Nov 30 2009
Battle of the Somme
The Battle of the Somme was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the First World War. It lasted from 1st July to 18th November 1916 and resulted in a massive loss of life with more than 1.5 million casualties on all sides. Little territory was gained by either side and it has gone down in British history as one of the battles that was the turning point in army tactics. Below is an account of the struggle to capture Thiepval.
In Northern France, on 1st June 1916 the 2nd Salford Pals battalion were getting ready for the ‘Big Push’ after enjoying a few days relaxation five miles behind the front line. Like most of the British soldiers during 1916 they were volunteers with none of them being either professional soldiers or conscripts. Over one million men had responded to Field Marshal Lord Kitchener’s call for a new army as a wave of patriotic fervour swept the country. The Pals battalions of World War 1 were specially constituted units of the British Army. They comprised men who had all enlisted together in local recruiting drives, with the promise that they would be able to serve alongside their friends, neighbours and work colleagues (‘pals’) rather than being allocated to regular Army regiments. The Salford Pals (16th Lancashire Fusiliers), along with the Ulster Division, played an important part of what is known as ‘The Big Push’ of 1st July 1916. Captain Thomas Tweed was the Commander of B Company of the 2nd Salford Pals
The Big Push was the British Army’s response to the French plea for British help after two years of trench warfare along a 350-mile front had taken its toll. German and French troops were locked in a vicious battle of attrition at the fortress town of Verdun and the German aim was to bleed France white. By mid-1916 the French army was on the brink of defeat and France was desperate for her ally to come to their assistance to help divert the German troops through a joint Anglo-French attack in the north of France at the River Somme. So, in the early summer of 1916, more than 300,000 Allied troops assembled against just 100.000 Germans along a front that was only 25 miles long. It was the greatest employment of British forces in the war so far.
General Baron Franz Von Soden commanded one of the eight German divisions facing the British Army and was fully aware of the British build-up of troops. Outnumbered six to one, what Van Soden was relying on was the fact that, unlike Kitchener’s volunteer army, most of his men were veterans of trench warfare. Corporal Friedrich Hinkel was one of them. Like the Salford Pals, Hinkel and his men were not professional soldiers, but many of them had done two years of compulsory service before the war.
Soden and his men held the Thiepval Plateau which was a key strongpoint in the German defences. This high ground dominated the entire northern sector of the Somme front and included the ruins of the village of Thiepval and a stronghold called the Schwaben Redoubt. Soden’s troops had turned the place into a fortress. Yet, on the morning of the 24th June, the strength of German engineering was put to the test. For seven days and seven nights some 3,000 British and French guns fired more than 3 million shells into the German lines with the aim to obliterate the German defences entirely. By the 1st of July, the day of the attack, it seemed to have worked.
The Salford Pals would all go over the top 30 minutes after zero hour. The battle plan dictated that they would take Thiepval within one hour and 20 minutes. On their left, the Ulster Division was to capture the Schwaben stronghold to the north. It was all meant to go like clockwork. On 1st July 1916 at 7.30 a.m. all along the 25 miles of the Somme front, 90,000 British and French soldiers began to cross into no-man’s-land. Many British infantry units were ordered to advance at walking pace and nobody expected there would be much left of the Germans and their defences. However, the huge British bombardment of 24th June had failed and, within minutes of the attack, the Germans were out of their dug-outs and back in position.
Meanwhile, just 500 yards from the Salford Pals, Corporal Hinkel was facing the first waves of the Ulster Division. Three of Hinkel’s section had been struck down by shrapnel, but the rest had survived the British bombardment. However, Hinkel’s men were vastly outnumbered and could do little against the onrushing Ulstermen until, just in time, there came vital support from German reinforcements. Once the German machine guns started firing, the Ulstermen wavered and fled leaving a wall of dead comrades piling up behind them. Not one of the Ulster Division made it through to what was left of the German trench.
By now the 2nd Salford Pals had made some progress and moved into the front trench. At 8 am it was their turn to go over the top and through a storm of bullets the company advanced, ignoring the bullets that whistled around them and running for cover from shell hole to shell hole. Many of them dropped, riddled with bullets, never to rise again. But the cry was always ‘On!’ One hour into the battle, the picture was the same on much of the Somme front –infantrymen mown down by machine guns. Those among the wounded who made it back to their trenches were the lucky ones.
