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MOURNING GLORY
By William Terdoslavich
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.
—ROBERT BURNS
Battles define nations. For Americans, that battle is Gettysburg, the dramatic climax of the Civil War. Freedom was won there. For the British, it is the Battle of the Somme, a tragic bloodletting that evokes sorrow, not pride.
What happened on July 1, 1916, still draws British tourists to the battlefield, which stretched over twenty miles in length and up to eight miles in depth. They seek out the graves of family members among the twenty thousand soldiers buried long ago in the military cemeteries that now trace the former lines.
The disaster also colored the British military’s outlook toward Germany’s rearmament in the years before the Second World War. An aversion to mass casualties led to reluctance in war planning, while the hiring pool for general officers was pretty shallow, given the number of losses of lieutenants and captains in the First World War. Anyone exhibiting courage and leadership had a good chance of getting killed. Many were.
Taking the King’s Shilling
The Battle of the Somme did not just happen. It took planning, as well as a convergence of events.
You have to go back to August 1914. Britain had just declared war on Germany. Six hundred thousand volunteers overran the enlistment offices. Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener now had to turn this mob into an army.
Five “New Armies” were formed, each of six divisions, a total of one hundred thousand men per army. Turning these civilians into soldiers was a challenge. The Territorial Divisions, much like our National Guard in national crises and war, had already been dispatched to France to help the British Expeditionary Force hold the line against the invading Germans. These divisions would help the old regulars in the BEF maintain position until the New Armies arrived.
Regular officers were in short supply, and with many at the front doing their duty, the responsibility of training devolved onto a small pool of retired officers and NCOs—perhaps not Britain’s best. Three officers and three NCOs would be allotted to each battalion of volunteers, with junior officers being raised from the ranks by necessity. There simply weren’t enough “gentlemen” to go around.
To maintain patriotic enthusiasm, the incoming men were told they could serve with their neighbors and coworkers. This gave rise to the so-called Pals Battalions, men from the same workplaces, cities, towns, and counties who were grouped together as units. Liverpool raised four Pals Battalions in the first month of the war alone. Many towns turned out single battalions. Many cities turned out brigades.
By the end of 1915, they would all be equipped and shipped to France. They knew how to march. They knew how to drill. They did not know how to fight. Their combat training was dangerously lacking.
Best-Laid Plans . . .
The Allies—France, Britain, Italy, and Russia—had to fashion a plan to defeat Germany and Austria-Hungary. There was no supreme commander yet, but the Allies agreed that they had to attack the Axis from all sides to produce a German defeat.
General Sir Douglas Haig was the first among those equals. Commanding all British forces in France, Haig had to do his part in cooperation with French field marshal Joseph Joffre.
That timetable for joint planning was messed up by the German offensive aimed at taking Verdun, beginning in February of 1916. (By December 1916, it ended with a strategic withdrawal by a now chagrined German offensive force.) Defending that fortress sucked in French units like a bloody vacuum cleaner. Divisions were rotated into and out of that sector, which had to be held.
That pretty much scotched the original French plan to attack the Somme sector in early July with three armies. The original plan called for using sixty-seven French divisions and twenty-five British divisions. On July 1, a much smaller plan went into action, with fourteen British divisions (and four in reserve), plus another five French divisions with six in reserve.
Haig was looking to score a decisive victory at the Somme. Clear, flat ground beyond the German lines would be ideal for a breakout. He held three British cavalry divisions in reserve, ready to ride through the gap he expected to blast in the German lines. The objectives were very optimistic—attacking British units had to make it to the second line of the German defense belt, which was three lines deep.
The northern half of the attack was entrusted to General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commanding the 4th Army, while General M. E. Fayolle commanded the French 6th Army for the southern half. The Somme River neatly divided the two sectors. Facing these troops were low-rising hills held by the German 2nd Army. They had burrowed deeply into the chalky ground, their first-line troops well protected in dugouts thirty feet deep, virtually bombproof against the seven-day artillery bombardment that preceded the attack.
Over the Top
To start the attack on July 1, the British set off eight mines that had been dug beneath the German lines, each packed with tons of high explosives. Once the British artillery fire stopped, the officers blew their whistles and the men deep in the trenches went over the top into “no-man’s-land.”
Each division attacked on a front two brigades wide, with the third brigade held in reserve. Each brigade sent two battalions forward. Each battalion advanced with each of its four companies in line, each line fifty paces apart. And they advanced at a walk, with every soldier burdened by his rifle, two hundred rounds of ammunition, two days of food, and an assortment of barbed wire, stakes, mortar ammunition, grenades—everything they would need to establish a defense once they took the German first line.
All that British artillery fire failed to cut the barbed wire that laced no-man’s-land—the deadly space between the lines. Many of the shells used during the prep fire were shrapnel, not high explosives. Shell splinters simply whizzed past the wire with each explosion. Many shells were duds, the product of rush orders and poor quality control.
And the bombardment did not soften up German defenses. Troops emerged from their dugouts, thirty feet below the surface, set up their machine guns, and opened fire. With each belt of ammo fired, the Germans reaped a bloody harvest, sometimes catching advancing companies in their flanks. Some were little more than platoons by the time they captured a stretch of German trench.
Not every sector along the twenty-six-mile line saw failure. The regulars in British XIII Corps made the greatest advance—about two miles. But other attacks were well shredded by the time any troops made it to the first German line. Sometimes none made it at all.
The worst disaster of the day fell upon the 1st Newfoundland Battalion, losing 710 men, about 91 percent of its initial strength, in killed and wounded. They had to advance across open ground with zero support from artillery or neighboring units. Many Pals Battalions lost half their strength, as attacks made minimal gains up and down the line. Some were annihilated in the first hour of battle.
By the time the sun set, close to twenty thousand British troops lay dead and nearly another forty thousand were wounded. When news of the fallen reached home, entire towns, villages, and neighborhoods were plunged into mourning. Many who grew up and worked together, who enlisted together, died together, too.
C’est la Guerre
French losses that day were fewer than two thousand killed and wounded. And they made their first-day objectives.
What?!
Why were French losses only one-thirtieth those of the British? The French had learned their tactical lessons the hard way two years before. They had once thought that bayonet charges could overcome machine-gun fire as they tried to retake their lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from the Germans. Heavy French casualties proved this was a bloody mistake.
After seeing how the Germans fought, the French army changed its tactics, emphasizing effective artillery fire that would precede a slow advance across no-man’s-land, followed closely by minimal infantry in small groups, one group advancing while the other provided support fire. This was beyond the capability of the ill-trained Pals Battalions.
Haig wanted a breakthrough. Had he listened to his subordinate, Rawlinson, the 4th Army’s attack would have aimed for more modest objectives, what Rawlinson called “bite and hold.” Just take the first line of trenches and dig in. Let the Germans counterattack to retake their trenches. Mow them down with rifle and machine-gun fire as they cross the open ground. Yet even this would have depended on improving the skills of the Pals Battalions, which, sadly, lacked the tactical finesse to attack forward in small groups practicing bounding overwatch.
The British army would learn how to fight as well as the French and the Germans. They would change their tactics, and substitute tanks and artillery for flesh and blood. That took time. The British army of 1918 was much more competent than its predecessor in 1916.
All of this would have lessened the body count, but not the battle. Fighting on the Somme ground on for another four months. By its conclusion in November, casualties numbered an estimated 195,000 for the French and about 650,000 for the Germans. British casualties numbered more than 415,000.
Such was the price paid by the British and the French to take eight miles of ground.