In 1916, when the war had been going on for 24 months, and even though the previous year had seen a complete victory for defence, the war continued to have popular support in Britain, as in Germany. The conflict was not going well for the Allies. Verdun in early 1916 was bleeding the French Army white. Kitchener’s ‘New Army’, the ‘Pals’ battalions, recruited in the first flush of 1914 enthusiasm, was filling in the line along the Somme. They replaced skeletal regular and Territorial Army battalions, decimated by two years of Western Front stalemate. The plan was to overcome the impasse with combined Allied offensives from west, east and south, but the ‘Big Push’ had to be prematurely launched by the British to relieve the French crisis at Verdun. Kitchener’s un-blooded recruits were prematurely hurled at the German Western Front through a storm of machine-gun and shell fire against intact barbed wire before they were ready. On 1 July 1916 more than half the size of the present-day British Army perished in the first 24 hours at the battle of the Somme.
This iconic day transformed the prevailing opinion in Britain that one ‘Big Push’ mounted with spirit, patriotism and guts would see the end of the war. It was a day when hope died. The British General Staff placed its faith in an optimistic concept that concentrated artillery fire would clear the way for Kitchener’s untrained army to conduct a ‘cake-walk’ through the German lines.
24 Hours at the Somme describes that catastrophic day hour by hour through the differing perspectives of both sides. The British trench view is juxtaposed against that from the German parapet and dugout alongside the backdrop of their staff commands, who, ensconced in châteaux to the rear, could see nothing. Staffs on the Western Front were not soft-hearted. Planning and decisions were to decimate 75 British battalions, the equivalent of six divisions of infantry.
No single battle has had such a widespread emotional impact on the psyche of the British public. Two hours of the 24 decided the battle. By nightfall 57,470 men lay dead, or were wounded or missing, at a cost of just 6,000 German dead. They encapsulated the cream of British volunteer manhood. Relatives from these casualties would have numbered some six million, from a population of 43 million, so that 13 per cent of the island community was affected by one day’s events. Entire districts and streets in major cities and rural village communities retired behind dark curtains having lost their menfolk that day. A documentary film was made and released even before the battle had finished four months later. It is estimated that within six weeks of its release 20 million people had viewed it at 1,500 cinemas across the country. Men were seen to fall on screen as they clambered out of their trenches on that July day, bringing home the horrors of war to the public for the first time. ‘Oh my God, they’re dead!’ cried out one woman in the audience. Almost half the population queued to see The Battle of the Somme, a box-office success that has never been equalled. More British soldiers died on 1 July 1916 than were lost in the Crimean, Boer and Korean wars combined.
The day begins with optimism and expectation in the crowded British trenches. Nothing, they are convinced, could have survived the seven-day artillery concentration preceding the attack. But the Germans secure in their deep dugouts have survived. They are veterans.
I have to date avoided writing about the Great War. Two questions have posed an enigma. As a former serving soldier, it is immensely difficult to rationalise what motivates simple soldiers to advance to certain death in the face of intense machine-gun fire and battered by overwhelming artillery fire. They volunteered to do this, following impractical orders, even though the carnage of the leading waves was strewn about the ground before them. How could this happen?
The second conundrum is that senior officers, probably more intellectually gifted than you or I, sent them on their way. How could this be so?
24 Hours at the Somme charts this dreadful day through the eyes, ears and senses of the soldiers themselves, through eyewitness accounts, diaries, unit logs and a mass of supporting material exhaustively harvested from across Europe. Château generalship is juxtaposed with the trench parapet view.
It attempts to offer some answers by using the words of the soldiers themselves to explain what happened. The reader may judge.
The first day of the Somme has had more of a widespread emotional impact on the psyche of the British public than any other battle in history. Now, 100 years later, Robert Kershaw attempts to understand the carnage, using the voices of the British and German soldiers who lived through that awful day.
In the early hours of 1 July 1916, the British General staff placed its faith in patriotism and guts, believing that one ‘Big Push’ would bring on the end of the Great War. By sunset, there were 57,470 men – more than half the size of the present-day British Army – who lay dead, missing or wounded. On that day hope died.
Juxtaposing the British trench view against that from the German parapet, Kershaw draws on eyewitness accounts, memories and letters to expose the true horror of that day. Amongst the mud, gore and stench of death, there are also stories of humanity and resilience, of all-embracing comradeship and gritty patriotic British spirit. However it was this very emotion which ultimately caused thousands of young men to sacrifice themselves on the Somme.
ROBERT KERSHAW is a former Para, who was commissioned into the British Army’s Parachute Regiment in 1973. His active service includes tours in Northern Ireland, the first Gulf War (during which he was awarded the US Bronze Star) and Bosnia. He became commander of 10 PARA and retired as a full Colonel in 2006. Today, Robert is a highly acclaimed military historian and author, and guides battlefield tours throughout the world. 24 Hours at the Somme is his tenth book.
Self-imposed censorship was a strain for war correspondent Phillip Gibbs, standing in a beetroot field on the ‘Grandstand’ viewpoint overlooking the panorama of the spectacular night-time artillery bombardment. He felt he wanted to write the truth as he saw it. ‘I stood with a few officers in the centre of a crescent sweeping round from Auchonvillers, Thiepval, La Boisselle and Fricourt to Bray, on the Somme.’ The view to his front was spectacular, ‘our fire for a time was most fierce’, he recalled, ‘so that sheets of flame waved to and fro as though fanned by a furious wind’. Occasionally the artillery fire might pause for as much as 30 seconds when ‘darkness, very black and velvety, blotted out everything and restored the world to peace’. But not for long – ‘then suddenly, at one point or another, the earth seemed to open furnace fires’.
