End Game - End Spiel The Somme 1916 - From Both Sides of the Wire

This programme contains some strong language

The Battle of the Somme had begun in the high summer of 1916

with the promise of a swift Anglo-French victory

against an outnumbered and outgunned German army.

But as autumn arrived,

expectations had been dashed time after time by enemy resistance.

The battlefield was now a killing zone,

where the Allies traded lives for territory

and their German enemy exchanged them for precious time.

And with the passing of summer came the inescapable added miseries

of rain, fog and mud.

It was a universal adversary,

smearing clothes and skin,

tainting food, polluting drink, infecting wounds.

The weather and the mud has for a century been used to explain

why Allied progress was so slow during the closing months of 1916.

Ground conditions certainly played a major role,

but the fuller story is more complicated and surprising.

My name is Peter Barton

and I believe that to fully understand this battle

we need to appreciate better how again and again the Germans

on the defensive were able to defy British and French attacks.

So in this series to commemorate the centenary of the battle,

I've been creating a history from both sides of the wire.

It's a narrative based upon some of the remarkable documents I've found

in German archives and the many revelations they offer.

In this programme, I'll tell the story

of the final phase of the battle as autumn turned to winter,

explain where and why the slaughter continued,

and how the Germans would spring the biggest surprise of the entire war.

I'll reveal how under new leadership the German army were able

to repeatedly resist monstrous Allied onslaughts

by the further development

of innovative and far-reaching battlefield tactics.

I'll also question the official closing date of the battle

and I'll draw, what might be for some,

an uncomfortable conclusion about the campaign itself.

In the thin light of dawn on the 15th of September 1916,

something unworldly began to creep across the fields here,

close to Delville Wood on the Somme battlefield.

It had a number, D1,

a nickname, Daredevil,

and it was taking part in the greatest British attack

since the first day of fighting ten weeks earlier.

Like the 47 others expected to go into battle that day,

it was a cumbersome, belching, spitting,

caterpillar track fortress painted in blotched reptilian colours.

What the Germans called the Panzerwagen, the tank, had arrived.

At first, there was terror and disbelief on the German side

as recorded by Feldwebel Reinert, of the 211th Regiment.

A man came running in from the left shouting,

"There is a crocodile crawling into our lines!"

The poor wretch was off his head.

He had seen a tank for the first time

and had imagined this giant of a machine rearing up

and dipping down as it came to be a monster.

Daredevil had been ordered to head straight across no-man's-land.

Now every tank had a gender.

Females carried machine guns,

males were armed with quick-firing six-pound cannon.

Following close behind were the infantry.

Lance-Corporal Len Lovell of the 6th King's Own Yorkshire light infantry

was thrilled to be joined by this mechanical comrade in arms.

It was marvellous.

That tank went on,

rolling and bobbing and swaying in and out of shell holes,

climbing over trees as easy as kiss your hand.

We were awed.

We were delighted that it was ours.

The tank made its debut at this time for one reason only -

to help British infantry finally break the German lines

and German spirits.

The decision had been taken by a man under ever-increasing pressure,

Commander-in-Chief of British and Imperial forces,

General Sir Douglas Haig.

Consider this candid press photograph.

On the left is Haig,

on the right is Secretary of State for War David Lloyd George.

The body language betrays mutual tension.

Listening in and clearly enjoying the moment

is Haig's French counterpart, General Joseph Joffre.

In early September 1916,

Lloyd George visited the front where he also met French commanders.

He posed pointed questions

about the competence of British military leadership,

which were promptly reported to Haig.

At his headquarters at the Chateau de Beaurepaire,

he recorded his disgust in his diary.

That a British minister could have been so ungentlemanly as to go to a

foreigner and put such questions regarding his own subordinates.

So for the 15th of September,

the commander-in-chief had more than one point to prove.

The attack would be, in the language of the time, a big show.

A show that would, in Haig's words, crush the Germans to the last man.

Sir Douglas Haig was assured by his chief of intelligence,

Colonel John Charteris,

that he had never before seen German morale so low.

Therefore, enemy collapse and British breakthrough was possible.

The British and the French still had an overwhelming superiority in guns,

in aircraft, in munitions and, most importantly of all, in fresh troops.

