Dan Snow's History Hit - My Great-Grandfather's War: Lt-Gen Thomas Snow & The Somme

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Dan explores his great-grandfather's part in the First World War. Lieutenant-General Thomas Snow was a senior officer in the British Army who commanded troops on the first day of the Somme. It was a disaster; thousands of men died for almost no strategic gains, and his legacy would be tarnished forever. But Snow's record is more complicated than that, having proved himself a competent defensive commander earlier in the conflict. So how should we remember the men who presided over catastrophes like the Somme? Were these disasters due to a lack of preparation, failures in leadership, or both?Dan speaks to Paul Reed, a leading historian of the First World War, to find out more about his great-granddad's wartime service and his complex legacy.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

There is a little bit of colourful language in this episode as we quote soldiers who just lived through the hell of a failed attack on the Western Front and were trudging back to their own trenches. Let's just say they're not full of praise for their commanding officers. Who can blame them? Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is an episode about my great-grandfather. He was a general, not just any old general. He was a general who commanded British troops at the Battle of the Somme on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. In fact, if anything, on pretty much the most unsuccessful, the bloodiest sector of that Somme battlefield. Thousands of lives lost for absolutely no gain whatsoever. One man who was there was Dick Reid. He was lucky enough not to be in the assault wave that day. He was slightly further back and he saw men withdrawing from the battlefield, the survivors staggering back. He wrote,

we sensed somehow that these men had seen hell. None of us dared to ask the question until one of us shouted, How do you get on, mates? None of them took the slightest notice, save a corporal carrying three rifles who was bringing up the rear. He half turned, and indicating the weary, straggling figures before him, shrugged expressively. General fucked up in command again. And he went on. Then he turned again. Back where they fucking well started. Well, the general in command that day was my

great-grandfather, Major General Thomas Doyley Snow. There was a picture of him hanging on the wall of my house when we were kids. Imagine in your mind what a First World General looks like. Well, that is what he looks like. Huge, big, bushy moustache. The visor of a cap tightly pulled down over his eyes. Firm jaw, chest full of medals on his khaki uniform. He'd had a glittering career before the First World War. He was old for First World War generals. He'd been born in 1858, so he's well into his 50s when war broke out. He'd served in the Anglo-Zulu War. He missed Rorke's Drift and his Andalwana, but he arrived right at the end. He met the Zulu king, Shishweo. He'd fought on the Nile,

trying to relieve Gordon in Khartoum, who was under siege. That expedition fell short and Gordon was killed and Snow was badly wounded in a battle in January 1885. He fought on the Nile again, this time under Kitchener. He took Khartoum this time and he was at the Battle of Omdurman, one of the great mismatches in military history, where the Mahdist force, the Sudanese forces, attacked the British and Egyptian army in gigantic numbers and were mowed down by machine guns and super accurate rifles. He left one of the better accounts of that battle, so he was in no doubt as to the effect of modern weaponry on human bone and flesh. He'd seen it firsthand. He was in India and therefore missed the Boer War, but was given command of the 4th Division in early 1911. This was one of the few British

regular army divisions available for service in Britain at the time, and they took part in some of the important pre-war exercises, now much pored over by the historians who were trying to work out the extent to which the British army was ready to do battle with the Germans. He was therefore one of the most senior officers in the British Expeditionary Force when it deployed to France and Belgium in August 1914. His 4th Division arrived just after the Battle of Mons in the Theatre of Combat, but it did fight in the Battle of Le Cateau, the second British battle on the Western Front in the theatre of combat, but it did fight in the Battle of Le Cateau, the second British battle on the Western Front in the First World War. He was very honest in later life about the performance of the British army in that period. He would write, the retreat of 1914 was not, as is now

imagined, a great military achievement, but rather a badly bungled affair, only being prevented from being a disaster of the first magnitude by the grit displayed by the officers and the men. There was some suggestion that he wasn't up to the task of commanding men in a modern war, even during that retreat from Mons in 1914. But before anyone had time to sack him, he was terribly injured when his horse rolled on him at the First Battle of the Marne, and he was sent to Britain to convalesce. But then, against his wishes, he was called back to serve on the Western Front. To talk to me about General Snow on the Western Front, and at the Somme in particular, I'm going back to Paul Reed. He's one of my oldest friends and colleagues. We've worked together for years and years and years now. We've visited together the battlefields, the places where

General Snow fought and served during the First World War. We've looked at archival sources, we've looked at letters together, and we've met descendants of men who served under him. It's a great privilege to have Paul back on the podcast. He's got a wonderful podcast of his own. It's called The Old Front Line about the First World War, about the Western Front. And he's the author of books, and he's a wonderful battlefield guide. He is a fountain of knowledge. So here's my chat with Paul Reed. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Paul, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure, Dan. It was a pleasure to chat with you.

