Breakdown

by Taylor Downing

  A week of almost continuous bombardment had certainly affected the nerves of the defending soldiers. Stephan Westmann, a medical officer in the German line just south of Beaumont-Hamel, recalled, ‘For seven days and seven nights the ground shook under the constant impact of the shell fire. In between the bombardments the gas alarms would sound and we could hardly breathe … The pounding never ceased. Fresh supplies of food or water never reached us.’ Many men suffered from severe shell shock. Westmann again: ‘Below the ground, men became hysterical and their fellow soldiers had to knock them out to prevent them from running pell-mell into the deadly hail of shell splinters. Even the rats panicked. They sought refuge in our flimsy shelters, running up the walls and we had to kill them with our spades.’6

  The survivors were only too pleased to come up out of their dugouts when the barrage ended. Westmann recalled that the British ‘did not expect anyone on the enemy side to have survived their bombardment. But German machine gunners and infantrymen still managed to crawl out of their holes. In fact, it was a kind of relief to be able to come up from the trenches, even into air filled with smoke and the smell of cordite. With inflamed and sunken eyes, faces blackened by fire and uniforms splashed with the blood of their wounded comrades, they started firing furiously. The intense German fire produced frightful losses on the British side … before the whole mighty offensive ground to a halt. The British and French generals had not yet learned that it was useless to send human beings to run against machine-gun and intense infantry fire, even after a week of so-called “softening up”.’7

  Lieutenant Fritz Cassel of the 99th German Infantry Reserve Regiment recalled the dugouts as being ‘18–20 steps deep, that is like two storeys of a house. They had an earth cover of circa 3 metres. Most were connected with each other or had two exits.’ He vividly described the events of that morning: ‘On 1 July at 7.30 am, the shout of the sentry “They are coming!” tore me out of apathy. Helmet, belt, rifle and up the steps. On the steps something white and bloody, in the trench a headless body. The sentry had lost his life by a last shell, before the fire was directed to the rear, and had paid for his vigilance with his life. We rushed to the ramparts, there they come, the khaki-yellows, they are not more than 20 metres in front of our trench. They advance fully equipped slowly to march across our bodies into the open country. But no boys, we are still alive, the moles come out of their holes. Machine gun fire tears holes in their rows. They discover our presence, throw themselves on the ground, now a mass of craters, welcomed by hand grenades and gun fire, and have now to sell their lives themselves.’8

  In many sections of the front it came down to a race, when the barrage lifted, between the advancing British infantry crossing No Man’s Land, and the German defenders surging up from their dugouts. Who would take charge of the parapet first? But the British soldiers had been told to walk and not run. As they slowly made their way towards the enemy lines the Germans rushed to man their machine gun posts and started to mow down the Tommies. On too many occasions, the British lost the crucial race to the German parapet. It has been argued that the British infantry lost the battle on 1 July only ‘by a matter of seconds’, that is the interval between the lifting of the artillery barrage and the arrival of the first wave at the German trenches.9

  Surveying Fourth Army’s progress on 1 July, from north to south, many Pals battalions from the industrial cities of northern Britain were gathered in the 31st Division outside Serre. The volunteers from Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Barnsley, Accrington and Hull went forward and tried to advance up the slope of the ridge against German lines they were told had been utterly destroyed. To their astonishment they proved to be very well defended. A German rifleman wrote of the Sheffield and Accrington Pals: ‘When the English started advancing we were very worried; they looked as though they must overrun our trenches. We were very surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before … The officers were in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them. If only they had run they would have overwhelmed us.’10 The Pals battalions did not stand a chance. The division lost 3,600 men and achieved none of its objectives.

  A little to the south, in the area around Beaumont-Hamel, the commander of VIII Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Hunter Weston, decided to detonate a huge mine under the German positions at the Hawthorn Redoubt at 7.20 a.m., before the time fixed for the general advance. This gave the Germans ten extra minutes to recover and prepare. It might not sound like much, but it was enough to allow German troops to race to the lip of the crater and set up their guns; they were waiting even before the British 29th Division began its assault. The 29th was a rare unit on 1 July as it was an experienced division that had fought hard at Gallipoli, where it had acquired a reputation as the ‘Incomparable 29th’. But that did it little good on the first day of the Somme battle.

