Pte. Daniel Sweeney of the Lincolnshire Regiment was a Regular soldier who had joined the army in 1907. He was discharged in March 1919, by which time he had married when on leave. He had four sons, all of whom were to serve in the Second World War. In a letter home simply dated July, he wrote, ‘I must tell you what I know and saw of this murder; I think I am allowed to tell you and it will be a truer story than what you have read in the papers, at least I think so.’62 In their support role, the 1st Lincolns had to ‘get across the German trench with our loads as quickly as possible… but as soon as were all on top the Germans started sending big shrapnel shells—terrible things—I heard when we got into the German first line of trenches… we lost twenty-four men killed by one shell.’ That night they had to relieve the men in front of them:
PRIVATE DANIEL SWEENEY
A soldier of the Lincolnshire Regiment, he fought for three days and two nights without relief during the first days of the Somme.
We were in the firing line all night of the 1st, all of the 2nd and were relieved on the night of the 3rd by the [redacted by the censor]… When I think of my poor dear chums who have fallen I could cry. I have had to cry about one of my chums who has been out here since the beginning of the war and had not received a scratch, poor lad he died game with his mother’s name his last word. You cannot realize what it is like to see poor lads lying about with terrible wounds and not being able to help them. We came out of action with 4 officers out of 26 and 435 men out of 1,150. I am glad to say that most of them are wounded, not killed, and I can say that for one of our dead there are ten German dead. I have accounted for fourteen I am certain of but I believe I killed twelve in one dugout. I gave them eight bombs, one for Kitchener and the others for my chums.63
To the south of the 21st Division was the 50th Brigade of the 17th Division, which had been ordered to capture Fricourt but also utterly failed to reach its objective. The future military journalist and historian Lt. Basil Liddell Hart observed how the German 110th and 111th Reserve Regiments’ fire ‘was so deadly that our men were forced to crawl… Our battalion lost about 500 men crossing 180 yards [165 m] of no-man’s land’.64 The experience was to affect his view of military tactics for the rest of his life, making him deeply sceptical of the direct frontal assault and a passionate theorist of the war of manoeuvre.
Gunner Gambling spent 1 July in front of Fricourt Wood too. As he wrote at the time:
The morning of the eighth day [of the bombardment, i.e. 1 July] found a steady fire proceeding from our guns, and it also revealed great devastation in the enemy’s lines. At 7.30 a.m. (the time for which thousands of men had been waiting anxiously, and which had arrived at last) the Infantry (prepared for the great work in hand) were ready to leave the trenches at the given signal. At last the signal was given, and the officers leapt on to the parapet of the trenches, then raising their arms above their heads, gave a lusty shout to the men to follow. In a second the men were over the top and rushing towards no-man’s land shouting and singing at the top of their voices, hundreds of them falling, never to rise again. The rest still rushing on to enter the Germans’ first-line trench, and then to forge further on into the enemy’s support trenches where they were met with a fierce shower of machine gun bullets, which were soon overcame… The infantry did wonderful work on that morning (the wonderful 1st of July) and in less time than it takes to tell had cleared the enemy right back and the cavalry were standing by ready to take a hand.65
‘Reports up to 8 a.m. most satisfactory’, wrote Haig in his diary that day. ‘Our troops had everywhere crossed the Enemy’s front trenches.’66 He was still being given deeply over-optimistic estimates, as only five of the seventeen British divisions achieved that key objective.67
There seem to have been two very different battles being fought on 1 July, the ones north and south of Fricourt. The great difference between them was that German guns were destroyed in large numbers in the valleys north of Mametz and Montauban, such as those of the German 12th Division which lost most of its guns.68 The British were also greatly helped by the fact that, having 386 aircraft to the Germans’ 129, the aerial observers were able to correct the Allied fire against the Germans. ‘The numerical superiority of the enemy’s airmen,’ wrote General von Arnim, ‘and the fact that their machines were better made, became disagreeably apparent to us, particularly in their direction of the enemy’s fire and in bomb-dropping.’69
The 7th Division to the south of 50th Brigade had the duty of capturing Mametz, south-east of Fricourt, which they managed to achieve by 4 p.m.70 ‘Very noisy night, fine morning’, noted Maj. Probert who was serving with the 7th Division’s artillery.
