Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Despite all these deficiencies, the sheer weight of metal thrown into German lines wreaked considerable destruction. Even in the north, where the bombardment was least effective, the Württembergers reported heavily damaged trenches, munitions stores hit and barbed wire largely shot away already after three days. Crucially, however, almost all shelters survived and that meant the positions remained defensible.112 It also protected the Second Army from heavy casualties. In the last ten days of June, the force registered just 2,478 killed and missing and 4,482 wounded. Two-fifths of the killed and missing were suffered by 121 Division opposite the well-armed French.113 Yet even if the troops were relatively safe, sheltering under a seven-day bombardment was exhausting and, as one frankly put it, ‘extraordinarily frightening’.114 Lieutenant Adolf Spemann’s diary for the period described the ordeal. Tension rose as already on 25 June his artillery regiment was blinded by the shooting down of its observation balloons and next day it suffered its first officer casualties. By 27 June, he wrote worriedly, if not wholly accurately, that ‘the infantry positions have been completely filled in, the obstacles totally wiped away, the shelters collapsed . . . Mayday calls from [Infantry Regiment] 99 from Thiepval are perpetually despaired.’115

  Spemann was not a man easily perturbed; he had fought on the Western Front since August 1914 and would end the war with an Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class and a Knight’s Cross.116 Nonetheless, by the fifth day of the British bombardment, panic was creeping into his diary. ‘The superiority [of the enemy] is immense,’ he confided. He had good reason to feel even more nervous on the next day, when a shell slammed into the air duct of his dugout. There was ‘a horrible jolt and bang’, the candles went out and the shelter was filled with smoke, dust and the odour of hydrogen cyanide from the explosive gases, which forced occupants to put on their gas masks. There had been a partial roof collapse, the entrance was blocked, but a faint ray of light seemed to be coming from above. The dugout had been built underneath a latrine, and the shell had opened up a channel. Fearing asphyxiation or the rest of the roof collapsing, with no helmet and only one boot, Spemann crawled through shit to the surface and then, to escape observation from the all-seeing flyers above, he and his comrades scattered for cover.117

  The long bombardment tested men’s endurance. Commanders did what they could to keep their men in condition to fight. Food was critical. Under stress, soldiers ate more. Units were told that every lull in the shelling must be used to bring forward warm food to the front garrisons, not merely to maintain their physical strength but also because ‘the nerves of the troops will hold longer, the more food is brought to them’.118 The continual need to stay alert for gas attacks and, in the front line, for a sudden shift in the shellfire that might herald the start of an assault was very wearing. So long did the ordeal last that some came to believe that the bombardment was an end in itself. ‘The buggers want to wear us down and smoke us out using only their technical means,’ raged Spemann. A story circulated, almost certainly apocryphal but illustrative of the defenders’ mindset: ‘an English officer at Beaumont [Hamel, a village through which the German front line passed] jumped out of his trench and shouted across: “Do you swine think we’ll attack? We’ll shoot you dead with artillery!” ’ After five days under siege, this seemed entirely plausible to German troops. Spemann rued his participation in a new ‘lunatic’ way of war, ‘which money and America have created, simply to destroy everything and not to advance with a single man’.119 The idea frightened the defenders more than any assault. At the end of June, infantry units were reporting that their men ‘All had just one hope: let the endless shelling finally stop and the enemy attack.’120

