First day of the Somme Page 2

  Dramatis Personae

  The following are the major characters in this book. They are arranged with the most senior commanders first, followed by subordinates in alphabetical order.

  British Commanders

  General Sir Douglas Haig: Commander of the British army on the Western Front. His Fourth and Third Armies were together responsible for launching the first day of the Somme attack on 1 July 1916.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Rawlinson: Commander of the Fourth Army, which undertook the main British attempt to break into and then through the German positions using its III, VIII, X, XV and XIII Corps between Serre and Montauban.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Edmund Allenby: Commanded the Third Army, which played a small diversionary role at Gommecourt on 1 July, using its VII Corps to assist the northern flank of Fourth Army.

  General Sir Hubert Gough: Was at the helm of the then yet-to-be-formed Reserve Army, which would come together on Fourth Army busting into the German lines. It was to subsequently be responsible for exploiting Fourth Army’s gains and, it was hoped, bring a return to mobile warfare.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Launcelot Kiggell: Haig’s chief of staff.

  Brigadier-General John Charteris: Haig’s chief of intelligence.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Walter Congreve, VC: Commander of XIII Corps and its successful attack either side of Montauban.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Horne: Led XV Corps’ partially successful operations around Fricourt and Mametz.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston: Commanded VIII Corps’ bungled attacks between Serre, Beaumont Hamel and the River Ancre.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Morland: In charge of X Corps’ ultimately failed operations between the River Ancre, Schwaben Redoubt, Thiepval and Leipzig Redoubt.

  Lieutenant-General Sir William Pulteney: Oversaw the failed attack of III Corps between Leipzig Redoubt, Ovillers and La Boisselle.

  Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Snow: Led VII Corps’ fruitless diversionary operation at Gommecourt, which was intended to draw German attention away from nearby VIII Corps at the northern end of Fourth Army’s battle sector.

  German Commanders

  General-der-Infanterie Erich von Falkenhayn: Chief of General Staff, Supreme Army Command. Falkenhayn was de facto supreme commander of the German army.

  General-der-Infanterie Fritz von Below: Commander of the Second Army, whose XIV Reserve and XVII Corps, respectively north and south of the River Somme, opposed the Anglo-French operation on 1 July with varying degrees of success and failure.

  Generalleutnant Hermann von Stein: Headed XIV Reserve Corps and was responsible for defending Second Army’s positions north of the River Somme, against the British Third and Fourth Armies and the French XX Corps.

  Oberst Fritz von Lossberg: A defensive expert brought in as Second Army’s replacement chief of staff following the outcome of 1 July (his predecessor having been sacked). He would influence future German defensive practices on the Somme.

  Generalleutnant Karl von Borries: In charge of 52nd Infantry Division between Gommecourt salient and Serre, portions of whose line were attacked unsuccessfully by elements of VII and VIII Corps.

  Generalleutnant Martin Châles de Beaulieu: Oversaw 12th Infantry Division between Montauban and the River Somme, this ground almost entirely overrun by XIII Corps and the French XX Corps on 1 July.

  Generalleutnant Ferdinand von Hahn: Led 28th Reserve Division between La Boisselle, Fricourt and Mametz. It faced about half of III Corps, which it defeated, but was itself largely overwhelmed by XV Corps around Fricourt and Mametz.

  Generalleutnant Franz Freiherr von Soden: Commanded 26th Reserve Division between Serre, Beaumont Hamel, the River Ancre, Thiepval, Leipzig Redoubt and Ovillers. His division defended its line against most of VIII Corps, all of X Corps and the remainder of III Corps, and successfully blocked Fourth Army’s planned main axis of advance.

  Generalleutnant Richard Freiherr von Süsskind-Schwendi: Oversaw 2nd Guards Reserve Division, which successfully defended Gommecourt salient opposite VII Corps.

  Generalmajor Hermann Ritter von Burkhardt: In command of 10th Bavarian Division, which was split up across XIV Reserve Corps’ sector.

  French Commanders

  General Joseph Joffre: Commander-in-Chief of the French Army. His Sixth Army would attack on 1 July as part of the British-French offensive with, at least in part, a view to reducing the pressure on the French Second Army at Verdun.

