The Somme Read online

  III

  Rawlinson replied to Haig's memorandum on 19 April. This document is a curious mixture of resistance and capitulation. On some matters there was no dispute. Now he had been made aware of the French plan, Rawlinson would reorient his operations subsequent to the initial attack, directing them south-east towards the French.27

  On other matters he was not so compliant. He agreed with Haig that the prospect of capturing the German line north of Pozières at a single blow was ‘alluring’ but he then restated his reasons for resisting this course. He argued that wire-cutting at great distances would be difficult, that his own troops would become disorganised, that the enemy garrisoning the second line might turn this disorganisation into a rout, and that even if the infantry did manage to gain a footing in the second line the artillery would have ‘serious difficulty’ in supporting them.

  Rawlinson also deprecated the extension of the southern flank, noting that it would require an additional division in the initial operation which would have to be supported with his existing artillery resources.28 He also noted that he did not have sufficient force to extend the northern front as far as the Gommecourt salient.29

  Thus far Rawlinson had stood his ground and rejected Haig's facile assurances that the risks to be run in capturing the German second line could be foreseen and guarded against. But he then went on to say:

  I, however, fully realise that it may be necessary to incur these risks in view of the importance of the object to be attained. This will, no doubt, be decided by the commander-in-chief, and definite instructions sent to me in due course.30

  In other words, he would in the last analysis carry out Haig's instructions even if he thought them to be impracticable.

  On some other matters, however, Rawlinson would not budge. In his original plan he had tried to make it clear to Haig that there really was no choice about the duration of the bombardment – the wire could not be cut in anything less than 50–60 hours. Haig had failed to grasp this point. So Rawlinson reiterated the need for a lengthy shelling of enemy positions. But in so doing he drifted away from his main argument by emphasising the greater effect on enemy morale of a prolonged bombardment. Haig refused to accept that a long bombardment was superior as a morale-breaker to a short one. For the time being, the matter remained unresolved.31

  On one final matter, the use of cavalry, Rawlinson took Haig's remarks to mean that a major role should be given to the horsed soldiers. He therefore proposed to push them through en masse south of Grandcourt to assist in the protection of the northern flank ‘if we succeed in inflicting on the enemy a serious state of demoralisation’.32 This was a major proviso but in any case Haig had nothing so grandiose in mind. He wrote on his copy of Rawlinson's letter: ‘This seems to indicate that you are intending to use the cavalry as one unit. This is not my view.... Certain Corps Cmdrs should have some Cav at their disposal on the flank near Serre.’33 In the light of future developments this remark is worth noting.

  In the following weeks the points at issue between Haig and Rawlinson were settled. Rawlinson raised no more objections about the extension of the objective in the north and this aspect of the plan was made explicit by Haig in a memorandum on 16 May.34 And Haig recognised that Rawlinson did not have the means to attack at Gommecourt. This operation became a ‘diversion plan’ and was transferred to the Third Army.35 Meanwhile Rawlinson agreed to extend the southern flank to Montauban if he could have five additional siege batteries, and this was accepted by Haig.36 As for the bombardment, Haig finally bowed to the inevitable – it would be a methodical one, spread out over five days. The use of cavalry continued to be a matter of dispute, but in the upshot it made no difference to the basic plan and will be dealt with later.

  The Rawlinson–Haig exchange on the nature of the Somme plan raises an interesting question. Why did Rawlinson so readily capitulate to Haig on those aspects of the plan where he plainly thought the commander-in-chief misguided? The simple answer is that he was merely bowing to the authority structure of the British army. But his readiness to yield on matters of importance perhaps has deeper roots. In 1915 Rawlinson had made injudicious remarks about the inadequacies of a divisional general. Haig had backed Rawlinson's criticisms and suggested to Sir John French that the general be sent home. An investigation revealed however that any inadequacies in command in fact lay with Rawlinson. Haig was furious with his subordinate but resisted French, who wanted Rawlinson removed. Haig had no hesitation in telling Rawlinson to whom he was indebted for retaining his post. From that point Rawlinson was Haig's man and although there would be numerous times when Rawlinson resisted the commander-in-chief, it is notable that resistance was only ever taken so far by the Fourth Army Commander

  The outline plan for the British aspect of the Somme campaign as it stood in May can now be briefly summarised. It called for an attack by 11 divisions on a 24,000 yard front with defensive flanks around Serre in the north and at the junction with the French around Montauban in the south. In the first instance the German second line would be overrun from Serre to the Pozières–Albert road. To the south of that point the initial penetration would stop well short of the German second line, but it would include the villages of Contalmaison and Montauban. The depth of advance would range from 3,000 to 4,000 yards in the north to 2,000 to 3,000 yards in the south. The attack would be preceded by a five-day bombardment which would include 220 heavy howitzers. Gas would be used to neutralise villages which were not to be directly attacked and the infantry advance would be screened by smoke. When the first objectives had been seized, the troops in the north would endeavour to roll up the remainder of the German second line, which would also be attacked from the south along a line Contalmaison–Montauban. Tanks (if available) and cavalry would be used to protect the flanks and, in the case of the horsed soldiers, to assist the infantry in capturing their objectives.

