Battle of Albert (1916)

The Battle of Albert is the British name for the first two weeks of the Battle of the Somme, from 1 to 13 July 1916. It began with the disaster of the first day, when the British Fourth Army lost more than 57,000 men and took almost nothing north of the road from Albert to Bapaume. South of that road, however, the British and French broke through the German first position. In the days that followed the British command abandoned the attack on the northern sector and shifted its effort to where it had succeeded. For almost two weeks, in rain and mud, division after division fought for the ruined villages of La Boisselle and Contalmaison and the dense Mametz and Trônes Woods, which screened the German second position on the Longueval – Bazentin ridge. By the time the attack on that ridge began on 14 July, the British had suffered another 25,000 killed, wounded and missing, and the Germans had begun moving divisions and guns from Verdun to the Somme.

Name and dates

The name “Battle of Albert” (1916) was given to this fighting after the war by a British committee that fixed the official names and dates of battles. It covers all British operations on the Somme from 1 to 13 July 1916, including the sectors where no attacks were made after the first day. The French do not single out this period, and German literature speaks simply of the first weeks of the Battle of the Somme (Schlacht an der Somme). The 1916 battle should not be confused with the First Battle of Albert of September 1914, in which the front formed on the same hills, or with the Second Battle of Albert of August 1918. The town of Albert itself, a few kilometres behind the front line, was not an objective of the attack. Columns of troops marched to the front through its streets, however, and above it rose the basilica with the golden statue of the Virgin, which a German shell had tipped over in January 1915. The soldiers believed the war would end when the statue fell.

Background

The plan of the offensive, its preparation and the course of the first day are described on the page devoted to the Battle of the Somme as a whole. Here it is enough to recall that on 1 July 1916, after a week-long bombardment, eleven divisions of General Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army attacked on a front more than 22 kilometres long, from Montauban to Serre, while two divisions of the Third Army made a subsidiary attack at Gommecourt. The British commander-in-chief, General Douglas Haig, hoped to break through both German positions. North of the Albert–Bapaume road, at Serre, Beaumont-Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers and La Boisselle, the attack collapsed under machine-gun fire. On the right wing XIII Corps took the village of Montauban, and XV Corps the village of Mametz, enveloping Fricourt from two sides. The French did even better: General Émile Fayolle’s Sixth Army took the whole German first position on both banks of the Somme.

On the evening of 1 July nobody at British headquarters yet knew the scale of the defeat. Haig wanted to renew the attack as soon as possible, to wear the Germans down and gain a starting line for the attack on their second position. At 10 p.m. Rawlinson ordered the corps to continue attacking “as soon as artillery preparation permits”. The two beaten northern corps, VIII and X, were taken over by General Hubert Gough, who had been meant to lead the cavalry into the breach. At noon on 3 July his group was turned into a separate Reserve Army.

Forces

The British Fourth Army had five corps in the front line: from the right, XIII, XV, III, X and VIII, each of several divisions, most of them from Kitchener’s New Armies. Exhausted divisions were relieved by others from reserve, and by mid-July more than twenty British divisions had been in the battle zone. South of them, and beyond the Somme, the French Sixth Army attacked, with General Balfourier’s XX Corps on the north bank of the river and the I Colonial Corps and XXXV Corps on the south bank. French operations as a whole were directed by General Ferdinand Foch, commander of the Northern Army Group.

On the German side the front from the Somme to Gommecourt was held by General Hermann von Stein’s XIV Reserve Corps, part of General Fritz von Below’s Second Army. According to the British official history, behind the seven German divisions that received the blow on 1 July there were only four in reserve. The Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, long believed that the main blow would fall further north, on the Sixth Army at Arras, and was slow to send reinforcements to the Somme: the 3rd Guards Division, the 183rd Division, then further divisions and dozens of heavy artillery batteries.

Course of the battle

2 July: Fricourt and La Boisselle. The night after the first day was quiet, and the sunny Sunday of 2 July passed almost without German shelling. Before midnight the defenders of Fricourt, enveloped from two sides, had abandoned the village. The 17th Division entered it at noon without a fight and rounded up eleven stragglers. On the right wing XIII Corps beat off a German counter-attack at Montauban during the night, and an attack at the junction with the French also failed. In the afternoon two battalions of the 19th Division attacked La Boisselle, where the 34th Division had been halted the day before beside the great crater of the Lochnagar mine. By 9 p.m. the British had cleared the western part of the village, searching cellars and dugouts with bombs.

That day Haig considered concentrating the whole effort on the right wing, where the Germans were clearly shaken. Rawlinson preferred first to improve the position in the centre and take Thiepval. Haig said there would be no shortage of men for replacements, but the limit was ammunition. About 70,000 field-gun shells and 6,000 rounds for the six-inch howitzers were arriving from England each day, and many of them, especially their fuzes, were defective.

On the German side there was alarm. South of the Somme XVII Corps, with the consent of Second Army headquarters, fell back to the third position. Falkenhayn came to Below’s headquarters at Saint-Quentin and declared that the first principle of position warfare was not to give up a foot of ground, and to retake any lost ground by immediate counter-attack, “even to the last man”. The Second Army’s chief of staff, General Grünert, was blamed for the withdrawal and replaced by Colonel Fritz von Loßberg, a specialist in defence. On 3 July Below repeated this principle in an order to the army.

