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Tactics and Strategy Haig's intention was to lay down a week-long pulverizing
artillery assault. Thousands of shells would rain down on the reinforced bunkers
and underground tunnels the Germans had built, rendering a response impossible.
Then thousands of soldiers, many green and fresh from Britain and its dominions,
would cakewalk uncontested across No Man's Land and occupy the ruptured defenses.
Things could not have gone more wrong.
German dugouts allowed frontline German soldiers, many shell-shocked to madness,
to endure the bombardment. Three kilometres behind the lines German artillery
guns were unaffected by the barrage and fought back. As well, many of the nearly
two million shells the Allies had fired were duds or were shrapnel, not high
explosives, and so did little harm to barbed wire or dugouts.
In the hour preceeding the infantry's first push, the Allies dumped 3,500 shells
a minute
on the German line. Then, at 7:30 a.m. on July 1st, |
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the men moved out into the
first silence in seven days, save for the whistles that signalled the attack.
The relative peace wouldn't last long. German machine guns, manned by soldiers
who emerged from dugouts, cut through the men like paper. The unharmed artillery
behind the German lines pounded the remaining soldiers to shattered pulp. There
were few Canadians in the line of fire, but the untested, yet well-trained First
Newfoundland Regiment was part of the advance.
At 9:15, the 25 officers and 776 soldiers of the Newfoundland Regiment entered
the fray. They immediately fell under relentless machine gun fire aimed at gaps
in Allied barbed wire. Hundreds died early in the bloody advance across No Man's
Land that was unsupported by Allied gunfire. Almost all the rest perished trapped
on German barbed wire they thought had been cut. In less than a half hour it
was over. The next day the damage was clear: 710 men were missing, wounded or
dead. There |
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The Battle of the Somme
Interactive Map
The three-month-long battle almost wiped out a Newfoundland
regiment and was seen as one of the great disasters of the war.
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