Paul, how well did General Snow prepare for the First World War in Europe? Well, I think anyone in the army between the Boer War and the Great War was aware that European conflict was pretty likely and that the Boer War had changed Great War was aware that European conflict was pretty likely and that the Boer War had changed the whole way that they saw fighting and had helped to modernize the British Army in many ways and men like General Snow I mean as a divisional commander before the war he was to my knowledge one of the few if not the only that trained his men to withdraw under the fire of the enemy which is kind of think, well,

the British army should never perhaps train to withdraw its men. But actually, it proved to be a critical bit of training when it came to the first battle he fought at Le Cateau, when his men had to do exactly that in a real life scenario facing the Imperial German army. So I think that there was a realisation that they were going to fight someone and that biggest target was going to be Germany really when you looked at the situation in Europe before the war there was something coming and war was very much on the horizon. How well prepared then do you think Snow and the other generals like Haig and Smith-Doran, how well prepared were the men under their command when August 1914, when the First World War broke out?

Well, I think it kind of depends what you mean, what they prepared for. I often say that Europe was prepared for war in 1914. It just wasn't prepared for the First World War. So they were gearing up for a traditional war of movement, a war which had figured on the kind of radar of most commanders for over a century. Sure, it now had modern aspects with lessons learned from fighting war commandos, but essentially they were looking for a swift war of movement where they could employ men and utilize the tactics of the British army had

learned before the First World War, the implementation of cavalry with artillery and everything else in an operation that would have not been out of place in some other previous conflicts in its overall picture, modified by the circumstances of a movement into a new century with ever more industrial weapons and those weapons capable of killing and wounding people on an industrial scale. You and I have walked a lot of the Western Front together. We've been to the place where General Snow sort of first joined the action, Le Cateau, the stopping action against the advancing German army in the opening days and weeks of the war. And then we've been to the places he served really through the rest of the war.

What strikes me about that first experience he had is he would have been on horseback. He would have been hoping to command the troops, actually get an oversight of what was going on in the battle, gallop around from unit to unit, not unlike the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo 99 years before. Very similar.

I mean, I think one of the strangest things I've been asked to do in television on your behalf was to get a horse for you so you could canter through the streets of esnes where his headquarters was just as he had done in 1914 and exactly that his men were dug in on a ridge line they had good defensive ground they pre-selected that because the enemy was still on the move and they could do that before the enemy arrived and he had his headquarters as a divisional commander this wasn't kind of black adder he was right up in the front line area very close to the forward positions and using his ability to move around on horseback to see where those positions were because they just didn't have time in those early battles to set up proper static communications.

This is a pre-radio era, of course, where you just can't get on a radio set and speak to a battalion or a brigade commander in the front line. He's got to see what's going on. And so he's doing exactly the same as any of Wellington's generals did in the Peninsular War or at Waterloo. And yet he realises in that first battle the lethality of being in the sight of the enemy,

the distance at which people are able to deliver lethal force, the accuracy of those weapons. It's that that forces fighting pretty much underground almost straight away, doesn't it? I mean, that first battle was almost the last glimpse of a bygone era. It was. It was the passing of an age and the men who stood in those fields around

Lakato, which included Bernard Law Montgomery, who was a junior subaltern in his division in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, they were seeing the end of an era. That kind of fighting that had all gone to war to take part in, Monty almost certainly probably carried his sword at Le Cateau, for example, just as officers had done a century before. But that war was ending and the power of artillery and the power of numbers and the power of machine guns would force the participants in this conflict into this troglodyte world of the Western Front, which would be created that autumn. As they were pushed back from battles like Mons and Locato, down to the Marne and the Aisne, that's where the first trenches were dug. And that's where General Snow and the men under his command got their first taste, really, of what

trench warfare was all about. It's amazing that they did get that first taste. It feels like, should they have known? Should they have looked at the American Civil War? Should they have looked at the Russo-Japanese War? Elements of the American Civil War? Should they have looked at the Russo-Japanese War, elements of the Boer War? Should he have been better prepared? Do you think he and his fellow senior officers were negligent? Or did it just take everyone by surprise? What happened there? I don't think they were either negligent or it really took them by surprise. I mean, Brigadier Edmonds, who wrote the British official history, one of the things that he wrote before the Great War was a very similar structured history of the American Civil War. And so this was a book that

was widely read by staff officers, senior officers in the Edwardian period. So they would have been familiar with some of those battles and the way that they went static. And it was kind of almost a dress rehearsal, you know, more than half a century before for the Great War. But I think that they were fighting a war, were aiming to fight a war in which they believed in and trained for, but the peculiar circumstances of what the Great War turned into, really no one was prepared for that. And I don't think anyone could have foreseen it. I mean, men were trained to dig trenches, fire positions. That was part of the 1911 field engineering manual and all that kind of stuff, but not on the scale of what the

Great War would turn into with 450 miles of the Western Front. Yeah. And the interesting thing is he's injured in late 14 and he comes back in early 15. And you and I have read that account. And what really strikes me is how surprised. He was like a tourist. He was like, hang on a minute. I went away and there was still some recognisable form of war as I knew it. And he said there were these zeppelins above the battlefield. You don't see any soul above ground during the day.

