Dan Snow's History Hit - The First Day of The Somme

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

Dan Explains the first day of The Somme which remains the bloodiest day in the history of the British army; a symbol of the senseless carnage of the First World War. At 7:30 a.m. on July 1 1916, the British soldiers climbed out of their trenches and advanced towards the German lines. They were met with a bombardment of machine gun fire, artillery barrages, and a hail of bullets from the well-entrenched German troops. It was a bloodbath.It wasn't supposed to happen like that- beforehand, the British had spent several days bombarding the German lines, believing they would destroy their enemy trenches and barbed wire defences, making the British advance straightforward and almost painless. They didn't know just how well-fortified the Germans were in their deep dugouts. When the bombardment stopped, the Germans manned their defences, waiting for the British to walk right into their line of fire.In chilling detail, Dan retells the astonishing story of that fateful first day of The Somme- determining what really happened in the days leading up to it and what the men endured when they went 'over the top', using the diaries of the men who were there.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited and sound designed 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- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

In the summer of 1916, an army gathered in Picardy in northern France. A British army, the likes of which the British had never fielded before. It was enormous. Vast numbers of troops, drawn from around britain ireland and the empire but perhaps more importantly a gigantic amount of material the staff of war shells guns explosives it gathered together in that rolling chalk downland a place not unlike what somewhere like Sussex wide fields, villages hidden in the folds of the ground, copses of trees, sunken roads. In a valley at the southern end of that British Imperial Army was what one soldier described as a kind of muddy stream. The water levels were low in mid-summer.

It was the River Somme. And that muddy trickle would give its name to a battle fought by that army. A battle that began on the 1st of July 1916. A terrible battle in the basin of the Somme. It would become the biggest and bloodiest in British history. It's one of the largest battles ever fought by any power. It dragged on for 141 days officially, although men continued to punch and stab, shoot, kill each other all through the winter that followed in the snow and the rain and the mud. But that was considered the normal order of life on the Western Front,

and historians have decided the battle did come to an end in November, 141 days after it started. And in this podcast, I'm going to tell the story of that start, of the beginning, what happened, why it happened, and you're going to hear diary accounts and letters from some of those involved. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

Atomic bomb 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. one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. If you'd told a British official 10 years or so before the storm, 1906, around there, that a decade later, a massive British army would be taking on the Germans in a huge conventional battle in northern France, I think he would have been surprised. For much of the

19th century, Britain had sought to avoid the expensive European entanglements in which she'd been enmeshed for so much of the 18th century, and focus instead on global Britain, trade, the oceans, the maintenance of the world's largest navy, and their ever-growing empire. Britain's army was small. It was often described as an imperial policing force. It would deploy to various parts of the world, carried by the navy, and fight wars such as the Boer War, the Zulu War, campaigns in Afghanistan or Abyssinia. There was an Indian army, a very large Indian army, paid for by the British Raj, but few had imagined that that army would operate outside the Indian ocean sphere. The British army itself remained small and highly professional.

So when war came to the European continent in August 1914 and Britain sent divisions to support the French and Belgians against the German invasion, Britain had a problem. Its army was much, much smaller than that of Germany. It hadn't taken part really in large-scale exercises like the German army had. The German army was really prepared for massive warfare in Western Europe. The British army wasn't. Kitchener, who was a war hero, fought and won campaigns in Sudan and Southern Africa and elsewhere, realised this instantly. He was not one of those people who claimed the war hero, fought and won campaigns in Sudan and Southern Africa and elsewhere, realised this instantly. He was not one of those people who claimed the war would be over by Christmas. He knew that war would be long, hard, industrial and attritional. And he immediately

set about trying to build a massive volunteer British army. In the end, there weren't enough volunteers and Britain would switch to conscription. And by the end of the war, something like 5 million men would end up passing through the British army. That's equivalent to a quarter of all UK men, but that figure does include troops from around the empire as well. Kitchener's army would take a long time to train, to equip, just to clothe. But he knew that war would be decided on the battlefields of Northwest Europe, just like Napoleonic Wars had, and many, many wars before then. It would be the cockpit in which empires would fight for global supremacy. So Kitchener started recruiting. Initially, the volunteering campaign, people have seen the posters, Kitchener needs you. The great man himself with his big moustache looking out at people, pointing, hoping to inspire a rush of patriotic young men to the colours.

tail off to almost nothing on a Sunday as people wandered arm in arm with their sweethearts through the parks and the promenades. And it would go through the roof on a Monday morning, perhaps a little weekend hangover, that Monday morning feeling, back to the office, back to the factory. You need to think you want a bit of excitement in your life, a bit of a change for these 18, 19, 20, 21 year old young men. But there was another problem, one that went just beyond people's weekly habit and that was that soldiers had a bad reputation they were considered a bit rough they were hard drinking they weren't perhaps as religiously observant as they might have been if you're trying to encourage lots and lots of young men to join up from shipping and clerical professions office jobs they might be a bit nervous serving alongside some tough old sweats who've marched the length of Southern Africa.

