To the south of the ridge was the valley of the Somme itself. Here the British line ended and the French line took over. The terrain here was flatter and much more favourable to the attacking force. The battlefield was dissected by a long straight road, Roman in origin, that ran from the small town of Albert, behind British lines, due north-east to Bapaume, well behind German lines. The full width of the battlefield from Gommecourt in the north to the Somme in the south was about fifteen miles, although the winding front line ran for about eighteen miles. Along the top and to the east of the ridge was a series of woods at Mametz, Delville and one known simply as High Wood.
Along the high ground, roughly two miles behind their front line, was the German second line, invisible from the British guns as it was on the eastern, reverse slope of the ridge. But this second line was almost as strong as the German front line, while, two or three miles further behind, German engineers had started to dig a third line. However formidable these defences might appear, not everything was stacked in favour of the defender. The German forward positions on the western slope of the chalk ridge were in full view of the Allied artillery and provided a clear target for barrage fire. And Falkenhayn had made it clear that any ground lost was to be recaptured immediately, requiring counter-attacks across heavily cratered and intensely contested ground which would lead to heavy casualties among German defenders to add to those of the Allied attackers.
Finally, although the Somme always receives much attention as a quintessentially British battle, it must not be forgotten that this was an Allied offensive in which French troops, although reduced in number from the initial plan, still played a substantial role in the southern sector of the battlefield. They were commanded by 65-year-old General Ferdinand Foch. Too young to have been involved in the defeat of 1871, Foch had gone into the artillery. He was an unusual, eccentric figure. A small, grey-haired man, he would speak and even shout in short sentences that sometimes he did not finish, constantly gesticulating with his hands. But although his subordinates often mimicked his almost comic style, he was a highly competent general who had first taught at and then commanded the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre (the French Army Staff College) before the war. His academic mind had led him to think hard about the nature of industrial warfare. In the true French military tradition he believed wholeheartedly in the offensive spirit, but he realised this had to be supported by a superiority in materiel, most particularly in artillery pieces and ammunition. Trying to learn the lessons of 1914 and 1915, Foch had concluded that what was required was ‘Lots of artillery, few infantry.’6 He believed in delivering a series of hard punches against the enemy by using heavy artillery to prepare the way, before small numbers of mobile troops launched focused attacks at the enemy’s weakest points.
Reporting to Foch was General Marie-Emile Fayolle. Like his boss, Fayolle was an artilleryman who had taught at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre. He too believed in the powerful concentration of heavy artillery to clear the way for an infantry assault. He had been called out of retirement into the French army in August 1914 and had been given command of a brigade. He had risen rapidly and was now in command of Sixth Army, which adjoined the British where the two armies met at the Somme. A down to earth, calm and highly effective commander who today would be called ‘a soldiers’ general’, he liked to walk in the front trenches and had frequently been under fire. Like Foch, Fayolle was quite clear about the nature of modern industrial warfare. He wrote in his diary that this was a war ‘not merely between two armies but between two nations. It will continue as long as they have resources.’7 Foch and Fayolle worked closely with the British units alongside them to the north, and their tactics would prove a great success in the early stage of the battle to come.
The lion’s share of the British offensive on the Somme was fought by the Fourth Army. Its commander was Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Rawlinson, known to his friends as ‘Rawly’. An infantryman who had gone from Eton and Sandhurst into the elite Coldstream Guards, he was fifty-two years of age in 1916. Most of his experience had been in colonial wars in India and Burma, Sudan and South Africa. At the beginning of the war he had commanded a division; in 1915 he was promoted to command a corps, and in early 1916 he was put in command of Fourth Army. As Haig’s subordinate at Ypres, Neuve Chapelle and Loos, he had built up a good working relationship with his commanding officer. He had also developed his own view of how to conduct a modern battle in the trench warfare of the Western Front. He believed in attacking at the weakest point, capturing German lines and then defending them from counter-attack, a tactic he called ‘bite and hold’. He described this simply: ‘Bite off a piece of the enemy’s line … and hold it against counter-attack. The bite can be made without much loss, and if we choose the right place and make every preparation to put it quickly into a state of defence, there ought to be no difficulty in holding it against the enemy’s counter-attacks, and inflicting on him at least twice the loss that we have suffered in making the bite.’8 This was the classic justification of a battle of attrition. According to this approach, Rawlinson had no expectation of breakthrough, just a plan to draw in the enemy and exhaust him.
Haig had a different vision of the battle, although he was never clear or consistent. Sometimes he spoke of a breakthrough. But it is unlikely he believed wholeheartedly in such an outcome. Mostly he spoke of putting immense pressure on the German army and of relieving Verdun. His initial, very ambitious plan was for a short artillery bombardment to precede a surprise attack across a broad front to capture the German first line, as well as the second line along the reverse of the Thiepval ridge, on the first day. This involved the infantry advancing between two and three miles, depending upon the distance across No Man’s Land. There would then follow an assault upon the German third position. This would open up the opportunity to use the cavalry to get behind (in the jargon of the day to ‘roll up’) the main German lines, to capture the town of Bapaume and then move north towards the city of Arras.
