Horrific WWI battle is deftly chronicled

February 20, 2009|Chuck Leddy, Globe Correspondent

The Battle of the Somme was World War I's most tragically futile military encounter. Hoping to destroy the German Army and thus end the war in 1916, the British and French armies launched their attacks, but neither side could legitimately claim victory. The five-month siege in France resulted in a total of some 1.2 million casualties. The Somme stalemate and its massive death toll would come to haunt the postwar generation.

Oral historian Peter Hart offers an insightful and viscerally detailed account of the horrific battle in "The Somme" by interweaving his historical narrative with personal stories from hundreds of ordinary soldiers. He describes the strategic goals of British general Douglas Haig while including eyewitness accounts from soldiers trying to survive amid the chaos of muddy trenches, machine-gun fire, fallen comrades, and constant artillery barrages. General Haig viewed the battle as one of attrition - he would attack repeatedly and sap Germany's capacity to fight. But Captain Philip Pilditch spoke for many exhausted Somme combatants: "I do not think we are any nearer the finish [of the war] except for the fact that many hundreds of thousands more are dead on both sides."

The Somme was chosen as a battleground because the French had suffered enormous casualties at Verdun, and they demanded that their British allies shoulder more of the burden. Hart does an outstanding job explaining the strategy of the Franco-British alliance, and an even better job detailing the lethal realities of the World War I battlefield. As he emphasizes, the military advantage was decidedly with the defenders. Attacking infantry faced machine guns, constant artillery fire, barbed wire, nerve gas, and a sophisticated series of defensive trenches.

When the British began their Somme offensive, in late June 1916, they expected that artillery alone would disable the German defenders. As the British Army confidently moved "over the top" on July 1, entering no man's land, they expected to simply overrun the German trenches. But the Germans unleashed an overwhelming artillery barrage and machine-gun fire that decimated the British attackers. British private Albert Atkins described a failed night-time assault: "They opened fire on us with rifles and machine guns and I shall always remember lying flat on the ground pressing myself and my face as deep as possible into the mud, with hundreds of . . . bullets zipping just inches above my head." Miraculously, Atkins made it back alive to the British trenches, but countless others wouldn't be so lucky.