It was perhaps inevitable that the dogged advance of the ‘revisionist’ First World War scholars would eventually be met by answering fire of varying intensity. The view from the other side of no-man’s-land is, for instance, rightly – if belatedly – receiving renewed attention. Jack Sheldon’s The German Army on the Somme, 1914–1916 does for German officers and other ranks what Peter Hart’s The Somme did for their British counterparts. Sheldon justifiably gives Anglocentric historians a timely reminder that the British army was not the only one learning lessons on the Somme. As was the case for the British army, he observes, the German army was ‘endlessly analytical and self-critical’ with every unit producing, at the end of each tour of duty, after action reports which were then processed and widely circulated. In this way, the overall lessons drawn from the Somme experience influenced German defensive doctrine and operations for the remainder of the war. Deep dugouts and continuous trench lines gave way to concrete bunkers and strongpoints, surrounded by belts of obstacles and sited so that they could provide mutual support: ‘In came flexibility, defence in depth, a huge increase in infantry fire power, streamlined command and control and numerous tactical innovations’.
Sheldon also asserts that to claim that the Somme was a beneficial and necessary stage in the development of the Kitchener divisions is ‘a judgement based on hindsight’ which, even if true, ‘glosses over the dislocation of British national expectations and appalling sense of loss’ and is all the more offensive because it ‘provides a fig leaf of dignity and respectability to the moral bankruptcy of attrition theory’.110 With the greatest possible respect to the author, whose work I much admire, these arguments, in turn, seem to me to ‘gloss over’ two or three important points. The first is that the new German tactics – adopted and developed as a result of the Somme experience – ultimately provided no real answer to the superior logistics of the Allies or to the British, French and American all-arms limited-objective attacks. The second point is that, in 1916, the German army still occupied much of Belgium and northern France, not the other way round. The Allies had no genuine option but to try to eject the Germans at the very least and, given the quality of the German army in 1916 and the strength of its defensive positions, this was bound to involve great loss of life and self-sacrifice. The French and British simply had to adopt an offensive stance and to find a way of defeating the German army. It was unthinkable for them to allow the Germans to remain in northern France and Belgium merely on the grounds that it would be difficult and painful to drive them out. A third consideration is that, while the Allies could hardly sit back and assume a strictly defensive posture in July 1916, the BEF, in particular, did not yet possess the resources, command and control systems, logistical flexibility or firepower to carry out truly effective offensive operations against a skilful, obdurate and well-entrenched army. However, this situation began to change during the course of the Somme battle and in its immediate aftermath.
The German experience on the Somme – especially from the point of view of those units facing the BEF – is also covered in some depth by Christopher Duffy in Through German Eyes: The British and the Somme 1916 (2006), a study which, unusually, is based in part on records of the interrogation of British prisoners of war and which examines the enemy’s perception of British performance and morale in the course of the offensive. Certainly, at the start of the campaign in July 1916, the Germans found their French opponents more highly trained and more skilful than the British, since they had a better grasp of the tactical situation and were thus able to display greater independence when their leaders fell. Duffy duly acknowledges and traces the developments and improvements in British technology and tactics from July onwards, though he too challenges the idea that there was a smooth ‘learning curve’ in the BEF. The progression, he declares, ‘was more of a series of steps, some of which led downwards. It was, if anything, a learning or re-learning process’. All the same, the BEF was feeling its way towards the ‘tactical revolution’ of 1917, when the platoon became firmly established as the basis for fire and manoeuvre, exploiting the mobile firepower of the Lewis gun. In the long run, Duffy suggests, this was to prove a more promising development than that of the much-vaunted German stormtroops, ‘who remained a minority within the German Army, and who in 1918 sucked the unimproved masses of the German infantry forward to be massacred by aircraft and machine guns’. In 1916 itself the BEF’s sustained effort on the Somme compelled the Germans to scale down and eventually abandon their own offensive at Verdun and, what is less generally appreciated, to call off an intended attack against British forces between Arras and the Somme sector. Hence the Allied offensive on the Somme was, ‘if not a victory, at least a costly strategic success that was important to the outcome of the war’.111
This general view of the Somme was evidently becoming commonly held by the ninetieth anniversary of the battle. J.P. Harris, in his Douglas Haig and the First World War (2008) judged that, although it was one of the most ghastly episodes in modern British history, the Somme offensive ‘wrested the initiative on the Western Front from the Germans’, helped to save Verdun and ‘contributed very largely to the general crisis experienced by the Central Powers’ in the summer and autumn of 1916. While, in humanitarian terms, it was ‘a catastrophe for all concerned’, it was also, in military terms, ‘a gruesome kind of limited victory for the Allies’. Haig, however, is subjected to a fair amount of censure from Harris. The latter criticises Haig’s operational methods – particularly his failure to adopt a ‘step-by-step’ approach, as advocated by Rawlinson and others, at the beginning of the battle. Harris also feels that, after mid-July, Haig appeared to lose his grip on the offensive for several weeks and, during the battle as a whole, not only neglected to create an Army Group command to give proper operational direction, coordination and control of the Fourth and Reserve (Fifth) Armies but never really performed consistently as an Army Group commander himself: ‘GHQ in 1916 and 1917 was not designed, organised and staffed appropriately to function effectively as an Army Group headquarters’. The significance of the various improvements in the BEF’s artillery techniques and of Solly-Flood’s achievements at the newly established Training Directorate by the spring of 1917 are recognised by Harris, who considers that the scale and sophistication of the preparations for the Battle of Arras – launched on 9 April – were, ‘for a mass army thrown together in a few years and desperately short of trained staff officers, highly commendable’. Even so, Harris deems that, despite much recent research, it is not clear ‘how widely and deeply such new doctrines had yet been disseminated and absorbed’ and he doubts whether much of the evolution of the BEF after 1 July 1916 was attributable ‘to any personal inspiration’ on the part of its Commander-in-Chief.112 The response to this last point, one could argue, is that, as C-in-C, Haig had at least presided over many of the acknowledged improvements and, if he did not initiate them personally, he should be given credit for encouraging the learning process and allowing it to flourish – rather like a good football manager successfully rebuilding a team which had previously been threatened with relegation.
