First Day - Erster Tag The Somme 1916 - From Both Sides of the Wire

It was just before 7.30 on the morning of the 1st of July, 1916.

Along a 25-mile battlefront in northern France,

British and French troops were ready

to embark on an offensive they'd been told

would be a walkover, and hasten the end of the First World War.

The Battle of the Somme was about to begin.

When the whistle sounded at zero hour,

tens of thousands strode confidently towards their enemy.

Facing them was an outnumbered and outgunned German army

that British commanders believed

had already been shattered and demoralised by monstrous shellfire.

But there was no walkover.

And the loss and suffering on this day, and in the months to come,

has made the Somme a symbol of a senseless slaughter.

At its sombre close months later, the casualty count, those killed,

wounded and missing, would far exceed a million.

So what exactly happened here,

and why?

My name is Peter Barton.

For over three decades as a writer,

broadcaster and battlefield archaeologist,

I've come to know the Somme intimately.

But during those years I've grown ever more uneasy

about the battle's history,

because the overwhelming majority of accounts have been written

from an almost exclusively British perspective.

The German experience -

their strategy, habits, tactics and character -

all this has been practically ignored.

For 100 years, we've told ourselves a self-serving story.

So to commemorate the centenary of the battle,

this series will look at history from both sides of the wire,

giving the Germans an equal voice

through the medium of their own remarkable archives.

Here lie mountains of maps, diaries, reports, plans,

records of interrogations and captured documents.

We might find things here which we don't like -

they might be distasteful, they might be deeply troubling.

And there ARE things like that.

But we have to know that, otherwise we have faulty history,

and that is no good to anybody at all.

These archives provide fresh evidence

for why the campaign lasted so long,

and why there was carnage on such a scale.

And these unique compelling sources

will lead me to what may be for some

uncomfortable conclusions.

Most importantly,

there was no British or French victory on the Somme.

Rather, the Germans fought a defensive campaign

of such resolve and flexibility

that the Allies could find no effective response,

and that campaign was founded on a tactical revolution

that would prolong the war itself beyond all expectations.

But the Germans were greatly assisted by British recklessness

and foolhardiness.

And what went so disastrously wrong did so from the very start.

The week leading up to the first day of fighting saw the longest

and heaviest bombardment in military history.

By the summer of 1916, the British and French were operating under

the maxim, "The artillery conquers, the infantry occupies."

Five days of intense shellfire would destroy enemy shelters,

trenches and protecting barbed wire.

Surprise was not part of the plan.

The scene in this valley was typical.

The German trenches lie one- and-a-half miles beyond the ridge.

Hidden from hostile eyes,

British and French guns crouch in every hollow,

in every fold in the ground,

in every ruin, in every wood, in every copse, behind every hedge.

All along the battlefront, in the seven days before the 1st of July,

1,500 guns of all calibres -

that's a four-to-one advantage over the enemy -

fire an astonishing 1.5 million shells.

The Allied purpose was unambiguous -

the long planned for elimination of all enemy resistance.

The German medical officer, Stefan Westmann, trying desperately to

survive and save others, it was a hell on earth.

"Often we found bodies crushed to pulp,

"or bunks full of suffocated soldiers.

"The drum fire never ceased, no food or water reached us.

"Down below, men became hysterical."

Day after day the howling shells

cultivated ever greater British optimism

about the approaching clash.

The infantry were reassured by both the incessant crash of the guns,

and the confidence of their officers.

It would be straightforward, they said.

A leisurely mopping up of the few remaining Germans alive.

On the evening of the 30th of June, after a postponement of two days

because of poor weather,

battalion after battalion of excited but apprehensive men

walked down avenues like this,

ready to take up their positions at the front for the following morning.

Confident, too, was the commander-in-chief

of British and imperial forces,

General Sir Douglas Haig,

who had established his personal quarters here

at the Chateau do Beaurepaire.

Haig knew the Allies enjoyed a daunting superiority in men, guns,

shells and aircraft.

And as a devout Christian,

his faith also gave him the conviction

that a higher power was on his side.

On the eve of battle, Haig wrote in his diary,

"Preparations were never so thorough, nor troops better trained.

"The wire has never been so well cut,

"nor the artillery preparation so thorough.

"The men are in splendid spirits.