What did the British hope to achieve?

The assault was to be concentrated

on the centre and south of their battleground.

Haig's goal was to smash the German third line of defence

and open the door to mobile warfare for his massed cavalry.

The battlefront stretched eight miles between the village of Combles

on the right, through Flers in the centre,

to beyond Courcelette on the left.

In the last two weeks, Haig's French allies had made substantial gains.

He was therefore also keen to demonstrate how

his troops could cut the mustard too.

Zero hour on the 15th September was set for 6:20 in the morning.

When the whistle sounded, soldiers from Britain,

Canada and New Zealand surged into no-man's-land.

In the vanguard of the attack on the German held village of Flers

was tank D17.

Making its clanking, thundery entrance,

it began by destroying machine-gun posts,

then drove the length of the main street to signal victory,

before returning unscathed to fight another day.

The antics of D17, of course, had enormous propaganda value.

Headlines in British newspapers breathlessly spoke of,

"Prehistoric monsters that strike terror in the enemy."

Tanks were, "Impervious to the hottest fire and

"able to eat houses and woods."

They were, "Our war of the worlds machines."

A useful weapon, perhaps, as Flers had shown.

But being entirely experimental,

there were inevitable teething problems.

Of 48 machines, only 36 crossed the British front line.

On the battlefield, they were huge and obvious targets

and, therefore, supremely vulnerable.

Some broke down, some ditched...

and several were disabled by enemy action.

18 survived the day.

And in the German archives, I found out how quickly and methodically

the Germans responded to the Panzerwagen.

Within a few days,

every German unit on the Western front had received an initial report

about the new threat. The first sketches, the captured diary,

the, by now, ubiquitous British operations order -

all here in the German archives -

had been copied and circulated so that everybody knew

how and when the tanks had first arrived in France,

what they looked like, very roughly, what the British thought they were

capable of and exactly how the British intended to deploy them.

A talkative tank crew member had also been captured

and this all led to a 5th of October document

suggesting ways to combat the new menace.

Direct hits by artillery of small or heavy calibre

are definitely effective. In addition,

machine guns should attempt to penetrate the armour

by focusing their fire upon a single point.

The best prospects are the loopholes and observation slits.

Success may be had by throwing grenades at the wheels.

Experience on the Somme reveals that the heat and bad atmosphere inside

the machine forces the crew to periodically open the doors.

Such an opportunity was successfully employed to throw grenades inside.

But with the tanks, Haig showed his resolve to use every available tool

to kick-start sluggish British progress.

And in the same spirit of enterprise,

his gunners employed, across the battlefront,

the most significant artillery development of the war so far,

the Creeping Barrage.

The Creeping Barrage was used in this sector,

in front of Courcelette.

What I have here is the artillery fire plan for this very place

to help the Canadian infantry attack the village of Courcelette,

just over there. If you follow me, I'll show you how it worked.

I am now walking the exact route used by the Canadians

on the 15th September.

Before their assault,

massed field artillery dropped a curtain of high explosive

and shrapnel in a line across these very fields - no-man's-land.

The Canadians formed up close behind those bursting shells.

Then, at prearranged intervals,

the guns simultaneously lifted their fire...

..moving the curtain a further 50 or 100 yards forward.

The troops followed.

In this manner, they advanced ribbon by ribbon,

over the German front line and beyond.

The barrage creeping methodically across the landscape was designed

to keep German heads low and Canadians alive.

Of course, all new technology has its hazards.

With a system as finely tuned as this,

mistakes and accidents were unavoidable,

so an acceptable loss to what we today call friendly fire

was built into the fire plan.

With the stakes being so very high on this day,

normal procedures had to be set aside.

And, as the operations orders for the 15th of September

so chillingly revealed,

risks may be taken but in less favourable circumstances

may not be advisable.

What then was achieved with the benefit of these

new tactics and weapons?

At his headquarters, the commander of the British 4th Army,

General Sir Henry Rawlinson,

reflected upon a day of mixed fortunes.

The attacks had been successful around Flers.

Here the third German line was breached,

but elsewhere results were disappointing.

The Canadians of Sir Hubert Gough's reserve army

took Courcelette, but got no further.

And near Combles, the story was the same.

Also there was no sign of Haig's decisive breakthrough.

