Was the battle of the Somme a sucess or failure?

In British language “Somme” has become a byword for military disaster, the incompetence of Generals such as Douglas Haig, the Head of General Staff in the British army and ultimately death on an enormous scale. A frequently asked question that I shall be answering, from both perspectives in this essay is whether the Battle of the Somme was a success or failure? On the first day of the battle alone there were 60,000 casualties of which 19,240 were deaths. The old British regimental system was based on counties and every regiment was made up of battalions of 1000. “Pals” battalions were soon formed of men from a certain street, district of town, school or profession. There were artists battalions consisting of painters, authors, poets, composers and actors. There was a Londoner sportsman’s battalion which absorbed footballers from Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspurs and numerous cricketers who played at Lords. About 4 of these battalions were formed into divisions that were then sent into battle. The men in the Pals battalions were brave, but generally under-trained and lacked battle experience as oftenly they were killed by making simple mistakes such as sticking their heads over the trench tops. German snipers picked them off in their hundreds. Many of these battalions were used on the Somme, making up the bulk of the army used and on the first day they made up the bulk of fatalities. Whole districts of towns and cities were decimated and dragged into mourning in the week after the first day of the Somme.

The battle was a result of the German offensive at Verdun in February 1916. In the earlier Franco-Prussian war of the 1870s the city of Verdun had held out against the might of the Prussian army in siege warfare and therefore had enormous significance as a symbol of national pride, particularly that of the army. The German high command realised the high sentimental status of Verdun and that the French would have to defend it at all costs. At that time, German casualties outnumbered the French ones, effectively meaning that the French were winning the war. Erich Von Ludendorf and Paul Hindenberg, the two most important men in the hierarchy of the German army decided to use attritional tactics, gradually wearing the French army down at a minimum casualty rate for themselves. By late spring the French were in desperate need for men and begged the British for assistance in some form. Douglas Haig proposed a British offensive on the Somme, with some French assistance in the Picardy region of northern France. The river Somme meanders through northern France and over millions of years, carved a valley out of the chalky soil. This valley was the chosen location for the battle.

The poor infrastructure of the area needed to improve to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of troops who would be marching through the area. Roads needed to be constructed and locations for the soldiers to billet to needed to be organised. Also, a huge amount of heavy and light artillery would be needed to support the operation. All this was done and in the week leading up to the battle over 100,000 British and French troops were marched into the area. On the 24th June the British artillery started a week-long bombardment of the German barbed wire. The Germans had a well constructed defence system. First, there was a thick strip of barbed wire at least 5 metres thick then a shallow trench which was frequently flooded to hinder the enemies approach. Next there was another trench, much deeper that the first with shell-proof bunkers to protect the men against bombardments and finally, a pair of heavy machine-guns with wide interlocking fields of fire. Any men who walked into the field of fire would be ripped to pieces. Douglas Haig was a cavalry officer from a different age, not being able to differentiate the correct use of weapons during the First World War and those of his time, some 30 years previously. He believed in a long, pounding bombardment with the artillery followed by a mass charge with bayonets or cavalry. He once wrote “I believe the machine-gun is an over-rated weapon. Two per battalion is ample.” The British machine-gun was the Vickers that fired powerful .303 (roughly 7.62mm or a third of an inch) bullets at an extremely high speed causing horrific wounds. It was also an extremely reliable weapon. Despite this the British failed to fully include it into its arsenal. By the beginning of the war there were less than 400 in the entire army. A machine-gun Sergeant once asked the Lieutenant-Colonel commanding his battalion “what should I do with the machine-gun today sir?” The answer which perfectly reflected the attitude of the British military towards machine-guns was “take the damn thing to the flank and make sure it’s out of everyone’s sight.” The French has similar attitudes and had adopted a mechanically unreliable Hotchkiss. On the other hand, the Germans recognised it’s potential and fully integrated it into their armies. As early as 1901 entire regiments devoted to using and servicing machine-guns existed. Technical developments were made and in 1908 the MG ’08 was perfected. It was the best machine-gun in the world at the time, being reliable, relatively light and having a high rate of fire. Every battalion of 1000 men had at least 6 machine guns. By 1914 more that 12,000 machine-guns were in use. The MG ’08 came with a thick wooden block which provided a highly accurate platform to shoot from. It also folded to a size that allowed made it easy way to manoeuvre and had handles that allowed it to be dragged like a stretcher. On the Somme, these guns were put to deadly effect. But back to Haig. He wasn’t a bad General but simply had no regard for human life. If a village had to be taken then under Haig, it would be but at an enormous cost of life.

When the artillery bombardment began the Germans simply went down into their bunkers and waited. By the fifth day they realised a large offensive was about to begin. The older, more seasoned soldiers just waited it out, playing cards and behaving normally but younger conscripts suffered badly, particularly from post-traumatic stress disorder and frequently had to be tied up to prevent them from committing suicide with their own rifles. At 6:00 am on 1st July British troops began assembling and by 7:00 were packed into the front-line trenches like sardines. At 07:20 the artillery stopped and several enormous mines were exploded to provoke the Germans. To give you a perspective of the amount of high-explosive used, a surviving crater could easily fit a dozen houses stacked on top of each other, with room to spare. For the Germans, this was the final warning that the attack was imminent they ran up from their bunkers with mortars and machine-guns, set them up and waited.

For the first time in a week, the British soldiers heard a bird sing. Then the officer’s whistles blew and they went over the top. The run-up and first few minutes of the battle is fantastically portrayed in the massively under-rated film: The Trench. As the men go over the top they are instantly under the fire of heavy machine-guns. Many of them are thrown back into the trenches, killed within seconds. The men who survived that were caught up in a bottle-neck of barbed wire, metres away from the German trench-line and shredded by intense rifle and machine-gun fire. Until mid afternoon wave after wave after wave repeated this process. It was in this way that just under 20,000 young men; an entire generation were killed in a single day. On the 2nd July Douglas Haig wrote in his diary “a day of ups and downs!” The only probable ups were the incorrect reports of British progress that were still being sent to him.


From the perspective of the British and French high-commands, the battle was a success. Two infantry divisions and 60 pieces of heavy artillery were sent from Verdun the resist the Allied offensive. In October the German army was sending division after division into that mincer-of-men, the Somme from Verdun to be spat out after a week as a shadow of their former selves. Eventually enough German troops were withdrawn from the Verdun front so that the French were able to drive them out of the area. That was what the reason for the battle but from the civilian perspective, it was a disaster. It had lasted until mid November and by that time had caused almost a million casualties on both sides, of which half were fatalities. Entire villages were deprived of young men, innumerable families lost a husband, son or brother. The objective of the battle was to actually take the insignificant town of Bapaume, which was simply the garrison of many German soldiers. It was very small, almost irrelevant to the war effort. The only real purpose was to kill more Germans, assist the French with their troubles at Verdun.

I personally think that the battle of the Somme was a success. Although the casualty lists were immense, it managed to divert German man-power from Verdun. As that was happening, the French counter-attacked, killing Germans in their hundreds of thousands. Some say that this changed the outcome of the war. And I agree. The German army had lost a large percentage of men, and that was Douglas Haig’s real objective had been.