by Robin Prior
Haig's October Plan
24 ‘A Severe Trial of Body and Spirit’: The Somme, October
I
Despite their limitations, the operations from 15 September to 30 September were the most successful carried out by the British on the Somme. The two assaults by Fourth Army and one by the Reserve Army had captured as much ground as all operations between 1 July and 14 September. And there were other positive aspects on the British side that had emerged from the fighting. The creeping barrage as a method of infantry protection was now used as a matter of course by all divisions in the Fourth and Reserve Armies. Furthermore, although on 15 September the tanks had proved disappointing and even a negative factor, because of the disruption to the artillery plan, they had proved useful in certain circumstances. In Flers, Gueudecourt, and Thiepval they had enabled stubborn resistance in the ruined villages to be overcome quickly and at modest cost.
The experience of battle had alerted the tank experts to deficiencies in the Mark I tank. It was now recognised that a more powerful engine must be employed, that the armour protection must be increased to deal with German armour-piercing bullets, that a shorter version of the 6-pounder gun must be developed for greater ease of manoeuvre, and that the tracks must be tightened to avoid the tendency to spin off in rough going.1 Finally, the British infantry in instances where the artillery could no longer be employed had outfought their German counterparts, even though the enemy were often occupying well-prepared defensive positions.
Set against these heartening aspects were some negative factors. The command seemed chronically unable to calculate exactly how much artillery was needed to capture particular objectives. The intervention of a Maxse might assist in the capture of a specific area such as Thiepval but the general modus operandi seemed to be to assemble as many guns as possible and hope for the best. A further problem was the inability of Haig to grasp the kind of operations that his army could conduct with at least some chance of success – that is, offensives limited in objectives to the range of the guns covering the infantry advance, and intended precisely to kill the maximum number of German soldiers with minimum loss to his own side. Always in this period when a major attack was announced the cavalry were assembled and distant objectives set. It was perhaps this hankering after the decisive battle that diverted the attention of the staff at GHQ from such matters as artillery concentration. What it ensured was that battles were never fought with the attritional factor at their centre, thus causing more casualties to the attacking British than were being inflicted on the defending Germans.
Another negative factor underlay this persistent overreaching. Optimism is a requirement that few commanders can do without. But optimism taken to ludicrous extremes is dangerous. Haig's conviction that, on the eve of all of his major offensives, German morale was on the brink of collapse underpinned his projected cavalry forays. Another example of unwarranted optimism is the assumption that major advances (in Somme terms) such as those of 15, 25, and 26 September were a sure sign of disintegrating enemy morale. The danger here lay in what might happen if Haig's armies, already worn down by hard fighting and somewhat disorganised as a result, were asked for additional efforts so as to push a supposedly tottering enemy over the edge. It will be recalled that the limited success of 14 July was followed by the disorganised, unco-ordinated, and ultimately futile attempts to gain ground. And if such a pattern reappeared in the aftermath of the September advances there were added dangers for Haig's armies which had not been present in mid-July.
The first was the fact that, except in small areas of the Reserve Army front still occupied by the Germans (Regina Trench and the areas of Stuff and Schwaben Redoubts), the British had reached the far edge of the Thiepval–Morval Ridge. Any advance from the ridge would see them lose this commanding position and descend into a valley. They would then face a gently slope to just beyond Bapaume. Thus any advance beyond their present position would restore the observation advantage to the Germans.
The second danger was that Haig had now reached a precarious point in the campaigning season. The latter half of September had been remarkably fine, with heavy rain falling on just two days – the 18th and 29th. Similar conditions were not to be expected in October. Mid-autumn often saw heavy rains in the Somme area, at a time when the British would be advancing from high ground to low. In these circumstances there was a considerable risk that the artillery would be blinded and that the men would be consigned to damp or boggy trenches for the winter.
A third danger concerned the Germans. Although most of their original defences (the first, second, and third lines) were now in British hands, in the weeks when the British army crawled towards the ridge the enemy had not been idle. A fourth line through Le Transloy now confronted the Fourth Army and aerial reconnaissance revealed that the Germans had commenced a fifth line in front of Bapaume and a sixth three miles further back.2 None of these lines possessed the strength and complexity, in terms of dug-outs and breadth of wire, of the systems overrun so far. Yet reaching them required a five-mile advance – precisely the distance that Haig's armies had achieved in a three month campaign. Unless the enemy collapsed entirely, such a timetable would extend the campaign into the depths of winter. Would Haig be so reckless as to take the risk?
