by Peter Hart
Private Reuben Stockman, 1/9th Battalion (Queen Victoria’s Rifles), London Regiment, 169th Brigade, 56th Division
By sheer hard work they had managed to cut the distance across No Man’s Land to around 400 yards. The new lines of trenches and aggressive posture of the 46th and 56th Divisions at Gommecourt were clearly visible to the Germans. The Germans reacted by bringing up another division to face the obvious threat to the salient. As Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Snow commander of the parent VII Corps, reported to Haig, ‘They know we are coming all right.’18 So far the Gommecourt diversion was working well.
As the time for the offensive grew imminent there was even more digging to be carried out all along the line: every battalion, every battery, every higher formation needed a headquarters dugout to accommodate the commanding officer, his adjutant, staff and signallers. These dugouts varied wildly in size according to whim, but for larger formations such as the infantry brigades they had to be of a considerable size just to accommodate the sheer numbers that needed shelter. But a far greater commitment was to dig assembly trenches for the attacking troops. The existing front line could not possibly contain all the men that would have to attack together and a series of extra trenches had to be dug to shelter them before they went over the top. This was back-breaking work under conditions that caused considerable resentment towards the Royal Engineers that supervised the tasks.
The men were given tasks which could not be done in the time specified. In the Royal Engineer textbooks and manuals there were standard times for work like digging trenches—so many cubic feet dug per hour. These times were obtained in ideal conditions at Aldershot in pre-war days, by highly trained regular soldiers, and it was not reasonable to expect the same performance in the most difficult war conditions—frequently under direct hostile machine-gun fire—from our mixed collection of old and young men, strong and weak. The human element was very often quite ignored by RE authorities. If a party of men could dig a 50 yards length of trench in two hours, they did not see any reason why they should not dig 150 yards in six hours. The possibility of their becoming exhausted after the third hour of strenuous digging and of their being incapable of doing anything at all after the fourth hour didn’t seem to occur to them. The work would be carried on until 2 or 3 in the morning, when we would collect ourselves together and march home, being pretty well exhausted by the time we had got there.19
Lieutenant William Colyer, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 10th Brigade, 4th Division
When at last the assembly trenches were completed they were usually covered with a layer of wire netting and roughly chopped grass in the hope that they would be invisible to the Germans. In the area targeted for the real assault it was essential to conceal as much as possible of the offensive preparations.
The Royal Engineers themselves were engaged in constructing a series of ‘Russian saps’ out under the wire and deep into No Man’s Land. These were shallow tunnels, just a couple of feet under the surface, which could be opened up as required to provide relatively safe communication across No Man’s Land. In some cases the head of the tunnel could be opened and expanded to allow the insertion of a Vickers machine gun or Stokes mortar in a post threateningly close to the German front line. Several such Russian saps were constructed towards the village of Serre. Naturally, the infantry were keen to make use of the shelter offered by the tunnels.
One day a few of us in turns went for a rest just behind the front line in a ‘mine-head’ which is the entrance to an underground passage running under No Man’s Land to underneath the enemy trenches where explosives were packed ready to be fired when the attack began. It was dry and seemed safe enough when suddenly a German shell fell right on the entrance and we were trapped. After a search we found the only way out was to get through a small passage to the next mine-head and hope that was clear. Never shall I forget the feeling of suffocation as we crawled on our stomachs dragging our rifles and equipment after us. It couldn’t have been very far, but it seemed miles.20
Private Clifford Carter, 10th Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment, 92nd Brigade, 31st Division
The damage was quickly repaired and the Russian sap remained ready for action.
The tunnelling companies were also frenetically but quietly busy constructing a series of nineteen mines to be detonated under the German lines at the crucial moment. These were very different in scale from the Russian saps and represented major engineering projects in their own right. In the north, the 252nd Tunnelling Company succeeded in drilling a large mine some 75 feet deep and over 1,000 feet long all the way out towards the German strong point of Hawthorn Redoubt in front of Beaumont Hamel. The chalk was rock hard, which made silent digging excessively difficult. In the end it was found that if the chalk was first soaked then it could be prised out in lumps without too much noise. Next in line, the 179th Tunnelling Company had dug two huge mines and flanking mines under the La Boisselle Salient. This sector had been the focus of virulent underground warfare and No Man’s Land was a confused tangle of craters left by the explosion of mines. Here there were different problems for the sappers as the chalk had been powdered by the concussive effect of frequent explosions and as a result the men had to dig right down to 100 feet to find solid chalk. Meanwhile the 178th Tunnelling Company was responsible for three large mines feeling their way out from the Tambour Salient towards the village of Fricourt; the 174th Tunnelling Company was digging mines towards Mametz; and, finally, the 183rd Tunnelling Company was located next to the French sector in the south.
