Sunday May 29th, 2016 The Battle of the Somme

The Battle of the Somme, which began on July 1, 1916, is one of the most well known battles of the Great War. It was also the blackest day in the history of the British Army. By sunset this volunteer army lay shattered on the banks of the Somme: 21,000 dead, 35,000 wounded, 600 prisoners, almost no objective gained.

The story of The First Day on the Somme is told by Martin Middlebrook who bases his vivid reconstruction of what happened on the personal experiences of British and German survivors, and conveys the horror and tragedy of that day in gripping and fully human terms.

Another compelling account based on eye witness testimony is given by Lyn MacDonald in Somme which looks at The Big Push that would at last break the long stalemate on the Western Front. However the 18 divisions that went over the top between Arras and St Quentin on July 1, 1916 walked into a hail of machine gun fire that cut them down like ripe wheat in the hot summer sun.
Among those going over the top that day was the Newfoundland Regiment who were given the objective of taking the village of Beaumont-Hamel. Two hundred and seventy-two Newfoundlanders were killed that day. No regiment suffered more casualties. It was the single greatest disaster in the island’s history.

Their story is told by Kevin Major in No Man’s Land, which pulls us into the lives of the young men of the Newfoundland Regiment as they prepare to set out for the trenches and what will come to be known as the Battle of the Somme. A classic war novel, the book is equally effective in its portrayal of the camaraderie and unnatural quiet before the storm, as in its graphic account of the fight to make it through the barbed wire and sweep of machine gun bullets.

Into The Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead is Michael Winter’s extraordinary narrative of the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel that follows two parallel journeys, one laid over the other like a sketch on opaque paper over the lines of an old map.

The first journey is that of the young men who came from Newfoundland’s outports, fields, villages, and narrow city streets to join the storied regiment which first saw action in the debacle which was the Dardanelles campaign. From Gallipoli they were sent straight to the battle fields of France and into the gaping jaws of the Battle of the Somme. It is said that, as they walked into the hail of steel on July 1, 1916, they pulled down their helmets and settled their chins into the collars of their uniforms, just as they did when fishing in a storm in the Atlantic Ocean.

The second journey is Michael Winter’s visit to Beaumont-Hamel one hundred years after the battle, as he follows in the footsteps of the dead men to discover what remains of their passage across land and through memory.

The Battle of the Somme was designed, in part, to take pressure off the French Army which was being bled white at Verdun. John Mosier tells The Lost History of the Most Important Battle of World War 1: Verdun. No fewer than eight distinct battles were waged for the possession of Vedun. These conflicts are largely unknown, even in France, owing to the obsessive secrecy of the French high command and its energetic propaganda campaign to fool the world into thinking that the war on the Western Front was a steady series of German checks and defeats.

John Pateman