  The wish was granted when, at 8.30 a.m. on 1 July, 55,000 Entente assault troops climbed over their parapets to storm German lines.121 The defenders were ready. Four hours earlier, Reserve Infantry Regiment 110, stationed in front of La Boiselle, had intercepted a British wireless message telling enemy soldiers to defend all gains stubbornly. Although no time of attack was given, the intelligence was rightly interpreted as implying that one was imminent, and news of it was quickly flashed to all other German units at the front. At 6.30 a.m. the Entente bombardment, which had pounded away all night, reached a new intensity and twenty minutes later sentries reported that the trenches opposite were filling with men.122 Unnoticed by the Germans, the British had tunnelled under no-man’s-land over the past months and packed 40,000 pounds of high explosive below a particularly strong position guarded by Reserve Infantry Regiment 119. At 8.20 a.m., ten minutes before the attack, this was detonated. The earth suddenly erupted, the whole of the 26 Reserve Division’s sector seemed to rock and a crater 50 metres wide and 15 metres deep was carved into the ground. One and a half platoons were buried. Yet despite their shock, the Württembergers reacted quickly. Two companies raced from the second and third lines to the shattered position. They reached the crater before the British assault troops rushing from the opposite direction, and were able to mow down most of the attackers. The enemy artillery in this sector had lifted to allow the assault to go ahead, permitting the rest of the men in Reserve Infantry Regiment 119 to exit their shelters unimpeded and take up battle positions. When the British 29 Division launched its main assault ten minutes later, it was met by a hail of fire. The 29 Division lost 5,000 men in this first attack and the subsequent failed attacks on 1 July. The casualties of Reserve Infantry Regiment 119 on this day and during the week-long bombardment that preceded it came to 144 men and 7 officers killed and 274 wounded.123

  The story was similar across most of the north of the battlefield. German defenders avoided the error of their allies at Lutsk a month earlier, climbing the steps of their dugouts in time and warning their artillery, if not through telephone then with red flares or prearranged messages with machine-gun bursts, to lay down a protective barrage. Very often, the wire in front of the German positions had not been well cut and, regardless of whatever innovative tactical formation they had adopted at the start of their advance, British troops bunched together, offering ideal targets for German gunners. On the occasions when the assaulting troops did manage to penetrate the forward line, they were so reduced in number and the difficulty of reinforcing them was so great that sooner or later they were overwhelmed by counter-attacks.124 However, further south the Germans’ defensive system worked less well. The Badisch 28 Reserve Division, the 26 Reserve’s neighbour, suffered a partial defeat. The artillery arrayed against it was more fearsome as British guns had been supported by those in the adjacent French sector. The shelters were less robust than in the north and largely confined to the first line. The infantry was severed from its artillery support, which was anyway devastated by counter-battery fire. With help from three small mines the British captured the fortified village of Fricourt from Reserve Infantry Regiment 111. Within twenty minutes of the attack going forward, the regiment had relinquished parts of its front line. To the east, its sister unit, Reserve Infantry Regiment 109, was also pushed out of its first line, and by the evening had conceded the village of Mametz. Having lost 1,200 of its 2,592 men and expended most of its ammunition and hand grenades in vicious hand-to-hand fighting, and after appealing for reinforcements, Reserve Infantry Regiment 111 also retreated under cover of darkness.125

  The Badeners were on the edge of a larger emergency that was developing in the south. The Silesian 12 Division, reinforced by Bavarians sandwiched between them and the Somme, lost its first line to British and French assault troops. South of the river the attack by the French Sixth Army, which began two hours after the start of the assault in the north, was also tremendously successful. By 12.30 p.m., French colonial troops had taken the whole of the German first line and 2,000 prisoners for minimal casualties. Their victory owed much to the superior artillery support received by the poilus compared with British troops further north. Whether, as was proudly claimed by Joffre then and repeated more recently, it reflected a significantly higher level of tactical skill among the F
rench infantry is more debatable.126 Fayolle’s men on the south bank of the Somme were in fact lucky to face a far weaker enemy than that in the north. Falkenhayn, believing the French to be pinned at Verdun and denying they had forces to spare for an offensive, left just three divisions facing them, while double this number were stationed north of the river.127 Moreover, the 121 Division on which the French blow was focused was a much more fragile unit than any opposing the British. Unlike the formations in the north, the division was a veteran and victim of Verdun. A six-week tour in the ‘Mill on the Meuse’ in March and April had cost it around a third of its complement: 5,690 men and 96 officers. Some of its infantry regiments had lost nearly half of their strength. The unit was still recovering from this trauma and, as it had only arrived in its defensive positions in the second half of May, it knew its terrain far less well than did the Württembergers and Badeners on the other side of the Somme.128 When attacked by overwhelming forces, it quickly lost over 5,000 men and fell back. Only by hastily throwing in reserves did the Germans halt French troops in front of the second position.129