"I have personally seen all the corps commanders,

"and one and all are full of confidence.

"With God's help, I feel hopeful."

Perhaps the commander-in-chief would have been less buoyant had he known

that for months, the Germans had been intercepting British telephone

conversations, and knew a great deal about his army and their intentions.

My research in the German archives

provides the stunning revelation that they did this

by using a machine called a Moritz.

On the Somme front there were ten underground listening stations

manned day and night.

By intercepting careless enemy telephone calls, a mass of vital

intelligence on deployments,

garrison strengths, arrivals and departures,

codes, tactics and weaponry, tumbled into German hands.

What they did not know, however, even on the eve of battle,

was the exact moment of Allied assault.

But then Moritz Station 28, at La Boisselle, came up trumps.

In the early morning of the 1st of July, it intercepted two calls that

indicated the assault was imminent.

But what were British ambitions this day?

How did their commanders plan to achieve them?

And how was the Somme part of the wider Allied strategy

to win the war?

12 miles behind the Somme battlefront, the British 4th Army,

tasked by Haig to achieve the breakthrough,

had set up its headquarters at the Chateau de Querrieu.

Here, its commander, General Sir Henry Rawlinson,

spent months refining battle plans.

The grim chronicle of Allied endeavours in France and Belgium

to date informed his every decision.

Since its outbreak in August 1914,

the war had been fought in Europe on Eastern, Southern

and Western Fronts.

After a few short weeks,

although the Allies halted the German advance on Paris,

the nature of fighting in France and Belgium swiftly changed from one

of almost frenetic movement, to one of mutual siege.

Static trench warfare.

In the next 12 months, every attempt to break that siege failed.

After disastrous results on the battlefield in 1915,

it was decided that the 1916 campaign

should be a joint enterprise with Britain, France,

Russia and Italy each launching huge offensives in their own

theatres of war, almost simultaneously.

On the 14th of February 1916, Sir Douglas Haig

and French commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre,

agreed that on the Western Front, a combined Anglo-French offensive

should take place where their troops stood shoulder to shoulder,

near the River Somme, in Picardy.

As always, France would take the lead.

But preparations were soon overtaken by events elsewhere.

A week later, chief of the German general staff,

Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn,

launched his own offensive at Verdun,

100 miles south of the Somme.

The purpose was to bring France to her knees

by draining the lifeblood of her army by attrition.

As fighting continued through the spring into the summer

Verdun devoured French resources,

drawing in troops and weapons from every part of the Western Front.

So a new plan for the Somme was drawn up with smaller French

participation, and with the British in the lead.

From Maricourt in the south, where the British linked with the French,

to Gommecourt in the north, where a diversionary assault was planned,

Haig became responsible for 15 miles of battlefront.

What this now meant

was that Britain's contribution to the Somme had changed,

and changed radically.

After for so long playing a supporting role,

it was now the British task to potentially save France from defeat.

On the eve of battle, all objectives had been set.

The artillery, it was claimed,

had completed their mission of devastation,

and now it was up to the infantry to engulf the German lines

and wreak havoc.

We begin their story in the northern sector of Serre,

with soldiers from the north of England.

The British 31st Division

were all volunteers from Lancashire and Yorkshire.

18 months before, they'd answered Lord Kitchener's call

to fight for King and country.

They'd enlisted with friends and colleagues from the same cities,

towns, villages and workplaces

to form what were called "pals battalions".

Trained, but entirely inexperienced in combat,

most of these men had never seen a German,

never mind had the opportunity to kill one.

Now the time to face that sworn and sober duty had arrived.

Zero hour, on zero day, was set for 7.30 in the morning.

When the whistle signalled the attack,

the pals were to follow 4th Army instructions.

They must push forward at a steady pace in successive lines.

WHISTLE BLOWS

ARTILLERY FIRE

Every man carried his 303 Lee Enfield rifle

with 18 inches of honed and polished Sheffield steel attached.

And also...

..two Mills bombs.

And being north country soldiers,

they called these Co-op bombs because everybody got a bit.

There were two critical stipulations in the operations orders -

do not stop and shoot.

Because that simply interrupted momentum.

And do not charge.

It was unnecessary because by the time they reached the German trenches,

the Germans would be destroyed by the artillery.