You do not see anyone outside a major offensive. It's just suicide to stand up above ground, above the trenches or dugouts during the day. He talks about the mud and the trench foot, which actually, again, from his account, trench foot seemed like it was his greatest enemy, actually, as he came back in early 1915. And also there's the question then, Paul, was he fit for duty?

I mean, is this about the British Army expanding rapidly and needing everyone they could hold on to? Because he shattered his pelvis in this injury in 1914. Kitchener asked him to go back and he actually begged not to go back. I mean, is that something that's common? I think at that stage of the war, I mean, he went back to command the 27th Division, which was another regular formation, but it was formed from battalions of the British Empire

that were in the far-flung corners of that empire and were returned to Britain in preparation for service overseas. And these were men, I think the trench fort element of it, I mean, these were men who'd been in places like India and South Africa and so on, much warmer climates and the kind of boggy ground of Flanders during that winter of 1914-15. So it's not surprising perhaps that tough as that generation were, they were being asked to live in open ditches in cold weather. No wonder they kind of broke down physically as a consequence of that. And Snow himself having been injured, I think it's testimony to the fact

of how desperate the British Army was at that stage of the conflict to get every man in the front line doing something, of the conflict to get every man in the front line doing something because the territorials were not sufficient to replace regular forces they were not sufficiently trained they're not sufficiently prepared some battalions had come over and taken part in the fighting in October November 1914 but there was nowhere near the scale of numbers that was required and the new army that Kitchener was forming was yet to be fully prepared for this conflict and it would take until the following spring for the first Kitchener divisions to be sent overseas. So Snow protested about going but reality of man, he would have been seen by the war office, he would have been seen by Kitchener and Sir John French, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force at this stage of the conflict as someone

they definitely wanted to have on the battlefield because he'd given a pretty good performance at Le Cateau the ground had held they'd been pushed back eventually but the whole of Smith Dorian's force there was and that training that he'd given his men before the war to withdraw under the eyes of enemy guns and get away to fight another day proved to be incredibly good and I think what you see with Snow and you see it in his last battle as well he's a good defensive general on the attack it's very different. Well that's right he performs actually pretty well doesn't he at the second battle of Ypres he cobbles together defences after the first ever use of poison gas on the Western Front, and I think it's quite effective. But let's come to 1916, because this is the thing that he's really infamous for now. day of the Battle of Somme. They'll have heard your previous appearance on the podcast talking about it as well. Gomcourt was a diversion, wasn't it? It was the northernmost part of the Somme

offensive that wasn't really even properly designed to be part of the attack. How should we think about that northern British thrust towards Gomcourt? Well, the British kind of looked at quite a few attacks on the Western Front and came up with these ideas of carrying out diversionary attacks to try and draw German attention away from where the main thrust would be. And Gomercourt was just one of those examples. It's a village, a very small village in northern France. It's not actually in the Department of the Somme, it's in the Pas-de-Calais, although it's in the kind of wider Somme battlefield area. And it had been rolled up by German forces in October 1914. It had a wood to the northeast which gave good views across the open ground towards the next village of Foncavilliers

and it had a park, a chateau park to the west that gave views towards the other village in that sector which was Hebiton, Foncavilliers and Heppitern being behind initially the French lines, and then of course the British lines when they took over that sector in 1915. And the purpose of this attack was to have two divisions, 46 North Midland and the 56 London Division, two territorial force, part-time Saturday night soldiers, make their attack on this village to make it look like it's part of the main Somme thrust. And hopefully some of the German units between the Somme and Arras and in that northern area of the Somme battlefield might be pulled in as reserves when they could be sent to where the main thrust of the attack was taking place between Montauban and Serre on the main area of the Somme

advance. We look back at it now and it's kind of a bit of a blunt instrument, really, I think, to believe that the Germans would be so easily fooled. And the day before the Somme, on the 30th of June, they carried out feint attacks in places like Richebourg and at the double Crassier at Loos for the same purpose. But the Germans weren't fooled with those either. So this was was like I say a bit of a blunt instrument and Major General Hull who was the commander of the 56th London

