For the British, who had staked so much on 1 July, the meagre achievements were a bitter disappointment. In simple terms, the right wing of their main attack had been successful; the centre and left had failed. At Gommecourt, the attack had not eliminated the salient even if the diversionary function had been fulfilled.
Territorially, the lower arm of the huge letter ‘L’ of the front line had been moved approximately one mile farther north, but the new front line here faced north towards the rest of the German lines rather than eastwards towards their rear.
The attack had taken three of the German fortified villages: Montauban, Mametz and Fricourt – the last being evacuated during the night following the battle – out of the thirteen which were in the day’s objectives, plus certain trenches, dug-outs and redoubts that had taken much labour to build. At no point had the German main second line been breached.
To achieve these results the British units involved on 1 July had suffered shattering losses. The first returns, made up from the roll calls taken as the battalions came out of action, showed nearly 62,000 casualties:
Killed or died of wounds |
Wounded |
Missing |
Total |
|
Officers |
721 |
1,531 |
339 |
2,591 |
Other ranks |
7,449 |
34,357 |
17,419 |
59,225 |
Total |
8,170 |
85,888 |
17,758 |
61,816 |
There was obviously an unknown number of stragglers who had lost their units and wounded still to be fetched in from No Man’s Land. It was hoped that, as these returned, the large number of missing would be reduced.
During the following days, the stragglers gradually returned to their units. Lists of prisoners were received from the Germans and many men, previously marked as missing, were now posted as killed as their bodies were found or witnesses to their death came forward. The final casualty list showed that, of the 17,758 men originally posted as missing, just over a quarter returned unharmed to their units or were taken prisoner, while 10,705 were found to be dead. The fate of the remaining 2,152 men was, in most cases, never discovered. They had been killed and their bodies lost.
The final return showed a total casualty list of 57,470 officers and men:
Killed or died of wounds |
Wounded |
Missing |
Prisoners |
Total |
|
Officers |
993 |
1,337 |
96 |
12 |
2,438 |
Other ranks |
18,247 |
34,156 |
2,056 |
573 |
55,032 |
Total |
19,240 |
35,493 |
2,152 |
585 |
57,470* |
Even allowing for the size of the force involved and the ferocity of the fighting the casualty list was an amazing one. Almost exactly half of the men in the 143 battalions who had attacked had become casualties. The figures for officers alone were far higher; only one in every four of those who had gone over the top remained unhurt at the end of the day – a seventy-five per cent casualty rate!
Most officers had attacked with their distinctive uniforms, complete with polished Sam Browne belts, revolvers or swagger sticks. The adjutant of the 9th Devons is reported to have carried a sword. The 2,438 officers who became casualties on 1 July certainly upheld the traditions of leadership and self-sacrifice of their class, but many were the victims of a code of conduct and dress which had not yet been adapted to the conditions of the Western Front. Seventy-eight battalions recorded their officer casualties in detail, and these figures indicate that the most dangerous rank to have held on 1 July was that of captain. The least dangerous position was almost certainly that of the private soldier.
The British Army’s casualties, on 1 July, were the equivalent of seventy-five battalions or of more than six full divisions of fighting infantry.* For every yard of the sixteen-mile front from Gommecourt to Montauban there were two British casualties.
The exact German losses for the day’s fighting on their front facing the British attack will never be known, as their units only made a casualty return once every ten days. However, because the action was so heavy, many German units did make special note of the day’s casualties. Based on these samples, a rough estimate would place German losses at about 8,000 men from Gommecourt to the boundary between the British and French armies. Of these, 2,200 are known to have been taken prisoner, leaving under 6,000 killed and wounded. A simple mathematical calculation shows the losses on 1 July to have been seven to one in the Germans’ favour, an exact reverse of the British and German numbers involved. The British had paid a high price for the relief of their ally at Verdun.
On certain sectors the ratio was even more in favour of the Germans. The boundaries of the British 8th Division, attacking up Mash Valley and against Ovillers, coincided almost exactly with those of the defending German 180th Regiment. Here, a mere two German battalions faced the 8th Division’s attack and, during the whole day, they had to call in only one company of the reserve battalion to repel the attack.