There were, however, some Allied successes that day. In the south, the more experienced French army made rapid gains, taking thousands of prisoners during their advance. And in some places, the British had captured their objectives. The German Corporal Hinkel’s section had so far held their own but, as Hinkel discovered, the battle had only just started. 600 yards from Hinkel’s trench, the Ulster Division on the left of the Salford Pals had broken into the stronghold of the Schwaben Redoubt and a British victory at Thiepval now seemed a real possibility.
Success now depended upon the core commander in charge of that section of the Somme front, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Morland. Morland was positioned three miles from the battlefield and, from his tree-top observation post, he was trying to follow events and progress of the battle. The commander of Morland’s 12,000-strong reserves, Major General Edward Perceval, went to see Morland in person. Perceval suggested exploiting the success of the Salford Pals at the Schwaben Redoubt and to employ the entire reserve division into battle to support the Ulstermen in their attempt to capture the Thiepval Plateau. He doubted that a frontal assault on the village was possible because of the position of German machine guns to the south but, with the success of the Schwaben Redoubt to the north of Thiepval, the village could be taken from the north. However, Lieutenant General Morland thought it was too early to deviate from the original battle plan and did not agree to Perceval’s suggestion.
Morland’s failure to change the battle plan was just one of the many missed chances that day. By the time Perceval saw Morland, two-thirds of Captain Tweed’s 120 men were already dead or wounded and for the survivors the situation was desperate. A sheltering bank in no-man’s land became a haven of refuge and what was left of the Company stayed there for two hours, unable to move. Tweed realised that he had to pull his men out, yet he dared not take the decision himself. Three hours earlier Lieutenant General Morland had ordered a second frontal assault on Thiepval and, shortly after 2.30pm, his Chief of Staff informed him of the disastrous result. On hearing that the second attack had also failed, Morland had two options available to him: He could send in his reserves to secure the British hold on the Redoubt, and encircle Thiepval from the north (as suggested by Perceval) or, he could stick to the original battle plan and attempt yet another frontal attack. He chose the latter. Another attack on Thiepval was planned at 4pm by the 146 Brigade of the reserve division. This unwillingness to alter the battle plan was typical of many British commanders that day and such unimaginative thinking would condemn thousands of soldiers to death.
Soden’s commanders, on the other hand, were trained to adapt battle plans to the situation on the ground. An example of this is the German counter-attack to reclaim the Schwaben Redoubt. At 4pm, only one of the three groups designated to retake the Schwaben stronghold was in place, yet, the German battalion commander in the field had decided to act on his own initiative. The counter-attack started with only one group. For Hinkel and his men this counter-attack came just in time because it forced the Ulstermen to withdraw from the Schwaben Redoubt and by 10.30 that night the stronghold of the Schwaben Redoubt was back in German hands.
There were many reasons for the British failure on the Somme that day of 1st July 1916 and the battle for Thiepval illustrated most of them. The most important reasons for failure have to include an excessive faith in the power of artillery, poor intelligence and the inflexibility of commanders who stuck to their battle plan regardless of events. 19,240 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the Somme and 37,000 were wounded. In contrast, the French casualties numbered 2,500. 1st July 1916 was the bloodiest day in British military history and, all over Britain, communities like Salford were devastated by the tragedy. And that is where the story of the Battle of the Somme traditionally ends. The British Army defeated and the Germans victorious. For the British at home the whole battle seemed a pointless tragedy and the Somme became a byword for the idiocy of war. But it didn’t end there. The 1st July was just the beginning of a battle that lasted for more than four months and in that time the British would learn from that terrible day and ultimately turn those lessons into victory.
As July 1916 progressed, allied forces made steady gains along the Somme front south of Thiepval and by the end of the month, 80,000 Germans were captured, wounded or dead. More than anything, the failures of that first day triggered a period of radical change in the British Army. Inflexible commanders like Morland were taken out of the front line and power was given for commanders on the spot to make many of the key decisions.
Brigadier General Herbert Shoubridge was one such commander who successfully made his own battle decisions based on the events that he and his brigade were experiencing. Shoubridge’s brigade was charged with the next assault on Thiepval in September and leading the attack would be his star battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Maxwell VC.
