Elegies: the first day on the Somme
buy, around 7:30 120, 1,000 British Expeditionary Force soldiers rose from the trenches and advanced across no man's land towards the German lines. 100 years ago
The Offensive was the much-awaited "Big Push" -- The start of the Somme Offensive, the offensive on the western front of World War One. Allied command hoped to spend a week of artillery bombardment blowing the barbed wire in front of the troops to smithereens. But this was not to be, and before sundown 19,240 British soldiers were killed and 38,231 wounded or captured, an attrition rate of nearly 50%. The land they occupied was measured in yards, not miles, and in the face of determined German counter-attacks they had to cede most of it back almost immediately. This year's sad centenary was by far the worst day in the history of the British army.
For decades, the blame for this disaster has fallen at the feet of the British High Command. In particular, Britain's Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front, Sir Douglas Haig, was considered, in the judgment of the American writer Geoffrey Norman (published in an article entitled "The Worst General"), a ruthless fool - "There is no denying that the British commander-in-chief was a ruthless fool," he said. -"Undeniably, as his harshest critics say, he was a butcher, but above all an arrogant fool." As a result, his generals, by their slowness and intransigence, were seen as betraying the bravery of the men in the trenches, and the image of the "donkey leading the lion" has been fixed in the British imagination for half a century. For much of that time, Haig's American colleague, General John J. Pershing, was revered as a leader whose tenacity and independence built the American Expeditionary Force into a winning machine.
, but the quote, attributed to German officer Max Hoffmann, was *** out of his mouth by British historian Alan Clarke, who then the title of his influential 1961 study of World War I, Donkey. Clarke later told a friend that he had "invented" the dialog he was supposed to be quoting. Such generalizations are equally false. Recent scholarship and battlefield archaeology, previously unpublished documents, and survivor accounts from both sides support the new view of Haig and his commanders: that they were smarter and more adaptable than other Allied generals and were quick to apply the hard lessons of the Somme, to cite one example that Pansing intentionally ignored.
I'd like to go a step further here and argue that it's time to really turn around the reputations of both generals.
While most Americans probably didn't focus on World War I until the centennial of the U.S. Army's entry into battle in the fall of 2017, the contrast between Hague After the Somme and Pershing After That Wild Autumn provides a sobering study. Despite the British example, Pershing took a surprisingly long time to adapt to the new realities of the battlefield, at the cost of a great deal of unnecessarily spilled American blood. Too many American generals clung to outdated dogma about how to fight the Germans, even though there was plenty of evidence that it was a necessary one. A great debate began about who was more foolish on the Western front. "Democratic Revolutionary Party" General Sir Douglas Haig (left) learned from his mistakes; General John Pershing (right) did not. (?PVDE/Bridgeman Images)
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Douglas Haig was the 11th and final child, born to a prominent Scotch whisky distillery and his wife. He was prone to asthma as a child, but he had several famous warriors in his ancestry, and as an adult a soldier in the British Empire was a model of manhood. He became a soldier.
Dutiful, reticent, and energetic, Haig served in senior positions in two total wars: the Sudan in 1898 and the Boer War of 1899-1902, and later became a center of reform and reorganization of the British Army; his superiors considered him to have a "first-rate staff mind" in the war office in the run-up to the war, thinking about how Britain would deploy its far-flung forces. War Office, thinking about how Britain would deploy an expeditionary force in France and Belgium if it had to. Nevertheless, he was slow to grasp the vagaries of mechanized warfare.
Within months of the outbreak of the conflict in August 1914, the mobile warfare that both sides had hoped for was replaced by a system of trenches stretching for 400 miles, from the Channel coast to the Swiss border. British General Sir Ian Hamilton wrote: "The war descended into the lowest depths of *** and depravity. "The glory of war" disappeared as "the army in its own corruption had to eat, drink and sleep."