The 8th Division suffered 5,121 casualties, the 180th Regiment only 280 – a proportion of eighteen to one in favour of the German defenders.
With nearly 60,000 casualties, how does this one-day battle compare with other battles in which the British Army has been involved? Is there any rival to 1 July 1916 in the extent of its loss? Before 1914, the bloodiest battle had almost certainly been that at Waterloo, when the Duke of Wellington, with the Prussians, had defeated Napoleon’s French. British losses at Waterloo had been 8,458 men, or twenty-five per cent of Wellington’s force; this was less than the average number of casualties sustained by any one of the six corps employed by Haig on 1 July.
Even the First World War, easily the bloodiest in Britain’s history, could not produce another day’s fighting which approached that of 1 July. The opening of the two big offensives of 1917 – at Arras in April, and at Messines in June – both of which employed troops on a similar scale to that of the opening of the Somme, cost 13,000 in three days and 24,500 in seven days respectively. The worst day after 1 July 1916 was probably 21 March 1918, when the Germans launched their spring offensive. Figures are not available for the first day, but British losses in the first eleven days were 165,000, of which a high proportion were prisoners.
The British Army had its fair share of pitched battles in the 1939-45 war, but this was a war waged on a completely different scale to its predecessor: D-Day – 4,000 British and Canadian casualties; El Alamein – an average of 1,125 per day for eleven days. The only comparable day in the Second World War was that on which Singapore fell and some 80,000 British, Australian and Indian troops were taken prisoner by the Japanese.
The casualties suffered by the British on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme stand comparison, not only with other battles, but with complete wars. The British Army’s loss on that one day easily exceeds its battle casualties in the Crimean War, the Boer War and the Korean War combined.
A study of the War Diaries of the units involved in the battle shows that it was the infantry who had sustained the overwhelming majority of the casualties. As some units were not as meticulous as others in recording every casualty, the first table overleaf is the best estimate one can make of the casualties suffered by the different arms during the day.
In the supporting arms, the moderate losses of the artillery and R.A.M.C. included a high proportion of officers. These were the Forward Observation Officers and Medical Officers who had been attached to the infantry.
Several General Staff officers had become casualties when they went forward in attempts to co-ordinate the efforts of struggling infantry battalions.
Type of unit |
Casualties |
||
Fighting Battalions |
54,335 |
|
|
Machine Gun Companies |
1,080 |
all manned by |
|
Poineer Battalions |
1,020 |
the infantry |
|
Light Trench Mortar Batteries |
350 |
||
Royal Engineers |
450 |
||
Artillery |
170 |
||
Royal Army Medical Corps |
60 |
||
Royal Flying Corps |
5 |
||
Total |
57,470 |
There is no record of any casualties among the cavalry. The three cavalry divisions of Gough’s Reserve Army certainly escaped without loss, but it is possible that a few men from the corps cavalry regiments were hit by long-range shells. The North Midland Division reported one mounted military policeman killed.
There is further interest in the distribution of the casualties among the different divisions which had taken part in the battle.
| Division | Casualties | Type of division * |
| 34th | 6,380 | N.A. |
| 29th | 5,240 | REG. |
| 8th | 5,121 | REG. |
| 36th (Ulster) | 5,104 | N.A. |
| 4th | 4,692 | REG |
| 56th (London) | 4,314 | T.F. |
| 21st | 4,256 | N.A. |
| 32nd | 3,949 | N.A. |
| 31st | 3,599 | N.A. |
| 7th | 3,410 | REG. |
| 18th (Eastern) | 3,115 | N.A. |
| 30th | 3,011 | N.A. |
| 46th (North Midland) Part divisions | 2,455 | T.F. |
| 17th (Northern) 3 battalions | 1,115 | N.A. |
| 48th (South Midland) 2 ,, | 1,060 | T.F. |
| 49th (West Riding) 5 ,, | 590 | T.F. |
*REG. - Regular Army; T.F. – Territorial Force; N.A. – New Army.