  Further advances would depend on developments.

  When all this had been accomplished, operations would be reoriented south-east to secure the left flank of the French.

  The Change of Plan, June

  IV

  With the final decisions made on objectives, artillery, and the type of bombardment, it might be thought that the planning process was at an end. All that remained was the drafting of detailed orders to give effect to the overall plan. This was not the case. By the time that Rawlinson and Haig had ironed out their major differences, the French position at Verdun had undergone a precipitate decline. The Germans had attacked that fortress on 21 February with indecisive results. But three months of heavy fighting had taken its toll on the French army. On 21 April Joffre informed Haig that the 39 French divisions which were to have made the major attack at the Somme would be reduced to 30. The remainder would have to be diverted to Verdun. Then on 20 May the number was reduced to 26. By the end of the month that figure had become 20 and by early June Joffre had stopped specifying the number of divisions he could now spare for the Somme.37 It was left to Haig to deduce that Joffre's Sixth Army was now the only French unit still designated for northern operations, and that its 12 divisions were all the support he could expect.38

  How did the shrinking number of French troops assigned to the Somme operation affect the British plan? Seemingly there was no immediate change. Late in April, one week after the first French reduction, Haig created a Reserve Corps, a combined infantry–cavalry force under General Gough to exploit targets of opportunity.39 The first proposals for the use of the force were put to Haig by Gough in May. After discussions with Rawlinson, Gough had concluded that two brigades of cavalry should be used, one on the northern sector of the front and one in the south, to help the infantry get forward in the event of an enemy collapse. In addition, he suggested that an entire cavalry division should be concentrated in the north to sweep forward to the enemy's second line and assist in rolling it up.40 However, Haig's response to these proposals indicated that his basic thinking had not changed. He commented that the scheme
was too ambitious. ‘One Cav Div in all is the utmost that can be allotted or that could be used. In such ground masses of Cav cannot be employed.’41 Gough was told to reduce the cavalry scheme to the use of one brigade in the area of the Ancre Valley and another in the Montauban area. They were to be used only if clear opportunities presented themselves.42

  Even by the end of May little had changed. By this time the French contribution to the battle had halved – from 39 divisions to 20. Yet shortly after this, Rawlinson published a set of operations orders which indicated that the plan decided on in April still held the field. The British would confine themselves to the capture of the German second line north of Pozières and then attack along it to the south-east in order to assist the main French operation.43

  A week later all was changing. The French contribution now consisted of a mere 12 divisions. This might have led to the conclusion that the whole campaign should be scaled down because there was no prospect that the British army could be expanded to the extent necessary to compensate for the lost French divisions. Yet nothing of the sort occurred. Instead, the British, without any major accession of power, took upon themselves a campaign no less ambitious than when the French were to be the major contributors.

  So on 14 June Rawlinson issued a new set of operations orders. The first objective remained as before, that is the German second line to the north of Pozières and south of that point an advance of between 2,000 and 3,000 yards towards the German second line. The second objective, however, was now stated to be a line due east of the first, namely Grandcourt–Martinpuich–Montauban. And there was now to be a third objective: the capture of the ridge from Martinpuich through High Wood to Ginchy. In short, operations were now to be directed due east instead of south-east towards the French.44 The aim of the operation had also changed. It was no longer to assist a French crossing of the Somme in the vicinity of Péronne but ‘to break the enemy's defensive system and [to] exploit to the full all opportunities opened up for defeating his forces within reach’.45 With this in mind three divisions of cavalry would be massed with the idea of turning the defeat of the enemy into a rout – their objective, Bapaume.46

  So Rawlinson's fears, expressed back in March to Kitchener, had been realised. A limited (if quite over-optimistic) attack had been transformed into an unlimited one. But the cause of this transformation was not that the British army had enjoyed a large accession of fighting forces, or that its capability to launch a mass offensive had suddenly become a realistic operation of war. It was simply that the French army was now so diminished that it was incapable of doing the job.

  The extension of objectives did not stop here. It transpired that, in Haig's estimation, the army which he had delegated to confine itself to strictly limited objectives but then had deemed equipped to capture Bapaume could do even more. Just two days after Rawlinson issued his revised operations orders, Haig announced that if enemy resistance collapsed a combined force of cavalry and infantry, to be commanded by Gough in what was ominously renamed the Reserve Army, was to turn north from Bapaume with the purpose of rolling up the German position from that place to Monchy (a German-held village to the east of Arras) in ‘flank and reverse’.47 So the ultimate objective of the Fourth Army, instead of being a move forward of about 3,000 yards and then a swing south to assist the French, had become a massed advance to positions 40 miles away. And this without any major accretion in British strength.

