The Somme

  What of the German casualties? There is no need to enter into the controversies surrounding the German casualty figures as discussed in the British Official History. M. J. Williams and others have effectively demolished the arguments put forward by Edmonds in his desperate attempt to establish some equivalence between the British and the German figures. The most thorough analysis of the German figures for the Somme campaign appears in Winston Churchill's The World Crisis. Churchill developed an early interest in this matter probably as a result of the War Committee's cursory rejection of his memorandum on the subject in August 1916. His figures for German casualties were supplied to him by the Reichsarchiv in Germany in the 1920s and there is no reason to doubt their accuracy. For the period July to October 1916 he states that approximately 200,000 casualties were inflicted on the Germans by the British at the Somme.1 To this figure should be added those German casualties suffered during the preliminary bombardment and those suffered in November. Neither figure is known with any accuracy but another source gives the total German casualty figures for the battle for June to December as 237,000 and this figure is not at all at odds with Churchill's total for the shorter period.2 Deducting a figure of some 7,000 for the rather sporadic fighting in December would give a total of 230,000 suffered by the Germans against the British.

  This is a truly startling figure, compared with the 432,000 British. What it reveals is that every casualty inflicted on the Germans by the British cost them almost two casualties of their own. If these statistics are taken as a measure there is no doubt which side emerged as the winner. Haig was wearing out his own armies at a much higher rate than he was wearing down his opponents’.

  Given that it was the British who mounted all the major attacks at the Somme, the disparity in casualties is not perhaps surprising. But since it was the British who had superiority in the air and in artillery, the most lethal weapon on the Western Front, perhaps it is.

  Air superiority conferred significant advantages. Aircraft could be left largely unmolested to direct artillery fire and to take photographs of German defensive positions. However, at the Somme these advantages were negated by a number of factors. The first and most serious was the weather. There was so much cloud and rain even at the height of summer in July and August that for many days, as noted by General Horne, aircraft could not be deployed. In addition, artillery accuracy had not reached such a high state of development at the Somme that aerial observation could always be used to good effect. Adjustment to the range of a gun was a slow matter which substantially reduced the number of shells that could be fired during a day. And the interpretation of aerial photographs had not reached in 1916 the level of precision obtained later in the war. Overall then, aerial superiority was not the asset it would become in 1918.

  What of artillery superiority? Haig's gunners fired around 19 million shells at the Germans between the opening of the preliminary bombardment and the end of the battle. This amounted to deluging the enemy with just less than 150,000 shells each day. We have no way of knowing what the Germans fired in retaliation, but the repeated statements made about the constancy and ferocity of British shelling which appear in their regimental accounts leave no doubt that it was less than they were receiving.

  Several factors lessened the effect of this artillery predominance. The first was that because the British were always on the attack their gunners were required to eliminate small or distant targets – trench lines, machine-gun posts, batteries – that were difficult to hit. On the defensive, the enemy had the relatively simpler task of firing their shells into the general area where the British were forming up or moving into no man's land. In these circumstances a lesser number of shells fired by the defenders might find more targets than a greater number fired by the attackers.

  Then there was the fact that the British were continually fighting themselves into positions where the Germans could take maximum toll with their lesser resources. The northern flank on 1 July, the right angle around Delville Wood in July and August, and the Pozières–Mouquet Farm salient in the same period are three of the more extreme examples where the British exposed their troops to intense enemy artillery retaliation.

  Added to this was the policy of small, narrow-front attacks which enabled the Germans to concentrate what guns they had against the relatively small number of British troops which might be advancing on any given occasion. Given all these factors and the primitive state of artillery accuracy, the British cast away much of the advantage artillery superiority might have given them.

  II

  What can be said about the performance of the British army? Let us start our investigation by considering the infantry.

  Overall, the soldiers of Haig's armies have not emerged well from accounts of the battle. The troops, especially of the New Armies, have been categorised as green, under-trained, and lacking in initiative. This view appears to have three distinct origins. The first is the British command (especially Haig, Rawlinson, and Gough) who often commented on the poor material with which they had to work. The second is the conventional view of the first day of battle when it is said that the troops could carry out no more complicated manoeuvres than advancing shoulder to shoulder at a slow walk. The third origin consists of the various German accounts which categorise the Somme as a Materialschlacht, a battle of resources in which the more lavishly munitioned but poorly trained British soldiers pushed back a more skilful enemy.

  All these criticisms can be largely discounted. The comments of Haig and his army commanders were usually self-serving, a mere cover for inadequate planning or for the impossible objectives set for the infantry. As for the image of the unthinking Tommy, plodding to his doom on 1 July, we have demonstrated that it is entirely fallacious. The battalion commanders certainly thought the troops under their command capable of quite sophisticated manoeuvres and planned accordingly. These plans came to naught not because of any inadequacy of the men but because of the inadequacy of the fire support given them and without which they were in no position to practise their skills. The German criticisms are curious and revealing. The post-war writers of these accounts failed to grasp that the consequence of the failure of the Schlieffen Plan meant that the war was bound to develop into a battle of resources. That they still thought otherwise in the 1920s and 1930s – that inferiority in resources could be compensated by skilled infantry – was to play its role in the road to war in 1939.

