The Permanent Stain of the Somme

In his 1918 poem ‘Futility’, Wilfred Owen plays with the theme of Nature’s restorative power. ‘Move him into the sun’, begins the speaker. But the effort is futile because the soldier is already dead. Owen has created a metaphor for the conflict as a whole.

The ‘futility narrative’ is an enduring one, despite the efforts of a number of revisionist historians, starting with John Terraine. And to no battle is ‘futility’ more attached than the Somme.

Yet as Gary Sheffield has argued (An Exercise in Futility?, July 2016), tragic though the unprecedented losses were for the British, they were apparently not without effect. The German C-in-C, Erich von Falkenhayn, for example, found it difficult to transfer divisions from the Somme to reinforce his faltering offensive against the French at Verdun, one of the reasons the French C-in-C, Joseph Joffre, had asked his British counterpart, Douglas Haig, to accelerate his plans to attack on the Somme. And the man who replaced Falkenhayn in August 1916, Paul von Hindenburg, soon began to press the Kaiser to authorise unrestricted submarine warfare to bring Britain to its knees, a desperate measure which brought the US into the war in April 1917, changing the strategic balance.

The four-and-a-half-month slogging match on the Somme certainly made the German army blanch: early the following year, German troops withdrew 40 miles to the Siegfriedstellung (‘Fortress Siegfried’). Finally, the British army on the Western Front – predominantly ‘green’ troops – learned a great deal about how to fight. But were the gains proportionate to the losses?             

There was never a serious possibility of the sustained breakthrough and restoration of mobility that Haig dreamed of. Nor was the alternative attritional approach favoured by Henry Rawlinson, whose Fourth Army was the instrument of the offensive, very ‘economic’. Around 130,000 British troops were killed on the Somme and 300,000 wounded. German losses are disputed, but they were fewer. The withdrawal to the Siegfriedstellung was as much a calculation of British potential in 1917 – the year in which Hindenburg intended to finish off the Russians – as a response to actual losses. It gave the Germans better ground to hold and a shorter front, allowing them to withdraw several divisions into reserve.

It is also the case that Germany’s naval chief, Reinhard Scheer, had been pressing for unrestricted submarine warfare since the Battle of Jutland (May 31st), as his surface ships could not get past Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet and the Royal Navy’s blockade was beginning to starve Germany of food and raw materials, a fact the Kaiser could not ignore forever.

As for the British army’s so-called ‘learning curve’, it was very uneven. What did Haig learn? Judging from Third Ypres (‘Passchendaele’) the following summer, very little. Several hundred thousand dead and wounded had learned nothing at all.

Was the Somme even necessary? No. An offensive, especially one going off half-cock, was not the way to relieve Verdun. Taking over more of the allied line to release French troops would have been better suited to Haig’s green regiments. Sending heavy artillery and aircraft to Verdun would also have helped. Above all, persuading the French to stop playing to Falkenhayn’s game plan by mounting costly counter-attacks to recover ground of no importance except to national (or, rather, Joffre’s) prestige would have preserved France’s fighting strength. When the Somme ceased to be an Anglo-French offensive because of the demands of Verdun, the plans ought to have been torn up. The Western Front was a single front but, in effect, the conference at Chantilly in December 1915, which had decided strategy for 1916, treated it as two.

The Somme was not futile, but the losses were excessive. Worse, they would haunt the British (as would those of the French at Verdun) ever after. In November 1918 the allies were too quick to accept the Germans’ call for an armistice. In 1919 the losses made for a bad treaty at Versailles. In the 1930s they begat appeasement. 

Allan Mallinson is the author of Too Important for the Generals: Losing and Winning the First World War (Bantam, 2016).