This was an area that had been the scene of underground warfare for over a year. Secrecy was crucial and as the tunnels approached the German front the digging was carried out with extreme caution to avoid tell-tale noises seeping through to the Germans working in their own tunnels not many feet away. Both sides were aware that the other was tunnelling but, of course, they did not know where. Talking was absolutely forbidden, and a thick carpet of sandbags on the floor of the tunnel allowed the men to remove their heavy boots to go barefoot. Soundless progress in the unyielding chalk was only achieved by using bayonets on spliced handles. Piece by piece was prised from the chalk face and they inched towards the Germans at a rate of about 18 inches a day. The importance of silence could be judged by the clear audibility of the Germans working close by in their own mines.
You had to listen to what the Germans were doing; you had to outsmart them. You had listening posts deep down in the chalk, I took my turn in listening. Sitting down in the bowels of the earth listening for what was going on. You had primitive listening instruments, electrified earphones and you could easily hear people tapping away a long distance through the chalk. Then if you listened carefully if they were making a chamber to put the explosive charge in you could hear the much more hollow noise of digging. Following that you would hear the sinister sliding of bags of explosive into the chamber. Following that you got out!21
Lieutenant Norman Dillon, 178th Tunnelling Company, Royal Engineers
The sappers finished their work during the final weeks and it was left to repair parties to ensure that nothing untoward happened to the shafts.
WITHOUT DOUBT, the most important component in the British attack on the Somme was the Royal Artillery. With the Royal Flying Corps conducting aerial reconnaissance and observation for them, the artillery was the weapon of war that was intended to bring the Germans to their knees. As the guns began to move forward into their battle positions it was essential that they do so as unobtrusively as possible without drawing the attention of the Germans. If new battery-gun positions were identified they would be vulnerable to potentially devastating German counter-battery fire. Sometimes gun-pits had already been prepared to minimise the visual disturbance to the landscape and some of these were almost works of art. The 147th Brigade, RFA moved into such positions along the poplar-tree-lined road between Englebelmer and Mailly-Maillet.
The gun emplacements, set at 20-yard intervals, closely resembl
ed the tumuli frequently seen on Salisbury Plain and had at the ‘business end’ an aperture large enough to allow for elevation and a sweep of 80 degrees. Well dug in and each skilfully camouflaged and protected by an overhead half-barrel shaped roof, supported by strong beams of timber on which was heaped several layers of sandbags covered with turfs of green grass. It was difficult even at close quarters to detect that concealed here was a formidable unit of destruction. On either side of the spade of the trail, four steps led down to, on one side the sleeping quarters of the detachment and, on the other, a recess for storing ammunition. The battery staff and signallers’ pit was positioned 20 yards south of No. 1 gunpit in line under the trees. It was certainly a masterpiece of engineering ingenuity—a holiday chalet in fact. Six steps led down to a spacious floor above which heavy crossbeams of timber-supported layers of sandbags and turfs similar to the gunpits. The interior was well appointed with tiered bunks along the walls, a space on the floor for the equipment and a frame holding the blanketed gas-screen for placing over the door, if necessary. The command post, which was connected to the signallers’ pit by a communication trench, was a deep pit, seven foot by seven foot by seven foot, provided with a small rough table sufficient to accommodate a message pad and a D3 telephone, an empty ammunition box as a bench, and two sleeping bunks, tiered—one for the officer on duty and the other for the signaller at rest. A ladder led from the floor up to the command post above, up which the officer would shin when alerted, to shout his orders to the guns, through a megaphone from an aperture facing the guns.22
Signaller Dudley Menaud-Lissenburg, 97th Battery, 147th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 29th Division
More and more batteries of guns flooded into the Somme and Ancre valleys. Most were the 18-pounder and 4.5-in field artillery guns but there were new heavier guns and howitzers beginning to appear at the front. Of these one of the most startling was the 8-in howitzer used by the 36th Siege Artillery Battery.
We were the first battery to arrive with guns any bigger than 6-inch and caused a great deal of attention by the higher authorities because of the sheer weight of ammunition which these 8-inch howitzers could produce. But they were improvised howitzers, because they were old 6-inch Mark Is, cut in half and the front half was thrown away. The rest was bored out to 8-inch with rifling and they were given modern breech mechanisms. They were mounted on enormous commercial tractor wheels as they were available. They were monstrous things and extremely heavy, but the machinery of the guns was very simple and that’s why they did so extremely well and didn’t give nearly as much trouble as some of the more complicated guns that came to appear later on. One was the very first one to be made and it was marked, ‘Eight-inch Howitzer No. 1 Mark I’ so we called that gun, ‘The Original’. It was marvellously accurate.23
Second Lieutenant Montague Cleeve, 36th Siege Artillery Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery
Usually the gunners dug their own gunpits and for the crews of the 8-in howitzers this was an exhausting prospect that involved the removal of literally tons of soil and rubble. Again, there was an attempt on relative invisibility using an early type of camouflage netting.