  The first day of the western Entente’s combined offensive was a clear victory for the Germans. Despite a massive commitment of men and materiel, the Entente missed its opportunity to precipitate a real crisis for the defenders. Only in the south, where the bombardment had been most effective and their troops were weakest, had German commanders feared a breakthrough. The French had moved forward everywhere on their 15-kilometre front, advancing around 3 kilometres by the evening. The British had success just north of the Somme River, where along a 6-kilometre front they advanced 1.5 kilometres, taking the German first line. However, beyond this point, the malign effects of Haig’s ambition and the dilution of artillery resources were felt. British attacks in the north were repelled with very heavy casualties. In total, the Fourth Army lost a staggering 57,470 men that day. Some 19,240 soldiers were killed or had died of their wounds, 35,493 were wounded, 2,152 missing and 585 captured. No firm figure exists for French losses, although one estimate puts them as low as 1,590 men. Around 13,000 German defenders had been lost. About 8,000 of their casualties had been inflicted north of the Somme, 2,200 of whom were prisoners in British hands.130 The sacrifice had not been in vain. Though parts of the front line had been lost, German troops’ bravery and steadfastness had protected their vastly outnumbered army from catastrophe, thwarted the Entente’s best chance of a major break-in, and disorganized the great combined western offensive.

  The Entente did not immediately press the limited gains made on 1 July. On the main northern attack front, the British needed time to reorganize after their heavy losses. The more successful French operation in the south had been intended to be merely auxiliary, and so the reserves necessary to follow it up were not immediately available. Meanwhile, the Germans reinforced their hard-pressed defence. Eleven divisions, twenty-seven heavy and fifteen light artillery batteries, and thirty aeroplanes had been brought into the sector by 5 July.131 With the first danger contained, they prepared to wage a bitter defence. On 3 July the commander of Second Army, General von Below, warned his tired troops what was at stake: ‘On the victory of Second Army on the Somme hangs the outcome of the war. The battle must be won by us, despite the momentary superiority of the enemy in artillery and infantry . . . For now, everything depends on holding onto our current positions at all costs and on improving them with small counter-attacks. I forbid the voluntary evacuation of positions . . . Only over corpses may the enemy find his way forward.’132

  Thus was the battle fought. Constant small-scale, wasteful attacks by the British in the first half of July were followed by a larger, better-planned assault along a 5,500-metre front on 14 July. The provision of ample artillery allowed a bombardment five times the intensity of that fired before 1 July and the British infantry demonstrated their skill, crawling into no-man’s-land under cover of darkness and then surprising the defenders in the early hours of the morning. By midday, the entire second German line between Ovillers and Hardecourt, roughly the area that the Badeners had defended at the start of the month, had been captured and an awkward salient eliminated.133 Yet thereafter the fighting settled back into an attritional grind. Second Lieutenant Ernst Klasen, a company commander in the elite Grenadier Regiment 12, left a good description of the defenders’ ordeal. In late July he found himself stationed in Delville Wood, the furthest point reached by the 14 July attack and a key position where the line shifted direction from west to south. The Tommies who fought there nicknamed the place ‘Devil’s Wood’, but the wordplay does not work so well in German; to Klasen, it was simply ‘hell’. He had been through the hectic advance of August 1914, taken part in the fierce position warfare of 1915, and survived the opening phase of Verdun, where he had seen ‘much horrific’ that had temporarily left his ‘nerves . . . somewhat broken’, but those five days and nights at the front on the Somme, he told his family, ‘were the worst days of the whole war’.134

