The Somme

“All battles are, in some degree…disasters.” ~ John Keegan

The well-known Prussian general and military strategist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz wrote in his famous treatise On War that it ‘is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty,’ whereby he acknowledged how hard it is to control the outcome of a skirmish, battle, campaign, or war.

Sadly, oftentimes the outcome is determined by human foibles like overconfidence, misjudgement of the opponent, and incompetence. Over the millennia, millions of soldiers have been mangled, maimed or massacred due to the dreadful ineptness of their commanding generals. In no human endeavor are the stakes higher than in the hostile environment of combat. Errors on the battlefield are paid for in blood, limbs, and human lives. By learning how and why plans and strategies have gone awry, we can know how to avoid such mistakes in the future.

For a military defeat to qualify as a blunder, it must be avoidable. Genuine blunders involve an element of blame and usually someone specific to blame the most. Often the blame lies with the commander or his superiors, but blunders can also be the result of some cultural practice of a whole group. In truth, the causes of military disasters are often complex and the result of multiple mistakes that amalgamate and compound each other, a chain of miscalculations, leading to a crisis, a calamity, and ultimately a catastrophe.

According to Dr Gregory S. Aldrete, an historian and Professor of Humanistic Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay, military blunders are caused by four broad varieties of failures: Failures of planning, failures of leadership, failures of execution, and failures of adaptation.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these in turn and, in the process, visit and examine some of the worst and most costly and horrific howlers in human history to see if we can harvest some useful wisdom from them that can stand us in good stead in the time that lies ahead.

Failures in planning

Sometimes planners of an operation deliberately ignore information that contradicts what they want to believe.

Strategies are difficult to craft, taking brain power, time, and hard work, and they are even more difficult to implement. Given the investment of time and effort that goes into planning a major strategy and implementing it, the military units and the people involved have an impetus to see it through. This is especially true when the commander’s ego and career is invested in a course of action, even if it becomes clear that the strategy is failing.

When lives are at stake, it can become crucial to change course. If not, it can have catastrophic consequences like what happened between the first of July and the eighteenth of November, 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. It was to be a joint French and British offensive to try and break through the heavily fortified Germans lines and take some of the pressure off the French army who were struggling at Verdun. Germany, at the time, was the mightiest military state on the face of the planet since the time of Imperial Rome, and given the advanced level of their weapons, they would have whipped the Romans too. The Allied forces also included troops from Newfoundland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, but most of the men were excited British volunteers who responded when Field marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener asked for more men in 1914. The high ground of the Thiepval–Pozieres ridge was to be their objective.

The overall British commander was General Sir Douglas Haig, who saw himself as “a tool in the hands of a Divine Power,” and the commander in charge of planning the attack on the Somme was General Sir Henry Rawlinson. Rawlinson originally wanted to launch a relatively small attack on a narrow front, but Haig insisted on a much bigger assault, which turned into the biggest attack in the history of the British army.

The plan was to devastate the German trenches, bunkers and strong points, cut their communications, and reduce their will to fight by bombarding them with artillery for a whole week. The planners reasoned that no one would be able to survive such a storm of steel and that the Germans would all be dead long before the British infantry advances.

The artillery fired thousands of shrapnel shells that were supposed to cut the German barbed wire into shreds. To add to the mayhem, the British would explode huge mines under the German lines just as the infantry attack starts, to kill any Germans who were not dead yet.

The British soldiers were inexperienced and the officers did not think they would be able to execute complicated maneuvers, so to keep them from becoming too excited and one group moving too far ahead, all the troops were ordered to walk at a steady pace towards the German lines. They were told this would be quite safe since all the Germans would be dead by then.

The battle began near the Somme River as the big guns opened up. Their sound was heard all the way to London. However, the seven-day artillery barrage gave the Germans good notice of what was about to go down and where to expect the British. The bombardment failed to destroy the barbed wire and tangled them up even more, making them almost impenetrable.

Devastating though it was, the artillery bombardment could not destroy the durable and deep German dugouts. Since the artillery barrage was aimed at the German trenches, they did not get the German guns, which were waiting to reciprocate. As soon as the British guns fell silent, it tipped off the Germans that the infantry were about to come in. The British then set off one of the huge underground mines to film it for the newsreels. This served as another warning to the Germans. The attack might have been on a large scale, but it was no surprise when it came.