Started our final intense bombardment at 6.25 a.m., lifted at 7.30 a.m. Milne went forward as FOO [forward observation officer] but was hit by shrapnel in our own front line… From the Observation Point we could see the infantry with the pink squares of flannel on the packs and bayonets flashing in the sun climbing up the hill towards [the] Fritz trench. They appeared to have the front line two supports without too much difficulty but the snipers had now come up from the deep dugouts and were causing a lot of casualties and were trying to bomb us out of Mametz Trench… One captain [of the] Gordons was sitting in the front line eating his lunch with one hand and shooting the snipers with the other as they came out to surrender. I thought that rather rough as some had their hands up but he said that he had had several wounded Jocks shot on their stretchers.*9 There were a great many dead lying about, both Gordons and Boche. Whilst we were waiting to get on, the 2nd Warwicks made their second attack across the old no man’s land shouting their war cry ‘Warwicks’ to clear the old Boche front line and support of snipers: the first troops having moved on without mopping up… This was a very noisy, alarming and bloody affair. The cries of the wounded for stretcher-bearers who couldn’t be attended to because of snipers were distressing. Although the Boche trenches were flattened by our bombardment the deep dugouts were hardly affected and spewed out snipers who effectively prevented movement until this second attack (Warwicks) was made.71
Afterwards Probert remarked: ‘White Trench [in front of Bazentin-le-Petit church and Bazentin-le-Grand Wood] was only half dug and I could see our chaps almost from the waist up as they moved down the trench from Beetle Alley throwing an occasional Mills bomb, the sharp ‘ping’ accompanied by a cloud of chalk dust… Col. Longbourne said that the Huns were so scared by the shelling from our 4.5 How[itzer]s that some of them had shat their pants.’72
Buried in the Dantzig Alley British Cemetery is Lt. Warwick Hall, twenty, of the South Staffordshire Regiment, the twin son of Walter and Frances Hall of Hodnet, Shropshire, who has ‘Thy will be done’ for a headstone. Mary Louise White of Bournemouth, the mother of Capt. J. V. White, twenty-four, of the Manchester Regiment, wrote on his grave marker: ‘I thank my God for all my remembrance of thee. Mother.’ A second lieutenant, J. H. Parr-Dudley, twenty, of the Royal Fusiliers, who came from East Malling in Kent and whose brother was also killed during the battle, lies beneath a quotation from the poet Rupert Brooke:
THE ‘LUCKY’ WOUNDED
These men have ‘Blighties’ that invalided them out of the trenches and back home, at least temporarily.
I found you white and radiant
Sleeping quietly,
Far out through the tides of darkness73
Those who remained of the 8th and 9th Battalions of the Devonshires later that same day buried their fallen comrades in the same trench from which they had gone over the top. They erected a wooden memorial in Mansell Copse with the words: ‘The Devonshires held this trench. The Devonshires hold it still.’
Maj.-Gen. Ivor Maxse’s 18th (Eastern) Division made the deepest territorial gains of the day, partly due to the training regime imposed by him on this New Army unit.74 Although it was the division’s first battle it behaved like an elite force, and by 3 p.m. had captured all its objectives, albeit at a cost of 3,115 men. There was a good deal of hand-to-han
d fighting; the 7th Buffs were given the task of clearing the old mine warfare Carnoy craters of men of the 6th Bavarian Regiment, for example, which took ninety minutes of brutal, exhausting bayonet fighting. ‘Dead British and Boche, in couples, were found afterwards, each man transfixed by the other’s bayonet’, recalled an eyewitness.75 The diminutive but fierce Sgt. P. G. Upton killed ten men in this crater-fighting.*10
Seeing the danger of a British breakthrough, the German High Command gave orders for all available men—including clerks, cooks, batmen and 200 raw recruits—to occupy the second position to prevent it falling. The 109th Reserve Regiment had lost 42 officers and 2,105 other ranks, while the 6th Bavarian Reserve Regiment had lost 35 officers and 1,775 men.76 Yet the British High Command did not move the 9th (Scottish) Division forward to take advantage of this momentary opportunity.
