“The
operation failed owing to insufficiency of artillery barrage. The Battalion suffered heavily.”- 44th
Battalion War Diary 25 Oct 1916
Time was wearing thin
and the weather more constantly vile. If
the Somme battle was to achieve a final overwhelming success, it would have to
come soon, or not at all. On the 25th
of October, 1916, the 4th Canadian Division, on loan to II (British)
Corps to gain combat experience committed elements of the 10th
Canadian Infantry Brigade to a minor operation against portions of Regina
Trench opposite their line. A few days
prior, the 11th Brigade, on 10 Bde.’s left lad put on a resoundingly
successful attack on the western edge of Regina Trench, and now the 10th
Bde needed to shore up.
Weather had been a
contributing factor for 11 Bde. Days of
cold and dreary rain grounded observer
Counterattacks over
these captured gains were more typically determined and frequent. It was defending against these attempts which
created the majority of the casualties for the 87th and 102nd. It also leant to a greater readiness in the
portions of Regina Trench still in German hands. Thus, the 10th Brigade’s effort on
the 25th, in a single battalion assault was a disappointing and
costly failure. “The 44th Bn.
minor operation,” the after action report states, “was not successful. The barrage was insufficient & the Bn.
met with great opposition, making it impossible to go forward.”[3] It cost the 44th Battalion 40
dead, 132 wounded and 26 missing within a few hours’ action.[4]
I ended my last post
with an excerpt from the first chapter of “Killing is a Sin” which described an
attack much like those which had occurred with the untested units of the 4th
Canadian Division. The fictional assault
at “Spoon Farm” echoes the actual unpreparedness of officers and men in battle
for the first time and that the fine edge between success and failure is found
in how such a deficit of preparation is overcome. It is a theme which strikes at the heart of
the history of the Battle of the Somme.
Very little captures
the notion of the Great War’s futility than does the Somme. Much of that has to do with the battle
concluding not with an appreciable victory; an obvious strategic triumph, but
rather that nothing more could be hoped to be gained as weather grew
worse. Nearly five months of consistent
effort- at many intervals successive efforts against the same objectives- had
come down to gaining the most advantageous position from which offensives could
resume in 1917.
Admittedly, it can be
heartbreaking to think that for each square mile gained in the Somme campaign,
British and Empire forces suffered 44,000 casualties. However, this figure- only an approximation-
used to drive home the point of excessive human cost made for small territorial
gains often is presented without the mention of its corollary. The Germans lost
an estimated 40,000 casualties for each square mile they were forced to cede,
not to mention materiel expended, captured or destroyed which their industrial
output could not hope to replace at the same rate the Allies could make good
these losses. Which brings up the point
that the Battle of the Somme was largely not about territorial gain.
The official despatches
of Sir Douglas Haig make it plain that “Verdun had been relieved; the main
German forces had been held on the Western Front; and the enemy’s strength had
been considerably worn down.”[5]
Drawing his thorough
examination to a close, William Philpott agrees that the Somme was “the
decisive victory of the attritional was of which it was the centrepiece: a
moral victory based on growing materiel
predominance and improving tactical and operational ability.”[6] He goes on to say: “It is perhaps surprising
that an event that changed so much has come down to posterity as an indecisive,
futile encounter.”[7]
Perhaps that has much
to do with one of the most influential early histories of the war, written by
an English officer who had seen it first hand and made no disguise of his
disenchantment in his volume on the Great War.
Sir Basil Liddell Hart writes that the Battle of the Somme “closed in an
atmosphere of disappointment, and with such a strain on British forces that the
coincidental strain on the enemy was obscured.”[8]
Brigadier Allan
Mallinson, in his recent History Today
article “The Permanent Stain of the Somme” attempts to straddle the divide of
how to define the battle by declaring “the Somme was not futile,” while arguing
that the battle itself was not even necessary.
It would have been far better, he posits, if the untested regiments of
the New Armies would have taken over “more of the Allied line” to free up French
units and allocating “heavy artillery and aircraft to Verdun” rather than
mounting a broad offensive at the Somme to affect Verdun’s relief. With respect to the Brigadier, his assessment
is fundamentally incorrect. Retaining
the New Armies as a defensive force would have only exchanged British lives for
French; the strategic consequences of such being the hastened collapse of
French morale. Most importantly, such an
avoidance would have left the British Army still largely offensively
inexperienced. This delay could have had
a direr outcome than as actually occurred.
Without the adjustments to tactics that the Somme helped set in motion,
this novice force, when committed to battle would have been contending with a
German doctrine evolved from their experiences in 1916; creating the potential
of a greater disaster in human cost at a more critical juncture of the
war. Casualties may be lamented and
desirably avoided, but wars are only won by closing with and destroying the
enemy. Inarguably, the time for British
forces to do so was both where and when they actually committed to battle at
the Somme.
Liddell Hart’s notion
of a “dealer’s push” and Brigadier Mallinson’s theory of possible avoidance
both fail to recognise one of the most critical elements of the battle.
This was the gain of
what could be learned from the Somme in an immediate sense of applicable
tactical doctrine. Any or all of General
Haig’s above stated objectives had very little bearing on the outlook of those
men more intimately acquainted with the fighting. For these men, taking account of what had
worked and what had failed over the months of the campaign and incorporating
those lessons into proactive changes would become a large part of subsequent
successes, including, most notably for Canada, Vimy Ridge. In my story, while waiting for Zero-hour at
Vimy, Felix sums up this experience in telling Lt. Thorncliffe: “Spoon Farm was
a while ago, Sir. I can’t guarantee
we’ll know what to do; but we sure as Hell know what not to do.”
From a modern point of
view it may seem the Battle of the Somme generated excessive casualties to no
tangible purpose. As a battle of
attrition, not one of territorial gain, the success of the Somme is more
measurable, but only marginally so. If viewed as a critical campaign to develop
proficiency and foster an evolution of arms, the Somme is responsible for the
Allied victory as no other. To regard it
as less than that; to relegate the battle as “futile” devalues the sacrifice of
life and blood given at the Somme which in no small way contributed to winning
the war.
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