And the casualty count was cruel, very cruel.

29,376 killed, wounded or missing.

But the stakes were far too high to change tack,

for this was just the opening salvo

of a titanic third phase of the battle on the Somme.

Those stakes were just as high for the Germans

enduring immense and ever-mounting Allied pressure.

By September 1916, their military enterprise was under new management.

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was now commander-in-chief

with General Erich Ludendorff his deputy.

Directing their Somme campaign was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria.

From his elegant villa in the city of Combles,

Rupprecht could call upon the resources of four German armies.

But it was all too clear that Allied pressure was beginning to tell.

A September entry in his diary noted

that subjected to relentless shelling, incessant attack

and living in shell craters surrounded by decomposing dead,

his troops could no longer endure more than 14 days in the line.

The toll was unceasing,

and many of Rupprecht's headquarters staff were close to breakdown.

During September, the British drove the Germans from the villages of

Ginchy, Guillemont, Gueudecourt, Lebouef,

Morval, Combles, Thiepval, Flers

and from Mouquet Farm.

And as the month drew to a close,

Rupprecht informed Hindenburg and Ludendorff

that the Allies were able to field twice as many divisions

as his own army group, fresh divisions,

and that the Somme was exceeding all other battles in its violence.

Faced with such superiority,

how did the Germans continue to endure and resist?

Answers can be found in their archives.

Here I've discovered uncomfortable evidence of how they took advantage

of the habitually careless and frequently foolhardy behaviour

of their enemy.

Learning from scores of top-secret documents found upon captured

British officers, they devise new moves

in the game of tactical cat and mouse.

Here's a post-operation report written by

Brigadier General HC Rees

of the 11th Infantry Brigade.

He could not have made the

sensitivity of its content more plain.

At the top here it says, "Secret, not to be taken into the front line,

"copies to be destroyed after reading."

But somehow this document has found

its way across no-man's-land and into German hands.

And here is an even more sensitive file.

This one is from the reserve army commander himself,

General Sir Hubert Gough, and it contains his observations on

recent operations and his suggestions,

which means orders, for future enterprises.

Now, top level,

top-secret intelligence like this was priceless to the Germans

because it allowed them to further reconfigure and refine

their own defensive tactics to counter those of their enemy.

Some adjustments were simple, but deadly.

To combat the British creeping barrage, for example,

machine guns were sighted beyond the range of British field artillery.

Here, unmolested by enemy shelling,

multiple guns delivered long-range concentrated fire

upon no-man's-land.

Even unaimed and at a distance of up to three miles,

that could still stop the enemy in his tracks.

At the beginning of October,

poor weather set in and continued for the rest of the month.

For both sides, the autumn fog made the battlefield

a bewildering place to navigate.

It was something experienced by Gefreiter Fritscher

of the 179th Regiment.

We sank in the saturated morass,

disappeared suddenly into unseen shell holes and forced our way

up and out, only to tumble into another hole.

There we would fall heavily on our faces and hands.

It was impossible to see anything.

We lost our way and wandered in confusion,

not knowing the location of the front line.

This shelling and the rain created a common,

reviled and often lethal enemy.

This is a track which was first used by German troops and later by

British soldiers to reach the front line.

And what impedes me today,

and impeded Allied progress during the autumn of 1916, is Somme mud.

It was a universal adversary, smearing clothes and skin,

tainting food, polluting drink, infecting wounds

and fouling rifle mechanisms. And there was no escape from it.

One Australian soldier rather memorably summed up the battlefield

when he said, "It's mile after mile of shit-coloured fuck all."

In a foul alchemy cursed by every soldier,

the Somme chalks and clays combine to produce a sticky,

clinging bane on their lives.

And it could claim life too.

As Lieutenant Edgar Lord of the Lancashire Fusiliers remembered...

The mud was so bad, ploughing our way to the front line,

we found two English soldiers up to the armpits in mud, one dead,

the other facing him was stark mad.

We gave him food and got out as soon as we could and he died.

They had been stuck there for 48 hours.

Such was the nightmarish, man-made landscape in which men lived,

worked, fought and died.

The transport of guns, ammunition, supplies,

food and water became ever more difficult,

exhausting and time-consuming.

