Battle of Delville Wood ends

By the British naming of battles, 3 September 1916 was the last day of the Battle of Delville Wood, a copse on the eastern edge of the village of Longueval that had been fought over since 15 July, when the South African Brigade entered it. The date is a convention. That day a wider Anglo-French attack began on the Somme, and the post-war Battles Nomenclature Committee assigned the fighting on the eastern edge of the wood on 3–6 September to the Battle of Guillemont. The wood itself had been in British hands for a week: on 27 August a Durham Light Infantry battalion of the 14th (Light) Division, in a surprise attack, had driven the Germans from their last foothold in the wood, Edge Trench, and taken about 60 prisoners. The German trenches just beyond the eastern and northern edges of the wood, which the British called Ale Alley, Hop Alley, Beer Trench and Tea Trench, still dominated the area, however.

The last days of August showed that the Germans did not intend to accept this. On 31 August, the first fine day in almost a week, they attacked Major-General John Capper’s newly arrived 24th Division, whose men had the previous night, soaked to the skin and under fire, relieved the exhausted 14th and 33rd Divisions. The British official history notes that in the morning German reconnaissance aircraft flew low over the British trenches, a rare sight for the British at that stage of the battle. After a heavy bombardment, at about one in the afternoon, storm detachments of the 35th Fusilier Regiment attacked with grenades along Ale Alley. According to the regiment’s history, its six flamethrowers were so caked with mud that they could not be used. The first two attacks were beaten off, but the third, at seven in the evening, pushed a battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment back into the wood. North-west of the wood, Bavarians with flamethrowers, supported by a company of the 3rd Jäger Battalion trained as a storm battalion, broke into the British Tea Trench and advanced along it, throwing grenades. On 1 September the British retook some of the lost trenches in the west, but an attempt to clear the eastern edge of the wood as far as Hop Alley broke down under machine-gun fire.

At noon on 3 September the neighbouring 7th Division attacked the village of Ginchy. The ground it had to cross was under fire from German positions on the eastern tip of the wood, so five minutes earlier, at 11.55 a.m., bombers of the 91st Brigade and a battalion of the East Surrey Regiment from the 24th Division were to take these positions. The attack failed. The smoke grenades with which the bombers meant to cover themselves only gave them away to the German riflemen and machine guns, and the East Surrey battalion received contradictory orders and could not get out of its sap. As a result the left wing of the attack on Ginchy, a Royal Welch Fusiliers battalion, came under flanking fire from Ale Alley and was pinned down in shell holes a few dozen metres short of Hop Alley. North-west of Longueval a company of a battalion of the Buffs from the 24th Division attacked Wood Lane trench twice, at noon and at four in the afternoon, in vain. Only during the night did a battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment occupy the nearby end of Tea Lane trench almost without a fight. On the German side, the history of the 35th Fusilier Regiment recorded that the heaviest fighting that day took place precisely at Delville Wood.

In the following days the fighting for the edge of the wood continued as part of the attack on Ginchy and Guillemont. On 5 September, after a two-hour mortar bombardment, two companies of a battalion of the Queen’s occupied the eastern edge of the wood up to the level of Hop Alley, but two days later their attack on the corner of the wood itself failed. From 5 September the 24th Division was relieved by the 55th Division, whose units on the following nights pushed the line forward in front of the north-eastern edge of the wood almost without hindrance. The fighting cost both sides dearly. The 14th (Light) Division lost about 3,600 men in August, and one of its field companies of sappers lost half its strength and almost all its officers in ten days of clearing and fortifying the wood. From the end of August to the first days of September the 24th Division lost nearly 2,000 killed, wounded and missing.

The battle, which the British called the fight for Devil’s Wood, thus ended not with a great assault but with a series of small, costly skirmishes for individual trenches. Delville Wood and Longueval, however, remained in British hands. Two weeks later one of the largest attacks of the Battle of the Somme set out from this base, in which tanks went into battle for the first time in history.