The Cauldron of Battle
‘At 6.20 am the sky was a circle of vivid flame as the British barrage opened up. The German sky flamed in response as our men began slowly moving across the torn waste of No Man’s Land. Looking backward it seemed the whole earth was full of the moving files of men. Coming up behind us in artillery formation were the battalions of the Rifle Brigade who were to sweep on through us to the village of Flers. About this movement was the most awesome sense of power.’111—The Auckland and Otago battalions begin their attack on the Somme, 16 September 1916.
The Somme is part of the ancient French province of Picardy, which had watched the march of foreign armies for 2000 years: Roman legions, the Vikings and the English armies of Edward III and Henry V in the Hundred Years War had all fought there. The Germans and French had fought on the Somme in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, and again in the opening months of World War I.
In 1916 it was to be the site of one of the greatest battles in military history. As devised by the Allied high commands, the purpose of this battle was to take the pressure off the embattled French at Verdun, to stop the Germans transferring forces to other theatres of war, and to generally wear down the strength of the German armies on the Western Front.
The great Somme offensive opened on 24 June with the heaviest Allied bombardment of the war so far—more than 1500 guns—designed to cut the enemy’s barbed-wire defences, neutralise their artillery, and destroy their trenches and strongpoints. On the morning of 1 July, 11 British and three French divisions—over 150,000 men in all—climbed from their trenches and advanced on the German lines. The protective barrage, however, was lifted too soon and the guns had largely failed to destroy the wire. The German troops, sheltering for the most part unharmed in deep dugouts, were able to bring their machine guns quickly to bear.
By day’s end, over 20,000 officers and men were dead and nearly 40,000 wounded—the greatest disaster to befall the British Army in a single day. ‘By the end of the day,’ wrote soldier-poet Edmund Blunden, ‘both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare . . . The War had won, and would go on winning.’112
For the next two months the British attacked and the Germans counter-attacked in a grinding battle of attrition. Fresh divisions thrown in by both sides were consumed in bloody struggles for woods, valleys, ravines and villages. By the end of July, the line had moved hardly 5 kilometres, but over 200,000 British and French soldiers, and 160,000 Germans, had been killed or wounded. Now it was to be the turn of Russell’s New Zealanders as part of XV Corps of Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, in what was to be called the Third Battle of the Somme.
Haig believed—wrongly, as events were to prove—that the German Army was at breaking point and that one more thrust would break through its formidable defensive line into open country beyond. To achieve this, 11 infantry divisions, supported by 50 tanks—the new weapon of war—would attack over a 16-kilometre front from Thiepval on the left to Combles on the right.
To the north, the First and Third armies would seize Gommecourt, Moncy and Vimy Ridge to coincide with the advance of the Fourth Army from the south. The aim was to capture all three German lines of defence at a single blow, opening the way for a breakthrough by the five cavalry divisions that would be massed behind the front line. It was to be ‘the climactic episode of the Somme campaign if not the entire war’.113
Despite Haig’s grand plan, the struggle would inevitably be costly, just as it had been in all previous assaults on the Somme. The German defence system facing the British divisions was still essentially intact, and built to be as impregnable as military engineering could make it. The first line of defence alone consisted of a series of trenches protected by deep belts of barbed wire and dugouts deep enough to protect their garrisons from all but a direct hit by the heaviest artillery. Into this system, the Germans had integrated a number of defended villages, each able to shelter garrisons of troops and machine gunners and shielded by trench defences protected by barbed-wire entanglements. With good reason, Winston Churchill described the German defences on the Somme in 1916 as ‘undoubtedly the strongest and most perfectly defended positions in the world’.
On 20 August, the New Zealanders entrained at Arques and St Omer for Abbeville, and in ‘the delectable wooded valleys of the lower Somme’ they began training in earnest. Russell had much to do in a very short time as his battalions were ill prepared for the demands being placed upon them by the coming Somme offensive. By this time, however, Russell and his fellow commanders were ready to apply the lessons of the British failures on the Somme in July 1916, along with those from the bloody attacks at Fromelles and Pozières where over 11,000 Australians had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner in their first action on the Western Front.
