You have plans. Specific plans for a limited specific battle, and you’re prepared for
it. But the big day draws near and as it does, you expand those plans, and expand them again
until they are now the realm of fantasy. Careful, because once you begin planning fantasies
in wartime, you can only be disappointed.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
The Battle of the Somme continued last week, though it was now a large and dizzying collection
of small, uncoordinated assaults. The Germans tried again and failed again at Verdun, and
the Russians took a bunch more ground before finally being halted at the Stockhod River.
Here’s what came next on the world’s battlefields.
Well, on a battlefield north of the Somme there was a diversion this week.
On the 19th at Fromelles with Australian troops. Many of these men had fought last summer,
autumn, and winter at Gallipoli, but this was their first offensive action on the Western
Front. The idea was to prevent the Germans from sending reinforcements down to the Somme.
Thing is, General Harold Elliott, known as Pompey, was alarmed by the strength of the
German defenses at Fromelles, and thought the diversion would be more of a slaughter.
He reported this to British Commander-in-Chief Sir Douglas Haig along with intelligence information
that the Germans were not, in fact, being transferred to the Somme so there was no need
for the attack, but the Corps commander, General Sir Richard Haking, wanted the attack to happen
anyhow, confident of success.
The objective was Aubers Ridge, two miles south of Fromelles. The attack would proceed
across a low no-man’s land toward a salient called the Sugar Loaf, which was strongly
fortified by the Germans. Now, the Germans in Fromelles had, high up in the church tower,
a peephole designed for observation, and all through the 18th they could watch the preparations
for the attack, which began late in the day on the 19th after a day long artillery barrage.
But when the men went over the top it turned out the artillery had not taken out the German
machine guns. The casualties were huge and the Sugar Loaf Salient remained in German
hands, though some British and Australian soldiers did at least manage to reach the
Sugar Loaf’s outer wire. The scene was described like this, “We found the No-mans land simply
full of our dead. In the narrow sector west of the sugar loaf salient, the skulls and
bones and torn uniforms were lying about everywhere. I found a bit of Australian kit lying 50 yards
from the corner of the salient, and the bones of an Australian officer and several men within
100 yards of it.”
Now, that was just a brief interlude away from the huge carnage of the Somme, but the
Australians lost 1,708 men killed and almost 4,000 wounded. The British lost another 400
or so killed. German dead and wounded in total were under 1,500. The attack was a total failure.
And at the Somme itself, the attacks also continued.
As the week began, so did the fight for Delville Wood. That battle began with the South African
Brigade being ordered to take the wood. Hugh Boustead had this to say (Gilbert), “We
moved forward through an orchard in single file, led by the platoon officer. Smith, the
Second Lieutenant, got through, but the next seven following him were shot dead in a circle
of a few yards, picked off by clean shooting without a murmur.”
This whole offensive - the Battle of Bazentin Ridge - had begun the 14th. It was to be an
assault by four divisions on the enemy’s second line between Longueval and Bazentin-le-petit
wood. General Sir Henry Rawlinson’s idea. Commander Haig thought Rawlinson would do
preliminary stuff to get the front to within a few hundred yards of the Germans, but Rawlinson
thought this impractical, but this meant the British had a no man’s land of nearly a
mile of no cover to cross, which was a scenario for disaster. But Rawlinson planned to make
a night maneuver, where the divisions would form in no man’s land undetected in the
dark and close in, and then attack with the dawn. As long as it remained undetected, it
would solve the no man’s land problem, but other night attacks, like back on the 3rd,
had been detected and failed.
The bombardment would be different from the one that kicked off the battle back on the
1st; five times heavier and only against the German front trench system; 1,000 guns on
a 6km front. As the day approached, though, the objectives were extended more and more,
so from an initially modest plan to take that one line, there were now plans to push as
far as Flers and Le Sars, several miles distant and even beyond. Rawlinson was now even planning
on taking the third German line between le Sars and Morvel. So the objective was no longer
an advance of a few hundred meters on a 6 km front, but an advance of around 6 kilometers
on a ten km front. Haig was actually against the scope of this plan. It seems he was no
longer as optimistic about a German collapse as he had been last week.
Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson in “The Somme” write, “commentators have hailed the plan
for July 14th as being a great advance in tactical sophistication. It must be emphasized
that a night attack in itself did not guarantee success... only one facet of Rawlinson’s
July 14th plan shows any improvement on the first day, namely the execution of a bombardment
on the front German system of a far greater intensity than anything delivered on July
1st. Here, Rawlinson may have revealed a measure of insight... two things tell firmly against
any such notion. First... was the delusion that that the bombardment would not only overwhelm
the German front defenses, but lead to a decisive collapse in German morale... The second is
that Rawlinson... never again employed a bombardment of the intensity of July 14th.” That last
would turn out not to be entirely true, actually.
But the men got in place, the attack went off at 3:25 AM, and soon almost the entire
German front trench system had fallen. This was a major achievement. But big obstacles
to further progress lay ahead. Behind the German lines lay the three fortified towns
and woods of Bazentin-le-petit, Bazentin-le-grand, and Longueval and Delville Wood. And if these
fell, High Wood on the ridge was a further barrier. And you know what? German morale
did not collapse, and Rawlinson’s large objectives really just fantasy. He had indeed
proved that the weight of his artillery could secure the enemy’s front position, but nothing
beyond that. As Peter Hart says, “the British had indeed succeeded in breaking IN to the
German system, but not in breaking THROUGH it.”
Rawlinson then had the idea of a combined attack with the French on the 18th, which
was a date French General Ferdinand Foch was going to send his men to attack as it was,
but weather postponed that. Then Rawlinson said his men wouldn’t be ready until the
22nd, so the French went ahead and attacked alone - and unsuccessfully - on the 20th.
So the week ended there with new plans afoot for a combined attack.
And further south at Verdun, the attacks seemed to be over for the time being.
But according to Alistair Horne, between February 21st and July 15th, the French had lost over
275,000 men and 6,563 officers at Verdun, and over 120,000 casualties in just the past
two months. The Germans had lost nearly a quarter of a million men, about twice the
amount German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn had wanted to allocate for his “limited
offensive” in the first place.
And an offensive that was anything but limited was still going on far to the east.
Alexei Brusilov’s enormous and enormously successful Russian offensive was in its 7th
week with no signs of slowing down, though this week his intelligence had uncovered an
Austrian plan to counterstrike the Russian center. So on the 16th Vladimir Sakharov’s
11th Army launched a pre-emptive strike on the Upper Styr River. He drove the Austrians
back to the Lipa, taking 13,000 prisoners.
Actually, Russia was on the move everywhere this week.
In Anatolia, the Russians were driving the Ottomans back southwest of Mush, while in
Persia were themselves being driven back north of Kermanshah by Ottoman forces.
And that was the week. Russian advances on two fronts and a defeat on a third. Verdun
quiet, a pointless diversion at Aubers Ridge, and dreams of German collapse at the Somme.
My conclusion last week was about Rawlinson, and here he is again. Really believing that
if they break through one German line of trenches German morale would collapse and the cavalry
could sweep in and overrun the entire German lines. But had that happened at any point
in the war? Had German morale collapsed at Loos and Champagne? At Festubert? At Verdun.
And yet Rawlinson believed it would happen at the Somme. Pure fantasy. And the results
of a general’s pure fantasy are easy enough to predict: everyone dies.
You can buy “The Somme” by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson in our amazon shop to support
our show.
If you want to find out more about Douglas Haig, the architect of the Somme offensive,
click right here for our biography episode.
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