Defence in Depth - Verteidigung in der Tiefe The Somme 1916 - From Both Sides of the Wire

Here on the Somme in 1916,

this low ridge was the most dangerous place on the planet.

Then, it was a wilderness,

a ribbon of precision engineered mutual annihilation.

And yet, on the plane beyond,

the landscape looked much as we see it today.

For the British, that was the promised land,

the way to victory.

For the Germans, it remained,

and must remain, a part of a new and expanding empire, the Kaiserreich.

And it was for the control of these fertile fields

that the next bloody phase of the Battle of the Somme was fought.

On the 14th of July,

the British launched their greatest attack

since the first day of fighting.

It was designed to open a fresh new offensive chapter.

But, as on the 1st of July, they again underestimated their enemy.

The Germans were to resist so ferociously

that the advances that British commanders expected to take hours

would, in fact, take weeks.

And within the ensuing wasteland,

the Germans fashioned new tactics

that would repeatedly shatter British hopes

and produce yet more carnage.

My name is Peter Barton,

and over the years my work in German military archives has convinced me

that this most symbolical of battles did not play out

in the way that we've been led to believe.

There is a better truth to be had about the Somme.

What became instantly clear when I started looking in these archives

was that there were two philosophies at work.

The British and French had an offensive philosophy.

The Germans had a defensive one.

Remember, in 1916, they were standing stolidly on the defence,

hoping to win through in Russia

before they came to attack on the Western Front.

That meant that the way they approached trench warfare

was entirely different to the way their enemies approached it.

Understand this,

and we can better understand how the Battle of the Somme unfolded.

So, in this programme, I'm going to continue the story

of the Allied offensive

but show how, in order to counter it,

the German army underwent a tactical revolution

that would frustrate Allied plans

and contribute so much to the terrible suffering, misery and loss

that still haunts us today, 100 years later.

The first 13 days of battle, though costly,

had brought the British within striking distance

of the second German line of defence.

Here, in front of Montauban,

no-man's land was a suicidal mile wide.

Risks had to be taken.

Here, under cover of darkness,

one of the more extraordinary ventures of the war took place.

In silence, and guided only by white tapes,

22,000 men assembled before the German trenches. Safe behind them,

thousands of cavalry awaited the expected breakthrough.

But there were grave doubts about the operation.

British Commander-in-Chief Sir Douglas Haig had no faith

in a night operation using inexperienced troops.

His French allies called it an attack planned by amateurs

to be carried out by an amateur army.

For three days, the German trenches were pummelled by shellfire,

and in the hope that they might be intercepted by German listeners,

fake British telephone calls were made

saying that all operations for the following day

had been postponed.

At 3:20am, the British artillery

unleashed a bombardment of unprecedented fury.

That super-concentrated shelling, known as a hurricane bombardment,

lasted just five minutes.

And then the troops rose for their assault.

Hans Gareis of the 16th Bavarian Regiment

was watching and waiting.

"The British are attacking. The platoon quickly deployed,

"which was not easy in total darkness.

"Then the first flare went up,

"and at about 300 metres we saw the British advancing towards our wire.

"And then, all hell broke loose."

The British pierced the enemy line.

For the Germans,

the question now was what would their enemy do next?

And when?

The intention of the commander-in-chief

of the British and imperial forces, Sir Douglas Haig,

had been to surge over two key ridges,

seizing villages and woods on the way.

On the 14th July, the initial hurdle was a second German line

along the Bazentin Ridge.

Afterwards, he could strike north against Pozieres, and Mouquet Farm,

and south-east to the important high ground

beyond Ginchy and Guillemont.

Haig's ambition was to provide his troops

with a commanding launch pad for a final, decisive rout of the enemy.

What the British troops needed,

after their initial gains on the morning of the 14th July,

was for the fog of battle to clear,

and to receive explicit orders to press on -

and, most importantly of all,

for the cavalry to arrive and finish the job.

It was here at the British headquarters

at the Chateaux de Querrieu, some 12 miles from Bazentin Ridge,

that the architect of the attack, General Sir Henry Rawlinson,

awaited news from the front.

Earlier reports were glorious.

Sir Douglas Haig motored here to Querrieu,

where he was congratulated by French commanders.

Rawlinson had been vindicated.

But, by noon, the picture had changed.

The British attacks were clearly held up in several places,

messages from the battlefield were erroneous or misleading,

and procrastination followed.

Now, Rawlinson had to push on -

but dare he now risk sending forward

thousands of cavalry and infantry into the unknown?