One of the most obvious conclusions to be reached from this table is that success, in this case, had been cheaper than defeat. The three divisions which had advanced on the right wing, the 7th, 18th and 30th, are all near the bottom of the main table. Their leading waves had captured the German front line quickly, allowing the follow-up troops a comparatively safe crossing of No Man’s Land. This was the all-important factor, because No Man’s Land, not the German trenches, had been the big killing ground for the divisions that had suffered the heaviest losses.
The table shows the terrible losses suffered by Maj.-Gen. Ingouville-Williams’s 34th Division, composed of the Tyneside Irish and Tyneside Scottish Brigades, two Edinburgh battalions, the Cambridge Battalion and the Grimsby Chums. Of its three brigades, two, the Tyneside Irish and Scottish, had each suffered more casualties than any other brigade in the battle. In their assault on La Boisselle, guarding the main road to Bapaume, they had lost one of their two brigade commanders, seven out of eight battalion commanders and each battalion had averaged 600 casualties. For this loss, the two brigades had captured a portion of German-held ground twenty acres in extent, the only result of the drive on Bapaume nine miles farther up the road. So shattered were the two Tyneside brigades that they were immediately detached from their division and sent to a quiet sector on Vimy Ridge. It was months before they were again fit for battle.
For a unit as large as a division to lose nearly three-quarters of its infantry in one day was a grisly achievement, even for the First World War, and shows both the strength of the German defences guarding the main road and the courage of the men from the 34th Division who tried to force those defences.
The presence of three Regular divisions in the first five places in the table shows how their battalions had preserved the traditions of the Old Army by pressing their attacks to the limits of their strength, but the sacrifice of these divisions had brought not a single yard of German trench as a permanent capture.
The position of the North Midland Division at the bottom of the main table shows how Maj.-Gen. Stuart-Wortley had managed to save most of his division. It had cost him his command.
Some divisions had cause to regret their success and comparatively low casualties on 1 July. Those who had done so well, notably the 18th and 30th Divisions at Montauban, gained such a reputation that they were used over and over again as ‘stormers’ during the remainder of the war. When peace came, very few of the original members of their battalions remained.
If heavy casualties could affect the character and performance of units as large as a division, what then of the battalion, the infantryman’s home? Many had suffered terrible casualties with only a handful of men returning from the 700 or 800 who had taken part in the battle.
It would be tedious for the reader to examine more tables and figures, but two battalions stand out from the rest as having virtually disappeared.
The 10th West Yorks, of which Lieut Philip Howe was the only officer who remained, and he slightly wounded, had suffered 710 casualties, probably the highest battalion casualty list for a single day during the war. The West Yorks had mostly crossed the German front line easily enough but were held up by the next trench. No one had cleared the dug-outs of the front line and no other troops followed the attack, so that when Germans came up from the front-line dug-outs, the West Yorks were trapped in the open between the two German-held trenches. Worse still, they were on a hillside in full view of the German machine-gunners only 200 yards away in the ruins of Fricourt, which had not been attacked. Philip Howe’s small party, all from the first wave, had escaped by pressing on hard to its objective. Trapped on the open slope, there had been no cover for the remainder of the battalion, and those who were not hit at once remained in full view of the enemy. This day-long purgatory had resulted in nearly sixty per cent of the West Yorks casualties being fatal – a very high proportion.
The other great tragedy of the day had been that of the Newfoundlanders. Their ill-planned attack in mid-morning had caused them a loss of 684 men. Fortunately a higher proportion of these had been wounded, but it was still a terrible casualty list.
The destruction of some battalions had been so complete that no one will ever know what really happened to them. Every battalion was supposed to enter a daily account of its activities in its War Diary, this becoming the official record. The 1st Hampshires had suffered so severely that no one could be found at the end of the day to describe, reliably, what had happened. Its War Diary entry for 1 July reads:
Our casualties in officers amounted to 100% and was also heavy in other ranks.*
And that was all that could be found to describe the battle in which the Hampshires lost twenty-six officers and 559 men.