Charging would simply sap energy,

for the essence of British tactics here,

and along the entire battlefront,

was for the infantry to break like a tidal wave upon the enemy

and kill with bayonet, bomb, bullet, rifle butt and, if necessary, boot,

until all German resistance had been erased.

Captain Walter Eubank of the 1st Border Regiment issued a final,

brutal instruction to his men.

"It is either kill or be killed, I tell them.

"And God help the loser.

"Each man knows every vital point on the Bosch's body

"and where to make for."

At Serre, the pals walked across no-man's-land

towards an enemy a mere 200 yards away.

But, contrary to all British expectations,

many Germans had survived the bombardment

and were waiting for the Tommies to attack.

They had scores to settle.

And, unlike Kitchener's new army,

these men were well-trained professional

or semiprofessional soldiers,

with long experience of combat on the Somme.

I'm now standing on the German frontline,

looking down the ridge to where the pals attacked from.

It was a day, very similar to today - bright and sunny.

What happened was, that the Germans here saw the pals forming up

before the assault signal had been given by the British.

The observers fired red rockets

to signal their artillery to bring down a rain of shrapnel

and high explosive.

They sounded the alarm

to bring up their soldiers from their underground dugouts

with their machine guns, and two ranks of those machine guns,

right down this ridge,

cut down the pals as they walked across the slope,

as a scythe cuts corn.

The primary function of every German defender was simple -

neutralise the enemy before he reached your trenches.

This, machine-gunner Karl Blenk did.

"We were very surprised to see them walking.

"We'd never seen that before.

"When we started firing, we just had to load and reload.

"They went down in their hundreds.

"You didn't have to aim, you just fired into them.

"If only they had run, they would have overwhelmed us."

Beyond faulty British tactics,

what else might explain the carnage here and elsewhere?

The reason, again,

was prior knowledge and compromised British plans.

In the German archives there is also disturbing evidence,

not just of careless talk, but of habitual British spilling of beans.

There are hundreds of files here recording the interrogations of,

and conversations with, both British and French prisoners

captured during patrols and raids prior to the Battle of the Somme.

Now, each one of these men knew that he must tell the enemy only name,

rank, number and regiment.

But, almost every single one of them offers them a great deal more.

There is, for example, the case of Captain Trevor Hamblin,

captured on the 7th of May, 1916.

He was in the Worcestershire Regiment.

There are photographs of him here,

taken at that very time with his captors.

And he was interviewed, we can see by the documents,

on at least three occasions,

each time giving his enemy more and more information.

In one interview Captain Hamblin was tricked into divulging secrets about

the recently formed British Machine Gun Corps.

The ruse was hardly sophisticated.

The information, said his German captors,

would only be used in their post-war regimental history.

And there's the file of 23-year-old Joseph Littman,

a Royal Fusilier.

Now, he'd volunteered just a week after war had been declared,

and he'd already seen action on the Gallipoli peninsula.

But just two days before battle, he did something very dangerous,

and very serious.

He deserted.

Creeping across to the German trenches during a nocturnal patrol,

and revealing vital intelligence about the imminent offensive.

The general offensive is imminent.

Confirmation of the 29th Division in the Beaumont sector

and their order of battle.

Company strength, 210 men.

In this area, the 4th, 31st, 36th and 42nd Divisions will take part.

The attack will take place ten minutes

after the British artillery lifts on to the second German trench.

Behind the front, Indian and British cavalry,

they are standing by to advance.

Commanders expect the battle to produce a decisive outcome.

The troops are very confident of success.

Yet documents show that almost every captured Tommy

added to the already immense amount

of secret intelligence in German hands.

Most dangerous, however, was what prisoners carried in their pockets.

Such as this extraordinary dossier found on a British sergeant

during a German trench raid on the 13th of April 1916.

It's a translation of a six-week course for officers and senior NCOs,

teaching them the very latest in British offensive infantry tactics.

It covers all aspects - the wave assault, trench-to-trench fighting,

all arms cooperation, machine guns,

stoked mortars, signalling, bombing.

And it even comes with notes by Major General Sir Ivor Maxse,

a British divisional commander.

In short, what it does is give the Germans

the very tactics the British were going to employ on the Somme.