Under their commander’s exacting eye the three infantry brigades practised the latest techniques for assaulting enemy positions. There were exercises in extended formation attacks, ground liaison with aircraft, fighting in woods and villages, and the consolidation of captured positions. The troops were trained to hug a creeping or rolling barrage—a protective curtain of shellfire that advanced in front of them, preventing the enemy from manning their machine guns—and to be ready to deliver their attack immediately it lifted. They were told that risking casualties from an occasional short burst from their own barrage was preferable to losing the barrage and being compelled to fight their way unsupported into the enemy trenches. Russell put it plainly: ‘When we begin to lose a man or two from our own barrage, we are in the right place to go in with it when it lifts.’114
The men practised the manoeuvre repeatedly, advancing behind lines of flags representing the movement of the barrage. The leading waves kept within 60 or 70 metres of the barrage, kneeling while they waited for it to take another leap forward and then closing on it immediately. Following closely were small sections in single file to act as ‘moppers up’, systematically searching all trenches, dugouts and ground overrun by the leading waves and killing or capturing any of the enemy who remained.
On 1 September, Russell, along with 26 other generals and 72 commanding officers, was invited to Saint-Riquier for a demonstration of what Haig hoped would be a decisive weapon in the coming battle—the tank. What they saw were six machines resembling armoured traction engines, each weighing about 28 tons, armed with either cannons or machine guns, and capable of a breathtaking 2 miles per hour over reasonable country. The assembled officers were told that the Mark I version could crush barbed wire, climb parapets, cross trenches, and even go through thick woods. Russell appeared unexcited by the tactical possibilities of this ‘new travelling fort’, noting in his diary that its ‘utility remains to be proved’.
On 2 September, the division began its march up the Somme River valley, billeting around various villages en route and rehearsing again and again the infantry tactics that would be used in the battle to come. By day, the rumble of distant guns fused gradually into a continuous roar; by night, the muzzle flashes of heavy artillery lit the sky like sheet lightning. On dusty, crowded roads, trucks and horse-drawn wagons moved steadily along, taking food, munitions, and troops into battle and tired and wounded men out—‘feeding the furnace with fuel and carrying out the waste,’ as Lindsay Inglis cynically put it.115 From troops of the 51st Highland Division at Armentières, Russell’s men had learned of the scale and brutality of the fighting on the Somme and knew what they were about to face.
By 10 September, the New Zealanders had reached their assembly positions between the villages of Mametz and Fricourt, both now no more than piles of bricks and splintered trees. The ground over which the division would advance was already much fought over. Eight weeks before, 3150 men of the South African Brigade had attacked German-occupied Delville Wood. Just 800 of them emerged from it a week later. High Wood, only half of which was in British hands, was a charnel house. Both sides had fought ferociously to take and hold it; both sides had shelled it until only a few trees and smoking stumps were left. All about lay swathes of dead, or parts of them—Germans and British; as well as broken rifles, machine guns, trench mortars, helmets, packs and other equipment, and shell parts of all calibres. The stench was overpowering.
The attack of XV Corps on 15 September had four objectives. The first was the German front line; the second comprised the defences covering the village of Flers; the third included Flers and the ground to the east and west of it. The final objective was the capture of the villages of Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs and Morval in order to establish a defensive flank for a cavalry thrust through the German lines into open country.
The specific task allocated to the New Zealand Division was the capture of three strong German trench systems—the Switch Line, the Flers Line and the Gird Line—that protected the village of Gueudecourt, an area of enemy territory 1 kilometre wide by about 3 kilometres deep. On the left and right flanks of the New Zealanders would be the British 47th and 41st divisions. The attack was to be preceded by a massive three-day artillery bombardment of the German positions. On 5 September, Russell recorded in his diary: ‘GOC explained our task; a good one, and quite to my liking. We are lucky so far.’
