The attack on the Somme began on 1st July 1916. For a week beforehand 1,537 British guns had fired over one and a half million shells at the German trenches. They had two targets, the trenches themselves and the barbed wire in front of them. There were problems with the timings of the exploding shells and therefore they exploded in the air instead of by the trenches and the barbed wire.
At 7.30 am the guns stopped firing and more than 100,000 British soldiers climbed out of their trenches in a line 25 kilometres long. In the bright sunshine they walked across no-man's-land towards the German trenches. Many were expecting it to be easy, one officer said, “You will not need rifles. You will find all the Germans dead.”
The Germans had been expecting an attack. German spy planes had seen British soldiers moving 'up the line' which gave the Germans time to prepare. They put up extra barbed wire and dug deep shelters beneath their trenches. When the British guns started firing the Germans simply went into their shelters and when they stopped, they quickly went up to their machine gun posts. They hardly had to aim all they had to do was point their guns at the neat rows of soldiers walking towards them.
The British soldiers still kept walking forwards but their next problem was the barbed wire. It had not been destroyed. The wire had simply been lifted in the air and then dropped it in a worse tangle than it was before. Thousands of men were shot at as they tried to pick their way through dense tangles of wire. As a result, 58,000 were injured and 20,000 died within the first hour of the battle.
General Haig did not stop the battle, or change his tactics. Day after day, British soldiers went ‘over the top’ to attack the German trenches. Every time the British attacked the Germans counter attacked and forced them to retreat. This went on for 140 days (nearly 4 months). Every metre of ground was fought over time and time again. The longer the fighting went on, the worse the conditions became. Shellfire churned up the land into a sea of mud. When the autumn rains came the mud dissolved into slime metres deep in places. In the trenches themselves shellfire killed thousands of men every day. Sometimes it was impossible to bury the dead properly so they were put into disused trenches. British soldiers attacking the German trenches sometimes found that the trench they captured was full of corpses and deep in maggots. In November the British made a last great attack. This time it actually worked and they captured the village of Beaumont Hamel and took thousands of Germans prisoner. At last they had made the breakthrough that Haig had so wanted. However, it then started to snow and the battlefield was already deep in mud, it was swept by icy winds and blizzards. General Haig had no choice but to call off the battle.
420,000 British soldiers and 200,000 French soldiers had been killed by the end of the battle, almost as many as the Germans when added together. Although the Germans had been driven back 10 kilometres the Western Front was still there and the German Army was unbeaten.
As a result of these figures as opposed to what we achieved in comparison to what we were hoping to achieve, there have been some controversies. Some people think Haig failed and call him a butcher. They hold him responsible for the slaughter of so many lives and say he was unprepared, not organised and did not learn from mistakes. Jenny Ealing once said “Haig does deserve his nickname. This is because Haig sent thousands of men to their deaths continuously after his war efforts seemed not to be working. 60,000 soldiers died in the first day alone in the battle of the Somme, 20,000 of those in the first hour. The reason that so many people died was that Haig ordered his men to walk across no-man’s land. They were easy targets for the German machine guns.”
Others think Haig was successful. Haig assisted Britain in winning the war and although he did so with tremendous loss of life, these men did not die pointlessly. They died to protect their families and everyone else on the home front, and they died to prevent Britain from becoming a German Nation. Detractors of Haig never seem to mention that Haig inherited both the tactical deficiency and the Trench deadlock from both the French and Field Marshal John French; the battle was eventually a British Victory. The Casualties of the Somme (the first large scale British offensive of the war) were no worse than what the Germans, French, Russians and Austrians had been suffering since 1914.
General Haig really believed he had won the Battle. The Germans had lost approximately 680,000 men and had retreated 10 kilometres from their trenches. One of the German generals admitted later that this broke the heart of the German Army. “We were completely exhausted”, he wrote, “If the war lasted, our defeat seemed certain.” Also the British had helped to save Verdun by keeping a million German soldiers occupied on the Somme. But the human cost was very high. 420,000 British soldiers and 200,000 French soldiers had been killed, almost as many as the Germans when added together. Haig pointed out that although both sides had lost huge numbers of men, the Germans could not afford so many deaths whereas the British could and therefore the Germans had been weakened.
There are some people who both agree and disagree, posing the question, “Did Haig have a choice?” Haig was faced with an almost impossible task of winning the war in the quickest time possible. He was under constant pressure from the government to have a large victory to boost morale. Haig was also given false information by his officers and advisors. His advisors often told him what he wanted to hear instead of the truth and because Haig never saw the front line, he relied solely on their reports. His officers and advisors told Haig that the bombardment had worked, the soldiers were advancing and the battle was going very well. This could be why Haig did not change his tactics. Also, because of a lack in communication skills, any messages he may have sent to try to improve the tactics may have not reached the sergeants or any messages he may have received to tell him about the real situation may have not reached him.
To conclude, I think Haig does deserve the title ‘Butcher of the Somme’ because he was responsible for a lot of deaths, but I think that he did what he did for a good reason which overall benefitted the whole country during the war effort. I think Haig definitely deserves some of the blame, but not all of it. Haig started out in a bad situation after taking over the trench deadlock and was under time pressure as well as being told untruthful facts about the progress being made. Overall, what Haig did was for the good of the nation but it is a shame so many had to die for it.