The sky was virtually cloudless during this final hour before midnight, heralding a promising summer dawn for 1 July 1916. Glancing south, Gibbs spotted another of those ‘violent shocks of light, and then a moment later another by Auchonvillers to the north’. Gibbs enthusiastically wanted to write about what he instinctively knew to be the ‘Big Push’. ‘For nearly a week now,’ he remembered, ‘we have been bombarding the enemy’s lines from the Yser to the Somme’ – but ‘we had to keep the secret, to close our lips tight, to write vague words lest the enemy should get a hint too soon.’ The evidence crackling to his front was clear to see:
And once again the infernal fires began, flashing, flickering, running along a ridge with a swift tongue of flame, tossing burning feathers above rosy smoke-clouds, concentrating into one bonfire of bursting shells over Fricourt and Thiépval, upon which our batteries always concentrated.
Gibbs was staring at the centre of the British Fourth Army front, shortly due to launch an offensive across an 18-mile frontage configured roughly in the shape of a capital letter ‘L’. From Serre in the north to Fricourt due south, the British line faced east. Gibbs overlooked the Fricourt salient, where the line changed direction to Maricourt further east, where the British would attack north, alongside the French. His Grandstand view was where the perpendicular side of the ‘L’ met the horizontal. Along virtually the whole front the Germans dominated the tactical high ground. The observers accompanying Gibbs watched intently as ‘red lights ran up and down like little red dancing devils’ where the ground rose steeply to Usna Hill by La Boisselle and to Château Thiepval above the wood.
Gibbs had been sending reports to the Daily Telegraph and Daily Chronicle virtually since the war began. He knew, ‘when the guns spoke one morning last week with a louder voice than has yet been heard upon the front’, that this was the likely opening of the new offensive. A mass of men and materiel had flowed in from the French ports for weeks now, ‘new men of new divisions’. He sensed an atmosphere of pent-up emotion among the troops. ‘There was a thrill in the air, a thrill from the pulse of men who knew the meaning of attack.’1
Corporal George Ashurst, with the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers, had spent the preceding week in the trenches of Beaumont Hamel, to the left of Gibbs’s field of vision. He called it the ‘Big Bang’ and, like the correspondent, appreciated ‘what a spectacle it was to stand quite upright in our front line at night-time’. This was a rare event indeed because of the risk of incoming German fire.
To see the sky illuminated with hundreds of large and small flashes like lightning dancing on the distant ridges, and listening to the continuous roar of big and little shells passing overhead.
He tried to discern the course of the shells arcing overhead and ‘then to turn about and look towards Fritz’s lines, to see a sight that made one feel pity even for an enemy’. Huge howitzer shells dug deeply, gouging out great fountains of earth from the German ridge line to his front, ‘shaking the very ground under our feet four or five hundred yards away’. The explosions displaced tons of earth, leaving gaping holes ‘in which a house could be placed’. The sound of an aeroplane overhead momentarily distracted them from the noise of the flying shells. Strangely illuminated, they could even pick out the tell-tale red, white and blue British roundels beneath its wings. It disappeared almost as quickly and was lost from sight.2
Pilot Cecil Arthur Lewis, flying overhead in a Morane Parasol with No. 3 Squadron Royal Flying Corps, recalled the terrible beauty of the scene when he flew this last patrol over the Somme front just as it grew dark. ‘The whole of the ground beneath the darkening evening was just like a veil of sequins, which were flashing and flashing,’ he recalled. ‘Each one was a gun,’ he appreciated, a dangerous environment, because his aircraft was ‘continually bucketing and jumping, as if in a gale’ as shells shrieked past. Not many servicemen could like correspondent Gibbs indulge in the view as a visual spectacle. Sergeant-Major Ernest Shepherd, a regular soldier, already seven years with the Dorset Regiment, was moving through the night towards the front-line salient via Aveluy Wood and Authuille, south of Thiepval. He had watched from Senlis Mill, which gave ‘a good view of the bombardment’ near his holding area, five days before. He knew the ‘Big Push’ was imminent. ‘The whole country is light as day with the gun flashes,’ he wrote in his diary, noting ‘several fires at points in enemy lines’. Looking rearward he saw ‘our lamps busily flashing messages behind us’.3
Despite the ferocity of the bombardment, Phillip Gibbs at his Grandstand vantage point above Albert felt ‘it was all muffled’. Distance appeared to mute the violence being visited upon the shadowy ridge lines opposite. He remembers the night sky with a few low-lying clouds, with the air calm and moist, not stirred by the wind. ‘Even our own batteries did not crash out with any startling thunder,’ he thought, despite hearing ‘the rush of big shells, like great birds in flight’. Most of the noise was distant rumbling, interrupted now and then by a ‘dull heavy thunder-clap’. It all seemed so remote. Star shells were continually rising above the German lines, ‘cutting out the black outline of the trees and broken roofs, and revealed heavy white smoke-clouds rolling over the enemy positions’. Yet all ‘along this stretch of the battle front there was no sign of men’; all he could see close by was the beetroot crop and wheat gently waving beyond.
