THE B A T T L E O F THE SOMME 1916–2016

THE
B A T T L E O F THE SOMME
1916–2016
www.rbl.org.uk/somme100

As day breaks through wind and rain we form a line
on rough terrain, to face a foe we’ll never know, we
will fall and die where poppies now grow. Remember
us the chosen ones, the lads the dads and someone’s
sons. Be not sad, just be glad, knowing we gave all
we had. As you walk on our fields of doom, places
where our bodies were strewn, we will gaze on you
through heaven’s door and hope our words stay for
evermore. When you leave save a tear, for here we
stay year on year, the lads the dads and someone’s
sons, the boys who fell before German guns.
Dave Callaghan
Taken from the wall of remembrance at
w w w.s o m m e - b at t le fi e l d s.c o m

THE
B A T T L E O F THE SOMME
1916–2016
01 FIELD MANUAL
© IWM (Q52)

CONTENTS
The Battle of the Somme
From an original work for The Royal British Legion
by Professor Sir Hew Strachan FRSE FRHistS
Introduction ................................. 03
The Soldiers ................................. 04
The Battle ................................... 08
Commemoration ................................ 12
Facts and Figures ............................ 14
CD Content includes
Video Clips and Images
Commemorative Music
Two Minute Silence Video
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INTRODUCTION
The British folk memory of the Battle of the Somme
is dominated by one moment: 7.30am on 01 July 1916.
It was a bright summer’s day, the sun well up, and
falling from the east on the backs of the German
defenders and into the faces of the British. Officers
sounded their whistles, and their men scrambled up
ladders to get out of the trenches and into No Man’s
Land. Sergeant R.H. Tawney, with the 22nd Battalion,
the Manchester Regiment near Fricourt, recalled that:
“[We] lay down, waiting for the line to form up
on each side of us. When it was ready, we went
forward, not doubling, but at a walk. For we had 900
yards of rough ground to the trench, which was our
first objective.
“By the day’s end 19,240 British soldiers had been
killed and nearly twice that number wounded: the
total of 57,470 casualties was and remains the
highest suffered by the British Army in a single day.
This single fact ensures that for most Britons the
Battle of the Somme defines what they mean when they
talk of the ‘tragedy’, the ‘waste’ and ‘futility’ of
the First World War. Apart from the war’s opening
and closing dates (for Britain 04 August 1914 and
11 November 1918), 01 July 1916 was the first day
picked out for national observance when plans for the
commemoration of the centenary were being drawn up.
“On 01 July 2016, it will be 100 years since the
beginning of the Battle of the Somme. This was one of
the largest battles of the First World War fought by
the British and the French against Germany. It took
place on both banks of the River Somme in France, and
is remembered as one of the most tragic episodes in
human history.”
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THE SOLDIERS
Going over the top at the Somme was the first taste
of battle many of these men had, as many were part
of ‘Kitchener’s Volunteer Army’ and were made up of
the Pals battalions, mainly recruited from the North
of England.
The losses to Pals battalions in particular gave the
battle special resonance for local communities. Pals
battalions were made up of groups of friends, of team
mates in sports clubs or colleagues at work, who had
joined together and expected to fight together. The
result of such tight local links meant that heavy
losses in one battalion could be felt in towns and
cities down to the level of individual streets and
corner shops. The Pals battalions therefore explain
why the effect of the first day of the Somme had such
a profound effect in Britain itself: the losses were
felt locally as much as nationally.
Pals battalions had their origins in Lancashire but
Yorkshire suffered as much as anywhere. At Serre
whole sections of the 12th (the Sheffield Pals)
battalion, the York and Lancaster Regiment were wiped
out by German machine guns, and Accrington, Barnsley
and Bradford, all with units in the same division,
suffered as grievously. Scotland had very few Pals
battalions: the most obvious were the 15th, 16th
and 17th battalions of the Highland Light Infantry
from Glasgow and the 16th (McCrae’s) battalion of
the Royal Scots from Edinburgh. By the afternoon
of 04 July 1916, the latter, with a large number
of footballers, including Hearts players, reckoned
that 12 out of 21 officers and 624 of 793 other ranks
were missing. Ireland to all intents and purposes
had no Pals battalions, but was still grievously
hit on 01 July. The 36th (Ulster) Division, many
of its men having been recruited from the Ulster
Volunteer Force, faced the Schwaben Redoubt and made
the greatest progress of any British formation on the
opening day. Irish Nationalists had joined the 16th
Division and it entered the battle later, in early
September. Recruiting in Wales had proved sticky,
and Lloyd George’s ambition to form a Welsh Corps
had to be modified to a division only, the 38th. It
entered the fighting on 07 July, clearing the Mametz Wood
by 12 July.
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Of the Dominions, Newfoundland (then still separate
from Canada) was as badly affected as any northern
town on 01 July. Its battalion attacked as part of
the second wave at Beaumont-Hamel, and suffered 91%
casualties, with every officer killed or wounded.
The Canadian Corps, which had arrived in France in
spring 1915, did not enter the battle – having been
further north – until September. The Australians
and New Zealanders came (like the Newfoundlanders)
by way of Gallipoli. The Australians joined Gough’s
Reserve Army and took Pozières on the Albert-Bapaume
road on 23 July. They held the village and their
units were rotated through the sector for the next
six weeks. The New Zealanders moved into the line at
Fricourt in late August, and took part in the Flers
attack on 15 September. On 15 July the South African
Brigade took Delville Wood, a thick tangle of trees,
and held it against successive counter-attacks and
under shellfire that shattered the forest. Of their
original strength of 3,153, just 143 left the wood five
days later. The South African memorial at Delville
Wood became, in the era of apartheid, a symbol of
white domination.
Unsurprisingly, many famous individuals fought
at the Somme. To name two is invidious, but they
caught the public imagination then and now. One was
Raymond Asquith, Fellow of All Souls, and son of
the Prime Minister. The latter visited the front in
early September and saw his son. It was their last
meeting, as Raymond was killed near Lesboeufs with
the Grenadier Guards on 15 September. His father
was shattered but so were those for whom Raymond’s
abilities made him the embodiment of what came to be
called ‘the lost generation’. Serving alongside him,
and wounded, was another prime minister (albeit of
the future), Harold Macmillan.
Siegfried Sassoon, nicknamed ‘Mad Jack’ by his
comrades, won the Military Cross serving with the
Royal Welch Fusiliers at Mametz in July 1916.
Although his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer would not
be published until after the war, his poetry made him
well known during the war, and his decision to throw
his Military Cross in the Mersey in 1917 in protest
against the war prompted the War Office to regard him
(not without reason) as suffering from shell shock.
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© IWM (Q4079)
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© IWM (Q3996)
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THE BATTLE
In 1914 the principal army on the Western Front was
that of France, but by 1916 the growth of the British
Army through Kitchener’s recruitment of volunteers
had begun to change the balance of power. On
14 February 1916, the British commander-in-chief,
Field Marshal Douglas Haig, agreed that the main
offensive should move to a sector in the south of
France, in Picardy, astride and to the north of the
river Somme. The plan was for a joint attack, with
both armies supporting each other, but the French
taking the larger part.
By 01 July, the French contribution to the joint
effort had been cut from a front of 40km to 15km,
from 39 divisions to 12, and from 1,700 guns to 688.
This caused Britain to take on a proportionately
larger role in the battle than had been planned, and
also resulted in pulling the weight of the unfolding
battle further north in the direction of Arras,
giving a British front that totalled about 25km, and
increasing the risk of fatalities.
The Somme – despite the resonance of its name –
is only a sluggish stream at the point where it
intersects with the 1916 front. Because the British
troops were to its north, the river played little
part in their experience of the battle. Much more
important was the Ancre, which runs from Miraumont to
the south west and joins the Somme at Corbie. Rural
Picardy lacked the transport networks and other
infrastructure to sustain a major army fighting a big
battle. The principal north-south railway line lay
to the rear, with its junction at Amiens. The roads
forward from there were narrow and as ill-adapted to
support the movement of troops, guns and supplies as
they are today to ferry tourists to the key points
of the battlefield. The decision to fight here required
the allies to establish from scratch the equivalent
of a modern urban infrastructure in a backward and
under-developed landscape.
The soil is chalky and so was less likely to become
waterlogged than the ground further north in Flanders.
In high summer the ground was firm and well-adapted to
support an attack. However, by October and November,
when mud had formed, it was different from that of
Flanders. The thin topsoil mixed with the chalk to
produce ‘a liquid grey yellow mud… extraordinarily
buoyant, like quicksilver’. It was sticky and formed
quicksand. This was as good a reason for closing down
08 FIELD MANUAL