Of all the studies of the battle which have appeared over the last decade, William Philpott’s magisterial Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (2009) offers the most comprehensive survey, analysing in depth the experience of all three major armies on the Somme and discussing the political, social, economic and cultural impact of the struggle in France and Germany as well as in Britain and the Dominions. Like most recent historians of the First World War, Philpott sees the Allied offensive on the Somme in 1916, and the sacrifice it entailed, as a necessary stage in an intense and brutal war of attrition, and as a bloody victory which has become obscured by the myth of tragedy. Although the war was far from over at the end of 1916, ‘after the Somme there would be only one ultimate victor’. Philpott also follows recent historiographical trends in tracing the gradual and painful evolution of the BEF from its low point of 1 July 1916 – when it was a ‘naïve and partly prepared’ citizen army, ‘“New” in name and limited in expertise, knowledge and experience’ – into a much more effective force by late September of that year. The BEF’s tactical and organisational changes and reforms are briefly summarised by the author, but he stresses that the learning process was far from smooth or uniform, and that some lessons were ill-absorbed, even if the British army by 1918 was as good as any on the Western Front. The main lessons acknowledged and absorbed related to the use of individual arms on the industrial battlefield and their effective co-ordination into what would today be called a ‘weapons system’. These basic principles, Philpott writes, were being grasped for the first time in July and August 1916. Only by a process of trial and error, in a gruelling fight against a skilled and stubborn adversary, ‘could the talented rise to the top in the short time available, and the expanded army develop an effective system of devolved operational command’.113
The German army at the beginning of 1916 is described as being ‘at the height of its morale and physical effectiveness’ and as battle-hardened, aggressive and tactically skilled in the field. It would literally have to be ground down and its morale undermined by ‘continuous hard pounding’ before an Allied victory could be attained. However, as Philpott reveals, the German army was indeed subjected to just such an ordeal: ‘In this relentless Materialschlacht on the Somme, Germany’s once proud and victorious divisions met their Nemesis – a tenacious, determined enemy who, despite no obvious strategic breakthrough, simply would not let go’. Nor is Philpott convinced by those historians who credit the Germans with initiating and developing infantry tactics which were appropriate for the modern industrial battlefield. All armies, he remarks, were confronted by the same challenges and worked out similar solutions. ‘“Storm-troops”, infiltration tactics, combined-arms tactics, heavy support weapons, infantry specialists and small group formations are all identified in the paeans to German military skill. But all were employed by the French army on the Somme in 1916’.114
It is in rightly re-emphasising the scale and key importance of the French army’s contribution to the Somme offensive that Philpott differs from most British and Commonwealth historians of the Great War. In too many accounts of the campaign, argues Philpott, the French generals concerned are ‘relegated to walk-on parts’, their successes having been largely ignored and obscured and all but vanishing from history. Bill Philpott’s contention is that, by the beginning of the battle, the French army had learned, digested, applied and disseminated the bitter lessons of 1915 and of Verdun, its tactics being far more advanced and sophisticated than those of the BEF at that stage. In his judgement, much of the blame for the comparative neglect of the French contribution can be laid at the door of Haig, whose record, in his diary, of some episodes – such as the French Sixth Army’s outstanding success at Bouchavesnes on 12 September – is viewed by Philpott as ‘bizarre, erroneous and indeed deceitful …’. Because British historians have often taken their cue from Haig’s account of events, the latter should perhaps ‘bear ultimate responsibility for the French army’s marginalisation’.115
One of Philpott’s own principal contributions to the historiography of the battle has been to refocus our attention on the ability and achievements of General Marie-Émile Fayolle, the commander of the French Sixth Army, and his superior, General Ferdinand Foch, commander of the Groupe des Armées du Nord (G.A.N. or Northern Army Group). Fayolle, himself a gunner, is credited with employing methodical and scientific artillery techniques, which were designed to conserve lives, accepted that neutralising counter-battery fire was often more effective than destructive fire, and were founded on meticulous calculations of the number of shells per metre required to overcome the enemy’s defences and defenders. Foch, for his part, is seen by Philpott as being the Allied general with probably the clearest understanding of what was needed to ensure genuine progress – rather than short-lived, shallow or narrow gains – on the congested industrial battlefield. By September 1916, certainly, Foch appears to have grasped that, instead of seeking to exploit limited penetrations of the enemy’s line in order to secure a bigger ‘breakthrough’, it might be better to exploit successes laterally, spreading one’s attacks successively across different sectors in a rolling series of blows, killing more Germans and keeping them off-balance, thereby dislocating and destabilising the defence. This operational method, which Foch termed ‘general battle’ (bataille générale) could be applied along the whole front and, on a wider scale, provided the basis for the overall Allied victory on the Western Front in 1918. According to Philpott, this was ‘the most important, if now long forgotten, intangible outcome of the Somme campaign …’.116 Such an approach was foreshadowed in September 1916, when the French and British forces launched a succession of blows across the entire Somme front, bringing the defence close to crisis point and causing German resources to become dangerously thin before the weather intervened and the momentum of the Allied offensive slowed once more.