Both sides spent 1915 trying to break out and rebuild mobile warfare, but the superiority of the machine gun as a defensive weapon defeated that hope again and again. Never before in the realm of human conflict had so many been wiped out so quickly by so few, and the Germans adopted it before the French and British. In Somme they deployed a copy of the weapon by the American inventor Hiram Max, a water-cooled belt-fed 7.92mm caliber weapon that weighed less than 60 pounds and could fire 500 rounds per minute. It had an optimum range of 2,000 yards, but remained fairly accurate at 4,000 yards. Nicknamed "The Lawnmower" or "The Coffee Grinder" by the French and "The Devil's Paintbrush" by the British, the German MG08 provided a formidable firepower. The German MG08 machine gun provided formidable firepower. Rate of fire: 400-500 rounds/minute. Optimum range: 2,000 yards. Muzzle velocity: 2,953 feet per second. Empty weight: 58.42 pounds (Diagram by Hessam Hussein; Das Massingenegger Verget (MG 08) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Allen Nurengen-Machine Gun Unit (MG 08) with all improvements)
On February 21, 1916, the Germans attacked Verdun. With no less than 90,000 French casualties in just 6 weeks, the attack lasted for 10 months, during which time the total number of French casualties was 377,000 (162,000 deaths) to 337,000 for Germany. Some 1,250,000 people were killed or wounded in the Verdun district during the war. The town itself never fell, but the massacre nearly broke the will of the French resistance and contributed to widespread mutinies in the army the following year.
Largely to ease the pressure on Verdun, the place and time of the Anglo-French attack on the Somme, nearly 200 miles to the north-west, was when the French commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre, visited his rival, Haig, in May 1916, and French losses at Verdun were projected to reach 200,000 pounds by the end of the month. Instead of caring about the survival of his soldiers, Haig tried to buy time for his green troops and inexperienced commanders. He promised to launch an attack between July 1 and August 15 in the Somme area. "KDSPE" "KDSPs" Joffre replied that if the British waited until August 15, "the French army would cease to exist," "KDSPE" "KDSPs" Haig promised Saturday. on July 1st.
(Gilbert Gates)********
The six weeks from July 1 to Aug. 15 may have little bearing on the outcome. Hague faced the best army in Europe.
Nor can Hague turn to Britain's Lord Secretary of State for War for kitchen work to change the date or location. After meeting Kitchener in London last December, he wrote in his diary, "I am going to remain on friendly terms with the French." . "General Joffe should be regarded as Commander-in-Chief [of the Allies]. In France we must make every effort to fulfill his wishes.
Still proving that Haig was a fine diplomat in the Western Alliance, a coalition that included France, Belgium, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and, later, the United States Army. Curiously, for a sedate Victorian and devout Christian, Haig as a young officer was interested in materialism, and he consulted a medium that brought him into contact with Napoleon. It is difficult, however, to discover the hand of the Almighty or the Emperor on the ground chosen by Joffre and Haig for the attack of July 1st.
The fluctuating, chalky Picardy farmland, the meandering Somme and Ancre rivers are studded with easy-to-protect towns and villages whose names meant nothing before 1916 but became synonymous with slaughter. The Germans had been methodically preparing for an attack on the Somme, with the first two German trenches long since repaired and a third in progress,
German personnel constructed deep bunkers, well-protected shelters, concrete strongholds and well-concealed forward operating posts, while maximizing the machine gun field of fire. The more advanced bunkers had kitchens and rooms to store food, ammunition, and supplies most needed for trench warfare, such as grenades and wool socks. Some had rails mounted on the bunker steps so that machine guns could be pulled up once the bombing stopped. Recent studies of battlefield archaeology by historians such as John Lee and Gary Sheffield have shown how in some areas, such as around Thiepval, the Germans dug a real rabbit warren of rooms and tunnels under their lines.
Against these fortifications, the British and French high commands **** fired 1.6 million shells in the seven days leading up to July 1st. The official historian of the 18th Division, Captain G.H.F. Nicholls, wrote: "The scale and extent of the bombardment was beyond previous human experience, and all the officers from the colonel down told us that very few Germans would be able to take part in the fighting after our heavy shelling, recalled Colonel Lance Sidney of the Queen Victoria Rifles. Some British commanders even considered deploying cavalry after an infantry raid. "My strongest recollection: all that imposing cavalry, ready to follow the breach," recalled Private Redbender of the 5th West Yorkshire Regiment. "How it was to be hoped!