the battle in October as any. The chalk also benefited
the Germans: they had had 18 months in which to cut
into it to create deep defensive positions, in a way
that was impossible further north, where the water
table was higher.
The Battle of the Somme did not produce a ‘decisive
victory’ of the sort that was alleged to have
characterised earlier wars, but the Somme could
be seen as a waypoint on the route to winning the
war in 1918. Certainly the Somme redefined modern
industrialised warfare, and was fought as a battle
of attrition. Within the ‘battle’ of the Somme were
scores of other battles – the battle of Albert, the
battle of Flers-Courcelette, the battle of Ancre; by
the standards of the previous century, the Somme was
a war within a war.
The control of Picardy was not massively significant
for the outcome of the war. So the Somme offensive,
deprived of any obvious strategic objective in
geographical terms, had to find another rationale.
In 1915 many senior officers had begun to conclude that,
given the difficulty of achieving a breakthrough, the
aim of an offensive should not be defined territorially
but economically. The answer was to force the enemy
to fight so as to exhaust his reserves, and ideally
to force him to attack you – and so suffer more
casualties – rather than the opposite.
The opening stages of the battle were filmed, by
Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell. The result
– The Battle of the Somme – was released on
21 August 1916 and seen by one million people in
Britain within a week. In six weeks up to 20 million
had seen it in nearly 2,000 cinemas. Malins produced a
follow-up – The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance
of the Tanks, released in January 1917. His footage
is used as the default for any and every First
World War documentary, regardless of its specific
relevance, and although some of the sequences were
staged, the majority were not. The film shows the
private soldier’s war, with no sign of senior officers
and no attempt to explain strategy. Soldiers of all
ranks saw it at the front, some in earshot of the
later stages of the same battle, and pronounced it
realistic. The film may have been light on gore, but
it brought the battle to the public in an immediate
and dramatic way, and for the first time.
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10 FIELD MANUAL
© IWM (Q70167)