The cavalry were not the sabre-wielding Victorian force of popular imagination. In the era before tanks and armoured cars, they were the nearest to mobile troops any commander had. They could be used either as mounted riflemen or as shock troops to seize key points behind enemy lines and hold them until the infantry caught up – a little like airborne troops in the next war. As a former cavalryman, Haig was keen to use his preferred force, and he put three cavalry divisions under a separate commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Hubert Gough, known as ‘Goughy’.
Gough, at forty-five, was the youngest of the senior commanders on the Somme – seven years younger than Rawlinson and ten years younger than Haig. He came from a well-known military family and his father, uncle and brother had all won VCs. He was Haig’s protégé and his rise, from brigade commander at Mons in 1914, had been meteoric. He was now given command of what was called the Reserve Army, although without a full general’s rank. The cavalry and two divisions of supporting infantry in this army were to wait until there was a big enough gap in the German lines to charge through and begin a period of mobile warfare that Haig was confident he could win.
Rawlinson was unhappy with Haig’s plan, and in accordance with his ‘bite and hold’ doctrine argued that each of the German first and second lines should be taken separately. Time should be allowed for the enemy to weaken himself by counter-attacking before the next line was captured. Rawlinson knew the landscape well and was perhaps concerned by the thought of having to advance up the slope of the ridge.9 He put great faith in the ability of the artillery to completely smash the German defences and destroy the barbed wire but, he contended, this would take time. In a paper on 19 April, he argued against Haig’s plan for a short artillery bombardment because ‘effective wire cutting cannot be carried out in five or six hours’. It would take, he said, ‘at least three days … for there is a very large amount of wire to be destroyed … far more than was the case at Loos’. He argued for ‘a long, accurate bombardment which will pulverise
strong points one by one’ and give the enemy ‘no chance of sleep’; he would then be sure to ‘break down under the strain’.10 Rawlinson also argued that the effective range of the artillery – that is the range at which they could be certain of ensuring accurate fire – was a limiting factor. It was possible to fire accurately on the German first line, but not on their second until there was time to move the batteries and observers forward.
Haig and Rawlinson therefore had fundamentally different views about both objectives and tactics in the upcoming Big Push. Haig conceded several vital points to Rawlinson. He accepted the need for a long artillery bombardment and the pair agreed this should last five days. He also compromised over the capture of both first and second lines on the opening day. North of the Albert–Bapaume road, where the German second line was close to the first, the objective would be to capture both lines on the first day. South of the road, where the German second line was further back, the objective would be to seize only the first line. But the confusion in the overall purpose of the battle was never resolved. Was it to be a sudden, powerful and decisive thrust to bring the enemy to his knees, thus opening the way for a breakout that the cavalry were to exploit? Or a slow, artillery-led assault, line by line, grinding the enemy down, drawing in his reserves until his resistance broke?
Haig still believed that speed was of the essence. The lesson he had drawn from Loos was that it was necessary to rush reserves in quickly and that the decisive blow should create a gap in the German lines in the first couple of days. Rawlinson and Foch were believers in taking the advance stage by stage, redeploying one’s artillery at every step. This difference of attitude continued until the very day of the offensive. As one historian has put it, was it to be ‘bite and hold’ or ‘rush and hope’?11
It might be thought that such confusion over both the overall objective and the tactics needed to achieve it was strange, an indication that the army high command was dysfunctional. Certainly, Haig should have taken a firm grip on the situation but did not. He did not have the personality to overwhelm his subordinates. In addition, he had continually to react to French demands to advance the start of the offensive before he felt he was ready and to redefine the shape of the battle as the French commitment to it dwindled. Also, without raising impossible expectations, he had to ‘talk up’ the prospects of victory to the politicians at home. It was not until April that he received even lukewarm political support for the Somme offensive from the Cabinet’s War Committee in London. Rawlinson, on the other hand, did not have complete confidence in the plan he was now to carry out, although he dutifully wrote, ‘I have told DH I will carry out his plan with as much enthusiasm as if it were my own.’12
Despite the differences between Haig and Rawlinson, the commander-in-chief maintained his confidence in his army commander throughout and largely delegated the more detailed tactical planning to him. This was indeed how the British army functioned, by downwards delegation of tactical decision making. Rawlinson himself let corps and divisional commanders decide their detailed plans according to local circumstances. This was clearly sensible, as it encouraged initiative and the adaptation of plans for specific strengths and weaknesses in the field. However, it could also mean failure to work through the overall strategy consistently.
