by Robin Prior
Notwithstanding these conditions, Haig was determined to maintain the offensive. For 5 November he ordered what would be the seventh British attack on the Transloy Line, even giving Rawlinson objectives beyond that point: ‘I told him that when Le Transloy is captured, arrangements must be made to push on at once to Beaulencourt in co-operation with the French. The XIV Corps had only planned to take Le Transloy.’51
The revelation that even the capture of Le Transloy would not end the ordeal of the troops provoked a minor revolt – not, it should be noted, from Rawlinson but from the corps commander responsible for carrying out the attack. Lord Cavan, the commander of XIV Corps, wrote to Rawlinson in terms not often employed to their superiors by high-ranking officers on the Western Front:
With a full and complete sense of my responsibility I feel it my bounden duty to put in writing my considered opinion as to the attack ordered to take place on Nov 5th....
An advance [on Le Transloy] from my present position with the troops at my disposal has practically no chance of success on account of the heavy enfilade fire of machine guns and artillery from the north, and the enormous distance we have to advance against a strongly prepared position, owing to the failure to advance our line in the recent operations....
I perfectly acknowledge the necessity of not leaving the French left in the air [and] ... I assert my readiness to sacrifice the British right rather than jeopardise the French ... but I feel that I am bound to ask if this is the intention, for a sacrifice it must be. It does not appear that a failure would much assist the French, and there is a danger of this attack shaking the confidence of the men and officers in their commanders.
No one who has not visited the front trenches can really know the state of exhaustion to which the men are reduced.52
Even this missive, with its suggestion that the higher command were neglecting to acquaint themselves with the situation at the front, did not alter the determination of Haig and Rawlinson. In reply to Cavan, Rawlinson emphasised ‘the importance of meeting our obligations with the French’. And he insisted that a minor attack scheduled for later that day (3 November) should be allowed to proceed as it ‘would form a useful test of what might be expected to be accomplished on the 5th’.53
The attack on the afternoon of the 3rd did indeed prove a ‘useful test’: it accomplished nothing at all. Rawlinson was not deterred. He concluded that the cause of failure was a want of vigour on the part of XIV Corps headquarters, and he decreed that the attack on the 5th would proceed as planned. Cavan, however, was not about to submit. He insisted that he would not attack until Rawlinson himself had seen conditions at the front.54 Cavan won his point. As he later recalled, after viewing the front line ‘R was equally convinced ... that an attack was impossible.’55 And Rawlinson was able to persuade Haig that operations to assist the French should be scaled down to trench raids and artillery support.56
Yet Cavan's commendable display of plain speaking availed his forces nothing. After an interview with Foch, Haig reversed his decision. The operation on the 5th was to go ahead after all.57 The Fourth Army was thus committed to the attack despite the advice of the army commander and the corps commander whose task it was to carry it out. To make matters worse, the plan promulgated by Haig made no tactical sense. The XIV Corps was ordered to mount two attacks by widely separated formations. This allowed the Germans in the intervening ground to bring to bear devastating enfilade machine-gun fire on the hapless troops. That is, Haig was ordering a repetition of precisely that type of attack which had caused him, two months previously, to warn Rawlinson that ‘something was wanting in the methods employed’. The operation failed at a cost of 2,000 casualties.58
This was not quite the end of the battle on the Fourth Army front. Attacks – generally small scale and usually futile even when a trench was occasionally wrested from the enemy – continued throughout November. Nor were these operations cheap. The 50 and the 33 Divisions suffered 8,750 casualties each in November, the 17 Division 1,300, the 8,750 and the Australian Corps (which re-entered the battle on 5 November) several thousand. So in operations that improved the tactical position of the Fourth Army not a whit, almost a division of infantry was cast away. But by then attention had turned away from the Fourth Army. In this last phase of the battle it was the Reserve (now renamed the Fifth Army) that held centre stage.
Gains Made, October
25 ‘We Must Keep Going!’: The Politicians and the Somme Campaign, September–October
I
As autumn set in and the Somme operations sustained mounting casualties for little progress, there seemed no gleam of promise for the Entente powers.
Since back in July it had become clear that the British offensive was not going to achieve a swift advance into German-held territory, and that the Germans were abandoning their campaign at Verdun. The proclaimed reason for maintaining the Somme offensive had therefore changed. For the British, success was simply defined as pinning the Germans to the west. So the Russians were enabled to continue their advance, and the Romanians were attracted into joining the fray.
In September and October, these justifications dramatically unravelled. Correspondingly, the validity of continuing the Somme operation came ever more steadily into question.
II
Early in September, Asquith spent three days on the Somme, including a visit to Fricourt. Reporting to the War Committee on his return, he endeavoured to provide a hopeful picture.1 Haig and Joffre, he reported, were ‘on very good terms’. At Fricourt he had found the general, officers, and men ‘all in the highest spirits’. The 7 Division, preparing to attack Ginchy, were ‘full of confidence’, and even though their assault did not prove ‘entirely successful’, an action two days later by the Irish had rendered it a ‘successful operation’.