SUBSCRIPTION TO SMITHSON'S MAGAZINE NOW ONLY $12This article was selected from the July/August issue of Smithsonian Magazine
BUYYet a large number of British artillery shells were three-quarters made in the United States. According to German observers, about 60 percent of British medium-caliber shells and nearly every grenade fragment failed to explode. British sources indicate that it was closer to 35 percent of each. In any case, quality control at the War Office clearly failed.
Historians still debate why. Shortages of labor and machinery, and overworked subcontractors were probably responsible for much of it. In the next century, farmers would live to plow so much land that their collection of unexploded shells became known as the "iron harvest" (in 2014, I saw some newly discovered shells on the side of the road near the village of Sayre.)
So when the whistle blew and the men climbed out of the trenches at 7:30 that morning, they had to try to get through the barbed wire. According to the official British history of h war.
For example, the British 29th Division prescribed that each infantryman "carry his rifle and accoutrements, 170 rounds of small-arms ammunition, one iron ration and rations for the day of the raid, two belt sandbags, two steel mill bombs [i.e., hand grenades], steel helmet, helmet with smoke [i.e., gas] in the rucksack, bottle of water, and rucksack on the back, and first aid-ground dress code and identity card." And, "The first aid-ground dress code and identity card. "And: "Troops in the second and third waves will carry only 120 rounds of ammunition. At least 40 percent of the infantry will carry shovels and 10 percent will carry picks.
Just the soldiers' personal equipment; they also had to carry a lot of other supplies, such as flares, stakes and sledgehammers. No wonder the official British history says that these men "could not walk faster than a slow pace."
The British army carried almost half its weight. (?IWM (Q 744))*****
Most of the day's deaths occurred in the first 15 minutes of the battle. "It was at this point that my confidence was replaced by the fact that I had been sent here to die," recalled Sergeant Crossley, 15th Drum Light Infantry (who proved to be wrong about the situation), "and as the Germans opened up on the 8th Division, the air was filled with
"the piercing noise of steam," Henry Williamson recalled. "[I] knew what it was: machine-gun bullets, each one faster than sound, hissing and bursting the air almost simultaneously, many thousands of them." When men were hit, he wrote, "some seemed to stop dead in their tracks, lower their heads, sink carefully to their knees, roll slowly, and lie still. Others rolled around, screaming and grabbing at my legs, and I had to struggle to get free. Paul Scheidt of the 109th Reserve Infantry Regiment recalled, "The British walked as if they were going to the theater or on a parade ground." Carl Brunker of the 169th said he changed the barrel of his machine gun five times to prevent overheating after each of the 5,000 rounds fired. "We thought they were crazy," he recalled.
Many British soldiers were killed as they reached the top of the trench ladder. 801 men of the 88th Brigade Newfoundland Regiment crossed the line that day, killing 266 and wounding 446, a casualty rate of 89 percent. Rev. Montague Bere, chaplain of the 43rd Casualty Clearing Station, wrote to his wife on July 4, "No one can put on paper the whole truth of what happened on Saturday and Saturday night, and if he reads it, no one can read it without being sick."
In Winston Churchill's judgment, the British were "no less martyrs than soldiers," and "the battlefield of the Somme is the graveyard of Kitchener's army,"
Sigfried Sassoon's soldiers had already called him "mad" for his reckless bravery Sigfried Sassoon's soldiers already called him "Mad Jack" for his reckless bravery: single-handedly occupying German trenches or bringing wounded men under fire, a feat for which he would receive the Military Cross on July 27, 1916. He made it through the first day of the Somme unscathed, but he remembers that a few days later, when he and his unit were evacuating, they came across a group of about 50 British dead, "their fingers mingled with the bloodstained girdle as if acknowledging the company of death." He wandered through the scene of thrown-down equipment and rags. "I would say I saw 'the horrors of war,'" he wrote, "and here they are."