3 July: defeat at Ovillers and Thiepval, success at Fricourt. At 3.15 a.m., in the half-light, two brigades of the 12th Division attacked Ovillers. They broke into the German trenches, but the defenders came out of their deep dugouts and, with bayonet and bomb, cut off the attackers when they ran out of bombs. The attack cost the division almost 2,400 men. At Thiepval the 32nd Division, whose orders had been changed during the night and whose attack had been postponed by three hours without most of the batteries being told, lost about 1,100 men for no gain at all. In La Boisselle hand-to-hand fighting went on all day. When three battalion commanders had been killed or wounded, it was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Adrian Carton de Wiart, who had lost an eye in Somaliland and a hand at Ypres. He pulled the pins out of grenades with his teeth. For this he was awarded the Victoria Cross.

On the right wing XV Corps took Bottom Wood and Shelter Wood. About 600 men of the German 186th Infantry Regiment and about 200 from other regiments surrendered. In the afternoon patrols reported that the great Mametz Wood and the trenches in front of it were empty. The corps commander, however, did not want to risk a fight for which he was not prepared, and a night raid was delayed because its guide lost his way. The British official history later judged that the wood could have been taken that afternoon almost without loss. In the evening two battalions of the 27th Brigade crossed open ground to Bernafay Wood and occupied it, losing six men.

That same day the allied commanders quarrelled. Generals Joffre and Foch came to Haig’s advanced headquarters and demanded that the British renew the main attack on Pozières and Thiepval, where they had previously been defeated. Joffre even tried to give Haig this as an order. Haig replied that he did not have the ammunition for an attack along the whole front and had to strike where the defence had already been breached, and that in matters of tactics he answered only to his own government. Joffre gave way, but the two armies did not agree on a joint attack at their junction and acted separately for several days.

4–6 July: rain and preparations. During the night of 3/4 July it began to rain, and in the afternoon a thunderstorm broke. The trenches filled with water and the roads turned to mud. On 4 July the 19th Division took the rest of La Boisselle, and the 18th Division occupied Caterpillar Wood without a fight. During the night of 4/5 July XV Corps surprised the Germans in the rain and took Quadrangle Trench in front of Mametz Wood, and the 23rd Division, after a day of fighting, captured Horseshoe Trench west of Contalmaison. Over these three days the British brought up artillery, repaired roads and prepared the attack on Trônes Wood, Mametz Wood and Contalmaison, fixed for 7 July. In the meantime the Germans put their defence in order. Mixed battalions of at least six divisions stood along the second position and on the line Mametz Wood – Contalmaison – Ovillers, and the front from the Somme to Gommecourt was divided into three groups under corps commanders.

The French in the south. On the south bank of the Somme the French I Colonial Corps and XXXV Corps took Frise and Herbécourt on 2 July, and on 3 July, almost without resistance, Assevillers and Flaucourt. They stood on the plateau above the bend of the Somme opposite Péronne. The British official history considers that a vigorous pursuit was possible that day, but Fayolle treated the attack south of the river as secondary. On 4 July the French took Belloy-en-Santerre and Estrées, which they lost the next day, and on 5 July the village of Hem on the north bank. On 9 July the Colonials broke through the German second position and took Biaches right outside Péronne, but were repulsed at Barleux. That same day Foch ordered Fayolle to remain on the defensive on the north bank until the British had broken the German second position.

7 July: Contalmaison, Mametz Wood, Ovillers. The attack of 7 July took place in a downpour. The trenches were knee-deep, and in places waist-deep, in mud, and fourteen horses had to be harnessed to a single ammunition wagon. A night attack by the 17th Division on Quadrangle Support Trench, against which the divisional commander and his subordinates had warned in vain, broke down on uncut wire. In front of Mametz Wood a brigade of the 38th (Welsh) Division advanced three times into machine-gun fire and got no closer than 250 metres to the wood. To its left the 1st Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment, of the 23rd Division, broke into Contalmaison at about 10 a.m. and cleared the ruins as far as the church, but in the afternoon, when bombs and ammunition ran out, it had to withdraw. Further left the 19th Division took trenches near Bailiff Wood and captured more than 400 prisoners from six regiments and five different divisions, which showed how badly mixed the German units had become. At Ovillers three battalions of the 12th Division took the first three lines of trenches, paying for them with more than 1,400 killed and wounded. One of the prisoners is said to have remarked: “Galicia was bad, Verdun was worse, but this is the worst of all.” In the evening Haig ordered the ANZAC corps, with the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions, to be moved from Flanders to the Somme.