Yet the overall account presented by Asquith was largely negative. ‘The advance,’ he admitted, ‘was a question of push, push, push and must necessarily be slow work.’ While Robertson was assuring the War Committee that the Germans, although fighting as well as ever up to a certain point, gave up more easily than formerly, Asquith provided no evidence that the enemy was approaching disintegration. He had, he said, seen a large number of German prisoners, ‘and they were fine men and looked well fed’. He related that he had asked Allenby, former commander of the cavalry and now in charge of the Third Army, about the chances of employing Britain's sole weapon of exploitation. Allenby was not hopeful. He held that ‘It was no use sending Cavalry through a small opening ... it would be a great mistake to send Cavalry forward unless they can take a whole length of front.’
When Curzon asked of the Prime Minister whether it was expected to push through the enemy line by Christmas, Asquith ‘did not think so’. This caused Grey, the Foreign Minister, to observe that ‘the situation was not much affected [that is, improved] if the Germans were not pushed back’. Asquith countered with the familiar, but increasingly threadbare, claim ‘that we kept the Germans occupied, that many were being killed, and there were numerous prisoners’.
Grey's response to this indicated the mounting uncertainty which the Somme campaign was generating: ‘we must keep going, but he wanted to know what it leads to.’ He went on to offer the speculation that ‘surely the rest of the German line must be affected by this pushing back’. Robertson's response was less than reassuring:
There was nothing else to be done.
Curzon, inquiring about the nation's ability to fill the gaps caused by the ongoing burden of casualties, received no greater comfort. Robertson told him that recruitment was the reverse of reassuring. The British army, he said, would by next March be short by 400,000 men, and he wanted to know how they were to be obtained. (His eyes, plainly, were directed towards the 2.5 million men employed in essential industries or otherwise exempted.) Robertson also made it clear that they could not look to the French to make up the deficiencies of manpower. He quoted Joffre as saying that the French army ‘could not help feeling the strain o
f reduction’, and might soon be asking the British to take over part of the French section of the Western Front.
As far as the Somme campaign was concerned, only one glimmer of hope presented itself at this 12 September meeting. The British were preparing to throw an entirely new weapon into the fray: what hitherto had been called ‘the caterpillar machine-gun destroyer’, but now was becoming known as ‘the tank’. Yet on the eve of its first employment (on 15 September) the new weapon was as much a source of bewilderment as of hope. Asquith acknowledged that the tanks were only an experiment, and anticipated that they would prove decidedly vulnerable: ‘They could be knocked out with ease by an artillery barrage.’ There was also a problem with numbers. When, the previous December, Haig had taken over as British commander on the Western Front, he had – sight unseen – been highly enthusiastic about the new weapon, and had promptly ordered 1,000. But, according to Asquith, by the second week in September just 62 of these machines were available.
The view was general in the War Committee that the successful employment of tanks depended on surprise. This meant that they must make a great impact on first employment. A problem resulted. Should tanks be thrown into battle straight away, when only a few score were available, or should they be put on hold until the day – plainly well distant – when they could be employed in large numbers? The Prime Minister implied that this was still an open question, telling his colleagues that Haig had not yet decided how and when to use them. Given that Haig was going to launch them just three days later, this is hard to credit.
In the event the War Committee – despite its concern that the tank might cease to be of value once its existence had been exposed – dodged the issue. Grey held that the timing of their first use must be left to the man on the spot. Asquith judged that ‘the question could be safely left to Sir Douglas Haig’. No one, apparently, dissented.
As it happened, only a small number of tanks were to hand when they made their début on 15 September. Robertson told the War Committee at its next meeting that 48 tanks had been deployed, of which 30 had got beyond the start line, 24 had done good work, and four had received direct hits. Their appearance, it was remarked, had attracted great attention in the press and among the public. Robertson, asked by Grey whether the tanks had achieved as much ‘as the newspapers said’, insisted that they had been ‘a big success’.2 The fact that they had been used only in small quantity, and were no longer a secret, passed without comment. But it is noteworthy how rarely, thereafter, the War Committee returned to the subject of the tank's part in the Somme battle. Indeed by the beginning of October the committee was wondering whether it was worth-while to continue producing tanks, since the enemy had probably already devised means of dealing with them.
So, the tank's ‘big success’ on 15 September was plainly relative, and had not transformed the conflict on the Western Front. The great offensive must continue to be a matter of ‘push, push, push’.
III
Over the same meeting that pondered the situation on the Somme and worried over the possible uses of the tank, other matters cast their shadow. These lay far from the fields of France, but related to the Somme campaign by calling in question its much-touted justification: that, however meagre its accomplishments, it was serving a large purpose by robbing the German command of strategic initiative.