Sir Douglas Haig, himself a cavalryman,

longed to see mounted troops

galloping through breaches in the German line.

And as for the cavalry themselves,

they had waited almost two years for such an opportunity.

In the early evening,

medieval and ultramodern military technology

combined for the first time.

A Royal Flying Corps aircraft swooped and soared over high woods,

signalling to the waiting cavalry below

that their moment had finally arrived.

Then, Indian horsemen armed with rifles, machine guns and lances

galloped down this valley into the attack.

Royal Artillery signaller Leonard Ounsworth

witnessed the stirring event.

"I saw this Indian cavalry - the Deccan Horse, they called them -

"and this plane diving down and up again.

"Suddenly, the officer in charge of the cavalry cottoned on.

"He stood up in his stirrups,

"waved his sword above his head, and they just charged across that field

"like a shot out of a gun.

"Like bats out of hell."

Banner front-page headlines throughout Britain and her empire

heralded an historic incident on the Somme.

The British offensive brilliantly continued,

34 Germans killed with the lance,

and the capture of over 200 prisoners.

Surprised but buoyed by the results of the day,

and now confident of further substantial, and imminent, success,

Sir Douglas Haig wrote in his diary,

"All the cavalry are heartened by this episode.

"And I think their time is soon coming."

It was, in fact,

the only time that mounted troops would ride into action on the Somme.

My research in Germany has uncovered remarkable eyewitness accounts,

suggesting the battle didn't unfold in the way

the British public were encouraged to believe.

During the attack on the morning of the 14th of July,

Lieutenant Colonel Kumme,

the commanding officer of the 16th Bavarian infantry regiment,

was captured here in Bazentin-le-Petit

with all his headquarters staff and all their maps and documents.

It was a tremendous coup for the British.

They were led back, probably down this very track, interrogated,

and eventually found themselves in a POW camp near Derby.

From this tiny Somme hamlet,

an illuminating chain of events was set in motion.

Despite their incarceration,

Lieutenant Colonel Kumme and at least two of his comrades

managed to send back reports of the attack,

and what happened after their capture.

They were smuggled out of the camp by German doctors

en route to a prisoner exchange in Switzerland.

A very dangerous exercise, for which they could have been shot.

Now, extraordinarily,

those reports found their way back here to the Somme battlefield

in a matter of weeks - and I found them in the German archives.

Here they are.

They make very interesting reading.

What Kumme and his comrades recorded

helps us to better understand what actually happened that day.

On their way to captivity,

they noted large numbers of idle British cavalry,

unsaddled and feeding,

but saw British artillery, lorries, motorbikes and ambulances

driving almost to the front line itself.

This contradicts British claims

that the cavalry were unable to assault any earlier

because of slippery, shell-shattered ground.

Research also shows the Germans

were fully aware that British cavalry were on their way,

just minutes after they'd set off,

through yet another intercepted British telephone call.

What we do know is that the charge took place at seven in the evening,

instead of noon,

and it consisted of only 300 horsemen instead of thousands...

..and that their casualties were more than one in three.

This was not the good news story so widely reported -

and there was another revealing insight.

Kumme and his colleagues also spoke with British officers

who expressed anxiety about the fighting

they believed they now faced -

mobile combat across open fields, instead of trench warfare.

"Although I gained the impression that everything was well practised,

"and that everyone knew what they had to do,

"it was also apparent that this was only sufficient

"for positional trench warfare,

"where leadership qualities are less important

"than in a war of movement."

As the sun set on the 14th July,

the British could certainly say the Bazentin Ridge was now theirs.

But protracted and violent enemy resistance had withered momentum

throughout the day, allowing vital hours to slip by.

And there were over 9,000 casualties.

The surge towards Haig's final objective

stalled in an atmosphere of indecision and fear.

The British had once again come up

against the rock-like resolve of German high command.

The principal ambition of this man,

chief of the German General Staff, Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn,

was to maintain an unbroken and unbreakable line

on the Western Front -

not a yard, not an inch of ground must be yielded to the enemy.

It was, after all, the new border of the German imperial empire.

Falkenhayn himself was a Prussian aristocrat,

albeit an impoverished one,

but he was militaristic and bellicose to his very core.

If, for example, two officers fell into a dispute,

he suggested settlement by duelling with sabres.

Falkenhayn knew his Somme army, one fifth the size of the enemy's,

was in danger of bleeding to death before his eyes.

What happened next came as a surprise to everyone,

for along the ridge the Germans were provided with an unexpected ally.

Woodland.