Division he kind of his view was his job was to get as many of the Germans interested in the activities of his division and as many of the German guns to come down on his division to tie up as much of the German army as he could to hopefully help other parts of the front. So he, in broad daylight, got his men to dig assembly trenches in the valley before Goncourt. So it would make it quite clear to the Germans that an attack was coming. And the lads in the Middlesex Regiment, for example, who were part of his formation, suffered casualties as a consequence of that so there was no disguise in what this was whether the men at ground level were aware at the time that it was a diversion not part of the main thrust is another thing some of the veterans i interviewed who were at gormacore were subsequently kind of obviously aware of that but

i don't think that they were as aware of it at the time it was just part of the battle of the Somme the big push the cakewalk and everything else how do you plan so the generals knew that it was a diversion is the plan any different is there a realistic attempt to kind of break through are they just sending their men just to be eye catching and a bit sacrificial or is there a kind of real plan, like we'll get to this trench and we'll push through there and we'll try and get to the next objective by this time and with this artillery fire? I mean, there is a real plan. I mean, you could just send men over as cannon fodder

and get them all mown down for nothing. But you want to try and achieve something as well. So the two divisions were going to advance either side of the village of Gomakaw and ideally meet behind it and bite off the Gomercourt salient. You know, these salients we often hear about connected with the battles on the Western Front, slight curvatures in the line that gives the Germans an advantage where they can look straight down the middle of no man's land one way,

straight down the middle of no man's land the other way. This was a temptation to try and bite one of those salients off as well as draw german attention away and i think if you'd have just made an obviously faint attack then perhaps the germans wouldn't have been fooled at all just by sending man over to get shot doesn't make sense so you are launching what looks to be a major attack upon the german lines so the implementation of gas you're bringing up engineering equipment you're digging assembly trenches out in no man's land to reduce the distance across. It's obvious to the Germans that something's coming.

And I think that commanders hope that that would then perhaps draw in other German regiments from the immediate area who would come up as reinforcements just in case whatever the Tommies were going to do here, they might succeed. And at least there'd be some reserves to try and throw them back. But you don't see the Germans being that convinced. And nothing major is sent up to assist the German units that are defending this part of the battlefield. So it's not working as a diversion. And it's very obvious that they're going to attack the Germans. So it's some kind of double failure, that, isn't it?

It is as well. And when you read the subsequent report on it, they kept stopping the bombardment in the area around Gomakor village itself to inspect the wire to see whether it was cut or not, which they then subsequently realised gave the Germans an opportunity to repair it. I mean, the whole thing seems to be incredibly ham-fisted. And no wonder there was an inquiry afterwards to kind of mean, the whole thing seems to be incredibly ham-fisted. And no wonder there was an inquiry afterwards to kind of look into the whole thing and how it had been managed. It wasn't the

finest day of the British Army in any respects. This has nothing to do with the ordinary soldiers, the officers and men in the infantry companies and battalions that took part in the assault. I mean, no man can give more than his own life and dead men advance no further. So this is no kind of reflection on them, but it is a reflection on those who plan attacks like this. Unfortunately, this kind of battle plays into the standard concept of chateau generals and all the kind of tropes that we think of every time we kind of watch and re-watch, as good as it is,

Blackadder, you know, it's a fine piece of comedy and drama, but it is not an historical documentary. And because it was a diversion, although it was meant to look like a big attack, there wasn't enough artillery along the rest of the line, but there was certainly not enough artillery along this sector, right? So it was going up against similar defences of similar strength to the rest of the Somme battle, but with even less firepower and preparation. Yeah, I mean, there wasn't any additional firepower there. I mean, there was a sizeable amount of it, but it wasn't just their own divisional guns. So 18 pounders

and 4.5 inch howitzers. There was a lot of core artillery assets. So Royal Garrison artillery, siege batteries, and heavy batteries attached to them knocking out key targets. So those are big guns that might have a chance of penetrating a bit deeper into the soil, a bit deeper into the rock and even hitting some of those deep German bunkers. That's right and one of the veterans that I interviewed who took part in the battle there was a forward observation officer for a 9.2 inch howitzer battery and his job was to bombard the southern part of the Gomelkor battlefield, not the front line, but the support and reserve lines in the area around a wood called the Bois de Rossignol wood, Nightingale wood, or COPS 125, as the Germans called it. And incredibly, on that landscape today, some of the craters from his 9.2s still exist in the wooded areas there, which were dropped onto the German defences. But even that wasn't enough.

This did not destroy the key concentration area of German defenders. So while you dropped a lot of shells, you released gas, you cut quite a lot of the wire, you hadn't killed the defenders. They'd been sheltering in deep dugouts in the cellars of buildings in Gommakor village in the chateau and emerge ready to greet that attack at zero hour. And if you've got entrenched enemy with good weapons in open ground ahead of them, which you're about to advance into, then there's only going to be one outcome of that.

