As it completed its second full year, World War I bore all the marks of an
unprecedented gash across the landscape of civilization. The Battle of the Somme, the Allied
campaign to change the grim arithmetic of casualties and futility, only
worsened matters. With 1.5 million shells fired, the biggest artillery
bombardment the world had ever seen (even heard in the South of England) as a week-long rologue, British and French soldiers rushed forth into battle on July 1, 1916, only to be cut
down by the waiting German guns—60,000 British casualties in those 24 hours
alone, including 20,000 dead, the greatest loss of life in the nation’s
military history.
Could it get any worse? No, but it could remain
remarkably bad throughout the month and well into autumn, as the Somme would soon feature commanders who used Napoleonic
tactics rendered obsolete by modern weaponry; common soldiers left physically
and psychically wounded in ways little understood at the time; and writers who
sought to make sense of it all. When the fight ended four months later, the
British incurred more than 400,000 casualties, while their French allies lost
200,000 and the Germans half a million. Together with the Battle of Verdun
(discussed in this prior post of mine),
the Somme came to symbolize the horror of trench warfare.
(Believe it or not, the image accompanying this post
comes from a British propaganda film meant to drum up homefront spirit during
the fight, The Battle of the Somme.
Well, I guess this image of a badly wounded soldier could have been worse—if it showed the rats that the soldiers had to contend with, not to mention the
gas masks frequently worn there.)
Oh, yes—and the futility and basic absurdity of such warfare, for the
battle was waged not on as site of military significance, but at the spot on
the map where British forces adjoined their French allies.
Reading these last two paragraphs reminds me of
nothing so much as America’s Civil War.
But Britain’s leaders, let alone those of the other nations in this conflict
across the Atlantic, seemed to have learned nothing from the conflict that had
occurred across the Atlantic a half-century before, and so they were doomed to
suffer similar outward convulsions and internal divisions.
That enormous single-day loss of life, for instance,
will remind Americans of the bloodiest 24 hours in their own history, the
Battle of Antietam—except that the Somme
was even worse. The number of British dead, wounded and missing in action
for this one day was more than double the combined Union-Confederate toll for
the legendary Civil War battle.
Although the depth of the carnage is reminiscent of
Antietam, the manner in which the first day of the Somme unfolded resembles
nothing so much as the third day of Gettysburg. An offensive-minded commander
(for the British, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig; for the Confederates, Robert E. Lee) preceded an order to attack
with an unprecedented artillery barrage—in the case of Gettysburg, a morning
shelling that was the greatest seen in the Western Hemisphere to that point; at
the Somme, a week-long bombardment. Far from softening the defender up as
intended, the bombardment was largely ineffective (e.g., British medium-range
fire fell consistently short of its target, and 30% of the shells were duds).
And so, khaki-clad British troops—many the product
of the “New Army” swelled by recruitment posters featuring military hero Lord
Kitchener, sunk by a submarine only the month before—marched into sunlight in
perfect order along a 15-mile front, across open fields, like so many sitting
ducks, under the watchful gaze of three ranks of Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops safely
entrenched, on higher ground, in dugouts.
Only minutes before the fateful assault, an
operation to disrupt the German defenses occurred in the form of two huge
mines, containing more than 100,000 pounds of explosives. The advancing
“Tommies” could then, the thinking went, exploit the resulting confusion around
the two craters to avoid the enfilade fire that would surely come from the
Germans.
Civil War buffs will recall a similar plan involving
Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces in the summer 1864 Petersburg campaign. The
resulting “Battle of the Crater” resulted in 4,000 Union casualties. On the
other hand, the mining operation meant to ease the capture of La Boiselle
Salient led to nearly 12,000 combined casualties in Britain’s 8th
and 34th Divisions. British planners had not reckoned with the
possibility that German intelligence, piecing together newspaper articles,
soldiers’ indiscreet talk and reports from spies, would figure out that the
twin explosions would in effect provide advance warning of the follow-up assault
by the Tommies.
Over the years, Haig has been excoriated so soundly
and repeatedly that in some quarters, a reaction has even occurred in his
favor. A number of his partisans say he learned from his mistakes, with some
claiming that he came around to see the value of new weaponry. One
historian, William Philpott, even nominated him as Britain’s greatest general.
But Haig’s lack of imagination—his inability to
grasp how tactics had to evolve in the face of new technology—is nowhere better
illustrated than this passage from a 1926 when he still saw a future for horses
in combat:
“I believe
that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are
likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the
men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as
much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.”
Even a relatively sympathetic historian such as
Peter Hart—who argued, in The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front, that “Haig’s way was excruciatingly painful but it was the only
realistic way at the time”—ends up acknowledging the myopia of the general and
his subordinates:
“There seemed to be no limit to the number of times
that it had to be demonstrated to them that isolated attacks on a narrow front
would not succeed without overpowering artillery to devastate everything in
both that and the adjoining sectors. The British rarely seemed to realise that
an attack to 'improve' a tactical position did not do so unless it succeeded.
Too often there was no proper analysis of how many guns and shells needed to be
fired to subdue a given frontage and depth of trench lines. And there seemed to
be no limit to their optimism that the German Army and the entire German Empire
stood ready to collapse if there was just one more push towards Bapaume.”
The Somme was also remarkable for the authors who
lived long enough to recapture the experience of the campaign, in one fashion
or another, in their writing, including:
*Alan Seeger, an American who, before
being killed on July 4, 1916, wrote “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” a poem
taken to heart by the young John F. Kennedy;
*J.R.R. Tolkien, whose grittily
realistic battle scenes from his Lord of
the Rings trilogy reflect his service in the Somme;
*Robert Graves, whose bitter 1929
antiwar memoir Goodbye to All That
narrated his participation in the attack on the High Wood three weeks into the
campaign, where he suffered a wound so grievous that his parents were
mistakenly informed of his death;
*Wilfred Owen, trapped underground at
the Somme, was transferred for treatment of his shell shock to Craiglockhart
War Hospital, where he began to write the verses that made him the most
acclaimed British poet of the Great War;
*Siegfried Sassoon, Owen’s fellow
shell shock victim at Craiglockhart—and who, unlike
his friend, survived the war;
* Ford Maddox Ford, who translated his
experience with shell shock into the novel sequence Parade’s End.
In this small sample of soldiers, the number of
shell-shock victims from the Somme looms large. But they were only a handful
compared with the total number of those afflicted with this disease, later
called combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress syndrome. A 2011 article on the BBC Web site by Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, estimates that by the
end of WWI, the British Army had dealt with 80,000 cases of this. Altogether,
war neuroses represented one-seventh of all personnel discharged for
disabilities from the British Army.
An article by neuropathologist Daniel Perl in the
scientific journal The Lancet Neurology, then
summarized in a New York Times Magazine article last month by Robert F. Worth, offers
the hypothesis that blasts in modern warfare can leave scars on the brain. TNT,
first used by the German Army in 1902, was employed on a far greater scale in
WWI, leading to development of shell shock.
The Allies learned hard lessons about fighting at
the Somme, lessons they were able to apply in outlasting the Kaiser’s military
machine (with American help) over the next two years of the war. But it came
too late for the men who fought at the Somme in July 1916. Peter Simkins, a
historian at the Imperial War Museum, noted, in an interview for the Great War documentary on PBS, that
veterans of the Somme were primed to go “over the top” in taking enemy
positions, but it was all for nought then:
"But it's sustaining the impetus of the advance
once they've gone over the top that's important. If they've got the wrong
weapons with which to fight, if they're carrying rifles and bayonets and
they're up against machine guns, the formula is wrong.”