The New Zealanders prepared early for the offensive to come. From their positions outside the village of Longueval saps were pushed forward into no-man’s-land. Communication trenches were dug between assembly and frontline trenches by Maori troops of the Pioneer Battalion. Under Russell’s direction, headquarters staff arranged for the transport of munitions, food and water, the evacuation of the wounded, the extension of roads, and the movement of troops and guns. Junior officers made themselves familiar with the ground over which their men would advance. Reserve ‘B’ teams, made up of selected officers and NCOs from each company, were set up to replace casualties sustained in the coming battle.
For the attack, Russell allocated his 2nd and 3rd brigades—about 6000 men in all—with 1st Brigade held in reserve. Their first objective was the Crest Trench followed by the formidable Switch Trench, 250 metres beyond it and up a long slope. Supporting the assault would be a creeping barrage from the New Zealand Field Artillery brigades, supported by the guns of the British 14th Division.
Hundred-metre-wide gaps would be left in the artillery barrage to allow the four tanks allocated to the division to advance safely in front of the infantry, crushing enemy barbed wire and dealing with their machine-gun nests and trench garrisons. The secret of the tank had been well kept, but by zero hour on 15 September most of the men in the trenches knew that a new weapon of war would be deployed that day.
The troops were kitted out in what was improbably described as ‘light fighting order’. Along with rifle and bayonet, every man carried two gas helmets, 200 rounds of ammunition in pouches and bandoliers, two Mills bombs, sandbags for reinforcing captured trenches, a waterproof sheet, a water bottle, a day’s rations and ‘iron’ ration, and every second man carried a shovel or pick—about 30 kilograms of gear in total. Each platoon carried a supply of smoke bombs to flush the enemy out of dugouts, and rockets and flares for signalling progress to patrolling aircraft. Each company was equipped with two Lewis light machine guns.
On 12 September, the guns allocated to XV Corps began their preliminary bombardment of the German lines. The following day Russell briefed his brigade commanders—Fulton, Earl Johnston and Braithwaite—in detail on the plan of attack. ‘Everything is I think on a sound footing,’ Russell wrote in his diary that night. Visiting the division just before the battle, Godley found the men ‘all most eager and full of fight; their sick rate practically nil’.116
On the night of 14 September the division moved into its assembly trenches between High Wood and Delville Wood in preparation for the attack. The men settled into their positions and slept as best they could. By 6 am on the 15th the troops had finished their breakfast of bread, cold bully beef, water or rum. Their equipment was on, bayonets fixed, and they were ready to go.
At 6.20 am, the artillery opened up, bringing a firestorm of high explosive and shrapnel down on the German lines. The leading companies of Auckland and Otago infantry advanced in four waves, hugging the barrage that lifted 50 metres every minute ahead of them. Up the slope they passed the tanks, exhausts smoking and tracks churning uselessly in the mud. At the top of the slope, was a billowing wall of white smoke shot with shell flashes; in their ears was the scream and explosion of shells and the staccato chatter of German machine guns.
The first objective, the Crest Trench, was stormed and its garrison overwhelmed. Some Germans gave up easily; others fought doggedly. Either way, it did not matter—stretcher-bearers and wounded men were spared; the rest, including those who had surrendered, were shot or bayoneted. Men facing heavy machine-gun and rifle fire and seeing their mates fall around them were in no mood to spare the men who, seconds before, had been inflicting it.
Two hundred Germans turned and ran back towards the Switch Line, 250 metres away; many of them were cut down in the open by the Lewis guns of the Otago battalion. Just before the Switch, the leading waves of Auckland infantry, advancing too fast, overstepped the barrage and lost men to the fire of their own guns. On the left, 47th Division was held up outside High Wood, exposing the Otago left flank to enfilading machine-gun and sniper fire. The four tanks that were due to reach the Switch five minutes before the infantry were nowhere to be seen—out of action with mechanical problems or delayed by a muddy terrain cratered with shell holes.
