July 1, 1916

[Zeno]

Ninety years ago this weekend the Battle of the Somme started. It lasted to November of that year, four bloody months. More than a million casualities (dead and wounded) total.

The first day was particularly ugly:

On the first day of the Somme, the British lost 19,240 dead, 35,494 seriously wounded, and 2,152 missing: 57,470 casualties in total. The Ulster Division, which assailed the heavily fortified German right, alone lost 5,600 men that day, most before noon.


Mr. Submarine man has given us some great battle posts. Perhaps a battle post on this grand folly of WWI would be appropriate given the anniversary date. General Haig can then be, yet again, run through the mud.

-Zeno

[scrub]

Great idea.

scrub

[The DaveR]

Just amazing what happens when you have morons leading with absolutely no regard for data, reality, or anything that doesn't agree with their rigid beliefs.
<----Whaaaa?

[MrMon]

If you aren't catching The First World War on the Military Channel, then you really should. I'll have to go back and look, but I think they aren't nearly as hard on Haig as past histories. There was some logic to his thinking.

If I get the chance, I'll see if I can dig up their evaluation.

[MrMon]

There are a bunch of interesting articles in the British papers today, just go to Google News to find them. This is one of the most interesting, wish I could see the special they're talking about. I'm guessing it'll show up here on one of the channels soon.

Not such a senseless slaughter

[Exsubmariner]

Sorry it has taken me so long to reply to this thread. I saw it last Thursady I believe, & did some referencing. However, this battle is like many battles in the past century of war. It covers six months and many major engagements and is therefore hard to summarize in one nice little neat post. I am going to have similar problems with Midway and the Bulge. They just don't fit into nice neat little paragraphs.

Anyway, The Battle of the Somme is the battle everyone talks about when they discuss WWI and thousands of men dying for just a 100 yards of ground. It's a tragedy, to be sure. As you can see in the image below (wiki), the advance only covered 5 miles at it's deepest penetration.



The allies really, really wanted those 5 miles and the Germans really, really wanted them, too. All told, somewhere between 1.1 million and 1.2 million men died defending/conquering that territory.

The fact of the matter is that the British and French had no effective strategy for dealing with the German defenses other than the ole miserable full on frontal assault. With so many troops dying, I feel it is a testament to the British high command's stupid arrogance that Haig was not relieved of command a month into the offensive, when it was clear what the outcome would be. To wit, massive casualties for very little ground.

I realize that Haig was later lionized in England. I don't come down on the side of the Haig legacy builders/apologists, however. To squander such a large military force is a travesty. Especially for so little. To put it in context, roughly 600,000 allied troops died. This number is equivalent to the casualties on both sides of the American Civil War, which was the bloodiest conflict in US history. The Civil War casualties out number all the American casualties suffered by the US in conflicts before and since.

All those men for five miles. Was Gueudecourt really strategically vital?

When seen in context of the overall war, the Battle of the Somme did deplete the forces of Germany, England, and France to such a degree that the end was hastened. Props to Haig for providing evidence that modern war is intended to waste manpower and the industrial production it takes to equip those men.

[OrigamiSensei]

[ QUOTE ]
There are a bunch of interesting articles in the British papers today, just go to Google News to find them. This is one of the most interesting, wish I could see the special they're talking about. I'm guessing it'll show up here on one of the channels soon.

Not such a senseless slaughter

[/ QUOTE ]
That article was, quite frankly, awful. I hold no pretensions as to being an expert on The Great War but I have done a fair amount of reading and study on the subject. That reading started about five years ago and was spurred into high gear by a visit to France which included a tour of the Somme battlefields.

The author throws in this sentence "The key to understanding this surprising interpretation of the traditional story is to see the terrible events of July 1 in a broader context, and to appreciate how and why the Battle of the Somme happened." and then completely fails to mention a primary reason for the offensive. The French were being "bled white" at Verdun and were seeking action from the British to relieve pressure by forcing the Germans to stave off attacks elsewhere along the front. The article is correct that Haig harbored ambitions of breaking through the German lines and exploiting the breach with cavalry in hopes of rolling the German line back a great distance. A visitor to the area can quickly see that the gently rolling farmlands would indeed be a place where cavalry could maneuver if a breakthrough occurred. However, I see it as inconceivable that even under the best of circumstances enough force could have been brought to bear quickly enough to actually achieve Haig's design, especially when trying to imagine horses attempting to make their way through the former no-man's land and through all the fortifications to get to that rolling country in the first place.

The article also fails to mention the reasons behind the failure of the artillery bombardment. First, the Germans were very well dug in and quite prepared to withstand artillery bombardments. Unlike the French and especially the British who felt that by treating the trench fortifications as temporary and deliberately withholding creature comforts they could instill an "offensive" mindset that would spur the soldiers into willingness to leave the (relative) safety of the trenches and attack. Second, it was assumed that by bombarding the barbed wire barriers that large gaps would be blown open. More high explosive shells may have helped but the large majority of shells used were shrapnel types and primarily served to tangle the barbed wire barriers into something even more impenetrable than they were previously. Third, most of the field guns being used were of smaller size, primarily in the 75mm range with relatively flat trajectories and lacked the punch needed to dig down into the German fortifications and destroy them. Lastly the ammunition produced by the British at that time was of notoriously poor quality with an unconscionable number of dud shells. The factors combined to severely limit the effectiveness of largest artillery bombardment in history up to that time.

