End of the Battle of the Somme

On 18 November 1916 the British Fifth Army carried out the last attack of the Battle of the Somme on the river Ancre. The first snow of the winter fell during the night, and the attack went in at dawn in a blizzard that later turned into pouring rain. The Canadians and British took two new German trenches on the ridge above Grandcourt, but north of the river the attack broke down once again. The next day rain flooded the battlefield and neither side was able to fight on. So ended, after four and a half months, the battle that had begun on 1 July with the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army. At their furthest point the Allies had advanced about ten kilometres; they had not broken through the front and had not taken any of the towns that were to fall in the first days of the offensive. The two sides together had lost more than a million men.

The last attack in the snow

The attack of 18 November was a continuation of the Battle of the Ancre, which General Hubert Gough had begun five days earlier. On 13 November his Fifth Army took Beaumont-Hamel, an objective from the first day of the battle, and the next day Beaucourt. The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, General Douglas Haig, was then at the conference at Chantilly and halted larger operations until his return, but agreed that Gough could strike once more before winter finally closed the fighting season.

The plan was changed several times and preparations were made in haste. The main blow was delivered by II Corps south of the Ancre, from the ridge taken a week earlier in the Battle of the Ancre Heights. At 6.10 a.m. the infantry went forward in the blizzard. The Canadian official history writes that the soldiers floundered through freezing mud, could barely make out objectives covered in snow and often lost their direction, while the artillery, unable to see anything, could only keep to the fixed fire plan. The 4th Canadian Division did best: it took Desire Support Trench, sent patrols as far as Grandcourt Trench and took 625 prisoners, losing about 1,250 men. It was its last fight on the Somme. The British 18th Division took only a stretch of Desire Trench, and the 19th Division reached the western edge of the ruins of Grandcourt, but the following night it was withdrawn to a line that could be held. North of the Ancre, the 32nd Division briefly broke into Munich and Frankfort Trenches on the ridge above Serre, but had to fall back with heavy losses, and a small group of its wounded hid for several days in one of the German dugouts before falling into enemy hands.

The same day Haig, just back from Paris, gathered his army commanders for the first monthly conference since the start of the battle and announced the rules for the winter. The British armies were to hold their positions, carry out limited operations as strength and weather allowed so as to give the Germans no rest, and be ready by 1 February 1917 for a great joint offensive in the spring. General Henry Rawlinson, commander of the Fourth Army, had already written to Haig that his divisions were exhausted and needed rest. The Fourth Army’s last attack, an Australian-British assault on Gird Trench near Le Barque, ended on 16 November with the loss of the ground gained. In the same days the French Sixth Army fought without success for St Pierre Vaast Wood and Sailly-Saillisel, and its further attacks were called off because of the weather.

The balance in ground

On the map the result of five months of fighting looked modest. North of the Somme the Allies had pushed the Germans off the whole range of high ground between Albert and Bapaume and from Thiepval to Combles, but at their furthest point they were about ten kilometres from the start line of 1 July. French accounts state that north of the river the front moved about 12 kilometres, and south of it about 8. Neither Bapaume nor Péronne, the objectives of the first days, had been taken. The front had not been broken, and the cavalry, which was to pour into the breach, never once got a real chance.

The state of the troops on both sides, on the other hand, was dreadful. In a report to London of 21 November Haig described the ground on the Somme as “a morass, in places almost bottomless”, through which food and ammunition were brought up with enormous difficulty, and the men were so exhausted by carrying supplies and repairing trenches that they had to be relieved often. In the same report he calculated that on 17 November the infantry of his 55 divisions in France was more than 90,000 men short of full establishment. On the German side, regiments came out of the line as mere remnants. According to the history of one of them, which had held out at Grandcourt, the regiment went into battle more than 3,000 strong and on 19 November came out of it about 1,250 strong.

The balance in losses

Even during the battle the two sides argued about the losses, and the argument goes on to this day. According to frequently quoted figures, at the Chantilly conference on 15 November the Allies estimated German losses on the Somme at about 630,000 and their own, British and French, at about 485,000. After the war the author of the second volume of the British official history for 1916, Wilfrid Miles, calculated in 1938 the German losses at 660,000–680,000, and the Anglo-French at just under 630,000. Most present-day historians regard the German figures from the British calculations as inflated and, following German sources, accept rather about 500,000. For November alone the German official history gives about 45,000 men up to the night of 17–18 November. The British Fifth Army lost more than 23,000 soldiers from 11 to 24 November, while taking more than 7,000 prisoners in that time. According to Haig’s dispatch, the British took a little over 38,000 prisoners on the Somme between 1 July and 18 November.