Gibbs was not the most popular correspondent at General Sir Douglas Haig’s General Headquarters (GHQ) at Montreuil. His first contact with the British Commander-in-Chief had been the previous year after the battle of Loos, when Haig had commanded the First Army. Hostile to the press, he had drawn a line across his operational area, beyond which the media would have no access. Brigadier-General Charteris, Haig’s intelligence chief, was also his press-minder and nervous about Gibbs’s frank responses to imposed censorship. ‘I understand fairly well what you gentlemen want,’ Haig had insensitively pointed out, and it was not what the press wanted to hear:
You want to get hold of little stories of heroism, and so forth, and to write them up in a bright way to make good reading for Mary Ann in the kitchen, and the man in the street.4
Haig was taken aback at the restrained passion of the response from the assembled press. He was reminded that men who had been sent to war from the Homeland and British Empire had a right to ‘know what they were doing and how they were doing’. The correspondents wanted to ‘mention more frequently the names of troops engaged – especially English troops – for the sake of the soldiers themselves, who were discouraged by this lack of recognition, and for the sake of the people behind them’. Charteris advised Haig to mellow and relax the censorship rules as far as possible. He took the advice. Casualty lists alone willed it.
As Gibbs watched the flashing ‘points of flame’ stabbing across the sky across the front visible from Thiepval to La Boisselle, he heard the steady tramp of marching feet for the first time. ‘Shadow forms came up out of the dark tunnel below the trees,’ he recalled, and some ‘were singing some music-hall tune, with a lilt in it’ as they marched towards the flashing and crackling vista of the front line opening before them. They were ‘tall boys of a North Country regiment’. Gibbs had to admire their composure. Some whistled the ‘Marseillaise’ while others gossiped quietly as they walked past. They did not seem to be in dread of pending action, perhaps because this was their first time. ‘A young officer walking at the head of his platoon called out a cheery good night to me.’ They could just as easily have passed on a London street.
At midnight a staff officer gathered the press in a small room. The door was shut and the window closed before he whispered conspiratorially, ‘The attack will be made this morning at 07.30.’ There was absolute silence from the dozen or so officers who heard the words:
Men who were to be lookers-on and who would not have to leave a trench up there on the battlefields when the little hand of a wrist-watch said, ‘It is now.’
‘Our hearts beat jumpily for just a moment,’ Gibbs recalled. ‘There would be no sleep for all those men crowded in the narrow trenches on the north of the Somme.’ It was now 1 July 1916, he realised.
‘God give them courage in the morning . . .’5
| 1914 | |
| 28 JUNE | Assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. |
| 28 JULY | Austria declares war on Serbia. |
| 29 JULY | Russia mobilises. |
| 3 AUGUST | German invasion of Belgium. |
| 4 AUGUST | Britain enters the war. |
| SEPTEMBER | German advance halted at the Marne. German Army on the defensive in Somme area. Kitchener appeals for mass British volunteer army. |
| OCTOBER | First battle of Ypres, Western Front stabilised. |
| 1915 | |
| 6–8 DECEMBER | Chantilly Conference. Allies agree to launch co-ordinated offensives across battlefronts in the west, east and south. |
| 19 DECEMBER | General Sir Douglas Haig takes over as Commander-in-Chief BEF from Field Marshal Sir John French. |
| 29 DECEMBER | Haig attends conference to discuss Anglo-French offensive on the Somme. |
| 1916 | |
| 24 JANUARY | First Military Service (Conscription) Bill passed by British House of Commons. |
| 21 FEBRUARY | The German offensive at Verdun begins. |
| 12 MARCH | Allied Conference at Chantilly for coming summer offensive. |
| 25 MAY | British conscription extended. |
| 31 MAY | Naval battle of Jutland. |
| 4 JUNE | Russian Brusilov offensive begins on the Eastern Front. |
| 5 JUNE | Kitchener drowned during the sinking of HMS Hampshire en route to Russia to discuss joint strategy. |
| 24 JUNE | Beginning of the preliminary bombardment for the Somme battle. |
| 27 JUNE | Haig moves his headquarters forward to the Château Valvion, 12 miles from the front. |
| 28 JUNE | H-Hour postponed for two days due to bad weather. |
| 30 JUNE, MIDNIGHT | Relief of some German regiments in the Somme line under way. 158 British battalions march forward from village staging areas to the front line. |
| 1 JULY | |
| 5.46 AM | Sunrise. |
| 7.20 AM | Hawthorne mine explodes in front of Beaumont Hamel. |
| 7.28 AM | Remainder of preliminary mines exploded. |
| 7.30 AM | H-Hour. |
| 8.30 AM | 30,000 of 66,000 British infantry are casualties. The Schwaben Redoubt is captured. There is failure between Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel and between Thiepval and Fricourt. Partial success near Mametz and Montauban. |
| 9.30 AM | Only one third of objectives are taken, one third of the remainder achieve only small enclaves, the rest are repulsed. The French attack to the south of the River Somme and achieve total surprise. |
| 9.45 AM | Generalmajor von Soden orders the recapture of the Schwaben Redoubt, taken by the 36th Ulster Division. |
