The Battle of the Somme was fought by an under-trained, inexperienced British volunteer army, supplied with poor quality artillery shells, advancing over rivers, marshland and deep clay mud, across often impassable terrain to launch uphill assaults against a well-defended and deeply dug-in enemy.
Worst of all, British commanders had no contingency plan should the opening stages fail and appeared quite inflexible in the face of failure – hence the almost incomprehensible policy of launching one doomed attack after another in which, day after day, tens of thousands of men were systematically mown down in waves by machine guns.
Most of the advancing men never reached the opposing front lines. Huge numbers were wounded by artillery shrapnel, machine-guns, snipers, but were never found and often drowned in the slippery-sided, water-filled shell-holes. Gas attacks killed hundreds at a time.
Thousands more died when company commanders ordered attacks through the few holes in German barbed-wire entanglements. These holes provided perfect targets for German machine-gunners who only had keep guns pointed on the holes and their triggers squeezed.
The only solid success of the five-months of carnage was the extraordinary courage and endurance of the troops and their junior officers at the front. Life expectancy for officers at The Somme was a few weeks. Life expectancy for their men was a couple of months.
The Statistics are appalling. The Battles of The Somme, gained a crescent of shattered, uninhabitable land about 16 miles deep at its widest point – all of which was later lost again.
This 'gain' cost 420,000 British casualties, 200,000 French casualties (the French having supported the battles on the southern tip of the front around the River Somme) and an estimated 500,000 German casualties. The actual German figure was never made known because they went to considerable lengths to conceal the extent of their losses, and the records were subsequently destroyed.
The first day of the main Somme offensive on July 1, 1916 resulted in more than 60,000 British casualties alone – almost 20.000 of them killed – more than any other day in British military history.