  General Marie-Emile Fayolle: At the helm of the French Sixth Army, which attacked either side of the River Somme on 1 July in co-operation with Rawlinson’s Fourth Army. In contrast to the British force, Fayolle’s army turned in a very successful performance.

  General Ferdinand Foch: Commanded the French Groupe des Armées du Nord, comprising the French Sixth and Tenth Armies, which were respectively astride the River Somme and further north near Arras.

  General Philippe Pétain: Led the French Second Army at the Battle of Verdun.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Mother Named ‘Attrition’

  General Sir Douglas Haig’s grand plan for 1 July 1916

  ‘As the day of battle approaches so is one worried by alterations and modifications.’1

  — General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of Fourth Army

  NOBODY KNOWS EXACTLY what General Sir Douglas Haig thought as he stood before Napoleon Bonaparte I’s tomb in Paris. Outside it was a silver-skied March 1916 afternoon, but Haig, the Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of the British army and one of the architects of the soon-to-belaunched Somme offensive, was indoors treading the magnificent halls of Les Invalides with his chief of intelligence, Brigadier-General John Charteris. Haig was taciturn, and his thoughts probably harked back to his time at Staff College, Camberley, when he had studied the long-dead French general. Perhaps Haig was paying homage to Napoleon; perhaps he was seeking inspiration for his own operational planning ahead of the Somme. Charteris, for his part, pondered how the bold Frenchman might have tackled the first day of the Somme: ‘If Napoleon’s spirit was near his tomb, did he wish to pull D.H.’s ear and wish him luck, and tell him the secret of victory? Would he have had any magic of strategy in these days of trenched positions, without any flank, and guns that range 10 miles?’2

  The Somme was almost certainly on Haig’s mind as he surveyed the stone paean to the Corsican’s victories, such as that at Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, when his infantry broke through a Prussian defensive line and cavalry routed the disarrayed enemy. The broad themes of this Napoleonic victory would become central to Haig’s Somme thinking.

  Biographers have penned Haig as a dour, asthmatic, career-focused, lowland Scot rich in ambiguities. A committed Presbyterian, he was said to possess Spartan self-discipline and self-sacrifice in pursuit of military efficiency.3 Such dedication led to pillories that Haig was ambitious, selfabsorbed, aloof, socially awkward, cold, formal and intense. The epithets continued: unpopular, abrupt, abrasive, dim-witted, limited to military literature, inarticulacy, without close friends and indifferent to women. Yet these criticisms go more to his uncompromising work ethic than the man. The anecdote-driven lens also reveals a more likeable side to Haig: loyal, educated and intelligent, organised, determined, reticent, a married family man and well-read. All had a basis in reality: Haig was a complex, driven professional, whose reserved character was laced with situational contradictions.

  War correspondent Philip Gibbs went with opinion when he described Haig as a good-looking chap who lacked a ‘magic touch’ with people:4 ‘He was constitutionally unable to make a dramatic gesture before a multitude, or to say easy, stirring things to officers and men whom he reviewed. His shyness and reserve prevented him also from knowing as much as he ought to have known about the opinions of officers and men.’5

  Paring Haig’s character back to its essence remains akin to grasping at shadows. Just one expert psychological assessment of the man exists, albeit long due an overhaul. ‘The evidence s
uggests that Haig’s burning ambition to succeed overlay a pronounced fear of failure, itself a product of childhood.’6 More specifically, this stemmed from a deep-rooted desire to prove his worth and ability to his mother, which dated back to childhood and unfavourable comparison with his siblings.7 The product in adulthood was an authoritarian character full of controlled aggression and tendencies towards obsessive, orderly, obstinate behaviour, along with a penchant for detail and fastidious appearance.8 His psychological makeup was unemotional, lacking in compassion, heavily critical of others and demanding of absolute loyalty.9 Haig was also overly sensitive to criticisms and questions, and generally mistrustful of others.10 All of this was set against the austere Victorian tenets of ‘heroic masculinity,’ namely physical health, self-restraint and devotion to duty,11 whether military or religious. Haig’s authoritarianism had as much to do with his feelings of inadequacy as his habitual optimism and determination to do ever better, which were linked to his achievement-driven character.

