Battle of Bazentin Ridge ends

Under the British battle nomenclature, 17 July 1916 was the last day of the Battle of Bazentin Ridge. Three days earlier the British Fourth Army had taken the German second position from Longueval to Bazentin-le-Petit in a dawn assault. The following days showed, however, that the Germans had managed to recover. On the morning of 15 July General Henry Rawlinson ordered his troops to exploit the enemy’s confusion, but the enemy had already received reinforcements and was putting up stiff resistance on a new trench line running along the reverse slope of the ridge through High Wood (the British called it the Switch Line). From the afternoon of 15 July it rained, the ground turned to mud, and low cloud made it hard for airmen to direct artillery fire.

In High Wood, which the 91st Brigade had entered on the evening of 14 July, no progress at all could be made on 15 July against machine-gun fire from the Switch Line, and the Germans counter-attacked. To the left of the wood the 33rd Division, attacking the Switch Line in front of Martinpuich, came under crossfire from the wood and by the afternoon was back on its starting positions. During the night XV Corps headquarters, having no news from the 91st Brigade, judged its position dangerous and ordered it to withdraw. The brigade left the wood almost without a fight, taking its wounded with it, and the Germans reoccupied it. On the right wing the South African Brigade entered Delville Wood on 15 July and took most of it, but the Scots of the 9th Division were unable to drive the Germans out of the northern part of Longueval. An attack on the village and the north-western part of the wood on 16 July, and then a night attack at two in the morning on 17 July, broke down under fire from hidden machine guns. On the morning of 17 July the British at last occupied the ruins of the Waterlot Farm sugar refinery, from which the Scots and South Africans had driven the Germans as early as 15 July, but which could not be held earlier under heavy shelling.

On the left wing things went better. During the night of 16/17 July battalions of the 1st Division, the Gloucestershire Regiment and the Royal Munster Fusiliers, attacked in darkness and rain, close behind the barrage, a stretch of the second position west of Bazentin-le-Petit Wood. The Germans fled before the bayonets, leaving many dead and wounded in the trenches. The 34th Division, by contrast, failed to take Pozières: on 15 July two of its attacks stopped a few hundred metres short of the village, and an evening attack on 17 July was repulsed. Further north, on 16 July, after two weeks of fighting, troops of the Reserve Army’s X Corps completed the capture of Ovillers, taking the last 128 defenders prisoner. On the German side General Friedrich Sixt von Armin wanted to counter-attack on 15 July with the fresh 8th Division to regain the Longueval–Bazentin-le-Petit line, but its battalions, tired from the march, got stuck in shell holes and trenches under fire from British artillery and aircraft.

As early as 16 July Rawlinson concluded that no further success could be achieved by isolated attacks, and began preparing a new, carefully planned attack on a broad front. He hoped that in the meantime the Germans would bleed themselves white in counter-attacks. That day Douglas Haig’s order of the day reached the troops, thanking them for the “very fine feat of arms” of 14 July. On 17 July Rawlinson met General Ferdinand Foch at Dury to agree a joint British–French attack, and good news came from headquarters that new deliveries from home had improved the ammunition supply. The dates fixed that day were, however, soon changed again, and in the evening the South Africans fighting in Delville Wood got a new commander, because the previous one, Lieutenant-Colonel Tanner, had been wounded.

According to the British official history the attack of 14 July cost the four assault divisions 9,194 men, and other divisions also suffered heavy losses in the following days. The British stood on the ridge on a front of about 5.5 kilometres, but their line now formed a narrow wedge under fire from three sides. On its right shoulder the Germans still held Delville Wood and the northern part of Longueval, on its left Pozières, and at its tip High Wood. Bloody fighting went on for weeks over all these places, and the Battle of Delville Wood was only getting under way. The Battle of the Somme was turning into a war of attrition for individual woods and villages.