  A secondary assault here, timed for 9.05, was bungled when the 29th divisional commander, Major-General Henry de Lisle, ordered in the reserves believing all the first objectives had been successfully taken. But they had not been. The men of the 1st Essex could not get through the congested communication trenches to their starting point. But no one told the 1st Battalion Newfoundland Regiment, who began the attack anyway and soon came under withering machine gun fire. Unfaltering, the men advanced until nearly 700 of them and all of their officers had been shot down. This sacrifice led to no meaningful gain and the ‘Incomparables’ lost a total of 5,240 officers and men, mostly in the two front-line assault brigades.

  Further south, Lieutenant-General Sir William Pulteney, who led III Corps, adopted the ‘steady pace’ method of attack laid out in the Tactical Notes. This resulted in very high losses. The 8th Division, an old regular unit heavily reinforced with New Army battalions, had to cross a wide stretch of No Man’s Land towards Ovillers village and took heavy casualties. Again, small groups of soldiers did succeed in reaching the German lines but were forced to withdraw later in the day. At La Boiselle, two huge mines were set off at 7.28 a.m., the bigger at Lochnagar leaving a crater ninety yards wide and seventy feet deep. Among the 34th Division, which tried to advance here, were some of the most famous Pals battalions including the Tyneside Irish, the Tyneside Scottish, the Edinburgh City Battalions and the Grimsby Chums. Many were shot down as they struggled across No Man’s Land, although some small groups penetrated as far as the German second line before being wiped out. The 34th had the dubious record of suffering the highest casualty rate of the day, losing 6,380 men. Its commander, Major-General Edward Ingouville-Williams (known by the men, inevitably, as ‘Inky Bill’), was himself killed by shell fire later in the month.

  The popular view of 1 July is thus one of unmitigated disaster and sacrifice in which most Allied soldiers were shot down before they had even been able to cross No Man’s Land. Certainly that is true of this section of the front, where VIII and III Corps made no progress at all and suffered immense losses. All along the front, the Germans had placed their machine gun nests in powerful positions that could rake the landscape with enfilade fire, usually from at least two different angles. Some reserve British battalions were shot down behind their own front line as they assembled and began to move up. Additionally, battalions that found the barbed wire had not been properly destroyed tended to bunch together at the gaps in the wire and proved a perfect mass target for the machine gunners. Many of the best-known images of the day came from this section of the front, where one of the two film cameramen who recorded events that day, Geoffrey Malins, was operating. He filmed the explosion of the mine at Hawthorn Redoubt and memorably captured on film a group of 1st Lancashire Fusiliers in a sunken road halfway out into No Man’s Land, waiting for the order to go over the top. Their anxious, nervous faces reveal the fear and tension that tens of thousands of men must have felt that morning. When ordered to advance they were simply
mown down by the German guns.11

  However, the full story of 1 July was more variable and on parts of the front the day proved to be a resounding success. From the far north at the diversionary attack at Gommecourt, to the very south, British and French troops succeeded in many places in reaching the German front line, sometimes in force. But the Germans were swift to respond. Their artillery fire was brutally accurate and men who tried to consolidate the captured German positions soon found themselves cut off. Reinforcements were unable to get through the shell fire. Small pockets of brave troops held out for much of the day with dwindling supplies of water and ammunition. The men who had lodged themselves in the German lines and fought until being overcome, usually by late afternoon, won several VCs and even more MCs, often posthumously.

  Nor did all units advance slowly in lines, walking across No Man’s Land towards the German guns. Some battalions had been told to get out into No Man’s Land and to wait, crouching perhaps 100 yards from the German front trench, until the barrage lifted at 7.30. In general, they tended to do much better than their fellows, as they were often able to reach the German trenches before the defenders had time to drag the heavy machine guns up from their dugouts and assemble them for firing.