On the 14th of July, Trones Wood fell to the British,

but Delville Wood remained in German hands.

Further along the ridge sat High Wood.

Machine gun crews had quickly nestled into its dense undergrowth,

and on the slope behind lay a new German trench,

known to the British as the Switch Line.

It had only been installed in the last eight days,

and, although primitive,

it was to provide the lethal nucleus

for a numbing period of German defensive resilience...

..and no British soldier had received any training

in woodland fighting.

It had never been thought necessary.

Woodland like this is a very difficult place to capture.

The problem is this - it's very similar to trench warfare,

except, whereas in trench warfare

you know that your enemy is in those trenches,

which are visible in the landscape,

here in the woods, there is the wood, but where is the enemy?

You can see out of a wood to see an attack coming,

you cannot see into a wood,

to detect how many enemy soldiers might be in there.

And that was the greatest problem.

It was very difficult to see anything from the air.

You could have ten aircraft up there -

all the soldiers had to do was stand against a tree trunk,

under that canopy, or simply don't move.

Simply keep still, and just wait for the enemy to appear.

And that's why it took weeks, even months, sometimes,

to capture small patches of woodland,

which, on the map, look minuscule.

Tens of thousands of lives were lost

in trying to capture places like this.

This benign, sylvan, beautiful landscape, now.

You simply don't know what's beneath your feet.

The British resorted to brutal firepower.

Eliminate the woods, and everything within them.

Massed artillery and mortars reduced them to splintered stumps

and tangled mats of fallen boughs...

..but even in ruination,

they continued to provide cover for machine guns and snipers,

and so the British infantry attacks, breasts against bullets,

had to continue.

The German 165th Division

acknowledged the bravery of their enemy,

but, all too often, the futility of their efforts.

"Wave upon wave of khaki-clad forms advancing against shot-up trenches.

"Red flares soared into the sky,

"and all at once a deadly barrage descended in front of our positions,

"cutting down the enemy by whole ranks.

"But the British are persistent.

"Again and again they attacked.

"In some places as much as four or five times over.

"Everywhere they failed...

"and not a single one of the British reached our regimental positions."

The British had no choice but to follow these tactics,

and for as long as it took.

Yet weeks of fighting led to advances so meagre and costly

they hardly warranted the name.

And, as a result, a new phrase now appeared

in the British Army's lexicon.

The wearing-out battle.

Whenever Sir Douglas Haig needed to justify sluggish British progress

he could always deploy the words "wearing-out battle".

The phrase had a suitably military texture,

and if accompanied by massaged German casualty figures

it helped appease a growing groundswell of concern and criticism

in British corridors of power.

But Haig and his advisers were convinced

that the Germans would eventually be broken

by the irresistible force of Allied troops and artillery.

It was simply a question of time and perseverance.

What was making the biggest difference at this time

was the Royal Flying Corps,

who still patrolled the skies almost unmolested.

During the early weeks of the Somme,

British pilots and observers enjoyed almost complete command of the air.

Taking aerial photographs, spotting targets for artillery,

guiding the guns onto those targets,

and themselves attacking troops, trenches, dugouts, transport -

any hostile feature that they could see.

For the first time in history,

aircraft were being used as offensive weapons in themselves.

And German troops complained bitterly about the lack of response

and protection from their own air force.

This 45th Reserve Division report is typical.

"The enemy deployed a large number of aircraft

"which cooperated extremely well with the artillery.

"Fire was rapidly directed into identified targets

"and quickly registered -

"presumably via a wireless transmitter,

"as no visible signalling was observed.

"The enemy pilots flew astonishingly low,

"raking the least movement in the trenches with their machine guns.

"Dropping bombs on dugouts, strafing men making their way to the rear,

"and even firing on individual runners."

For the Germans, concealment and camouflage

therefore became ever more critical.

To resist, they must endure and survive,

and that meant forsaking the once safe havens of the trenches

for the most ubiquitous feature in the landscape.

The shell hole.

As a result of Allied air superiority,

they could see everything from the skies.

The Germans had to become a part of the earth itself

in order to survive.

Ideally, you'd go underground in a dugout,

but, of course, they could be seen from the sky.

The entrances could be seen from the sky as, well,

and were bombed. Artillery was brought down upon them.

So they resorted to very simple methods.

This is one of them.

Use the shell holes in the landscape - they are everywhere...

..and form your line of defence in those shell holes.

You just need a standard groundsheet...

..in the shell hole, make yourself comfortable.

This is all done at night, of course.

And cover yourself up.

And become a part of the shell hole.