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wherever you get your podcasts. So that planning process overseen by General Snow, is he responsible for those failures, the plan being insufficient? Was it unusually bad there or was it sort of pretty much average for the British Army's ability to plan offensives and execute to that point in time? I think the Army at this point is on a tipping point. You know, I often say this,

this is a quote of AJP Taylor, that for him, the 20th century didn't begin on the 1st of January 1900, it began on the 1st of July 1916. This was a move into a new world, a move from the old world into the new, because this was a day, as you know, more than 57,000 British soldiers became casualties. So it was this killing on this industrial scale, and much of the rest of the 20th century would be death and destruction on that kind of industrial scale. And while they planned on most parts of the front to try and overcome the German defences, these were men from Tommy to General who had seen how technology had changed their lives, and they perhaps believed too much in the ability of the artillery that they saw this huge stockpile

of ammunition, they saw these wheel-to-wheel guns, they saw the seven-day bombardment, and they were told, as many of them were, that nothing would survive that, not even a rat, and all they'd have to do was to walk across no man's land. But the artillery had been used in too blunt a way. The plans were too rigid. Once the guns lifted at zero hour and moved on to targets behind, you couldn't call them back. So when you went over and you came under fire, you couldn't call back friendly artillery fire to protect you. and all of these were lessons that were learned we can see this beginning of the idea of what some historians have described as a learning curve whatever we're going to call it we've got to remember that it's always done at the cost of

men's lives and we clearly see that in places like Goncourt. Talk to me now about what it was like for the men at 7.30 in the morning on the 1st of July tell me about what happened like Goncourt. Talk to me now about what it was like for the men at 7.30 in the morning on the 1st of July. Tell me about what happened at Goncourt. So there's two different attacks there really. The Major General Harlow commands the 56th London Division and Stuart Worley with the 46th North Midland Division. In that division the men have to bring up everything. And just I should say, so those are the two divisions under the command of a corps commander who was my great-grandpa, Thomas Snow. Yeah, that's right. So an army corps consisted of two or more, normally three or four, actually, divisions, of which those two were the ones that were the tip of the spear for this particular battle.

There were others that were in reserve in the trenches just to the north of there. There were others that were in reserve in the trenches just to the north of there. And Stuart Walkley's 46th North Midland Division, those men were required to carry up everything that was required for the assault. So they never had a chance to rest before zero hour. The weather before the 1st of July was atrocious. It rained heavily. A lot of the dugouts flooded and the trenches flooded. heavily a lot of the dugouts flooded and the trenches flooded and these were men were moving up through waterlogged trenches in the southern rain carrying bangalore torpedoes rolls of barbed wire to consolidate the german trenches once they captured them wooden planking i mean all this kind

of stuff and then they've got to make an attack and that's not good for any assault battalion to be required to do those kind of things. In the 56th London Division, the men who made the attack were not part of those preparations. Others had done it for them. And so they were fresh, ready, as much as men are ever ready for an attack. And they went in. And you see the effect of the bombardment on those two. It's only one side of the village to the other. But on one side, more of the wire where the London's attacked is cut. They get into the German positions. On the other part of the front where the North

Midlanders go over, the North Staffs and the South Staffs and the Sherwood Foresters, they come under murderous fire from the German defenders who've survived the bombardment in open ground. That's a flat valley, really, in the approach to the edge of Gomakaw village and Gomakaw wood and they melt away really under that kind of machine gun fire and when they get to the German wire the ones that do get to the German wire it's impassable because the bombardment has been ineffective and in the places where it had been effective the Germans have been given that opportunity to repair it so that division by the end of the day's fighting, has lost, what, nearly two and a half thousand men just trying to cross that valley. Most of

the assault troops that went over, they suffered very high percentage casualties. Most battalion commanders were killed or wounded. Most company commanders were killed or wounded. And that's important because they're the ones directing these guys on the ground and in the 56th London division although they'd got some gains into the German lines their casualties once they got there with German counter-attacks were so heavy that they were eventually thrown back and there was nothing to show for it except lines of men lying out in no man's land or lots of dead left behind in the German trenches and they suffered even more well over 4,000 casualties in the 56th London Division and some of the veterans I interviewed felt angry with the North Midlanders unjustifiably so but the idea was to get and meet up on one side of Gommacore Village and the Londoners almost got there but saw no one and of course what they

didn't realize at the time is these lads had just been cut down in open ground where they didn't really stand a chance. It was a disastrous day for both divisions. But Major General Hull, he looked back on it and concluded that he'd achieved his objectives. as target practice to bring in the German defenders, bring their fire to bear on them rather than other people and hopefully draw in other troops. Now that had not happened, but he felt that his objective of going over and making sure the enemy knew that he was coming, that had been achieved.

