Three Armies on the Somme Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2009 by William Philpott

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Originally published in Great Britain in different form as Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century: The Battle, the Myth, the Legacy by Little, Brown, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, London, in 2009.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Philpott, William James.

  Three armies on the Somme : the first battle of the twentieth century / by William Philpott.

  p. cm.

  “A Borzoi book” — T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59372-6

  1. Somme, 1st Battle of the, France, 1916.

  2. Great Britain. Army—History—World War, 1914–1918.

  3. France. Armée—History—World War, 1914–1918.

  4. Germany. Heer—History—World War, 1914–1918. I. Title.

  D545.S7P495 2010

  940.4'272 — dc22 2010004070

  First United States Edition

  v3.1

  Dedicated to the memory of my grandfather

  Sergeant James Erswell Philpott MM

  and his daughters,

  Joan Ella and Jean Gladys

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Engagement

  1 Three Armies

  2 The Strategic Labyrinth

  3 Planning the Attritional Battle

  4 Preparing the Big Push

  5 “Varying Fortune”: 1 July 1916

  6 Exploitation

  7 The Battle of Attrition: August 1916

  8 Behind the Lines

  9 The Tipping Point: September 1916

  10 Muddy Stalemate: October–December 1916

  11 “Victory Inclining to Us”

  12 Remobilisation

  13 Decision in Picardy: 1918

  14 Aftermath and Memory

  Reflection

  Appendix: A Note on Military Organisation, 1914–1918

  Notes

  Notes on Sources and Further Reading

  A Note About the Author

  Maps

  The War in Picardy, 1914–1918

  Changing Plans for the Somme Offensive, February–June 1916

  1 July 1916

  The Capture of the Flaucourt Plateau, July 1916

  Fourth Army’s Operations, July–16 November 1916

  Sixth Army’s Advance North of the River, July–November 1916

  Reserve (Fifth) Army’s Operations, July–November 1916

  The Somme Offensive: Overview

  The 1918 Fighting in Picardy

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for permission to quote and cite material in their possession, or for which they hold the copyright: Her Majesty the Queen and the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office; the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland; the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London; the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum; the Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Bonham Carter Trustees; the Councillors of the Army Records Society; the Cheshire Military Museum; the National Library of Australia, Canberra; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney; Archives and Special Collections, Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University, Newfoundland; the Archives de l’armée de terre, Service historique de la défense, Vincennes; the Archives départementales de la Somme, Amiens; the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne; Earl Haig; Lord Esher; Mr. M. A. F. Rawlinson. Finally I would like to thank Pen and Sword publishers for permission to quote from Jack Sheldon’s excellent anthology of German combatants’ writings, The German Army on the Somme, 1914–1916.

  I also owe many personal and professional debts to those who have provided practical assistance and support during the writing of this book. Its preparation and publication have been greatly assisted by many individuals. Of these I would in particular like to thank Charlie Viney, my agent; Andrew Miller, my editor at Knopf; Maria Massey, production editor at Knopf; John Gilkes, who prepared the maps; and Philip Parr, who meticulously copyedited the manuscript.

  Research for this book in France was supported by a small personal research grant from the British Academy. At the Archives de l’armée de terre, Vincennes, Colonel Frédéric Guelton and Lieutenant-Colonel Rémy Porte and their colleagues provided invaluable assistance and guidance. Laurent Henninger and his colleagues at the Centre d’études d’histoire de la défense offered a warm reception and valuable facilities while I was in Vincennes. Christopher Goscha provided a comfortable home away from home in Vincennes. The Australian government’s Bicentennial Fellowships fund supported research in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. Dr. Peter Stanley and his colleagues at the Memorial’s research centre were welcoming and hospitable to the Pom who appeared in their midst. Professor Carl Bridge of the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London, offered help and advice before, during and after that fellowship. The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded a term of research leave to enable me to finish the manuscript.

  Over the years my research students, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate classes, in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, have been a constant source of stimulation and inspiration in understanding the complexities of the First World War. In particular the members of the “Coal Hole Club” military operations study group have provided a lively and sociable forum in which to refine my understanding of the dynamics of the Great War battlefield. They will see where their insights, sadly unattributable, have informed and improved this work. Similarly, my colleagues in the Department of War Studies have been helpful and supportive during the writing of this book. While it is invidious to single out individuals, nevertheless my successive Heads of Department, Professor Brian Holden Reid and Professor Mervyn Frost, must be thanked for supporting my periods of research leave without which this book might never have been finished. Similarly, Professor James Gow and Professor Theo Farrell gave valuable advice on my applications for funding which assisted the writing of this book. Over the years the Institute of Historical Research’s Military History research seminar has been a lively forum for debate, and I thank Professor Brian Bond and its members for their friendship, and for hearing me out and offering professional insights on the occasions when I spoke on aspects of my ongoing research. The membership of the British Commission for Military History have also been stimulating, interested and patient in equal measure over the many years in which I have been obsessing about the Somme, to the point of letting me guide them over the less remembered corners of the battlefield. Professors Hew Strachan, Martin Alexander, David French and John Gooch have always been wise friends, as well as strong supporters of this research project.