And so an idea was born, the idea of the PALS battalion. You could serve with like-minded people, people with similar backgrounds. One poster said, join up, no undesirables. Sheffield raised one battalion, between 800, 1000 men, in two days. In Tyneside, there was a race between those of Scottish descent and those of Irish descent to raise a battalion. The Irish won. And so you get a series of the so-called PALS battalions being created. They would become synonymous with the bloodletting on the first day of the Somme. As soon as the men joined there was a great shortage of clothing and equipment. An absolutely

key driver for joining apparently was uniforms. People didn't really mind if it wasn't fit for purpose as long as they could put on a uniform and tell their loved ones in their community that they had volunteered to serve. So in certain northern mill towns, where there was a huge textile industry, battalions would just sort of make their own uniforms. Blue serge became very popular before they could be fitted out with proper military regulation khaki. In terms of equipment, they had to use old stuff, the accounts of rifles from the 19th century. They used imports, anything they get their hands on from Japan, from the USA. They trained with wooden rifles. Only two factories in the country made regulation

webbing, the kind of shoulder strapping, the belt-like garment that you put on and contained essentials and extra ammunition and things like that for the battlefield. So they were under enormous pressure to produce hundreds of thousands of these items. And that explains why it took a reasonably long time for the British Army to mount its first massive offensive on the Western Front. Certainly they made attempts in 1915. Some of these units arrived on the Western Front in May 1915. I think the first so-called Kitchener units, the new units of the British Army, arrived on the Western Front in May 1915. I think the first so-called Kitchener units, the new units of the British army, arrived on the Western Front. The Battle of Loos saw a big deployment of so-called Kitchener men. So did Gallipoli, which ran through the summer and autumn of 1915, the attempt to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula on the Bosporus and allow British forces to move on from there

to Istanbul to knock Turkish empire out of the war. So these new soldiers were on the battlefield by the summer of 1915. And that was a disappointing year. I mentioned the Battle of Luz there. It was a limited attack. It completely failed. 50,000 men were killed, wounded, or captured for no gain at all. Gallipoli was a failure. And meanwhile, Russia was teetering. It was struggling. Zeppelins were bombing Britain. U-boats were threatening supplies in the first battle of the Atlantic. So 1916 was looked forward to as a year where they could really turn the tide of the First World War. And the British Army, Kitchener's new expanded British Army, was central to that. army. Kitchener's new expanded British army was central to that. Britain was an industrial,

it was a naval superpower, and now Britain had built itself a big army for the first time in the modern era. Planners believed that it was time for massive concerted assaults on the western front to drive back the Germans. The commander of the British Expeditionary Force was Douglas Haig. He'd taken over after some of those setbacks of 1915. His focus was Ypres. He'd fought there with distinction in 1914. Ypres was in Belgium, reasonably close to the Channel Coast. It was part of the little enclave of Belgium that the Allies were able to hold on to. And Haig wanted to drive up the coast of Belgium, the coast of F to hold on to. And Haig wanted to drive up the coast of Belgium, the coast of Flanders. He wanted to turn the German flank. He wanted to stop U-boats operating in German bases on the Channel Coast. And he believed this flanking attack was the place

to launch the big British assault. But the French, for obvious reasons, wanted it in France. They were less concerned with liberating Belgium. They were less concerned with liberating Belgium. They were less concerned with the U-boat threat. They wanted a massive assault against the Germans occupying northern France. And at this stage of the war, the French were still the dominant partner on the Western Front. In December of 1915, when the Allies met at Chantilly, there was a conference. And by that stage, the French were managing over 300 miles of the Western Front, the British less than 100 miles, and the Belgians 25, 30 miles or so.

So you can see that the French were dominant. And they wanted a war-winning offensive, British and French troops fighting together in France. And the obvious place, the place it had to be, was where the British and French armies met each other. And they met each other on the Somme. It's so poignant that we're talking about the Somme River. The Somme might be in France, but it runs like an artery through British history. Edward III forced a crossing of the Somme before the Battle of Crecy. Henry V also had to cross the Somme. He actually surprised the French. He crossed and fought Agincourt on the north side of the Somme. Going back even further, William the Conqueror, their ancestor, he'd left from the mouth of the Somme. San Valerice of Somme sailed in that huge tidal estuary where at low springs, huge mudflats extend for miles and catch out careless sailors. And now, this river would see yet another generation of young men from these islands fighting against a continental foe. And this time they would seek to batter, not the French, but a mighty German army into submission.