We moved to a splendid position near Beaumetz. The guns were dug into an enormously deep bank about 10 feet deep by the side of a field. The digging we had to do to get into that gun position—10 feet deep and about 40 feet in length—was simply gigantic. We camouflaged it extremely well by putting wire netting over it threaded with real grass. We had an awful job to manoeuvre the guns into it, because the caterpillars were useless, they could get them into the neighbourhood of the guns, but then we had to manhandle these enormous monsters—they weighed several tons. We had to push them, couldn’t pull them, push them into their positions. When they were there they were very well concealed, so much so that a French farmer with his cow walked straight into the net and both fell in. We had the most appalling job getting this beastly cow out of the gun position. The man came out all right, but the cow! However it was enormous fun! It was one of those delightful moments when you all burst out laughing.24
Second Lieutenant Montague Cleeve, 36th Siege Artillery Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery
The huge howitzers of the siege artillery were enormously powerful, heavy monsters that needed special measures to tamp down and tame the ferocious recoil every time they were fired. Untrained teams would find that the howitzers had minds of their own and were soon firing with a complete lack of accuracy that rendered them good for nothing but harassing fire. This was the kind of training that only real firing practice, rather than ‘gun drill’ could give, and many artillery units went through a prolonged learning process before they made the maximum use of their guns’ potential accuracy and destructive capacity.
They had to have a wooden platform put down over the rather soft earth to strengthen the surface from which they had to fire. Then they had huge wooden chocks which we put behind the wheels. After the gun was laid, the final thing was to shove these chocks up, hoping they wouldn’t move, but they always did because they took half the recoil. Half the recoil was taken by the buffer and half by the movement of the gun. The wheels used to ride right up to the top of the chocks and then the curvature of the chocks made them go back forwards again by gravity. If the drill was bad and the chocks weren’t put in quite the right position the gun went back and got slewed round completely off line. One of the skills we developed, purely down to the men, a splendid lot of Durham miners, was to get so good at placing the chocks that we could fire quite rapidly, knowing that the gun would recoil back only a fraction of a degree off the line to the target. It was largely that that I think got us our reputation for being so accurate.25
Second Lieutenant Montague Cleeve, 36th Siege Artillery Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery
When the guns’ positions were established that was by no means the end of the hard work. The guns relied a great deal on range corrections from their forward observation officers located in the front line. Unfortunately, in the absence of any effective two-way wireless communication the only real alternative was the telephone, which meant that a line had to be laid from the battery signal post right forward to the observation post.
We had great difficulty in maintaining communications between batteries and the forward observation posts at this time. Our telephone wires ran over open ground for a short distance from the battery and then entered the communication trenches. The first communication trench approached the front line head on, down a long and fairly steep gradient and was, therefore, open to enfilade, so it had a traverse every few feet. The soil here was clay and the rains made it most difficult to progress along the trench. Our telephone wires, together with those of many other units, were stapled to the side of the trench in a bunch. They were easily torn by infantrymen who, loaded with all the paraphernalia of war, could not possibly avoid doing so. The soft, sticky and slippery floor of the trench was treacherous and the poor fellows were labouring through clay at times over their ankles and up to their putteed legs, so it was not prudent to remonstrate when they were near. The wire was torn from the side of the trench, fell to the ground and was trampled into the clayey bottom by all and sundry. It was a nightmare, especially when dark, to follow the wire from the battery to break point ‘A’ and then, from the forward observation post to break point ‘B’ and find the ends did not meet.26
Signaller Dudley Menaud-Lissenburg, 97th Battery, 147th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 29th Division
The infantry watched the guns coming forward with undiluted pleasure, fully aware as they were that their very survival over the next few weeks depended on the guns clearing the German wire, destroying the trenches and strong points, and suppressing the answering roar of the German artillery.
The face of the earth is changed up there, has changed within the last seven days. It is now honeycombed with gun emplacements. Guns are everywhere. Guns of all calibres. Some 9.2s were registering on Mametz whilst we were watching. They are terribl
e shells and simply knocked lumps out of the village. There are 9.2’s, 8-ins, 6-ins, 4.7s, 4.5s, 18-pounders and 13-pounders, all sorts and conditions, all bristling out of the ground ready to belch forth a regular tornado of fire. As Worthy said when he saw it, ‘Fritz, you’re for it!’ It is a sentiment I quite agree with. Ammunition is pouring up, that for the heavies by motor transport, that for the lighter fry by wagon and limber. Two convoys of the latter, each of them fully 500 yards in length passed the Bois at sundown. It was a great sight. It is marvellous, this marshalling of power. This concentrated effort of our great nation put forward to the end of destroying our foe. The greatest battle in the world is on the eve of breaking. Please God it may terminate successfully for us. Fritz I think knows all about it. At any rate a day or two ago he put the following notice on his wire opposite the 4th Division. ‘When your bombardment starts we are going to bugger off back five miles. Kitchener is buggered. Asquith is buggered. You’re buggered. We’re buggered. Let’s all bugger off home!’ It is vulgar, as his humour invariably is, but the sentiments are so eminently those of ‘Tommy Atkins’ that it must certainly have been a man with a good knowledge of England and the English who wrote the message.27