| 11.15 AM | Orders issued for the recapture of the Schwaben Redoubt. |
| MIDDAY | The British have suffered 50,000 casualties and have been repelled along 80 per cent of the front. Comparative lull. |
| 1 PM | There is success to the right of the line next to the French XX Corps, and Mametz and Montauban are captured. |
| 2.30 PM | 50th Brigade attack repulsed at Fricourt. |
| 2.45 PM | Last British attacks called off. Haig confers with Rawlinson, Commander Fourth Army. |
| 3 PM | German three-pronged counter-attack underway against the Schwaben Redoubt. Losing impetus at 4 pm. |
| 7 PM | Haig places VIII and X Corps under command of Lt.-Gen. Gough, forming new Fifth Army. Planned attacks cancelled. |
| 9 PM | German artillery fire concentrated on the Schwaben Redoubt to support the final counter-attack to restore the Thiepval plateau. |
| 10.03 PM | Sunset Last-ditch elements of the London Division quit Gommecourt and the 36th Ulster Division survivors depart the Schwaben Redoubt. British wounded and stragglers return to the British line. |
| 10.30 PM. | The Germans recapture the Schwaben Redoubt. |
| MIDNIGHT | The German line is restored across 80 per cent of the front to Fricourt. The British have penetrated just over one mile to the right at Mametz and Montauban. |
| 18 NOVEMBER | The end of the battle of the Somme. |
| 1917 | |
| 6 APRIL | The United States declares war on Germany. |
| OCTOBER–NOVEMBER | The Russian Revolution begins, ceasefire Eastern Front. |
| 1918 | |
| MARCH | Final German offensive in the west, the Somme gains re-occupied. |
| APRIL–JULY | Successive German attacks. |
| JULY | Allied turning point. |
| NOVEMBER | Final Allied assaults. |
| 9 NOVEMBER | The Kaiser abdicates. |
| 11 NOVEMBER | German Armistice in the west. |
ARMY
Commanded by a General.
Comprised about four corps, but precise numbers depended on the army’s role.
CORPS
Commanded by a Lieutenant-General.
Usually comprised three or four divisions.
DIVISION
Commanded by a Major-General.
Usually comprised three brigades.
BRIGADE
Commanded by a Brigadier-General.
Four battalions.
German equivalent comprised two Regiments each of three battalions with a machine-gun (MG) company.
BATTALION
Commanded by a Lieutenant-Colonel.
Four companies. Normally about 900 to 1,000 men with MG platoon.
German equivalent 1,000 men with 90-man MG company.
COMPANY
Commanded by a Major or Captain.
Four platoons. About 200 to 250 men.
German equivalent about 230 men with MG platoon.
PLATOON
Commanded by a Lieutenant.
Four sections. About 40 men.
German equivalent 45 men.
SECTION/SQUAD
Commanded by a Corporal with 8 to 10 men.
| Field Marshal | Generalfeldmarschall |
| General | Generaloberst |
| Lieutenant-General | General der Infanterie, Kavallerie etc |
| Major-General | Generalmajor |
| Brigadier-General | no German equivalent |
| Colonel | Oberst |
| Lieutenant-Colonel | Oberstleutnant |
| Major | Major |
| Captain | Hauptmann Rittmeister (cavalry) |
| Lieutenant | Oberleutnant |
| Second Lieutenant | Leutnant |
| Sergeant-Major | Stabsfeldwebel or Feldwebel (ac to unit) |
| Staff Sergeant | Vizefeldwebel |
| Sergeant | Feldwebel |
| Corporal | Unteroffizier/Gefreiter |
| Officer deputy (cadet) | Offizierstellvertreter |
| Artillery gunner | Kanonier |
| Light machine-gunner | Musketier |
| Rifleman | Schütze |
| Infantryman | Landsturmmann /Grenadier/ Füsilier |
| Driver | Fahrer |
Private Albert Andrews was with the 19th Manchesters opposite Montauban. His great-grandfather had charged with the Light Brigade at Balaclava. A former clerk, Albert was not taken in by the ‘bull’ of Kitchener’s New Army. He would go over the top with a cigarette in his mouth.
Corporal George Ashurst, with the Lancashire Fusiliers, was aware of the ugly mood in the ranks when they were given a pep talk by their 29th Division Commander, General de Lisle. They were lined up and told not a single German would bar their progress to Beaumont Hamel after the massive artillery bombardment going on in the background. He and his men were not so sure; they had experienced catastrophe at Gallipoli the year before.
Captain Charles Carrington, with the 1/5th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, was manning the battalion command dugout overlooking Gommecourt Wood. As the acting adjutant, he was to report back to brigade what he saw once the attack started. He could not see anything.
Lieutenant Richard ‘Rex’ Cary, with the 9th London Rifles, was in fine fettle waiting for the attack on Serre. Next month he would be engaged to Doris Mummery from Leytonstone – her parents had just agreed.
Brigadier-General John Charteris was General Haig’s over-optimistic intelligence chief. Despite the inexperience of the troops, he was quietly confident about the coming attack. A 14-hour day was the norm for General Staff officers.
Lieutenant-General Walter Congreve, commanding XIII Corps on the far right of the British line between Mametz and Montauban, next to the French XX Corps, was the only corps commander to achieve all his objectives this day.
Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Crozier, with the 9th Royal Irish, would attack the Schwaben Redoubt with the later waves of the reserve brigade of the 36th Ulster Division. He had taken the UVF oath of the Irish brotherhood, and, whatever the cost in casualties, they would take the ‘Devil’s Dwelling Place’.