As the barrage lifted, the surviving New Zealanders closed up and poured in one wave through the smashed wire and into the Switch Trench, now battered almost beyond recognition by artillery fire and filled with German dead. The ensuing fighting was brutal and short. Four German officers were the only prisoners taken. Of the 700 Aucklanders who went into action that morning, 324 had been killed, wounded, or were missing. The Otagos had lost 460, most of them from the enfilading fire from High Wood. Below them now lay the village of Flers and, 1 kilometre beyond, the village of Gueudecourt.
At his headquarters at Meaulte, 7 kilometres behind the front line, Russell waited anxiously for news of the attack. Despatch riders came and went, and badly shocked German prisoners arrived in a steady stream. ‘Heavy fighting going on,’ Russell wrote to his sisters as the battle progressed. ‘It’s difficult to see as much of this business as one would like: smoke, enemy fire, folds in the ground, etc, all make observation poor.’
At 8.20 am the Rifle Brigade battalions attacked the Flers trench system, but without artillery support and facing a barrier of uncut wire. The impasse was broken by a tank that had finally reached the forward New Zealand positions. Smashing through the wire, it destroyed the German machine guns, allowing the riflemen to attack and take the trench. One hundred Germans gave themselves up to the advancing New Zealanders.
Meanwhile, 2nd Battalion was meeting fierce resistance and losing many men to German machine gunners firing from the outskirts of Flers village. Again, a tank played a critical role, crushing an enemy machine-gun post and forcing its garrison to run for their lives. From there to Abbey Road it was hard fighting all the way. The road was hidden in plantations and full of dugouts, and from there the Germans resisted stubbornly, but by 10 am the village of Flers had been secured.
The next objective, Grove Alley Trench, was taken by 1st Battalion, but again at heavy cost. German artillery and machine-gun fire swept the leading platoons from the front and right flank: ‘The Boche kept his field artillery playing on us and opened a terrific fire from machine-guns,’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Hart, ‘but our men went straight through as bravely and steadily as if on parade, with heads down as though through a hailstorm. Right and left they fell until one third were out of action, then with a rush the remainder stormed the trench . . . It was magnificent but costly.’117
By noon, however, the remnants of 1st Battalion were far in advance of the supporting British units and in imminent danger of being cut off and annihilated by German counter-attacks. They were spared by a costly mistake: battalion officers, thinking that the movement of a platoon signalled a general withdrawal, ordered their men to abandon Grove Alley and pull back towards Flers.
By the end of the day, Russell’s division had taken three out of its four objectives and established a defensive line around the village of Flers. The British 47th and 41st divisions, however, had failed to keep pace, leaving the New Zealanders in an exposed salient under heavy German shellfire. By nightfall of the next day they had secured the fourth objective and captured some 500 prisoners and 15 machine guns.
The price of success was high—over 600 men of the division had been killed and more than 1400 wounded. Russell’s diary of 15 September noted drily: ‘Zero at 6.20 am. We carried the first two objectives up to Flers line up to time—nearly 200 yards in depth—and the third which brought us in advance of Flers village some 3 hours later . . . Losses about 2500—a good many officers.’
Some of the British divisions had fared much worse. Against a final total of 2580 New Zealand casualties on 15 September, 14th Division had suffered an estimated 4500; the 47th 4000; the 56th just under 4500; and the Guards 4150. In total, nearly 30,000 British and Dominion troops were killed or wounded on the first day of battle alone.
Tactical deficiencies and mechanical problems were responsible for much of this. On 15 September, the troops went forward in the stereotyped ‘wave’ formation that had proved so disastrous on 1 July. The task of the tanks was to advance first, crushing the enemy wire and destroying the machine-gun posts before the infantry arrived to mop up the survivors. Rawlinson, however, decided that the tanks needed to be protected from the creeping barrage and so his planners created 100-metre-wide, artillery-free ‘lanes’ along which the lumbering machines could advance in safety. Many of the tanks were still far behind the front line when the attack began and when the whistles blew, large sections of the infantry, including troops of the New Zealand Division, were forced to advance without artillery cover. From strongpoints that were, for the most part, untouched by the barrage, the German machine gunners cut them down in swathes.
