Battle of Sommes:
1916
- Germans began pressing the French at Verdun. British
commander in chief (Douglas Haig) decided to go on the offensive
and smash through the German lines. Haig was slow to adjust to the
new demands of trench warfare, by the time he had adjusted,
countless allied lives were lost in a series of badly planned and poorly
executed battles along the So_mme River. For 5 days British and
French troops bombarded the German lines with 1.5 million rounds of
ammunition. Germans hid in their trenches: their casualties were
much lower than Haig had expected. Germans were prepared for the
allied ground attack. The First Battle on July 1, 1g16: Germans were
prepared for allied offensive, killed hundreds of allies as they began
to approach the Germans. Despite the significant loss of troops in
the first offensive, the allies during the next 3 months lost more than
600,000 dead and wounded soldiers. A total of 1.2s million men had
been killed or wounded during the 5 month Batfle of Somme. The
British army had advanced less than a dozen km and the stalemate
continued. The feelings of Canadians shifted from hope to despair.
Ouotes from the Battle of the Sommes:
"Our transport lines had weigh scales, and it was found that a man's clothing became so
coated from the half-frozen mud that together with his boots and puttees they weighed
around 120 lbs. One soldier weighed as much as 145 lbs."
"Henceforward they (Canadians) were marked out as storm troops; for the remainder of
the war they were brought along to head the assault in one great battle after another".
"Probably the most effective blow yet dealt to the enemy
troops".
General Haig
"..."'What's that, sir?" said the man at my side...For a moment I could discem nothing.
Then, gradually out of the early morning mist a huge, dark, shapeless object evolved...
What in the world was it? For the life of me I could not take my eyes off it. The
thing - I really don't know how else to describe it - ambled forward, with slow, jerky,
uncertain movements....At one moment its nose disappeared, then with a slide and an
upward glide it climbed to the other side of a deep shell crater which lay in its path...
It waddled, it ambled, it jolted, it rolled, it - well it did everything in tum and
nothing wrong.. ..it came to a crater. Down went its nose; a slight dip, and a clinging,
crawling motion, and it came up merrily on the other side. And all the time as it slowly
advanced, it breathed and belched forth tongues of flames; its nostrils seemed to breathe
death and destruction, and the Huns, tenified by its appearance, were mown down like
corn falling to the reaper's sickle."
Geofkey Malins, British Filmmaker at the Sommes
"The tank waddled on with its guns blazing and we could see Jerry popping up and down,
not knowing what to do; whether to stay or run. We Bombers were sheltering behind the
tank peering'round and anxious to let Jerry have our bombs, But we had no need of them.
The Jerries waited until our tank was only a few yards away and then fled - or hoped to!
The tank just shot them down and the machine-guns, the post itself, the dead and the
wounded who hadn't been able to run, just disappeared. The tank went right over them."
Lance-Corporal Lee Lovall