Overview - the Battle of the Somme
The Battle of the Somme
'Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more gruesome word.' This is how one German officer described the Battle of the Somme in 1916. It was here that, day after day, lines of advancing soldiers were cut down by machine-gun fire; here that the shriek and thud of hundreds of thousands of artillery shells shattered the air. In the desolation of No Man's Land between the British and German lines, men floundered and drowned in the mud or lay in agony, awaiting rescue.
Background
The British and French offensive on the German-held territory around the river Somme in northern France in mid-1916 was intended to be a key breakthrough on the Western Front. Five months earlier, French and German forces had clashed around the medieval French fortress town of Verdun as the Germans aimed to bleed the French dry. It became a war of attrition. Much blood was certainly being spilt, but neither side showed any signs of cracking. With French losses mounting, the British took charge of the plan to attack on the Somme to relieve pressure at Verdun.
Men and machines - the Battle of the Somme
Men and machines
By the time of the Somme offensive of 1916, the Great War had become shaped by artillery. Villages, woods and fields were reduced to drab wilderness by relentless shellfire and blighted by the squalid apparatus needed to support hordes of soldiers. No Man's Land became so featureless that it was easy to get lost and blunder into the enemy's lines.
The perfection of quick-firing guns that were able to deliver high-explosive shells with accuracy had made such a war possible. The harnessing of economies to the demands of total war since 1914 enabled the deployment of huge numbers of these guns. Munitions stocks were massive; the British army in France received 16 million shells in the second half of 1915. The war had become a clash between machines as much as between men.
New Zealand artillery on the Somme - the Battle of the Somme
New Zealand's artillery war on the Somme
The Great War was halfway through when the big guns roared into life along the New Zealand Division's sector around the Somme in support of a major attack on 15 September 1916.
In the preceding days, field gunners tried to blow gaps in the barbed-wire entanglements in No Man's Land and between trench lines, while howitzers pulverised trenches, lines of communication, machine-gun nests, observation posts and other strong points. New Zealand gunners also fired poison-gas shells for the first time on 12 September.
Targets were identified from balloons or aircraft, or by Forward Observation Officers – artillery officers stationed in the front line. These observers called down concentrated fire from groups of batteries, called crashes, on anything that moved around the German lines, while British heavy guns sought out enemy batteries. At 6 p.m. on the 14th a continuous heavy bombardment began.
On the Western Front - Maori and the First World War
New Zealand Pioneer Battalion on the Western Front
First on the Somme
The newly formed New Zealand Pioneer Battalion arrived in France in April 1916. In late August it became the first unit of the New Zealand Division to move onto the Somme battlefield. That bitter campaign had started on 1 July 1916 with horrendous losses among the British.
Other Ministry Websites