In spite of the heavy losses, however, Rawlinson appeared to be satisfied with the results of the first day’s fighting. The villages of Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs and Morval were still in enemy hands, but other heavily fortified villages—Flers, Martinpuich, and Courcelette—had been captured, along with 4000 German prisoners. By nightfall on 16 September two main lines of German trench had been taken and an advance of 2 kilometres had been made over a front of 10 kilometres. The Fourth Army, Haig acknowledged, had made a larger advance in a single operation than any since the beginning of the Somme offensive in July. For its part, the New Zealand Division had taken all its objectives, earning it a commendation from Rawlinson for its ‘fine fighting spirit and admirable energy and dash’.118
The three days from 19–21 September saw a fierce struggle for the vital junction of Flers and Flers Support trenches with Drop Alley and Goose Alley. The junction was finally taken after a night-time attack by a force of bombers from the British 1st Division and three companies of the Canterbury battalion under the inspired leadership of Captain Fred Starnes. ‘No operation in which the division took part in the battle,’ wrote Colonel Hugh Stewart, ‘called for such tenacity and grim determination on the part of the individual soldier.’119
In the following days, the British 14th and 41st divisions were relieved. The New Zealanders stayed in the line, fighting in knee-deep mud, soaked by continuous rain and without greatcoats, blankets or hot food. Artillerymen and their horse teams struggled under ceaseless shellfire to reposition their guns. Stretcher-bearers carried seriously wounded men under fire to safety and medical help. Tired soldiers repaired roads, dug trenches and gun pits, carried essential supplies up the line, and buried the dead. ‘The men,’ wrote Byrne, ‘were reduced to a state of deepest misery and exhaustion.’120
Russell, however, was more than satisfied with what the division had achieved so far, despite the exposed positions his men now held. His casualties had been heavy, but proportionately much less than those of the supporting British divisions. One factor was the success of the preliminary bombardments in destroying much of the Switch Trench system and its barbed-wire defences. When the attacking troops arrived at the Switch they found much of it had been demolished, and many of its defenders dead or wounded. A second factor was the speed of the New Zealanders’ advance. Moving quickly behind a protective curtain of shellfire, as Russell had insisted, the troops caught many of the surviving German machine gunners still in their dugouts and unable to bring their weapons into action.
Diary entries at this time, however, reveal Russell’s frustration with the slow progress of the British attack overall. This, he complained, was allowing the enemy to shore up their forward lines of defence, construct new ones further back, and so forestall any breakthrough by the cavalry. The sweeping opening attacks of the Third Battle of the Somme looked likely to degenerate into just another grim battle of attrition—‘Grind forward yard by bloody yard,’ as Malthus put it.121
Meanwhile, Russell applied himself to the problems of servicing his forward units. For the first four days of the offensive the only supply routes were over a wasteland of shell holes strewn with barbed wire, or via the road from Longueval, both of which were being shelled day and night. Heavy rain on 17 and 18 September had compounded the problem, turning the battlefield into a quagmire and making it impossible to get ammunition and supplies forward to the troops. After several inspections of the captured ground, Russell ordered the main communication trench, ‘Turk Lane’, pushed forward, trench duckboards laid, and a light railway constructed to get food, water, ammunition and other supplies to frontline positions around the village of Flers.
The division was involved in two other major attacks in the Third Battle of the Somme—the Battle of Morval on 25 September and the Battle of Transloy Ridges beginning on 1 October—but essentially in a supporting role to other divisions of the Fourth Army. On 25 September the New Zealanders were partnered by the British 21st and 55th divisions, and their objectives were those that Rawlinson had failed to reach on 15 and 16 September—the villages of Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs and Morval.
