Before 1916, the government had to use Propaganda to sign people up for war, but after this date they called up all men aged between 18 and 41 to join up immediately. This was called conscription. At first only single men were called up, but then married were too. This is shown in Source A2. Some even lied about their age to actually get into the army and get conscribed to fight in the war.
At this time, there was a lot of poverty about in Britain, and the people generally wanted to get away from their lives and have an adventure. When the First World War finally arose, this was the perfect opportunity for many to get away from this. This is shown in Source A1 (iii), the battalion of the Accrington Pals, conscribed by Lord Kitchner. This is a good useful Source to study and must be real information and statistics because you can see that research has been done to obtain this.
The trench life was an expectation that did not match its reality. The soldiers were promised with warm, comfortable, cosy homes with good food and good, easy battle situations. When they got to the trenches it was a living nightmare never thought imaginable. Conditions promised were transformed into baron wastelands of shell holes, no-mans land and miles of strung razor wire.
This is shown clearly in Source A5, a British trench photograph in 1916. It is clear, visual evidence of a typical British War Trench, and has lots of information about the trench life, such as the space shown, the broken debris everywhere, the dirt, slime and lice infested blankets. That is why I believe that visual evidence is a very useful, powerful and informative source of information. The only problem with visual evidence is that it could possibly be staged and you can’t really see the emotions and feeling of the men at war. You can only see this by looking into their eyes, and trying to imagine their pain. But even this would be too impossible to imagine. But this is still a very good source to work from.
Haig and the Generals thought that the Battle of the Somme was a complete success because he had accomplished all his aims. Haig had set 4 aims to accomplish on the French territory, which had been taken over by the German forces. The first, was the ‘Break-Out’ and capture back French Territory. The second was to relieve the town of Verdun. This was because the General’s did not want the enemy to even pass this point, and onto a straight onward journey to capture the French Capitol Paris.
So they needed to prepare a battle plan. They decided to divert German troops away from Verdun. The third was to inflict heavy losses on the enemy’s population of troops and to wear and crush them down. And finally the forth was to hold the German artillery forces on the western front, and prevent the re-direction of a large mass of troops to fight the Russians on the Eastern Front. If so doing this, they would capture the Russian capital Moscow, and would be a fatal mistake, as they would have infact taken over the largest country in the World.
The area shown in Source B2 is captured territory in the first aim. It shows the movement of the front line in favour of Haig’s attrition plan. This worked effectively. For every 12 inches of land captured back, an average of 3 men were killed as a price. Source B4 is an extremely useful source. It is a short comment by the German Commander-in-chief in 1918. He said that his forces lacked and had been wasted from the heavy and powerful British artillery fire. He also commented that the Somme was the muddy grave of the German Field Army.
He would not be saying these accusations about his own army if they weren’t true. This source is clearly not biased and you can see in Source B3 that the forces of the German army are equally destroyed and shows that Haig’s attrition plan had worked effectively and successfully.
Source B7 shows how General Haig achieved aims 2 and 4, because it states that the Somme offensive had relieved Verdun, and had held large forces to aid assistance to the British allies Russia, in the east. However, Source B7 is not reliable because it’s written by a Newspaper, and they got this information by Haig himself. Haig wouldn’t want the people of Britain to know that he had lost 400,000 men, and 60,000 on the first day alone. The General would have disliked the idea of criticism being thrown at him from every angle, so the source therefore is biased and self-justified. Another set back on the source, is that a lot of true facts such as the conditions, casualties, deaths and spirit of the men had been censored by the government to hide the actual information that people should have known. The eyewitness of the site fed this information through to the government and then onto the paper’s, along with the good comments added the eye-witness which was infact Haig himself.
Therefore, General Haig had set out what he wanted to do at the Battle of the Somme, and accomplished his aims successfully, but at the cost of 400,000 men’s lives, a life of hell for the soldiers, lies to the media, and all for one battle in the First World War.
