battle of the Somme

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Somme, battle of the (1916), WW I campaign in northern France. Battalions from every infantry regiment in the British army at some stage were stationed here, thus the Somme has a unique place in British social and military history. Although Haig would have preferred to attack in the north, he was persuaded to mount a major attack with the French on the Somme, where the Allied armies joined. However, the Germans attacked Verdun on 21 February, forcing France into an attritional, defensive battle. The Somme battle was therefore launched early, to draw German pressure off Verdun, and never involved as many French troops as had been intended. Bisected by the Albert-Bapaume road, the battleground was a series of gentle chalk ridges, into which the Germans had dug extensive fortifications. Haig's plan was for Rawlinson's Fourth Army to break through in the centre, capturing the Pozières ridgeline, while Gough's Reserve Army (later renamed the Fifth Army), including cavalry, exploited this gap and rolled up the German defences and took Bapaume. Allenby's Third Army was to mount a diversionary attack on Gommecourt, to the north.

Massive preparatory bombardment to destroy the German defences started at 06.00 on 24 June: 1.7 million shells were fired, while tunnelling companies hollowed out chambers under the key German strong points and filled them with explosives. Perhaps 30 per cent of the shells did not explode, while others failed to destroy the barbed wire or dugouts. The shelling started on ‘U’ Day, continued throughout the subsequent days, and the assault should have gone in on ‘Z’ Day, 29 June. Heavy rainstorms, which made the approach roads, trenches, and crater-ridden no man's land too wet and muddy to keep up with the strict timetable of advance, meant that ‘Z’ Day was postponed until 1 July.

As the attack went in, seventeen large mines were exploded under German strong points, and the guns lifted and fired further forward. Behind the creeping barrage infantry followed. Although there were local gains—36th Ulster Division was briefly successful near Thiepval, and on the southern end of the line Montauban was taken—the picture was bleak by the day's end. The British had lost 57, 470 officers and men—19, 240 of them killed, 2, 152 missing, the rest wounded. This casualty rate was an unprecedented experience for the British army. Martin Middlebrook has identified 32 battalions that lost over 500 men on 1 July. Twenty of these were New Army battalions of ‘Pals’ or ‘Chums’ units—groups of friends who enlisted together. Seven New Army divisions attacked, alongside three Territorial and four Regular ones, making 1 July a fairly even-handed affair. The French attack on the British right, although smaller in scale than initially planned, went relatively well, and the preponderance of heavy guns in the French sector proved a real help to adjacent British formations.

The images of 1 July tend to cloud the overall Somme campaign. The British army's casualties of that day need to be seen against its overall losses for the 142 days—some 415, 000 men. The perception is of disproportionate British casualties; in fact, the Germans are calculated to have suffered much more—possibly 650, 000. Spread over the 142 days, therefore, the average British casualty rate was under 3, 000 per day. John Terraine argues persuasively that 1 July should be seen as a freak day of battle, an unrepresentative snapshot of 1916, and certainly not a typical day of war.

There were twelve separate battles that together constitute the 1916 Somme campaign, which ended on 18 November 1916, when the 51st Highland Division took Beaumont Hamel (which had been a Day One objective). After the initial setback, Gough's Fifth Army took over attacking Pozières in the north, while Rawlinson's Fourth concentrated on securing a series of ridgelines in the Mametz-Montauban area, to the south. The 38th (Welsh) Division suffered particularly taking Mametz Wood, and fighting up to 13 July cost the Fourth Army 25, 000 more men. Longueval and Bazentin fell to a well-conducted night attack on the 14th, opening a hole in the German second line, but Delville Wood took longer to subdue, the South African Brigade suffering heavily. However, German reserves arrived in time to hold a line between High Wood and Delville Wood, on the crest of Longueval Ridge, and remained there for the rest of the summer. On 15 September, tanks made their first-ever appearance in war, supporting the attack on Flers-Courcelette. This led to the capture of High Wood, and the break-in to the German third line. While 1 July did not bring the breakthrough expected by Haig, by November he could claim a victory, though only in attritional terms. Territory had been taken, and the Germans pushed back and badly mauled: one officer called the Somme ‘the muddy grave of the German field army’. That eleven French divisions also fought on the Somme between July and November is often overlooked, along with the 200, 000 casualties they sustained.

The Somme, 1916.
(Click to enlarge)

The battle remains deeply controversial. Paddy Griffith emphasizes that the British army that emerged from it was a better-trained instrument of war than that which entered it, and John Terraine points out that the ‘true texture of the Somme’ included failed German counter-attacks as much as failed British attacks. However, it is impossible to exonerate Haig and Rawlinson from having fundamentally different conceptions of the battle: the latter had initially advocated modest ‘bite and hold’ tactics, and had little real confidence in the breakthrough he was bidden to achieve. There was also a distressing lack of grip by Fourth Army for much of the battle, when the same objectives were repeatedly attacked, with too little originality, behind too light a barrage. In principle Haig had no alternative but to fight on the Somme; but in practice it was not a well-handled battle.

Bibliography

• Brown, Malcolm, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme (London, 1996).
• Griffith, Paddy, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack 1916-1918 (London, 1994).
• Middlebrook, Martin, The First Day on the Somme (London, 1971).
• Prior, Robin, and Wilson, Trevor, Command on the Western Front (Oxford, 1992).
• Terraine, John, The Smoke and the Fire (London, 1980)

— Peter Caddick-Adams/Richard Holmes

A long-running battle in World War I near the upper basin of the Somme River in France. In the four and a half months of fighting (July to mid-November, 1916) little ground was gained by the British and French, attacking entrenched German positions. Casualties were in the hundreds of thousands on both sides, leading to the battle to become a emblem of the destructiveness of war. A smaller battle was fought in the same area in World War II.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has 2 meanings:

Meaning #1: battle of World War II (1944)
  Synonyms: Somme, Somme River

Meaning #2: battle in World War I (1916)
  Synonyms: Somme, Somme River

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