The attack by 1st Brigade on 25 September was a complete success. Aided again by careful preparation and good artillery support, the brigade took its objectives to the northwest of Gueudecourt with relative ease. The follow-up attack on 27 September was a disaster. The Otago regiment was cut to pieces in front of Gird Trench, the victim of rushed preparations and a weak artillery barrage that had failed to cut the German wire and destroy their machine-gun emplacements. Every officer and almost every man was either killed or wounded. It was, Byrne noted, the regiment’s ‘most bitter and costly experience on the Somme’.122
By 29 September the three villages and the German third line were in British hands, and 2nd Brigade was defending the Gird trench system with grim determination. Russell wrote to his sisters that day: ‘We are still at it, hammer and tongs. I hope, however, that before long we shall get a rest, which the men have well earned . . . for apart from the danger, which I don’t suppose worries them much, the discomfort, the physical weariness begins to tell. They have done well, and I hope that the good words the Corps and Army Commander have said for us have a solid foundation . . . I shall feel relieved for the men’s sake when we quit.’
Russell contrasted his position some kilometres behind the front line with the dangers and discomforts endured by his troops. ‘Personally I am as fit as a fiddle, live comfortably, and seldom find myself in the least danger; such is the ignoble share of a divisional commander. I do not altogether appreciate it. An admiral has a much better time; he at least shares equally the dangers of his men; and fortunately neither of them have the discomforts of the soldier in the trenches.’ Russell was not being altogether honest. On the night of 16 September, the Germans had shelled the ground around his headquarters at Meaulte, forcing him and his staff to take shelter in their dugouts.
Encouraged by his successes, Haig and his staff now devised a new plan by which the two armies would again attempt to break through to Bapaume and then on to Cambrai, an advance of nearly 40 kilometres through the German lines. The role of the New Zealand Division was again to be a limited one. It would support an attack by the British 47th Division on the village of Eaucourt l’Abbaye by capturing the Goose Alley–Gird Trench junction.
On 1 October Russell noted in his diary: ‘Made further attack—extending our line to the N.W. towards Eaucourt L’Abbaye—successful. It was not until this evening that the situation on our left was cleared up—the 47th division entrusted with the taking of Eaucourt L’Abbaye made a mess of it, and our flank was very much in the air.’
Once again, the cost of the attack was heavy—nearly 600 casualties, including over 100 killed. The brigade took about 250 prisoners, among them the headquarters staff of two battalions of a Bavarian reserve regiment. The village of Eaucourt L’Abbaye finally fell to British troops on 3 October after several days of hard fighting.
On 2 October Private John Joseph Sweeney was shot by firing squad in front of a dugout near Russell’s headquarters at Meaulte. ‘A deserter twice over and yet he went out to be shot without showing any fear,’ wrote Sergeant Arthur Rhind, a clerk on Russell’s staff.123 Sweeney was one of more than 60 soldiers of Haig’s armies to be executed for desertion or cowardice during the Battle of the Somme, and the second New Zealander.
On 3 October, the New Zealand Division ended its tour of duty on the Somme and pulled back to camps at Pommiers Redoubt and Fricourt. Many of them were laden with rings, watches, field glasses and other souvenirs of battle. All were wet and filthy from continuous exposure to bad weather and exhausted by lack of sleep and the strain of heavy fighting. Much of their clothing was in rags; many wore sandbags for leggings and waterlogged, mud-plastered German greatcoats. ‘The only light all the way came from gun flashes blanketed by rain,’ wrote Lindsay Inglis. ‘The company arrived at last at a muddy archipelago where tarpaulin and ammunition-box shelters formed the islands. The men lay down in the slush. The rain beat down. It had taken us 7 and a quarter hours to come 6 miles.’124
In its first test of battle on the Western Front, Russell’s division had done well. In atrocious conditions, it had stayed in the line for 23 days on end—the longest unbroken spell of any division on the Somme. The division had taken part in three major attacks and fought its way forward for over 3 kilometres. It had captured nearly 1000 German troops, many machine guns and other war material. On 15 September, the division had advanced further than any other division in a single day of the Third Battle of the Somme. It had also rendered timely assistance to British divisions on both flanks whose attacks had been temporarily held up.
