British troops going over the top at the Somme

Brought to life: The dead of the Somme

Matthew Lewin talks to historian Sir Martin Gilbert about his new book on an infamous battle

SOMME: THE HEROISM AND HORROR OF WAR  by Sir Martin Gilbert
John Murray, £20 order this book

DURING the last few days of June, 1916, the British Army fired nearly a quarter of a million artillery shells at German lines on the Somme in a bombardment so loud that it could clearly be heard hundreds of miles away on Hampstead Heath.
But it did not have the desired effect, and when thousands of British and Commonwealth troops responded to the whistles at 7.28am on July 1 and poured “over the top” to attack the German lines, they were decimated by machine-gun fire.
By the end of that day, nearly 20,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers lay dead on the battlefield, twice that number were wounded, and one of the blackest pages ever was added to the annals of military history.
It was without question one of the bloodiest conflicts of all time, and by the time the battle finally ended some 100 days later, no fewer than 310,000 men had died (half of whose bodies were never found), and 600,000 were wounded.
When the guns went silent, The British, French and Commonwealth forces had not even reached the objectives they had set themselves for the very first day. It was a battle that changed the nature of warfare for ever.
Scores of books have been produced about the battle, but few could possibly be better written, or more moving, than the new account published this week by Sir Martin Gilbert, the prolific historical writer who was the official biographer of Winston Churchill and the author of many books on subjects such as the Nazi Holocaust, the history of Israel, a history of the 20th century and both world wars.
Sir Martin, who was born in Mill Lane, West Hampstead, went to Highgate School and read history at Oxford, now lives in Archway, near the bottom of Highgate Hill.
Why, I asked him, had he decided to write this book in time for the 90th anniversary of the battle.
“I have always wanted to write about the Somme, ever since my first history teacher at Highgate School, Arthur ‘Jumbo’ White, talked about it to us,” Sir Martin said.
“He was a remarkable teacher. He had been through the whole battle, as a lieutenant, never rising to the dizzy heights of captain, let alone major, and he fought in every engagement. It affected him greatly.”
Later, when Sir Martin was a fellow at Merton College, Oxford, he heard more about the Somme from another former lieutenant who had served there, the writer JRR Tolkien.
But why yet another book? “Yes, there are a lot of books on the subject,” he acknowledges, “but if you have a battle in which 300,000 men were killed and another 600,000 desperately injured, just think what that means in human terms. And then ask: how many books do you need to have published just to scratch the surface of the experience of those men? What I wanted to do was to review the pattern, the cabinet planning, the way the generals acted and how they were told what to do, and then look at the preparation, the supplies, the organisation and then the actual conduct of the battle and the individual experiences.
“I think I have done something quite new – every time I mention a soldier, I actually use his name. And if he was killed, I say in each case where he is buried. I have done this to show that these were real people, and that they are physically somewhere. This has not been done before. It involved a little extra work, but I felt it was an important thing that they should have a place as well as a name.”
And it is this device that makes the book so readable and accessible to people who may not normally be interested in reading about military history. There are literally hundreds of accounts of aspects of the battle by ordinary soldiers and officers which make it a very human, and intensely moving story.
Why did the generals embark on this folly in the first place? “It was already the third year of the war, and both the British and French had only just managed to hold their line,” Gilbert explains. “They had tried to push the Germans back in two great battles in 1915, and they had failed.
“The alternative, as it was seen in London, was that the war would go on for ever. And the danger was: what would happen if the Germans defeated the French? The Germans would have won the war; their aggression would have paid off, and their occupation would become permanent.
“There was also great pressure from the French for the British forces to do something, because they were under terrific pressure and bombardment at Verdun. They begged the British to do something on the flank to pull the Germans away to some extent at least.
“General Sir Douglas Haig was emphatic that he wasn’t ready to go until mid-August at the earliest, and even there he felt he needed tanks in large numbers (which would have been available even then). But he was forced to go because of the fear that the French would collapse.
“The French kept saying that they were about to be defeated, even when the British had successfully drawn off an enormous number of Germans and were inflicting tremendous casualties on the Germans, destroying some of their great regiments in the process.”
The generals and the War Cabinet behind them, where convinced that the bombardment would decimate the troops and that there would be no Germans left in the first trenches.
“But the Germans had dug themselves in very deep underground, sometimes two or three storeys down. So while they were shaken by the bombardment, and many of them were killed, enough survived and they came up and manned their machine guns.
“When the plans were made, I don’t think anyone could have said: this isn’t going to work, because it had never been done before. Never before had 150,000 men made this kind of attack.”