Diagram of the Battle of the Somme, showing battle lines and formations.
On July 1, 1916, the Allied and Central forces would open the Battle of the Somme, by all counts one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. This action, which would last for the better part of five months, would see a total of over one million casualties (to include wounded, missing, sick, and killed in action) in just this one battle. The effort to win would cost both sides hundreds of thousands of men killed, and also resulted in some of the worst instances of shell shock and loss of morale in the entire war. The battle would also mark the first major deployment of two forces that have long since become staples of the modern battlefield: the fighter plane and the tank.
The roots of the offensive go back to the end of 1915, when the Allied powers committed themselves to a battle at the River Somme occurring sometime in 1916. Drawing on the need for a combined effort, the original plan called for the use of French forces to bear the brunt of the attack with the British forces in a support role. This changed at the start of the battle, however, and would see the British take the major role and the French assume the support role. For the next five months, the Allied and Central Powers involved in fighting on the Western Front would hammer each other as they had never hammered each other before. With the full might of the industrial revolution and the associated scientific and technical fields now almost exclusively devoted to the war effort, the Somme represented the point on the graph at which the military industrial complex and World War I fighting finally met each other, with devastating consequences.
As the fighting at the Somme intensified, the earliest mass uses of tanks – and thus armored warfare – and fighter planes – which would represent the birth of airborne combat between dedicated fighters – would change the world. From these two developments, armies across the world would move to investigate and spend resources on armored forces and fighter planes that would in time lay the ground work for the units deployed in World War II and the doctrines that would subsequently be adopted and modified for use on battlefields to this day.
The Somme also left a lasting legacy of the suffering and the misery that the men who served endured at the behest of their nations. Soaring causality rates, few territorial gains, and the injuries that plagued the men in the trench-lines helped to lay the groundwork that would permanently alter the mindset of war from being one of noble pursuit to being an endevour that should be avoided, or if that is not possible, placed among the last of the last resorts.
About The Bugle
First published in 2006, the Bugle is the monthly newsletter of the English Wikipedia's Military history WikiProject.
