replaced by a combination of the volunteers of the Territorial Force (equivalent to the Australian militia forces) and the units known as Kitchener’s New Army (troops who enlisted after the start of the war following a campaign headed by Lord Horatio Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War). A combined force of 13 British divisions to the north of the Somme River and 11 French divisions to its south would carry out the offensive. They would line up against 11 divisions of the German Second Army under General Fritz von Below. The battle would grow into one of the bloodiest in history, running from 1 July through to 18 November 1916, dragging in 50 divisions from each of the British, French and German armies, and resulting in casualties of more than a million men.
The preliminary bombardment began on 24 June and lasted for five days. Its unprecedented intensity rattled windows in London 260 kilometres away. The British artillery alone fired almost two million shells before the assault began across the entire Somme front at 7.30 am on 1 July, as witnessed by English poet John Masefield:
The price of war! The living mingle with the dead as troops shelter between actions on the Western Front.
all along that old front line of the English came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across no-man’s land to begin the Battle of the Somme.
Despite the extraordinary opening barrage, the German front line remained intact in many areas and their machine-gunners took a terrifying toll of the cumbersome British infantry. (It was later ascertained that up to 30 per cent of the British shells had been duds.) Burdened with equipment weighing more than 30 kilograms and organised into slow-moving lines, the British attackers fell like ninepins in the face of the unwavering German artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire.
Thanks to their superior artillery, the French to the south fared much better and in some of their sectors they met all of their first-day objectives. But the first day of the battle was an unmitigated disaster for the British. Communications broke down completely and for some days the British commanders had no accurate idea of progress or the scale of their losses. When the casualty figures eventually came in for that first day they showed the British had lost 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2152 missing and 585 taken as prisoners, for a total loss of 57,470. By contrast, the German forces against them suffered a total loss of about 8000. That revered and faithful reporter of the facts, The Times , reported the opening attack as follows:
EVERYTHING HAS GONE WELL
Our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counterattacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners taken.
The reality was summed up by a British captain quoted in Malcolm Brown’s Tommy Goes to War :
The trench was a horrible sight. The dead were stretched out on one side, one on top of each other six feet high. I thought at the time I should never get the peculiar disgusting smell of the vapour of warm human blood heated by the sun out of my nostrils. I would rather have smelt gas a hundred times. I can never describe that faint sickening, horrible smell which several times nearly knocked me up altogether.
Some of the British units suffered cataclysmic losses. The Newfoundland Regiment was virtually wiped out. This redoubtable band of men from what was then the Dominion of Newfoundland, a vast island in the Gulf of St Lawrence off the Canadian mainland, was the only North American unit to have fought in the Gallipoli campaign and was one of the last to leave as part of the British rearguard in January 1916. During the Somme offensive the regiment went into battle with the British at Beaumont-Hamel, 9 kilometres north of the town of Albert. Unable to reach even its starting point in the
The preliminary bombardment began on 24 June and lasted for five days. Its unprecedented intensity rattled windows in London 260 kilometres away. The British artillery alone fired almost two million shells before the assault began across the entire Somme front at 7.30 am on 1 July, as witnessed by English poet John Masefield:
The price of war! The living mingle with the dead as troops shelter between actions on the Western Front.
all along that old front line of the English came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across no-man’s land to begin the Battle of the Somme.
Despite the extraordinary opening barrage, the German front line remained intact in many areas and their machine-gunners took a terrifying toll of the cumbersome British infantry. (It was later ascertained that up to 30 per cent of the British shells had been duds.) Burdened with equipment weighing more than 30 kilograms and organised into slow-moving lines, the British attackers fell like ninepins in the face of the unwavering German artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire.
Thanks to their superior artillery, the French to the south fared much better and in some of their sectors they met all of their first-day objectives. But the first day of the battle was an unmitigated disaster for the British. Communications broke down completely and for some days the British commanders had no accurate idea of progress or the scale of their losses. When the casualty figures eventually came in for that first day they showed the British had lost 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2152 missing and 585 taken as prisoners, for a total loss of 57,470. By contrast, the German forces against them suffered a total loss of about 8000. That revered and faithful reporter of the facts, The Times , reported the opening attack as follows:
EVERYTHING HAS GONE WELL
Our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counterattacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners taken.
The reality was summed up by a British captain quoted in Malcolm Brown’s Tommy Goes to War :
The trench was a horrible sight. The dead were stretched out on one side, one on top of each other six feet high. I thought at the time I should never get the peculiar disgusting smell of the vapour of warm human blood heated by the sun out of my nostrils. I would rather have smelt gas a hundred times. I can never describe that faint sickening, horrible smell which several times nearly knocked me up altogether.
Some of the British units suffered cataclysmic losses. The Newfoundland Regiment was virtually wiped out. This redoubtable band of men from what was then the Dominion of Newfoundland, a vast island in the Gulf of St Lawrence off the Canadian mainland, was the only North American unit to have fought in the Gallipoli campaign and was one of the last to leave as part of the British rearguard in January 1916. During the Somme offensive the regiment went into battle with the British at Beaumont-Hamel, 9 kilometres north of the town of Albert. Unable to reach even its starting point in the
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