The Somme Read online

  For Heather and Jane

  And in memory of John Grigg

  Scholar and Friend

  Copyright © 2005 by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson

  First printed in paperback 2006

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Set in Minion by Northern Phototypesetting Co. Ltd, Bolton

  Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Prior, Robin.

  The Somme/Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0–300–10694–7 (cl.: alk. paper)

  1. Somme, 1st Battle of the, France, 1916. I. Wilson, Trevor, 1928– II. Title.

  D545.S7P75 2004

  940.4'272—dc22

  2004028497

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  1. The Context

  2. ‘Absolutely Astonishing’: The War Committee and the Military

  3. Decision-making, January–February

  4. Decision-making, March–June

  5. ‘Grasping at the Shadow’: Planning for the Somme, February–June

  6. ‘Favourable Results Are Not Anticipated’: Preparations for Battle, June

  7. ‘A Short Life’: VII and VIII Corps on 1 July

  8. ‘The Enemy's Fire Was So Intense’: X Corps on 1 July

  9. ‘Wave after Wave Were Mown Down’: III Corps on 1 July

  10. ‘Cowering Men in Field Grey’: XV and XIII Corps on 1 July

  11. Reflections on 1 July

  12. ‘Ill-Considered Attacks on a Small Front’, 2–13 July

  13. ‘Cavalry Sharpening Their Swords’, 14 July

  14. ‘We Are a Bit Stuck’, 15–31 July

  15. ‘Something Wanting in the Methods Employed’, 1 August–12 September

  16. ‘A Hell of a Time’: Pozières and Mouquet Farm, July–August

  17. Summary, 15 July–12 September

  18. The Politicians and the Somme Campaign, July–August

  19. One Division's Somme: The First Division, July–September

  20. ‘An Operation Planned on Bolder Lines’: Tanks and the 15 September Plan

  21. Lumbering Tanks: The Battle of 15 September

  22. 25 September

  23. ‘The Tragic Hill of Thiepval’, 26–30 September

  24. ‘A Severe Trial of Body and Spirit’: The Somme, October

  25. ‘We Must Keep Going!’: The Politicians and the Somme Campaign, September–October

  26. The Political Battle: Beaumont Hamel, 13–19 November

  27. Reflections on the British at the Somme

  28. Epilogue: The End of It All, November 1916

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Maps

  The Topography of the Battlefield

  The Haig/Rawlinson Plans, April–May

  The Change of Plan, June

  VIII Corps, 1 July

  X Corps, 1 July

  III Corps, 1 July

  XV Corps, 1 July

  XIII Corps, 1 July

  2–13 July

  The Plans, 14 July

  15–31 July

  August

  From Pozières to Mouquet Farm, 23 July–31 August

  The 1 Division on the Somme, July–September

  Tanks in Action, 15 September

  25 September

  Thiepval Ridge, 26–30 September

  The Schwaben Redoute, October

  Haig's October Plan

  The October Battles

  Gains Made, October

  Beaumont Hamel, 13–19 November

  Acknowledgements

  The authors wish to acknowledge the many people and institutions that have helped them in the research and production of this book about the British experience at the Somme.

  Firstly, they wish to thank their colleagues at their respective university departments whose encouragement has been much appreciated. In his School Robin Prior wishes to mention in particular the help he received from Elizabeth Greenhalgh and for the many discussions with her on the First World War. He also wishes to thank Bernadette McDermott, Deborah Furphy, Elsa Selleck, Julie McMahon, Shirley Ramsay, Marilyn Anderson-Smith and Lyn Weaver for helping in various ways, not least in preparing a readable manuscript – no mean feat given his handwriting.

  To Robert King, the former Rector of UNSW@ADFA, Robin Prior owes special thanks. It is a rare university administrator who still thinks that the Head of a School should have the right to undertake scholarly research.

  The authors wish to thank the following research institutions for granting access to material in their archives. In London: the Public Record Office (now sadly renamed the National Archives), the efficiency of which is a marvel; the Liddell Hart Centre at King's College; the Royal Artillery Institution in Woolwich; and the Imperial War Museum, where Rod Sudderby and his expert staff make research work a pleasure. Robin Prior wishes especially to thank Rod for drawing the Horne Papers to his attention. In Canberra: the Australian War Memorial.

  Robin Prior expresses his gratitude to the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Australian National University for offering congenial facilities and company for a semester in 1997. He would also like to thank Professor Joanna Bourke of Birkbeck College, London; Professor Carl Bridge at the Menzies Centre in London; and Professor John Moses at the University of New England for opportunities to test chapters of this book on expert audiences.

  Both authors wish to thank Keith Mitchell for preparing the maps from their often incomprehensible drafts.

  The authors would like to thank their publisher, Robert Baldock, and his expert team at Yale University Press, London. Robert is a publisher par excellence and a great friend. It is also a pleasure to deal with people of the professionalism of Candida Brazil and Ewan Thompson. Their efforts have improved the text and saved us from many errors and grotesqueries (a word they would not approve) of style.