The all-important British artillery

was confronted with enormous challenges.

To maintain attacking momentum,

the light field guns had to follow close on the heels of the infantry

they served and protected.

Moving a gun normally required a small team of horses

and half a dozen men.

It now demanded many more.

And stable gun positions became ever harder to construct.

Without a solid foundation, it was impossible to deliver accurate fire.

Many accounts of the battle explain the stuttering nature of British

progress during the autumn of 1916 by blaming the weather,

but this is only partially true.

There are other compelling reasons.

Slowly but surely, the Germans were moving towards parity,

not only in troops and artillery, but also airpower.

At the beginning of the battle and for weeks afterwards,

the Allies enjoyed clear superiority in the skies.

But now this was changing.

With new German machines that could climb and fly faster

than British aircraft.

Soon they were able to protect their territory and their troops

from prying British eyes.

And back on the ground,

the evolving defence in depth system was being constantly expanded,

revised and refined.

At this time, what the British perceived as German disarray,

shabby trenches without dugouts, poorly protected by barbed wire,

was in fact part of a wider, evolving defensive strategy.

The old trench-based defensive system was now being replaced by

deep defensive zones,

and the Germans and their machine guns might lie anywhere

within that zone, hidden and ready.

At the front itself, empty trenches could be made to appear occupied

simply by having a few men go from place to place at night

firing their rifles and shooting rockets and flares.

And that was guaranteed to draw down heavy British artillery fire,

entirely useless fire.

The Germans benefited not only from simple ploys like this,

but also from an extraordinary new network of defences

now spreading across the landscape.

Constructed even as the battle raged,

they were called the Regelstellung.

The Regelstellung, literally blocking positions,

run perpendicular to the original German front lines.

Across this series of gentle ridges, here in front of me,

they were built on the reverse slopes of those ridges so the

trenches would remain invisible to British ground observers.

And they ran in parallel lines right across this landscape.

To carry out such a monumental task of engineering in the midst of the

Battle of the Somme really was a triumph of human effort.

But their purpose could not have been simpler, nor more vital.

To understand this better, follow me across this field.

I'm moving towards the blocking lines installed here,

named after local places, so the Beaucourt, Thiepval

and Mouquet Regelstellung.

Construction had begun as early as the 5th of July.

Woven into the defences of the still uncaptured stronghold of Thiepval.

They both protected the village

and blighted Hague's desire to break out northwards.

Throughout the battle,

they successfully slowed and boxed in the British.

Constricting the Tommies to an ever narrowing corridor of action.

To capture the German third line and threaten the town of Bapaume,

the Allies had a number of key targets.

One was a heavily fortified hillock

believed to be an ancient burial mound.

The positions around the Butte de Warlencourt

were held by the 16th Bavarian regiment.

On the morning of the 12th of October,

the 9th Scottish division advanced barely 200 yards across these fields

before being halted by a rain of lead and steel.

In the weeks that followed, repeated attempts were made

to capture the butte. On the 18th,

the 23rd, the 28th and the 29th of October.

It had become, as an officer of the Durham light infantry later noted,

an obsession.

But every assault failed.

Why? Partly because by this time,

every German regiment on the Somme

was able to deploy at least twice as many machine guns

than they had on the first day of fighting.

But there was now another factor at work.

Should the British have actually taken the stronghold,

the Butte de Warlencourt,

it's quite possible that their tenure would have been brief.

Hundreds of assaults had ultimately failed in the face

of German Gegenstosse,

bitter, brutal, hand-to-hand, face-to-face counterattacks.

In fact, by mid-October 1916,

German High Command were able to

report they were invariably successful

when delivered as an immediate and instinctive counterpunch.

But now the Allies were going to face an even greater challenge.

For a dedicated, elite German counterattack unit had arrived.

They were the notorious Sturmtruppen,

the storm troopers.

As masters of the counterattack, Sturmtruppen gradually

became a vital element in defence in depth.

They were highly motivated, highly trained troops,

mainly volunteers with distinctive uniforms and specialist weapons like

light machine guns, semi-automatic rifles and portable flame-throwers.

Storm troopers were renowned for their teamwork and proficiency

in ruthless, close combat fighting.

