First day of the Somme Read online

  Dedication

  For my darling wife, Lara Schönberger

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Author’s Note

  Dramatis Personae

  1. A Mother Named ‘Attrition’

  2. ‘I Learned to Hate the Place’

  3. ‘Artillery is Decisive’

  4. Ballad of the Blind Gunners

  5. Hunter Bunter’s Folly

  6. Loitering without Intent

  7. Ovillers, La Boisselle or Bust

  8. Fluttering for Fricourt

  9. The Straw Man of Montauban

  10. ‘This Tragic Adventure’

  11. The Earth Abideth

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index of Military Units

  General Index

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  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 a
ll 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

  Author’s Note

  To fully appreciate the strategies and movements of the opposing forces along the Somme on 1 July 1916, it helps to understand the structure of and chains of command in the opposing armies.

  Military formations at the Somme

  British

  Fourth Army was responsible for launching the lion’s share of the first day of the Somme attack, with Third Army undertaking also only a small diversionary operation. Fourth Army was much larger than Third Army given the scope of its planned operations and the influx of manpower and resources.

  On the morning of 1 July, Fourth Army had a total strength of 511,676 officers and men, mostly in infantry, artillery and cavalry units, as well as army and corps headquarters troops. There were, additionally, fewer than 8000 French and Indian personnel. Fourth Army had a total of six corps on its ration roll. One of these, II Corps, was in General Headquarters’ reserve. The others — III, VIII, X, XIII and XV Corps — participated in the attack. Third Army’s VII Corps was also engaged.

  British army corps generally each had three divisions attached, but sometimes, as in the case of VIII Corps, that number could rise to four. The total strength of each division was an average of 21,600 of all ranks spread primarily across various infantry, artillery, engineer, pioneer, machine-gun, trench-mortar, medical and workshop units. Each division comprised three infantry brigades, each of these with four battalions. There were four infantry companies to a battalion. The average attack strength of a battalion on 1 July was 761 soldiers of all ranks, which was below nominal strength after the deduction of non-fighting personnel and a percentage of fighting troops left out of battle.

  Although every division had its own field artillery, these were, along with heavy artillery, controlled by corps headquarters. A number of Royal Flying Corps squadrons were included in the order of battle, with some attached to GHQ, as well as army and corps headquarters.

  German

  Second Army comprised XIV Reserve Corps and XVII Corps, the former engaged against the British Third and Fourth Armies on the first day of the Somme. In addition it had the three divisions of VI Reserve Corps in army reserve. Fourteenth Reserve Corps numbered about 95,000 soldiers of all ranks. It comprised six divisions, each with several permanent regiments of infantry and artillery organised within one or more brigades respectively.

  Twenty-six Reserve and 2nd Guards Reserve Divisions consisted of four regiments each, whereas the 12th Infantry, 28th Reserve, 52nd Infantry and 10th Bavarian Infantry Divisions comprised three. The latter division was split up across XIV Reserve Corps’ sector to be used in the front line or as reserves by other divisions. An infantry regiment usually numbered 2750–3000 officers and men and had at least one machinegun company attached, if not two. Regiments usually comprised three battalions, sometimes four. Each battalion had four companies of about 250 soldiers of all ranks.

  Divisions had their own field and heavy artillery, whether permanently on strength or attached for a period of time from either corps headquarters or divisions in reserve. Observation balloons were deployed by divisions, while three squadrons of aircraft were attached to corps headquarters. Miscellaneous divisional troops included construction, medical, trench-mortar, pioneer, engineer and communications units, among others.

  German ranks

  German ranks mentioned in this book are listed below, along with their British equivalents. Note, however, this is not an exhaustive list of German ranks and appointments for the First World War.

  German rank British equivalent

  Military personnel

  Kanonier

  Gunner

  Fahrer

  Driver

  Infanterist, Landsturmann, Musketier, Reservist, Ersatz-Reservist, Schütze, Soldat, Grenadier

  Private

  Gefreiter

  Lance-Corporal

  Unteroffizier

  Corporal

  Vizefeldwebel

  Staff-Sergeant

  Feldwebel

  Sergeant-Major

  Offizierstellvertreter

  Officer deputy (an appointment, not a rank)

  Leutnant, Leutnant-der-Reserve, Leutnant-der-Landwehr

  Second-Lieutenant

  Oberleutnant, Oberleutnant-der-Reserve

  Lieutenant

  Hauptmann, Hauptmann-der-Reserve

  Captain

  Major

  Major

  Oberstleutnant

  Lieutenant-Colonel

  Oberst

  Colonel

  Generalmajor

  Major-General

  Generalleutnant

  Lieutenant-General

  General-der-Infanterie

  General (of infantry)

  Generalfeldmarschall

  Field-Marshal

  Medical personnel

  Oberstabsarzt

  Major (or higher)

  Stabsarzt

  Captain

  Other

  Fliegertruppoffizier

  Flying troop officer

  Casualty figures


  Chapters 5–10 (pages 140–356) include footnotes detailing the formal names of battalions involved in the fighting. In each case the number of casualties suffered on 1 July is stated, along with the source document. Casualties for longer periods are given where more precise information is not available. The type of casualty is abbreviated as follows: d (for dead), which includes soldiers who were killed or died of wounds; w (wounded); m (missing in action); and p (prisoner of war). In some cases casualty figures for even a single battalion can vary between different sources, but only one has been cited. These figures should generally be regarded as preliminary estimates of casualties. For each of these battalions a separate and comparative figure for the number of fatalities on 1 July is quoted from Soldiers Died in the Great War (SDGW), published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1921. These SDGW data will help readers appreciate the fate of many of those soldiers who were initially reported to be missing, wounded or a prisoner of war on 1 July.

  Maps

  Throughout this book maps provide a useful reference point for following the course of battle on 1 July, and the units involved. The maps are based on those included in the British official history, Military Operations, France and Belgium 1916. Further detail has been sourced from a variety of other texts, among them the German volume Somme-Nord, I Teil. All maps include a distance gauge with imperial and metric conversions. Contour lines are shown with grey-scale gradients and the elevation above sea level is expressed in metres, as was the case with British maps in 1916.