A day at the Somme

The first week of July has a lot of historical significance if you’re a military historian. I’ll have more to say about some of the domestic bits later, but today I want to remind you of one of the most amazing stories of command idiocy in the annals of British history.

On 1 July 1916, the British Expeditionary Force impaled itself upon the idea that if you only throw more men at entrenched machine gun emplacements, you’ll achieve a breakthrough in a war of stagnation.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the Brits 58,000 casualties (almost 20,000 of them dead), but won no breakthrough. Neither did it break through the dense crania of the British generals. The new commander, Sir Douglas Haig, remained boneheaded to his death, which unfortunately came long after the Armistice in 1918.

(Generals typically were not in danger of injuries, unless they fell off their polo ponies or slipped on the floor of the officers’ mess.)

No, wave after wave of Tommies went over the top from 1 July to 18 November without enough land to grow a crop of wheat changing hands. The ground was churned to sludge by unbelievable numbers of artillery bombardments; farmers are still turning up unexploded shells as they tend their fields. In the end the butcher’s bill ran to 420,000 British, 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans dead, missing and wounded.

So pause a moment and think of the day when the sun truly began to set on the British Empire; and consider the tens of thousands of men who’ve rested along the battle line for the past 97 years.