The Somme In A Day

So what do we hope to achieve in these battlefields in a day series? Well obviously we can't cover the whole battlefield. The idea is to give you an insight into that particular battle and the battlefield as it is today. To inspire you perhaps to make a visit to that area for the first time. And for those of you, I know many people who listen to the podcast travel regularly in normal times to the battlefields of the Great War.

Perhaps some of the lesser known locations that we talk about will inspire you to visit some of those as well. And for the many podcast listeners who live so far away from these places... It'll serve, I hope, as a virtual journey through this battlefield area. So as this is our second Battlefields in a Day episode, we'll begin to establish a regular kind of preparation for making these sorts of visits.

And as I said in the one about Eap, in some respects, when it comes to reading preparation for a visit like this, by all means do some reading and there are plenty of books on the Battle of the Somme. You could fill an entire library with them in many respects and we'll talk about some of the books on this subject shortly. But one of the things that I always say, sometimes you get more from the reading once you've been.

To get out on the ground, to familiarise yourself with that ground, to see how all these places knit together, how close they are, or the distance across no man's land, what did that really look like. When you can visualise these things, I think that the reading makes a lot more sense. So while it's good to do some basic prep work before you go there, Really, the in-depth reading, I always feel, should be done when you return, because to me, anyway, it always makes a lot more sense.

So when it comes to books on the Battle of the Somme, where to begin? Now, in the EAP episode, I mentioned my old school teacher, Les Coates, and his book on EAP. He did another one on the Somme, and I'll put a link to that on the podcast website, as with all of these books that we're about to talk about.

Les Coates' books are aimed at students, but I think that they give a good general view it's an intelligent book all of his books are and it gives you a good insight into the basic aspects of the Battle of the Somme and he concentrates quite heavily on the 1st of July the first day of the Battle of the Somme and there are very good maps in there as well which are key to understanding the ground as it is today but in terms of the literature on the Battle of the Somme there is a huge huge amount

so where do you begin now for myself the two titles that I'd always recommend as a kind of first reading is Martin Middlebrook's First Day of the Somme published in the 1970s following an extensive amount of research where he interviewed hundreds of Great War veterans who had taken part in the battle. I think this book is a real classic of the Battle of the Somme.

Your understanding of the Somme really is not complete without picking up Martin's book and reading that and understanding what the approach to the Somme was and what happened on that terrible first day when so many were killed and In conjunction with that is Lynn MacDonald's Somme, published in 1983, again following an extensive amount of work interviewing and visiting and researching the Great War veteran stories of the Battle of the Somme.

It's an oral history in many respects of the Somme, a bit like Martin Middlebrook's is, but he does somewhat more analysis, I think, than Lynn MacDonald. But Lynn MacDonald's book, again, I think it's an absolute classic of the Great War writing from that period and a book that you can pick up and just dip into and read again and again. Lynne Macdonald was a great writer, a great storyteller and all of that comes together in this book.

But in terms of other, in some respects, more recent studies, we've got work on the Battle of the Somme by authors like Peter Hart, Gary Sheffield's Forgotten Victory, and Andrew McDonald's and Paul Kendall, both recently, close to the centenary period, wrote books about the first day of the Battle of the Somme, looking at it in a new and somewhat different way. So the literature of the Somme expands, and in terms of personal accounts, there are so many.

There's a huge amount of memoirs that relate the story of the Battle of the Somme. The whole Great War, we often talk about the crisscross paths of the Great War and the whole Great War runs through those fields of Picardy in so many ways and the literature connected to it does as well. So there's no shortage of material really to prepare you for a visit to the Somme and also enhance your visit once you've returned.

In terms of guidebooks, there is my own Walking the Somme that came out in 1997 and 10 years ago I did a new edition of it it really could do with a new edition updated edition now but Martin Middlebrook who wrote that seminal book on the Battle of the Somme with his wife published an excellent guidebook to the Somme which is still in print and is highly highly recommended Jerry Merland and John Cooksey have also done some Somme guidebooks a second volume of which only recently came out

published by Pen and Sword and again highly recommended and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission produced their own little guidebook that covers the main semi up across those fields it was incredibly useful because it was at that time the only guidebook and I'll end on books with a nod back to my old friend and founder of the Western Front Association John Giles he's Somme Then and Now which is still in print by After the Battle you can pick up some of the earlier editions on eBay as well

again these are all books that are really great to have you can sit down and look you can absorb the history of the Somme and once you've made a visit to that ground all of it begins to connect together or part of that Great War jigsaw that we often talk about. But maps are important too. The Somme area is covered by the French IGN Blue Series maps. These are quite detailed maps, the kind of equivalent of ordnance survey maps that show the tracks and the paths and the routes around the Somme.

