The Battle of the Somme: Blood and Mud
It's been 100 years since the Battle of the Somme. It started on July 1, 1916 and ground on for four and half months. The casualties were staggering; the gains negligible. Wave after wave of Allied troops were sacrificed in a series of battles described as flawed in planning and execution from the outset. "The Battle of the Somme: Blood and Mud" relives those events of 100 years ago through chilling stories told by the men who were there. It first aired in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the battle, and was produced and presented by CBC reporter and documentary maker J. Frank Willis.
In 1916, Newfoundland was not yet part of Canada. Men who wanted to fight in the war overseas did so under the British flag. Canadian forces only took part some months later but the Newfoundlanders were there from Day One. Their job (along with the rest of the 88th Brigade) was to seize control of the German trenches near the northern French village of Beaumont Hamel. The battleground was a 34-kilometre ribbon of land near the River Somme. Allied trenches stretched along one side, Germans along the other. In between was No Man's Land.
"We were just sitting ducks, nothing more or less. But the boys did not falter, not one iota. They just marched into this thing as though they were going on parade. And they knew they were marching to their death." Newfoundland Soldier at the Battle of the Somme
The entire venture on July 1 was a devastating failure. Allied troops had been ordered to advance on foot down an open, sloping field right into the German line. The troops had no cover to protect them and were met with a barrage of machine gun fire from the German side. Most were killed or wounded in the first ten minutes. A second wave of troops went out and met the same fate. The Newfoundland Regiment followed. Most were killed before they reached No Man's Land. In a single morning, almost 20,000 British troops died, and another 37,000 were wounded. The Newfoundland Regiment had been almost wiped out.
That was just Day One of the Battle of the Somme. The Allied soldiers showed dedication in the face of unbearable conditions, poor planning, tactical miscalculations, and inferior weapons. Each small advance on the battlefield was paid with scores of human lives, but British generals refused to change tactics.
It's no wonder the battle was called "the meat grinder known as the Somme." When the Somme offensive was halted in November 1916, more than one million Commonwealth, French and German soldiers had been wounded, captured or killed. The war ground on for another two years before finally ending in November 1918.
It's now been 100 years since those terrible months in France. There will be commemorative events in Canada and also in France. An expanded interactive exhibit at Halifax's Citadel Hill invites visitors to step down into Canada's First World War history. A series of trenches have been set up on the hill that represents what Canadian trenches would have looked like on the Western Front in 1916, on the eve of the Battle of the Somme.