  These traits were apparent as Haig built his military career over the three decades leading to 1914. Born in Edinburgh on 19 June 1861 to a middle-class family, Haig was educated at Clifton College and then Brasenose College, Oxford (1880–3). He left university without a degree to enter the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in 1884. The colourblind cadet was commissioned into the 7th (Queen’s Own) Hussars as a lieutenant in 1885, thereafter serving in India (1886–92), then attending Staff College, Camberley (1896–7). Service and limited action with then Major-General Sir Horatio Kitchener’s staff in the Sudan followed (1898). Afterwards Haig was brigade-major to 1st Cavalry Brigade at Aldershot. During the South African or Second Boer War (1899–1902) he served first as then General Sir John French’s chief of staff and next at the helm of a column chasing various Boer guerilla leaders and enforcing a scorchedearth policy. Haig finished that war as lieutenant-colonel commanding 17th Lancers, an appointment he held until 1903. Back in England, he served as aide-de-camp to King Edward VII (1902–3), then, becoming the youngest major-general in the British army, as Inspector-General of Cavalry, India (1903–6). In 1905 he became engaged to one of Queen Alexandra’s maids of honour, the Honourable Dorothy Maud Vivian. The couple, who married in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, had produced four children by 1919.

  Subsequent military posts for Haig included several at the War Office, London (1906–9), which showed that he was seen as a trusted pair of hands. First he was Director of Military Training and then Director of Staff Duties. In these roles, Haig — perceived as a forward-thinking and professionally minded general by the then Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane — ushered in a series of essential but not always welcome reforms that pulled Militia, Yeomanry and Volunteers into a single Territorial Force. At this time Haig also oversaw the writing of Field Service Regulations, 1909, which became the core doctrine for ‘the training for war, and the organisation in war, of the whole British Army.’12 This work, which provided the framework for deploying the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1914, revealed Haig possessed a ‘cool head and proved that his reputation as a shrewd practical soldier in peace held good in war. On the veldt, in India or at home he mastered problems consistently. . . . Douglas Haig earned not only the praise of Edward VII and his heir [George V] but the esteem of a wide circle amongst the officer corps. Talented, self-effacing, handsome, orthodox, he was the very model of a British Major General.’13

  Knighthood and promotion to Chief of Staff, India (1909–12), followed. Then, following his return to England, came advancement to the post of General Officer Commanding Aldershot Command (1912–14). Haig, by now a lieutenant-general, was still in this job when pan-European war broke out.

  The First World War’s origins date from the 19th century, when Prussia shifted the balance of European power with its battlefield defeats of Austria in 1866 and France in 1870–1. ‘Iron Chancellor’ Otto von Bismarck then united the various German states into a Prussian-led German empire. It was the most powerful state in Europe and an ally of Austria-Hungary, as per their treaty of 1879. By mid-1888, the German throne belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm II, a grandson of Queen Victoria and cousin to both King George V and Russia’s tsar, Nicholas II. He was an aggressive, vain man with expansionist political policies and an unwelcome programme of naval re-armament. He desired a Mitteleuropa, German-speak for a Berlin-dominated economic zone in the centre of Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s ‘bellicose and clumsy’ overtures along these lines saw France and Russia form an uneasy alliance in 1894 founded on shared strategic worries about Kaiser Wilhelm II’s ambitions.14 Britain was concerned by the threat Germany posed to the status quo of power in Europe and the security of its home islands.15 It placed store in the Treaty of London (1839), which guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality and had been signed by Britain, Austria-Hungary, France, Prussia, Russia, the Netherlands and Belgium. Britain had reached a point of diplomatic accommodation with France and Russia, reaching agreements with these nations in 1904 and 1907 respectively, but was not part of the alliance agreed between those two countries. In early 1914, pan-European politics was charged with tension. Britain, France and Russia were suspicious of a Germany that had cast itself into a diplomatic corner; all the situation lacked was a tinderbox to set the continent ablaze.

  Two shots rang out in central Sarajevo, capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was 28 June 1914 and Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were dead. Nineteen-year-old Serbian insurgent Gavrilo Princip was triggerman, protesting against Bosnia’s inclusion in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A month of increasingly aggressive diplomatic posturing and unrealistic demands now known as the July Crisis followed. Kaiser Wilhelm II played the faux aggrieved innocent when he said ‘there can no longer be any doubts, England, France and Russia have conspired themselves together to fight an annihilation war against us.’16 He then ranted about his cousins: ‘To think that George [V] and Nicky [II] should have played me false! If my grandmother [Queen Victoria] had been alive, she would never have allowed it.’17 This was akin to schoolyard whingeing, except that European stability was at stake. With an air of grim inevitability, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, with Germany following suit against Russia (1 August), France (3 August) and Belgium (4 August).

