110 Years Ago Today, the 141 Days of the Somme Began

 

Some Random Thoughts

By Editor/Publisher Mike Hanlon

One summer day in 2016, I had a wonderful time in Sacramento, CA, making a presentation on the coming centennial of the Battle of the Somme for the city library's World War I Revisited Project. The turn-out was a "full house" and the audience was engaged and knowledgeable about the war. Our host, James Scott, could not have been more hospitable and helpful. I made some notes for my PowerPoint presentation. Here are some of my comments and images I used during the presentation, somewhat revised over the ensuing decade. Please keep in mind these are my views alone.  In the past, Roads to the Great War has published numerous articles on the famous battle; at the bottom you can find some tips on how to quickly access them.

1.  In the English-speaking world the Somme remains the war's signature battle. It gave the 20th century its most haunting image (at least before the mushroom cloud), a soldier rising out of a trench mowed down in no-man's-land in his tracks.

 

Men of the Newfoundland Regiment, 29th Division, 1 July 1916
In a Short Time 90 Percent of These Men Will Be Dead, Dying, or Wounded

2.  The First Day on the Somme is a story told over and over, but the next 140 days of the battle are the more important part of the tale. In the larger British sector, where the original intention was the rupture the German line, the battle seamlessly evolved into a war of attrition. The 60,000 killed and wounded they suffered on 1 July 1916 was multiplied by a factor of seven. Furthermore, in some dance of death, the German Army—despite having all the defensive advantages—managed to closely parallel the British losses.

3. Many authors focus blame for the incredible casualties on either Douglas Haig or 4th Army commander, Henry Rawlinson. Another entry in that discussion should be none other than General Joffre. Recall that France was the dominant member of the 1916 coalition and led (forcefully) the planning for that year's campaign. It was to be a joint French-British attack, originally with 39 French divisions committed. The requirements of dealing with Verdun did not inhibit Joffre's drive for the attack to proceed despite:

a.  An ever diminishing availability of French divisions, and

b. The skepticism about the whole affair from the northern sector commander, Ferdinand Foch.

Thiepval, Now Site of the Largest Somme Memorial
Close to the Front Line But Not Captured Until September 1916

4.  General Foch was one of the victims of the Somme. After the failure of the five-month battles and losses that accumulated at the same rate as Verdun, he found himself in disfavor and was pushed to the side in favor of the rising star, Robert Nivelle. Luckily, Foch was rehabilitated in time to become the most important Allied general of the 1918 campaign.

5.  The rolling, apparently open country of the Somme looked like the perfect location to attempt a major breakthrough. However, the Germans had been in the sector since October 1914 and converted every village, rise, ridge, and forest into a defensive stronghold. After the failure of the first day's assault, following the sound military principle of reinforcing success, rather than failure, Haig's staff decided to push south of the Albert-Baupame Road where there had been some modest, although incredibly expensive success around Fricourt village, and the singular fully successful British operation of the day, the capture of Montauban village.  The valley they chose to move through had a horseshoe of five small forests: Mametz, Bazantin, High, Delville, and Trones Woods. Each was a superb defensive position on a plateau, commanding the gently rising surrounding countryside. Readers know the story of Belleau Wood for the U.S. Marines. The middle phase of the Somme was Belleau Wood times five for the British Army.

6. One mystery about the Somme that I've never seen satisfactorily explained is how the German Army, which had minimal casualties on 1 July, managed to catch up to the grand total for the British Army over the next 140 days, despite being on the defensive throughout. They started out with all the advantageous positions, and they knew the Allies' intentions. Didn't the machine gun and massed artillery give the defenders a decisive advantage? Everywhere else they did. (I've concluded since I first wrote this section that a good portion of the German losses must have been due to their commanders obsessive practice of immediately counterattacking to regain any lost ground.)

Vigil at Thiepval Memorial, July 2016

7.  The Pals Battalions and, in general, the commitment of the under-trained New Army divisions are part of the tragic dimension of the Somme and elements of its compelling mythic heritage with its soccer balls, the Leaning Virgin, sacred trees, and countless memorials and cemeteries of varied design. The near-annihilation of the experienced 29th Division (with eight months continual combat at Gallipoli) in trying to capture the mine site on Hawthorne Ridge and Y-Ravine, however, shows that there were more fundamental flaws in the initial concept that the inexperience of the troops.

Hull Commercial Pals Approaching the Somme, 28 June 1916

8.  The poor bloody infantry suffered the most, of course. But the failure of the campaign was due to the poor performance of the artillery. To begin with, the Royal Artillery simply lacked enough guns, especially larger pieces. None of their major missions—cutting the wire, destroying trenches and redoubts, supporting the advancing infantry, and suppressing enemy artillery—were accomplished to an acceptable level. Plus, they suffered a high number of duds, many of which came from American suppliers.

9.  The Somme is the Great War's most remembered battle (at least in the English-speaking world). Last time I checked, the U.S. Library of Congress catalog had 289 citations for the "Battle of the Somme" and only 161 entries–combined–for the three biggest American battles of the war, the Second  Marne, St. Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. I'm sure the ratio would be much greater in, say, the British Library. Why the Somme fascination? Some speculations:

a.  It was almost inhuman in scale. The casualties for the British on that first day, and for both sides for its duration are draw-dropping. Beside those wounded, crippled-for-life and killed, there is no better symbol of the Somme than the Lochnagar Mine Crater shown above, which was fired on the first morning of the battle.

b.  Much of what we know about the battle comes from British sources, and the Somme sent shock waves through the British Empire like few other events in  history (India Mutiny?, Fall of Singapore?). It affected every level of their stratified society from the working class Pals of Accrington to the graduates of the "playing fields of Eton." (Over 1,100 Etonians died on the Great War's battlefields.) It drew-in and touched every corner of the empire.  Canadians, Anzacs, South Africans, and even Indian Lancers, served and died at the Somme.

Robert Graves

Alan Seeger

c. The Somme marks a literary fault line. The early war poets, like Rupert Brooke, John McCrae, and Alan Seeger, wrote of tradition, duty, and sacrifice. Well, Seeger dutifully met his "Rendezvous with Death" at the Somme on 4 July 1916, while serving with the French Foreign Legion. About the same time, two junior officers of the 38th Welsh Division named Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves were in the neighborhood of  Mametz Wood, where their units would encounter a brutal fights. They would later help initiate what has become the more famous school of war writers, the rejectors of the past, who saw the war as futile and a great betrayal. Graves later wrote, "I found in Mametz Wood a certain cure for lust of blood" and aptly titled his war memoir Goodbye to All That.

10.  Final Irony

After all that happened in 1916, what happened next truly must have seemed to have made the whole effort appear futile. The red area on the map below marks all the territory captured by British and French forces in the 1916 battle. The green line marks Operation Alberich, AKA, the retreat to the Hindenburg Line (9 Feb–20 Mar 1917). The Allies were "gifted" with three times the territory they had bled barrels for, and the Germans were manning a shorter and much more defensible front line.

Roads to the Great War
Has Much More on the Battle of the Somme

Just enter "Somme 1916" in the search box at the top of the screen and you will find over two dozen articles we have presented in the past on the battle.

Revised from my earlier two-part version of this article, which have been removed from the site. MH