From ground level this just looked like a tarpaulin in a shell hole,

but from 1,000 feet or 2,000 feet in the air, to Allied pilots,

it was simply a hole in the ground.

But it secreted soldiers -

and not just soldiers, soldiers with their machine guns.

The bigger the hole, the more men you could have down here.

You could have an entire machine gun crew in a hole in the ground,

invisible to the British.

And that was the key.

Improvisation of this kind had always been officially encouraged.

On a battlefield that was disintegrating

before their very eyes,

German troops were expected to respond

to the transforming landscape and, wherever possible,

use it to further increase their defensive capabilities.

It always amazes me to think that 100 years later

we can still see the marks of the First World War in the landscape.

Across the valley where you can see one, two,

three white German lines of chalk in the ploughed field.

These are today's scars of the old trenches -

but 100 years ago, relentless Allied shelling

was literally wiping them from the face of the earth.

By the end of July and into August in 1916, all that had gone.

We are into open warfare, of a kind,

and the British don't actually know where the Germans are any more.

The battlefield's become fuzzy.

The mundane shell hole

was about to become a foundation of German resistance.

The principles were simple.

Stay hidden to stay alive, be where you are not expected,

move if you need to, and if ground is lost,

strike back hard and fast to regain it.

But this behaviour had been forced upon the Germans

by the unremitting firepower of a British enemy

apparently undeterred by monumental human loss.

What was happening across the Somme

was the birth of a new and flexible German approach

designed to provide both defiance and survival.

It was called Verteidigung in der Tiefe.

Defence in depth.

And in German documents

we can actually see it appearing and evolving.

After each action, every unit was required to produce an Erfahrungen,

a report detailing their experiences,

observations and lessons learned.

There are thousands here in the archives.

Now, the writers, usually officers,

were not just encouraged to be critical of their own military,

they were obliged to be so.

For these reports had to be objective,

accurate and comprehensive.

Any other approach was damaging to German prospects.

Their candid and self-critical tone

is something one seldom encounters in British military records.

But this had long been standard German practice.

For every soldier was trained to be aware that exaggeration,

fabrication or omission could serve to shorten not only his own life,

but those of his comrades.

Erfahrungen were universally circulated

so that others might learn, especially from mistakes,

for both good and bad news carried equal significance.

Here is an example.

Listen to the tone of this extract

by a major of the 29th Infantry Regiment.

"Our artillery fire fell partly on our own trenches,

"there were often large gaps.

"One gun fired continually into our own trenches.

"Our company sustained heavy casualties as a result.

"Our rifle fire was too slow, instruction is needed.

"Our front line was marked on our maps as being in British hands.

"A position can only be held if the garrison are alive!"

Forthright reports like this frequently confirmed the value

of shell hole-based defences,

and from these mundane beginnings,

new and devastating defensive techniques began to emerge.

By late July, as fighting to secure High Wood,

the Switch Line and Delville Wood continued,

another objective on the ridge came within British sights.

This was the dominating fortress of Pozieres,

whose landmark windmill

occupied the highest point on the Somme battlefield.

Spearheading the assault would be the Australian Imperial force.

Part of Sir Hubert Gough's reserve army.

It would be the Aussies' first action on the Somme.

They were part of a seemingly endless stream of men

that the nations of the British Empire could offer

to the mother country.

They'd come halfway around the world, via Gallipoli,

onto the Western Front,

and when they arrived here, into this maelstrom,

what they said was, Gallipoli was like a firework display

by comparison to what the Germans were capable of doing here.

Sir Douglas Haig believed that Pozieres

would not be too tough a nut to crack,

and he actually said beforehand,

give the Australians something easy to do.

He expected this because of the weight of artillery he was able to

produce, and the strength of Australians.

They were all fresh troops,

and he thought this would fall fairly quickly.

In the eight days since the 14th July,

Sir Douglas Haig's lofty expectations had been restricted

to the capture of a few mangled fields.

The first attack on Pozieres

was timed for half-past midnight on the 23rd July.

As massed Anglo-Australian guns prepared the way,

the 1st Australian Division awaited their leap in the dark.

As the earth and even the air shook with concussive force,

German defenders, clustered in cellars and dugouts,

waited for the alarm signal from observers on the surface.

Unteroffizier Klufmann,

of the 77th Reserve Infantry Regiment, was amongst them.

"Around Pozieres, fire of the heaviest calibre

"was falling on our trenches.

"We sat huddled in our dugout, smoking pipes,

"cigars and cigarettes by the feeble light of a candle,

"to soothe our overstrained nerves because, with one hit,

"we could all be killed.