He lost a brother in the 1915 war, and he himself would take a bullet in 1917. But his departure from the war, a war that produced some of the most moving anti-war poetry of the Great War, began on the Somme.
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, as the official history of the war in Britain puts it: 'More is learned from defeat than from victory, and, after all, defeat is the real experience, and is not usually too much attributed to good men If the horrors of July 1, 1916, were any consolation to the British commanders, it was that they soon learned from it. Hague, who was clearly responsible for the failures of his men, initiated a revolution in tactics at all levels and promoted officers capable of implementing these changes by mid-September, and the concept of 'creeping artillery fire' proved effective: it began by crushing any Germans who crawled out of no-man's-land halfway across the country before dawn, and then advancing in a precisely coordinated manner, 100 yards every four minutes, ahead of the infantry attack. The development of the Royal Flying Corps photo image analysis system improved the accuracy of the artillery. Improvements were made in the Quartermaster's Department and ordnance was improved.
First, infantry tactics changed. Instead of marching side by side, men were ordered to make short sprints under cover of blazing fire. on July 1, infantry attacks were organized mainly around companies, which typically numbered about 200 men; by November, companies consisted of 30 or 40 men, and had now been transformed into four highly interdependent and efficient groups of experts, with each platoon ideally numbering one officer and 48 subordinates Tactics would have been meaningless without better training. The British Expeditionary Force excelled here. after July 1, every battalion, division, and regiment was required to submit a post-war report with recommendations, which resulted in the publication of two new manuals on the practicalities of barbed wire, field operations, ground appreciation, and avoiding enemy fields of fire. By 1917, the plethora of new pamphlets ensured that every man knew what was expected of him if his officers and non-commissioned officers were killed.
It was an energetic British Expeditionary Force that inflicted a series of punishing defeats on the enemy at Arras on April 9 and Messines Ridge on June 7, and in the third Ypres in September-October, well-prepared Operation Bite the Bullet captured important terrain before German infantry counterattacks retook it. German infantry counterattacked to retake the terrain and then massacred them. After absorbing the brunt of the German Spring Offensive in March, April and May 1918, the BEF became an essential part of the Allied offensive, in which a complex system of infantry, artillery, tanks, motorized machine guns and aircraft drove the German army back to the Rhine.
The effect was clear A captain in the German Guard Reserve Division said, "The Somme is the muddy grave of the German field army."
German soldiers with machine guns in the trenches, July 1916 (Rue des Archives/the Granger Collection)*****
The United States sent observers to both sides from 1914, however with Britain's declaration of war by the U.S. in 1917, and U.S. troops going to war in October, the U.S. High Command seemed to lose the the experience. As Churchill said of the Dougboys, "Half trained, half organized, with only their courage, their numbers and their magnificent youth behind arms, they had to buy their experience at a terrible price." In less than six months of fighting, the United States lost 115,000 dead and 200,000 wounded.
It was the men who led the American expeditionary force that had little experience in large-scale warfare, and neither did anyone else in the U.S. Army.After winning the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States did not face a major enemy for 20 years.
"Black Jack" is the polite version of John Pershing's nickname, given to him by his classmates at racist West Point after he commanded the Bison Soldiers, the segregated African-American Tenth U.S. Cavalry, in battles against the Plains Indians. He showed personal bravery fighting the Apaches in the late 1880s, Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and until 1903 the Philippines. By 1917, however, he had little experience commanding anything other than small-scale counter-guerrilla campaigns such as the pursuit, but failure to round up, Pancho Villa in Mexico in 1916. The future General Douglas MacArthur recalled that Pershing's "steely gaze, determined look and inspiring chin almost created a caricature of nature's soldier."