And even more than that,

it came with a breakdown of all the British artillery available

at that time,

the calibre and the capabilities of every gun and every shell.

And all this was in German hands ten weeks before the battle.

This was not an isolated incident.

There were others.

And each one prompted the Germans to go to work...

..deepening trenches, improving communications,

building concrete observation posts,

strengthening wire and installing more protective underground dugouts.

And British GCHQ was blissfully unaware of any of it.

The equally secret operation orders individually given to every

British unit just before battle

were framed around a rigid timetable.

Here in the Beaumont-Hamel sector and nearby,

the first objective lay 500 yards beyond the German frontline.

They were allocated 20 minutes to reach it.

For the next, it was an hour and 20, and so on.

So these lines, on the 1st of July battle map,

reveal what British commanders firmly believed was achievable

with the resources at their disposal.

And with confidence so high,

it was decided that this unique moment in British history should be

captured by the new medium of moving pictures.

During the night of the 30th of June and the 1st of July,

400 men arrived in this lane.

They came through a tunnel in this bank.

And they would have been surprised to see,

not long before the battle began,

the official cinematographer and his assistant arrive to film them

as they waited to go over the top.

The film he took on that morning

is probably the most powerful imagery of the entire war,

because it's authentic.

These are men going to an entirely unknown fate.

At 7.30 they'll climb out of this lane, through the bushes,

towards the Germans.

In the adjacent sector, the Germans occupied a dominating crest

known as the Hawthorn Ridge.

For months, the Royal Engineers had been digging a tunnel under

no-man's-land 300 yards long and 75 feet beneath the surface.

Where it ended, under the German frontline trenches,

they planted a huge mine.

The moment of its detonation was captured

by the same cinematographer, Geoffrey Malins.

DEEP RUMBLING

HUGE EXPLOSION

This is the vast crater today,

evidence of a terrible destructive power.

But there'd been a problem.

It was decided that the mine should be blown at 7.20am,

ten minutes before the main infantry assault.

For the enemy, there could not have been a more revealing indicator

that the offensive was about to commence.

When those 18 tonnes of explosive blew beneath this fortress -

which is what it was -

every German to either side who felt it or saw the plume of smoke

was instantly warned. So they were not at the bottom of their dugout,

they were halfway up the steps.

All they had to do was wait for the enemy to leave his trenches.

Equally astonishing footage by Malins

then shows the British advancing

from their trenches on the Hawthorn Ridge under murderous enemy fire

and watched by helpless comrades.

By noon, many of the men Malins had filmed

here were lying dead or wounded in front of the enemy wire.

Close by Hawthorn Ridge there is, today,

a memorial park where one can still see the original trenches

and shell holes.

Here, on the 1st of July, were soldiers not only from Britain,

but from the north-east coast of Canada.

In this reserve trench 200 yards behind the frontline,

the 1st Battalion of the Newfoundland Regiment

awaited their moment of glory.

At 9.15 they were ordered into the attack from this point,

because every trench to their front was clogged with wounded Welsh and

Cumbrian troops from the disastrous assaults at 7.30.

Captain Arthur Raley later remembered

the steady walk of his men onto what he called

"a deadly piece of ground to cross."

As the only body of troops now moving in the open,

on this very spot, they were trapped and exposed,

and facing withering multiple German machine-gun fire.

Many were cut down before even reaching their own frontline.

The casualties of the Newfoundlanders here

almost defy belief.

They lost every single officer,

and 87% of their number in these fields before me.

They had travelled 6,500 miles,

served in two theatres of war,

to meet this cheerless fate.

It's very doubtful that even one of them had seen a German.

Once more, the question we need to ask is,

just how could such catastrophic failure like this have happened?

And to answer this, I've crossed to the other side of no-man's-land.

Studying the landscape with the original documents,

we can understand what the Germans did well here,

rather than what the British did poorly.

They'd occupied this sector for more than a year and a half,

knew the ground intimately,

and had designed defences of deadly sophistication for just such a day.

I'm looking at one of the maps

I picked up from the Stuttgart archive.

We are about 200 yards behind the German frontline,

but overlooking it.

Not only did fire come from here, but from the Thiepval Ridge -

you can see the monument in the far distance there.

And probably, most importantly,

numerous machine guns along the Beaucourt Ridge

on the horizon over there.