"The commander was buried three times in an hour and a half

"and, on each occasion, he was dug out in the nick of time by his men."

By the following morning, a wedge had been driven into Pozieres,

but half the village, its windmill,

and the critical defences on the crest of the ridge, held out.

They are now firing some devastating, defensive barrages.

So the very moment the Australians leave their position in these fields

behind me to attack the second line,

down comes this deluge of high explosive.

Another deluge falls behind them to catch the second wave

and the third wave.

Private Archie Barwick of the 1st Australian Battalion

was on the receiving end.

"All day long, the ground rocked and swayed backwards and forwards

"from the concussion, like a well-built haystack, swaying about.

"Men were driven stark, staring mad

"and more than one of them rushed out of the trench,

"over towards the Germans.

"Any amount of them could be seen crying and sobbing like children -

"their nerves completely gone."

Assault followed assault, now with British units in support.

And with each one, the Germans counterattacked.

On the 7th of August, after 16 days of fighting,

the Pozieres fortress finally fell.

Thousands lay dead, but Sir Hubert Gough's army

had taken a critical bite out of the ridge.

Charles Bean, the Australian historian,

said that Aussie troops lay more thickly on this plateau

than on any other battlefield on the Western Front.

It was carnage.

But they ousted the Germans from this most vital position.

The survivors had every right to celebrate and to model their booty -

German Picklehaube helmets.

The original owners probably lay mingled in death with their enemies.

But the Australian ordeal was far from over.

With Pozieres, the windmill, and the defences around it finally secured,

Gough now pushed further north

to the next key objective, Mouquet Farm.

Known as Moo Cow or Mucky Farm to the troops,

it too had been recently integrated into the German defensive system.

A warren of tunnels, dugouts and cellars lay underground,

whilst on the surface it was protected by a complex of trenches.

A Pozieres in miniature.

It's here that we can see

the fledgling German defence-in-depth tactics

appearing in practice.

This British aerial photograph

from June 1916 shows the courtyard farmstead and its trench network.

Over the coming weeks, it will be reduced to a wilderness of craters,

in which one might imagine

that nothing - and nobody - could survive.

At the beginning of the battle,

Mouquet Farm was well behind the German front line,

it was used as a headquarters.

By the 10th August, it WAS the front line,

and it had been converted into a strong point, a redoubt.

Here's a German plan of it then.

Most of it is underground.

There are tunnels and dugouts to accommodate men and weapons.

So, in order for the Australians

to make any advance onto the ridges and plateaus over there,

they first had to take this strong point.

There was no choice...

..and there was no time to waste.

Preparations quickly began.

Fresh Australian and British troops were brought forward

and massed artillery moved up and dug in.

At the beginning of the battle,

German commander-in-chief

Field Marshal Erich von Falkenhayn's orders were unambiguous.

Defend every position to the last man.

But since the 1st of July,

the British had gradually eaten into his territory.

To understand how the Germans now began to employ

this tortured landscape, created by the British artillery,

to their own advantage,

we have the account of a Leutnant Schulz

of the 133rd Infantry Regiment.

He was here, here.

"There was no trace of a trench -

"just a straggling line of shell holes,

"which was actually much better.

"We dig in in a large hole and cover ourselves with a groundsheet."

What Schulz now did was to turn a problem for his men into a solution.

"I need to deploy my company

"so that it suffers as few casualties as possible.

"I noticed this could best be done if I temporarily evacuated

"the trench in front of the farm."

The accuracy of the British shelling was so precise

that a shift of just 100 yards took his troops out of harm's way.

"We celebrated every British shell

"that pitches into the empty positions before us.

"They fired and fired and fired

"until they had completely wrecked this delightful part

"of the Somme countryside."

Now, the challenge was to get back in to those wrecked positions,

the moment the British shelling lifted.

The goal could not have been simpler.

Surprise.

"The first enemy wave advances upon us.

"Several attacking columns follow.

"Where no resistance was expected, we give them a hot reception.

"Now, the machine guns open up,

"the infantry shoot like men possessed.

"Grenades explode.

"Finally, just in front of Mouquet Farm, the masses begin to stall.

"After an hour, the attack is decisively repulsed."

In other sectors, the Germans didn't retire

from their battered front line

but moved forward into a shell hole like this in no-man's land,

ruining British tactics

simply by being somewhere they were not expected.

Now Falkenhayn's insistence on retention of ground still prevailed,

but now his troops are no longer required

to fight IN their front line but FOR their front line.