And their appearance here on the Somme

signalled the birth of a legendary status

that soon came to define Teutonic martial ferocity.

As the attrition and frustration continued unabated,

doubts were being expressed not only from without,

but within the British Army.

On the 3rd of November,

General Sir Henry Rawlinson received an unusually forthright evaluation

from one of his own corps commanders.

After a series of disastrous assaults, the commander of XIV Corp,

Lord Cavan, wrote very frankly to Rawlinson here,

expressing grave concerns over another venture proposed for the

5th of November in support of the French.

Cavan did not mince his words.

An advance from my present position with the troops at my disposal has

practically no chance of success on account of the heavy fire

of machine guns and artillery from the North.

And the enormous distance we have to advance

against a strongly prepared position.

Owing to the failure to advance our line in the recent operations.

Cavan actually refused to attack

until Rawlinson had visited the front

to see the conditions for himself.

To his credit, Rawlinson did so and immediately agreed

that the plan was unrealistic,

only to be then overruled by Hague after a meeting

here at the chateaux with French commanders.

So regardless of the state of the ground and the

condition of his troops,

the commander-in-chief was determined

to accommodate his senior ally.

So it was that as part of a substantial

Anglo-Australian operation, on the 5th of November,

the Butte de Warlencourt was attacked once more.

The enterprise included three

battalions of the Durham light infantry.

Amongst them was Lance-Corporal Harry Cruddas.

Immediately the first wave mounted the trench and made off.

They were met by terrific and annihilating fire and crumpled up

like snow in summer.

The second wave was by this time on its way.

I was in that wave.

The enemy barrage was doing enormous damage

and our fighting strength was fast diminishing.

Cruddas's ninth Durham's actually overran the Butte,

only to be evicted by the inevitable counter attack.

The other assaults floundered beneath shell,

mortar and multiple machine gun fire.

Casualties, as ever, were heavy.

As autumn turned to winter, there was no escape from the cold,

the damp and the deep discomfort.

And now British morale was plunging too.

The German archives provide fascinating evidence of this,

especially in reports of conversations with Allied prisoners.

Intelligence documents like these are very illuminating

because they show a gradual shift in British Stimmung,

that's mood and morale.

After the early gung ho days of July,

we can see a growing pessimism and even doubt as the battle slithers

towards yet another winter without even a glimpse of Sir Douglas Haig's

decisive victory. One man says,

"The so-called walkover has turned into a steeplechase with an infinite

"number of obstacles."

And these files show that he was far from alone in harbouring

such bleak thoughts.

Having now spoken with many hundreds of British prisoners,

German interrogators made a number of observations.

Among the troops themselves,

there is an undeniable mood of war weariness.

Which seems to have become even more widespread in recent months,

perhaps due to the lack of success of the offensive as a whole.

Even some officers have not been afraid to admit that they were

pleased to have been taken prisoner.

Every single man expresses his disgust at the

unconscionable machinations of the British press

and the lies that it constantly publishes in the guise of news.

And in particular the so-called letters from the front

that appear in the Daily Mail,

which are evidently written by someone

who has never set foot in France.

And after their experiences at Pozieres,

Delville Wood, Mouquet Farm and Courcelette,

we can also hear Australians,

South Africans and Canadians railing against British leadership.

Among many soldiers from the colonies,

the appetite for the war has sunk to zero and a consequence of the less

favoured treatment that they feel they receive

by comparison with British soldiers.

And also because they believe they are simply being used by the

British, especially when it comes to the frequency with which they are

deployed in the toughest locations

and are thrown into the bitterest fighting.

One Australian described his comrades

as, "The white slaves of the Somme."

But it wasn't just the physical hardships of battle.

In common with all the great offensives,

the Somme saw an abrupt rise in mental illness,

in particular it was the ever increasing intensity

and duration of heavy shellfire

that led to thousands on both sides suffering from shellshock.

The condition could lead to self-mutilation, even suicide.

And as always, it produced a sharp spike in desertion rates.

Whilst some slipped across no-man's-land to the enemy,

most disappeared into the calmer backwaters behind their own lines.

For one man, it led to a prison cell here in the

Belgian town of Poperinge.

His name was Second Lieutenant Eric Skeffington Poole

of the 11th Battalion the West Yorkshire Regiment.

