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cdbab29
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Nothing the Western Front can offer, however, matches the intensity of the five days of fighting inside Fort Vaux.
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Robin Neillands |
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82863b9
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the large numbers attacking in the early hours of 1 July - 64 battalions, mostly in line - was of no advantage, since they simply offered a large target to the enemy guns. As a result, this 'extended line' formation was blown away in a matter of minutes, after which the survivors advanced, if at all, in small parties, dodging from crater to crater, a tactic which should arguably have been adopted from the start.
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Robin Neillands |
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bf8526c
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The generals were now two years into this war and it should have been - and indeed was - glaringly apparent that the methods being employed to attack the enemy lines, be they British, French or German, were simply not working. Increasing the scale of the attack by the current methods simply increased the number of casualties
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Robin Neillands |
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8918a3a
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Von Falkenhayn's plan for Verdun, however flawed in execution, was at least possible; he did not intend to gain ground, penetrate the enemy defences or take Verdun. He simply wanted to kill soldiers, to bleed the French Army to death. The Anglo-French Somme plan, even if it had not been disrupted and reduced by the Verdun offensive, was a far more risky business, with little chance of achieving its objectives without new tactical ideas and ..
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Robin Neillands |
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9f601be
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the British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line between Maricourt and Gommecourt. Their attack was pressed home with great resolution - and at considerable cost. By the end of that day, 19,240 men had been killed outright and the total casualty figure, including the missing and those taken p..
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Robin Neillands |
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f9832d1
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What any analysis of the first day on the Somme comes down to is the familiar lesson - that Western Front defensive positions could not be stormed and taken by any means currently open to the attacker. The British assault on the first day of the Somme was a classic example of a nineteenth-century attack, only with aircraft in the scouting role in the place of cavalry.
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Robin Neillands |
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459cdf5
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It is an axiom of warfare that a good officer never reinforces failure. To do so simply throws away more lives and a good general will avoid doing that. A commander's task, even in moments of defeat, is to find some way forward, some way out of the current catastrophe and when General Haig assembled his reports and looked at his maps on 2-3 July, he saw that all was not yet lost in this battle on the Somme.
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Robin Neillands |
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cb82e1b
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The French, and especially the French generals, would not accept the British as equal partners in the war. The fact that without the help of Britain and her Empire they would already have lost the war and what remained of their national territory did not alter their belief in their own military superiority, or lead them into any feelings of gratitude towards their Anglo-Saxon allies.
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Robin Neillands |
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750c698
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As Sir Douglas Haig's despatch makes clear, the series of engagements collectively known to history as the Battle of the Somme did not begin as a battle of attrition. The Somme battle was designed from the first as an offensive but major battles and offensives do not happen overnight.
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Robin Neillands |
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306e62f
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sufficiency of artillery depended not only on the number of guns provided but on the width of the front attacked. The guns-per-yards-of-front ratio was crucial; to expand the latter, it was necessary to increase the former, or the infantry would go over the top without adequate support.
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Robin Neillands |
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1d6ad17
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This army contained 16 divisions, three per corps, but with a fourth division in VIII Corps. Each division could muster around 15,000 men, so the total, with corps troops and the Army reserve, came to some 400,000 men. To this can be added, for the initial onslaught on the German line, two divisions from VII Corps of Third Army, the 46th and the 56th, who would attack the salient at Gommecourt, north of Fourth Army line. More than half the ..
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Robin Neillands |
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443323f
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To supply Fourth Army's basic needs it was estimated that 31 trains must reach the front every day, bringing the day-to-day supplies as well as massive amounts of ammunition, food, water and trench stores that must be gathered for the main offensive. More than 3,000,000 shells were stockpiled close to the artillery batteries, ready to open the bombardment on 24 June.
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Robin Neillands |
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76376b9
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Haig wanted Fourth Army to achieve a breakthrough of the first and second lines in the first phase; Rawlinson thought that if his men took the German first line in the first phase they would be doing well. This is the by-now-familiar 'breakthrough' or 'bite and hold' argument and, since Rawlinson's view prevailed, his proposals are the ones to examine.