There were plenty of stories of devotion to duty in the division, such as that of LCpl. G. Bilson, a runner, who was sent off to the 55th Brigade HQ with the historic message that the East Surreys had captured their final objective at 12.30 p.m. The corporal did not return till the next morning. ‘I noticed’, said Col. Irwin of the East Surreys later, ‘that his clothes and equipment were in tatters, and that his eyes were crossed in an extraordinary way. “Where have you been,” I asked. He said he had delivered the message, and coming back was blown up. He had only come to himself half an hour before but his first thought, you see, was to report himself.’77
MAJOR-GENERAL IVOR MAXSE
Maxse, pictured here presenting medals to men of the 152nd Highland Brigade, made the greatest territorial gains of the 1 July commanding the 18th Division.
The most southerly division in the British army on 1 July, the 30th Division under Maj.-Gen. James ‘Jimmy’ Shea, was charged with taking the village of Montauban, which it achieved by 1 p.m., though with the loss of 3,011 men.78 The division was enormously aided by the way that the British and especially the French artillery had managed to destroy deep German dugouts in and around Montauban. ‘They looked monstrous, lying there crumpled, amidst a foul litter of clothes, stick bombs, old boots and bottles’, the journalist Philip Gibbs wrote of the German corpses there. ‘Others might have been old or young. One could not tell because they had no faces and were just masses of raw flesh in uniforms.’79
In the attack on the southern sector at Montauban, Lt.-Col. Bryan Fairfax, who commanded the 17th Battalion King’s Liverpool Regiment, and Commandant Le Petit of the 3rd Battalion of the French 153rd Regiment left the trenches and crossed no mans land arm-in-arm, in a display of Allied unity. ‘This battalion moved forward,’ reported Le Petit’s colonel, ‘as practised during manoeuvres, and managed to sweep its way over five lines of enemy trenches covering an 800 metre (875 yd) stretch. German prisoners and weaponry were taken.’ Although Fairfax was gassed near Guillemont on 29 July, he survived the war, as did Le Petit, who was appointed to the General Staff.
When the 18th Manchesters went into the attack, Pte. Ted Higson recalled the way those men from the Liverpool and Bedford who had been wounded earlier,
were shouting out to us ‘Good luck Manchesters’ as suddenly we began to notice the enemy artillery fire increasing, shells began to come over thick and fast. We were also being swept by machine gun fire from the left. Our fellows were falling right and left… impossible to hear orders, but we looked to our captain. He was holding up his hand for a halt; our hearts were filled with anxious fears that we had failed. But no—we were only waiting until the unit on our left, which had been held up by barbed wire, got over the obstacle and cleared away the Germans who were hammering us on that side. We waited twenty minutes and then started again, all the time our wounded comrades were calling out for help and begging for drinks.80
They left them for the RAMC to deal with later. ‘When we reached within a hundred yards of the village [of Montauban], our artillery barrage lifted as we unslung our rifles and charged the waiting Germans’, Higson continued. ‘They fired at us until we got up quite close to them and then the row of steel got to make for them and scrambling out of their trenches they ran for it. Many of them did not run far, for the aim of our boys was splendid.’81 They captured Montauban Alley on the far side of the village. That night Higson slept until the enemy’s artillery opened up on their position at dawn on 2 July, and after a German counter-attack they were relieved by the Wiltshires.
To the south of 30th Division, straddling both sides of the river Somme, was the French 6th Army under Gen. Fayolle (part of Foch’s Army Group). Its experience was summed up in one page of the Official History, accurately entitled ‘The Complete Success of the French on 1st July’.82 South of the Somme the French had built up a ten-to-one advantage in heavy artillery, 84 batteries to the Germans’ eight. North of the Somme, next to the British 30th Division, was the French XX Corps under Gen. Balfourier. In that sector a German officer claimed to have ‘counted as many as two hundred explosions a minute’, and in the final forty-eight hours before the attack his men had received no food as a result of the bombardment, and, ‘At each explosion, the earth shook over a wide area.’83 Next to XX Corps was Gen. Berdoulat’s I Colonial Corps and then Gen. Jacquot’s XXXV Corps, with Gen. Duchêne’s II Corps in reserve.