War correspondent Phillip Gibbs had watched the artillery bombardment from the ‘Grandstand’, the high ground above Albert. He had been tipped off at midnight that the ‘Big Push’ would begin at 7.30 am. He was optimistic it would go well.
General Sir Douglas Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief, slept easily this night, secure in a devout belief that God was on their side. This was his first major operation as C-in-C, and he was about to oversee the largest British attack the British had ever mounted on the Western Front. Artillery would pave the way, and his Corps Commanders were confident they would get through.
Private ‘Tommy’ Higgins would attack with the 1/5th North Staffs at Gommecourt. He had been standing all night in knee-deep water, waiting for H-Hour. He was very impressed when an 18-inch gun fired and blew down all the old barn buildings nearby.
Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, known as ‘Hunter-Bunter’, took the decision to blow the Hawthorne mine prematurely, ten minutes before H-Hour. It warned every German soldier in his sector that the attack was under way and proved the undoing of the VIII Corps.
Private Frank Lindley, with the Barnsley Pals (14th Yorks and Lancs), was unimpressed by assurances that the artillery bombardment would enable them to walk unscathed across no man’s land. He knew that the Jerries knew they were coming. Before he went over the top, he strapped his entrenching tool over his private parts. They were told not to stop for the wounded.
Lieutenant Edward Liveing was about to go into action for the first time with the London Regiment at Gommecourt. He carried in his pocket the seventeenth century Cavalier prayer, sent by his father, which he continually repeated under his breath in the front line. ‘Lord, I shall be very busy this day,’ it read. ‘I may forget Thee, but do not Thou forget me.’ He was disconcerted to realise the German trenches up above looked directly down into their own.
Cinematographer Geoffrey Malins, officially embedded with the 29th Infantry Division, was poised opposite Beaumont Hamel to film the massive explosion of the Hawthorne Ridge Redoubt mine, charged with 40,600 lbs of ammonal. He would record some of the most iconic images of the Great War that day.
Major-General Ivor Maxse’s 18th Division attacking between Mametz and Montauban was not relying on artillery alone to break through. Maxse employed every tactical and technical ruse, from mines to flame-throwers and explosive saps, to get his men across no man’s land with as few casualties as possible.
‘McCrae’s Battalion’ consisted of the core of Scotland’s formidable Heart of Midlothian football team and supporters. ‘Kick-off’ for the attack into Mash Valley would be a whistle blow, which would send them over the top at 7.30 am.
Lieutenant-General Morland, the Commander of X Corps, observing from his tree-top command post, failed to reinforce the potentially decisive breakthrough by General Nugent’s 36th Ulster Division.
Private Leo O’Neil was a 5 ft 4 in, 15-year-old boy soldier with the Newfoundland Regiment. He had left five sisters behind at home, and the army was now their primary provider. He would be in the second wave attacking ‘Y’ Ravine, one of the most formidable German strongpoints along the line. Being second wave increased the chances of survival.
Lieutenant-General Sir Henry ‘Rawley’ Rawlinson, the Commander of the British Fourth Army attacking on the Somme, was regarded as an over-ambitious ‘cad’ by his Sandhurst contemporaries. He was a capable if inexperienced army commander, who had compromised his plan at Haig’s direction. Artillery firepower would either enable him to break through or ‘bite and hold’ the German line. He would then destroy the inevitable counter-attacks.
Brigadier-General Hubert Rees had recently taken over command of 94th Brigade, the left-flank unit attacking Serre. The plan for the approaching attack arrived in a 76-page document that made little sense. It catered for everything accept the unexpected.
Sergeant-Major Ernest Shepherd was a regular soldier with the 1st Dorsets opposite the Leipzig salient. He had been on leave in England the week before. Unaware of having been Mentioned in Dispatches, he thought his friends were congratulating him for simply being alive. Ever professional, he had already walked the route his men would follow through the communication trenches to reach the front line. He had high expectations of the ‘Big Push’.
Sergeant Richard Tawney would attack with the 22nd Manchesters south of Montauban. He was a socialist economics lecturer who had turned down the chance of a commission. He and his men were already exhausted by the stop-go progress to reach the front line through the communication trenches in pitch darkness. The war, he believed, would herald meaningful social, economic and political change.
Captain Thomas Tweed commanded B Company of the 2nd Salford Pals opposite Thiepval. He realised his men would suffer more casualties on this day than ever before, it being their first deliberate conventional attack. Tweed had personally recruited many of the men around him in 1914 and had lived cheek by jowl with them ever since.
Generalleutnant von Auwärter commanded the 52nd Brigade, defending a critical sector that covered the vital approach to the Thiepval plateau and the Schwaben Redoubt. This was the division commander’s Schwerpunkt, or main point of defence effort. Von Auwärter had been shelled out of his command post in the middle of co-ordinating a major relief in place for his 99th Infantry Regiment, and now the British attack was upon them as he was setting up his new command post.
Oberstleutnant Alfons Ritter von Bram, commanding Bavarian Infantry Regiment 8, was tasked by von Soden, the 26th Division commander, to co-ordinate measures for the three-pronged counter-attack to retake the Schwaben Redoubt. At no time was he in contact with all three attack groups, but he took the decision to attack with less, rather than gamble and wait for all to assemble. Ordered at 11.15 am, the attack did not get going until 3 pm. It was a risk.