  Robin Prior owes an even greater debt to his wife than usual. She not only read the entire manuscript several times and made many improvements, she also assisted in a considerable way with the research. About 600 British battalions fought on the Somme and without Heather's help many of their war diaries would have remained uncopied and unseen and this book would have been the poorer. Robin would also like to thank his daughter, Megan, for help in compiling the index.

  1 The Context

  I

  There is a widely held view about the initiation and prosecution of the Battle of the Somme. It is that the Somme campaign was the brainchild of the British and French military commands alone. That is, the political leaders of Britain (like those of France) played no effective part in this decision-making. Such a proceeding was at odds with British constitutional tradition, whereby high military strategy remained the province of the civilian heads of government.

  A large generalisation follows from this. It is that what was true of the Somme battle in 1916 was true of the First World War as a whole. The British military command, who are deemed men of desperately limited strategic horizons and
a fixed unwillingness to learn, did the deciding all the way through. Invariably, they opted to strike where the enemy was strongest and best prepared, which meant the Western Front. As a consequence, civilian leaders blessed with more imagination, and dismayed by heavy casualties, went unregarded. The results for the devoted rank and file of the British army were tragic: vast casualties sustained for derisory gains.

  The civilian leaders of the nation, according to this scenario, were overall possessed of larger vision and greater strategic insight. They recognised the folly of hammering away on the stalemated Western Front, and perceived hopeful ways of proceeding elsewhere. But ultimately they proved incapable of imposing their views. The contrast with the Second World War is taken to be marked. In that struggle the political rulers of Britain exercised their rightful dominion over the making of strategy, and thereby avoided the terrible bloodbaths of 1914–18.

  II

  In this version, the Somme campaign stemmed from a conference held at French military headquarters in Chantilly early in December 1915. It was summoned by the French commander-in-chief, Marshal Joseph Joffre, and attended by representatives of the other Allied armies: British, Russian, and Italian. The principal British figures were Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, and Sir Archibald Murray, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

  The decisions taken at Chantilly were as follows.

  First, it was agreed that large offensive actions by the four Allies would be undertaken in 1916, and would be launched as near simultaneously as possible. Thereby Germany would be assailed on every front at the same time, and so be prevented from deploying its forces first against one adversary and then against another.

  Second, it was decided that Allied endeavours in areas away from the major fronts would either be abandoned altogether, as in the case of Gallipoli, or reduced to a minimum, as with Mesopotamia and Salonika. The British representatives even argued for the total abandonment of the Salonika operation, given that the initial object of sending an Anglo-French expedition there (the rescue of Serbia) had conspicuously failed. The decision however – at French insistence – was for quiescence rather than complete evacuation.

  The third decision, and that most germane to this study, concerned the objectives of the Allies' near-simultaneous offensives. The Italians would resume their Isonzo offensive northwards into the territory of Austria-Hungary. The Russians, who had spent most of 1915 being forced into retreat by better equipped and led German forces, would launch a great effort on their more northerly front against the German army, with a lesser holding action in the south against the Austro-Hungarians. The British and French armies would act side by side in a great endeavour on the Western Front, with the French providing the major component but with the British offering a much larger participation than hitherto. Its location would be Picardy, on either side of the River Somme.

  These concentric offensives, aimed at closing the ring on the Central Powers, could not be initiated early in 1916. For one thing the Russian army, following its numerous setbacks sustained at the hands of the Germans in 1914 and 1915, needed many months for recuperation and re-equipment. For another, Britain required time to train and, even more, to munition the huge volunteer army it had been accumulating since the outbreak of the war. So it was agreed that the three Allied offensives, including the campaign on the Somme, would go ahead not earlier than the spring of 1916.

  As it happened, the presence at this conference of Sir John French and Sir Archibald Murray, Britain's principal military figures for the moment, was pretty much their swan song. There was a generally held opinion in British governing circles, in the upper echelons of the British army, and even at Buckingham Palace, that the nation needed a more independently minded figure than Murray as CIGS, and that Sir John French had proved conspicuously inadequate as chief of the BEF. So in short order French was supplanted by Sir Douglas Haig, and Murray by Sir William Robertson. This was of no strategic significance. Each replacement was utterly convinced of the wisdom of the decisions taken at Chantilly: that the sideshows should be abandoned or placed on the defensive, and that the Western Front should be the focus of Britain's military endeavours. Certainly, Haig had been contemplating, not a joint Anglo-French action on the Somme, but a predominantly British offensive (with French and Belgian assistance) on the northern part of the Western Front directed towards the Belgian coast. But Joffre's proposal for a great wide-front offensive further south, to which the French would be the main contributor but with a significant British participation, was entirely acceptable to him.

