The Somme a tactical error? My uncle called it murder...
MY GREAT-UNCLE, Thomas Heinrick (our family dropped the first ‘i ‘ from the surname because it sounded too Germanic), who served with the Oxford And Bucks Light Infantry and was taken PoW during the Battle of the Somme, certainly did not describe the carnage he witnessed as ‘tactical errors’ by Haig the ‘Butcher’ (Letters). He told his older brother Arthur, serving with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, that for Haig to order thousands of men to repeatedly attack heavily fortified German positions was cold-blooded murder. The men had been assured the German positions would have been destroyed by the massive round-theclock, seven-day British artillery bombardment before the battle. In fact vast belts of barbed wire, wellsited machine-gun posts, a complex trench network and deep and virtually indestructible deep shelters were still left quite intact. Thomas never got the opportunity to tell his other brother Joseph, also serving with the Royal Warwicks, of the horrors of the Somme because he was butchered on the beaches of Gallipoli in 1915, which was another unmitigated military disaster. One hundred years later, it’s hard to comprehend that on the first day of the Somme battle, a beautiful, sunny July Saturday on the chalky uplands of Picardy, there were 57,470 British casualties, of whom 19,240 were killed for no military gain. The primary purpose for the Battle of the Somme was to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun, not to assist the Russians as your correspondent states. German Army Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn’s stated intention was to ‘bleed France white’. Haig didn’t learn any lessons from the Somme as evidenced by his continuance with his strategy of attrition at that stinking swamp better known as Passchendaele in 1917, whatever the cost in human life and however negligible the gains — at Passchendaele, a few yards of desolate landscape. The Somme offensive came to a sodden end in the November rains at a cost of more than a million lives among the various combatants. Nothing of military significance was achieved during those four-and-a-half months and all the eye could see was a sodden, sterile landscape, described by my great-uncle as ‘hell on earth’.
PETER HENRICK, Birmingham.