Well, when I went with you to that battlefield, we went and sat in the chateau where general snow was during that attack i think he wrote to his wife didn't he and said when the wind's in the right direction we can hear the firing and that's something that subsequent generations have found very difficult to explain and and they find the distance between being in a fancy chateau and just a few miles away their men being in these terrible trenches and on these blood-soaked battlefields, they find that very difficult.

In a way, that's modern war, though, isn't it? I mean, if you look at the people running the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, they were doing so from bunkers in Florida and Nevada and London. I guess it's the nature of... And you explained that to me when we went there. Chateaus are big, purpose-built headquarters buildings. They're're good they can put your staff in there you put your vehicles and horses and things but it just leaves a bad taste in their mouth doesn't it it does i don't think

he acquitted himself particularly well there i mean he wasn't a well man as you know his injury was kind of getting worse and i think that he was distracted by that and was very distant from what was happening on the battlefield he kind of left it in the hands of his subordinates and his staff. And you need that chateau for those subordinates and for those staff because they need areas to prepare maps and look at air photographs, type up operation orders, think about how they're going to make an attack and all this kind of stuff. That's why you need a building like that. But good corps commanders make sure that they are in touch with the front line. And as the war progresses, you see this kind of distance from the front line. It still exists,

but these men are still going up to the forward zone. So as the war continues, senior officers still become casualties because they're not really doing what the war office wants them to do, which is kind of sculpt behind the lines and let other people tell them they want to see it with their own eyes. I don't think Snow in the summer of 1916 was anything like that for all kinds of understandable reasons. But at the end of the day, he was commanding tens of thousands of men and he held their fate in his hands.

And his decisions were a matter of life and death for these men and you want a commander as an ordinary soldier you want a commander who's going to send you into battle to give you at least a fair chance of some success even if you don't come through you feel as if you want your sacrifice to mean something, not just to be some pointless slaughter. So I'll come to the controversy after the battle in a second, but on that day, on that first day of July, you think that his shortcomings were partly responsible for just such a terrible loss of life on that sector?

I think so, and I think the whole planning, particularly the 46th North Midland Division attack, where these men carried up stuff and the ground and the failure of the bombardment and so on. None of that kind of helped, really. I mean, unusually, they had a court of inquiry. They didn't have a court of inquiry after every battle. There was only a handful of these on the Western Front in the Great War. And it's a fascinating document in the National Archives to do it. In a normal court of inquiry, they would have called probably nobody below the rank of captain. So they would have been all officers, all gentlemen, gentleman's word is

his bond and all that kind of stuff. But this was a battle in which those kind of men had become casualties. So they weren't there. There weren't battalion commanders. There weren't company commanders. In some cases, there weren't even platoon commanders to actually say what had happened. So you have a court of inquiry in which the voice of the ordinary soldier is heard. And it's a fascinating document because these guys do not skip their language. They kind of drop a few language bombs in the testimonies that they give, which is a fascinating insight into people in the past did also swear just like us. That's a valuable document from that point of view. But what you see is these men saying how the whole thing fell apart very, very quickly, that they looked at

their officers. It was a unit that had suffered a lot of casualties at Luz the previous year, 1915. It had been made up with fresh reinforcements. There wasn't quite the geographical identity within the division that they'd been at the very beginning of its war experiences. That differed a bit to the London division, which was very firmly a London formation. And when officers, platoon, company, battalion commanders start to fall, because these are not men who say to their soldiers, okay, the Germans are there off you go they say the germans are over there follow me so they're amongst the first to go down to become casualties and once that starts falling apart you see the whole battle there just falling apart as well because this was a part of the war incredulous as it is for us in which the war office and the

army did not trust citizens and soldiers like these to understand how to fight a battle. So he didn't tell them anything. So they had no idea except they had to go forward and capture a German trench. They hadn't seen maps. They hadn't seen air photos. They had no clear idea of what the plan was because the army felt that if you told them, they could get captured and spill the beans to the juries. But that all changed, and other generals like Plumer eventually

trusted their men with this information and discovered that the more information you gave a soldier, the better he performed on a battlefield. So that transformed the whole way of warfare, really. But that was in the future. It wasn't there in the approach to the first day of the Battle of the Somme. And why was there a court of inquiry in General Snow's sector? Was it seen as a disaster even at the time, immediately? I think that Major General Hull, who was the divisional commander of the Londons, probably felt uncomfortable at the scale of the casualties in his division and what had been achieved and possibly made some noises.

I don't know who specifically prompted it, but they were looking for someone to blame. And Major General Stuart Wortley, who commanded the 46th Division, was the one that they blamed. And General Snow was a man who I think acquitted himself even more ingloriously by blaming the men with this incredible phrase, really, where he says that they lacked offensive spirit. I mean, it beggars belief. Yeah, this is the big moment. It is. Yeah, it is.