In August 1915, his wife, Helen, and their three daughters, ages 3 to 8, died in a fire that engulfed the elder San Francisco. In response, he threw himself into his work, a work that most crucially did not involve any rigorous study of the nature of the war on the Western front in case the United States became involved. This was all the more surprising since he had served as a military observer in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the Balkan Wars of 1908.
, and Pershing arrived in France with firm ideas about how the war should be conducted. He was adamant about *** attempts to "mix" some soldiers into British or French units, and was a particular advocate of the American way of "open" warfare, and an article in the September 1914 issue of The Infantryman's Magazine distilled the American approach that Panshin believed in so strongly: Infantrymen hit by artillery fire would "leap up, gather together, form a long line, and from the beginning to the end of the day (fire their weapons by men) ignite. The last overhead draw of the army, the last charge in the crowd, the rapid rush of the bayonet in readiness, the simultaneous roar of the artillery ...... The cavalry lurched out of their bunkers with a wild roar of victory, and the attack began. Warriors killed by gunfire will plant their tattered banners on the ground, covered with the bodies of their defeated foes.
Anything remotely close to the way war was actually fought at the time is unimaginable.
In the actual combat infantry was supreme, the "official military doctrine of the United States" at the time. (It was not until 1923 that it recognized the great role of artillery.) "It is the infantry that conquers the battlefield, directs the fighting, and ultimately decides the fate." In the European theater, however, modern artillery and machine guns changed all that. It's ridiculous to say that "firepower is an aid, but only an aid" is outdated.
Even as late as 1918, Pershing insisted that "the rifle and the bayonet are still the supreme weapons of the infantry," and that "the ultimate success of armies depends on their proper use in open warfare."
When Pershing arrived with his staff in the summer of 1917, U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker also sent a fact-finding mission that included an artillery expert, Colonel Charles P. Sommer, and a machine-gun expert, Lieutenant Colonel John Parker. Sommer was quick to insist that the American Expeditionary Force needed twice as many guns as it had in the past, especially medium field guns and howitzers, "without which the experience of the present war positively shows that the infantry cannot advance." However, the U.S. High Command rejected the idea. Parker added that he and Sommer were "both convinced ...... that the era of the rifleman was over ...... that the bayonet would soon be as obsolete as the crossbow," which was considered heretical. The USAF training section chief scribbled on the report, "John, speak for yourself." Pershing refused to modify USAF doctrine. As historian Mark Grotruesschen noted, "Only a battlefield struggle can do that."
Those struggles began at 3:45 a.m. on June 6, 1918, when the U.S. 2nd Division attacked in a linear wave at the Battle of Bellwood, killing and wounding hundreds in a matter of minutes, more than nine, and taking the wood again five days later. The division commander, General James Hubbard, a Pansing native, said, "When a soldier climbs to the front, the adventure becomes open war for him," even though there had been no "open" war on the Western Front for nearly four years.
Hubbard learned enough from his losses for Bello Wood to agree with Marine Brigade Commander John Lejeune, who said, "The reckless courage of the infantryman with rifle and bayonet could not prevail against the machine gun, which was well protected in its nest of rocks." Yet Pansing and most of the rest of the High Command were at the ensuing Battle of Soissons (where they lost 7,000 men, including 75% of their field officers). A subsequent report noted, "These men were not permitted to advance by sprinting or to take advantage of the bullet holes caused by our barrage, but they were obliged to follow the barrage by marching slowly at the rate of 100 yards in three minutes." The men tended to congregate in these "ancient conventional attack formations ...... with no apparent attempt to exploit the cover."
Fortunately for the Allies, the officers of Pershing's men soon realized that their teachings had to change. Tactical and other adaptations by the likes of Robert Bullard, John Lejeune, Charles Sommer and the lean chief of staff George Marshall enabled the best of the American divisions to contribute significantly to the Allied victory. It was they who took into account the lessons learned by the British and French armies at Hekatom on the first day of the Somme two years earlier. After the war,, Pershing returned home to a hero's welcome for placing the Army under American command and projecting American power overseas. The rank of general in the army was created for him. But the way he waged war was dangerously outdated