  In fact, the British infantry when they were adequately supported by fire-power – the factor that was the determinant of victory on the Western Front – could perform as well as their enemy. This is demonstrated by the actions of XIII Corps on 1 July, by the Fourth Army in the opening stages of the 14 July operation, by the successful attack on 25 September, and by the fighting around the redoubts by the Reserve Army in September and October. Whatever failings the Somme demonstrated in the British army, it is hard to argue that the performance of the combat infantry was one of them.

  What of the intermediate levels of command? In most cases we know very little about the brigadiers and divisional generals on the British side. Higginson of 53 Brigade stands out as a commander who would never hesitate to point out the impossible nature of what his men were often asked to do and the inadequate planning which usually accompanied such orders. Maxse is the best known of the divisional commanders and some of his operations (1 July in the south, the capture of Thiepval in September) bear the hallmarks of well-thought-out affairs. Yet when his division was thrown into the chaotic situation around Delville Wood in mid-July it could perform no better than any other division. A similar point could be made about Tudor (9 Division), who developed some innovatory fire support tactics which aided the advance of his division on 14 July, but who found himself powerless in the shambles that resulted. Similarly Walker (1 Australian Division) who led his men with skill in the capture of Pozières laboured without success against the disastrous Mouquet Farm operations which were subsequently forced on him.

  The
point to be made about all of these examples is that it was often not the quality of the brigade or divisional command that led to success but the position in which their troops were placed by decisions made elsewhere. Thus if fire support was adequate a well-trained division could exercise its skill and capture its objectives. If such support was absent a Maxse, Tudor, or Walker could make no difference whatever.

  The corps commanders could have slightly more influence on a battle. This could be in a negative sense, as with Pulteney in his unimaginative plan for III Corps before 1 July or in his insistence that tanks could traverse High Wood on 15 September. Similarly, Hunter-Weston had a malign effect on VIII Corps in his artillery arrangements on 1 July and in his insistence on detonating the Hawthorn mine 10 minutes before zero hour. Horne is more of an enigma. He was not without insight, as his remarks in his letters to his wife reveal. However, he rarely seemed able to translate these insights into action. Moreover at times his obtuseness could be breathtaking – as in September when he revealed that he could not understand the purpose of a creeping barrage. Of the others, Congreve did well when the artillery provided him with the preconditions for success but floundered when it did not. Cavan was the only corps commander to resist (momentarily) a futile attack ordered from above, but under pressure he soon capitulated. In the end no corps commander was blessed with enough insight or courage to place those insights before the higher command and hence to influence decisively the course of the battle.

  Of the army commanders, Gough need not detain us. His grasp of the tactical situation facing his army seemed always limited, his dithering over the best way to capture Thiepval was disastrous for his troops and his ‘victory’ at Beaumont Hamel much overrated. His performance at the Somme should have seen him sink into a well-deserved obscurity. Perversely, in 1917, the opposite was to happen.

  Rawlinson is a more complicated figure. In 1915 he was one of the originators of the ‘bite and hold’ concept of battle and on several occasions at the Somme he tried to revert to this style of warfare. His original plans for 1 July and 15 September were certainly more realistic than those he was required by Haig to implement. But when challenged by the Commander-in-Chief, his grip on the concept seemed so uncertain, or his obedience to authority so ingrained, that he soon found himself attempting to carry out the more grandiose plans foisted on him by GHQ. Whatever the reason, it was Haig's conceptions which were implemented, usually with disastrous results. Certainly Rawlinson seems to have lacked fixity of purpose. Having declared one course of action sensible (well-thought-out, large-scale attacks) he often proceeded in a quite different course (hastily prepared, small-scale operations) to the great detriment of his army. The troops surely deserved better than this from one in such high authority.

  What of Haig? Any analysis of the military aspects of the Somme campaign has to conclude with an assessment of his performance. It was Haig who set the parameters for battle before 1 July and on any subsequent occasion when a major attack was in the offing. It was Haig who decided on what resources would be directed towards a particular operation, what objectives would be set and whether an attack would continue or be closed down.

  At his own estimation he achieved three great things at the Battle of the Somme. He relieved the pressure on the French at Verdun and thus saved their army to fight another day. He pinned the German army to the Western Front, thus relieving pressure on the Russians. And he commenced a well-thought-out process whereby the German army was to be worn out in ‘one continuous battle’ over the next two years.

  None of these claims stands up to close scrutiny. The Somme was planned by Haig without any relation to Verdun. His first plan for the battle indeed had as an integral component assisting the French armies to his immediate south by attacking down the Thiepval Ridge towards them; but this had nothing to do with Verdun. Moreover, when the French contribution to the Somme diminished as a result of Verdun, Haig reoriented his plan so that his armies would advance north-east (away from the French) and win the campaign on their own account. The Somme eventually directed German attention away from Verdun, but that was never Haig's intention.

