“Young men, soldiers, Nineteen
Fourteen
Marching through countries,
they’d never seen
Virgins with rifles, a game of
charades
All for a Children’s Crusade” (1)
On this
date, at the break of dawn precisely one hundred years ago, they went over the
top in what became known as the Battle of the Somme. (2) It was the bloodiest day in the history of
the British army. As the sun rose, the
whistles blew and the men went, in the parlance of the time, “Over the
Top”. By sundown, the British had lost
57,470 men, an estimated 20,000 dead, mostly by noon that day. It was a killing field. The army advanced at a cost of 3 men for
every foot of ground gained.
It is
remembered today largely as the leitmotif of a struggle characterized by what
historian Max Hastings has termed the “Blackadder” interpretation of the First
World War, after the British Sitcom of that name, which pilloried the struggle,
especially the military leadership that led it.
Hastings takes umbrage with the critics, among them Siegfried Sassoon,
claiming that they didn’t understand either its necessity nor its tactics. I
must take issue with Hastings on both counts.
I don’t
think that either Atkinson (“Blackadder”) or Sassoon the poet were critics of
the struggle. I don’t think either one
of them, or many of the host of other critics of General Haig and the military
chiefs, hold the view that the battle was unnecessary. Where they take issue is with the strategy
and the tactics used, and the continued order of repeated attacks for the next
141 days until the battle subsided due to the onset of winter having achieved
not even the first day’s military objectives.
When it ended both sides suffered casualties each estimated at over half
million men.
“The Children of England would
never be slaves
They’re trapped on the wire and
dying in waves
The flower of England face down
in the mud
And stained in the blood of a
whole generation.” (3)
The
battle occurred because the French were being decimated at Verdun and to
alleviate the pressure and to save the French army, the British were called
upon to begin a major offensive. Its
necessity is, therefore, not in dispute.
What is in dispute are the tactics.
I’ve
made the point in previous posts concerning this conflict that I hold the
military brass responsible because they had learned nothing from studying
war. One questions the purpose of
military academies where lessons from previous conflicts seemingly are at best
forgotten and at worst ignored. All the
European powers had observers on both sides during the American Civil War, a
war that introduced the devastation of the modern rifle as well as the
stalemate of trench warfare. Nothing had
improved since then, the introduction of the Gatling gun, followed in turn by
the machine gun, could not auger well for any military offensive. Nevertheless the military mind, being what it
is, refused to come to terms with the evolving technology. Indeed the French military approached the
conflict with a training manual that insisted that the army would do nothing
but attack. Such tactics, given the
technology at the time, were breathtakingly uninspired.
“Corpulent generals safe behind lines
History’s lesson drowned in red
wine
Poppies for young men, death’s
bitter trade
All for a Children’s Crusade” (4)
The
bombardment started a week or so before they went over the top. The British fired an estimated 3 million
shells at the German lines but, due to lack of quality control, a third of them
were duds. The purpose was, of course to
destroy the enemy’s earthworks; but also to cut the barbed wire to ease the
advance. Ignoring front-line
reconnaissance reports back to headquarters that the barbed wire was still in
tact; and arming the men with wire cutters that couldn’t cut the much thicker
German barbed wire, the men were led ‘over the top’.
The
artillery were largely anti-personnel shells (similar to Civil War era grape
shot) and, therefore, useless at destroying either trenches or wire, and the
enemy was dug in with bunkers 30 to 40 feet underground. The British Infantry,
loaded with up to 60 pounds of kit and told to walk across ‘no man’s land’
because the enemy will have been destroyed, went up—‘over the top’ into a
perfect killing field.
Like
Viet Nam decades later, a conflict in which American forces would be brought to
the battlefield by helicopter and the enemy simply counting the rotors and
quickly determining if he would stand and fight or blend back into the jungle,
so the Allies would announce the advance by the cessation of the artillery
barrage. A quick silence followed by the
blowing of whistles signaling the men to climb out of their trenches and
advance on no-man’s land—but also signaling to the enemy to come out of his
bunkers and take up position, a strategy that effectively eliminated any
purpose or advantage the bombardment was supposed to produce. With the element of surprise gone, with the
relative strength of each army generally understood, it was left to the
infantry to slog it out in what quickly became a hell on earth.
All of
this was foreseeable. As in the American
Civil War, one had only to look to Fredericksburg or Antietam for lessons on
what not to do at Gettysburg or Kennesaw Mountain; one had look no further than
what was going on at Verdun to draw similar simple conclusions. However, no, the military mind has trouble
with universally observable empiricism.
The
historian struggles to justify. Many
point to the Battle of the Somme as the first use of tanks and the use of
aircraft as offensive weapons in an effort to demonstrate the military’s
willingness to embrace new technologies and strategies but, unfortunately,
these apologies are not supported by the historical record. The fact is that tanks, here introduced to
warfare, were not the brainchild of the Army’s brass. Instead, the modern tank is the brainchild of
one Winston Churchill who, in a rare moment of prescience and wisdom, insisted
as Lord of the Admiralty, to build
the tank. It was the British Navy not the army that developed the
modern tank; the army having been presented with the idea quickly dismissed tanks,
deriding them as ‘land yachts”. While
taking part in the battle, tanks were, nevertheless ineffective both because
they were not present in large enough numbers and because the Army hadn’t
developed the tactics for their use.
Indeed the same criticism has been leveled at Haig and the brass
concerning the use of flamethrowers, mortars, and other weapons that civilian
authorities were to impose upon the military command in an effort to break the
stalemate. Indeed, it was the
Canadians, later in the war that introduced the ‘rolling’ artillery”, a
strategy of using it during the assault and calibrating their fire to lay down
a barrage just ahead of the advancing troops. This to prevent the enemy from
taking position—a strategy that more than any other would finally break the
stalemate near the end of the war.
Hastings,
unlike Sassoon, did not fight this battle, nor any other in this war. He is the grandson of one who did, but he
wasn’t there. Sassoon was and, on
balance, I’ll take his version of it.
Let us
take a moment and pay our respects to the ones who fought and died there, to
the ones who fought and were wounded and dismembered in body and soul, to the
ones who carried the memories well into my lifetime for while it surely wasn’t
in vain it was, however, altogether too great a sacrifice. The battle remains, however, a veritable
monument to the stupidity of leadership and the madness of man.
“Pawns in the game are not
victims of chance
Strewn on the fields of Belgium
and France
Poppies for young men, death’s
bitter trade
All of those young lives
betrayed” (5)
____
(3)
Op. cit.
(4)
Ibid.
(5)
Ibid.