All those were firing at the same time,

creating an interlocking field of fire.

That's a German bullet.

But tens of thousands of these were being fired every minute.

Let's just look at how those guns on

the Beaucourt Ridge were deployed.

They were sighted to fire just over the heads of the troops in their own

front and support lines, and deluge not only no-man's-land,

but the British front, support and reserve trenches as well.

It is this shrewd use of terrain

that explains why so many suffered and died here on the 1st of July.

The objectives decided upon by British tacticians

reflected a collective and fatal underestimation of their enemy.

And that problem was compounded by Haig and Rawlinson

holding radically different views

on how this first phase of the offensive should be approached.

Sir Henry Rawlinson was an infantryman by trade,

and the hard lessons he had learned at the hands of the Germans in 1915

had taught him just how critical the opening moves of a battle could be.

So, for the Somme,

he based his tactics upon "bite and hold".

"Bite and hold" was a step-by-step method that entailed grabbing and

consolidating a limited set of initial objectives - in this case,

the German frontline - before approaching further targets.

It required both planning and patience.

But Haig wanted more.

He was a cavalryman, schooled in the traditions of derring-do.

In the parlance of the time, Haig was a thruster.

Haig believed Rawlinson's plan to be far too cautious.

It lacked surprise, it lacked imagination, it lacked ambition -

it lacked everything that appealed to a thruster.

What he wanted was to create panic, to open the door for his cavalry,

to see the Germans in headlong flight,

and potentially to bring about the beginning of the end of the war.

The German frontline system was not

the only hurdle to be negotiated, however.

Behind it, they'd installed a second line of defence.

So to achieve the breakthrough that would permit his cavalry

to be loosed, Haig ordered that both positions be secured.

But Rawlinson believed this would dilute the power

of his artillery and overstretch his infantry.

And he would be proved right.

But he had no choice but to follow the orders

of his commander-in-chief.

Crossing the River Ancre

and approaching the centre of the British battlefront,

we reach the place where Haig's ambition to take the German

second line came closest to being realised -

in the Thiepval sector.

Here were gathered men from the British 36th Division.

They were Ulstermen - volunteers from Londonderry, Tyrone, Armagh,

Belfast, Antrim and Donegal.

Many had been part of the Ulster Volunteer Force,

the militia created before the war to resist -

with arms, if necessary - the imposition of home rule.

The Ulsters' first challenge

was of course to take the German frontlines.

But beyond them lay a critical intermediate target -

the Schwaben Redoubt.

One of their many "schwerpunkt", strong points,

strategically positioned between the two main defensive lines,

it was a warren of trenches, dugouts and machine-gun emplacements,

600 yards wide and 200 yards broad.

The redoubt commanded the landscape in all directions.

For the Ulsters to reach the German second line, it had to fall.

The Ulstermen had employed very similar tactics to the other units

to the north - all those who had failed.

But here, there was a crucial difference.

They had come out of the wood, they had formed up in no-man's-land

and from there, they charged the German lines.

So how did they do that?

They did that by dumping all the heavy equipment

they were meant to take with them in the lane -

picks, shovels, barbed wire -

that could all stay behind, so they could get across to the Germans,

mercilessly, as soon as possible.

Unlike the long-distance carnage at Beaumont-Hamel,

the fighting here was face-to-face,

hand-to-hand, frenzied and vicious.

It was a clash of bomb and bayonet, even sharpened shovels.

The Ulsters had trained long and hard for this moment

and, like every other British soldier,

they were expected to give the enemy no quarter.

By 9.30am, it was already being reported

that the redoubt was theirs.

The Ulsters could now move against

the final objective that Haig so coveted. And so they pushed on,

expecting support from neighbouring British divisions advancing

in unison on both flanks.

Three miles to the south,

on the Roman road that links the towns of Albert and Bapaume,

lies the village of La Boisselle.

On its northern side was a gentle dell known to the Tommies

as Mash Valley.

Here, the Tyneside Irish,

a brigade of volunteers from the north-east of England,

mostly of Irish descent, waited for zero hour.

In Mash Valley, no-man's-land was wider than anywhere on the Somme.

But their steady advance illustrates the confidence the British

had invested in the neutralising power of the artillery.