Feldwebel Karl Eisler, with Reserve Artillery Regiment 29, was an artillery observer positioned on the Contalmaison castle tower. For days he had been watching hundreds of lorries moving forward behind the British front line. An attack was clearly coming and he was starting to feel vulnerable.
Oberleutnant Franz Gerhardinger was in reserve with the 2nd Battalion 16 Regiment south of Bapaume. He had watched the villages of Pozières and Contalmaison burn each night during the bombardment. Every observation balloon tethered in viewing distance had been shot down by marauding British aircraft. They were to be warned off about a British break-in near Montauban.
Leutnant Matthäus Gerster was dug in with 119 Regiment at Beaumont Hamel. He knew that after seven days of artillery fire their only hope of surviving the coming attack would be to get to the parapets before the British. The trigger was the firing of the Hawthorne mine.
Unteroffizier Friedrich Hinkel was with the 7th Company 99th Infantry Regiment defending the front line in front of the Schwaben Redoubt, opposite the 36th Ulster Division. He was a hardened veteran. ‘Give it ’em hard, boys’ was his Westphalian battle cry. Goaded by seven days of non-stop artillery fire, he and his men were determined to exact bitter revenge when the British attacked.
Unteroffizier Felix Kircher was a forward artillery observer with Artillery Regiment 26. He had watched the steady British build-up and been shelled out of his observation post on the church tower at Pozières. They had escaped by climbing down the bell ropes.
Walther Kleinfeldt was a 16-year-old artillery gunner, whose battery was dug in near Pozières. He was so young that his mother had had to sign his recruitment papers to go to the front. She also sent him a Contessa camera, which he had started to use during the British artillery bombardment. ‘At least now I can say I have been in a war,’ he wrote to her.
Vizefeldwebel Laasch commanded a reserve platoon with 110 Regiment, deeply dug in near La Boisselle in Mash Valley. He quickly realised that part of the line nearby was overrun by the British and he and his men would have to fill the gaps.
Unteroffizier Otto Lais from Baden was a machine-gun commander awaiting the British onslaught at Serre. He was a tough, resourceful, hard-bitten veteran and proud of his association with the elite machine-gun corps. He and his men were methodically proficient in spinning impenetrable webs of interlocking arcs of fire, through which no British infantryman would pass. He had already noticed that a new British Division had surfaced opposite their sector.
Generalmajor Maur was von Soden’s artillery commander, a recently arrived veteran from the Eastern Front. He immediately regrouped the 26th Division’s artillery assets into three distinct sub-groups. This enabled them to rapidly and flexibly concentrate and redirect fire, creating task organisations that would be familiar to present-day gunners.
Otto Maute was a wagon driver with Infantry Regiment 180 and carried munitions between Bapaume and the front line before Albert. This was his first battle. Being a private soldier meant nobody told him anything. He was pessimistic about the massive British build-up; if the enemy broke through, they would have to move.
Generalmajor Franz von Soden’s 26th Division would be attacked by two and a half British corps on the first day. He had commanded his division in peacetime and was called from retirement to mobilise it in 1914. He was a consummate professional. His division had fought in the mobile battles of 1914 and he had spent nearly two years on the Somme preparing for just this attack.
Generalleutnant Hermann von Stein was convinced his XIV Corps was to be the focus of the coming British offensive after Verdun. His Schwerpunkt was in von Soden’s 26th Reserve Division sector. General Erich von Falkenhayn, his superior, was not convinced the blow would fall north of the River Somme. The artillery bombardment had already forced von Stein to move his headquarters over four miles further back.
Stephan Westman was a German Army surgeon attached to the 119th Regiment near Beaumont Hamel, where he had set up a Field Dressing Station. He had recently returned from Berlin, where he had seen the poor economic conditions inflicted on the home front by the Allied blockade.
Hauptmann Herbert Ritter von Wurmb was a company commander with the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 8, positioned in depth in the German second line behind the Schwaben Redoubt and between Irles and Pys. He knew the Schwaben Redoubt was vital ground, which if lost would need to be recaptured immediately, and that he and his men would have to do it. He had been up all night with his fellow company commanders conducting a reconnaissance in the forward 99th Regiment trenches they were due to relieve that night. They were exhausted, and the British attack started just as they got back.
