History of the Battle of the Somme

The Battle of the Somme began on 1 July 1916 and lasted into November. Conceived as a joint Anglo-French offensive, it was reshaped by the crisis at Verdun, which forced the French to reduce their role and left the British carrying more of the burden than originally planned. The first day has entered history for a reason. British forces suffered around 57,000 casualties, including more than 19,000 dead, making it the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army. The numbers are often repeated, but on the Somme they do not feel merely statistical. The terrain keeps converting them back into distance, exposure, and time.

The opening day was disastrous across much of the British front. The attack at Gommecourt, on the northern edge, was intended as a diversion to draw German attention and reserves away from the main assault further south, and it failed to secure any lasting gain. The main British attack began south of Gommecourt along the line from Serre towards Maricourt - 25 miles of front. Strategically, the wider Somme offensive did help relieve pressure on the French at Verdun, even if it did not produce the breakthrough its commanders had hoped for.

But why did it go so wrong on that first day? The British plan asked the infantry to do too much against a defence that had not been broken. General Haig, the British commander, set objectives that stretched too deep into the German positions. The deeper problem lay in the assumptions of British command. They underestimated the strength, resilience and sophistication of the German defensive system. The immense bombardment failed to destroy much of the barbed wire and many of the deep dugouts. Crucially, the mines containing exlosives planted under the German lines were also detonated too early. This gave German troops time to recover from the shock, emerge from their shelters, man their machine guns and prepare for the attack. 

The British infantry, meanwhile, had been instructed to walk—and in some sectors even march—forward in daylight on the assumption that they would meet no resistance. Laden with heavy equipment and often funnelled through the few gaps in the wire that had been cut, they became easy targets. The men who died on 1 July were not defeated by a lack of courage. They were defeated by a plan that expected too much, revealed too much and confronted a defence far stronger than British commanders were willing to acknowledge.

It would be wrong, however, to let the first day swallow the whole meaning of the Somme. The fighting that followed through October and into November 1916 did not deliver the breakthrough Haig had once imagined, but it did produce some real, if limited, successes. In the October battles around Le Transloy and the Ancre Heights, British and Dominion formations continued to push the Germans from successive trench systems, strongpoints, and villages, often in appalling conditions of rain, mud, and failing light. Ground was gained at places such as Le Sars and Beaucourt l’Abbaye, and the pressure of repeated attacks prevented the Germans from simply restoring the old line untouched. Just as importantly, British methods were improving. Objectives became more limited, artillery support more carefully coordinated, and attacks increasingly designed to take and hold specific positions rather than promise a dramatic rupture the battlefield could not sustain. These were not victories in the old sweeping sense, but they were signs that the army was learning how to fight a modern set-piece battle more effectively than it had done in July. 

The clearest of these later gains came in November during the Battle of the Ancre, the final major phase of the Somme offensive. Here, British forces at last captured Beaumont-Hamel, St Pierre Divion, and Beaucourt, places that had resisted so bloodily on 1 July. Beaumont-Hamel in particular carried a symbolic weight beyond its tactical value, because its fall in November redeemed, at least in part, one of the most painful failures of the opening day back in July. The attack also gave the British better winter positions on higher and more defendable ground, which mattered in a campaign where holding the line through winter was itself a military fact of consequence. 

None of this justifies the scale of the the first day losses, nor does it transform the overall offensive into a simple success. But it does complicate the usual picture. By the end of the battle, the British Army had forced the Germans back from much of their original position, inflicted serious strain on the defence, and learned hard tactical lessons that would matter later in the war. The Somme was not only a catastrophe. It was also, in its later phases, a grim and costly process of adaptation in which some real gains were made. 

The Somme comes most sharply into focus through particular units and particular moments. Beaumont-Hamel, with its connection to the Newfoundland Regiment, condenses the cruelty of the first day into a small stretch of ground and a few terrible minutes. The tunnellers of the Royal Engineers who had spent so long underground to prepare the mines. Their labour was astonishing in itself, and the huge Lochnagar crater, still visible in the French countryside,  also reminds you how little even the largest explosion could guarantee once the infantry advance began. The machine-guns still had to be faced. The wire still had to be crossed. The ridge still had to be climbed.

There is something especially painful about the Somme because so much of its loss fell on volunteer formations and local communities. Pals battalions, Tyneside units, Ulster units, Newfoundlanders, regulars, territorials—all became part of the same grim arithmetic, but often in ways that concentrated grief back home with unusual force. 

      Memorials such as this restore some sense of that accumulation, not by narrating the battle in full, but by confronting visitors with the reality that while some of the fallen lie in marked graves, many others have no known resting place at all. The Somme remains a battlefield of names, but it is also one of absences. The human stories that survive do so partly because they stand against a landscape of loss so vast that much of it can never be fully accounted for.

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Extracted from: Mayne, P. (2026) The Western Front 1914–1918: A Personal Journey. 4RLife. Available on: Amazon (Proceeds from the sale of the book will be made to the Memorial fund.)