Besides the 10th West Yorks and the 1st Newfoundland, two other battalions, the 1st Tyneside Irish and the 4th Tyneside Scottish, had suffered over 600 casualties each, and twenty-eight more battalions had lost over 500 men.†
Many communities at home suffered terribly because of the intense local nature of so many battalions. Certain areas suddenly found they had lost a large number of their menfolk as, by tragic chance, their battalions had seen fierce action while those from more fortunate areas had missed the worst on this occasion. The parts of the country that appear to have suffered most were:
| Yorkshire | 9,000 |
| Ulster | 6,000‡ |
| Lancashire | 6,000 |
| the North-East | 5,500 |
| London | 5,500 |
| Scotland | 3,500 |
Most of the English counties had their share of casualties, but Wales had escaped lightly with no more than about 500 casualties; its turn came in other battles. The Southern Irish regiments had lost less than 1,000 men, but this is not conclusive as many Irishmen were serving in English and Scottish units.
Particular cities had suffered grievously. The list is a long one: London – over 5,000 casualties; Manchester (with Salford) – 3,500; Belfast – 1,800; Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Bradford, Leeds and Birmingham – all over 1,000; Durham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham, Wolverhampton, Cambridge and many more – each with several hundred casualties. Then there were the smaller communities – Accrington, Barnsley, Grimsby; the country towns and villages of Ulster; the mining villages of Tyneside and south Yorkshire; the fishing villages and lumber towns of Newfoundland. For all these, and for many more, 1 July was to be a day of mourning and sad remembrance for the next fifty years.
In the days following the battle, large drafts of men arrived from the reinforcement camps and the battered battalions were soon restored to strength, taking their place in the line and, in many cases, taking part in later stages of the Somme battle. But the new men were not always from the battalion’s parent regiment; one London battalion, the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, was made up with men from nine different regiments. Other battalions received men of every description; there were second-line Territorials, Lord Derby men, dismounted Yeomanry and, before long, conscripts. It was the beginning of the end for the unique, volunteer Army of 1916.
To the Regulars and Territorials this rebuilding process was nothing new; the hard core of old soldiers who seemed to survive every battle soon knocked the new men into shape.
Many of the battalions of Kitchener’s New Army, however, underwent drastic changes in their character. They were more mature now; the success of their 18th and 30th Divisions, the only ones to have taken all their objectives when more experienced divisions had failed, ensured that there would be no more looking down on the New Army. Kitchener’s raw battalions had suddenly come of age, but in doing so they had lost part of their mystique. The bonds which had held the men so tightly together had been loosed. The new men who came to fill the huge gaps in the ranks were good men, but they were no longer from the same select area or background as their predecessors; they could never replace the band of brothers who had formed the original battalions in 1914. ‘The memories of those heart-breaking days will last forever. The name Serre and the date July 1st is engraved deep in our hearts, along with the faces of our “Pals”, a grand crowd of chaps. We were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying.’ (Pte A. V. Pearson, Leeds Pals)
‘The battalion was then re-organized and brought up to strength with men from all sources and so ended the era of a battalion composed of the “Clerks and Warehousemen of Manchester” who so eagerly enlisted early in September 1914. It was never again a “Manchester City Battalion”.’ (Pte A. E. Hall, 2nd Manchester Pals)
One division which suffered greatly from these changes was the Ulster Division. For political reasons conscription was never enforced in Ireland and the division was made up with whatever men it could find. In doing so it lost its wholly Protestant nature, for some of the new men turned out to be Catholics.
Men who had sworn to remain with their friends as privates, on finding these friends dead, left to become officers. Others who had gone home wounded asked, when they had recovered from their wounds, to be transferred to other arms, many to the R.F.C. or to the newly formed Tank Battalions. They knew that if they went back to their old battalions they would find most of their comrades gone.
Perhaps the differing attitudes between the Old Army and the New can be summed up in two quotations. The history of the Essex Regiment, whose losses had nearly all been in its two Regular battalions, describes 1 July as ‘A trying day on the Somme’.* To them it was just another bad day in a long war.
By contrast, the 9th Yorks and Lancs, a New Army battalion of South Yorkshire miners which had lost 423 men in its first battle, was to write of this day:
So ends the Golden Age.†