As the weeks passed,

the Germans further adapted these tactics to suit local circumstances.

What was once a defensive line was about to become a defensive zone.

Here, the simple German modifications worked all too well

for British liking.

Once more, what should have taken days, or even hours, took weeks...

and the casualty count was grim.

The fight for Mouquet, and indeed all other objectives,

brought to the battlefield the perennial,

and unavoidable by-product of summer combat.

For both sides, the immense daily death toll

posed a particular problem.

In the midsummer heat,

the battlefield simply swarmed with flies.

Observation, and indeed experimentation,

showed that they could strip a body to bleached bone in just nine days.

Flies also carried the scourge of every army.

Dysentery could empty a trench more effectively than any bombardment.

The ideal solution, of course, was swift burial.

But here, where action followed action without pause,

that was impossible.

All too often, the dead were simply devoured.

By mid-August, Sir Douglas Haig was experiencing mounting concern

about the sluggish rate of British progress.

He was now in discussions about a massive and conclusive Anglo-French

assault for mid-September

that would take the Allies through the third German line

and, indeed, far beyond.

To ensure success,

he told Rawlinson that all of the 14th of July objectives

must be in British hands by then.

The battle had slipped back into siege warfare -

exactly what Sir Douglas Haig did not want.

What the British wanted to do was to keep this thing mobile.

What they did was they brought out all their old weapons -

the mothballed weapons, seven two-tonne flame-throwers.

They started mine warfare again, pure siege warfare technique,

and they started using totally experimental weapons,

whether the conditions were suitable or not.

Artillery was the greatest killer of the war.

The cause of 70% of all casualties.

To it were now added flame-throwers, poison gas and aerial attacks -

but, extraordinarily, it still wasn't enough to break the deadlock.

A new weapon, invented on the Somme battlefield itself,

was now introduced.

The Livens Projector.

In August, there were using it to try to oust the Germans

from these little strong points, which they just would not give up.

It might look almost medieval,

but this was a purely modern killer

with a singular and pitiless purpose.

This is a projectile.

This one has been fired.

They held a mixture of petrol and diesel.

What that would do would be to create a lake of fire.

Later in the war, it delivered storms of high explosive,

toxic gas, or thermite - an early form of napalm -

to produce zones where survival was impossible.

The Livens Projector was destined to become the cheapest,

but by far the most effective killer of the war.

Allied victory on the Somme

depended not only on combat on land and in the air,

but in their knowledge of the enemy,

the battle of the intelligence services.

Both sides needed information

on garrison strengths, tactics, movements,

reserves, weapons, casualties, mood and morale.

And, of course, their enemy's intentions.

But by the summer of 1916,

British intelligence staff

were already labouring under a serious impediment.

When the Germans shattered the network of British agents

working behind the lines in France and Belgium,

almost 2,000 watchers,

predominantly Dutch and Belgian peasants, farmers and tradesmen,

were arrested.

Watchers were vital because they noted the movements,

numbers and identities of German units at rest behind the lines.

And the passage and content of trains and trucks passing

to and from the front.

Their observations had been secretly smuggled across the Dutch border

and passed to the British military attache in Rotterdam.

The Germans sealed the border

and, at a stroke, reduced what had once been a flood

of the most critical military intelligence to a trickle.

The amputation of this crucial source

meant that the British became almost wholly dependent

upon statements extracted from German prisoners.

To encourage the prompt disclosure of information,

Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston had these guidelines

translated into German for prisoners to mull over before questioning.

"To prisoners, important warning.

"One. Answer questions quickly, clearly, shortly and truthfully.

"Two. Remember, we already know the correct answers

"to many of the questions,

"which are only put to test your good faith.

"Three. True and satisfactory information

"is remembered to the credit of prisoners.

"Four. Those who give untruthful or unsatisfactory answers

"will be dealt with specially."

The German record suggests that British techniques

could sometimes be brutal.

From the archives, here is the testimony of Medical Officer Blass,

captured by the British in September,

revealing what he calls "inadmissible pressure"

from his interrogators.

"They tried to wear them down through bad treatment

"and constant harassment.

"In answer to a German officer's question

"as to how long he would have to remain in such undignified position,

"the English camp commander answered,

" 'That depends entirely on the testimony you give.' "

But how were British and French prisoners treated?

It was here at the citadel in Cambrai,

some 30 miles behind the Somme battle front,

that Allied prisoners were processed.

This is a site that was familiar to a lot of British soldiers.

There is actually film archive of this.

