Battles Of Verdun Somme And The Hindenburg Line

The Battle of Somme was the result of the allied or gathering of the forces to attack against German forces on the western front that continued from July to November 1916. It turned out to be the nastiest, bitter and costly battle that was ever fought and is popularly known as World War I. In the battle of Verdun Somme and the Hindenburg line, there were more than 75000 casualties on the soldiers of the British were 15000 soldiers were killed in a single day. 

Thus it was marked as the most disastrous day in the history of the nation’s soldiers. After three months when the battle of Somme or as it is also referred to as the first battle of Somme ended, by the time it came to an end, about 3 million soldiers from both sides have fought the battle and about 1 million soldiers were either killed or injured.  

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Battle of the Somme Beginning

The Allies did massive bombing using cannonry for almost a week prior to the attack. Just in order to cut the barbed wire that was guarding the German defence and to destroy the positions of the German soldiers, 1.75 million shells were fired from across the guarding to the side of the Germans. On the 1st of July, 11 divisions of the 4th soldiers of the allies, most of them volunteers who were facing the battlefields for the first time, started marching 15 miles from the front of the northern range of the Somme. At the same time from the south end of the Somme, five-division French soldiers advanced 8 miles towards the air ground. Here the defence of Germany was quite weak. 

The allied army thought that the constant heavy bombardment would damage the position of the German troops and it would be easy for the British and the French soldiers to advance. But the wired defence was much stronger than anticipated and thus in many of the places it did not break, thus the troops of the German soldiers that were much underground remained intact in its positions. On the day of the advancements of French and British soldiers, the German troops brought down as many as thousands of their allied soldiers with their machine guns and firing rifles. Many of them were attacked in the no man's land. 

By the end of day one of the war,  there were 38000 British soldiers who were severely injured and wounded and about 19,240 soldiers were killed in the attack. The casualties were almost equal to the casualties that the British forces suffered when they lost the battle for their ally France in the second world War and these forces included the prisoners as well along with the soldiers. 

Trench Warfare & War of Attrition

The British and the French soldiers who approached from the south of Somme gained success but this success was very limited as compared to the loss that they suffered in terms of the lost lives of soldiers of both allies who ascended from the northern part of the Somme. But Haig was determined to be on the attacking side and therefore the British soldiers made a strategy to aim for many small attacks along the line of Germany so as to create pressure on the Germans. This resulted in forcing the Germans to diverge some of the troops and weapons from the Verdun. 

This time the British launched artillery bombardments and gun fire along with the massive attack on the Bazentin Ridge which was situated on the northern part of the Somme in the early morning of 15th July. As the attack was not anticipated by the Germans, it took them by surprise and till the time they came with the term of the attack, the British troops got the time to move 6000 yards into the territory of the German camp. They then immediately occupied the village of Longueval. But these small advances from the side of the allies came at the very big cost of losing almost 160,000 soldiers and the British and French more than 200,000 by the end of July.

At the end of August, as the German troops were losing their morale and their spirits were running low due to the loss of their major battlefields in Somme and Verdun, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff replaced the army general Germany’s General Eric. A new strategy was followed by the new generals where they agreed to form a new defensive line behind the Somme front that would allow the German Troops to acknowledge the territories to the allied troops but at the cost of inflicting more casualties to the advancing British and the French soldiers than before. 

At the time of the attack on the  Flers Courcelette on 15th September, the British Barrage was followed by the 48 Marks I Tanks along with 12 divisions of the soldiers advancing on the lines of the German soldiers. But since the tanks of the British troops were in the initial stage of development, thus many of them broke down even before reaching the front line. Though the British were able to advance another 1.5 miles sustaining the 29000 casualties of the troops but could not make a big breakthrough. 

When October arrived, another hindrance to the advancement of the troops came along the way due to extremely bad and cold weather. The soldiers struggled through the muddy terrains under the fierce firing of the German ordnance and the fighter planes. After attacking the German positions in the Ancre River valley, the Allies made their final advance of the battle in mid-November.  As the winter weather arrived, Haige finally called off the offensive and ordered for a halt on 18th November. Finally, the battle of attrition on the Somme came to a standstill till the next year. For almost 141 days the British could advance only 7 miles, failing to break the German lines as planned.   

Conclusion and the Legacy that Followed

The battle more than anything is remembered for the heavy loss and the casualties of the troops that followed on the first day of the battlefield. It is always realized as the epitome of senseless and brutal carnage that was characterized as trench warfare in world war I. the world had always criticized Haig for continuing with the offensive strategy even after employing heavy losses. Many of the British Soldiers that have fought the battle of Somme had volunteered themselves for the war in 1914 and 1915. They experienced combat for the first time in their lives. 

Many of them were members of the Pal-Battalion or such units that were made of neighbours, relatives or friends who belonged in the same community. One of the prominent examples of the loss of the community battalion was when among 720 men who fought on the 1st of July and belonged to the  East Lancashire battalion (known as the Accrington Pals) 520 men lost their lives.

Despite the failure of the warfare from the British end, it did manage to inflict some serious loss to the positions of the German in France and forced them to retreat strategically to the Hindenburg Line in March 1917 than to continue the war on the same land during that spring. Though the numbers are still disputed the loss that the Germans faced was exceeded then the loss of the British troops as Germany has lost about 45000 soldiers as compared to 42000 soldiers from Britain’s end. The British forces that finally survived gained much of the Warfield experiences that later helped them to achieve victory over the Western Front.