  Britain had long realised that a successful German conquest of Western Europe — specifically the coastal strips of Belgium and France — would undermine its strategic and economic position, and demanded Belgium’s neutrality as per the Treaty of London. Britain had fought for centuries to keep these two territories out of hostile hands, and nothing had changed by 1914. Germany’s response was unsatisfactory, and Britain declared war at 11 p.m. on 4 August. German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg claimed it was unbelievable that war had been declared over a ‘mere scrap of paper,’ meaning the Treaty of London, but everything else suggested he and Kaiser Wilhelm II knew full well what the German Empire’s brinkmanship would bring.18

  As one historian has written, ‘Seeking to break out of self-created diplomatic encirclement, and achieve hegemony in Europe, the German leadership risked war in 1914 and embraced it when it occurred. In doing so, Germany took Europe on the first step towards the Somme.’19

  German military commanders had foreseen the dangers of fighting a two-front war of attrition against the French in the west and Russians in the east, and set down the means to avoid this in their so-called Schlieffen Plan. The strategy adopted — there were actually several to choose from within the overall plan — was to push several German armies through northern Belgium and into France, forcing a quick surrender. With the west shored up, the German army would then turn its might against Russia.

  The fighting began when the Kaiser’s troops swept into Luxembourg, France and Belgium in August 1914 on what would become the Western Front, while two Russian armies attacked Germany on the future Eastern Front. In early August the first 100,000 men of
the BEF landed in France and began fighting alongside the 62-division French army to stem the German juggernaut. What followed were the 1914 battles of Mons, Le Cateau, the Marne and the Aisne: in sum, a retreat to the outskirts of Paris followed by an Anglo-French fightback that retook some of the lost ground. A so-called ‘race’ to the North Sea ensued as each side tried to outmanoeuvre the other, but this faded into a stalemate. All that remained of the war in the west that was supposed to have been over by Christmas was hundreds of miles of opposing trenches and no end in sight. The parallel trenches ran across the continent from the North Sea to Switzerland. One side was occupied by Germany and the other by Britain, France and Belgium. Germany’s Schlieffen Plan had failed to produce a six-week victory over France, and the fighting on the Eastern Front demanded ever more men and materiel. Within months any hopes of a short conflict were dead, succeeded by increasingly industrialised killing and economic mobilisation, whose reign of horror would last until late 1918.

  Fighting in Western Europe in 1915 altered neither diplomatic nor tactical impasses. Casualties were heavy and the German army remained ensconced in Belgium and France. Britain remained the junior Allied partner, and France wanted it to make a greater contribution of manpower, take over more of the line to free up French troops for use elsewhere, and launch attacks in its own right. On the Italian Front, which along with France and Belgium comprised the Western European operational theatre, the fighting between the Austro-Hungarian and Italian armies had devolved into a stalemate in 1915. On the Eastern Front, Russia, which was also an operational theatre, had ceded more ground to the German army and wanted some of the pressure it faced relieved by an offensive in the west. Operations in the Balkans, Egypt, Africa, Asia and Australasia were never going to alter the fact that Western Europe was the main theatre of war. British attacks at Neuve Chapelle (10–13 March), Aubers (9 May), Festubert (15–25 May), Givenchy (15–16 June) and Loos (25 September–14 October) produced negligible results and lengthy casualty lists. French army attacks in 1915 were similarly non-productive. If the German army enjoyed a qualitative advantage in the east, the same was not true in the west, where the opposing armies were broadly matched in terms of firepower and technology, even if the well-dug-in defender enjoyed a tactical advantage over its attackers, who had to advance exposed across no-man’s-land to reach the enemy’s front line. Germany had no plans to quit France, Belgium or Russia, which, along with Britain, still wanted the enemy out. The absence of a negotiated peace or battlefield resolution on the Western Front in 1915 guaranteed the Allied armies would have to find a military solution to the deadlock in 1916.