  To reach their exposed front line, Klasen and his men had to hop from shell hole to shell hole. The air, he wrote, had been ‘full of iron’. Once they arrived, the enemy immediately bombarded and assaulted them. This first experience set the tone for the next days. Klasen’s unit was under a constant ‘murderous drumfire’ from heavy guns, which was then followed by infantry attacks. Only once could ration carriers get through with food and drink. What provisions the men had, they shared. ‘On such occasions,’ observed Klasen, ‘one meets true comradeship.’ The last day was the worst. A three-hour barrage of extraordinary violence filled in their trenches and almost everybody in the company was buried or lightly wounded. Klasen himself was hit twice by shell fragments, which fortunately just ripped his uniform and left bruises. Suddenly the fire stopped and British troops stormed forwards. The Germans opened up with machine guns and rifles, but the attackers were only finally repelled after a vicious fight with hand grenades. The position held, but at a terrible cost. Only Klasen, who was awarded an Iron Cross 1st Class, and two others among his battalion’s officers, returned unscathed. As company commander, his duties when he reached the rest areas included writing condolence letters to the families of 130 dead, wounded and missing men.135

  The Entente deployed unmatchable resources throughout the Somme battle. The alliance had far more manpower than its enemy: by mid-August, 106 British and French divisions had fought 57½ German ones. The British alone fired off 7.8 million shells in the sector in the two months after mid-July. New technology was eagerly embraced. At the Battle of Flers–Courcelette in September, for example, they deployed the first ever tanks; lumbering twenty-eight-ton monsters spitting fire from sponson-mounted cannon and machine guns. The British also used aircraft innovatively and extensively for reconnaissance missions, directing artillery fire and even bombing and machine-gunning defenders’ positions.136 German divisional commanders in desperation appealed for more guns, much more ammunition, aircraft, signalling equipment, labourers for fortification-building and more training time for their troops. ‘Where to get it all from?’ wondered General Max von Gallwitz, the head of the new Second Army formed south of the river when the old Second Army was divided into this and a new First Army in the north.137 Yet thanks to poor planning and coordination, as well as the sacrifices of men like Klasen, the vast Entente resources produced remarkably modest results, right up to November when the battle was finally halted. The breakthrough for which Haig hankered never happened. The territory captured was very limited, covering an area no more than 8 kilometres deep and 25 kilometres wide by the end of August. Given the restraints imposed by the Western Front battlefield, that was not surprising, but a command which had concentrated its forces instead of frittering them away in disjointed battalion-strength attacks could have gained the territory at a lower cost in blood.138 More seriously, and contrary to Haig’s subsequent exculpatory dispatch on the battle, the Entente failed even to pin German forces to the Somme Front. Fifteen German divisions were transferred away fr
om the west during the campaign to meet more urgent threats on other fronts. Intense though the pressure was, the Central Powers retained sufficient reserves to fire-fight emergencies and survive.139

  The most common argument put forward to justify the Entente’s effort on the Somme is that it inflicted lethal damage on the German army. Haig argued in retrospect that the fighting had served its function as the first stage of an extended ‘wearing-out battle’, and in the aftermath of the war a heated debate took place, with strangely little reference to German sources, about which side had lost more men. The British and French officially acknowledged losses of 419,654 and 204,253 respectively at the Somme: 623,907 Entente soldiers altogether. The German army in its official history stated that its casualties reached nearly 500,000.140 Deliberate confusion about whether this figure was complete was spread by the authors of the official British military history to cast Haig and his army in a better light. However, the figure was not just comprehensive, but cautious and even conservative. German units submitted returns every ten days, reporting permanent casualties (killed, missing and wounded), and sick and lightly wounded who could be expected to return. Those compiled for the Second and First Armies on the Somme recorded a casualty rate of 416,802 killed, wounded (including lightly wounded) and missing. If gas casualties (3,053 for both armies) and psychiatric disorders (officially 9,354 men, although the Germans, as other armies of the period, misdiagnosed and underestimated these ailments) are added, total recorded German battle casualties reach 429,209.141