British prisoners streaming through this gate

to the next stage of their captivity.

They have been taken on the battlefield.

They have been interrogated as soon after battle as possible,

when they are still in a state of shock.

The next stage of their journey is here.

Through these gates, into the citadel,

where a different form of interrogation took place.

The Germans called it a conversation,

because these men now felt safe -

they have been reunited with their comrades,

so the entire ambience had changed.

When fear was removed, traumatised men relaxed,

probably feeling a sense of gratitude at being spared.

And it was in this altered post-battle state

that extra intelligence could most easily be extracted.

Because of what we know about the Second World War,

the German approach in the First World War

sounds a bit counterintuitive -

but it was not based upon instilling fear, but removing it.

Making prisoners more comfortable, less fearful

and, therefore, more forthcoming,

from the very moment of their capture.

And we can find evidence for this in files

from the National Archives in London. I've got an example here.

August 1916.

Hugh Jones.

"I was wounded by liquid fire in the back

"and a machine gun bullet in my left arm.

"My left arm is amputated at the elbow.

"Two bullets fractured two of my ribs on the left side.

"I was very kindly treated at the field dressing station.

"I was taken to some hospital in a motor car.

"I was well treated by the military guard

"and the behaviour of the German Red Cross was good.

"The food was good, so also were the sanitary arrangements.

"I was most kindly treated.

"I have nothing to complain about."

And that is quite a common feature of thousands of these testimonies.

By early September, parts of the Pozieres Ridge

were now in British hands.

But key targets still held out, such as Guillemont,

a serious obstruction.

It had already been attacked five times.

Sir Douglas Haig's patience was running thin.

Neighbouring Ginchy and the ridge beyond

must fall before the 15th of September.

By that time, this sleepy little Somme hamlet

was no more than a brick-coloured stain on the landscape.

Dugouts beneath the ruins of Guillemont again provided protection

for German troops.

But because the British were never certain

where their enemy and his machine guns lay,

for weeks they poured torrents of high explosive into the sector.

The Germans retaliated in kind,

turning these pastures into true killing fields.

Leutnant Ernst Junger of the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment served here.

"The sunken road and the ground behind was full of German dead.

"The ground in front of English.

"Arms, legs and heads stuck out stark above the lips of the craters.

"In front of our miserable defences,

"there were torn-off limbs and corpses,

"over many of which cloaks and growing sheets had been thrown,

"to hide the fixed stare of their distorted features.

"In spite of the heat,

"no-one thought for a moment of covering them with soil."

Even today, these fields are still strewn

with the fragments of those who died.

British military records later hailed the defence of Guillemont

as the finest performance of the war by the German army.

It became the stuff of legend...

..because of the terrible human misery and loss.

The troops on both sides of the wire

had now become part of an industrial mincing machine.

Commodities in flesh and blood.

The Germans called it Materialschlacht -

attrition in its basest and most pitiless form.

In the six weeks between the 1st of July and mid-August,

the German army suffered over 100,000 men

killed, wounded or missing.

Some of them lie in this German burial ground,

one of only a handful on the Somme.

Steel crosses mark their place.

No white headstones here, as in the Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries,

and each cross commemorates not one, but four German soldiers.

Here at Fricourt, there are 17,000 dead.

I can't visualise what that actually means in human terms,

and what I would tend to do, and what I would invite you to do,

is imagine four men buried beneath each cross

standing there behind that cross,

and then behind them, their families,

and behind them their circle of friends.

And then do the same

for the 12,000 men in the mass graves here,

and that helps me to perceptualise these...

indescribable figures, indescribable statistics,

because these men are men.

They are not statistics, but all too often we look at them as statistics,

so many thousand men died in this place.

So many thousand casualties.

They are all individuals with a family and a history.

For the Germans, this endless haemorrhage of lives

could not continue.

Things had to change, and someone had to be held responsible.

Whispers among high command were rife.

Most fingers pointed towards Falkenhayn and his rigid mantra -

retention of ground at all costs.

On the 28th of August 1916,

he was replaced by two heroes of the Eastern Front,

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff.

On the morning of the 8th of September,

they joined the highest echelon of German command

at this house in Cambrai to address the situation on the Somme.

Now, in this very room,

Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany,

Hindenburg and Ludendorff listened to the grim assessments

of their army commanders and chiefs of staff.

September, they said, had started badly,

and the crisis was growing worse by the day.

The situation was approaching tipping point.

One decision made on this day

that would have far reaching and cruel consequences for the Allies

was to be a closely guarded secret for the next seven months -

the construction of a purpose-built defensive line

behind the Somme battlefront.