8–13 July: Trônes Wood. On 8 July the right wing attacked, together with the French. Trônes Wood, dense and not thinned for two years, lay in a valley below the German second position and was under fire from Longueval and Guillemont. The British official history wrote that it could be taken, but held only by permission of the Germans. The French 39th Division took Maltz Horn Trench on the slope in front of Hardecourt, and the 30th Division broke into the southern edge of the wood. Over the following days the wood changed hands several times. On 9 July the British crossed it almost without a fight, but in the afternoon German artillery from several dozen batteries smothered it with shells and drove them out, and in the evening a battalion of the fresh German 123rd Division broke into the wood in a counter-attack. In five days the 30th Division lost more than 2,300 men. The last attack by the 18th Division on the evening of 13 July stalled among fallen trees. Trônes Wood was still not entirely taken when the attack on Bazentin Ridge began at dawn on 14 July.

10–12 July: Mametz Wood. Mametz Wood was the largest wood on the battlefield, with dense undergrowth, fallen trunks and wire that the Germans had managed to stretch out after 1 July. After the failed attempts of 7 and 8 July the corps command removed the commander of the 38th Division, General Ivor Philipps, and temporarily gave the division to General Watts of the 7th Division. At 4.15 a.m. on 10 July the whole Welsh division advanced on the wood behind a creeping barrage, crossing almost a kilometre of open slope. The Welsh quickly took the southern part of the wood, but then companies and battalions lost touch in the thicket. Several battalion commanders were killed, and one brigade lost all 96 of its runners. In the afternoon, after reserves had been committed, they cleared the wood almost to its northern edge, where machine-gun fire stopped them. On 11 July the last Welsh brigade again reached the northern edge, but during the night German artillery forced it to fall back. During the night of 11/12 July the German command agreed to abandon the wood, whose defence “had cost countless brave men”. On the morning of 12 July the 62nd Brigade of the 21st Division occupied it without organised resistance, finding hundreds of German dead and 13 heavy guns. According to the British official history the 38th Division lost nearly 4,000 men, including seven battalion commanders. Among the Welshmen fighting in the wood was the poet and painter David Jones, who described this fighting in the poem “In Parenthesis”.

10 July: Contalmaison. On the evening of 9 July the 23rd Division took Bailiff Wood west of Contalmaison, from which the Germans had been firing into the flank of the attackers. At 4.30 p.m. the next day, after a half-hour bombardment, the 8th and 9th Battalions of the Green Howards, of the 69th Brigade, advanced on the village across open ground in four waves. They crossed the trench in front of the village and the wire, and at 5.30 p.m. joined up with the companies that had gone round the village from the north. The 8th Battalion, reduced to five officers and 150 men, took more prisoners than its own strength. In all the captors of Contalmaison took 280 prisoners and nine machine guns. According to a German account quoted in the British history, little more than a hundred men of the village garrison escaped to the second position. That same day the 17th Division, after fierce hand-to-hand fighting, at last took Quadrangle Support Trench between the village and the wood.

Ovillers. On the left wing the Reserve Army fought for Ovillers throughout this time, in a labyrinth of ruins, trenches and dugouts where the opponents were so close together that the artillery could not help. The battle with bombs, rifles and trench mortars went on day and night. The village fell only on 16 July, when its last defenders, about 130 men of the German 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment and the Guard Fusilier Regiment, laid down their arms.

Casualties

According to the British official history the first day cost the British 57,470 killed, wounded, missing and prisoners, including 19,240 killed and died of wounds. From 2 to 13 July, by historians’ reckoning, the Fourth Army made several dozen separate attacks in which it lost about 25,000 men, so more than 80,000 in the Battle of Albert as a whole. Many divisions lost 4,000–5,000 men within a few days, for example the 34th Division 6,811 from 1 to 5 July and the 17th Division 4,771 up to 11 July. French losses were incomparably smaller: according to some studies about 1,600 men on 1 July and some ten to twenty thousand in the following days. The German official history gives German losses from 1 to 10 July as more than 40,000 men. Many German regiments were almost destroyed: according to the British official history Grenadier Regiment No. 9 lost 35 officers and 1,150 men out of about 2,800 from 4 to 16 July, and Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 111 at Fricourt more than 2,300 men.

Significance

The Battle of Albert did not bring the breakthrough Haig had hoped for, but nor was it simply a defeat. On the sector from the Somme to the Albert–Bapaume road the Allies took the German first position and closed up to the second, on the Longueval – Bazentin ridge. The British official history pointed out that immediately after 1 July the opportunity on the right wing, where the Germans had been routed, was not exploited. For several days Mametz Wood and the area around Contalmaison were almost empty, and when the British attacked them a week later they were already defended by fresh divisions. Uncoordinated attacks by single brigades, poorly supported by artillery, allowed the Germans to concentrate their modest forces on narrow sectors. Haig, however, refused to renew the attack where he had been defeated, and that choice, against Joffre’s demands, set the direction of the rest of the battle.

The most important effect of the battle concerned Verdun. When the last great assault on Fort Souville failed on 11 July, Falkenhayn, because of the dangerous situation on the Somme, ordered the Fifth Army to go over to strict defence and began taking artillery away from Verdun. The British official history judged that on that day the Somme offensive had achieved its first aim. For the Germans, the first two weeks of the battle were a foretaste of what awaited them until the autumn: the constant feeding of new divisions into the fight, under the fire of an enemy’s artillery that also ruled the air, and immediate counter-attacks to defend every scrap of ground.