This book began on a paddock just outside Ovillers in northern France, one of the killing fields of the Battle of the Somme. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the battle, this was a place of death and destruction; nowadays it is once more a sleepy hamlet surrounded by peaceful farmland. In 2008, my wife and I were on the trail of her long-deceased great uncle, Reservist Friedrich Bauer, of Infantry Regiment 180, who survived the carnage of 1 July only to perish a few days later. He has no known grave. (In 1918, Friedrich’s younger brother and brother-in-law-to-be also lost their lives on the Western Front, along with two of my own great-great-uncles in the New Zealand Division. Three of these four have known graves.)
As we wandered across the British and German battle lines of 1916, I mused on the immensity of the losses on that single day and its enduring significance in military history. Britain’s official casualty roll for 1 July came in at 57,470. Of these, 19,240 were dead, a further 35,493 were wounded and 2737 others were recorded as either missing or prisoners of war. It was the British army’s greatest one-day loss, so too for Newfoundland whose regiment of civilian soldiers was also destroyed amid the tornado of machine-gun and artillery fire. Casualties in the opposing XIV Reserve Korps were about 12,000 on 1 July, including roughly 3000 dead.
These appalling losses resulted from an Allied plan to end the stalemate that had endured since soon after the beginning of the war. The Allies on one side and the Germans on the other had dug a chain of increasingly heavily defended trench lines running from coastal Belgium south through northern France to Switzerland. Months of skirmishes and thrust and counterthrust had resulted in little movement of the lines and an increasingly troglodytic and brutalised existence for troops. Clearly, the eviction of the German army from occupied territories was going to require a major Allied offensive in 1916, attempts in 1914–15 having proved fruitless.
In collaboration with his French counterpart Joseph Joffre, British commander-in-chief General Sir Douglas Haig devised such an offensive in the Picardy department of northern France for mid-1916. Haig’s plan was for Fourth Army, commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, to bust into the German lines astride the Roman road between Albert and Bapaume, with the yet-to-be formed Reserve Army, commanded by General Sir Hubert Gough, following on to restart mobile warfare and, hopefully, over time and with more resources, drive the German army out of France, then Belgium and ultimately back to its home-country borders. Further north, part of Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Allenby’s Third Army would undertake a small diversionary operation. To the south, coalition partner France would attack in co-operation, astride the slowmoving River Somme. In addition it was hoped the Somme offensive would relieve some of the pressure on the French forces at Verdun.
The first day of the offensive, launched at 7.30 a.m. on 1 July, proved disastrous for the British army, with many of its casualties occurring within the first hour and most by midday. Moreover, the minor gains in ground at the southern end of Haig’s battlefield merely provided a jumping-off line for what became the four-and-a-half-month attritional slog that we now know as the Battle of the Somme. It would chew through hundreds of thousands of Allied and German soldiers before petering out in the November rain and the onset of the European winter. Campaigning on the Western Front resumed in 1917.
Villages, woods and other locations swamped by the 1916 fighting, many of them figuring in the disaster of 1 July, became equally well known in Britain, the Commonwealth and Germany. In the 1920s and 1930s these otherwise anonymous places were spoken of in hushed tones in veterans’ homes and clubs, and at reunions. Nowadays many of them have returned to obscurity, overshadowed by legions of other foreignsounding names from more recent conflicts. The Somme and its first day, though, linger 100 years later as international bywords for horror and degradation and ineptitude and death.
In military terms, however, the Somme was a key element in converting Haig’s army of largely civilian soldiers into one of skilled professionals. The subsequent rise of the platoon as an essential tactical building block, the fine-tuning of command and control, and the use of technology and combined-arms operations, among many other elements, can all be traced back to the Somme, including its first day. Many of these lessons were on show at the successful Battle of Messines, on 7 June 1917, with its effective planning and preparation, closer co-operation between infantry, artillery, engineering and air assets, and use of massive underground mines. Yet, Third Ypres, in the latter half of 1917, showed there was still much to be learned and, in reality, it would be 1918 before Haig and his generals put together a war-winning formula that resulted in the Armistice on 11 November of that year.