He was known to have a nervous disposition,

and in fact he'd been hospitalised for shellshock,

that's what we know today as post-traumatic stress disorder.

But on the 5th of October 1916, here in the village of Flers,

he'd gone missing.

And was absent for two days before being arrested wearing a

private's tunic.

Now because Eric Poole was an officer,

his case received special attention.

But as it made its way up the chain of command

towards the final arbiter, the commander-in-chief himself,

there were recommendations that the penalty,

because of his mental state, should be imprisonment.

But despite exonerating evidence being presented

at Eric Poole's court-martial,

Sir Douglas Haig decided an example must be made.

In his diary on 6 December, Haig wrote...

"Such a crime is more serious in the case of an officer than of a man.

"And also it is highly important that all ranks should realise the

"law is the same for an officer as a private."

Four days later, Eric Poole was

escorted from his cell to this nearby courtyard,

where he was blindfolded, tied to a post and executed by firing squad.

He was the first British officer to suffer the ultimate penalty

for desertion.

And here he lives in a cemetery on the outskirts of Poperinge

amongst the other fallen, but beneath a headstone

that offers no clue to his fate.

Poole was one of 284 British and Empire soldiers

to face the firing squad for casting away arms,

cowardice or desertion during the war.

Many German soldiers also quit the battlefield,

but the number of executions is strikingly fewer.

Only 18 during the entire conflict.

So what explains the disparity?

The answer sheds revealing light on differences between the two sides.

For generations, British high command had dealt

with offenders as they saw fit,

taking full military control of the judicial process.

The records show that the tradition at court-martials was for both

prosecution and defence to be

conducted by serving officers untrained in the law.

By 1916, and now with an army of millions,

the reason for imposing the death penalty for desertion was primarily

concerned not with justice, nor even punishment, but deterrence.

On the Somme, it was vital to stop a disciplinary rot setting in.

And this was clear from the way the executioners

themselves were selected.

Firing squads were often deliberately composed of men from

the victim's own unit, so they were being ordered to shoot

one of their own comrades.

And officers were required to read out the latest list of executions to

their men. Here is an example.

It's another captured British document, so it is in German.

There are four men listed, they are all deserters,

Fahnenflucht im Deinster.

Deserting his Majesty's forces.

The sentence of the court, Tod Durch Erschiessen,

death by shooting.

And this one carried out on the 29th of October at 6.26 in the morning.

German high command approached desertion differently.

One might even call their methods more liberal.

Every case could be subject to civilian law,

dealt with by professional lawyers and heard in the presence of a jury.

And the records indicate a much greater empathy for the awful plight

of the common soldier.

Also, the thorough training of the German army

imbued their troops with an unmatched degree of duty,

discipline and honour.

But there was another factor keeping the number of executions so low.

German officers were allowed to take the law into their own hands.

They could strike offenders or enforce corporal punishment

without the need for court-martial.

It may seem a rough form of justice,

but a public display of dishonour in front of comrades frequently acted

more effectively than judicial decree.

On the Somme, the sheer vigour of German resistance

showed that morale was high and discipline good.

So there was no need for executions at dawn.

By early November, Sir Douglas Haig was determined

to assure his French allies that British aggression

would be maintained now and throughout the coming winter.

So he ordered attacks on both banks of the River Ancre

and in sectors where for months his line had not moved at all.

These operations would be commanded by General Sir Hubert Gough

of the newly renamed 5th Army,

a man with a reputation for no holds barred aggression.

One was planned for the morning of the 13th of November,

here on the Hawthorn Ridge in front of Beaumont Hamel.

Officer Cadet Pukal was on duty in the German trenches.

Something was happening out there.

I could hear repeated muffled sounds.

It couldn't be digging or wire cutting.

I staggered back.

What was that?

A huge pillar of flame and smoke was ascending skywards.

The astonished Pukal had witnessed the detonation of a huge mine

packed with 30,000lbs of explosive.

It went up on almost exactly the same spot

as the one blown on the very first day of fighting in July.

But this time the waiting Scotsmen were able to grab

and hold the initiative.

The Highlanders of the 51st division surged towards the enemy trenches,

breaking in at several places.

Soon German prisoners streamed back across these fields.