Whatever the exact figures, the British Army had never lost so many men in any earlier battle. Many towns and cities from which whole “Pals” battalions had volunteered lost a large part of their young men in a few hours or days.

What the Somme taught

For the British Army, overwhelmingly made up of Kitchener’s volunteers and fresh conscripts, the Somme was a school of industrial war. The British official history concluded that the great lesson of 1 July was that the infantry must get into a trench before the defenders had time to set up their machine guns. The answer proved to be the creeping barrage, a wall of shells moving ahead of the attackers, and teaching the infantry to follow close behind it. By the end of the battle this was already the basic method of attack. The successful attacks on Regina Trench showed that with carefully prepared artillery and surprise a strong position could be taken at little cost. Tanks, used for the first time on 15 September at Flers, brought, according to the official history, little benefit, but their promise was enough for hundreds of them to be ordered. The British air service learned to direct artillery fire, photograph positions and attack infantry from low altitude. In the winter of 1916/1917 the experience of the Somme was poured into new training instructions for divisions and platoons, which gave more freedom to small units.

The Germans took an even harder lesson away from the Somme. Their soldiers coined a name for it, “battle of materiel” (Materialschlacht): a war in which the outcome was decided by a mass of steel and ammunition, not by the courage of the individual soldier. The principle of rigidly defending every metre of trench cost them enormous losses under the fire of superior artillery. In December 1916 the Supreme Army Command issued a new instruction on the defensive battle. Instead of holding on to the front line at all costs, the infantry was to defend itself in a deep zone of strongpoints and retake lost ground with counter-attacks by reserves. Companies were given more machine guns, so that firepower could replace the trained soldiers who had been lost. Erich Ludendorff wrote after the war that at the end of the fighting of 1916 the German army had been “completely exhausted”, and Paul von Hindenburg, arguing in January 1917 for unrestricted submarine warfare, said that the soldiers had to be spared a second Battle of the Somme. As early as September the Germans had begun building a new, shorter line of defence behind the front, to which they withdrew without a fight in the spring of 1917.

The dispute over Haig

The Battle of the Somme at once became a subject of dispute in London. As early as 1 August 1916 Winston Churchill, then out of office, circulated to members of the Cabinet a memorandum arguing that the offensive cost too much in relation to the gains. On 13 November, on the eve of the last attacks, the minister without portfolio, Lord Lansdowne, put before the Cabinet a memorandum in which he asked whether, in the face of such losses, Britain could still count on victory, and suggested considering peace. Growing dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war contributed to the fall of the government of H. H. Asquith at the beginning of December. His successor, David Lloyd George, distrusted Haig from then on, though he was unable to remove him, and on 1 January 1917 Haig was made a field marshal. The French, for their part, held it against the British that they had broken off the battle too soon. Joffre later claimed in his memoirs that the Allies’ perseverance could have brought Germany complete defeat.

Haig defended his decision in a dispatch published at the end of December 1916. He wrote that the offensive had achieved all three of its aims: it had relieved Verdun, tied down the main German forces in the west and seriously worn them down, and each of these results in itself justified the battle. After the war, however, criticism prevailed. Lloyd George in his war memoirs of the 1930s, and the military historian Basil Liddell Hart in his works, portrayed Haig as a stubborn, unimaginative commander who sent men to the slaughter. In the 1960s the image of the army as “lions led by donkeys” took hold. Some historians, however, defended Haig, pointing out that in 1916 there was no way of defeating Germany without battles of attrition on the Western Front. Present-day scholars most often speak of a “learning curve”: the Somme was a cruel but unavoidable school in which the British Army learned the methods with which in 1918 it carried out the victorious Hundred Days Offensive. Others point out that many costly mistakes, such as the persistent renewal of small, badly prepared attacks, resulted not from lack of experience but from the commanders’ decisions.

After the battle

A winter quiet settled on the Somme front, broken by shelling, raids and local attacks. The soldiers of both sides now fought above all against mud, frost and disease. The Chantilly conference agreed that the Allies would be ready for joint offensives on all fronts from the first half of February 1917. No one yet knew that in December Joffre would be replaced by General Robert Nivelle, who instead of finishing the Battle of the Somme would propose an entirely new offensive on the Aisne, and that the Germans, not wanting a second Somme, would give up without a fight in the spring all the ground over which this battle had been fought, and more besides.