But as ever, the enemy can interfere with the most carefully laid plans. In the beginning of 1916, the Germans launched their own, surprise, enormous offensive on the French town of Verdun. This became one of the most terrible battles in history, sucking in vast reserves of men and material from both sides. The German army sought to bleed the French white, was their expression, and both sides ended up bleeding each other almost to the point of extinction. As Verdun went on, the French had to send more and more reinforcements, which they'd been hoping to earmark for this great joint offensive, into the Verdun sector. The French element of the Somme battle shrank and shrank and shrank. They'd hoped to deploy about 42 divisions, that's more than half a million men,

that halved down to 18 divisions that would take part in the final assault. And with that shrinking commitment came a sort of shrinking of ambition. Rather than being a giant breakthrough battle, this became a battle to inflict damage on the Germans, to cause attritional losses to the Germans and take the pressure off the French. And it might not seem like much, but the difference between those two ideas, one fighting a giant breakthrough battle, the other a kind of break-in and attritional battle, led to there being ambiguities throughout the planning process that would come to hamper British efforts on the day.

The French also put enormous pressure on the British to bring forward the date of the attack. They were desperate in Verdun and they needed a counter-offensive to try and stop the Germans putting more and more pressure on the Verdun front. So the British had to attack in a place they hadn't really wanted to, with a much lower French component, with a plan that had been heavily modified at a time earlier than their choosing. It wasn't the best of preparations. British military might flooded into the zone just behind the Somme front. Divisions of new army soldiers took their place between divisions of old army, professional soldiers, so that this new force was kind of intermixed and the new army would gain strength and support from the more experienced veteran units on their flanks.

The Germans could see this was happening and one of the reasons why they had the best positions. In 1914, the Germans had advanced into France and Belgium and when it became clear there was stalemate, the Germans had pulled back. They decided to sit back on their haunches and dig in and that meant they were able to take the high ground, places where they could observe what was going on in the valleys below. And that was certainly true at the Somme. They had excellent observation and they could see the British stockpiling, building new railways, marching huge numbers of men into position. At that stage of the war, the importance of secrecy was underappreciated, and the levels at which they had to go to by 1918 was just not common practice. So the Germans could see them coming, and the Germans made their own preparations.

In front of the German positions, there were two bands of barbed wire, 30 metres wide, perhaps 15 metres apart. Two metres or so high, just terrifying obstacles. Behind that there was a front line trench that was traversed, so it was zigzag, so explosive blasts couldn't just clear out huge portions of trench. There were sentry posts and concrete recesses built into the sides of the trench, and then there were dugouts as well. Not as many dugouts in the first line as they were in the second line. 200 metres behind this front line trench, there would be a second line trench. And that was where the bulk of the German infantry

were. They'd learned their lesson. Then Germans knew that in any assault, the front line trench would be battered with artillery fire in the days and hours leading up to the assault. So they kept the majority of their troops in this second line and they were deep, deep underground. There were dugouts, they could be two metres deep, but they could be 10 metres down, concrete with carpet, electricity, beds, cooking facilities. They could be large enough for 25 men embedded into the chalk rock around them. embedded into the chalk rock around them. Very, very difficult for even heavy Allied guns to reach. There was then a third line trench for reserves and behind that there were also strong points which were specially commissioned as the Germans realised this would be the focus of an Allied assault. Now these were actually outside the range of Allied artillery altogether so the Allies had

no way even of touching them. The German infantry in those trenches further up were connected by telephone to their artillerymen five miles back. Those telephone lines were dug in two metres or so below the soils. They saw a good chance of not being smashed by Allied artillery. And so that when the Germans saw assaults coming, they could phone their own artillery and speak to them in real time, directing their fire down on the hapless soldiers moving towards them. This was probably the most formidable defensive position in the history of warfare to that point. And the British didn't know the full scale and depth of these defences, but they knew that they'd be extraordinarily hard nut to crack.

And that's why they planned to fire the largest bombardment in history. The lessons of the First World War thus far had told them that artillery was dominant on the battlefield. Artillery sitting well behind the lines. They could blast shells at the enemy. Now those shells could contain high explosives to just blast things up. They could contain shrapnel, hundreds of tiny balls, like ball bearings, that would be detonated above the ground and shower the ground with shards of supersonic metal that could tear through humans, could tear through barbed wire, and could tear through flimsy defences. You could also use poison gas by that stage of the war. It had been introduced to the