For the centenary, they did a special version map of the main Somme battlefields with some of the trench lines and front lines overlaid and dispositions of units. But one of the things that I did in those early visits to the Somme before those kind of ready-made maps were available was to get a couple of the Blue Series maps, trace the front line myself using trench maps and contemporary maps, and then mark on different positions and locations and units to create your own overlay.

And while we're in a digital age now, and we'll come onto some digital mapping shortly, The old method of annotating maps yourself is all part of the way to connect to the landscape. You can't understand a landscape unless you can understand the maps that portray it and vice versa.

And putting in that map work by creating your own overlays, tracing the line of the trenches, marking on key cemeteries, key fortifications, key locations, unit markings, which unit advance from here to there and so on, all of that helps with your own research and your own understanding.

but there's a digital way to do it as well and IGN produce digital versions of their maps which you can use on a Mac or a PC but there's also the excellent Great War Digital linesman product which is digital trench maps where you can use digital trench maps so GPS orientated trench maps that are accurate when you're on the ground and these are available in a pre-loaded tablet where you can stand on the battlefield to pick up a GPS signal and it'll show you where you are on the the First World

War landscape environment on the map that's on the tablet for that area. And it works also with modern maps so you can see that too and trace your route as you walk around that particular battlefield area. Now it doesn't just cover the Somme, it covers the whole British sector of the Western Front and it's not a cheap product but it's an incredibly useful product and one that I've been using myself since 2008. I need to upgrade to a more recent tablet to do that.

I had it on a Mark I iPad and it worked well on there because that was quite a big screen but the newer version on the newer tablet they have works much better and once i get a chance to get one of those and get over onto the the battlefields with it i'm going to report back on the podcast what it's like to use that so that's our preparation getting ready for our visit to the Somme in a day first let's understand the Somme battlefields with some history and background to the battle of the Somme

in 1916 When we look at the background to the Battle of the Somme in July to November of 1916, our story takes us back a year, really, to the previous summer of 1915, when the British Army, before the Battle of Loos, began to extend its line southwards and take over more sectors of the Western Front. It wasn't entirely joined up at that point, so British units went down to the Somme, but it hadn't as yet taken over the area to the north around Arras, so it wasn't one continuous line.

But British units like the 51st Highland Division, for example, went into the Somme trenches in the summer of 1915. took over from the French who had established those positions since the early battles of movement there in the autumn of 1914, and gradually the British line on the Somme expanded until the early part of 1916 when that sector between northern France, the Forgotten Front as we call it today, and around Arras to the Somme was all joined up.

But another factor in the road to the Somme in 1916 was the outcome of the Battle of Loos. Loos was a failure, a costly failure. It had not achieved the breakthrough that had been promised. And the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, was dismissed and replaced by Sir Douglas Haig. After taking command of the BEF, the British Expeditionary Force, Haig met with his French counterparts to discuss their plans for the forthcoming year.

And at the Chantilly Conference in December 1915, the French, who were the major stakeholders really on the Western Front, at that stage the British Army was holding less than 100 miles of the front, the Belgians about 20-30 miles, and the French the rest, so well over 300 miles of the Western Front. So they were the major players. In their eyes, the war was about France. They were less concerned with Belgium and more concerned with pushing the Salbosch out of France and defeating Germany.

Haig was an Ypres salient man. Ypres salient, the ground around Ypres in Flanders, was the key British sector on the Western Front at that time. And he had in hand a plan to attack along the Messines Ridge to the south of Ypres in 1916.

But at Chantilly in December 1950 the commanders sat down and discussed what they would do the following year and Haig agreed to the idea of an Anglo-French offensive to take place on the Somme sector because this would be the point once the British had extended their line properly to the south and connected all those bits up the Somme would be the area where the French and the British armies joined. So if you were going to launch a joint attack, that was the most ideal ground to do it.

So plans were put in place for this hammer blow against the German lines to properly break out, attack side by side.

Some of the 1915 battles had been joint offensives, Neuve Chapelle, Albers Ridge, Loos, but the British had attacked in one area and then quite a long way down the front the French had attacked elsewhere this time attacking side by side hopefully they would achieve victory break through the German lines and end the war and tentatively this was planned for June of 1916 it would coincide as well with the build up of the British army a little bit more about that shortly but as with any plans no

plan survives first contact with the enemy and once this plan had been made what do the Germans do they decide to go on the offensive themselves at Verdun in February 1916 16 the Germans attack in the Verdun salient with the intention it was said of bleeding the French nation white.

Now the history of the fighting at Verdun doesn't really concern us here but what it does do in terms of the Battle of the Somme is draw French units away from the Somme front to defend Verdun and then later launch the counter-attacks to push the Germans back.

