In August 1916 Haig was informed that the first batch of tanks was now ready. There was debate as to whether these first tanks were sufficiently reliable to be used, and whether there were enough of them to make a difference. There were those, including Lloyd George, now Secretary of State for War after the death of Kitchener, and Robertson the CIGS, as well as many of the tank officers themselves, who would have preferred not to expose the new weapon yet, but to wait until mechanical teething problems had all been ironed out, and until there were sufficient tanks available to strike a decisive blow. As it was, Haig decided to use what was to hand. On 29 July he wrote to Robertson:
I am fully alive to the disadvantage of using the tanks before the full number on order [150] are available...if the enemy is not forced from his entrenched positions – as there is good hope that he will be – before the autumn, it is unlikely to prove possible to arrange for another simultaneous effort on such a large scale before next spring. In these circumstances, if opportunity should offer to gain valuable results in the present struggle by the use of even a few tanks, I should have no hesitation in taking advantage of it, and I consider it of very great importance that such number of tanks as can be made available should be sent to France with the least possible delay...8
In hindsight Haig may have been wrong, but in a battle that was killing an average of 500 British soldiers every day, anything that might help was better than nothing.
Forty-nine tanks, stencilled ‘With care – Petrograd’ (the cover story now was that these were water-carriers destined for the Russians) went by rail and boat to Le Havre and then by rail again to Bray-sur-Somme, a railhead about eight miles behind the British lines. There were two types, male and female. The male weighed twenty-eight tons and was twenty-six feet long, fourteen feet wide and eight feet high. It carried two six-pounder guns mounted on spontoons either side of the tank, with 324 rounds of ammunition, and three Hotchkiss machine guns mounted (plus a spare) with 6,000 rounds. The female version weighed slightly less and had no six-pounders, but was instead armed with four Vickers machine guns mounted and 31,000 rounds of ammunition. Both types were powered by a six cylinder petrol engine. There were eight crewmen in each tank: a commander, usually at this stage an officer, a driver, two gearsmen (the tank was steered by varying the engine power transmitted to each track), and a number one and a number two for each six-pounder gun. Each man could, at least in theory, fill in for any of the others should they be wounded or killed. For communications each tank carried carrier pigeons, flags and flares, and a method of communicating with aircraft had been worked out. During the attack, lanes would be left in the artillery barrage to allow the tanks to advance ahead of the infantry without molestation from friendly fire.
The main attack on 15 September was to begin at 0620 hours, but before that the right flank for the advance on Flers had to be secured by the removal of a stubborn party of Germans still holding out in the south-east corner of Delville Wood. This was to be the first-ever appearance of the tank on a battlefield. It was originally intended to use two tanks; but one broke down on the way, and the tank that made history was number D1, commanded by Captain H. W. Mortimore. The tank started from about 300 yards behind the British lines and clanked its way at one mile per hour up to the British trench line, itself about 100 yards from the German position. The tank followed a line of white tape, and an aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps circled overhead to drown the noise of the tank engine. At 0515 hours tank D1 crossed the British line, trundled up to the German trench, turned right and drove along the trench peppering it with machine-gun fire. Two companies of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry charged across the intervening ground and leaped into the German trench, and in a few minutes the defenders were dead or had surrendered. It was a promising beginning to armoured warfare, although Mortimore now decided to carry on towards the main German position, where his tank was hit by an artillery shell, lost one of its tracks, and played no further part in the battle.
On the British left, High Wood was attacked by infantry supported by four tanks, and the wood was taken by mid-afternoon. In the centre the Canadians attacked from Pozières Ridge, where they had taken over from the Australians in early September, towards Courcelette. Here too zero hour was 0620, and the attack was to be supported by six tanks. All six broke down or ditched or were knocked out except one, christened by its crew Crème de Menthe. When the infantry were held up by fierce resistance at a sugar factory just short of Courcelette village, Crème de Menthe obligingly fired one of its six-pounders through an embrasure in the factory wall; the fifty occupants surrendered and the position was taken.
On the right good progress was made, with the New Zealand Division and 41 Division being supported by tanks, two of which got into Flers village by 0820 hours. It was D17, Dinnaken, commanded by Lieutenant S. H. Hastie, that gave rise to the reports in the English newspapers that ‘a tank is walking up the High Street of Flers with the British Army cheering behind it’.9 Dinnaken achieved another first by shooting down a German observation balloon with its six-pounder on the way into Flers. Two tanks got even further, into Gueudecourt village. They were both knocked out by German artillery; the infantry were unable to follow and it was not until 26 September that Gueudecourt was finally taken.