  As for pinning the Germans to the Western Front, this was simply not true. Fifteen German divisions left for the east during the course of the battle and this number proved quite capable of overrunning Romania when that country rashly entered the war on the Allied side.

  The ‘one continuous battle’ argument is the merest sophistry. The Somme was never fought by Haig as the first step of a wearing-out campaign. On 1 July, 14 July, 15 September, and in early October he developed plans that were meant to win the campaign (if not the war) at a single stroke. Not until the very end of the battle was any mention made of the necessity for a campaign in 1917, let alone 1918. As we will see, it was the decisive battle, not attrition, that lay at the heart of Haig's conception of war.

  On routine matters of command he performed badly. He proved incapable of co-ordinating the actions of his two armies, which as a consequence hardly ever carried out a joint attack. Nor in other ways did Haig seek to impose his authority on the battlefield. In the shambles into which the campaign sank in the latter half of July and August Haig only belatedly sought to intervene and then failed to follow through to ensure that his instructions were being obeyed by his lower-order commanders. The battle thus drifted along, seemingly out of control of anyone on the British side.

  On the more important matters of the higher tactical and strategic conduct of the battle his performance was, except in one respect, even worse.

  In the matter of modern technology Haig was not the troglodyte of legend. He adopted weapons such as heavy artillery, the tank, and aircraft. However, he was unable to use these modern weapons to develop an appropriate strategy. He persisted in relying not on his more modern weaponry but on the cavalry. Throughout the campaign he regarded the cavalry as a battle-winning or even war-winning weapon of exploitation. This was to have particularly disastrous consequences for the first day of the Somme. To clear the field for a cavalry sweep Haig spread his already inadequate artillery fire across the entire German defensive system. As a result, most enemy machine-guns and batteries survived to wreak havoc on the British attack.

  On many subsequent occasions (14 July, 15 September, early October) the cavalry were massed and distant objectives, ranging from 50 to 100 miles, were set. Each of these strokes was designed to be a campaign or war-winning affair. The fact that 18 months of warfare had demonstrated that cavalry could not live on a modern battlefield was stubbornly resisted by Haig. His problem seems to have been that without a weapon of exploitation his whole conception of warfare, which was rooted somewhere in the nineteenthth century, would lie in ruins. In this he was the very opposite of an attritional general. He considered that wars were won by decisive battles and that battles could only be decisive if large amounts of ground were gained and that this could only be accomplished by the cavalry. None of his major battles was planned with attrition in mind. Indeed, only at one point in the campaign (early August) does he admit that he is in a ‘wearing-out’ phase, but says that it is just a temporary condition until he can mass his forces for another decisive effort. In acting thus, Haig was in denial about the reality of warfare on the Western Front. No conceivable method of fighting in that maze of trench defences, barbed wire, and massed artillery and machine-guns could have been cheap. As the French General Mangin said, ‘whatever you do, you lose a lot of men’. But by 1916, as every battle in 1915 had demonstrated, the only sure way of proceeding was to accumulate such weaponry and shells as could blast the enemy from one defensive line to another, along the way ensuring that the casualties of the attacking side were minimised and those on the defending side maximised. The aim of an ‘attritional’ general was not therefore to gain ground but to kill the enemy in such numbers that his powers of resistance would be gradually worn down. Haig did not have the deadliness, the fixity of purpose, or the type of mind that could make such precise calculati
ons of the munitions and guns required to achieve such results. He was in fact, and contrary to legend, much more of a romantic than was required on the Western Front. So far from having too little imagination, he had too much. He could envisage cavalry sweeps and decisive battles more in keeping with Napoleonic conceptions than with industrial war.

  III

  The final arbiter of the British fortunes at the Somme was the civilian War Committee. It is melancholy to report that this group of generally intelligent men carried out their tasks with no more understanding of the imperatives which faced them than did Haig.

  They started well enough. Their constitutional authority to determine British strategy was asserted at an early stage in the discussions about the nature of the 1916 campaign. If a group of civilians insisted that in the last analysis it would be they who decided the relatively trivial matter of how many horses the British army would have on the Western Front, what else might they not determine? As a group, the War Committee also insisted that any new offensive in the west in 1916 should not be launched prematurely, that it should be adequately munitioned and sensibly conducted. Indeed, they insisted on canvassing all other options to the Western Front before they agreed to an offensive in that area at all. Thus Balfour wanted the Eastern theatre to be thoroughly examined for possible offensive action, while others suggested Turkey, Russia, Romania, and Italy. In the end the impracticalities of major operations in all these theatres and the awkward fact that the greater part of the German army lay in France and Belgium led them to sanction an offensive in the west.

  Nevertheless, having agreed to the operation, the War Committee sought assurances from Kitchener and Lloyd George that the battle would be fought with due regard for manpower resources and would not be fought until a superiority of guns and munitions could be guaranteed. These assurances were duly given.