The British high command was not slow to acknowledge the division’s achievements during its three-week tour of duty. Godley reported to Defence Minister Allen that the performance of the New Zealanders had been unsurpassed by any British division on the Somme. General Sir Douglas Haig, a man not lavish with praise, cabled the New Zealand Government: ‘The division has won universal confidence and admiration. No praise can be too high for such troops.’125 Missing from Haig’s dispatch was any acknowledgement of the appalling cost of the division’s success on the Somme—nearly 8000 officers and men killed or wounded, equivalent to eight of its 12 battalions.
Whatever the feelings of the New Zealand Government about the division’s blooding on the Somme, they obviously did not blunt its commitment to the imperial cause, or cause it to question the competency of the British high command. A month after the division was withdrawn from the line, Massey and Ward were assuring Haig in person that the Dominion had a reserve of 100,000 men to reinforce the division that New Zealand had already put in the field.126
Russell had reason to be pleased with his contribution to the division’s first major offensive on the Western Front. His rigorous training and careful preparation had equipped his artillery and infantry well to deal with a range of battlefield situations. Junior officers and NCOs were able to assess situations quickly in the heat of battle and take over leaderless units when the chain of command broke down. As Malthus put it, ‘The whole division was now well seasoned in the new type of fighting. Thanks to smooth coordination and plenty of initiative in meeting local obstacles, it won the highest praise.’127
The division, however, had endured its share of difficulties and near-disasters. There had been problems in getting food, ammunition and other supplies across a shellfire-swept battlefield and into the front line, and in bringing hundreds of seriously wounded men back under fire into overcrowded medical facilities. There had been difficulties in maintaining contact between Russell’s headquarters and his forward units in key phases of the battle. There had been major problems also in ensuring adequate artillery support for the assaulting troops, as evidenced by the attack on the Flers Trench system on 15 September, and that on Gird Trench 12 days later. Inglis’s battalion, for example, had to fight its way forward with exposed flanks, no creeping barrage and no tank support.
Russell’s control over the battle was limited in its early phases by his isolation at division headquarters, 7 kilometres behind the front line. It was an archetypical situation: World War I commanders planned attacks with their staffs, issued orders to subordinates, then fretted at headquarters, sited for safety and tactical reasons well behind the front line. Once their troops had gone over the top, brigade or battalion commanders could send back information only by runner or telephone lines, both vulnerable to enemy fire.
The outstanding feature of the battles of 1914–18 was the almost total lack of control once the battle had started, and this was the case in the Third Battle of the Somme. Once the attack of 15 September was underway, control effectively passed from Russell and his brigadiers to the battalion commanders, junior officers and NCOs who went forward with their men. Progress reports from forward positions took an hour or more to reach divisional or brigade headquarters, by which time they had often been overtaken by events. On the first day of the battle it was 5 pm before Russell and his brigade commanders had a complete and accurate report from the front line.
To what extent Russell was responsible for the failed attack on the Gird Trench network on 27 September is difficult to determine. Plans for such operations would usually begin at corps or divisional headquarters, be passed through to brigade headquarters for refinement, then on to battalion commanders for action. In this case, the headquarters staff of XV Corps, Russell as divisional commander, and Johnston as brigade commander could all have had a hand in managing the assault. Given Russell’s trademark attention to preparation and planning, it is difficult to conclude that he, rather than XV Corps staff or the sick and exhausted Earl Johnston, was responsible for the botched operation that day.
Arguably, the heavy casualties sustained by the New Zealanders on the Somme could have been much reduced had Russell asked for the division to be withdrawn and rested after the first four days of heavy fighting, in which nearly 1000 of his men had been killed.128 There is no evidence that he did, and the division was kept in the front line when flanking British divisions were pulled back to be rested and reinforced. Because of its continuing success, the New Zealand Division was worked until it was exhausted.