Robertson on 12 September referred to mounting evidence that, over time, the Germans had withdrawn 11 divisions from the Somme front, some of which had been traced to the east. This, he said, bore out the view that he had recently expressed, that Hindenburg's preference lay in actions on the Eastern rather than the Western Front. What he did not go on to remark, and what nobody chose to draw to his attention, was that this statement demolished his many assurances that, on account of the Somme, the Germans no longer possessed the capacity to act on their preferences.3
Robertson read from a recent memo of his, with which Joffre concurred, ‘that the German High Command may be tempted to undertake offensive action against certain points on the Eastern Front’. The reaction of the British and French high commands was predictable. They proposed to thwart Hindenburg's plans ‘by a continued offensive’ in the west, with the French and British intensifying their effort while they retained the advantage of fine weather. (Robertson's next observation was to quote Joffre's earlier comment that the French army was a declining asset. So it was clear which of the Western Allies would have to do the intensifying.)
Britain's civilian leaders did not dissent from this judgement. The War committee resolved that it agreed ‘with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff that the proper course to be followed in the present situation is to continue the offensive on the Western Front with all energy and with the full powers at the disposal of the French and ourselves’. In other words, where hitherto the rationale of the Somme offensive had been that it prevented the Germans from attacking on the Eastern Front, now it was justified because the Germans were about to do just that.
In another respect the overall situation, notwithstanding the unrelenting Allied offensive in the West, was changing. As noted previously, the early success of Russian forces against Austria-Hungary had at last persuaded Romania to come in on the side of the Entente powers. This event had brought enormous cheer to the Allies and dismay to the rulers of Germany. Both reactions, it rapidly became evident, were premature.
In no time at all, Romania's entry into the war began transforming itself into an Allied calamity. On 12 September Robertson spoke bluntly to the War Committee about the ineptitude of the Romanian command. It had spread its forces along the frontier in the worst possible way. ‘The dispositions exhibited an extraordinary amateurishness.’ At the same time, Robertson said, the Romanian government was proving resentful. Their Prime Minister was ‘rather upset, and implied the Allies had not kept faith’. In Romania's view, the Allies had done nothing to aid them, and had allowed the Germans to transfer nine divisions from the Somme to the Balkans.
Robertson challenged these complaints. He asserted that the nine divisions had gone to the Russian front, not the Romanian. And he insisted that the French and British had made serious endeavours to activate their forces at Salonika, so tying the Bulgarians to their southern front and restricting their power to concentrate against Romania.
Yet it could not be concealed that neither the Anglo-French exertions on the Somme nor their activation of the Salonika front was proving of much help to the Romanians. Curzon referred to the numerical dominance of the Allies at Salonika and inquired whether more could not be done. Robertson had to explain that some elements in the Salonika forces were performing ill, and that Sarrail's leadership of the Allied campaign there, having for some time been under a cloud, was proving decidedly faulty. The most that Robertson could hope for from action in Salonika was that it might keep the Bulgarians in place. ‘He had always said[,] and said again, that our troops could not get through.’ For the Romanians, this was hardly enough.
IV
The implicit, if hitherto rarely expressed, conflict within the British political command concerning the orientation of strategy, West or East, came to a head in early October. But it had been establishing itself for at least a month.
Up to the end of August, Robertson believed (as he assured Haig) that in matters of strategy the Somme operation retained general support in the War Committee. But on 7 September his tone changed as he discerned that elements in the committee were beginning to contemplate the diversion of military resources to another area. Robertson told Haig:
I find Lloyd George has got the Servian fit again [i.e. was dismayed at the way Britain was failing to aid its allies in the Balkans, just as – in Lloyd George's view – Britain had done regarding Serbia in 1915] and maintains we have been wrong all along & the French have been right, as shown by Rumania's coming in. He thinks Hindenburg will now go for Rumania with more troops.4
For a few weeks more, the War Committee went along with Robertson's view that the best
way to assist Romania was for Haig to hammer away on the Somme. But by early October, with the peril to Romania now acute (Robertson admitted to the War Committee that the enemy were within 80 miles of Bucharest), and with Haig's endeavours apparently having no effect on German activity in the Balkans, another view was making itself heard. Lloyd George's ‘Servian fit’ was taking hold.
The matter expressed itself at a War Committee meeting on 9 October. Robertson, in an attempt to head off dangerous tendencies, had elicited from Haig an astonishing statement (which enjoyed Robertson's ‘entire agreement’):
The C-in-C urged most strongly that he should be empowered to continue the offensive on the Western Front without intermission. Sir Douglas Haig had stated that he could not too strongly urge that the utmost efforts of the Empire be devoted to enabling him to continue the offensive. There were fair grounds for hope that very far-reaching success, affording full compensation for all that had been done to attain it, might be gained in the near future by a vigorous maintenance of our offensive in that theatre.5
Any relaxation of his army's efforts on the Somme would enable the enemy both to recover himself and to strengthen his defences, with the result that much of the great advantage already gained would be lost.
Robertson immediately turned the discussion in the direction of the Balkans and the imperilled state of Romania. But he did so only in the context of three premises. First, Romania had brought its problems upon itself by the ineptitude of its military command. Second, the only Allied power in a position to help Romania – and, if so inclined, well placed to help it – was Russia. Third, Britain must take no action in the Balkans (such as sending additional British divisions to Salonika) which would diminish the primacy, and the great promise, of the Somme campaign.6