  Broadly speaking, the fighting on that first day of the Somme battle fell into a story of two halves. In the northern half above the old Roman road from Albert to Bapaume, it was a disaster. In the southern half, below the road and including the French positions, it was a great success, although one whose potential was not realised. In the far southern sector along the Somme valley, the French Sixth Army under General Fayolle performed brilliantly. The artillery bombardment had been far more concentrated and successful here than in the British sector. The heavy French howitzers had been well targeted and the 75mm field guns had used HE to successfully destroy the barbed wire and to strike accurately at the German positions. In the final hours of the barrage, trench mortars had poured down a hail of explosives on the enemy front lines. When the lightly equipped French infantry moved out of their trenches at 7.30 shouting ‘Vive la France,’ they found precious little resistance. They advanced through the first German line and on to the second; before long they had reached the third. By mid-morning, the French XX Corps had taken most of their objectives and had captured 2,500 stunned and dejected prisoners. French losses had been slight. The Germans did not think the French could mount an offensive while the Battle of Verdun was draining so many of their men, so without doubt this part of the line was less well defended. Nevertheless, it was a triumph for French arms and a sign that many of the lessons both from 1915 and from Verdun had been learned.

  To the immediate left of the French, the British units in XIII Corps under Lieutenant-General Walter Congreve VC were also successful that morning. Again, the barrage had been far more effective here and the Germans had withdrawn from parts of their front line, so badly had it been mauled. The Manchester and Liverpool Pals battalions advanced quickly across No Man’s Land to capture their first objective, Dublin Trench, by 8.30. Next to them General Ivor Maxse’s 18th Division was held up by one or two isolated but well-sited German machine gunners, who could sweep vast areas of the battle zone. However, they were eventually overwhelmed and by lunchtime British troops had captured the village of Montauban, which formed an important part of the German second line. German soldiers could be seen fleeing back towards their third line.

  Further north, Lieutenant-General Henry Horne’s XV Corps were coming up against much more determined resistance. Captain Charlie May, who had worried about the German machine guns ‘pooping off’ in the early morning, was killed as he led his company of Manchester volunteers towards a defensive line known as Danzig Alley. The villages of Mametz and Fricourt, meanwhile, were also proving tough nuts to crack. At Mametz a fortified machine gun post at a shrine in an old cemetery caused dreadful losses in two Devonshire battalions as they tried to advance across a section of No Man’s Land about 650 yards wide. At Fricourt, the bombardment by the heavy 9.2-inch howitzers had failed to destroy the German defences as so many of the shells had been duds. The 10th West Yorkshires took the highest battalion casualties of the day, losing 22 officers and 688 men. By nightfall Mametz had fallen, but Fricourt still held out and losses had been considerable.

  One of the problems in most First World War battles was that of communication between the front and rear, which ceased to exist the moment an assault began. After the subalterns blew their whistles and went over the top with their men, the fog of war descended. Heavy shelling filled the vast battlefield with smoke, so that line of sight, where it existed at all, was always unreliable. For similar reasons, the use of flags or rockets to signal the position of troops was rarely effective. There were no portable radios available in the First World War and while telephone lines could be laid out, the intense shelling usually destroyed cables as quickly as they were laid. In one day alone at Verdun, ninety miles of cables were needed to repair broken telephone lines.

  The situation was similar on the shell-pocked battlefields of the Somme. Aircraft observers could provide useful information, but sometimes they misinterpreted what they were seeing. Also, it was difficult to get reports back quickly enough to those who needed to know. Often the only reliable form of communication was through the use of runners. But these men had to cross open ground and traverse packed communication trenches. It could take hours for a runner to get a message back four or five miles to headquarters, by which time the information was likely to be well out of date. The further back from the front the information had to travel, the longer it took for those in command to receive it, and the less accurate it was by the time it arrived. As far as their commanding officers were concerned, when the infantry advanced they passed out of sight and out of communication into an unknown space. First World War battles were hence often said to be ‘platoon commanders’ battles’: they were the only officers who could influence the course of events once the whistles had been blown and battle had commenced. It meant that the use of reserves was nearly always delayed, with fatal consequences for the outcome of the battle; or the reverse, that attacks were continued when they had become quite pointless, leading to massive and unnecessary loss of life.