Certainly, Rawlinson and his staff valued the willingness of the New Zealanders to stay in the line without complaint and without asking for relief. They particularly appreciated, according to Godley, the fact that once the division had received its orders, nothing more was heard from it until a report was sent back saying that it had achieved all its objectives.129
If the Somme campaign had exposed the division’s lack of combat experience, senior British generals found little to criticise. Corps commander General Sir Henry Horne described Russell as ‘a capable and determined commander, leading a division imbued with an excellent spirit’. ‘Officers and men,’ he wrote to Godley, ‘were keen to attack and went in with the intention of winning, and consequently did succeed in every case whilst I remained commander of XV Corps . . . In short, I formed a very high opinion of the division.’130
Rawlinson praised the leadership of Russell and his brigade commanders for its skill and precision; and the division for not only taking every objective allotted to it, but securing and holding several enemy strong points beyond those objectives. The division’s endurance and fighting spirit were beyond praise, he wrote, and its successes around the village of Flers would ‘rank high amongst the best achievements of the British Army’.131 It was on the Somme that the New Zealand Division would first earn its reputation in the eyes of the British high command as an outstanding fighting formation.
The British offensive on the Somme finally ground to a halt in mid-November, defeated by continuing foul weather and dogged German resistance. Haig’s armies had captured a piece of enemy-occupied territory just 32 kilometres wide by 10 kilometres deep. The price was over 600,000 killed and wounded on the Allied side alone, and the British armies were still 5 kilometres short of Bapaume, which Haig had aimed to capture in his opening attack on 1 July. The irony of it all was that all of the territory won so expensively would be recaptured in the first days of the Kaiserschlacht, the German counter-offensive of March 1918 that almost won them the war.
The Somme offensive failed to achieve its main aim: a break through German lines into open country that could be exploited by the cavalry. It did succeed in its crucial secondary aim: to break the force of the German attack on Verdun and give its French defenders a breathing space. It also prevented the Germans from transferring large numbers of troops from the Western Front to where they were badly needed on the Russian and Romanian fronts.
Haig’s offensive had also inflicted huge losses on the German armies. In four and a half months of battle, between 437,000 and 680,000 German troops had been killed or wounded. Captain von Hentig of the German Guard Reserve Division would famously claim that ‘the battlefields of the Somme were the muddy grave of the German field army, dug by British industry and its shells’.
German supreme commanders Hindenburg and Ludendorff were determined that their troops should at all costs be spared from another battle of the Somme. The result was a German withdrawal in February 1917 to the new and heavily fortified Hindenburg Line, some 40 kilometres east of the Somme battlefield. The Germans would now rest on the defensive in the west and attempt to knock Britain out of the alliance by unrestricted submarine warfare against both Allied and neutral shipping.
For now, however, Russell’s men would live with their memories. They would remember the ‘infernal roar’ of the artillery as the New Zealand Division fixed bayonets for its opening attack on 15 September, and the massacre of 1st Brigade in front of Gird Trench because of hurried planning and the failure of the artillery to cut the German wire. They would recall the bloody struggle of the Canterbury battalion for Goose Alley under the inspired leadership of Captain Fred Starnes. They would remember the New Zealand wounded lying exposed to driving rain and shellfire, thirsty and in pain; the famished troops searching German bodies and haversacks for food and water.
On 6 October, the survivors of the Somme began their journey back north towards Armentières. In the village of Allery, many of the inhabitants dressed in their Sunday best and came out to meet the marching men. ‘They had told us when we marched out to the Somme that we were “beaucoup bien aimé” (much-loved). Now they had come in great concern to see how we had fared. Shouts of joy when some popular lad was found to be safe and deep sympathy when Monsieur Jack or George was wounded. Many were weeping when they heard the long roll of the dead.’132