The preconditions for the successful execution of British strategy had not been met, yet the commander of the British Fourth Army, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, ordered the attack to proceed.

The poor, hapless, but brave Tommies went over the top of their trenches on the first of July and marched over open ground towards the enemy. Some British troops kicked a football between them as they moved forward. Captain Nevill of the East Surrey Regiment thought it would help calm his men’s nerves and take the men’s minds off what awaited them at the other side of no-man’s-land, if they had some footballs to kick around. Captain Nevill was killed trying to traverse the barbed wire, but his regiment somehow managed to get through and took some trenches. The British loved the story of the footballs and told it afterwards as an example of British pluck. The Germans held it up as an example of ‘English absurdity’.

Elsewhere, supreme courage was rewarded with dismal failure. The advancing waves of Allied soldiers were cut down by rifle and machine gun fire while German artillery rained down death from above, cutting men to pieces with flying splinters of steel. Most men never even made it near the German lines. Some of the inexperienced soldiers crossed the enemy’s front-line trenches without clearing the deep dugouts, so the Germans shot them down from behind.

Some Allied troops reached their objectives. The British took some trenches on the right wing and the French took all their objectives. The South Africans took and held on to Delville Wood, despite suffering appalling casualties. The Ulster division managed to overrun a formidable German fortification called the Schwaben Redoubt. Unfortunately the British commanders stuck rigidly to the original plan and refused send any reinforcements, so the Germans counter-attacked and took the position back again.

The few successes were too small to make up for the terrible losses. Along the thirty kilometer front, khaki clad corpses lay sprawled among the thick fields of scarlet poppies or entangled in barbed wire. Survivors crawled or limped back to their own lines or took cover in shell holes, waiting for darkness to try and make their way back. By the end of the day, the British had suffered sixty thousand casualties, of which twenty thousand were dead, making the first of July, 1916 the bloodiest and blackest day in the entire history of the British army.

“This is the place where more than anywhere else in the war, the dead lay very thick.” ~ Sir Winston Churchill

The next day the fighting continued and some of the follow-up attacks were almost as disastrous as the first one. After two and a half months of fighting, the British used tanks for the first time in battle. Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty and thought in Naval terms, had commissioned a fleet of what he called “land ships.” The British referred to them as “tanks,” as in water tanks, to keep their real purpose a secret. Eventually the word caught on and it is still in use today, as you no doubt know. Initially these tanks startled the Germans, but most of them broke down which made them easy targets for German artillery. The first tank assault in history turned out to be a failure.

After three months of fighting the British finally took Thiepval, the position they were aiming to conquer on that first fatal day. However, as the British took the German positions, the Huns just fell back to stronger positions they’d prepared. Instead of breaking the German army, the British were losing thousands of lives to capture a few hundred yards of land. To put a positive spin on it, the generals started to talk about a battle of attrition.

Finally, in November, with snow on the way, the attacks petered out, and the guns fell silent. The Allies had pushed the Germans seven miles back, but at a fearsome cost. The British lost more than four hundred and twenty thousand men, the French about two hundred thousand soldiers, and the Germans, around five hundred thousand. The British had recruited men from the same communities into so-called Pals’ Battalions, and it had a devastating effect on these communities when they learned that all their young men had been killed in the flower of their youth in one disastrous attack.

People accused the British generals of this battle of being butchers who were willing to throw away the lives of their men for no gain. The German general Erich Ludendorff said the British troops were ‘lions led by donkeys’. Siegfried Sassoon, a British officer who fought bravely and survived the war, wrote a poem that expressed his white-hot rage against the senseless waste of life, called The Generals:

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

The Somme was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the First World War, becoming a symbol of the horrors of trench warfare as well as military stupidity. According to some historians the British never really recovered from the shock of the Somme, and began to lose faith in their leaders and even in the society that had sent them into such a nightmare in the first place. England was not just at war with the Kaiser, but also with itself, as people grew disgusted with the moral codes and values that had led them into the war, jingoism, war-profiteering, decadent leaders, and incompetent generals. In a sense Victorian Britain died on the Somme and a more cynical and sober modern Britain was born.

Perhaps in an attempt to atone after the war, General Haig led a huge operation to raise money for wounded former servicemen by selling poppies.

In memoriam of all those who died at the Somme and in the many other battles of the Great War:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them”

~ From The Fallen, a poem by Laurence Binyon

The world should never forget their sacrifice.

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