End of the Battle of Flers–Courcelette

According to the British battle nomenclature, 22 September 1916 was the last day of the Battle of Flers–Courcelette. A week earlier, on 15 September, the British Fourth Army and the Canadian Corps, supported for the first time by tanks, had taken High Wood and the villages of Flers, Martinpuich and Courcelette on the Somme. There was no breakthrough, and the following days, as the British official history writes, turned into a series of local attacks, “always costly in men and munitions”, which were meant only to prepare the ground for the next great attack.

On 16 September the British tried to complete the work. A brigade of the 20th Division took a stretch of trenches before Lesbœufs, but the exhausted Guards stopped halfway, and near Gueudecourt the attack of the 64th Brigade, which had marched several miles in the rain during the night and set off far behind the barrage, broke down under machine-gun fire. The next day General Henry Rawlinson postponed the new great attack. The French were not ready, and in the course of a week the stock of shells for the British field guns in France had fallen by more than two thirds. On 18 September, in a downpour, the 6th Division at last took the redoubt known as the Quadrilateral, east of Ginchy, which on 15 September had held up the whole right flank. Then for several days it rained almost without a break. Roads and tracks dissolved into mud, guns and ammunition wagons sank in, and the batteries began to bring up shells on the backs of horses and mules. The date of the attack was moved first to the 23rd and then, after Haig’s conversation with General Ferdinand Foch on 21 September, to 25 September.

Throughout the week the Canadians defended Courcelette against counter-attacks and fought for the German trenches on the ridge beyond the village. On 20 September they took part of the Zollern Graben trench, but after a whole morning of fighting the Germans won back almost all of it. On the evening of 22 September the 1st Canadian Division of General Arthur Currie advanced about 500 metres east of Courcelette. The same day, the first fine day for a long time, British divisions occupied the Starfish and Prue trenches before Martinpuich, abandoned by the Germans the previous night. According to the Canadian official history, the week of fighting cost the Canadian Corps 7,230 men. The losses of the British divisions were greater still: Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson calculated the losses of the nine Fourth Army divisions that went into the attack on 15 September at about 29,000 men.

Douglas Haig regarded the battle as a success. In his dispatch he wrote that it had brought a gain “greater than any that our arms had achieved in a single operation since the beginning of the offensive”. The British had broken through two main lines of the German defence on a front of about ten kilometres and advanced on average a kilometre and a half. He was also pleased with the tanks, although of the 36 that went into action on 15 September few had really helped the infantry, and after a few days hardly any were fit to fight. On 19 September he sent his deputy chief of staff, General Butler, to London with a request for a thousand new machines.

The most important objectives, however, still remained in German hands. The road to Bapaume was barred by the fortified villages of Morval, Lesbœufs and Gueudecourt, and at both ends of the ridge the Germans held Combles and Thiepval. Haig decided to attack them simultaneously. On 25 September the Fourth Army was to strike at Morval and Lesbœufs, and a day later the Reserve Army of General Hubert Gough at Thiepval, which had resisted all British attacks since 1 July.