  Family and friends too, if not possessing the expertise of colleagues and students, still demonstrated interest and patience while this lengthy project was completed. Many have been helpful or supportive along the way; a few deserve individual mention. Above all, my parents, my sisters and their families (who I will not name, since they know who they are); Professor Michael Neiberg, who read and provided insightful comments on the manuscript in draft; Sophy Kershaw, who read the m
anuscript in draft with a professional and personal eye, and was always supportive while the book rolled ever onwards (and remembering her grandfather Second-Lieutenant Raymond Kershaw MC, 2nd Battalion Australian Machine Gun Corps, wounded in the Battle of Hamel, 4 July 1918); Richard Kershaw and Jann Parry, who shared an author’s ups and downs; the late Venetia Murray, who gave valuable advice on the ins and outs of the publishing trade when this project was in its infancy; Matthew and Carol Cragoe, my writing companions and hospitable friends; Rachel Mustalish, who looked after me in New York; Sian Evans, who kept me company in Paris; Jeremy Hughes, for his research assistance; Genevieve Ford-Saville, for our musings over one too many pints; Charlie, Sarah, Eleanor and Hebe Robinson, Kate and John Madin, welcoming friends always.

  And finally, thank you to Elizabeth Greenhalgh: without her provocation, this book might never have been written.

  Engagement

  ON 1 JULY 1916, AT precisely 07:28, a series of huge explosions tore open the ground around the small French hamlet of La Boisselle. A company of the 10th Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment (the “Grimsby Chums”) dashed from the British front line, outpacing men from the German 110 Reserveinfanterieregiment (RIR) to seize the newly blown Lochnagar mine crater. All along the front the deadly race was repeated, as thousands of British and French infantry rose in a long surging line, and German machine-gunners hastened to their weapons. The winners might live to see a different world.

  “The Last Post” is sounded at Lochnagar Crater every 1 July, although nowadays there are no longer veterans among the mourners. Nevertheless they will not fade away. Dutifully each year their children, and after them their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, will gather at that sacred shell-hole to honour the memory of those who fought—and those who died—in Britain’s greatest battle. Elsewhere small parties of French and Germans, Australians, Canadians and South Africans, pay their respects, as the Battles of the Somme pass from experience, through memory, into history.

  THE RIVER SOMME, which meanders across north-west France, bisecting the rolling uplands of Picardy, has lent its name to four battles. The first encounter was in September and October 1914. The second and greatest—the Battle of the Somme—lasted for four and a half months, from June to November 1916. The third took place in March 1918; the fourth in August 1918. Even today, the mention of this quiet river evokes deep atavistic sentiments: pride, anger, anguish, grief. The 1916 battle scarred the British national psyche in particular: up to that point Britain had had no Verdun, the “Meuse mill” which ground up the French army in early 1916, or Langemarck, the German army’s Kindermord sacrifice of her eager young volunteers in autumn 1914. Yet the reasons for that scar, and the true nature of the historical phenomenon which inflicted it, are little understood. The 1916 Somme campaign was a struggle of three armies, and three empires. Each left its young men and their memorials in that patch of Picardy downland, now lush, quiet and mournful. On the hills opposite Albert, the British army made its longest and greatest sacrifice in the allied cause. Astride the river to the south their French allies were fighting their own gruelling battle, closely integrated with British operations but all but forgotten by posterity. To the east the German army fought its prolonged defensive Battle of the Somme, more bloody and morale-sapping than the Anglo-French offensive, yet rarely acknowledged or recounted.

  In the summer of 1916 Walter Page, the American ambassador in London, noted that “war has come to be the normal state of life.”1 The world had paused as three great empires, championed by their armies, staked their futures in a single great battle. The scale of the Somme was immense, a global event impacting on the lives of everyone in Western Europe and resonating beyond European shores. Millions of Frenchmen, Germans and Britons, and many thousands of colonial volunteers and conscripts—Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, Moroccans, Algerians and West Africans—converged on that corner of a foreign field from twenty-five nations, all five continents.2 It was no small corner: from north to south the battlefield stretches some forty miles, from east to west twenty: as large as London south of the Thames. Most went willingly, believing in the cause: the liberation of the invaded patrie; the defence or aggrandisement of a besieged empire; the crushing of rampant militarism; the forging of a national identity. Above all, honour and duty—loyalty to one’s country, to one’s army, to one’s comrades—motivated the combatants. Three imperial superpowers found themselves enmeshed in a new kind of struggle, to the death: “a total war for the preservation of the nation” as General Ludendorff was to call it. The centrepiece of this industrial war was an industrial battle in which population, economy, industry and imagination all strained to sustain a battle longer and more intense than any fought before. Back at home, anxious families waited for news; a letter from a son, brother, husband or father, or the much-feared official telegram. Munitions workers toiled to feed the guns and farmers harvested to feed the men. Journalists reported, writers commented, poets rhymed and artists painted. Having committed their armies and nations to the field, political leaders of the three struggling empires were rapt, their credibility and authority on trial. Their rivals, of left and right, sought advantage from each turn of events. Allies watched their brothers-in-arms with interest and anxiety, their own nation’s cause inextricably tied up with that being disputed in Picardy. Neutrals monitored world-changing events, judging and rejudging their position in the global struggle. Would the Battle of the Somme end the war? If so, what would be the peace? What if the war continued? Armageddon and Judgement Day seemed one.