One Tynesider later recalled the sound of larks singing

just before the whistles blew.

Another, a drum beating time.

And amongst the waves of plodding infantry,

a Piper Cunningham played the tune Minstrel Boy.

The attacks in Mash Valley were greeted

by machine guns spitting from the front,

from the flanks, in what's called enfilade fire,

and again, from distant ridges.

A German artillery barrage completed the deadly equation.

ARTILLERY FIRE BOOMS

As the thinning ranks drew close to the German trenches,

the troops encountered lethal evidence

of the failure of the British guns.

They had been assured that the enemy barbed wire would be swept away.

But many here and elsewhere who survived no-man's-land

found themselves trapped by a deadly barrier of steel thorns.

This is German First World War barbed wire.

It has been in the ground for 100 years,

and yet every single one of these barbs is still razor sharp.

It only takes one to catch on your trousers and you become

a stationary target, a sitting duck for German sharpshooters.

It's really a weapon of mass destruction.

One Seaforth Highlander, Private JS Reid, recalled...

"I could see that our leading waves had got caught with their kilts.

"They were killed hanging on the wire, riddled with bullets,

"like crows shot on a dyke."

But that was not all.

On the battlefield today,

it's difficult to avoid evidence of another problem facing

the British artillery -

faulty ammunition.

These are three British shells,

but, importantly, they are three British DUD shells.

They have not exploded.

And the reason why I'm saying this is because in the German archives,

what I have found is, the minimum percentage of duds is 40%.

The maximum is 90%.

And what that means is, one shell out of ten exploding on impact.

So the shelling couldn't produce

the annihilating firestorm that had been promised.

And as the Tommies discovered in the few places where they did enter

the enemy line, many German shelters were still intact

and their occupants very much alive.

Today, a site like this helps us understand why.

A medieval refuge under a church,

converted by the Germans into a deep dugout.

In the 18 months before the battle,

thousands had been installed in the trenches all along the front.

Blueprints and plans in German archives reveal the meticulous

and considered thought that went into their design and siting.

We're about 30 feet underground.

This is a particularly sophisticated German dugout.

But it gives us a really good idea

of the kind of atmosphere and ambience

that the originals would have had in the frontline.

This one has electricity cables, it's got communication cables,

so they were constantly in touch with the rear,

with the artillery in particular.

Brick arch here, that's to give it extra support.

And here's a ventilation chimney

going up to the surface to take the fumes out.

Let's have a look in here.

This is the kind of place where they would have lived.

Reinforced concrete roof with steel beams.

Even the heaviest British high explosive shell

couldn't hurt you down here.

It would shake the place, it would make the candles go out,

but you would be safe.

And thousands and thousands of soldiers were accommodated

in places like this.

But the British also toiled in the chalk and clay of the Somme.

And their labours would help to bring welcome success

on the 1st of July.

The scale of catastrophe in the north and centre

has led to an enduring myth

that the first day of battle saw complete British failure.

But this was far from true.

By noon, there'd been success in and around the villages of Mametz,

Montauban,

and here in the Maricourt sector,

where the British advanced side-by-side with their French ally.

In these southern sectors,

the British employed every tool in the military tool box

to assist their vulnerable infantry.

The most audacious of these schemes was invisible to the eye,

and also, therefore, to the enemy.

Here in these fields,

the Royal Engineers dug dozens of Russian saps -

tunnels beneath no-man's-land -

which reached all the way to the German trenches.

What they sought to achieve by this underground war was shock,

terror and, most importantly, surprise.

This is a typical Russian sap.

Barely big enough for somebody my size to walk along.

In the south, 13 were installed by tunnellers recruited from mines

and quarries from across the British Empire,

who found the Picardy chalk a perfect medium for their work.

Once completed, multiple explosive charges

were planted at the end of each tunnel,

for detonation just before zero hour.

Just back from those mines,

there would be galleries going to the surface with a manhole,

so the moment those mines blew,

out of that manhole would rush a group of bombers,

and go straight into the German trenches.

And this is where the surprise came in.

Whilst the gunfire and mines created shock and awe

in the enemy trenches...

HUGE EXPLOSIONS

..British bombers had not even had to set foot upon no-man's-land.

