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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“FIRST DAY OF
THE SOMME” by Andrew Macdonald (Harper-Collins, $NZ39:99) ; “DARK JOURNEY” by Glyn
Harper [paperback reprint of book first published in hardback in 2007]
(Penguin-Random House, $NZ39:99)
It’s the week
with Anzac Day in it and we are once again reminded of the First World War,
with plenty of cues from the media about the Gallipoli campaign and all its
overstated nationalist trimmings. I’m pleased, therefore, to look at a book
which has nothing to do with Gallipoli, even if it was written by a New
Zealander.
Andrew Macdonald
is a youngish military historian, now residing in London, who specialises in
the Western Front in the First World War. First
Day of the Somme is his third book in this field. It is a comprehensive
account of a single day, probably the most notorious and certainly the most
lethal day in the history of the British Army. This was 1 July 1916, the first
day of the Somme offensive, in which the British suffered 57,540 casualties,
comprising 19,240 dead, 35,493 wounded and 2737 “others” (missing or p.o.ws.).
The German total casualties in the same day’s fighting were about 12, 000
including approximately 3,000 dead. Notoriously, on this day the whole
Newfoundland Army Corps ceased to exist.
This single day
has been covered before by many other writers, but usually only from the
British point of view. In his introduction, Andrew Macdonald remarks that this
was the case with the last major scholarly book on the subject, Martin Middlebrook’s
“soldier-centric” The First Day on the
Somme, published in 1971. Macdonald’s aim is to restore balance by giving
as much of the German perspective as the archives permit, as well as the
British one. And this he proceeds to do, with methodical accounts of
preparations on both sides of the lines, and the sufferings of ordinary
soldiers.
He begins
(Chapter 1) with British high command and its ambitions. General Sir Douglas
Haig believed that he could mount a major attack, which would punch through
German lines and resume a war of movement as opposed to the trench warfare in
which the conflict had become bogged down. In some respects the French supremo
General Joseph Joffre supported this strategy, but was modifying his opinions
somewhat as the prolonged meat-grinder that was the Battle of Verdun was going
on. The subordinate generals of Haig and Joffre - Generals Rawlinson, Allenby,
Foch and Petain - were very sceptical of this grand strategy and were more in
favour of the “bite-and-hold” technique, knowing that a war of attrition would
follow but that it was unavoidable. Before Britain’s Somme offensive began, the
French general Fayolle wrote presciently:
“We have understood that we cannot run around
like madmen in the successive enemy positions. Doctrine is taking shape. If
there are so many defensive positions, there will need to be as many battles,
succeeding each other as rapidly as possible. Each one needs to be organised
anew, with a new artillery preparation. If one goes too quickly, one risks a
check. If one goes too slowly, the enemy has time to construct successive
defensive lines. That is the problem and it is extremely difficult.” (quoted
p.18).
Macdonald argues
that were many changes of commitment to the offensive by the French (who were
preoccupied with Verdun) and the British. “In
short, the British army’s final attack orders were the laboured sum of the
shifting sands of coalition warfare.” (p.38) His introduction to high
command all suggests a mighty mess in the making.
Whereupon (Chapter
2) Macdonald takes us to the lower ranks and gives a more worms’-eye-view of
the prelude to battle. Of Haig’s 19 divisions, a high number were new to
Picardy and under-trained. Conditions in trench life were already dreadful but
by all objective measures, the morale of the troops had been rising in the months
before the offensive. Tommies had picked up the idea that there really would be
a major breakthrough that would hasten the war’s end. There was less
insubordination and there were far fewer field courts-martial. Logically
Macdonald then (Chapter 3) gives us the view from the German side of the lines,
both officers and other ranks. The preparations for the British offensive were
open and observable enough for the Germans to understand that a major attack
was in the offing, especially when their binoculars saw thousands of lorries
bringing up materiel to the British front lines and when they observed large
changes of personnel in certain sectors. The German Commander-in-Chief
Falkenhayn had the worry of having to send off a considerable part of his
forces to the Eastern Front to counter a major Russian offensive. Germans in
the trenches were regularly harassed by Allied air power which was numerically
much superior to German air power. Even so, Germans had learnt in 1915 to dig much
deeper defensive positions than either the French or the British, as often as
possible capable of withstanding prolonged artillery bombardment.