  This was not the case in the southern sector on the afternoon of 1 July. Having carried out a recce of his front, General Congreve of XIII Corps, it seems, telephoned his commanding officer, General Rawlinson, to tell him that his men had achieved all their objectives and he believed there were no substantial enemy forces ahead of him. He told Rawlinson that he had a reserve infantry division and the 2nd Indian Cavalry Division available and asked if he could deploy them and try for a breakthrough. However, according to Rawlinson’s plan, the main thrust that day was to come further north, and Congreve’s advance in the south was a holding operation to cover the flank. Rawlinson, an infantry man, never had much faith in the use of the cavalry, and denied Congreve permission to deploy his reserves. He was simply too inflexible, unwilling to adapt his plan only a few hours into the assault. Ironically, in front of Congreve’s troops, the Germans could only muster a few scratch reserves and were busy marshalling cooks and clerks to provide a makeshift defence.12

  Of course, it can never be known what would have happened if the cavalry had gone in and got behind the German positions. But there was certainly a possibility of capturing some ground at the southern end of the Thiepval ridge, an area that would be fought over bitterly and with massive loss of life in the following weeks and months. Rawlinson appears to have made a disastrous decision in not exploiting the opportunities in the south.

  The German army had displayed its experience and superiority in many ways during the course of the long and bitter fighting on 1 July. It had selected the better ground for defence and had positioned its nests of machine guns and concrete fortresses accordingly. Its communications were far better, especially with the firing of flares by the infantry to signal to the artillery where a barrage was needed. And the
artillery was more accurate, and was consequently able completely to cut off groups of British troops that had lodged themselves in German lines or strongholds. The German leadership reacted swiftly to events on a changing battlefield, calling in reserves, shoring up defences, improvising where needed and striking back in force when the opportunity appeared. But more than anything, despite seven days and nights of horrific bombardment, the German infantryman still fought with determination and courage when called upon to do so. The real victor of that day was the German soldier.

  On the other hand, the heroes of 1 July were the British infantrymen who, believing what they had been told about the destruction of the barbed wire and the enemy trenches, went forward willingly and enthusiastically. Never in history had such optimism as that of Fourth Army, packed as it was with Pals battalions and volunteers for the Territorials, come up against such a cruel reality. Today, the horror of that day looks very much like a massacre of the innocents.

  The fighting on the Somme that began on 1 July was to last for 140 days. It was the most intense and long-running battle the British army had ever engaged in. By comparison, the Battle of Waterloo was over in less than a day. The Battle of Loos in September 1915, the biggest the British had so far been involved in since the start of the war, had lasted just twelve fighting days. Although the German machine guns had inflicted many of the casualties in the first hours of the attack from 7.30 on the morning of 1 July, it was the artillery that then started to inflict its dreadful carnage and a vast number of casualties after that opening morning were from the intense artillery barrages.

  From day one of the Battle of the Somme there was a massive increase in the incidence of shell shock. Assessing the numbers of those affected is immensely difficult from the available evidence, which does not distinguish between different categories of wounds. And the categories to which shell shock victims were assigned, Shell Shock ‘W’, Shell Shock ‘S’ and Neurasthenic, were only sometimes included in the lists of wounded. For example, the Official History of the Medical Services records that there were 16,138 battle casualties in France from shell shock in the months July to December 1916, over four times more than in the previous six months; and more than ten times greater than in the six months from July to December 1915. Although this gives an indication of the rate of increase in the incidence of shell shock, it does not convey anything like the real numbers involved; it only includes Shell Shock ‘W’ and not Shell Shock ‘S’, nor does it include all of those diagnosed with Neurasthenia. The total number of cases of shell shock was more likely to be in the region of 53–63,000.13 Shell shock was transformed from a disease into an epidemic almost overnight.