What were conditions like for the British Tommy in World War One?
So if we think about conditions for the British Tommy in the First World War, the initial
observation is that noone is expecting to be in trenches and if they are, for no period
of time at all. So we associate the First World War with trenches, but that was never
the intention. And the idea of course is to dig in to protect the gains you've made and
also protect the troops from the weather and it just happens that we stay in the trenches
for 3 and a half years because we can't get out of them because of advances in military
technology. So, having said that, the easiest way to convey the trenches to a contemporary
audience is - think Glastonbury, but without the waterproofing, without the wellington
boots, or anything like that. All soldiers have is their ordinary woolen uniforms, which
don't really protect them from the elements. Now we have problem when we're talking about
trenches in the first World War, because the perception is that people go in to the trenches
and spend months on end in them. The reality is, certainly for the British soldiers, you
will go in for no more than a week or ten days max, and be rotated through, so your
time of misery of trench foot, of freezing of all the rest of it, is never really longer
than seven to ten days. It's difficult for the Germans and the French, they tend to stay
for months on end in the same trenches with all the sort of deterioration in their morale
and their health and so on. How and why did trench warfare develop?
Trench warfare is very much an accident, we can reach back to the American Civil War we
can reach back to 17th century siege warfare, soldiers have always dug trenches to protect
them from enemy fire, and a bit from the elements, so this is nothing new, the development of
trenches in the First World War is firstly their complexity, it's not one line of trenches
it's several, they're interconnected, they're also dug in zig-zag fashion to minimalise
the blast, and something else we forget, is that most soldiers live underground for the
duration of their time in the trenches there's endless dug-outs, and that's not where you
just go during a bombardment, you live there, you sleep there all the rest of it. But, having
said that trenches are a very ancient way of warfare, it's the fact that you blend onto
them modern technology, so barbed wire, machine gun positions, when gas arrives, you've got
to protect soldiers from gas because gas is usually heavier than air it will sink straight
into the trenches. Tanks are developed specifically to cross trenches. So the reason why First
World War tanks are very long, is so that they can get over the trenches. So trenches
actually trigger all sorts of other technological developments as well.
In what ways did the Somme go wrong? The Somme is the natural development of the
Brits and the French understanding that to defeat the Germans they've got to attack together,
use the combined resources of bothe nations and then launch a major attack in the Somme
area because that's where the French and the British armies borders overlap. And so it's
very much a sort of unified effort, neither army is strong enough or has the resources
to break through the German lines but together they will. And something happens that ruins
that plan. Very good idea, masses of troops and artillery, concentrated, punch your way
through the German lines and roll them up. What happens is the Germans strike at Verdun
first in February 1916 and the French are bleeding so much man-power that they can't
support the attack on the Somme with any great strength which was their original intention.
And also we need to launch the Somme early to take the pressure off the French. So the
Somme is launched earlier than first planned and without the huge majority of Frenchmen
that we were expecting. Looking back from a distance of a hundred
years, how significant was this battle? Was it Haig's great folly?
There's nothing wrong with the Somme plan as it stands.And it's a perfectly logical
deployment of the military technology of the day - a week-long bombardment of guns literally
drenching the enemy lines with high explosive. The problem with the Somme comes in three
forms. First communication, so when something goes wrong at the Front and you're men are
held up on the barbed wire, you don't have wireless equipment to radio back and say "Stop
it's all going horribly wrong!" Communications in those days are so primitive, you can't
get that message back to higher commanders quick enough. So that's the first thing that
happened. The second is the duration of the campaign. Initially it's expected to launch
the attack in good weather and within a few days the German reserves their trenches will
be taken and the battle will be essentially over. Because the Germans resist for longer,
and it takes longer to punch our way through the various German trench lines, the campaign
starts getting drawn out. And that means we run out of reserves, we start to run out of
shells, the weather starts to change, and although we're slowly grinding the Germans
down, it's not the quick victory that everyone expects. And the third point, is that Douglas
Haig continues with the battle, because if you are the commander-in-chief of your armies,
ehen do you suddenly stop and pull stumps and say "Enough!"? You're advised by your
intelligence chief, that one more push and the Germans will win do you suddenly stop?
What moment do you actually decide enough is enough? And Haig quite rightly looks to
his politicians who give him no guidance. They simply say "We want you to win the War,
carry on you're our senior military commander, our advisor, we'll do what you want." And
he's got no yardstick about what is too much, about what is enough. So he's gone down as
the architect of this huge huge tragedy, there's no inevitability about that.
But wasn't this a military disaster by today's standards?
Of the one hundred and twenty thousand British soldiers who were attacking on the first day
sixty thousand become casualties of whom twenty-thousand are killed most of those before breakfast.
Now if we think that the British army today is under a hundred thousand strong, we're
talking about almost the entire British Army becoming casualties and a lot of the fatalities
being suffered before breakfast has even finished.