In addition to the main assault, Third Army was to organise a diversionary attack to the north. The commander of Third Army was General Sir Edmund Allenby, known as ‘the Bull’, another cavalryman and probably the only senior commander who was seen as a rival to Haig. He was ordered to attack at the woods of Gommecourt where a German salient protruded into the British line, and to make the preparations for the assault as obvious as possible in order to divert German forces from the main zone of the battle. Although not keen on the concept he ordered his relevant corps commander to make appropriate plans. He decided to use two Territorial divisions, one each from the Midlands and London, to attack on both sides of the wood. If successful they would meet up behind the enemy’s lines and cut off the German salient.
The plan Haig and Rawlinson had argued over was then passed on to the six corps commanders who would participate in the battle. Their staff officers worked on the detail and in turn passed on orders to the seventeen divisional commanders involved. Reconnaissance aircraft took tens of thousands of aerial photographs of the German trenches, enabling the production of photo mosaics and, from them, detailed maps of the German lines for distribution to the commanders. It was from aerial photos that interpreters were able to follow the construction of the German third line, four or five miles behind the front.13 Each division was to attack on a front of approximately one mile with two brigades in the line and one in reserve.
Divisional staff officers began to plan for and amass the necessary resources. Huge supply dumps were set up to assemble shells, ammunition and every sort of munition. Workshops were built to service the guns, and stables constructed for thousands of horses. Reservoirs and water pipelines were installed. Vast supplies of food, clothing and equipment were gathered in depots – each division required 200 tons of supplies every day, equivalent to four trainloads. Hospitals, CCSs and field ambulance units were made ready. What today is called ‘logistics’ was then known as ‘administration’, and a great deal was needed to prepare for a First World War battle of this scale. And so the brigade staffs received detailed plans, which they passed down through the chain of command. One brigade commander was astonished to receive a document of 76 pages outlining the plan of attack to which divisional staff officers had added 365 supplementary instructions.14 Eventually, each battalion commander was to receive dozens of pages of typed orders, along with photos and maps. To most of the officers involved it seemed that everything had been prepared for, that every detail had been considered and that never had plans been so well drawn up for an operation.
In June, however, there was yet another change of mind. The Russian offensive in the east, led by General Alexei Brusilov, proved against all expectations to be a great success. The Russians advanced across a vast front one hundred miles wide and smashed the Austro-Hungarian armies, forcing the Germans to come to the rescue of their allies. Meanwhile, German forces at Verdun, while having given the French a massive pounding, had themselves suffered great losses. By the end of June the French had lost just over 250,000 men; but by that time German casualties had reached 224,000. Haig’s intelligence chief led him to believe that German forces in the west had been substantially reduced and that units were being withdrawn to shore up the Eastern Front. Having left Rawlinson to draw up detailed plans with his corps commanders for a slow, attritional offensive, Haig decided that perhaps a decisive breakthrough was possible in the west after all and issued a new set of orders only two weeks before the battle was due to commence. He ordered Rawlinson to make some of his day-one objectives more ambitious and to prepare to order the cavalry to break out towards Bapaume, about ten miles behind the German front line. Rawlinson was baffled by the last-minute changes but did what he could to implement them. It was yet another illustration of what have been called ‘the ambiguities inherent in the British concept for the Somme’.15
Both commanders, however, were agreed on one point. The battalions of the New Army had arrived in massive numbers in France during late 1915 and early 1916. Haig was now in command of fifty divisions. Because nine of the seventeen divisions taking part in the assault were from Kitchener’s New Army, the generals did not expect much of the assaulting infantry. Indeed, even the surviving regular and Territorial divisions were by now largely reinforced with battalions from the New Army, and their commanding officers were aware that they too were packed with novice soldiers. It has been estimated that 97 out of the 143 battalions destined to attack on the Somme – that is two-thirds of the attacking force – were made up of volunteers.16 Haig and Rawlinson were in command of a citizen army whose men only eighteen months before had been clerks, railway workers, dockers, teachers, waiters or miners. They had received basic training b
ut they had no experience of fighting or war.
Disdain for the New Army among officers of the regular army was still apparent. Haig wrote in his diary in March 1916, ‘I have not got an army in France really, but a collection of divisions untrained for the field.’17 Rawlinson wrote, ‘The fact that a very large part of the troops to be engaged are new troops with little experience, and among whom the standard of discipline, leadership and tactical training of company commanders is not what obtained in our troops of a year ago … [means that] disorganisation will appear more quickly.’18
Coping with a twelve-fold growth of Britain’s army in the field brought a vast array of challenges. In terms of leadership, no one in the senior ranks had any previous experience of command at the level they were called upon to perform on the Somme. Of the twenty-three divisional commanders in the field, only three had even commanded a brigade before the war.19 To both Haig and Rawlinson, this was particularly damaging when it came to the lower levels of command. The public schoolboys from school corps, the university men from the Officer Training Corps recruited as company or platoon commanders lacked nothing in enthusiasm, but there had been insufficient time for them to develop or learn tactical skills. Haig noted during the Battle of Loos that the army lacked ‘junior officers with some tactical knowledge’ to take the right decisions at the right time.20
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