battlefield in early 1915. So the British believed that they would use artillery on an unprecedented scale. They would fire more than 1.5 million shells at these German positions over the space of a week. It would be the most dreadful bombardment in history, and they confidently believed that nothing could survive it. history and they confidently believed that nothing could survive it. General Rawlinson was the commander of the British Fourth Army, the principal army involved in the offensive, and he wrote nothing could exist at the conclusion of the bombardment in the area covered by it. That was widely repeated by the men. Nothing will survive, not even a rat was one of the expressions at the time, and there was the idea that all the British would have to do was get out of their trenches

and walk across this battered moonscape and take possession of the enemy lines. And so, at the end of June 1916, the most gigantic bombardment of the war to that point took place. The British would fire more shells than they'd fired in the whole of the first year of the First World War. The guns could apparently be heard on Hampstead Heath in London, around 150 miles away. The French had fired comparable bombardments, but no British army had ever come close. Many of those shells as we'll hear hear, failed to detonate. And today, as you travel around the Somme, you still see piles of unexploded ammunition discovered by farmers left by the roadside for proper demolition and removal. We're still reaping the iron harvest that was sown in that week in 1916. And every so often, even now in the 21st century, there are still casualties of the Battle

of the Somme, when some poor unfortunate soul disturbs a piece of unexploded munition. This is Dan Snow's History Hit, more after this. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week, every week, as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the ones shaping our future. We talk to award-winning journalists. ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the US invasion of Iraq.

We hear from the people who were actually there. The Sudanese have been incredible. They have managed to get supplies to people, to individuals who are suffering. And we learn from the remarkable historians shining a light on forgotten histories. For the most part, the millions of people who were taken to those camps were immediately murdered. Auschwitz combined the functions of death camp and concentration camp and slave labour. Join us on the Warfare podcast for a history hit

twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. To be continued... 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. There had been rain at the end of June, but by the early hours of the 1st of July, there were clear skies. There was mist. At 6am, up and down the line, over 100,000 men prepared to go into battle. Captain Charlie May of the 22nd Manchester's wrote in his diary at 5.45am. We marched up last night, the most exciting march imaginable. Guns all round us crashed and roared till sometimes it was quite impossible to hear oneself speak. It was, however, a fine sight, and one realised from it what gunpowder really means. Fritz, of course, strafed back in reply, causing us some uneasiness and a few

casualties before ever we reached the line. The night passed noisily and with a few more casualties. The Hun puts a barrage on us every now and then and generally claims one or two victims. It is a glorious morning and is now broad daylight. We go over in two hours' time. It seems a long time to wait, and I think, whatever happens, we shall all feel relieved once the line is launched. No man's land is a tangled desert. Unless one could see it, one cannot imagine what a terrible state of disorder it is in. Our gunnery has wrecked that, and his front line trench is all right, but we do not yet seem to have stopped his machine guns. These are popping off all along our parapet as I write.

I trust they will not claim too many of our lads before the day is over. Tragically, that was Charlie May's last diary entry. He would be killed in the hours that followed and would never see his darling baby again. The soldiers knew that when the guns fell silent it would be time to go, and that moment was zero hour, 7.30am. The guns stopped, and the overwhelming memory that veterans have of that exact moment was the sound of the skylarks.

For the first time in a week they heard birdsong, and there was a brief glimpse of a perfect summer day. Siegfried Sassoon called it a sunlit picture of hell. Because in the seconds that followed, 120,000 men would attack along 25 kilometres. As the men stood in their trenches, fidgeting with kit, taking a gulp of water or something stronger, having a last cigarette, trying to chat to the man next door, the sound of the whistles came up and down the line. When the whistles blew, it was time to go.

The men climbed ladders, scrambled out of their trenches. The weight of their equipment, including rifle, helmet and everything else, was around 66 pounds. They had clothing with them. They had spare equipment with them. They had biscuits. They had ammunition. Because they had to carry everything they might need, perhaps for a day of fighting.

They knew that even if they're successful, they would like to get cut off on the far side of no man's land. And there were no armoured vehicles that we have today to bring up replenishment, resupply. The men would have to survive with what they were able to carry with them. So they staggered off into no man's land. Captain Harold Yeo of the 9th King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry had described the bombardment as the final anger.

