An interesting quote from a bloke on AH.com:
“This from
Corrigan, Gordon. Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) . Orion. Kindle Edition.
Critics of the Somme make much of what they see as insistence on parade-ground precision, with men being ordered to walk and keep in line. This had nothing to do with ceremonial parades, but was a perfectly sensible rule to ensure that control was not lost, that men were not shot by their own side, and that they all arrived on the objective together and in a fit state to engage the enemy. Scorn is also poured on the need for the attacking infantry to carry packs weighing sixty pounds. This is one of the enduring myths of the First World War, and derives from an imperfect reading of Field Service Regulations. In fact, it was everything that the man carried and wore that weighed sixty pounds: the uniform he stood up in, the boots on his feet, his weapon and its ammunition. In the attack large packs were left behind, and the small pack contained only the essentials for the operation. That said, each man still had to carry his entrenching tool, extra rations, two gas helmets, wire-cutters, 220 rounds of ammunition, two grenades and two sandbags, while ten picks and fifty shovels were taken by each leading company. This was no light burden, and the follow-up troops, coming immediately after those who carried out the actual assault, carried a great deal more. It is one thing to capture ground, quite another to hold it. Once into a German position the objective had to be consolidated and held against the inevitable counter-attack. This meant that the existing defence works had to be turned round to face the other way, wire obstacles had to be constructed and communications had to be established. Ammunition, grenades and digging implements had to be there, to say nothing of signals cable, water and food, and there was no other way of making all this immediately available to the infantry than by having them carry it with them.
The British had been reluctant to accept an offensive on the Somme, rather than in Flanders, and would have been even more reluctant if they had known that events would force them to shoulder the greater share of the burden. For sound strategic reasons, however, there had to be an Allied offensive somewhere on the Western Front in 1916; and once the Germans began throwing their armies at Verdun, the Somme had to be persisted with at least until they gave up.
Planning was exact and the staff work preparatory to 1 July was superb. The troops were brought into position, the bombardment went as planned, even if the results were not as hoped, and it is difficult to see what else could have been done to minimise casualties. The reason that 1 July 1916 saw more British deaths than any other day in British military history is a combination of there never before or since having been a British offensive of such ferocity, against the main enemy in the main theatre of war, and the lack of experience of the troops and their leaders at battalion level. While to the British 1 July 1916 is the first day of the Somme, it was also the 121st day of the Battle of Verdun, and by then the French had already taken half a million casualties. Playing in the major league has its price: the British would learn from 1 July, and it was, after all, only the first day.
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. The 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:
Number of weeks British Divisions Total dead Dead per division of weeks engaged per week
The Somme 20 ½ weeks 53 95,000 89
Normandy 11 ½ weeks 19 22,000 100
Normandy is not engraved on the British national consciousness as a slaughter. Partly this is because in Normandy there was not much doubt that the British were winning, but more importantly we did not recruit our infantry battalions from small geographical areas. The 6th Battalion the Green Howards, a Territorial battalion supposedly raised from the Middlesbrough area, lost thirty-one men killed and took 250 casualties overall in one day, at Cristot on 11 June 1944. In the First War they would all have come from the same town or village, and their relatives would all have known one another. It would have been a significant loss, and the entire toll would have been engraved on one war memorial and remembered down the generations. As it was, two of the dead were American-born, two were from Liverpool, two from Sheffield, two from Birmingham, two from Derby and two from Middlesbrough. The homes of the other nineteen ranged from Edinburgh to Glamorgan, no two coming from the same place. The bill went unnoticed except by those most closely involved.
The Somme is often thought of as five and a half months of staggering about in mud and attacking in blinding rain. In fact, for the whole months of July and August the temperature never dropped below a comfortable 60° Fahrenheit. In September it dropped below 60º on three days, and for roughly half of October the temperature fluctuated between 50º and 58º, with four days being described as ‘very cold’. In November it stayed between 54º and 57º until the last four days of the battle, when it fell to 37º on 17 November. In July 1.3 inches of rain were recorded over four days, in August two inches over twelve days and in September 2.8 inches over nine days; in October there were two inches of rain in sixteen days, and just under one inch over ten days before 18 November, the last day of the offensive. On that day also the first snow of the winter fell. On two days (16 October and 9 November) frost two days of October and the first week of November, when 1.3 inches of rain fell in eight days. There is no doubt that towards the close of the battle the weather did have an effect on operations, not so much because the infantry could not fight in the mud as because movement of vehicles and artillery was hampered. On 10 November it was recorded that no movement at all was possible owing to the state of the ground. That said, the picture of a constant sea of mud is clearly false.
Why did Haig not stop the battle when he saw that the casualties were so great? This oft-posed question assumes firstly that the casualty list was somehow disproportionate, and secondly that Haig could have stopped the battle. Of all the British soldiers involved in the Somme offensive, seventy-four per cent emerged at the end of it without a scratch. Given that one of the primary aims was to relieve the pressure on Verdun and thus prevent the Germans winning the war, a twenty-six per cent toll of killed, wounded and taken prisoner is not excessive, although I accept that to be subjective opinion. Haig could not have stopped the battle because the British were not alone. This was a coalition war and this was an Allied offensive. Given their involvement at Verdun, which absorbed seventy-three French divisions, one could not have blamed the French had they declined to take part at all. As it was, their part in the Somme, while considerably smaller to begin with, was eventually not much less significant than that of the British – forty-four divisions compared to fifty-three – and they had around 90,000 men killed there. There were 160,000 French deaths at Verdun, and the total for the year of 1916 came to 270,000 dead French soldiers. The British Empire lost 115,389 dead in 1916: 109,411 on the Western Front, 3,871 in Mesopotamia, 579 in East Africa, 857 in Salonika, 471 in Palestine, 180 in Gallipoli and twenty in minor theatres elsewhere. The British had come through 1916 much less scathed than their principal ally or main enemy.
Haig did not want to attack on the Somme at all, but since the politics of a coalition war meant that he had to, the preparation and planning were as good as they could be. That more was not achieved was due to an underestimation of the strength of German defences, a shortage of artillery ammunition and, more than anything else, the lack of experience of the New Armies. Once the Germans had attacked towards Verdun, waiting another year before launching a major offensive was simply not an option for the British. The Somme had to happen, and it had to continue until German reserves were used up, and until the Germans could not win the war in 1916. The tactics were simple because it was all that the new Armies, in their first blooding, were capable of at the time. Had Haig been left to follow his own counsel and attack out of Flanders, or anywhere else for that matter, he could not have lowered the ante for putting a civilian army into the field, in its first battle, against an enemy that had had universal male conscription since 1870, had prepared for European war for twenty years and had spent eighteen months preparing his positions for defence. Even so, the damage inflicted on the Germans by these New Armies was far more than might have been expected. Ludendorff, effectively Chief of Staff of the German army, admitted that his troops had suffered very heavy losses, first at Verdun and then on the Somme, and that morale was at a low ebb. Before the end of the year both he and Hindenburg would be demanding the use of child labour in Germany to release men for the front. It was far from being a needless slaughter.“