As might have been expected, Philpott’s important work did not, in fact, end the debate, though the most recent contributors to it have tended to give general support to the ‘revisionist’ interpretation. In his scholarly, and not uncritical, biography of Haig – The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army (2011) – Gary Sheffield broadly maintains the position he occupied earlier in the decade but suggests that, as applied to the Somme, the term ‘victory’ is ‘simply inappropriate for an affair that in the end was aimed at inflicting maximum damage on the enemy’. Sheffield states that the BEF’s apprenticeship in 1916 made it a much more formidable machine and that its morale remained largely intact in spite of its ordeal: ‘Haig’s argument was, in effect, that the Somme had not resulted in a decisive victory because the German army had not yet suffered enough from attrition’.117 However, Haig’s swift recognition of the value of Solly-Flood’s tactical, organisational and training reforms of early 1917 is duly underlined by Sheffield and he recounts an interesting conversation in December 1916 between the Commander-in-Chief and Major-General Oliver Nugent (GOC of the 36th (Ulster) Division), which throws revealing light upon Haig himself. When the latter suggested to Nugent that the Ulster Division may not have been given sufficient support at Thiepval on 1 July 1916, Nugent had conceded that ‘perhaps we had all been rather optimistic as to what it was possible to do’. Haig’s unusually candid response was ‘Well, we were all learning’.118 Just what was learned by British generals in 1916 has also been reexamined in detail by the American historian Sanders Marble, who, in a recently published study of British artillery on the Western Front, expands upon the earlier conclusions reached by Bidwell and Graham, Martin Farndale and Jonathan Bailey – particularly those relating to developments in the creeping barrage and counter-battery fire. ‘What is impressive’, Marble claims, ‘given the reputation of First World War generals for obstinacy, is the eager search for lessons’.119
Whatever side one takes, it is pleasing to note that, at least in scholarly circles, the debate is now based firmly on sound archival research and can, if the media allows, be treated – in the words of Brian Bond – ‘as history (like earlier wars) rather than being approached emotionally and polemically in terms of “futility”, “horror” and “national trauma”’.120 There can surely now be little doubt that various aspects of the BEF’s command, organisation and tactics did show a marked improvement during, or as a direct result of, the Somme. By 1917 the creeping barrage had become standard and was better understood and applied; overhead machine-gun barrages were more common; the introduction of the 106 fuse would help artillery to cut enemy wire without cratering the ground; progress was being made towards the location of enemy gun batteries by flash-spotting and sound-ranging, facilitating much more effective counter-battery fire and enhancing understanding of the ‘deep battle’; and GHQ’s reorganisation of the artillery in late 1916 created Army Field Artillery (AFA) brigades which, in turn, provided a flexible reserve of field artillery to reinforce divisional gunners when required and give the latter more rest by reducing the frequency of calls upon them to assist other divisions.
In addition, the preparation and dissemination of training pamphlets such as SS 135, SS 143 and SS 144 led to standard operating procedures and more uniform application of tactical lessons, aided by an increase in schools of instruction at GHQ, army, corps and divisional level; the crucial reorganisation of the infantry platoon early in 1917 encouraged more flexible small-unit tactics, with the platoon becoming a miniature all-arms battlefield team capable of providing its own internal fire-support and of maintaining the momentum of an advance for longer periods; there was a renewed emphasis on higher musketry standards and less reliance on the ‘cult of the bomb’; unsuitable commanders at all levels were removed and replaced with younger, fitter officers; and command and control continued to devolve downwards in the best corps, divisions and brigades, with more trust in the ‘man on the spot’ (as FSR had advocated) and a more managerial, consultative style of command being adopted. All this, one can argue, does strongly indicate the existence of a learning process and the beginning of ‘re-skilling’ the BEF in 1916. As John Bourne has neatly summarised it: ‘In some ways, the most important day of the war was 2 July 1916. The British had suffered an appalling reverse, but it was apparent that they were not going away, that their operational method was bound to improve and that the resources available to them from the mobilisation of British industry would make them what they eventually became, a formidable enemy’.121