  As the summer drew on casualty lists lengthened; all, it appeared, for a few square miles of insignificant French countryside. The combatants knew that much more was at stake than mere ground and human life: honour; reputation; culture; tradition; the future. It must be victory, or extinction. Fighting for one meant change for all, as on the Somme the old familiar world perished and a new uncertain world emerged. As German veteran Ernst Jünger attested: “Chivalry here took a final farewell … The Europe of today appeared here for the first time on the field of battle.”3

  It is this 1916 battle which has left its mark on our collective psyche, but the Somme experience reaches much further. As well as the several million men who actually fought on the Somme—not just in 1916, but in 1914, 1915, 1917, and 1918—millions more then and later lived their experience vicariously, through newspapers and films, poetry and paintings, memoirs, plays, novels and histories. Many thousands took their experience with them to the neatly tended graves or unmarked plots they occupy to this day. Others survived yet left no record. Many, however, lived to tell their tales; soldiers’ tales. In the war-of-words which follows any battle, official despatches from the commanders-in-chief sought to explain and justify their actions. Diaries, memoirs and letters of those who had fought proliferated. A few became celebrated classics: most are long-forgotten.

  One memoir in particular constructed the Somme of popular memory. Winston Churchill, who lived by the pen as well as the sword, found the former an effective weapon in the so-called battle of the memoirs which followed the war. Although Churchill’s career subsequently prospered, when writing The World Crisis, his memoir-history of the First World War, the former First Lord of the Admiralty was defending his own far from unblemished war record.4 He shared responsibility for the ill-planned and badly executed Dardanelles campaign, which forced his resignation from the Cabinet in November 1915, after which he spent eighteen months out of office, in the trenches and on the backbenches. In 1916 he had been restless and critical, observing a war which apparently was not being won and looking for reasons and scapegoats, and his egocentric memoir revisited these wartime gripes. He had the unique perspective of someone who had both served at the front and moved in the highest political circles. Yet, like many of his contemporaries, he was too caught up in events to appreciate the bigger picture; too preoccupied with his own part in affairs to consider the roles of others. As he wrote to his wife
while he worked on the first volume of his history: “It is a great chance to put my case in an agreeable form to an attentive audience.”5

  Published in 1927, Churchill’s account of the Battle of the Somme in The World Crisis was to manufacture one of Britain’s great historical myths. Ironically, the man whose account of the Somme has proved most influential had little to do with it. Churchill enjoyed the luxury of dissociation: he was not at the front and he had no ministerial responsibility. A troublemaking and under-employed backbench MP in 1916, he watched and judged. His critique of the genesis and conduct of the battle is founded on his own strongly expressed opinion, at the end of the battle’s first month, that the British army’s casualties were significantly higher than the enemy’s.6 Then his objection was ignored: the offensive was just getting into its stride. Yet Churchill remained too involved ever to rethink or revise this highly specific contemporary critique, which in The World Crisis is subsumed into a general narrative of what were to become familiar clichés, the product of a self-absorbed refusal to investigate the bigger picture: unimaginative and callous generals; ill-planned and futile offensive operations; high and unnecessary casualties; atrocious battlefield conditions; technophobic cavalrymen failing to appreciate the potential of new war-winning weapons, notably the tank. Churchill thus set the agenda for subsequent generations’ perception of the Battle of the Somme, and the war of which it was the defining and pivotal event.

  Written in Churchill’s lucid and compelling prose, they proved popular accusations. The first printing of volume one of The World Crisis instantly sold ten thousand copies; the whole six-volume series (the third volume of which covered the Somme) sold more than a million copies in total.7 Serialisation in The Times disseminated Churchill’s message among the general public, and syndication in Europe and the empire reached the wider world. Cheaper, abridged, popular editions of The World Crisis, first published in the 1930s, reprinted in the 1960s on the fiftieth anniversary of the war, and most recently in 2007, kept Churchill’s impression current. Here was a soldier, statesman and wordsmith who apparently could make sense of a conflict which defied understanding: who could explain the reasons why so many had died, and seemed to know who should be held responsible. Yet even on publication Churchill’s words provoked concern, and they have stood up poorly to subsequent scholarly analysis. “The very attractiveness of Mr. Churchill’s writing of itself constitutes a danger; for the layman may well be led to accept facile phrase and seductive argument for hard fact and sober reasoning,” Lord Sydenham commented in introducing a collection of early criticisms of The World Crisis,8 and in a later scholarly critique Robin Prior concluded that Churchill’s best-selling account of the war was “to shape the popular historical memory of the recent past in its own image.”9 Indeed, Churchill’s widely read nostrums and cavils have become the familiar staples of First World War literature, recycled again and again to a credulous public. Perhaps they reach their apogee in the influential work of A. J. P. Taylor, the pacifist historian whose scathing narrative of the war has dominated popular consciousness for over forty years.10