Dimly lit dugouts shook with the impact of near misses on the German ridge lines; chalk dust and loose spoil cascaded from the ceilings. Reverberating cracks scattered shrapnel against dugout entrances, fluttering groundsheet curtains as spent air from blasts wafted the pungent smell of cordite inside. Anxious faces glanced up from the murk 20 feet below. The momentary displacement of air dispersed the musty aroma of sour sweat and tallow, with which the German field-grey uniforms were waterproofed. 1915 had been the year when the spade had triumphed over the gun, and now men relatively safely ensconced in deep dugouts were realising the benefit. Infantryman Bernhard Lehnert remembered how cosy bunkers had been during the first winter of 1914, but ‘nobody,’ he reflected, ‘could have thought then that we would be living in them for years’.1
Soldiers perspired freely in the evil-smelling underground chambers. Unteroffizier Otto Lais, a machine-gunner in 169 Regiment at Serre, near Puisieux on the northern tip of the Allied attack sector, recalled that ‘the second, the third and fourth line trenches held deeper and deeper dugouts; that needed thirty, forty or fifty steps to get down’. Men lay on wired bed frames below or sat on long wooden benches, pensively watching as their hanging jackets and equipment swung from the ceiling rods with each artillery impact.2
‘We were well pleased,’ recalled Vizefeldwebel Laasch, with a reserve platoon occupying the Mittelweg Trench behind La Boisselle, ‘that the deep dugouts constructed by us after such hard work, also protected us against the heavy calibre shells.’ Card games provided a distraction, but ‘scat’ hands were slapped down with little enthusiasm. Men tried to sleep, but the incessant banging and howling impacts precluded this. It had been another dreadful day; dust from countless detonations ‘swirled as high as towers’, Laasch dolefully observed. ‘Satan pulled out all the stops as the men in the forward destruction zone had the sunlight blotted out.’ Tension was palpable, and soldiers were watchful, they knew an attack was coming. Phillip Gibbs on the Grandstand would have seen Laasch’s position simply as a succession of flashes periodically crackling over the dark mass of the ruined village of La Boisselle, alongside the straight Roman road from Albert to Bapaume. ‘Whoever went above as sentry could barely still recognise the position,’ Laasch observed. ‘Instead of well dug trenches, one saw shell hole after shell hole.’ Despite this, the seven-day bombardment ‘had brought us barely a casualty’ but ‘the remaining ruins of La Boisselle were ground to powder’.3
The artillery barrage had spluttered into life seven days ago on 24 June and escalated ever since. Leutnant FL Cassel ensconced in a deep dugout near Thiepval with Infantry Regiment 99, at the battered epicentre of the threatened front, had been warned shortly after midnight the attack would come that same day. Who could tell? Previous experience suggested it came on the third day, but the British still had not moved. As no food was getting through the battered communication trenches, they broke into the iron rations secured in the platoon commander’s dugout. ‘The bread of course was not exactly fresh,’ Cassel remembered, ‘and rumour had it that not all the meat rations could be found, but at least it gave something for the stomach.’ Hunger was less an issue than thirst. Springs and pumps had been buried by displaced earth from the huge craters. Men were reduced to drinking from puddles. Twenty-year-old infantryman Hermann Baass remembers being lucky enough to have a small stream behind his position. That there was a body lying in it ‘played absolutely no role whatever’, he recalled, because ‘we were constantly being inoculated’.4
It had been raining shells for 160 hours. At first it was shrapnel, cracking overhead with dry metallic reports, lashing overhead cover, but having no effect on men in dugouts. The ‘heavies’ opening up on the second day had been an entirely different proposition. These monster shells whistled in from a great height and bored deeply into the earth with a reverberating thud before setting off massive explosions. Huge blocks of chalk mixed with tons of earth were spat out into the sky, gouging 12-foot craters 15 feet across. Only solidly constructed and deep dugouts could withstand such blows and most were, having been systematically excavated over the previous 22 months. There was a five-metre danger circle. Even those landing outside could still bend earthen walls and snuff out trench candles with the pressure wave. A direct hit collapsed trenches, bulged out bunker walls and flung masses of spoil across dugout entrances. Everyone’s inner dread was of being buried alive, clawing and scrabbling at the crushing weight of earth before suffocating or being overcome by gas and fumes.
Unteroffizier Braungart’s machine-gun post dugout with the 2nd MG Company of Reserve Infantry Regiment 119 was hit by an ‘air torpedo’ two days before. They were dug in on the Hawthorne Ridge outside Beaumont Hamel. It took three hours for the trapped to dig their way out. Eighteen-year-old German soldier Herman Siebe recalled a like incident, ‘something I’ll never forget’, when interviewed in theus quickly, for 1990s. His bunker was shaken up by a near miss, which pinned a comrade caught outside beneath masses of earth. ‘Ooooh Mama, Mama,’ he piteously wailed, ‘I’ve been wounded.’ They could hear him underneath and see one of his legs protruding from the soil. ‘Perhaps we could pull him out,’ Siebe and his comrades decided:
We loosened him a little and then I pulled on his leg and it came off. I’ll never forget that in my whole life. It only lasted for a few minutes before the whimpering stopped. When it was over it was very, very quiet.
Unteroffizier Baungart’s gun crew was jinxed. Two days later it was buried again. ‘MG Schütze Kottler,’ he reported, ‘who was on guard, is buried under the rubble’ of the second exit ‘and cannot be saved as the entire wall threatens to give way’. The dugout containing the number 2 machine-gun had also to be evacuated because it too was threatened with collapse. The gun was left inside; they were covering a key sector from the Hawthorne Ridge and the dugout might have to be re-occupied. Meanwhile, 75 feet below them sat a lone British soldier on watch with a candle, guarding a chamber packed with 40,600 lbs of ammonal. The German machine-gunners had no idea. It was set to explode in six hours’ time.5
Leutnant Rupp in the same regiment was bombed out twice in the same sector. Thirty minutes of frantic digging was needed to release the buried Vizefeldwebel Mögle on the second day of the bombardment. Speed of reaction was crucial, as reserve Leutnant Walter Schulze recalled in a similar, later incident on the Somme, with the 76th Regiment:
Terrified shouts were still coming from the mounds of earth. They had recognised [my voice]. ‘Dig, Walter, dig! Walter, help us quickly, for God’s sake, help us! Quicker, Walter, quicker! We are suffocating!’ they shouted desperately from the mound. My blood ran cold at the fearful shouts. It was just horrible.