The air throbbed with sound. And then he describes the excitement of finally heading off. And then you saw the most wonderful sight imaginable. Rows of steel-hatted people with bayonets fixed going slowly forward over the German parapets and onwards. This was to be seen from where we were, about so yards behind, with smoke and morning mist enveloping them a short way ahead. Harold Yeo's enthusiasm, his optimism, would not last for long. The minutes that followed would see the most terrible bloodletting, the most terrible slaughter in the history of the

British Army, one of the most terrible in all of military history. The plan had gone catastrophically wrong. British troops marched evenly, with regularity, across no man's land. And the first thing they discovered was that the German wire had not been cut as had been promised. Worse still, much of it was hanging with unexploded shells, and still more of them were littering the ground around the wire. British shell production had been ramped up enormously in the previous 18 months and quality control had suffered. So many of these shells, perhaps one third of them, had not detonated properly. That meant that, despite huge damage being done to enemy trenches, the barbed wire had not been sliced through by shrapnel. And the British faced a formidable

obstacle. But much, much worse was to come. We'll start at the northern end of the Fourth Army, at a place called Serre. This is where Kitchener's pals famously, infamously, went into action. The Accretin pals, the Barnsley pals. Just seconds after they left their trench, they suffered between 80 and 90% casualties. One of them famously said, we were two years in the making, 10 minutes in the destruction. The Accrington pals, about 700 of them attacked, 585 killed, captured or wounded. One signaler wrote, they were mown down like meadow grass. I felt sick

at the sight of the carnage and remember weeping. Why were they moaned down? Well, the answer is that the bombardment had not worked. It had not destroyed the German army in the field. The Germans had taken refuge in those deep dugouts that I mentioned. They'd taken refuge further back, further away from the frontline trenches. And although it had been a miserable, traumatic, shattering experience for many of them, being bombarded for a week constantly, they were physically able,

as soon as they heard those whistles blow on the other side of No Man's Land, they were able to rush up to their fire steps or even any old shell holes that they found on the surface, take cover, mount their machine guns, or even any old shell holes that they found on the surface, take cover, mount their machine guns, shoulder their rifles, and start firing, pouring down a withering fire on the British troops, till on that perfect July morning, we're walking towards them in lines. One German officer, Otto Leis, said there was wild firing slamming into masses of the enemy. All around us, rushing, whistling and roaring of a storm.

Belt after belt was fired. Despite the fact that hundreds are already lying dead, fresh waves kept emerging to assault the trenches. One of those hundreds lying dead was 16-year-old Private Horace Iles. He was with the Leeds Pals. He joined up at 14. He pretended to be 18. His family learned of his death on July the 11th. I went with descendants of his family to the Somme way back for a BBC TV show, and they brought a letter that had been returned to the family on July the 11th, unopened, simply stamped on the outside, was killed in action. They opened the envelope for me and they showed me the letter. Flory, who was Horace's sister, begged,

for goodness sakes, Horace, tell them how old you are. I'm sure they will send you back if they know you are only 16. You've seen quite enough now to chuck it up and try to get back. You won't fare no worse for it. If you don't do it now, you'll come back in bits, and we want the whole of you. I remember standing on that battlefield with the family, and even a hundred years later, the tears still flowed. They also shared with me his last letter from France. He wrote just a few lines, hoping to reach you in the best of health as it leaves me at present. I was discharged from hospital about two days ago.

I'm sorry not to have written before, but I'd kept putting it off. But at last I've written. That was the last they heard from Horace. Lieutenant Alfred Bundy of the 2nd Middlesex was luckier. He survived to write about the battle. My platoon continued to advance in good order, without many casualties, and until we had reached nearly halfway to the Bosch front line. I saw no sign of life there. Suddenly, however, an appalling rifle and machine-gun fire opened against us, and my men commenced to fall. I shouted down,

but most of those that were still not hit had already taken what cover they could find. I dropped in a shell hole and occasionally attempted to move to my right and left, but bullets were forming an impenetrable barrier and exposure of the head meant certain death. None of our men were visible, but in all directions came pitiful groans and cries of pain. Alfred crawled back to his trench. It was filled with corpses. He describes his company commander as having gone almost insane under the stress of what they'd endured. They lost around 540 men, well over half of their battalion. And weeks later, there was another casualty of the first day of the Somme as their colonel committed suicide.

He shot himself in a London hotel. the Somme as their colonel commits suicide. He shots himself in a London hotel. 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. The German testimonies of this slaughter are absolutely fascinating. I'll read one out from a man called Castle. He's a German soldier. More than a week we'd live with the deafening noise of the battle. Dull and apathetic we were lying in our dugout, secluded from life,

but prepared to defend ourselves whatever the cost. On the 1st of July at 7.30, the shout of the sentry, they are coming, tore me out of apathy. Helmet, belt, rifle, and up the steps. On the steps, something white and bloody. In the trench, a headless body. The sentry had lost his life by a last shell, before the fire was directed to the rear, and it paid the price for his vigilance with his life. We rushed to the ramparts. There they come, the khaki yellows. They're not more than twenty

metres in front of our trench. They advance, fully equipped, slowly, to march across our bodies into the open country. But no, boys, we are still alive. The moles come out of our trench. They advance, fully equipped, slowly to march across our bodies into the open country. But no, boys, we are still alive. The moles come out of their holes. Machine gun fire tears holes in their rows. They discover our presence, throw themselves on the ground, now a mass of craters welcomed by hand grenades and gunfire, and have now to sell their lives themselves. Another German observer was called Stefan Westmann, he was a medical officer, and he describes how the German machine gunners and infantrymen crawled back out of their holes with inflamed and sunken eyes, their faces blackened by fire, their uniforms