There was never a chance that he would do anything else. Even before operations on the Reserve Army front were concluded he had issued new orders to his army commanders. He instructed Rawlinson to capture the Transloy Line, Gough to advance on Loupart Wood from the south and Beaumont Hamel from the west, and Allenby (Third Army) to attack from around Gommecourt.3 These were modest enough objectives with a maximum advance of about 2,500–3,000 yards. However, as always with Haig, there must be no pause while preparations for these operations were undertaken. He instructed the Fourth and Reserve Armies to secure ‘as soon as possible’ the outer defences of the Transloy Line and the remainder of Thiepval Ridge. In the case of the Thiepval Ridge this made sense in that it would place Gough's troops securely on the high ground. To the Fourth Army it made no sense at all, because it would allow no preparation time for the larger affair he intended and was bound to result in the hasty, ill-thought-out, narrow-front operations that invariably followed from such directives.
But then the larger affair to which these actions were intended as a prelude – the capture of the Transloy Line – itself made no sense. If successful it would see Rawlinson's troops descend from the high ground and press forward into a valley. This would lose them the advantage of observation and the valley would become a bog should the normal October rains set in.
It soon became clear why these factors did not weigh with Haig. The advance he had ordered was only the first step in an expanding design. Once more he was beginning to see distant vistas and far-away places as the true destination for his armies. The trend seems to have set in after a visit by Kavanagh (commanding the Cavalry Corps) on 30 September. The discussion commenced reasonably enough with Haig instructing Kavanagh to explore the area north of the River Ancre in case an attack from that direction might take the Germans by surprise.4 Soon, however, the issue arose of a cavalry pursuit in the event of an enemy collapse. Haig told Kavanagh:
I would aim at getting the enemy into a trap with the marshes to the east of Arras (around Hamel) on his N side and the Canal du Nord on the east of him. The latter is a brand new canal running in deep cuttings in places 150 feet deep.
This scenario would be brought about by a three army attack. Rawlinson would attack the Transloy Line and then advance north-east to Beaumetz. He would then swing due east, pass through Marcoing and encircle Cambrai from the south-east.5
Gough's movements were not spelt out with any precision. However he was to capture Achiet-le-Grand and then presumably operate on Rawlinson's left flank as the Fourth Army closed on Cambrai.
Allenby (who also visited Haig that day) would provide the northern pincer of the whole movement. He would attack south of Arras, capture the high ground aro
und Beaurains–Monchy, cut off the enemy from the north and close the gap in the unfinished Canal du Nord with artillery fire. He would then undertake a further advance to trap the enemy in a pocket formed by Canal du Nord-Scheldt marshes around Hamel–Beaulencourt.
It is important to understand what this plan entailed. In Rawlinson's case, Beaumetz was eight miles from the recently captured Flers; Marcoing was a further eight miles distant, and to pass the Fourth Army to the south and east of Cambrai would have involved a further 8 miles advance. That is, Haig was postulating for the Fourth Army a 24-mile operation, six times the distance they had traversed in the campaign so far which had occupied a period of three months. For Gough the distances would have been approximately the same. As for Allenby, he had a mere 20 miles to cover but he had the additional task of rapidly moving his heavy artillery forward to deny to the Germans the gap in the Canal du Nord.
There was never a chance that any aspect of this plan would be put into effect. Successful cavalry operations would require the German army to have collapsed – down to the last machine-gun team and the last battery of guns. If even a few Germans were inclined to stand and fire these weapons the cavalry would be slaughtered. In addition a heavy toll would be taken on the infantry, now out of their trench defences, advancing at a walk across open country. Allenby's forces would bear a further burden. They would have to transport most of their heavy guns, and all the ammunition to support them, in rapid time over a distance of at least 15 miles across an area crisscrossed with trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. In short, this whole plan was preposterous in the conditions applying on the Western Front in late 1916.
It might of course be argued that this after all was just a contingency plan of the type developed by any well-run army. Certainly armies have contingency plans, but in this case Haig's had no chance of success if the enemy continued to fight (and would be unnecessary should they not). In other words this was not an example of prescient forward planning, it bore the characteristics of something concocted at the Mad Hatter's tea party.
It might also be argued that Haig's plan should not be taken seriously – that it was just an example of the Commander-in-Chief ‘s imagination running away with him late at night while he was writing up his diary. A number of factors tell against this view. First, there is no reason to doubt that the conversations with Kavanagh, Rawlinson, Allenby, and Gough on which the diary entry is based actually took place. If Haig's imagination was running riot then he had no hesitation in sharing his fantasies with his army commanders – down to such points of detail as how particular locations were to be attacked.
There is an additional reason which indicates that Haig was serious about these operations. In the section of his diary where he goes into detail about the plan, he drew a thick line in the margin and indicated to Doris, his wife (who regularly typed out his manuscript diary), ‘please do not copy this point’.6 Two explanations suggest themselves. The first is that at the time Doris received the diary, the plan was still regarded as sufficiently secret for the number of copies of it to be kept to a minimum. But second, and in sharp contrast, by the time she received the diary the actual achievements of the British army had fallen so far short of the objectives stated in the plan as to make the entry embarrassing. What these scenarios have in common is that Haig was indeed serious about his grand October plan.
