Jean-Michel Steg - These Englishmen Who Died for France: 1st July 1916: The Bloodiest Day in British History

Published by University of Buckingham Press,

an imprint of Legend Times Group

51 Gower Street

London WC1E 6HJ

www.unibuckinghampress.com

First published in French in 2016 by ditions Fayard

Jean-Michel Steg, 2016, 2022

Translation Ethan Rudell, 2016

The right of the above author and translator to be identified as the author and translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

ISBN (paperback): 9781800310872

ISBN (ebook): 9781800310889

Cover design: Ditte Lkkegaard

Printed by Lightning Source

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For Paul Feunette, in memoriam

The Bloodiest Day in British History

The Annihilation of the Newfoundland Regiment

Why a Franco-British Offensive on the Somme in the Summer of 1916?

The Strategic Context: Trench Warfare

The Tactical Context: The Evolution of Arms between 1914 and 1916

The Creation of a British New Army

Preparing the British Battle Plan for 1 July 1916

The French Battle Plan on the Somme

The German Army on the Somme in 1916

Preparations for the 1 July 1916 Attack

1 July 1916: The First Hour

1 July 1916: The Rest of the Day

1 July 1916: Dead and Wounded

Why Did 1 July 1916 End in Defeat?

The Battle of the Somme from 2 July

The Consequences of the Battle of the Somme

Return to Beaumont-Hamel: A Path of Memory

Happy are those who died for the carnal earth,

Provided that it was in a just war.

Happy are those who died for a patch of ground.

Happy are those who died a solemn death.

Charles Pguy, ve (1913)

The Battle of the Somme lives on in the collective memory of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the countries of the Commonwealth (Australia, Canada, New Zealand) as the most dramatic episode of the Great War. For it was at this moment that the mass armies entirely composed of volunteers levied in the conflicts first wave of enthusiasm encountered the industrial warfare of the Western Front. Baptism of fire and baptism of blood! The battles first day 1 July 1916 remains notorious for the scale of human losses suffered by the British army, which were greater than on any other single day in its entire history. Many British citizens are familiar with the Battle of the Somme, particularly through the work of the wars most famous writers Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves. Lasting four and a half months, it is above all seen as a monument to the tragedy, if not the futility, of the war of all wars.

A very different interpretation is advanced by the British school of military historians. They tend to see the battle as the beginning of a true learning curve that would lead the British army to play a prominent role in the victory in 1918. Yet the French are curiously unfamiliar with the Battle of the Somme, and this despite the substantial contribution of the French army, which suffered around 20 per cent of all losses. Overshadowed by the Battle of Verdun, to which it was nevertheless intimately related, the Battle of the Somme (like that of Verdun for the British) occupies a marginal place in French national memory. It is as if each nation only has room for its symbolic battle.

For the Germans, the Somme was at the time seen as a challenge: to defend the Reichs outposts in enemy territory across the Rhine. While the battle continued to serve as a reference point in the interwar years, it was subsequently overshadowed by Verdun and the theme of Franco-German reconciliation. If the battlefields of the Somme are today a site of memory and pilgrimage, it is thus above all for the citizens of the United Kingdom and the former Dominions of the Commonwealth. More than ever, it is the accents of London, Glasgow, Toronto, Melbourne and many other distant cities that one hears in the cemeteries and taverns of Picardy, making it a little corner of the vast British world that existed at the time of the Great War.

This makes the present work a clear and accessible presentation of the Battle of the Somme from the British point of view all the more relevant. Without neglecting the soldiers experiences, it offers well-grounded judgements regarding the nature of the battle, its place in the war and the role of the high command. It exhibits an excellent mastery of the strategic and tactical aspects of the battles first day, and gives an idea of the dimensions of a struggle that was to continue until November 1916. It nicely situates Britains role in the battle (its subject) relative to that of France and Germany, and in doing so offers a view of the start of the Somme campaign that is more comprehensive than most other English-language studies, preoccupied as they are with their battle.

The present work will help readers understand the importance of this battle for the United Kingdom and its Dominions as well as the traces it has left in politics, culture and memory. In the wake of the centenary year, Jean-Michel Stegs book thus comes as a welcome addition. Thanks to it, readers will better grasp what was, after its fashion, the British Verdun and more fully appreciate its status as the greatest battle of the conflict (at least in terms of casualties). Jean-Michel Steg has written a book that is as succinct as it is wise, one that goes straight to the heart of this terrible ordeal and the major place it continues to occupy, a century on, in the British worlds memory of the Great War.

John Horne,

Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin,

11 November 2021

The centenary of the First World War has received frenzied coverage in the media. Is it any wonder? It is only now, a hundred years on, that the wounds left by this unprecedented trauma can be examined without provoking fresh pangs of memory, forcing one to rapidly halt the autopsy and cover everything in a protective and ultimately convenient shroud. As in the aftermath of the Shoah, the children of those who lived through this deeply traumatic experience were reluctant to question the taciturn survivors in their lifetimes.

It was only with their grandchildren and those who followed that it first became possible to reconstruct the hell through which their forefathers lived between 1914 and 1918.

On a personal level, I spent several years immersed in studying the appalling casualties suffered by the French army at the very start of the hostilities. There is always something relevant to be learned, it seems to me, from studying the most extreme moments of a confrontation. This is particularly the case of spikes in mortality during the First World War, a conflict that was unprecedented in terms of its duration, extent and intensity. Such moments of extremity are not random statistical facts but rather result from the specific conjunction of major causes of death at a given time and place.

Those that came together, for example, on 22 August 1914. On this, the bloodiest day in French history, the tactics, organization and military culture that the French army had inherited from the eighteenth century collided head-on with the firepower of the enemys early twentieth-century weapons. On this day alone, more than 27,000 French soldiers were to die.