The Somme: over to you

It won’t, I think, surprise followers to hear that I know next to nothing about the Battle of the Somme compared with Ypres 1 and Gallipoli, which George Calderon fought at and which we covered from day to day in autumn 2014 and summer 2015.

I am grateful, therefore, to Harvey Pitcher for pointing out in his Comment that at the Somme the orders were to walk towards the enemy. I did not know that. It has been referred to several times in the media since. I gather that the rationale was that each man was carrying 70 lbs of equipment (why so much?) and would have been exhausted if he had had to run the whole distance. But, of course, it gave the enemy plenty of time to surface from their dugouts, man their machine-guns, and mow the British soldiers down ‘like corn’, as eye witnesses put it. I don’t know, however, whether the sound of the whistles would have carried three hundred yards and was therefore as stupid as it appears. I asked a military man about this with regard to the Third Battle of Krithia, where the lines were about 200 yards apart, and he confessed it had never occurred to him. I agree, though, that it is tempting to regard the use of whistles as typical Edwardian military gung-hoism or ‘casual arrogance’ as Peter Hart called it (see my post of 1 July).

Where the walking pace is concerned, it could be objected that the commander of the Fourth Army, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, did not know that the German front line had not been destroyed, and in particular that its twenty-foot-deep dugouts were intact; that for us to criticise him and Haig, therefore, is simply wisdom of hindsight.

But that was my point in my post on 1 July: Rawlinson assumed the German barbed wire and trenches had been destroyed, he did not know, and he went ahead with the Battle. What kind of risk assessment is that? In fact, as I understand it, Rawlinson ignored the doubts expressed to him by infantry officers about the damage caused by the barrage (Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, 1971), and the opinion of his intelligence officers, formed from interrogating deserters, that the German machine-gun placements were still in one piece (Hugh Sebag Montefiore, Somme: Into the Breach, 2016). It is the fact that he went ahead and there was no plan B when it became clear he was disastrously wrong, that I regard as so Edwardian.

I am not, however, by any stretch of the imagination a military historian. I have asked experts at the Imperial War Museum to comment, but (understandably) they are too busy. (See http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-happened-during-the-battle-of-the-somme .) If there are any military historians out there who can throw their expert light on our perceptions of the Battle of the Somme, please do Comment, or you would be very welcome to present a guest post.

The most difficult, and awful, thing to get one’s head round, I find, is that although the Battle of the Somme was perceived at the time as a defeat, or at least deadlock, as attrition it does seem to have marked the beginning of the end for the German war effort.

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One Response to The Somme: over to you

  1. Damian Grant says:

    Patrick: considerably less a war historian than your modest self, I nevertheless hazard a ‘literary’ comment on the alleged instruction, once over the top, to ‘walk’ towards the enemy. My hazy impression is that I have never seen such a practice described, in prose or poetry. What one remembers, from writers who have tried to convey the immediacy of actual conflict, is the two-time effect of either rapidity or paralysis; never, that I can think of, the deliberation of walking. I cite just one example, from Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive:’

    So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
    Over an open stretch of herb and heather
    Exposed…

    Isn’t this the image we always have? And Owen would surely have known; he’d been there and done it. Of course, this is only an impression; and ‘only’ from literary sources. It would indeed be interesting to have some counter-evidence; and as you say, only the military historian would have the authoritative references.

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