The importance of this episode lies not so much in the plan itself – not one section of which was ever implemented – as in what it revealed about the mind of the Commander-in-Chief. Even so late in the campaigning season as October, Haig was thinking in terms of Napoleonic decisive battles – discrete episodes which would either end the war or go a long way towards it. And decisive battles could only be brought about after a break-in, achieved by the infantry and artillery, was converted to a breakthrough by the cavalry. The awkward fact that the cavalry had no place on a modern battlefield pointed elsewhere: to the lamentable conclusion (from Haig's viewpoint) that limited objective operations with attrition should be the principal aim. This conclusion, it has to be stressed again, was one that Haig had spent most of the war avoiding. Breakthrough was his watchword, the cavalry his instrument, a vivid imagination his guide. And that would long continue to be the case
II
Meanwhile, back at the front Rawlinson and Gough were wrestling with those sections of the Commander-in-Chief ‘s design that it was possible to set in train. Even here Haig had placed a deadly ambiguity at the centre of his instructions. He had set the Transloy Ridge as the objective for the Fourth Army and Loupart Wood and Beaumont Hamel for Gough's forces. But he had also enjoined that there be no pause in operations and that objectives that lay within easy reach of these forces were to be captured at once.
Only in one area were useful gains made – when the units of XIV Corps eliminated a sharp salient in the British line around Eaucourt l'Abbaye. In other areas the Canadians failed to capture Regina Trench and fighting continued in Stuff and Schwaben Redoubts.7
Two features of the fighting are worthy of note. The first is that the German infantry resisted all attacks with its usual tenacity, only giving ground (as around Eaucourt) where it was tactically sensible to do so. The second matter is that from 1 to 6 October the ‘enemy's artillery fire daily increased in violence and accuracy’.8 Trenches were continually obliterated and attacks broken up.9
None of this indicated that the Germans were about to crack and fall back into the marshes designated for them by Haig. On the contrary it appeared that they were recovering from the setbacks of September. They were relieving tired divisions and strengthening their artillery. Between the end of September and 13 October the six divisions holding the line from Le Transloy to the Ancre were replaced by seven from other parts of the front, and from 15 September to 8 October 361/2 additional heavy batteries were introduced and 36 worn-out batteries replaced.10 It was the fruits of these efforts that the British infantry were noticing in early October. The high command unfortunately did not notice.
But then another factor intervened which the high command could not dis-regard. The weather, which had been remarkably fine since 15 September, broke. On 2 October heavy rain fell. The air observers were grounded and the artillery greatly hampered in their work. The 3rd was misty but on the 4th heavy rain returned and persisted on the 5th and 6th. All this disrupted Rawlinson and Gough's plan to capture the objectives immediately facing them – the outlying trenches of the Transloy Line and the remainder of the Thiepval Ridge. So heavy was the rain that the ground was reduced to a bog and the operation, set for the 5th, had to be postponed first until the 6th and then until the 7th.
It was at this point that the incessant attacks ordered by Haig took their toll on the troops and on the British plan. The Canadians, who had been trying to make ground towards Regina Trench since their failed attempt on 1October, announced that they could not provide relief for their tired troops in time for an attack on the 7th. The French on the other hand would be ready by that date. It was decided that no simultaneous operations could take place – the Fourth Army and the French would attack on the 7th, the Reserve Army on the 8th.
Although the Fourth Army attack was only intended to be a preliminary to Haig's big push towards the swamps north of Cambrai, it was a large enough affair. One French division and six British divisions would attack with the intention of capturing the Transloy Line.
Taken as a whole, the attack was a failure. On most parts of the front the weather had not allowed sufficient aerial spotting for the guns to be directed with any accuracy on to the German trenches or batteries. Moreover, in some areas the Germans had positioned trenches behind small folds in the ground, which although close to the British front trenches, could not be directly observed.11 In other areas the British ran into newly constructed German trenches of which neither the infantry nor the artillery was aware.12 On yet other occasions resistance came not from defensive lines, but from machine-guns, placed either in shell holes on the flan
k of the attack or at a distance beyond the range of the creeping barrage.13
There was one small success on the left flank to show for this gloomy affair. There the 23 Division following close behind a creeping barrage jumped the defenders of Le Sars in their dug-outs before they could bring their weapons into play. By the end of the day the village was in British hands. This episode demonstrated yet again the efficacy of the creeping barrage when accurately fired against conventional defence.14 Otherwise the weather, which should have cautioned against any attack, and the new German machine-gun tactics made the capture of intermediate positions protecting the Transloy Line impossible. There may have been another reason as well, noted by an acute observer in XV Corps. ‘Perhaps,’ the new commander of XV Corps General du Cane wrote, ‘all concerned were too optimistic owing to the previous successes.’15