The attack was an undoubted success, capturing more than six miles of German trenches to a depth of a mile and a half. The performance of the tanks was less clear. Initially their appearance caused panic in some German units, and whole platoons surrendered to these lumbering beasts They were useful in providing covering fire for the infantry at High Wood, but the Canadians would probably have taken Courcelette without them, though it would have taken longer. Of the forty-nine tanks sent to France, only two were unscathed at the close of business on 15 September. Thirty-two got as far as their start point; of these fourteen broke down or ditched before or just after crossing the jump-off line, and of the eighteen that took part in the battle six ditched, five were hit by artillery and knocked out, three were hit by artillery and went on fire, and two caught fire unaided by the Germans. In many cases the tanks could not keep up with the infantry. It was not very impressive, and the existence of these new weapons was now exposed. That said, the tank had proved that it could cross trenches, force a passage through wire and provide the infantry with mobile fire support. Only nine members of the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps (as the Tank Corps was then called) had been killed all day, so despite the tank’s vulnerability to aimed shellfire, it gave its crew at least a modicum of protection. There was nothing wrong with the idea; the trick was to make the machine reliable, work out how to use it to best effect in cooperation with infantry, artillery and the air, and improve its communications. Valuable lessons were learned, modifications were incorporated into the design and production was stepped up. The tank was an undoubted boost to the morale of the troops on the ground and to the public at home. The tank was not the wonder weapon that the newspapers claimed, but it was something that the British had and the Germans did not, and that it appeared at all is a tribute to the designers and engineers who produced it in such a short space of time.
From now on in this war tanks would be used more and more, and they would get better and better. The Germans, for once well behind the British in things technical, did try to compete by producing a tank of their own, the A7V, in spring 1917. It was an ungainly twenty-four-foot-long monster weighing thirty tons, with a crew of eighteen. It was top-heavy and had a distressing tendency to turn turtle on sloping ground. The Germans produced only twenty of them, and much preferred to use captured British tanks. In the meantime the German reaction was to issue elephant guns, originally intended for German South West Africa, which could penetrate the armour of the British Mark 1 tank; later they adapted artillery pieces to the anti-tank role. The Germans took note of the lessons, however, and while the British had invented the tank, it was their enemy that would become the chief proponent of armoured warfare in the next
conflict.
Between 15 and 17 September the French took Berny, Deniécourt and Vermandovillers, and on the 26th, with some help from the British, they took Combles. The British were now outstripping the French, however, and were in danger of having their right flank exposed. The main British thrust would now shift to Morval and Thiepval Ridge, still unconquered since 1 July.
September 1916 was not a good month for Germany. Forced to shift thirteen new divisions to the Somme, she had gone onto the defensive at Verdun on 2 September. In that month alone the Germans had expended nearly six million rounds of field-artillery ammunition and one and a quarter million heavy artillery rounds, and still they lost ground on the Somme and gained none at Verdun. On 15 September the new Chief of the General Staff, Hindenburg, ordered the construction of the Siegfried Line (known to the Allies as the Hindenburg Line) further back, thereby creating positions to which his troops could withdraw in order to shorten their front. At home the German government lowered the minimum age for compulsory military service from nineteen to sixteen, and raised the upper limit from thirty-nine to sixty. By the end of the year they would make all males between seventeen and sixty, unless already in the armed forces, liable to conscription for the war industries.
A foothold on the Schwaben Redoubt on Thiepval Ridge, which had first fallen to and then defeated the Ulstermen on 1 July, was eventually gained by Major-General Maxse’s 18 Division on 28 September, and fighting to the north of it continued into October. While the British casualties now were nothing like as severe as they had been in the first phase of the offensive, there were still personal tragedies. The Fifty-fifth Brigade of 18 Division was in reserve for the attack on the Schwaben Redoubt on 28 September, and during that night took over the front line. This brigade had been in action on 1 July (when Billy Nevill had led the right-hand company of the 8th East Surreys with his football), again on 14 July in Trones Wood and in the subsequent operations in Delville Wood. Maxse ordered 55 Brigade, augmented by a fifth battalion, 6th Royal Berkshires, to clear the remnants of the Schwaben Redoubt and to occupy the high ground to its north. There was confused fighting from 30 September to 5 October, with little progress and with fourteen officers and 227 other ranks of the brigade killed. On 6 October the brigade commander, Sir Thomas Jackson, was removed from command. Major-General Maxse said, ‘In my opinion the 55th Brigade was not handled with firmness and the attacks were too partial. The situation should have been grasped more firmly by the brigade commander concerned and he was so informed.’10
Jackson was a regular officer who had earned the Distinguished Service Order in the South African War.11 By 1914 he was a company commander in the 1st Battalion the King’s Own (Royal Lancaster) Regiment, and went to France with his battalion on 23 August 1914. In July 1915 he was promoted to command the battalion, and in October 1915, at the age of forty, he became a brigadier general and took over command of 55 Brigade. By October 1916 Jackson had been on the Western Front for over two years, and for all of that time he was in an operational infantry unit. He had argued with Maxse before, nearly always to oppose what he saw as pointless attacks, and his continuing to disagree with his divisional commander was what got him the sack. It is a measure of the man that, despite losing his brigade and reverting to his substantive rank of lieutenant colonel, Jackson asked to remain on the Western Front. There must have been some sympathy for Jackson in the higher echelons of the army, for instead of being sent home in an administrative or training capacity, as usually happened to commanders who failed, he was allowed to stay and was appointed commanding officer of 11th Battalion the Manchester Regiment, in another division. He collapsed while on a route march in September 1917, was invalided back to England, spent seven months in hospital, and then commanded a holding unit until the end of the war.