© IWM (Q79501)
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COMMEMORATION
None of the cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission on the Somme compares in scale with those
at Ypres. They are scattered throughout the landscape,
behind folds in the ground and in isolated copses, the
sites of particular actions or of casualty clearing
stations. They therefore reflect the ebb and flow of
the battle. Today they have become the focus for
regimental acts of commemoration, often held not on
01 July (when the main event to mark the battle is
held) but on the day appropriate to the action of a
particular Pals battalion.
Many of the memorials erected by the British empire in
the early 1920s were symbols of victory as much as of
loss: those of the 1st Australian Division at Pozières,
the South African Brigade at Delville Wood and the New
Zealander Division at Flers. The most obvious Scottish
memorial on the Somme is that to the 51st Highland
Division at Beaumont-Hamel, which in contrast to that
of the Newfoundlanders on the same site, also marks
success: the capture of Y Ravine on 13 November 1916. So
does that of the Welsh dragon at Mametz. Most striking
of all in this respect is the Ulster Tower, erected on
the site of the 36th Division’s attack, and modelled
on Helen’s Tower in Clandboye.
The Ulster Tower was opened in 1921. With the passage
of time the sense of victory, not just at the Somme
but in the war as a whole, was eroded. As a result,
commemoration changed its tone. Subsequent memorials
have conveyed different messages. Today’s Australians
are probably more aware of Fromelles, the site of
a failed diversionary attack, at the end of which
the Australian dead, together with some British, were
buried in a mass grave. Its discovery in Pheasant Wood
led to a new cemetery, which was opened in 2010.
The most striking manifestation of this change of
mood is Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Thiepval arch, visible
from many points of the battlefield and sited on the
ridge which was the centre of much of the fighting. It
was inaugurated in 1932 and commemorates the 72,000
British and South African soldiers who were killed on
the Somme and have no known graves. Their names are on
the sixteen pillars, although some are so high up as to
be difficult to read. The design, which consists of four
superimposed arches of increasing heights, owes its
inspiration to classical models for triumphal arches,
even if its materials (it is faced in brick) and its
massing are very much of the 20th Century. Thiepval is
the location for the annual service of remembrance on
01 July.
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© IWM
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THE BATTLE
OF THE SOMME
01 JULY – 18 NOVEMBER 1916
Somme
FRANCE
19,240
British soldiers
had been killed
by the end of the
first day.
1 ST
The first tank to
engage in battle
was designated D1, a
British Mark I Male,
during the Battle
of the Somme on
15 September 1916.
14 FIELD MANUAL
141 DAYS
The Battle of the
Somme lasted from 01
July – 18 November 1916.
5 MILES
was the furthest
advance of any allied
force during the
whole battle.
1,700,000
shells were fired on to
the German lines by
1,600 pieces of British
artillery during the
eight-day preliminary
bombardment.(est)

FIRST DAY OF BATTLE
TOTAL CASUALTIES
GERMAN CASUALTIES
500,000
BRITISH CASUALTIES
419,654
FRENCH CASUALTIES
204,253
BRITISH CASUALTIES
57, 470
Casualties including the
19,240 soldiers killed,
was and remains the
highest suffered by the
British Army in a single
day. In comparison, the
French Army had around
1,600 casualties and the
German had 10,000–12,000
casualties.
30KG
The average British
infantryman carried
30kg of equipment
as he went over
the top during
the first phase of
the battle.
67
The oldest British
soldier to die during
the battle was Lt
Henry Webber, 7th
South Lancashire
Regiment. He was 67
when he died on 27th
July 1916.
49
tanks of the Heavy
Branch of the
Machine Gun Corps
of the British Army
were sourced and
were to reach Somme
by September 1916.
However, due to
mechanical and other
failures, only 36 of
them participated
at the Battle of
the Somme.
DID YOU KNOW?
During the Battle of the Somme, 51 Victoria Crosses were
awarded – 17 of them were awarded posthumously.
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16 FIELD MANUAL
© IWM

As day breaks through wind and rain we form a line
on rough terrain, to face a foe we’ll never know, we
will fall and die where poppies now grow. Remember
us the chosen ones, the lads the dads and someone’s
sons. Be not sad, just be glad, knowing we gave all
we had. As you walk on our fields of doom, places
where our bodies were strewn, we will gaze on you
through heaven’s door and hope our words stay for
evermore. When you leave save a tear, for here we
stay year on year, the lads the dads and someone’s
sons, the boys who fell before German guns.
Dave Callaghan
Taken from the wall of remembrance at
w w w.s o m m e - b at t le fi e l d s.c o m