And the very same tunnels were also employed to house machine-gun posts,

mortar emplacements, and even two-and-a-half-tonne flame-throwers,

all firing from hidden, unexpected locations.

And on the 1st of July,

the combination of massed heavy artillery

and the Russian saps helped the 18th and 30th Divisions

achieve all their objectives in the south.

But to obtain a fuller explanation for British success here,

we must look at the German account.

From reports received from this area,

the Germans frankly acknowledged the weakness in their southern defences.

Despite the efforts made in the months leading up to battle,

they were still nowhere near as well developed as those in the north.

There were fewer deep dugouts,

telephone communications were poorer,

wire entanglements were thinner.

Garrison strengths were very similar -

they were still outnumbered five or six to one.

On the 1st of July 1916, therefore, it led to catastrophe.

For example, the 6th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment,

who were here, went into battle with 3,500 men.

The following day only 500 answered to the roll call.

Whilst in the south the impressive Allied progress soon became clear,

the picture elsewhere was much more confusing.

Here at Querrieu, Sir Henry Rawlinson received telegrams

from all parts of the battlefront.

They were recorded in this log.

During the morning,

they provided an optimistic but misleading account

of the fighting in his central and northern sectors.

"7.46am, the whole of the 8th Corps is over the German frontline."

Messages falsely state that German lines had been taken,

fresh attacks were going well,

and British troops had been seen in places they were not.

"9.47am. Am moving corps reserve to Mailly,

"so as to be ready to exploit success."

It was from lunchtime onwards that the tone changed to one that was

horribly familiar.

Here's an example.

"2.45pm. 29th Division are all back in their own frontline trenches.

"There are a few men holding Hawthorn Crater.

"They were unable to make the projected attack,

"owing to the congestion of wounded, etc,

"in our frontline and communication trenches.

"The 86th Brigade have lost heavily.

"The 10th Brigade has been used up."

Despite the grim outlook,

4th Army HQ awaited better news from the 36th Division.

It had been reported that the Ulstermen had taken the Schwaben Redoubt,

and were pushing towards the German second line.

The truth was, they were now in deep trouble.

Exhausted, short of ammunition and water, and alone.

By mid-afternoon, the Ulsters knew they were isolated.

The Germans had laid down a carpet of fire over no-man's-land,

artillery and machine guns.

Communications had completely broken down - no telephones,

a runner could not get through. Support could not reach them.

On their right, the 32nd Division had failed, that's plain.

On their left, the 29th Division had failed.

The Germans now knew that the time was ripe for counterattack.

The Munich archives tell us what happened as evening fell.

Here's a report by Hauptmann Wurm,

a captain in the 8th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment.

Ordered to drive the Ulsters out by counterattack,

the tactic known as Gegenstossen.

Wurm describes pushing his enemy back and then trapping them.

It's an incredible document because it's so comprehensive.

You can follow the action minute by minute by minute.

In it is his report, corrected.

And every message which he sent, some of them mud-covered.

Look at that.

Given to a runner so they could help retake the Schwaben Redoubt,

eject those Ulsters.

Captain Wurm reports that in the gathering gloom,

his troops stayed in contact by singing a recognition song, Die Wacht am Rhein,

The Watch On The Rhine.

"Our men moved forward under constant hostile artillery fire.

"The enemy found himself threatened from the rear and withdrew.

"Evidently because in the darkness,

"the noise made by the oncoming troops

"had convinced him that he was facing a much stronger force.

"The enemy was in retreat, and the Schwaben Redoubt was ours."

The day that had begun with Ulster triumph had, by sunset,

ended in anti-climactic defeat.

And as twilight ebbed from the battlefield,

those who survived the fighting

had both participated in and bore witness to terrible violence.

But some had committed acts of deplorable cruelty, too.

War crimes.

What happened at the moment of surrender

and soon afterwards was a grey area.

The power of life or death lying solely with the captor,

never the captive.

If orders were issued to take no prisoners,

they had to be implemented,

for military training is based upon obedience without question.

In the German archives, there exists files of interviews

with exchanged German prisoners interned in camps

in neutral Switzerland and Holland.

They contain hundreds of allegations of Allied brutality.

For example, this account from the 1st of July comes from appendix 22.

"Infanterist Ritler and another soldier

"had been taken prisoner and were awaiting evacuation to the rear,

"when a British infantryman fired on the two defenceless men,

"wounding Ritler and killing his comrade.