Maxse was probably unfair to Jackson. Very early on, the British had learned the importance of alternating men between the front lines and billets well back, but little attention was paid to commanders. During the Somme offensive battalions rarely spent more than one day in the firing line before being relieved, but there was no relief for a brigade commander as long as any of his four battalions was forward. It would not be surprising if Jackson was completely burnt out, and the award of a bar to his DSO in January 1918 is evidence that little stigma was considered to attach to his dismissal. The importance of rest for commanders was another lesson that the British would learn the hard way.
In October the tide, already turning in favour of the Allies, began to flow more strongly. On 24 October French troops of General Mangin, and under the direction of General Robert Nivelle, now commanding at Verdun, recaptured Fort Douaumont, and the Germans began to lose more men than the French. On the night of 2/3 November the Germans evacuated Fort Vaux.
By now, however, the French were very tired. They had fed forty-four divisions into the Somme battle, thirty of which had already been through the meat-grinder of Verdun. Fayolle was becoming disillusioned: ‘Joffre and Foch want Bapaume,’ he wrote in his diary on 21 October, ‘but if 60,000 are lost to get there, where is the benefit?’12
The British battled their way up the Bapaume road and along the banks of the Ancre, but the weather had turned against them and movement became more and more difficult. Le Sars was captured on 7 October, the Schwaben Redoubt was finally cleared of Germans on the 14th, and Beaumont-Hamel was taken on 14 November. The French reached Mont Saint-Quentin, overlooking Péronne, but there they stuck.
Joffre and Foch would have liked to go on. Fayolle noted on 3 November: ‘Foch says the Germans are done with. He has been saying that since the start of the battle...for him the troops are always ready to attack indefinitely.’13 In truth, the Germans were very nearly done with. They had mounted few counter-attacks on the Somme since September, and those that were put in lacked the verve and aggression of the old German army of 1914 and 1915. A combination of weather, Allied exhaustion, and the lack of a large force of fresh British or French divisions to feed in forced the closure of the Somme offensive on 18 November, the day the first winter snow appeared. On 15 December the Germans finally accepted defeat at Verdun when the French pushed them back nearly two miles. The policy of bleeding the French white had failed, but only just.
The Somme had relieved the pressure on Verdun. The Somme sector was originally held by six German divisions. Had the Allies not attacked there, at least half of the sixty-nine German divisions eventually engaged on the Somme would have been available for Verdun; the Germans could have attacked on both banks of the River Meuse simultaneously, and there can be little doubt that the French army would have been defeated. Such a defeat could well have led to a complete collapse of French military will, and to a German victory in the west.
The Somme offensive had recovered seventy square miles of occupied French territory and fifty-one French towns and villages. The villages were now little more than piles of rubble, but at least their owners could return and reconstruction could start. The Germans had been forced back between five and seven miles along ten miles of front, and knocked off their forward defensive positions over another twelve miles on the flanks. Of the sixty-nine German divisions engaged on the Somme, many were so badly mauled that they were useless until rebuilt with recruits from Germany. They had suffered half a million casualties, of whom around 150,000 were killed. These figures, added to about 143,000 German deaths at Verdun and those inflicted by the Brusilov offensive on the Eastern Front, made 1916 a black year for the German army.
Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, had been quite clear what the Somme was to be: a battle to relieve the pressure on Verdun and to kill Germans. Haig, albeit reluctantly, had accepted that aim, though he always hoped for a return to a war of manoeuvre, farmore in keeping with British military doctrine. Those who aver that Haig had somehow failed because a breakthrough was not achieved are wrong – as Haig’s directive to the Fourth Army plainly shows.
Verdun had been relieved and a lot of Germans had been killed. Th
e Somme offensive had achieved its aim. What made, and makes, the Somme a source of controversy to the British even today is the price paid for that achievement. Total British and Empire deaths on the Somme amounted to around 95,000, and the overall casualty list totalled 400,000 killed, wounded, missing and taken prisoner. Of the dead, nearly 20,000 were killed on the first day, and British ignorance of the scale of continental warfare, combined with the way in which the British had expanded their army by the use of ‘pals’ and Territorial battalions, made the battle seem a terrible slaughter. In fact the death rate on the Somme was less severe than it was in Normandy, when twenty-eight years later another undertrained and inexperienced British army would be loosed against the Germans. The table below shows a comparison of British Empire dead in the two campaigns:
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 34