First up, from Country Life, June 20, 2016, approaching the 100th anniversary of the first day:
Britain’s bloodiest day: in memoriam
The first day of the Battle of the Somme was the costliest in British military history. Here, in abridged extracts from Jolyon Fenwick's book Zero Hour, he explains why we shall always remember July 1, 1916.
We have never tired of revisiting the First World War. A hundred years on, its tragic ironies continue to cast their spell. Names like Gallipoli, Arras and Passchendaele remain bywords for thwarted youth and needless slaughter. There is one battle, however, whose name has come to symbolise a generation’s sacrifice like no other—its doom-laden resonance is almost embedded in our genes: the Somme.
To us, the Somme is synonymous only with bloody failure, but, at the time, after two years of stalemate, the battle promised to be the turning point of the war. Civilians and Government had allowed their generals the failed offensive experiments of 1915. This time, however, on the rolling fields of Picardy, Gen Sir Douglas Haig, Commander of the British Army in France, would put Teutonic barbarism to the sword once and for all.
The belief in certain victory was under- pinned by the introduction to the field of a new kind of army—an army who were all friends. These were the men from the same villages, factories, cricket teams and public schools —the ‘grinning archaic faces’ who had waited patiently outside their local recruiting offices to enlist in August 1914. For the people at home, these civilian ‘Pals’ units would naturally outclass the servile martial professionalism of the enemy. And the civilian soldiers—right up until the final seconds— believed it, too.
The plan was familiar in format, but novel in scale. The British would attack with 13 divisions along a 15-mile front (the Germans having received over 1,500,000 shells) and force a break in the enemy line that the cavalry would then exploit. The objective was the town of Bapaume, 10 miles up the old Roman road from the British lines. It was forecast they would get there in three days.
But the breakthrough never came. On November 18, 140 days after the initial attack, Haig called a halt just short of the ancient burial ground of the Butte de Warlencourt. The remnants of Gen Rawlinson’s 4th Army were still four miles short of Bapaume, having suffered 420,000 casualties. The passage of the fighting was charted by the unrecovered bodies and makeshift graves of 131,000 British and Empire soldiers.
Each phase of the campaign had been costly. But the names of such killing grounds as Delville Wood, Pozieres and Guillemont would not headline the battle for posterity. The ownership of the Somme in popular memory would forever rest with the battle’s first day.
In the early hours of that summer Saturday, a society of miners, stevedores, tramwaymen, errand boys, shipping clerks, railway porters, artists and aristocrats— along with regular and territorial soldiers —assembled in the dirty white chalk of the British front line. At 7.30am (zero hour), the early mist had gone and, against a sky ‘of the kind commonly described as heavenly’, 60,000 men, each carrying at least 60lbs of equipment, climbed out of their trenches and—in the vast majority of cases—walked towards the enemy.
The advancing troops had been assured the German defences would be obliterated by the six-day British bombardment. ‘You will be able to go over with a walking stick; you will not need rifles,’ one general told them. ‘You will find nothing other than the caretaker and his dog,’ promised another. They were wrong.
Sheltered (although, in many cases, tormented to madness) during the unprecedented preliminary shelling in underground bunkers (in places 40ft deep), the majority of the defenders survived. Within two minutes of the British barrage lifting, German machine gunners had scaled their ladders and set up their weapons, unloading belt after belt into the ‘perfectly dressed’ British lines at a rate per gun of 500 rounds a minute. The German artillery also laid down its own carefully ranged stripes of shellfire in No Man’s Land. The explosions looked like ‘a thick belt of poplar trees’.
The resulting carnage appalled even the Germans. In the first hour, more than 20,000 of the attacking troops were killed or wounded. By nightfall, out of a total of 116,000 British and Empire soldiers committed to the battle over the course of the day, 57,470 had become casualties—19,240 of them were dead.
For days following the battle, the British people remained ignorant of the fate of their young men. High-flown headlines of ‘heroic advances’ and ‘enemy trenches occupied’ persisted in national newspapers through the first week of July. But, as early as the Sunday evening, rumours of the disaster were crossing the Channel with the wounded....
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And from the Daily Mail, June 29/30, 2016:
Relaxing before the carnage: Heartbreaking photos of our troops on the eve of the Somme 100 years ago shortly before they went 'over the top' on the bloodiest single day in British military history
- The weeks leading up to the bloodiest battle in British history were gentle, compared with the horror that followed
- Rolling countryside north of River Somme was home to more than a million British servicemen, mainly volunteers
- Haunting photographs from 100 years ago show the men relaxing, released to mark the centenary of the WWI battle
- But the lush, green, springtime lands would shortly be turned into a muddy moonscape by the horrifying conflict
A welcome rest: Exhausted soldiers of the 9th Rifle Brigade take a break — and a chance to have a smoke — in a field away from the front line. From left, Second Lieutenant Walter Elliott, who was killed on November 20, 1916, Second Lieutenant Roger Kirkpatrick, wounded (date unknown), Captain Herbert Garton, who was killed on September 15, 1916, Lieutenant Evelyn Southwell, killed on September 15, 1916, and Second Lieutenant Herman Kiek, wounded on April 27, 1918. Southwell told his mother in a letter he was so tired he fell asleep while marching
A chance to wash: Officers of the 9th Rifle Brigade bathing in a stream behind the lines are (from left, excluding obscured faces): Captain Arthur Mckinstry — wounded, Second Lieutenant William Hesseltine, killed August 21, 1916, Captain William Purvis, wounded September 15, 1916, Second Lieutenant Joseph Buckley, killed December 23, 1917, Lieutenant Morris Heycock, wounded August 22, 1916, Captain Eric Parsons, killed September 15, 1916, Second Lieutenant Sidney Smith (in background) killed August 25, 1916, and Second Lieutenant Walter Elliott, killed November 20, 1916
Facing the future: Smiling confidently in their trench beneath a clear blue springtime sky are two officers of the 11th Royal Fusiliers: Lieutenant Richard Hawkins, left, was wounded in February, 1917, during the final push on the Somme prior to German evacuation. Second Lieutenant George Cornaby, right, was killed on September 23, 1918, only weeks before the end of the war....
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