swallow the lonely wanderer in the darkness.”’
Yet the battle continued, thanks to the unbelievable devotion of the Army, until 18 November. On the 13th, in clammy fog which no doubt hampered the defence as on many other occasions in the War, the 51st Highland Division at last took Beaumont Hamel. It is a measure of the change that had come over the battle that the 51st division, in the four days of fighting which included the capture of Beaumont Hamel, lost some 2,200 officers and men - compared with the 223 officers and 5,017 other ranks lost by the 29th Division for no gain at all, attacking the same village on 1 July.
Beaumont Hamel was the last success; five days later the battle officially ended. By that time, to my certain knowledge, the Germans had attacked the British not less than 330 times.2’Three hundred and thirty: it was the texture of the battle created by these incessant counter-attacks that gave the Somme its real significance. Just as, after the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, according to the Official History, ‘the old British Army was gone beyond recall’, so, according to one German staff officer, ‘the Somme was the muddy grave of the German field army’.2° Field-Marshal Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria said: 'what still remained of the old first-class peace-trained German infantry had been expended on the battlefield.’ ° And this was what Ludendorff meant when he said ‘The Army had been fought to a standstill and was utterly worn out.’3°
This, then, was what the Somme - linked to Verdun, where the French pressed home their own successful counter-offensives in October and November, and to General Brusilov's achievement in the East - really meant in the War: the loss, once and for all, of that intrinsic superiority of quality through peacetime training which the German Army had hitherto enjoyed - irreparable damage to the ‘motor’ of the War. Henceforward the German Army was in decline, becoming what its leaders called a ‘militia!. The British has been a militia ever since their small Regular Army vanished in 1914-15; now they were on equal terms, and, being relatively fresh late-comers, they would get better. The Somme was the turning point. The first dim harbingers of the still far-distant victories of 1918 may be discerned in the crude texture imparted to the Battle of the Somme by the German Army in 1916.
This article, from the late 1970s or early 1980s, was reproduced in Bulletin 106, in November 2016. Bulletin is one of several magazines available for free to members of The WFA. If you want to see more articles like this one, you may wish to become a member of The Western Front Association.
References:
1 e.g: 1 July 2nd Tour
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4th Div. 5, 752 8-28 Oct. just over 4,000
8th Div. 5,121 23-29 Oct. nearly 2,500
29th Div. 5,240 11-30 Oct. 1,874
etc.,etc.
2 Professor Sir Charles Oman, in his important article, ‘The German Losses on the Somme’, in The Nineteenth Century and After, May 1927, says: ‘in July 1916 we were sending into the line battalions with twenty-five combatant officers or more - the German battalions with only eight or nine.’ This simple fact, which seems to have entirely escaped both Lloyd George and Churchill, sufficiently accounts for the much heavier British officer casualties which upset them both so much. This was a persistent fault in the British Army. Writing of the Battles of Arras in 1917 (i, p. 554) the Official History says: ‘When British troops lost their officers, they were. apt to fall back, not because they were beaten but because they did not know what to do and expected to receive fresh orders. Perhaps the large numbers of officers commissioned and the fact that a sergeant rarely held command of a platoon for more than a few days lessened the prestige of the non-commissioned officer. .’
We find the same situation in the army of the 1930s and the Second World War: ‘The British Army with its large number of Officers tended to wet nurse the men mentally with the result that the rank and file never thought for themselves and all, including warrant officers and NCOs, lacked initiative.’ (Brigadier John Prendergast, Prender's Progress, Cassell, 1979, p. 56).
3 C.E. Carrington's Soldier from the Wars Returning, Hutchinson, 1965, p. 120.
4 Thus, on the night of 26-27 June 1916, the 1/4 East Yorkshires carried out a raid on the German Trenches: ‘Immediately prior to the raid the enemy wire where we were to enter was cut by two subalterns, a dangerous and difficult job which they carried out well.’ (Cecil M. Slack, Grandfather's Adventures in the Great War 1914-18, Arthur H. Stockwell, 1977, p.71; my emphasis). This was normal in the British Army, unthinkable in the German.
5 Neville Lytton, The Press and General Staff, Collins, 1920, pp. 50-51.
6 This remained to a large extent true in the Second World War. Thus Field Marshal Lord Slim, Defeat into Victory, Cassell, 1956, P. 447: ‘To watch a highly-skilled, experienced, and resolute commander controll- ing a hard-fought battle is to see, not only a man triumphing over the highest mental and physical stresses, but an artist producing his effects in the most complicated and difficult of the arts. I thought as I watched what very good divisional commanders I had.’ He was referring to Major-General D.T. (Punch) Cowan, 17th Indian Division, at Meiktila, 1 March 1945.
7 Haig Diary, 8 July 1915; author's papers.
8 Lord Roberts: Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa, i, p. 441; my emphasis. Lord Robert's idea of ‘a large army’ was ’250,000 and 300,000 men’; the BEF on 30 June 1916 numbered 1,426,000.
9 See the Royal Unite Services Institute Journal, November 1938.
10 Spears, Prelude to Victory, p. 91
11 Haig Diary, 29 July; see Duff Cooper, Haig, Faber, 1935, ii, p. 334.
12 For the French, as well as for the British, 1 July was a freak. The Germans expected only a demonstration, not an attack, and were taken by surprise. Just as the British never again did so badly, so the French never again did so well.
13 Haig Diary, 2 July; author's papers
14 General Sir Hubert Gough, The Fifth Army, Hodder and Stoughton, 1931, p. 139.
15 O.H., 1916, ii, p. 27.
16 Author's papers; a captured copy of von Below's Order is included in the Haig Papers of 4 July.
17 I count not less than fifty-eight German attacks.
18 125th Regiment, quoted in O.H., 1916, ii, p. 201, f.n.a.
19 Ibid., p. 174.
20 Graham H. Greenwell, An Infant in Arms, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1972, p. 134.
21 War Memoirs, Odham's, 1936, i, p. 385.
22 H W Wilson and J A Hammerton, The Great War: The Standard History of the All Europe Conflict, Amalgamated Press, 1914-1918, viii, p. 174.
23 O.H., 1916, ii, p. 356.
24 Ibid., p. 444.
25 Sidney Rogerson, Twelve Days, Arthur Barker, 1933, p. 29, Gerald Gliddon 1988, with new Introduction by John Terraine.
26 O.H., 1917 ii pp. 65-6, referring to November and December 1916.
27 The reader will note my recurring use of the phrase ‘not less than’. Sometimes, on a particular date, the source will say ‘several’ or simply ‘attacks’ in the plural. I decided to count all such cases as two attacks, because we know they mean more than one, but we do not know how many more; all my figures are therefore minimum.
28 O.H., 1916, i, p. 494.
29 Ibid., ii, p. xii.
30 General Erich Ludendorff, My War Memories 1914-1918, i, p. 3O4; Hutchinson 1919.
For more about John Terraine, see here.
