The attack on Serre starts badly
At 07.20am as a prelude to the attack on the neighbouring village of Beaumont-Hamel, the British exploded a massive mine under the German stronghold at Hawthorn Ridge, immediately south of Serre.
After the mine exploded there was a ten minute lull before the main advance at 07.30. During this time the massive eight day continuous bombardment of the German front lines had ended, and neither side fired a shot as both waited for the inevitable attack.
It really was the lull before the storm, but unfortunately it gave the Germans ten full minutes to prepare themselves for the certain British attack.
All over by 10.00am
By ten in the morning, the fighting at Serre was all over. Despite attacking hard, the British had been driven back by the Germans and had met with heavy casualties.
Two out of three now dead or maimed
Two out of every three men who had gone ‘over the top’ at 07.30 were now casualties and lay dead or maimed on the gentle slope between their trenches and the German lines.
The Pals who had joined up in the heady early days of the war had been decimated in the first minutes of the battle.
On 1 July 1916 alone, the 31st Division suffered 3,599 casualties, of which a large proportion had been killed.
The Pals had suffered huge losses, four Battalions in particular suffering more than 500 losses. The Accrington Pals lost 585, the Leeds Pals lost 528, The 1st Bradford Pals lost 515 and the Sheffield City Battalion lost 512.
Serre attacked again on 11 November 1916
Serre was attacked again on 1 November 1916 as a part of a concerted attack on Beaumont-Hamel.
When the time came to launch the attack, the 3rd and 31st Divisions were waiting at Serre just as the Pals had done four and a half months before.
The positions from which they attacked were the same, but there were two important differences.
On the positive side, the British had twice as many guns supporting them.
One the negative side, the ground they had to advance over had become a waterlogged sea of mud in the autumn rains. The ground was so soft the guns had to be mounted on solid platforms of pit props to stop them sinking into the ground.
The attacking soldiers had to wade through mud so heavy and deep that more than half of them were bogged down even before they reached the German trenches. Of those who did reach their objective, many found their rifles were clogged with mud and useless.
The outcome was once again failure for the British, the village fortress of Serre remaining in German hands.
Serre did not finally fall to the British until the Germans retired to the Hindenburg Line on 24 February 1917 and the 22nd Manchesters occupied the village the following day.