So we come (Chapter
4) to the British bombardment of 26-30 June. This was intended to shatter
German morale, kill most German front-line troops and cut the heavy barbed wire
entanglements that stood before the German trenches, making it easier for
British infantry to pass through. The bombardment was meant to last three days
only, but went on for five full days as weather was bad and on some days, poor
visibility meant difficulties with ranging. Even so, hundreds of thousands of
shells rained down on German positions. Macdonald notes that there were pockets
of scepticism about the effectiveness of this. Some shrewd Tommies realized
that the whole bombardment would put the Germans in a state of high preparedness
for the coming attack. British patrols observed that in most places, German
wire was not cut at all, and British infantry trying to pass through would be
easy targets for German machine-guns and riflemen. Also, piles of rubble in the
nine villages that were completely destroyed in the British bombardment still
made excellent defensive positions for German infantry. Says Macdonald: “German soldiers were, overall, well prepared
to meet the British attack when it eventually came, and many were motivated by
a desire to exact bloody payback for their ordeal by shellfire.” (p.122)
Furthermore: “Senior British intelligence
officers… ignored the abundance of available warning signs that the
shellfire-torn German positions remained not only defensible, but also defended.”
(p.129). Germans had had to remain in their deep dug-outs when the shells were
falling, but only a very small proportion were in fact killed or wounded by the
preliminary bombardment.
And so, from Chapters
5 to 10, there follows the detailed, scrupulously-documented, agonising tale of
the day’s disaster in each sector.
It begins (Chapter
5) with VIII Corps’ failure at Serre and Beaumont Hamel. A huge British mine
detonation was set off ten minutes before it should have been, giving Germans a
clear warning that the attack was immanent. “German infantrymen raced up from dugouts and into the shellfire-torn trenches,
propping rifles and machine-guns on broken parapets and shell-crater rims; they
were ready and waiting 5-10 minutes before the British attack even began.”
(p.147)
Macdonald is
merciless in documenting the incompetence, or unfounded optimism, of many
British field commanders. Chapter 6, chronicling X Corps’ bloody failure at
Thiepval, is very personal in condemning Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Morland.
A large British force – many of them Ulstermen – did manage to push through
German forward trenches after the bombardment ceased, and pressed hundreds of
yards into German-held territory, making what amounted to a mini-salient. But
Morland kept insisting on more full-frontal attacks on German forward trenches,
rather than taking the many opportunities he was given to out-flank German
strongholds. Result? By the end of the first day X Corps, for all its valour,
was rolled up by vigorous and well-organised German counter-attacks, no ground
was gained, and the pile of British corpses was as big as it was anywhere else
on the battlefield. Says Macdonald “Tenth
Corps’ failure was the result of Morland’s bungled corps command. This included
his artillery’s failure to neutralise German defensive obstacles and
mechanisms, his deployment of the 49th too far back, and his myopic
planning. All these factors were decided before a single X Corps soldier
stepped into no-man’s-land on 1 July. Morland had handed the pre-battle
tactical advantage to [his German opposite number] Soden.” (p.206)
A similar
scenario played out (Chapter 7) where III Corps had their lives squandered in
an attempt to charge into Ovillers and La Boisselle under the incompetent field
commander Lieutenant-General Sir William Pulteney. Macdonald depicts him as
promoted beyond his level of competence and totally unprepared for the
conditions of battle that the men under his command would have to face. Some
tactical British successes are recorded in Chapter 8, but they are not properly
exploited for the intended capture of much more German-held territory. In this
case, Macdonald is fairly merciless about both the competence and the moral
character of the field commander:
“The job of busting this defensive network
fell to 55-year-old details man Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Horne. Before the
war, Horne had served in India and South Africa, where he burned Afrikaner
farms in a failed attempt to quell resistance. His previously non-descript
career bloomed in 1914-16. Being a Haig protégé helped, as did the fact that
both men were deeply religious. Horne sometimes went to church twice on a
Sunday. But his rise to corps command in 1916 had more to do with Haig’s and
Fourth Army commander General Sir Henry Rawlinson’s appreciation of his
scientific, open-minded approach to warfare and a ‘meticulous and indefatigable
personal attention to details of organisation and execution.’ Colleagues thought Horne courteous, charming,
modest, honest and unpretentious, but Afrikaner families probably still saw him
as a war criminal. While artilleryman Horne was said to be sociable and even
humorous among friends, outsiders thought him sparing of words. He possessed a
‘wise, kindly look, with a suspicion of a smile coming through his
seriousness.’ He liked horse-riding, hunting and fishing, found coarse language
distasteful and later hypocritically raged against German scorched-earth
tactics.” (p.250)
The climax of
stupidity is the account (Chapter 10) of VII Corps’ assault on Gommecourt, this
time under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow who “habitually talked a better game than he
delivered” (p.325). The assault was intended as a diversionary attack,
which Snow mistook for a mere “feint” – and after all his men had been duly
slaughtered in a pointless assault on a strong position, Snow comforted himself
with the thought that at least they had tied down some of the enemy troops for
a while. Macdonald’s comment on this particular sector could describe most of
the others:
“The 46th’s failure was the result
of mostly intact German wire, numerous defenders who sat out the preparatory
bombardment in shell-proof dugouts, and large numbers of operational enemy
artillery batteries that intervened when the attack began and ultimately
decided the outcome of the battle.” (p.353)
In his summing
up (Chapter 11), Macdonald is at pains to explain that the outcome of the first
day of the Somme was not just the result of poor British planning, incompetent
British field commanders and the over-confidence of British high command. It
should also be credited to the greater skill of German troops in trench warfare
and the greater professionalism, and ability to adapt to changing conditions,
of German field commanders. Macdonald concurs with the judgment (pp.380-381) of
the French supremo General Joffre that British artillery and infantry were at
this point simply less skilled than either German or French artillery and infantry.