splashed with the blood of their wounded comrades. It was a kind of relief to be able to come out, even into the air still filled with smoke and the smell of cordite. They started firing furiously and the British had frightful losses. Now another reason for the British disaster on this first day of the Somme was actually hinted at by one of those Germans. He talks about the artillery fire moving on and in the absence of any battlefield communication nowadays if you're advancing you're on the radio constantly with your artillery, with your air and you are able to say we're just here please deal with this obstacle in front of us. There was no way of communicating back then in that manner. Very primitive ideas with lamps and flags, runners, of course, you could be a machine

gun and kill very, very slow. It's very difficult to lay telephone cable as you advanced. It was vulnerable to German shell fire. And so the solution they came up with was a rigid timetable. The artillery would blast the German trenches and then it would lift, it would move forward. The idea is that you can advance behind a kind of curtain of fire and steel of your own artillery. So it's battering the German trenches, then it stops, it lifts, you advance forward, seize those trenches, but the artillery then starts firing just beyond those German trenches to stop anyone coming to their aid, reinforcements or counterattacks, which is great in theory, but in practice it has to go to a regular timetable. And if you're behind that timetable,

then you can't call back the artillery. So the infantry advancing and they're watching as their artillery goes 100 feet further every two minutes. The trouble is they're not going 100 feet every two minutes. They're stuck in the same place, dealing with the Germans who are now emerging from their strong points. Then your British artillery is off pounding positions way, way, way further back that's having no impact on your fate on the battlefield. As the First World War goes on,

cooperation between infantry and artillery reaches an extraordinarily impressive pitch. But at this point, you're pretty near the beginning, and British infantry watched as its artillery support disappeared off and they were left alone to deal with the Germans. Just south of the Pals battalions were the Newfoundlanders. This sector was the setting of really one of the most tragic events on that awful day. The annihilation of an entire unit from Britain's smallest colony, the colony of Newfoundland, that was not then part of Canada. The Newfoundlanders were very proud. They were

determined that there would be a Newfoundland regiment and it would not be subsumed into a Canadian force or a British one. And the Newfoundlanders would go into action really for the first time on this day, on the 1st of July. In the space of minutes, out of 800 men who attacked, they lost around 710 of them. Many of them didn't even make their own front line. They were clambering out of their second line to go forward and join the assault when they were mowed down. It's one of the most poignant and beautiful stretches of the Western Front today, so-called Newfoundland Park at Beaumont Hamel. After the war, it was seen as such an important place in the story of Newfoundland that the wives, the daughters, the children of

those veterans who died purchased that slice of battlefield and left it. You can still go there to that. It's never been put back under the plough. It was never returned to agriculture. So you can see the trench lines. You can see the zigzags, and you get a real sense of what it was like there on the 1st of July, 1916, when a terrible hammer blow befell the people of Newfoundland. South of them, interestingly, is the Ulster Division, the 36th Ulster Division. They enjoyed some success on the 1st of July initially. They succeeded where other divisions failed, partly because they attacked before zero hour.

Their leading battalions pushed as far forward as they could whilst that bombardment was still continuing. So they pushed and pushed and pushed so that they were as close as possible to German positions when that bombardment lifted. They also discovered that the wire was pretty well cut in their sector, so they were able to get through the barbed wire. The shrapnel had worked in their sector.

And as the whistles blew and a zero hour happened, the Ulstermann were able to swarm forward and did capture a very strong section of the German line known as the Schwaben Redoubt. It was a very brilliant advance, nearly a mile in its depth. It was certainly the most dramatic advance here in the northern section of the Battle of Somme. But sadly, it didn't lead to enduring success because either side of them, British divisions hadn't got anywhere at all. And so they found themselves surrounded on three

sides by the Germans in an absolute storm of German artillery fire, rifle and machine gun bullets. And the Germans counterattacked as the day went on. As the Ulstermen ran out of ammunition, ran out of grenades, they were forced to slowly relinquish the ground that they'd gained. And what survivors they were, by nightfall, crept back across no man's land, back to their start point. Something like 5,000 Northern Irishmen had been killed, wounded or captured in their heroic, but ultimately pretty futile, assault. South of them is an attack on Teatvale. People will know it because that's where the giant monument stands today. It was awful. The so-called First Salford Pals lost nearly 500 men there.