Schulze and his comrades dug as carefully and quickly as they could. ‘Yes! There was a helmet, a head!’ One of the missing, Liefering, was uncovered as far as his chest; ‘his face was as white as a sheet from the horrible shock and fear from the event,’ Schulze remembered. Another man, Wartemann, was still buried, calling faintly as he expired. But they could find no trace and soon ‘all is quiet from the mound, as quiet as a grave’. It was now a question of retrieving his corpse. Eventually they found a hand, thankfully still attached, then hair and at last a head. ‘What a horrible sight!’ Schulze recalled:
I had known this man for the entire time I had been in the field, but I could not recognise him. We cleaned his face, but it was swollen. His lips were blue and his eyes were wild and staring madly. His nose was fat and bloody, but at least his torso was free.
After dragging him out they instinctively tried artificial respiration and miraculously his chest began to heave. When his eyes appeared at last to focus ‘he recognised me’, Schulze remembered, and said ‘Walter, is that you? What’s happened?’ They told him he had been buried, and with that a spark of life returned, because ‘he suddenly went mad and we could hardly restrain him’.6
Near misses were frightening. Leutnant Cassel at Beaumont Hamel recalled the seemingly remorseless sequence of events that occurred when Allied gunners began to register on their dugouts. The ‘dull boom of a heavy gun’ was followed by the ‘awesome whizz and swish of a rising heavy missile’, which would land nearby. The systematic process of ‘walking’ shells onto targets as guns methodically registered on objectives initiated a cringing unease as the sinister exploding footprints approached. Tension could drive men to hysteria. Cassel recalled one such strike:
The earth was quaking and white dirt falling through the boards, I saw the beams above bend and slowly descend by about 10 cm. My heart seemed to stop, now comes the end . . .
He froze, awaiting the inevitable massive detonation, ‘but the catastrophe did not come’. Emotionally spent, he relaxed back on his bed overcoming ‘momentary paralysis’ before abruptly jumping up and running outside. Better to ‘die in the open air than be crushed between the boards’, he decided. Just outside was a crater several metres wide, which had been gouged out by a 21 cm dud. ‘Had it exploded,’ he reflected, ‘whoever was in the dugout would not have seen daylight – not before the Day of Resurrection.’7
Passing time inside dimly lit and claustrophobic dugouts, intimidated by successions of shrieking, howling near misses and impacts, was testing the resilience of the German XIV Reserve Corps. They sheltered beneath this firestorm that stretched from Gommecourt in the north 18 miles across the Ancre and Somme rivers to the French sector beyond Maricourt further east. Schütze Eversmann, with Infantry Regiment 143, scribbled down diary impressions inside the Wunderwerk, or marvel, a massive bulwark within the Leipzig Redoubt, south of Thiepval. ‘When will they attack?’ he asked himself on day two, ‘tomorrow or the day after? Who knows?’ By early morning of the fifth day the British had still not made a move. ‘There must be an end sometime to this horrible bombardment,’ he despaired. Subsequent diary entries became more despondent, even alarmist:
Haven’t we had enough of this frightful horror? Five days and five nights now this hell has lasted. One’s head is like a madman’s, the tongue sticks to the roof of the mouth. Almost nothing to eat and nothing to drink. No sleep. All contact with the outer world cut off.
‘Even the rats became hysterical,’ observed newly arrived medical officer Stephan Westman, attached to Infantry Regiment 119. Men snapped out of their shell-induced apathy to flail at them with spades as they ran up the dugout walls. ‘They sought refuge in our flimsy shelters,’ he recalled, fleeing the storm of steel outside.
By the early morning hours of the seventh day, 1 July, the British guns had fired 1,508,652 shells into the German lines. ‘All around there was a howling, snarling and hissing,’ recalled Leutnant Matthäus Gerster, also with the 119th north of the Ancre. ‘With a sharp ringing sound, the death dealing shells burst, spewing their leaden fragments against our line.’ The deluge of shells was as remorseless as it was incessant:
Large calibre shells droned through the air like giant bumblebees, crashing, smashing and boring down into the earth. Occasionally small calibre high explosive shells broke the pattern.8
It was worse for German units facing the French, at the end of the ‘L’ horizontal of the front, near the River Somme. The French on the right were about to attack with five, compared to 13 British, divisions, but they had four times more artillery per mile of front and it was heavier. The Mametz area had more recently come under control of the German 28th Division following a rationalisation of the front line, with a likely Allied offensive pending. Infantry Regiment 109 had been assigned its new sector just eight days before the opening of the British bombardment. On arrival they found too few deep dugouts to house trench garrisons, most of which were situated in the first line and very few in the second or third lines. Feverish digging started to rectify the shortfalls and was now being done under heavy fire. Men sheltering in the older shallow dugouts found they were vulnerable to medium and heavy calibre shells. Casualties rose: 12 men were killed and 32 wounded in the first six days of the bombardment. Forward companies with the 1st Battalion lost one third of their strengths. Discussions at corps and division level decided some form of relief ought to be attempted. One of the 109 Regiment’s companies had been reduced to 149 men, and it was agreed two companies from Infantry Regiment 23 should attempt a changeover.9