On the first day of the Somme, the French contribution was the only part of the
allied offensive that succeeded and met all its objectives.
Instead
of the knockout blow and the breakthrough to open country that Haig had
expected, the first day of the 4-month battle of the Somme led merely to a long
campaign of attrition. The Western Front war became, as it remained until 1918,
slow-motion, grinding-down slaughter. There were no marvellous breakthroughs.
There are some
miscellaneous things that I should note about Macdonald’s book. More than once,
in post-conflict analysis, he uses the term “butcher’s bill” for the statistics of dead and wounded. This might
sound cynical and callous, but regrettably it is justified by his unflattering
accounts of field commanders and their attitudes. Just occasionally I wish
there was a glossary of specialist military terms (okay, I know it’s some sort
of entrenchment, but what exactly is a “Russian Sap”?). I admire Macdonald’s
habit, in each chapter on operations, of first giving us the view of the top
brass, then cutting to the experiences of the ordinary soldiers in the front
line – and then switching to the German perspective, which is the key novelty
of this book. And as a sideline, it is interesting to find vignettes of people
who much later became well-known – Cecil Lewis (later the author of the flying
classic Sagittarius Rising) flies
overhead with the RFC. The soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, to one side of this
battle, gets a long shot of the action. Later famous as a theorist on military
strategy, Captain Basil Liddell Hart [his middle name for some reason misspelt
“Liddle” in this book] gives his soldier’s-eye view of action at close quarters
(pp.257-258 and p.275). Sergeant Richard Tawney (later the illustrious economic
historian R.H.Tawney) is knocked over by rifle fire and spends 30 hours lying
wounded in no-man’s-land before he is rescued (p.264).
Of course the
story this book tells is large-scale tragedy. Of course words like “futility”
come to mind. Of course the horrors pile up, as does the sense of the
pointlessness of it all. There are tears, curses, remorse, the honeyed
self-justifications of officers, and slaughter, slaughter, slaughter reported
in all its grisly detail. For some readers, Macdonald’s approach may seem a
little clinical as he works methodically through the different sectors of this
one day. But this is how military history should be written – giving us both
the big picture and the individual experience. First Day of the Somme is a wrenching experience but also a
documented one. True history in other words, and a great book.
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The only reason
that I do not spend as much time on Glyn Harper’s excellent Dark Journey is because it is the
paperback reprint of a book first published in 2007. Dark Journey includes the text of two of Harper’s earlier military
histories, Massacre at Passchendaele: The
New Zealand Story and Spring
Offensive: New Zealand and the Second Battle of the Somme. These make up
the first two parts of Dark Journey,
to which has been added the third part “Bloody Bapaume”. The original edition
bore on its cover the subtitle “Three key New Zealand battles of the Western
Front”. The new paperback reprint alters this to “Passchendaele, the Somme and
the New Zealand experience of the Western Front”.
Like his fellow
military historian Chris Pugsley, Harper is performing the valuable service of
reminding New Zealanders that the greatest number of casualties this nation
sustained in the First World
Dark Journey is
well-illustrated, lucid in its prose, and very clear about unearthing memories
of individual soldiers and their battlefield experiences. It is good and
accessible military history.
Foolish Footnote: I
cannot hear the name Bapaume without at once remembering Siegfried Sassoon’s
bitter poem “Blighters” about idiotic civilians who turned the war into a cheap
joke even as it was being fought. The poem was written in 1917, a year before
New Zealanders were involved in action near Bapaume, and of course has no place
in Glyn Harper’s history of the New Zealanders’ action. But here it is anyway:
The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
“We’re sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!”
I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or “Home, sweet Home,”
And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.
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