The following day, there were just three officers and 37 men from the 650-ish that had gone into battle. Private Donald Murray, who was part of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry that day, he attacked south of Teepval. He actually recalls that many of his comrades were drunk when they attacked, and who can blame them? He said, all I could see were men lying dead, men screaming, men on the barbed wire with their bowels hanging down shrieking. I was just alone in a hail of fire and smoke and stink. And the official history usually far more measured and stayed. Even that had an element of poetry recounting those terrible events. It writes, it was said with some truth that only bulletproof soldiers could have taken Tiefvall on this day. By nightfall, there was again nothing to show for that British assault.

As we go further down the line in the south, there was some success. Now this was largely thanks to cooperation with the French who were attacking in much more limited numbers, remember, down to the south of the British lines. The French were able to do a couple of important things. First of all, they had heavier guns. Their big, heavier guns had more effectively penetrated into the earth and smashed up some of those deep German bunkers. Secondly, the French had learned through bitter, bitter experience on the Western Front that you had to focus on counter-battery fire. And that is blasting the German gun batteries,

not necessarily the battlefield where the infantry are all hiding in their trenches, but further back, the gun batteries, because that's going to do the real damage to any attack. And so they poured down a relentless fire on the German batteries so they were unable in turn to focus on the advancing British and French. As well as a huge bombardment rained on the Germans from above, the British decided to lay at least three enormous mines under German lines, using British expertise in mining. Of course, Britain's a coal superpower in this period, so miners would dig right under German lines and pack them with high explosives. Enormous, enormous amounts of high explosives, sending German defences sky high. Now in the north,

that hadn't really worked. The Hawthorne Ridge mine had been detonated 10 minutes before zero at 7.20 and that enabled the Germans to put together some kind of plan to deal with the eventual attack. They manned the parapet of this new crater and as the British troops surged in and around it the Germans poured down a terrible fire on them. So despite the Royal Engineers digging a thousand feet long mine, despite them packing it with something like 40,000 pounds of high explosives, 75 feet beneath German positions, it didn't have the effect that they were hoping for. Down south they were slightly more effective. One veteran remembers that our people began creeping out to the attack and the earth rocked with two enormous mine explosions. Those

were detonated at 7.28, just two minutes before zero hour, and that gave the Brits more of an opportunity to exploit those explosions. In fact, there's a Royal Flying Corps pilot, Cecil Arthur Lewis, who remembers seeing a tremendous and magnificent column of earth rising to about 4,000 feet from those two explosions in the southern end of the line. Down in the south is where you get the extraordinary story from the 8th East Surrey's kicking footballs. It was applauded in the press as a sign of British sporting gallantry. It was derided by the Germans as an absurd English affectation, but those footballs were kicked ahead into no man's land. Private Robert Kewd of the 7th East Kents has left a really interesting

account of this battle. He calls it a wonderful sight. He says, war such as this on a beautiful day seems to me quite correct and proper. One feels a joy in living, he writes, even though that living is, to say the least, very precarious. He describes how his mates were jesting, they were smiling, even though some of them were racing to certain death. And he talks more honestly than many veterans about the desire to kill Germans. He says he feels one must kill as often as one can. And he notices at one point some prisoners. He writes that he wished he could have killed them, and he would have done had it not been for the fact that they were being closely watched. He then seems to complete his letter a little later, and his tone has definitely

changed. He said, I'm afraid that had it not been for the fact I was too busy dodging the shells, I should have broken down. He lists several of his friends who've been killed. He said they would not rise again. Have lost my old pals today. Still, some will be left if I am. Our boys gave no quarter. And he and units around him were able to seize objectives like the village of Mametz and Montauban. The great tragedy of the Somme is that there was an opportunity to advance beyond Montauban. In fact, the troops remember seeing the green fields beyond. They'd penetrated, they thought, nearly all the way through German defences. But there was no way at this point of the war to respond, to react, to send reinforcements, to reinforce success. And there was this very staid fire plan,

as I mentioned, an infantry plan. If you met your objective, you stopped there and you waited for another plan to be made. And so the glimpse, the possibility of a breakthrough was lost as the men watched the Germans scramble to recover their defences, dig new positions, lay new barbed wire and build another terrible line of defence. Down to the south of them, General Marie-Emile Fayol's 6th French Army struck, we ignore this in Britain, it was probably the most effective blow yet struck on the Western Front. His heavy guns did smash the German defences, his lighter guns provided covering fire as five divisions seized the German front line almost in its entirety. One of his colonial corps, made up of French North African soldiers, seized the German second line. And the French lost just 1,600 men, mostly lightly wounded.

The infantry moved forward in slightly different ways to the British. They did not walk in lines. They were more highly trained. This was not their first experience of battle. They were able to move forward in dispersed formations to look for weak points, to kind of infiltrate a little bit more rather than just march forward in a long line. I mentioned the French had 600 casualties. Well, the British suffered far worse.

