Battle of the Somme

A third of the shells that had been fired didn’t explode. Also the shells that were fired to destroy the barbed wire didn’t destroy the wire but made it harder to get through by tangling it because the wire would leave the ground, go into the air and then return to the ground with knots in it. Last of all the shells that had been fired hadn’t killed hardly any German soldiers compared to what they had planned to. This was due to the fact that the Germans had survived by digging deep dugouts which protected them. To protect themselves the Germans hid themselves in the dugouts while the bombing was taking place. The shells killed a small amount of men but what they did do was make the German soldiers very nervous and frightened. Last of all the British were delayed for 15 minutes after the shelling stopped which gave the Germans plenty of time to get out of their dugouts and to their machine guns, so when the British left their trenches they were held up by the barbed wire and gunned down by machine gun fire since the British were standing targets. Also the British were all crowded together and had been told to walk the distance and so the German machine gunners found it very hard to miss their targets. 50% of the men who took part in the attack were either killed or injured. Although the start of the battle was not an instant success it did achieve its primary objective to relieve the pressure from the French fort at Verdun.

My advice for new tactics would be to bomb the German lines at different times to take them by surprise, to use the tank bomb the German lines along with aircraft, to attacked at night so the enemy machine gunners could not see their targets or to have used decoys to trick the Germans.