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| Hull Commercial Pals Approaching the Somme, 28 June 1916 |
By Mark M. Hull, PhD, Professor, U.S. Army Command & General Staff College
The 141-day clash between Allied and German forces along the Somme in the summer and fall of 1916 is difficult to evaluate. While the surviving participants were perhaps too damaged for reflective analysis, the more distant leaders on both sides were more sanguine and certain they had achieved success, by whatever definition. After the war, memories of the event – some more accurate than others – propelled this complicated series of unit actions into the position it has held since: a by-word for the hemorrhage of lives for no gain, and for military leaders’ uncaring sacrifice of an entire generation of young men. Some more recent scholarship has attempted to rehabilitate the cultural legacy, arguing that from the British perspective, at least, the deaths of so many achieved a positive result even if that result was unintended or unappreciated at the time. These historians argue that in an attritional struggle the enemy’s manpower and resources must be worn down to the breaking point, and contend that the hundreds of thousands of German casualties on the Somme, combined with their staggering losses at Verdun, were integral to their defeat, even though the Allied victory was more than two years away. Whether or not that arithmetic comforted the families of those lost over that bloody period in 1916 is another issue entirely. . .
The Allies won the Great War, more than two years after the Somme offensive. Did the Somme play a vital role in that success? Was this an important aspect of the attritional struggle that collapsed the German army in October and November 1918? Did the more than 19,000 men who died on 1 July alone contribute to that First V-E day? How should we interpret the greater meaning of what happened on the Western Front In 1916? Unfortunately, none of these questions have a satisfying answer,and perhaps that is why our cultural memory of this long-ago event is so ambiguous. For understandable reasons, the British have faithfully kept the traditions of memorializing World War I. Remembrance Day, marked by displays of poppies and dignified public ceremony, has a somber connection to what happened in France in 1916. Selfless service and heroism are recognized from a war now removed from personal memory. Rightly or wrongly, 11 November also brings with it hazy images of a command being given, a whistle blowing, lines of brown-uniformed men slowly climbing ladders, going over the top of the trenches, all heading for a certain, futile death. The Somme has become the centerpiece of that cultural narrative. The truth here, as with most things, probably lies in the middle.
A fair assessment is that the Somme was a necessary and painful place of transition from the Allied army that often foundered in the first two years of war to the Allied army that was qualitatively and quantitatively superior to its German opponents by 1918. That transition came at a terrible cost but was nonetheless a decisive pivot from what had come before and the more effective things that would eventually come after.
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| Vigil at Thiepval Memorial, July 2016 |
Visitors to the battlefield should take time to see the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, located a few kilometers southwest of the site of the original village, which was destroyed during the war, in the Somme Department of the Hauts-de-Fance region in Northern France. Dominating the high ground near Beaumont-Hamel, it towers over the fields which saw so much death in the summer and autumn of 1916. It Would be natural for strangers to assume that the 72,195 names carved all around the massive granite pillars are those of the dead, but they are not. They are the names of the missing: only British, Commonwealth, and South African, and only from the Somme. Their moment of sacrifice and significance in 1916 came at a human and emotional cost that modern descendants can no longer fathom
Source: Forgotten Decisive Victories, Army Press, 2017
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