The supporting tanks stuck in the mud almost immediately

but they weren't required.

The artillery and a deluge of poison gas had done the trick.

There was success at Beaumont Hamel,

but as ever, it was a different story elsewhere.

At nearby Serre, the British met the same uncut wire

and annihilating machine guns

that had confronted their predecessors on the 1st of July.

But this time they also faced a no-man's-land of waist-deep mud.

For the next five days, the Germans and the mud stifled British hopes.

Considering the conditions, Gough's attacks made good ground,

but on 50% of the battlefront, he failed to achieve his hopes.

And it was on the following day, Sunday, the 19th of November 1916,

that the Battle of the Somme is officially said to have concluded.

As the troops prepared to endure the third Christmas of the war in

freezing trenches and icy dugouts,

they may have laughed had they been told the battle was over.

For the fighting did not cease but continued well into the

New Year of 1917.

The closing date of the Somme campaign was

actually decided four years

later, in 1920, when the battle's Nomenclature Committee,

a Whitehall body,

was tasked to officially name and date every action of the war.

The troops may also have raised a wry smile at the news that

Sir Douglas Haig had ordered what he called winter sports,

to keep the offensive spirit alive, harass and kill Germans

and try to steal more ground.

One such exercise took place on the 17th of February, 1917,

when almost 9,000 men took up their positions on frozen ground

in a sector called Boom Ravine.

They were about to take part in what I consider to be the final

major action of the Somme campaign.

The British were shelled, even as they assembled in no-man's-land.

The previous day, a thaw had set in, so when the attack got underway,

the troops struggled in the melting ice and defrosting mud.

To make matters much worse,

the creeping barrage plan had been drawn up for dry, frosty conditions.

So, the artillery's curtain of protective shells surged ahead of

the slithering and now fatally exposed infantry.

The result was over 2,000 casualty and only a limited number of

objectives gained in and around Boom Ravine.

The pinpoint accuracy and timing of the enemy shellfire before battle

could hardly have been luck.

So, there was suspicion.

Was treachery involved?

There were all too many uncomfortable indications

from captured German officers that the day before the attack,

British prisoners or deserters had spilled the beans,

giving away the exact location here and the precise timing

of the operation.

They were noted in British war diaries

and an official enquiry was launched, but whatever the truth,

it provided the Germans with further evidence

that their enemy intended to sustain the attrition

until their next major offensive,

believed to be in a few weeks' time.

But German high command had other plans.

They were about to inflict the greatest surprise of the war

upon the entirely unsuspecting British and French.

A few days after Boom Ravine,

Allied troops reported a peculiar lack of German activity

on the far side of no-man's-land.

Patrols crept nervously out to investigate,

not a German was to be seen.

Where were they?

In fact, they ended up here, miles from the Somme battleground.

I'm standing on a steel reinforced concrete triple machine gun post,

one of thousands of similar emplacements

installed along the Siegfriedstellung.

Known to the British as the Hindenburg Line,

it was an extraordinary feat of military engineering,

90 miles long and 10 miles broad.

Since September 1916, engineers, recruits,

imported and forced labour and

prisoners of war had toiled to create this

formidable defensive bulwark.

The withdrawal was even kept secret from German troops

until the last moment.

And with that shocking move,

the blood-soaked fields of the Somme

instantly became still and redundant backwaters.

And all the British reconstruction work during the winter

was rendered null and void.

Some argue that the move here to the Hindenburg Line

was a sign of German weakness, and so it was.

But the objective was to increase their strength.

Around 90,000 troops and a great

mass of artillery had now been released

for service wherever they were required.

And it had also allowed the Germans to further enhance

their defence in depth -

on tactically favourable ground of their own choosing.

So, what the British press quite naturally described as a retreat

was in fact a finely calculated strategic withdrawal.

And, for me, this is the moment when the Battle of the Somme truly ended.

In the early spring of 1917, not the late autumn of 1916.

That operation, codenamed Alberich,

was accompanied by a ruthless policy of destruction - scorched earth.

In his memoir, Storm Of Steel,

Leutnant Ernst Junger described what he saw.

As far back as the Siegfriedstellung,

every village was reduced to rubble, every tree chopped down,

every road undermined, every well poisoned,

every cellar blown up or booby-trapped, every rail unscrewed,

every telephone wire rolled up, everything burnable, burnt.

