Contribution
Without hesitation.
Captain Siegfried Sassoon MC, one of the famous war poets, wrote in his diary on 1 July 1916:
“We had breakfast at 6.—the morning is brilliantly fine—after a mist early. Since 6:30 there has been hell let loose. The air vibrates with the incessant din—the whole earth shakes & rocks & throbs—It is one continuous roar—Machine guns tap & rattle—bullets whistling over head—small fry quite outdone by the gangs of hooligan shells, that dash over to rend the German line”.
On a personal note, as a student on the King’s College London MA war studies course studying the first world war, I went on a departmental tour to the Somme battlefield in 1987. I was then aged 22. We were awakened early in the morning, given a hot breakfast, taken out to the site of the then British frontline, given a tot of rum and then listened as whistles were blown at H-hour at 0730. It was exactly as it was intended to be: a deeply affecting experience and one that I will never forget.
Given the relative inexperience of around half the assaulting divisions, British tactical instructions placed considerable emphasis on troops advancing steadily in line so as to maintain order and discipline. Troops were generally ordered to walk and not run on the assumption that the defenders would either have likely been killed, or so stunned as to be incapable of offering effective resistance. However, in the southern part of the British sector, some British officers who were sceptical of their artillery’s ability to suppress the German defenders ordered their troops to lie out in the open just prior to the assault, and then rush the German lines as soon as the barrage had lifted. Some of these units achieved at least local tactical surprise in reaching their initial objectives before the well-drilled German infantry could react in time. Sadly, however, that was the exception rather than the rule.
In the majority of cases, the German defenders, exactly as they had rehearsed many times, won
“the race to the parapet”
and then rained down a literally murderous fire on the slowly advancing British infantry, who had been assured by their senior commanders that what they were about to experience could not happen. Even among those units who made it to the German lines, they frequently discovered the wire still uncut while being raked by multiple machine guns, still stuck in no man’s land.
The eventual outcome in terms of loss of life was catastrophic. On the first day alone, over 19,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers were killed and a further 38,000 became casualties in what to this day represents the single bloodiest day in the history of the British Army. By that evening, some battalions, in particular the inexperienced pals battalions, had effectively ceased to exist.
Despite the failure of the initial assault, British commanders pressed on over the next several months, resulting in a number of heroic actions, such as the Australians at Pozières and the South Africans at Delville—or Devil’s—Wood. Nevertheless, by the time the offensive was finally abandoned on 18 November, the maximum limit of the advance was some seven miles, for which the British Army alone had lost some 130,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers killed and more than twice as many wounded. In total, including combatants on all sides, over 1 million men were either killed, wounded, taken prisoner or went missing over the course of the battle, which lasted a total of 141 days. One of those wounded on the German side was a Bavarian corporal named Adolf Hitler.
Men of all ages bravely fought and died, in many cases literally side by side, during the Somme. The oldest confirmed British fatality was Lieutenant Henry Webber of the 7th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment, who was 67 when he was killed on 21 July. Members of this House and the other place also lost their lives, as did Lieutenant Raymond Asquith, son of the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who was killed in action on 15 September. In contrast, the youngest British soldier to perish was Private Horace Iles of the 15th Battalion the West Yorkshire Regiment, the Leeds Pals, who fell on the first day, aged just 16, having initially lied about his age at the recruiting office months before.
However, before concluding, it would be wrong to leave the impression that the whole of the first world war was as operationally unsuccessful as the battle of the Somme. In March 1918, the British Army, with their “backs to the wall”, withstood the Kaiser’s offensive and eventually launched a highly successful counter-attack using the principle of combined arms—tanks, artillery, infantry and, to some extent, nascent air power, all working in unison—to effectively break the back of the German army in the field by the autumn and force the eventual German surrender in November. The great difference was that by mid-1918, British generals had learnt through brutal experience how to combine the various weapons of war for maximum offensive effect to achieve operational and, ultimately, strategic success, rather than being over-reliant on one arm—artillery—to the great detriment of another: the humble infantry. That was, literally, the fatal error of the Somme.
Those who fought at the Somme, as elsewhere in world war one, laid down their lives for a greater cause: for the many freedoms we now enjoy. They, indeed, gave their today for our tomorrow, and we in this House and across the nation should never take their supreme sacrifice for granted, nor will we. Lest we forget.