More immediately,

it was officially agreed to study the radical tactical changes

that were constantly evolving as a result of the Somme fighting.

A team led by Ludendorff would filter and categorise experiences,

observations and opinions, and consult with every unit.

It is here that we see that German culture

of self analysis and self-criticism come into play.

Self-criticism to the point of self-mutilation, as Hindenburg said.

What they decided to do unanimously

was to have a root and branch reorganisation

of the entire Somme battlefront in the middle of that battle.

A system of defence in depth was to be universally applied,

with initiative and independence as the core values.

The key points in the new defensive guidelines were...

One - reorganisation of sectors into narrow and deep zones of defence.

Two - devolvement of command to the men on the spot.

Three - a sparsely garrisoned front line,

but with specialist troops in close support.

And four - the approval of temporary tactical withdrawals,

be they forwards, backwards or sideways.

A sea change had taken place.

Now, for the first time,

flesh and blood was being looked upon as more valuable than terrain.

In overall command of the German campaign on the Somme was an aristocratic Field Marshal,

Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.

In his diary, he noted how the new defence in depth tactics

could also lead to an improvement in troop morale.

"Reports from units speak unanimously

"of the importance of deployment in depth.

"The men returned repeatedly to familiar territory,

"developing a proprietary interest,

"knowing that they will serve there again.

"The men get more rest.

"It is easier to feed them well,

"and they have to travel shorter distances during relief."

The flexible methods forged here in the fires of the Somme

became the foundation for German defensive tactics

for the rest of the war.

The day after the Cambrai summit,

the British began another assault on the hamlet of Ginchy.

A mile beyond was the crest of the low ridge

that had been Haig and Rawlinson's objective for almost two months.

The bombardment began early in the morning,

but to try to prevent ravaging German counterattacks

during daylight,

the infantry attack took place at 4:45 in the afternoon.

On September the 9th, the village fell,

but it nevertheless required several more days

to negotiate the open fields beyond.

And what happened here

reveals something which we see in every war.

Both tragedy and irony.

The 2nd Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters was attacked here,

with this man,

Lance Corporal John Duesbury.

The attack was a failure.

John Duesbury died on that day.

He had last written to his family on the 3rd of September,

and they would have thought that that latter was the last missive

they would never receive from him.

They were wrong.

In this field...

..alone, he wrote again to them.

I've got a copy of that letter here.

He scribbled something in his pocketbook as he died.

This is what it said.

"Dear Mother. I am writing these few lines severely wounded.

"We've done well.

"Our battalion advanced about three quarters of a mile.

"I am laid in a shell hole

"with two wounds in my hip and through my back.

"I cannot move or crawl.

"I've been here for 24 hours and never seen a living soul.

"I hope you will receive these few lines

"as I don't expect anyone will come to take me away.

"But you know I've done my duty out here now

"for one year and eight months,

"and you will always have the consolation

"that I died quite happy doing my duty.

"Must give my best of love to all the cousins,

"who have been so kind to me the time I've been out here.

"And the best of luck to Mother and Harry and all at Swinefleet."

It's probably the most extraordinary...

document I've ever come across.

In order to find this notebook,

they must have found the body of John Duesbury.

So, it seems that he was found in his shell hole -

later action blew away all signs of that grave.

His name, however, is engraved in the Portland stone panels

of the Thiepval Memorial To The Missing.

The family name wasn't always Duesbury.

In fact, here it has been further anglicised.

But, if I cover the Y, and ask you to imagine that as a G,

that was their name.

Duesburg.

Like so many other soldiers serving in the British Army,

John Duesbury was of German stock.

The capture of the ridge in the Ginchy sector

was finally completed just days before Haig's great offensive

of the 15th of September.

The attack of the 14th of July

had been followed by eight weeks of the bitterest fighting,

during which time the British evicted their enemy

from the Bazentin Ridge,

Pozieres, from Guillemont, and finally Ginchy.

But the tasks Sir Douglas Haig had set was still incomplete.

Parts of High Wood and the Switch Line remained in German hands.

Nevertheless, he could still rely upon continued domination

in men and aircraft and a monstrous array of firepower.

The great battle must still go ahead as planned.

And now there was hope

that a revolutionary new weapon would help smash the German lines

and shatter German spirits.

The bulletproof cavalry was on its way.

On the Somme, the festival of killing was far from over,

for there was now a new German mantra.

If recapturing lost ground was not worth the cost,

let the British have it.

But make them pay. And pay dearly.