The media had very good information to report back at home, by receiving good news from General Haig. The paper’s headline of ‘Great successes at the Somme’, as shown in Source C1, and one extremely positive side of the “wide-picture” of the battle, only it doesn’t mention the actual life out at war. Everything reported that reflects badly on the Generals and the government had been censored and any suggestions of dis-satisfaction, the General therefore only views the success and not the setbacks. General Haig has a good knowledge of the battle, so the success would make the biased General look like an excellent and well-organized leader. Haig doesn’t actually know all this because he’s a long distance away from the front-line. So this source cannot be truly reliable. The purpose of this report and the reflections of Haig are written to make himself look good, and to make everyone believe that the battle is all going according to plan. Source C2 is another example of good view reflected by the media on General Haig by the bottom three lines, stating the successes on the Somme. In this report there are many congratulations on the invigorating success. The media had backed up the Generals well by using words to amplify the greatness of the Generals commands and stratgies. Source C3 is a very reliable and useful source to study from as it is written by a historian. The historian who wrote this, Greg Hetherton is well educated and has studied intensively to come to a logical conclusion about the views of the media. It comments in many ways about the lack of truth being reported at the time. It says about the censorship of documents sent to the loved ones of the soldiers. If the censorship plan hadn’t have been put into action by the government, then the moral of the leaders and the country would have hit rock bottom.
The general public have a very negative view of the battle during 1914-18, mainly because of the losses. But also, many people believed that the battle was a success. This is due to the strategic plans, successfully obtained by General Haig.
This view of positiveness comes from historians that maybe only looked at the battle from one side of the story. There was no other way to defeat the German’s in the battle, except but to push forth, and attack against the violent, and deadly bombardment of heavy machine-gun fire. There was no way to negotiate because the German’s only had one thing in mind, to command and conquer. The only way to defeat and opposing enemy at war is to kill as many as possible.
People of today, don’t exactly realize the effects of war from back then at the battlefields, compared to the minor skirmishes between a few countries today. For example the Falkland war, only 200 men died in this “full scale war”, as shown in Source D7. This source shows the victory headline for the war, and in the 4th paragraph, it states that ‘it cost more than 200 British lives’. This is written in such a way, that the views of war, and this tragic loss of life are looked upon very badly and as a total disaster.
This is opposed to the loss of life endured in the early 20th century, when a total of 760,000 British men had lost their lives in battle for their country. This can be proved that today, humans believe that if people die in smaller numbers than the losses of the Battle of the Somme, it is known as a disaster.
We can’t judge the events of 1916 from modern viewpoints by historians, to criticise the actions of General Haig because we cant use the values and opinions of actual people that were there. We can only judge this by modern sources and modern opinions. AJP Taylor believes that General Haig was an incompetent commander of war, with poor tactics and of poor battle strategies out at the field. This is shown in source D5, and I can say that he is an unreliable source of evidence, as he can’t understand and feel the emotions of heartbreak and pain of receiving news of a large majority of his men had been killed, and he was the commander held responsible. He can only judge these actions by other sources and figures of information. He hasn’t mentioned the pressure that Haig must have been put through and despite this, he had achieved all his priority aims.
The historian Phillip Warner however is a very useful and trustworthy source of evidence. The book that he had written about the subject, quotes that if the aim of war is to win it, then Haig must be hailed as a success. He mentions that the cost of victory was appalling, so this indicates that this particular historian was looking at the views of both the public and of Haigs. Warner therefore believes that Haig is a success.
Historians agree and disagree about the Battle of the Somme because there are so many different points of views and many sources to observe, and to understand completely. People can agree about success or disaster or they can disagree with one another, but maybe no one will be right or wrong about the battle, if it was a success or disaster but historians will always have different views of this particular battle.
This battle, out of many in World War One has been studied intensively, researched, criticised, praised and concluded by many. There are so many points of view that historians and researchers need to analyse because of the amount of information given and the sources of all kinds that tell us more and more about this battle.
But I can conclude that after lots of research and many thoughts that have studied that the Battle of the Somme 1916-18 was infact a success for Britain. My reasons for this opinion is that General Haig had planned a battle plan, and the aim of a battle in a war, is obviously to win it. And Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig had accomplished this. Although this cost thousands of lives, Britain came out on top and saved the independence of separate countries in Europe and Russia from the German take-over of the western civilisation. If it hadn’t of been for this great battle, maybe the First World War could have turned out a lot different than planned and hoped. We can only but thank the soldiers that fought and died with our lives, because maybe modern life could be a new world of horror. The Battle of the Somme can only be known as a disastrous success.