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Robin Neillands |
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676254c
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even today, 85 years after the battle, an average year of scavenging on the Somme battlefield provides the disposal squads of the French Army with 90 tons of dangerous ordnance.
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Robin Neillands |
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b092c1c
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What Joffre wanted on the Somme was not a tactical battle. As he saw it, the attempt at a breakthrough had failed and now, as so often before, the task of breaking the enemy line would get even harder. Therefore, since it was probably impossible to break through the enemy line, the next best thing was to attack all along the line, and engage the enemy in a battle that would force him to remove divisions from the Verdun front
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Robin Neillands |
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43804d8
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The orders given to the troops were not the result of stupidity or ignorance but attempts to cope with the hard and oft-repeated fact that there was no way of communicating with those troops once they had left their trenches. Hence the daylight attack, hence the general shortage of smoke, hence the advance in extended line, hence the 'creeping', or 'drifting', barrage.
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Robin Neillands |
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5bdfd7e
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on the day the Somme battle opened, the French share of the offensive had shrunk to 14 divisions compared to 16 British divisions; this fact disposes of one of the lesser British myths, that the French only played a minor part in the Somme offensive. On the first day of the Somme, the French divisions on the right also did far better than most of the British divisions.
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Robin Neillands |
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46bac2e
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the credit for developing the basic idea into what became the first tank must go to Winston Churchill,
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Robin Neillands |
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909ac10
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Now and again, the history of war throws up a battle that transcends reason. The soldiers fight because they cannot stop fighting, because too much has been committed to give up now. Too much blood has been shed, so much courage and will has been committed, that to admit defeat would be unthinkable.
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Robin Neillands |
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9a39e55
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as Alistair Horne points out, this was not simply a battle between two armies but the ancient conflict of Teuton and Gaul, two ethnic groups letting one thousand years of envy and hatred out in one long pent-up explosion of violence
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Robin Neillands |
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5d7b552
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The British generals have been widely castigated for their actions in this war and their prodigality with lives; it is hard to find evidence that the French or German generals were any better.
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Robin Neillands |
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d2d4f2c
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When evidence reached Joffre's ears that the men were complaining, that untenable positions were being given up or that attacks were not being pressed home with their former elan, his answer was not to question Nivelle or his own methods, but to call for courts martial and firing squads.
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Robin Neillands |
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1447699
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In the second week of June, two second-lieutenants were shot by firing squads drawn from their own companies, for allegedly failing to press home their attacks. Orders also went out that battalions abandoning positions or retiring during an attack were to be fired on by their own machine-guns or bombarded by French artillery. Some of these orders were actually obeyed but the resentment they caused far outweighed the influence they had on th..
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Robin Neillands |
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2d7ffb0
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The defence of Verdun and the French Republic was a splendid cause but that alone was not enough; it needed to be a two-way commitment - and what did the Republic care for them, the infantry soldiers of France, alone and dying in their shell holes, sent in again and again in attacks that withered away under the shelling and machine-gun fire, achieving nothing? By mid-June the murmurs heard among the troops in May were growing louder.
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Robin Neillands |
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a66609b
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Morale is a fragile thing. Its creation and maintenance are among the most important duties that can fall to a commander and neither Joffre nor Nivelle devoted as much thought to this issue as it deserved. Morale is maintained by a wide range of means: by discipline and training, by good leadership, by organization, by caring for the wounded, by regular reliefs,
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Robin Neillands |
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09a0e19
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In all but killing terms, the battle ended in the last days of September and the main reason it ended was mud.
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Robin Neillands |
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eebf382
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The veterans of the Somme have gone now but while they lived they talked incessantly of the mud of the Somme, mud which permeated everything, clogged rifles, flowed like lava into dugouts and trenches, sucked off boots, drowned wounded men and horses and made movement either impossible or a tremendous physical effort. To fight on the Somme was bad enough; to also fight the mud of the Somme was simply too much.