Pondering all of this as I returned again and again to the battlefields, I began to consider the possibility of writing a new history of that calamitous first day of the Somme. There are plenty of books on the subject, ranging from the British two-volume official history Military Operations, France and Belgium 1916, soldier memoirs and various accumulations of eyewitness accounts, studies about specific battalions, coffee-table glossies, paperback self-guided tours, a few books touching on the German experience, and pocket-sized easy reads on war poets. I spied one yawning omission, however. Nobody, in recent times, it seemed, had attempted to write a meaningful both-sides-of-the-hill account of the first day of the Somme, nor indeed for any other battle of the First World War. In terms of the Somme, the only book that came close was Martin Middlebrook’s soldier-centric The First Day on the Somme, which included a limited German element from the trenches. Written in 1971, it was already 20 years old when I read it at high school. History, it seemed, had almost entirely been written by the victor.
My objective, then, was to write a detailed and balanced Anglo-German history of the fighting on 1 July, focusing on the disaster that unfolded in the British sector of the battlefield, to identify what went so horribly wrong and occasionally right, as well as how and why. I desired to give voices to the participants of this industrial-scale tragedy, and, somewhat unusually, allow them direct comment as part of the analysis. Subject management alone meant that this was best achieved by examining the battle according to the geographic sectors allocated to each of the six British army corps involved. That in turn made it easier to marshal the experiences, opinions and decision-making of British and German commanders, along with those of the legion of men in their respective formations.
Since the arrival of Middlebrook’s classic, relatively little dealing with the tragedy of 1 July has appeared in a single-volume format. Perhaps this was with good reason: the first day of the Somme was a massive engagement with lots of moving parts, more than a few shades of grey and, by now, plenty of 100-year-old conundrums that needed deciphering. Several people queried why I was bothering at all with my project, claiming the bones were well picked over. This proved incorrect. Time and again I had to resolve many questions that had not previously been addressed satisfactorily or even answered at all. Haig’s whereabouts on 1 July and his interactions with Rawlinson that day were prominent among them. This was true also of the actions, reactions and rationales of various other Allied commanders, along with strategic and tactical thinking in the opposing armies. In short, while the pool of Somme literature appeared to be brimming to the point of overflow, it was neither complete nor exhaustive and specifically so in relation to the first day.
On several occasions during my research it became clear that I was reading official documents, diaries, memoirs and books that had seldom been viewed previously, if at all. This applied particularly to the journals of British and German senior commanders, on many occasions to those of private soldiers, and also to the myriad official documentation housed at various archives. As a result this book is populated with frequently unpublished British and German voices. All up close to 600 soldiers and officers are named or quoted, and almost one in four of these are German. (That ratio seems about right given the differing strengths of the opposing armies.) This rich collection of eyewitness accounts was not without method: I wanted to capture not only the soldiers’ impressions of 1 July and the build-up to it, but also their sensory perceptions, their mood and spirit, and their thinking. Some soldiers wrote plenty and others not so much; together their words capture the essence of their ordeal.
A good deal of other fresh ground is broken, too, particularly when it comes to the collaborative decision-making by Haig and Rawlinson. Their performances are weighed — for the first time ever — against those of senior German commanders. General-der-Infanterie Erich von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of General Staff, along with subordinate General-der-Infanterie Fritz von Below and Generalleutnant Hermann von Stein, respectively the commanders of Second Army and XIV Reserve Corps, feature prominently. These commanders and their five principal divisional commanders played critical roles in the 1 July fighting that are frequently either marginalised or airbrushed more or less completely from British accounts. Fresh, unbiased research has allowed me to right that long-standing wrong.
I have opted to discuss the engagement along traditional lines. I begin by looking at background and agreed strategies for the offensive, cover the build-up in detail, on both sides, and then provide a sectorby-sector account of the day’s events, again including perspectives from both sides. Detailed maps throughout will assist readers in following the flow of events. The conclusion examines all of this and critically evaluates senior British, German and French commanders at a strategic level, but also looks at the tactical implications of the day’s outcome. Overall, my goal — one I hope I have achieved — was to compile the most complete and detailed picture of the first day of the Somme yet written.
Andrew Macdonald
April 2016