  Nor was Haig satisfied with even this much. Some days after settling on Monchy as the Fourth Army's destination, he received an Intelligence report which suggested that the enemy had ‘only’ 32 battalions on the main front of the British attack and ‘only’ a further 65 with which to reinforce this front within the first six days of battle.48 The use of the word ‘only’ in this report is puzzling. The course of battle over two years had made it plain that, given the advantage of defence over attack, in the current state of weaponry a small force dug in and equipped with machine-guns and artillery could stop a very much larger force attacking across the open. Further, the Intelligence report indicated that any superiority held by the Fourth Army would entirely vanish after just five days, hardly the scenario for a decisive advance or any sort of breakthrough. Indeed, it foreshadowed, at the very most, a gradual and costly pushing forward of no great significance.

  Yet Haig appears to have embraced this information as justifying a further move in the direction of optimism. Soon after reading this document he extended the Fourth Army's objective to Douai, some 70 miles away. Such an objective would only be obtainable if the entire German army holding the line in the north collapsed, so enabling Haig's cavalry to range into territory that the Germans had become incapable of defending. Haig was indeed thinking in Napoleonic terms. As noted, he intended to use his cavalry, he told Robertson, ‘on the lines of 1806’ – that is, as Napoleon had done at Jena when an infantry break in had been converted into a breakthrough and rout of Prussian forces by the cavalry.49 Thus machine-guns, quick-firing artillery, barbed wire, and trenches, none of which had been present at Jena, were wished away by the commander-in-chief as he sought to return to simpler times and decisive victories.

  Rawlinson, it must be said, was not being swept along by Haig's flights of fancy. On 22 June he addressed his corps commanders on the new plan. He informed them (presumably they already knew) that the British attack had become the main operation and that although the first objective remained the same, subsequent ones had been added by the commander-in-chief. Distant towns such as Bapaume, Monchy, and Douai were to be captured seriatim by the cavalry. Rawlinson then went on to say:

  An opportunity may occur to push the cavalry through, in order to confirm success, and in this connection I will read you the orders which I have received on the subject from the Commander-in-Chief this morning. But before I read them I had better make it quite clear that it may not be possible to break the enemy's line and put the cavalry through at the first rush. In the event of our not being able to capture the [first] line until the afternoon, it would not be possible to send the Cavalry through on the first day at all. A situation may supervene later when the attack on the [second] line takes place for pushing the cavalry through; but until we can see what is the [state] of the battle, it is impossible to predict at what moment we shall be able to undertake this, and the decision will rest in my hand to say when it can be carried out.50

  A more lukewarm endorsement of a plan would be hard to find.

  V

  We have looked so far at the infantry and cavalry plans and have seen them transformed. Beginning as an operation designed to capture certain enemy trench lines to assist the French, it had become a grandiose plan for the defeat of the entire German army in the northern area of the Western Front. The artillery aspects of the plan have only been mentioned in passing. But it should be noted, whether or not the military command recognised it, that the artillery was the primary weapon whereby the German trench defenders were to be neutralised or killed. And unless this was to occur along a sufficient portion of the line, there was little to be gained from discussing distant cavalry objectives.

  Rawlinson's initial thoughts on the artillery aspect of the plan were made in the light of his recent experience on the Western Front and in particular his experience at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. At the conclusion of that battle, Rawlinson's artillery adviser General Budworth, who was to serve in the same capacity at the Somme, calculated that one heavy howitzer (which he defined as 8 inches and above) was required for every 100 yards of front attacked.51 We have seen that Rawlinson employed this formula at the Somme to calculate that with approximately 200 heavy howitzers at his disposal he could attack around 20,000 yards of front.

  It is quite clear that Rawlinson regarded this situation as most satisfactory. In May he told his corps commanders:

  As regards the bombardment, looking at the operations as a whole, we shall have twice as many guns for the bombardment as we had at Loos, and we shall have an unl
imited supply of ammunition.52

  Yet the situation was hardly as promising as this statement implies. In the first place, Rawlinson himself, on the occasion of presenting his figures to the corps commanders, observed that the attack would be delivered on a front rather more than twice as wide as we attacked on at Loos'.53 So at least in terms of the availability of guns per yard of front, his army would not be better placed than in the previous operation. This is of particular importance given that Rawlinson himself had recognised that the British artillery at Loos was insufficient to destroy the German defences and for that very reason had employed poison gas in a futile attempt to rectify the insufficiency.

  Rawlinson's calculation concerning guns had been made purely in terms of the length of front. This had some validity at Loos where the German defences consisted of little more than the front line. It had no validity at the Somme where, as noted, enemy trenches consisted of a front system of three lines, including a strong second line some 2,000 to 4,000 yards beyond the first, and a maze of communication trenches between. Rawlinson, in his first proposal to Haig, intended to penetrate these defences to an average depth of 2,500 yards, in other words to subdue trenches greatly in excess of the actual length of front attacked. This was cause enough to raise doubts about Rawlinson's optimistic view of the artillery situation. Even more alarming, it will be recalled that Haig had extended Rawlinson's original objectives so that the trenches to be reduced were doubled, making any comparison with Loos even less relevant. In fact, if any calculations had been made at this point it would have been discovered that the 24,000 yards of front actually to be attacked had no less than 150,000 yards of trench behind it. The Loos calculation, accordingly, was out by a factor of eight.