Maurice Balfourier’s XX Corps attacked with two front-line divisions at 7.30 a.m., which were helped by a thick morning mist on the Somme that allowed them to reach the German trenches largely unseen. Although there was severe hand-to-hand fighting in Bois Favière, whose north-eastern corner was retained by the Germans for several days, otherwise Gen. Nourrisson’s 39th Division (next to the British 30th Division) took all his objectives so quickly that at noon he proposed attacking Hardecourt in front of him, but could not do so because the British XIII Corps had not yet reached its second phase positions.84 He did, however, use rifle fire to repulse no fewer than four German counter-attacks from Hardecourt.85
Gen. Vuillemot’s 11th Division meanwhile captured the Y Wood Salient at the first assault, but failed to capture Curlu on its right flank until the evening. So by the end of 1 July XX Corps had captured the entire German first position with few losses and no use of its own reserves. The French corps south of the river did not attack until 9.30 a.m., so they were able to take the enemy by surprise. Although the village of Frise was held by the Germans, the Colonial Corps took the villages of Dompierre and Becquincourt. By noon it had captured all its initial objectives and was pushing on towards Herbecourt and Assevillers, and by nightfall the corps had taken 2,000 prisoners and was ready to attack the Germans’ second position the next day.*11 The XXXV Corps attracted the fire of the German divisions further south, but nonetheless it too was very successful, and altogether the 6th Army achieved all its objectives and took 4,000 prisoners.86
Rawlinson was not ready to take advantage of this breakthrough, however, but kept his cavalry reserves north of the Albert-Bapaume road all day and failed to deploy his infantry reserve, the 9th (Scottish) Division. Haig, who unlike Rawlinson at least did believe in the possibilities of a breakthrough, was impressed by the successes in the south—even sending a telegram to his wife boasting of them at 10.55 a.m.—but he too failed to take advantage of the success there.*12
The first day of the Somme Offensive ended with the British army having captured less than 3 sq. miles (7.7 sq. km).87 Before 9 a.m., Lady Haig later claimed, ‘satisfactory progress was made… Douglas was very pleased with the early success of the morning.’88 Yet that was because he was misinformed of what was happening. Of his war diary reports that the 31st Division ‘was moving into Serre village’, for example, he later wrote, ‘This was afterwards proved to be incorrect’. Another report that ‘our troops… were entering Thiepval village’ he later qualified with the words ‘This did not prove to be the case.’ Later on in the same diary entry he wrote: ‘On a 16-mile [26 km] front of attack varying fortune must be expected! It is difficult to summarise all that was reported. After lunch I motored to Querrieu and saw Sir H. Rawlinso
n. We hold the Montauban–Mametz Spur and villages of those names… our men are in the Schwaben Redoubt… the Enemy counter-attacked here but were driven back… I am inclined to believe from further reports that few of the VIII Corps left their trenches!’89 This monstrous slur—the Newfoundlanders were in the VIII Corps, as were several other units crucified before Beaumont Hamel—along with the imputation he made against the 137th Brigade of the 46th Division serves to illustrate how bad was the ‘fog of war’ that day.
‘Haig has been demonized in popular memory as the chief butcher and bungler’, the historian Brian Bond has written, ‘among a generation of callous and incompetent generals responsible for mass slaughter in a futile conflict.’90 Although Bond rightly deplores this, it must be said that Haig left plenty of evidence in his own handwriting to support the unfair thesis. In 1936, in a memoir entitled The Man I Knew, Haig’s widow wrote that on 1 July 1916: ‘Our troops crossed the [German] frontline trenches everywhere on a front of 16 miles [26 km].’91 Only five of the seventeen divisions that attacked achieved anything like this. In some cases they could not even cross the British front-line trenches, but were massacred in the attempt.
On 4 July Lieutenant-General Hunter-Weston, who commanded VIII Corps, which incorporated 4th, 29th and 31st Divisions, wrote to the men of VIII Corps to say:
All observers agree in stating that the various waves of men issued from their trenches and moved forward at the appointed time in perfect order, undismayed by the heavy artillery fire and deadly machine gun fire. There were no cowards or waverers, and not a man fell out. It was a magnificent display of disciplined courage worthy of the best traditions of the British race… We had the most difficult part of the line to attack… By your splendid attack you held the enemy forces here in the North, and so enabled our friends in the South, both British and French, to achieve the brilliant success that they have. Therefore though we did not do all that we hoped to, you have more than pulled your weight… We have got to stick it out, and go on hammering. Next time we attack, if it please God, we will not only pull our weight, but will pull off a big thing… I rejoice to have the privilege of commanding such a band of heroes as the VIII Corps have proved themselves to be.92
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