Maxwell was a veteran of the Boer War and a hero to his men with a reputation for leading from the front. Maxwell’s battalion, the 12th Middlesex, was to take on Thiepval on the 26th September and, with the 11th Royal Fusiliers, their task was to assault some of the most heavily defended German positions such as the ruins of the Thiepval Chateau. On 26th September 1916 at 12.35pm the attack began. Just as on the 1st July it began with an artillery bombardment but this time there was a difference. Maxwell’s men were relying on a new, sophisticated artillery tactic known as ‘the creeping barrage’. This was one of the many innovations that developed during the battle of the Somme and entailed an artillery barrage which started in no-man’s land and then crept gradually over the German trenches, according to a set timetable. The British infantry soldiers followed as closely as possible the curtain of shell fire that the barrage created. This way, they could advance with constant artillery cover making it far harder for the Germans to shoot at them. The creeping barrage tactic seemed to work.
The Middlesex successfully over-ran the first German trenches with relative ease. However, once Maxwell’s men had cleared the German forward trenches, they had to then move over open ground in order to reach the Thiepval Chateau. It was then that things began to go wrong. The men were unable to keep up with the artillery timetable and, as the barrage moved on the distance between them and the infantry soldiers became greater. As the barrage advanced the German defenders of the Thiepval Chateau had time to re-man their positions before the infantry arrived. The Germans had captured Thiepval and its chateau in 1914 and their commanding officer had pledged to fight to the last man in order to maintain it. For the British troops things were beginning to look very similar to the slaughter of 1st July. But then a revolutionary new weapon made its appearance on the battlefield. This was – the armoured tank. Tanks had arrived in France just a few weeks earlier and it was on the Somme that they were used for the first time in history. Although tanks would eventually become a key weapon in breaking the deadlock of trench warfare when first employed, in September 1916, the Army had yet to figure out how best to use them. Nobody seemed to realise that for the best results the tanks should go ahead of the troops and not follow them. Also they broke down. Yet even one tank could make a huge difference.
Whilst the German Infantry Regiment 180 were battling to hold on to Thiepval Chateau, General Von Soden was dealing with a distraction that he could have done without. The Adjutant General to his Imperial Majesty the Kaiser - General Hans Von Plessen who was the German ruler’s official representative had arrived for an update on the battle. It was during this visit that Soden and Von Plessen learnt that the British forces had penetrated the Thiepval defences. Furthermore, all underground telephone cables had been destroyed and without accurate information Soden was helpless. In contrast, this time British generals were fully informed about the course of the fighting with reports that were coming through from artillery observers and also aeroplanes. Air observation had greatly improved since 1st July and this enabled headquarters to order a re-bombardment of the positions which were still in German hands. But more than anything else, the senior British command left most decisions to the men on the ground. A tactic that had been completely ignored a short time ago on 1st July.
Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell had followed his troops onto the battlefield and set up a command post at the Thiepval Chateau. The Kaiser’s representative, General Von Plessen had stayed at Soden’s headquarters hoping for news of the battle and it wasn’t until six hours later, when reconnaissance parties finally got through to Thiepval, that the situation became clear for them. It was then that the German commanders realised that a counter-attack would be impossible to succeed. Thiepval was lost to them and the Germany strategy to bleed France white had failed. .
The loss of Thiepval was a major blow to the Germans on the Somme. It would eventually allow the British army to achieve all their objectives of 1st July. Objectives that had cost so many lives. But the true importance of the battle should not be measured by the territory gained. For the French at Verdun, the Somme offensive provided the relief that they so desperately needed and by October they were able to launch a large-scale counterattack pushing the Germans back by December 1916. But perhaps the most important outcome of the Battle of the Somme was the lessons learnt by the British army. After the disaster of the 1st July, the British army developed new tactics which combined infantry, artillery, air power and tanks. These radical new tactics would ultimately help the allies to win the war.
432,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded in the Battle of the Somme. The French lost nearly 200,000 men and the Germans an estimated half a million. Thiepval is now the site of the largest British war memorial in the world and it commemorates more than 70,000 soldiers who have no known grave. The Salford Pals were at the very epicentre of the Battle and the men were decimated. Like all the towns, villages, neighbourhoods and communities back in Britain, Salford suffered disproportionate losses and was shattered by the experience.
This article is dedicated to the 90 years since the Armistice of 11 of November 1918
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