It beggars belief that a commander can blame men lying dead in no man's land. But he did. So let's be clear. Snow wrote, was it to Hague or was it to the Court of Inquiry? I think it was to Hague. You and I have seen the letter. I regret to inform you the men lacked offensive spirit and these were men who were lying dead near no man's land having advanced

have been let down by their plan let down by their senior commanders had advanced across no man's land died in their ranks and the few as you mentioned a few who some did manage to break into german positions and they'd fought with dwindling supplies of ammunition they fought with their hands and their fists they fought with their entrenching tools until they were overwhelmed by German counter-attacks and my great-grandfather blamed them now what was he what was he doing what was he thinking there maybe he felt that he still had a career to go and he wanted to distance himself from this I mean I think that is a moment in which the hierarchy of the army may well have accepted what he said, but should have shuffled him sideways and got him away from commanding men on a battlefield. This was something that

the army increasingly began to realise that they had these dugouts, as they were often called, men who'd been dug out of retirement to serve. I mean, he wasn't an example specifically of that, but they were older soldiers with no fresh view of what the war was really about. And those kind of men emerged eventually, but they were still emerging. And men like Snow, he could fight a defensive battle. He understood aspects of trench warfare, but Gomakaw showed that he was a very very long way from where the real shooting war was and what was required to win those kind of battles if you fought attrition

like this then you were going to lose because of the scale of losses i mean the german casualties at gomakor were around about 2 000 compared to what you nearly 7,000 with the two divisions combined. They were all trying to shift the blame on each other, weren't they? And he was trying to shift it over to this general you've mentioned, Stuart Watley. And that was a success. He was actually removed from post, wasn't he? And that led to a feud that went on for decades after the war between his family and trying to clear his name and the so-called shame of being seen to be blamed for

that disastrous attack. Yeah, I mean, he never kind of recovered from that. He felt he'd been very poorly treated. And he was still embossed in the kind of verbal currency of the day. Still embossed was a place in South Africa where I think they make very nice wine now. But it was the depot for dud officers during the Boer War. And this was a phrase, a kind of bit of verbal currency that senior officers used for men who were bowler-hatted, sent home in disgrace. So he left and that brought his career as a commander to an end, certainly on a frontline point of view. And he was the fool guy.

I don't think he escapes blame entirely because he oversaw a plan for his division that was not fit for purpose and put too much pressure on the men within the attacking units to carry out the tasks that really should have been carried out by other people but he certainly wasn't the one to blame for the whole operation I think that should always rest with those who are very much in command. But whether Haig was in a situation where he would sack a corps commander at this stage of the war, they've just suffered a body blow with the Somme at this stage. They might know what the local casualties at Gomercourt are, but the picture of the overall terrible losses of that Black Day of the British Army of the 1st of July 1916, that's still emerging. Some commanders think it's perhaps 20,000. One thinks it's 40,000. But as we know,

it's much closer to 60,000. So it was a period in which I don't think they were going to kind of say we've got this wrong, because that would send the wrong message to those back home and above them. that would send the wrong message to those back home and above them but it's clear to me that someone like snow that's where his career even if they didn't actively openly blame him that's where his career should have ended he should have been shuffled sideways to become a training officer or whatever kind of job they wanted to find him but certainly not continuing the command men on a battlefield after that disaster. Interestingly, he commanded again in the following summer and even in winter of 1917. And he is eventually fired or shuffled sideways, sacked.

And actually, ironically, after a battle in which he performs creditably. So he survives the Somme, which he probably should have been fired for. And then he got fired for a battle that probably wasn't his fault, the huge German counterattack at the Battle of Cambrai, which Snow had been warning about and warning his superiors, saying, I'm facing this big German force massing against me. I think they're going to counterattack. He was sort of ignored. And then the hammer blow landed.

And he didn't do that badly, did he, in terms of, again, a bit of a fighting withdrawal. But it was over for him at that point. Yeah, and I think what you see as you rightly suggest is you see him emerge again as a good defensive general that he kind of redeems himself a little bit at the tail end of the battle of combré when the germans launched this counter attack and they capture not just some of the ground that we'd taken from them in that battle they actually capture additional ground as well, leading to another court of inquiry, but not directed at him this time,

because he's actually given a good account of himself within his core area. But the British Army from 1916 until the end of the war did not need defensive generals. That's the reality of it. They didn't need defensive generals. They need generals who were capable of making attacks, making successful attacks. And when those attacks were not successful, clearly learning from those mistakes and from those examples and putting that into practice and increasingly giving junior officers, men who'd emerged through the rank system of the army. So Major General Brodie, who commands the 46th North Midland Division in the rank system of the army. So Major General Brodie, who commands the 46th North Midland Division in the last phase of the war, when that division finally is able to acquit itself and capture the St. Quentin Canal in the battles of the Hindenburg Line, he'd gone

from a private soldier in 1900 with the DCM through to a divisional commander in 1918. Those are the kind of men that you need in the army in the final phase to break the German lines. Not every general was General Snow. And General Snow could hold the enemy back. He could stop them. He could contain them. But we didn't just need men like that in the First World War.