In a word, we were turning the country that our

advancing opponents would occupy into a wasteland.

At least now, the duty of finding and recovering

the dead of a dozen nations, including Germans,

could be carried out in safety.

It had finally become possible to gather up the mortal remains of men

who had lain on the Somme battlefield

since the first days of fighting eight months before.

A task that fell to Private Reg Glen

of the Sheffield City Pals Battalion.

The padre asked me if I would

accompany him to visit our old front line

and no-man's-land, which was littered with British dead.

Ours were in lines when they had fallen.

They were just skeletons in khaki rags and their equipment.

We walked up to the old German wire.

The padre had brought a friend with him and the three of us turned back

to look towards our lines.

Then the padre said a prayer for the dead and we sang the hymn

For All The Saints.

They, and tens of thousands of others,

now lie across Picardy in cemeteries like this.

Here, we may try to imagine the Battle of the Somme,

but we will always fail,

for our imaginations are, perhaps thankfully, ill-equipped.

In truth, the Somme casualty figures also defy our perceptions.

There were 419,654 men of Britain and her empire killed,

wounded and missing...

..and 204,253 French soldiers.

That's an Allied total of just over 620,000 men.

And on the other side of the wire, can those losses be quantified too?

The official British history of the campaign, published in 1938,

informs us that German losses were 680,000.

But recent studies suggest that figure was massaged

to cultivate the notion of unequivocal German defeat.

Present estimates suggest around 430,000.

But reducing the Somme to a battle of numbers,

with each digit representing a life, a death,

a maiming and haunting memories that would never fade...

..this, I think, is a detestable exercise.

There was an equality of suffering.

Let us leave it at that.

Protocol demanded that Sir Douglas Haig

write a Somme dispatch -

the commander-in-chief's own official account of the campaign,

it was published in The London Gazette.

Haig's dispatch is an important document,

with even more important politico-military aims.

In it, he states that Verdun has been relieved,

that he main German forces on the Western Front have been held,

and that the enemy's strength has been worn down.

All perfectly accurate, of course.

But not the whole truth.

It's worth looking again at a map showing the Allied objectives

before the fighting began on 1st of July, 1916.

The intention was to overwhelm all three German defensive positions.

But let us now trace a line across the Somme battlefield that shows

actual gains made during those long months of combat.

We can see that by the time the battle officially ended,

the most advanced British troops lay just six miles

from the original start line.

And in the North, gains could be measured in yards, not miles.

None of this was mentioned in Haig's dispatch,

which spoke of considerable further progress,

successes gained an undiminished confidence

that a decisive victory would come.

This is where I began our story of the Somme,

at Serre, on the northern battlefront.

The first day of filming was here during the summer

and I've returned for our last in late winter.

Walking again across no-man's-land, I'm left contemplating

Sir Douglas Haig's claims for success.

Some historians argue that the campaign provided the British Army

with a bloody but critical testing ground,

where vital lessons were learned,

that helped speed the Armistice two long years later.

There is no question that the battle seriously damaged

German offensive capabilities,

but they were far from defeated.

There had not been the breakthrough that Haig predicted

and so very many yearned for.

And the Somme had certainly not hastened the end of the war,

far from it.

As I've argued throughout this series,

it was what was happening on the other side of no-man's-land,

the other side of the wire, that proved decisive here on the Somme.

So, in my opinion,

the battle should be classed as a German defensive victory.

The fighting compelled them to forge

ever more devastating and disruptive tactics.

Tactics that the following year would be further enhanced

and developed, so that defence in depth

became elastic defence in depth, an extraordinary system,

whereby an enemy was deliberately enticed deep into German territory

before being withered and then wiped away by counterattack.

This is what happened during the Allied defences during the most

costly year of the war, 1917 -

at Arras, in Champagne and at Passchendaele.

The wretched results of those encounters came about

as a direct consequence of German lessons learned in Picardy in 1916.

This was the Somme's true and most dismal legacy.

The great sacrifice had served to increase the

blood-letting and extend the war.

And when in the autumn of 1918, German downfall did come,

it was under very different circumstances

and for very different reasons.