Then we get this little gem: "The 90,000 soldiers who advanced across the 25 miles of the Somme front must have expected to simply stroll towards the devastated German lines. But they were wrong. The Germans had survived, huddled deep underground in protected bunkers. The result was carnage." That mistaken expectation was indeed fed to the men but more importantly they were under strict orders to advance at a walking pace and to disdain the use of cover. Forward they came in great ranks only to be mowed down in turn by German machine guns. German accounts speak of barrels glowing red, overheated by continuous shooting. Men were urinating on the barrels and into the coolant reservoirs to keep them going, and told of bleeding and shredded fingers abused by the continuous firing. The accounts also speak of lessening the carnage by reducing their fire once it was obvious that a retreat was in progress. As an American I have admiration and respect for the British but the German accounts of that day are as harrowing as the Allied stories.

We then come to the story of the Ulstermen. "The Ulster division, for example, displayed almost reckless bravery on the first day of the Somme and managed to break into the German stronghold of the Schwaben Redoubt - a key position on the Somme front." I firmly believe they made it that far because of that "reckless bravery" and because I don't doubt they ran like hell to get there instead of plodding along. Of course the comapanies that made it the farthest disappeared, never to be seen again because there were no reserves in the right place at the right time to exploit the breaches. This is because the generals insisted on keeping strict control over the ffeding of the reserves and because the only form of communucation was by runners. By the time a runner got back that far, if they made it back at all it would be too late to get men all the way in the other direction to do anything about it. The combination of an overly centralized command structure and the lack of communication only worsened matters.

The last item I'll deal with is this one: 'Leading military historian Dr Gary Sheffield believes the Somme, far from being a catastrophic defeat, was, in fact, "the battle that turned the British Army from a group of amateurs into a hard-bitten professional army".' At the start of the war there was a core British professional army that was decimated in halting the original German advance. In 1915 and 1916 there was a large scale recruitment campaign that focused on the wish of men to fight together with friends and co-workers and these units were assembled into the so-called Pals batttalions. These men were inadequately trained and thrown into the front far too quickly but I cannot fault that as it is the nature war for this to happen. Unfortunately when a Pals battalion got wiped out the cost fell disproportionately on a singe locale. The survivors did learn to fight the hard way, but to present it as being primarily responsible due to the lengthy Somme offensive is simplistic and overlooks the events at other places such as Ypres and Gallipoli (which I count because the Anzacs later got sent to the Western Front).

What I primarily object to is saying that the slaughter wasn't senseless because the British Army learned from it. The fact that they learned from it doesn't make it any less senseless. When I toured the Somme battlefields I was horrified as I imagined that evil day and the slaughter that should have been obvious to everyone would occur. Row after row of marble stones marked "Unknown" and "Inconnu" honor men known only to God. Only engravings and lists can honor those who were never found at all, whose bones sank into the mud. At the La Boisselle mine crater I found a cross marking the final resting place of a young lieutenant who disappeared that day and was not found until 1998. That man bore an ancestral name from my family and may well have been a distant relative. I am not ashamed to say I shed tears and prayed that my son would never suffer the same horrors as the flower of European manhood did on that day.

[Exsubmariner]

Hat's off Sensei,
That was one hell of a post. Thanks for the contribution.

[MrMon]

You're a bit off on the casualty figures. 600,000 Allied troops did not die at the Somme, that's the total casualty figure. Deaths on the Allied side totaled 146,000. The battle is noteworthy for the casualties of the first day, which was a horrific slaughter, but considering the length of the battle, July to November, obviously things slowed down considerably, with the Allies doing some good during the next four months, as the Germans wound up having even more men killed than the Allies.

We often hear the fact that there were a total of 1.2 million casualties on both sides during the battle, but that's over four and a half months. By comparison, the Normandy campaign produced 425,000 casualties in just two months, not all that much lower a casualty rate, but one that resulted in a clear Allied victory. Casualty rates on the Eastern Front during WWI, where trench warfare never developed, were apparently no lower than the Western Front, and may have been worse. Where the Somme gets a bad rap is in its apparent futility over little ground. But that's just it, once you start something in war, you can't throw up your hands and say this is worthless, you have to deal with what you have. No one planned for the slaughter of the first day, it just happened. Do you now stop? Or do you continue forward and make the best of it? It's easy to sit back today and say that was just stupid, but given the technology of the time, it seems that those casualty rates were inevitable, regardless of who was in charge.

[Exsubmariner]

If you feel Wikipedia is incorrect, you should dispute their article.

Truly, I have not studied this battle in depth, but perhaps you are thinking of the missing, or perhaps just one phase of the campaign.

If Abe Lincoln had just gone with what he had instead of firing six generals, the union would have lost. Haig should have been replaced. It's too bad for the British that Sir Winston was busy being Lord of the Admiralty.