Mr Mark Francois

It is an honour to sum up this debate on the day after Armistice Day, although it is a genuine shame that, yet again, no Reform MP has chosen to take part, especially as some of them regard themselves as authorities on world war one. Fortunately, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith) was here, and she clearly really knows what she is talking about. The battle of the Somme took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916, during which both sides between them suffered over 1 million casualties. Of that total, over 400,000 were British and Commonwealth troops, including over 130,000 who were killed. The strategy for an Anglo-French offensive had been agreed between the respective commanders, Lord Haig and General Joffre, at the Chantilly staff conference some months previously. However, when the attack was launched in July, it was a costly failure. In the 110 years that have passed since, a great deal has been written about what happened. However, the fundamental reason for the failure of the Somme offensive, especially in the British sector, was the highly over-optimistic assumptions about the effect of artillery on prepared defensive positions that had been skilfully chosen by German generals and engineers months previously. As John Keegan, in his authoritative history of the first world war, summed it up, the Germans “had driven dugouts thirty feet below ground, impervious to artillery fire, provisioned to withstand siege and linked to the rear by buried telephone cable and deep communication trenches….They had made themselves secure.” Moreover, the German defenders regularly rehearsed dashing up from their well-protected dugouts to man their defensive positions and, crucially, setting up their machine guns with carefully calibrated interlocking fields of fire in rapid time. It was a feat that the allied planners thought impossible, as they believed that all such positions, including dense belts of barbed wire, would effectively have been destroyed by a massive preliminary bombardment —one that also effectively surrendered any element of strategic or even operational surprise. Even worse, many of the shells failed to explode. For many men, the Somme was their first experience of combat, and their last. The 19 or so British divisions that took part in the initial assault were a mixture of old soldiers and new. Four divisions—the 4th, 7th, 8th and 29th—comprised largely veterans, including men who had survived the original battles as part of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, or had served at Gallipoli. As a former Territorial Army infantry officer myself, I should also point out that four more—the 46th, 48th, 49th and 56th—were territorial divisions, whereas the bulk of the remaining 11 divisions largely comprised idealistic civilian volunteers who answered the famous call from the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener: “Your Country Needs You”. Many of those men comprised Kitchener’s army and volunteered to fight alongside their fellow workmates or townsfolk in the so-called Pals battalions, enticed into the recruiting office by the promise that those who joined together would serve together. On 24 June, British artillery commenced a seven-day bombardment of the German defences, utilising around 1,000 field guns and almost 500 heavy artillery pieces. During that preparatory barrage, approximately 1.5 million shells were fired and confidence was high among British commanders, with General Sir Henry Rawlinson reportedly stating: “nothing could exist at the conclusion of the bombardment in the area covered by it.” Tragically, he was wrong.