57,000 casualties in one day, 20,000 of which were killed or who died of wounds. That's more than the death toll of the Crimean War and the Boer War combined. And the vast majority of those men were killed in the first 30 minutes of the attack. And in return, the British had so little to show for it. Although that wasn't clear at the time. At 8am, the first situation report arrived on the desk of Rawlinson. It's referred to 8 Corps, one of the corps that advanced. The whole of the corps reported over the German front line, and Rawlinson wrote in his personal diary, the battle has begun well.

We captured all the front line trenches easily. That was written at 9.20, by which time he didn't realise, but he just presided over the most catastrophic attack in the history of the British Army. Many of the men, of course, who took part were traumatised for the rest of their lives. But interestingly, there were flashes of optimism on that terrible day. Lieutenant Lancelot Spicer wrote to his mother four days later. It was the most marvellous show I've ever seen or had anything to do with. If it wasn't for that, our losses would be unbearable, for we have suffered, particularly in officers. But they all died a magnificent death, and if they know, as I'm sure they must do,

what they have achieved by sacrificing their own lives, they would be perfectly satisfied. In a slightly similar vein, Lieutenant Russell Jones wrote in his diary as he heard rumours of success. Let us hope we are in sight of the finish. All the Allies are advancing, and behind the dark clouds there is just a little ray of sunshine which we trust will mean peace for ourselves, our children, our children's children, and even peace for ever and a day. Many men like Russell Jones would have to deal with terrible disappointment as the truth emerged over the days that followed. So how should we think about the first day of the

Battle of Somme? It was clearly a catastrophe. It was clearly a disaster. In a brutal sense, it was a learning experience. The British did refine their offensive operations in the weeks and months and years that followed. The British army was on a very steep learning curve. It improved. There was a terrible, appalling, unprecedented cost to that process, but lessons were learned. A French officer observing the British said, the British infantry is very brave, but undergoing a costly apprenticeship. And by the end of the Battle of Somme, the British had ground their way forward. Many NCOs, many young officers, many staff officers had gained battle experience that would prove vital, war-winning, in the years that followed. The cost, though, was astonishing. The British and French would lose around 600,000 men, the Germans over 400,000 men. men, the Germans over 400,000 men. It was not a breakthrough battle. It did succeed in the terrible logic of the First World War in inflicting casualties on the Germans at a higher level than they could sustain. The Battle of Somme could be regarded as defeat for Germany. One German soldier

has written, the tragedy of the Somme battle was that the best soldiers, the stoutest-hearted men, were lost. Their numbers were replaceable, but their spiritual worth never could be. And Ernst Jünger, the legendary First World War soldier, veteran, writer of Storm of Steel, wrote about the Somme that it was the muddy grave of the German field army. He believed that that German army never recovered from the loss of so many experienced junior and non-commissioned officers. But those are the statistics. That's the strategic level. But I think when we're talking about the first day in particular, it's difficult to see beyond the suffering of the individuals who were caught up in that terrible storm of steel and high explosives. George Morgan served there with the Bradford pals.

He was interviewed in the 1970s by the Imperial War Museum, and he describes the effect it had on his unit. We were pals, very happy together, and they were such good people. They were fine young men, the cream of the country. That spirit lasted until 1st July 1916. We had so many casualties that we were all strangers after that. The new men who came were fed up. They were conscripts and they didn't want to come, they didn't want to fight.

Things were never the same anymore. After July 1st, I hated the generals and the people who were running the country and the war I felt we'd been sacrificed we didn't do anything we didn't win a thing thank you for listening to this account of the Battle of the Somme

I've got some special news for you I didn't talk about a diversionary attack that took place on the northern edge of the Somme battlefield which've got some special news for you. I didn't talk about a diversionary attack that took place on the northern edge of the Somme battlefield, which is part of that first day. It was a catastrophe. 7,000 men died up there. It's a place called Gomcourt. Not a single German was diverted. It was an utter, utter failure. Now, the general in charge of that failure was a man called General Thomas Doyley Snow. He was my great-grandfather. He presided over one of the worst sectors of one of the darkest days in British military history.

To mark the launch of our subscription service here at Dan Snow's History Hit, I've got an interview with the brilliant military historian, battlefield guide, podcaster, Paul Reid. He's been on the podcast many times before. He's a great friend. He's one of the best in the business. And he's going to talk me through what happened at GOMCOR and the part that my great-grandfather played. What he could have done better. Could he have done anything worse? And we're going to talk about his shocking behaviour after the battle as well. So please take out a subscription wherever you get your pods and listen to that accompanying podcast.

Not the easiest one for me to record. Thank you. you