We needed generals who were capable of pushing the Germans out of land over which they had no dominion and ending that war. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. We've met the families of veterans who were killed under his command that day some have said well it's got nothing to do with you man i don't know what you're you know don't

worry about it others have expressed sort of anger towards me in a way and you know i've talked about many beers i felt guilty meeting some of those men how do you think i should think about being descended from a general who was not up to the mark, was poor on that day, on the 1st of July, 1916, the bloodiest day in the history of British army. One of the men responsible for that slaughter. I mean, you can have no responsibility for his actions. You weren't born, this happened before your time. You're aware of it. You understand it. You don't try and dismiss it. You accept it. And this is one of several occasions which we've actively kind of discussed

this, which I think is all well and good. I mean, as you know, my father was a gunner at Anzio for five months, dropping shells onto the German positions around Aprilia and the flyover and various other places. I mean, what am I going to do one day? Meet the descendants of Germans, kill the Anzio and apologise to them. I mean, it's kind of the same sort of thing. You can't apologise for his actions. You can understand them, explain them, put them into context. And I think that's the right thing to do.

We need to see these generals in the context of the time and understand them. And we need to see them beyond the kind of caricature of Blackadder and Alan Clark's, the donkeys and all this kind of stuff. But we also need to accept that they weren't all good. The army was not made of perfect soldiers. It had soldiers that were not good, that were broken, that were damaged by the experiences that they had and were not fit for purpose and needed to be removed, just as it had brilliant commanders who came up with brilliant concepts and ideas that saved men's lives, minimised casualties and eventually led to victory.

Because if the whole war had been fought like Gomakor, then the outcome would have been very different indeed. It wasn't. And men like Snow were gradually replaced. But you can bear no responsibility for him. That's a concept that is kind of alien to me, really. Yeah, well, we've definitely had a few interesting conversations, though. We're some descendants, though, haven't we?

Well, that's right. I mean, you can see it. I mean, you know, people look for meaning. As I said to you, a soldier looks for meaning in his own sacrifice. A man enlists, and these were all volunteers at Gomel Corp. There were no conscripts there. They were all volunteers. And a man can give no more than his own life.

And in doing so, and in putting that life on the line, he, I guess, subconsciously, consciously thinks that I'm putting my life in the hands of a commander and I expect him to make that sacrifice mean something. If I'm required to be killed or wounded or injured or whatever in this endeavour, my life has got to mean something. And I think that there were some commanders who got that and there were some commanders who didn't. And you can look throughout British military history to find examples of both of those and not just British military history, any nation's military history.

Thanks very much, Paul Reid, for coming on. My pleasure. As always, my pleasure, Dan. It's a pleasure to talk about the Great War. So after the Battle of Cambrai, General Snow was removed from command on the Western Front. It was the 2nd of January, 1918. He was replaced by younger, more energetic,

more thrusting men with ideas about how to overcome the stalemate on the Western Front. They heaped him with honours, they promoted him to Lieutenant General, but it was clear that he had been retired. He ended up leaving the army in September 1919, just after his 60th birthday. And actually, even though one of the reasons he was removed was because he was too old, he actually outlived most of the other generals in the First World War. He lived right up until 1940, age 82. My dad met him when my dad was a baby. He was about three or four years old. And we got a picture of, black and white photo of General Snow in a wheelchair, a bath chair, I think they were

called. And my dad, the baby, sitting on his lap. We had that photo. We had the portrait of him on the wall, but we didn't talk much about him growing up. I think it was still a period where we bought into the story that the First World Generals had been uniquely incompetent, responsible for the almost deliberate slaughter of millions of men across Europe, the kind of blackadder school of history. Then I was approached to do a BBC programme about him for the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War in 2008. That's the time when Paul and I spent so much time on the Western Front. And interestingly, I think what emerges from that programme is actually he wasn't good enough. He wasn't up to the job. In fact, whilst we've rehabilitated many of the generals in the First World War, perhaps General Snow is a little bit more like that older cliché, a man who was not ready for the different challenges of industrial warfare in Europe,

who was not able to imagine the new tactics and techniques and technologies required to slice through enemy lines. And perhaps he was occasionally just a little bit too disengaged, a little bit too far back, a little bit too callous with the lives of his men. Thanks for listening to this podcast, a very personal one. I'm glad it's the first one we put out for our audio subscribers. I hope you enjoyed it. See you next time. you you