Sir Julian Lewis

Yes, indeed. I believe I am right in thinking that he won the VC twice overall—one of three people to do so—and I am delighted that my hon. and gallant Friend has put that on the record. In more recent years, there has been a swing of the pendulum that has tried to justify the scale of loss on the Somme by saying that it was necessary for lessons to be learned for the ultimately successful campaigns of 1918. Some of the people who have put forward that proposition undoubtedly know more about the history of the first world war and its battles than I do, but I simply do not buy that. You should not have to waste the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers to learn lessons, some of which ought to have been obvious from the beginning. One of those lessons was the need for surprise. Before 1 July 1916, there was a seven-day bombardment by British artillery on the Somme. Everybody knew what was going to happen and where it was going to happen. In 1918, at the start of the successful 100 days offensive—the phenomenal, brilliantly fought campaign that led to Germany suing for armistice in November 1918—everybody had secrecy impressed on them. Every officer and man had a passbook in which it was deemed essential that they must not say anything about what preparations were being made. Similarly, when the Germans mounted their spring offensive in March 1918—which, for a while, looked as if it could have put Britain out of the war—one of the reasons it succeeded was that they too had an element of surprise. They had three alternative plans and decided on one of them, the Operation Michael attack, very much at the last minute before it was launched. You did not have to be a strategic genius to know that you needed an element of surprise in order to achieve tactical success. Similarly, the lessons of the Somme were not learned very quickly, because the same thing happened again in April 1918 with the second battle of Arras and, later in the year, with the third battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele. Let me conclude by quoting someone who was not an amateur historian: a man called Sholto Douglas, who later became Marshal of the Royal Air Force. He stated that, as he looked down from his aircraft at the field of Passchendaele in 1917, his mind was full of the sort of questions that many people have asked about the futility of the tactics. He said then, and I agree with him now, that those questions are very, very difficult to answer.