"It was our old Blood-bath - the Somme."

July 1, 2016 4:15 AM

On July 1st 1916 began the deadliest day in British history. One hundred years ago today, British imperial soldiers left their trenches to attack German lines supposedly suppressed by an extraordinary artillery barrage. By the day's end 20,000 of them would be dead, the first casualties of nearly half a million by the terrible battle's end. All told almost a million casualties occurred on all sides, the Somme became Britain's iconic WWI event, and the struggle has been controversial ever since. In 2016 commemorations have begun.

In France one person preserves and maintains a single crater from the battle to this day. Elsewhere is the massive Thiepval monument.

Visuals
A BBC gallery. 27 images from the Telegraph. Photos colorized and annotated. More photos.
Photos, maps, paintings from from Wikimedia Commons.
Pierre's photo impressions.
Postcards.
From the Canadian War Museum.
Items in the Europeana collection. More than 1000 hits (!) in the First World War British Poetry Archive.
Flickr photos. Pins from Pinterest.
Timeline of the full almost five months long battle.
Animated map.
Very detailed map.


Texts
Ten quotations.
Reporter Philip Gibbs describes the battle.
Alfred Ball, one soldier's account.
Alfred Dambitsch on destructive technology.
Commanding general Douglas Haig's summary of the battle at year's end.
German Crown Prince Rupprecht reflects on the British attack during the battle.
The German official statement.
John Buchan's 1916 account (between bouts of writing spy fiction about WWI).
The first appearance of the tank in war.
A 1918 Michelin book, "In memory of the Michelin workmen and employees who died gloriously for their country", followed by their 1919 battlefield guide.
John Masefield's 1919 history.
Alan Seeger's death; "I Have A Rendezvous With Death".
On the French role and the German experience.

Audio
"Somme Battle Stories", AJ Dawson, published in 1916, read aloud.
Tanks on the Somme.

Film
From a 1916 British film.
From a 1927 British film.
Interviews with veterans, combined with contemporary footage.
More footage.
Archaeological digs into British and German trenches.
"The devil is coming", the BBC's 1964 documentary. A 1976 documentary, narrated by Leo McKern. A more recent BBC work.
Here Comes Kitchener's Army.
2006 BBC/Open University documentary.
Examining contemporary footage.

Previously: the battle in 2006; one extraordinary graphic novel; the Verdun context; air combat over the Somme, a webcomic; images of the Somme.

posted by doctornemo (9 comments total)

A troubling observation from the Guardian's Jonathan Jones: 'History means trying to understand the past, but Britain has decided to see it not as a global tragedy that binds us with our fellow Europeans, but solely as a heroic British tale.'

A few links to redress the balance:

A French perspective.
A German perspective.
An Irish perspective.
A Canadian perspective.
An Australian perspective.

Les archives de la bataille de la Somme: French photographs of the battle.
The Man who Shot the Great War: images by an Irish photographer, including a photograph taken on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916.
posted by verstegan at 4:20 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Great links, very strong FPP.

I listened to the Hardcore History podcasts about WWI, and they were so awful in the retelling a century later that I had to stop them a few times.
posted by wenestvedt at 4:44 AM on July 1, 2016

I remember learning about the battles of WWI and the unimaginable numbers of casualties in school. I couldn't understand how the various commanders could send so many to their deaths, over and over.

I still can't. I never will.
posted by tommasz at 5:04 AM on July 1, 2016

. X10⁶
posted by mondo dentro at 5:12 AM on July 1, 2016

.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:20 AM on July 1, 2016

Supreme confidence in their strategies, far enough removed from the carnage to maintain the romance of war that had sustained militaries for generations, and a burning knowledge that this is the break-through that will finally let them find a flank and turn, that finally this attack will work.

I can't fault von Falkenhayn for the carnage at Verdun - he designed that battle to be a charnel house. The whole point was to "bleed the French white" and kill as many of them as possible in order to even the odds for a terminally outnumbered German army saddled with an incompetent and crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Haig gets no such clemency from me. He was simply blinded by his unshaking belief that this charge would be the one to finally work, even though all the others before had failed, simply because it was bigger and louder than any of the other ones before. He ignored that artillery still wasn't great at defeating barbed wire, ignored reports of German lines returning fire as if unharmed, ignored reports of a massive German counter-build-up, and after the battle, ignored report after report after report of unheard of levels of casualties and simply threw more young men into the face of German machine guns, well after his contemporaries had learned the realities of war on the Western Front.

There's been efforts to point out Haig's solid leadership prior to the Somme in a attempt to rehabilitate his image, but as a student of military history and strategy? His sins are unforgivable. He is the definition of not adapting to circumstances and not learning from your mistakes.
posted by Punkey at 5:23 AM on July 1, 2016

Oh my, that "destructive technology" link. The original shock and awe.

"The deepest impression left on me was not a feeling of horror and terror in face of these gigantic forces of destruction, but an unceasing admiration for my own men. Young recruits who had just come into the field from home, fresh twenty-year-old boys, behaved in this catastrophic ploughing and thundering as if they had spent all their life in such surroundings, and it is partly thanks to them that the older married men also stood the test so well."

posted by kmt at 5:23 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

with regards to maintaining the wider context, it's also worth recalling that the Somme was originally intended to be the centerpiece Anglo-French offensive of 1916, but because the Germans pre-empted these plans by launching their attack on Verdun (previous 100th anniversary post) it had slowly evolved into being a relief operation to draw German troops away from the battle, which had started in February of that year and was still going on.

I do not terribly mind the British fixation on the Somme as 'their' battle. The French had Verdun, which was equally horrible. Australians have Gallipoli. Canadians have Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. I think it is possible to acknowledge the deep trauma that was inflicted upon a nation by a horrible meat grinder like The Somme without denying that other nations had also suffered.

Another particularly poignant aspect of the Somme was the use of "Pals" battalions. (this is an interesting video profile on one such battalion)It was a particular recruiting tactic used by Lord Kitchener after the original professional British Expeditionary Force had been worn down by the fighting of 1914, and as the Empire started turning to mass conscription. They basically promised that if you got a bunch of friends who signed up together, you could serve together. You wouldn't be alone. You would have your friends along. You could peer pressure the reluctant into coming along with you.

Kitchener was widely believed to have known that this would be a double edged sword, because morale would be high so long as the units didn't suffer many casualties, but that it would collapse exponentially as more soldiers saw their friends being blown apart by shellfire. When the 1915 battles showed their utterly horrific casualty figures, he did his best not to get the Pals battalions deployed and instead used other forces for that fighting while keeping the conscripts in reserve for training and drill.

Then Kitchener died when his ship was sunk by a mine, and his Pals battalions went off into the charnel house. Football clubs, school debating teams, the sons of an entire neighborhood or community block -- slaughtered in a day.
posted by bl1nk at 5:24 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I got very interested in this battle a few years ago, and read some books about it. While the carnage of July 1 is what we mostly remember, the battle dragged on for months, until the rains came in November and they coould not continue. What I found especially awful was, for about the first month, the British didn't seem to have much idea of what to do except let local commanders order more and more futile, ad hoc attacks, to try to capture heavily defended strong points. These accomplished nothing and cost many thousand more lives.
posted by thelonius at 5:24 AM on July 1, 2016