  Only in one serious respect was this proposal unwelcome to Haig. Joffre intended that, in the months preceding the great offensive, the German reserves would be worn away in a succession of spoiling attacks. Thereby the scene would be set for an Allied breakthrough victory. And given the huge sacrifices already borne by French forces, and the large British army now coming into Haig's hands, Joffre considered that this preliminary task should fall to the British.

  Haig did not agree. He had no enthusiasm for seeing his army drained away in unspectacular activities that would lay the foundation for a primarily French triumph. He persuaded Joffre to agree that the proposed preliminary action should be undertaken by both armies, and that it would be confined to just a few weeks immediately preceding the great attack.

  In the event, that matter was decided by neither Joffre nor Haig. Late in February the German commander-in-chief, Falkenhayn, launched a vast offensive against the fortress of Verdun in the French sector of the Western Front. This seemed a curious choice, seeing that Falkenhayn had long argued that Germany could only triumph in this war by beating the British, whom he regarded as the major adversary, rather than the French. But (or so he alleged) he concluded that the elimination of Britain could be accomplished by bleeding white the French army, which he called ‘Britain's best sword’ – as if not noticing that Britain had now accumulated a considerable army of its own. His assault on Verdun was intended to remove this ‘sword’.

  So, during the four months preceding the opening of the Somme campaign, the French army was forced to ward off a vast German offensive. This had the effect of whittling away the German reserves, as Joffre had stipulated, but only by imposing the sort of heavy cost on the French army which Joffre had sought to avoid. Thus the scene was set for an Allied offensive which would still occur on the Somme in mid-1916 but would be radically changed in important particulars. As a result of France's grievous losses at Verdun, the French contribution to the Anglo-French assault would be much reduced, the length of front to be attacked would be considerably diminished, the predominant force undertaking the offensive would now be the British army (with the French as a lesser contributor), and the commander chiefly responsible for directing the operation would be not Joffre but Haig. Yet these concessions to necessity did not appear to render the Somme campaign anything but the military operation devised at Chantilly.

  III

  This narrative of preliminaries to the Battle of the Somme seems to sustain the established account. It is all about military conferences, military figures, and military decisions.

  But it is not a complete account. For one thing, it lacks context. Whatever may have been true of the Somme in 1916, it was plainly not the case that up to that point the great decisions on British strategy had been taken without significant civilian input.

  Events at the outbreak of the war illustrate this. Certainly, as evidence had mounted in the years before the war that Germany might be preparing to strike against France by transgressing Belgian territory, the British military command had worked out an appropriate response. They would send an expeditionary force to Europe to stand on the left of the French army. But the political chiefs of Britain were not ignorant of these preparations. It was the choice of the British government that these military preparations should proceed, but on the clear understanding that they were not sanctioning an offensive. As its response to the
crisis of July–August 1914 made apparent, the British cabinet reserved to itself the decision whether or not to enter the war at all, and where to direct the forces at its disposal if it did choose to enter. In the event, the British government showed an inclination to abstain from intervention should Germany bow to its demand to withdraw its forces from Belgian territory. And when the German government chose to disregard Britain's ultimatum, the British cabinet opted to send just a part, not all, of its meagre military resources to stand alongside the French. The other part, in defiance of pre-war military arrangements, was kept at home to guard against invasion. A third decision, of vast importance, owed nothing at all to military initiative: the decision that Britain, while preserving its hallowed practice of voluntary service in the armed forces, would straightway abandon its reliance on a small standing army. It would set about raising a huge military force eventually running into millions of men. This striking innovation, without which there could have been no Battle of the Somme, was the spontaneous decision of the British cabinet, and was both thoroughly endorsed by the House of Commons and widely agreed to by the community at large. The role of the military was that of a consenting onlooker.

  That the course of events in Britain in the opening days of the war was the outcome of civilian decision-making has been obscured by a personal matter. A large role was soon being played in the conduct of affairs by Horatio Herbert Kitchener, victor over the Dervishes at Omdurman, a major participant in Britain's endeavour in the South African war, and Britain's most famous soldier. That the ‘new armies’ which Britain set about raising were instantly known as ‘Kitchener Armies’ has contributed to the conception of a British war effort under military direction. The point needs to be stressed that Kitchener was not acting at this time in a military capacity. On 3 August 1914, having spent three years as ruler of Egypt under the title of British agent and consul-general, Kitchener was prevailed upon by the British Prime Minister to accept the post of Secretary of State for War in the government. That is, Kitchener had become a civilian cabinet minister with special responsibility for military affairs. (His opposite number at the Admiralty was Winston Churchill, who has never been thought of as a member of any sort of ‘military hierarchy’.) The fact that Kitchener played an influential role in the decision to send four of Britain's six divisions to France, while retaining the other two in Britain, and that he argued strongly for raising a mass army in what he foresaw as a long war, was no evidence that decision-making on the key matters of strategy and mobilisation had been wrested from civilian grasp.