"He left Ritler lying in a pool of his own blood and went away.

"The next day, another British soldier came

"and stabbed Ritler in the back twice with his bayonet."

British records alleging German brutality are harder to find.

But here's one from Major Henry Hance,

with the Royal Engineers in Mash Valley.

"All the dead hanging on the wire, where it was still intact,

"had had the backs of their heads bashed in.

"The German patrols at night

"had either murdered our wounded or mutilated our dead.

"That no-man's-land, in front of Ovillers,

"was the worst sight I saw in the whole war."

Throughout the day, British wounded were first treated at aid posts

on the battlefield,

the most serious then being evacuated to a number

of large casualty clearing stations behind the lines,

where surgery was carried out.

They were then transported by ambulance, rail or by barge,

as here at Corby on the Somme,

to hospitals on the French coast or across the Channel to the UK.

After long deliberation,

it was estimated that on the first day of battle,

there would be 10,000 British casualties.

And it was this figure on which the medical corps based all their planning,

from hospitals to bandages to graves.

But the actual number was up to five times greater,

with serious implications for the fate of the wounded.

It was habitual British underestimation

of their German enemy that led to a tragic underestimation

of the medical requirements.

They were overwhelmed.

And as a result, countless men died who might have been saved.

On the 2nd of July, a Sunday,

the commander-in-chief, as always, went to church.

He afterwards wrote that the previous day

had been one of downs and ups.

And that diary entry concluded...

"The Adjutant General reported today

"that the total casualties are estimated at 40,000 to date.

"This cannot be considered severe,

"in view of the numbers of engaged and the length of front attacked."

In fact, there were exactly 57,470 British casualties

on the 1st of July.

Of which, 19,240 men perished.

It remains the most costly day in British military history.

So what had been gained for such a historic toll?

Let us return to the battle map.

In the south, the Allies achieved practically all their objectives.

But on three-quarters of the British battlefront,

the German frontline was at best only temporarily occupied

by the infantry and, at worst, untouched.

The German's second line was never threatened.

It is worth visiting the Munich archives one more time,

because their collections can also tell us

what British prisoners thought were the reasons

behind the disasters of the 1st of July in the northern sectors,

and how they explained that to their German captors.

It is, so to speak, a postmortem in every way.

And this document alone

provides a sombre indictment of British planning.

The document's entitled

Conversations With British Prisoners,

and records the views of wounded soldiers

of all ranks being treated in a German military hospital.

"The German wire defences

"were still in astonishingly good condition in many places.

"And the first wave of attack was unable to penetrate them.

"The attackers had been led to believe

"that they would encounter little or no opposition,

"hence the leisurely pace of their advance,

"and the resulting heavy casualties.

"The German machine-gun fire

"was such that a breakthrough was never a possibility."

Despite the losses,

there was no question but that the offensive would continue.

After church, the commander-in-chief motored to Querrieu to discuss

future operations with Rawlinson.

Rawlinson favoured renewal in the north, so too did the French.

But Hague believed that Allied success in the south

must be exploited.

Discussions were heated, but his will once more prevailed.

To secure a platform for the next major attack in ten days' time,

there were 46 separate assaults involving over 90,000 men.

But they were planned locally without central coordination,

and launched on narrow fronts, which played into German hands.

Gains were made, but slowly.

And again, at a terrible price -

a further 25,000 casualties.

And new sites of sacrifice emerged,

Ovillers, Contalmaison and Mametz Wood.

The Germans suffered too.

But being on the defence, their losses were hardly comparable -

30,000 since the 24th of June.

A host of captured documents

had told them what the Allies had wanted to achieve, and how.

And the piecemeal nature of recent British attacks

had provided a little precious time to bring up fresh troops

and install new defences.

Meanwhile back here at Querrieu,

Sir Henry Rawlinson observed that his commander-in-chief's

legendary confidence and optimism was undiminished.

The next great venture would make up

for all the failures of the first fortnight,

devour the enemy defences, and unleash his cavalry.

The first phase of the Battle of the Somme was over.

The next was about to commence, and with it,

a remarkable German tactical revolution

that would stifle Allied progress on the battlefield

and prolong the slaughter.