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Robin Neillands |
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01c972e
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the aim of the Somme battle was no longer an attempt at a breakthrough to Bapaume but an attempt to write down the strength of the German field army and kill German soldiers - in other words, attrition.
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Robin Neillands |
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deb2e49
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One can only wonder if the generals were serious ... or mad. In all but slaughter, the Battle of the Somme was over by early October, and to continue past that point was madness indeed, but this side of Haig's character, his stubbornness combined with a seemingly incurable optimism, is one that even his supporters find difficult to defend:
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Robin Neillands |
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f3fc901
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The decision on when to break off an attack, like the decision to launch it, is one requiring careful calculation and fine judgement. That said, Haig's judgement in fighting on into the early winter of 1916, when he could have stopped after Flers, is a clear error.
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Robin Neillands |
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55954a3
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The collapse of morale in the French Army arose not because of the German attack at Verdun but because the French generals, specifically Nivelle, also adopted the doctrine of attrition, and fought with cran and elan, instead of intelligence.
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Robin Neillands |
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823f5cf
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sometime in October 1916, Haig abandoned the notion of a breakthrough on the Somme and joined his peers in France and Germany in committing his soldiers to a battle of attrition.
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Robin Neillands |
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2c937de
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The fate of Sir John French, who had failed in the previous September at Loos - but had not lost anything like so many men in the process - cannot have passed unnoticed by General Haig in the autumn of 1916.
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Robin Neillands |
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c20c771
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In all his battles, Haig never seems to have appreciated that there came a time when he had obtained or achieved all he could hope for and that to press on would either throw away his success to date or result in terrible losses.
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Robin Neillands |
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125b325
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No tactical or strategic gain was made on the Somme front that was worth the cost in lives. Even had the British and French achieved their breakthrough on the Somme, the Germans had plenty of room to manoeuvre and, unlike the French at Verdun, no national interest in staying where they were. During the winter of 1916-17 the Germans simply withdrew to the Hindenburg Line, east of the Somme battlefield, and it all had to be done again.
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Robin Neillands |
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f1542bc
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Total casualties on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, come to some 1,300,000 men, British, French and German. The British share in this total includes the losses incurred by the Empire and Commonwealth troops, from Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand, and amounts to some 400,000 men. The French lost 200,000 men on the Somme, to add to the more serious losses of Verdun. German losses on the Somme came to more than 60..
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Robin Neillands |
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fa42445
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As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men.
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Robin Neillands |
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96b68ce
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German casualty returns did not include the less seriously wounded who were treated in their corps area. All British wounded were included in the casualty returns, even if they were treated in a regimental aid post (RAP) or at dressing stations and then returned to duty.
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Robin Neillands |
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c883887
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The regular lesson of the Western Front, one the generals seemed unable to learn, was that - using the currently conventional methods - most attacks simply did not come off, whoever carried them out
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Robin Neillands |
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9dded39
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In some curious way the battle at Verdun had become a paradigm for the entire war. Verdun now exerted its own dynamic and needed no reason to continue. By the middle of 1916 it was, or should have been, clear to all that there was no reason in it; reason had ceased to play any part in this struggle.
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Robin Neillands |
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e4b0b9f
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The British Army was learning how to fight the 'all-arms' battle by this stage of the war; no longer would the brunt be left to the infantry.
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Robin Neillands |
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66ec963
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In all the odium the British generals have attracted, it should be noticed that it was the British, not the French or the Germans, who created the tank and brought it into action and in so doing changed the face of war.
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Robin Neillands |
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12b9cb2
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The battle at Verdun can best be imagined as some monstrous ball game, in which two teams of giants push a boulder to and fro across impossible terrain. For months the Germans had pushed the French south, towards Verdun; now the French were pushing the Germans back to the north, towards their start-line positions of 21 February. The entry fee in this contest for a worthless piece of terrain was a great number of lives.
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Robin Neillands |
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e93d00a
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If the French Government had deliberately intended to inflict further torment and loss on their long-suffering soldiers they could hardly have done better than appoint General Nivelle to the post of Commander-in-Chief.
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Robin Neillands |