The plan was simple, the British would fire their artillery for a solid week, killing all the Germans and destroying the barbed wire. The British soldiers would then be able to literally walk across and take the German trenches. This however did not go exactly to plan. The first problem came with the artillery. For this job the British were using a new piece called the ‘creeping barrage’. The way this was used was: the artillery would be set at an angle aimed roughly a few feet in front of the enemy trenches. This aim would no be altered. Instead as the gun fired it would slowly roll forward. The idea was that because each time it would hit a few feet in front of the last shot it would not miss any thing. This works well in theory, but the problem came when the initial aim was out. More often than not the gun would hit no-mans land, making huge craters that would fill with water and be large enough to drown a man. Also the shots would often hit a few feet either side of the barbed wire, not actually destroying it. Finally, and probably most importantly, is that the artillery didn’t kill nearly as many enemy soldiers as it was supposed to. This was because the Germans had much better trenches than the Brits, with much deeper, concrete covered dugouts, which when the shelling started, they climbed into and didn’t come out of for a week. Another reason the plan failed was because five minutes before the Brits were due to start walking (most Germans were in there dugouts still at this time) someone accidentally let of a mine, this warned the Germans the British were up to something giving them tome to leave there dugouts and re-man there machine guns etc. the third reason the plan failed was because the British were given strict instructions to walk across no-mans land. By this time Hague thought the Germans would mostly be dead so the soldiers were told to walk, but as the Germans weren’t dead and had already been alerted of the soldiers actions this led to a slaughter.
In the first day of the Somme there was 60,000 casualties, 20,000 deaths. With these kinds of figures it’s easy to see how the battle could be viewed as a failure. Also, because of the huge number of deaths the soldiers started to question their orders for the first time. People finally started to realise the sheer horror of the war and that the easiest person to blame for all the deaths were the colonels – the people giving the orders.
Of coarse it was not all bad. Firstly, the battle gave the British a chance it use the tank for the first time and although it wasn’t entirely successful this time it was later used to great affect and still is now. Also the Somme allowed the British to gain a total of 10 km into what was previously German space. Also, although the British losses were great the German losses were still considerably higher in the end.
In conclusion, I think the battle of the Somme was not a complete waste of life. I believe there were a lot of casualties – more than there should have been but it did help us to win the war in the end. I do believe however that if the plan had been more ‘fine tuned’ then the campaign would have been eve more successful for fewer lives lost.