So what that means in terms of the preparation for the Somme, although French units will continue to be involved in the battle it is much more of a British affair than a French one and as the fight moves on at Verdun and the French position becomes more and more desperate the approaching battle of the Somme it was felt at the time was about relieving pressure on the French at Verdun by drawing German troops away from the Verdun sector to defend the Somme because it was felt the Germans would not

be able to maintain an offensive operation at Verdun and a defensive battle on the Somme so the whole purpose of the battle to a degree changed but Haig was confident and believed that a hammer blow could be inflicted nevertheless on the German positions and the British army was building up its strength at this time and when we think about the kind of men that travelled to the Somme in 1916 to take part in that battle we think of those eager volunteers of 1914 this was not the first time in

which men of that army the new army or Kitchener's army as it became known had fought in a battle that was at Gallipoli in August 1915 and then on the Western Front at Luz in September of the same year but these men of the new army raised in 1914 when Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War called for 100,000 volunteers and by the end of 1914 had over a million and across Britain all of the service battalions of different regiments so wartime raised battalions were brought into the army chums

and pals Battalions particularly in the north were raised and these men, these eager volunteers began to be sent out to the western front in unit by unit, brigade by brigade, division by division as the British Expeditionary Force expanded throughout 1915 on into early 1916. With the infantry came a huge amount of guns, of artillery and with the artillery came huge amounts of shells.

All the problems in artillery shell mass manufacture had been solved in 1915 and in the approach to the Battle of the Somme an unprecedented amount of firepower was available and with it the shells to do their damage. The destructive potential destructive power of the artillery seemed almost unstoppable. So in the spring of 1916 as the British Army expanded the units began to prepare for the Battle of the Somme.

More and more units were sent down to the Somme fronts, and as the spring moved into the early summer, no one on the Somme front could escape from the fact that some kind of offensive was just round the corner here, something that the Germans too did not fail to notice. But the men, the British and Commonwealth soldiers who were on that road to the Somme, were in high morale as the battle approached.

We tend to think of soldiers sitting in their trenches in lots of dew and gloom but this seemed to be a different battle there were more guns there were more shells there were more men and the units assembled for this battle were told that once the bombardment would fall onto the German trenches and it would take place over nearly a week nothing would survive that bombardment one of the phrases used was nothing would survive not even a rat and all they would have to do was to walk across no

man's land occupy the enemy positions beyond would be in the town behind the German lines of Bapaume and Perron by nightfall. Berlin, potentially, by Christmas. The reality was the Germans had dug deep on the Somme front. This is rolling chalk downland. It's not flat. And in that chalk, the Germans had constructed deep dugouts, tens of feet, some of them 80 feet, beneath the battlefield.

And the majority of the 1.75 million shells that were dropped on the German lines on that 18-mile Somme front, from the village of Gommekor in the north down to Montauban in the south, were the standard field artillery 18-pounder shells and they were not going to penetrate into the ground 10 feet, let alone 80 feet, and the Germans simply sheltered in their dugouts from the Trommelfeuer, as they called it, the drum fire, until zero hour on the 1st of July 1916.

7.30am on that perfect summer's morning, Siegfried Sassoon called it a sunlit picture of hell, more than 100,000 men from Kitchener's army, units from the Territorial Force and the last vestiges of the regular army were volunteers to a man walked out from their frontline trenches out into no man's land to make their attack it was perfect visibility perfect visibility for us but also for the Germans and the men who went over the top that morning walked quite simply into machine gun oblivion By

the close of the day's fighting, the British Army had suffered more than 57,000 casualties, of which almost 20,000 were men killed in action or had died of wounds. It was the blackest day of the British Army, its worst casualties in a single day than on any other day in its entire history, both before and since.

But to the south, where the lines had joined with the French Army, where a lot more heavy artillery was available to smash the German defences, to cave in their dugouts, to knock out their machine gun positions, there had been some success. Elsewhere along that 18-mile front, only the odd trench had been captured. In many cases, no man's land was now littered with the dead, and the attack had been a complete and utter failure.

But between Mametz and Montaubat, the battle continued, and gradually over the next few days and the next few weeks, the line was pushed back. The British advance moved forward. On the 14th of July, in a night attack, the next German German line was breached and two months later on the 15th of September 1916 a new weapon was used for the first time and that was the tank in the Battle of Fleurs-Courcelette.

When using those tanks Canadian, New Zealand and British forces pushed the Germans back and advanced even further into their defences.

After Fleurs-Courcelette and those first use of tanks the weather changed, the rains came and turned the Somme into a quagmire but the battle continued throughout October on into November and gradually the British line moved nearer to Bapaume and the French were now more heavily involved in the Somme because with the turning point of the attack on the Somme in July 1916 that saw the scaling down and then the stopping of the German offensive at Verdun the French went on the counter-attack there

and as they pushed the Germans back more French troops became available to take part in the fighting on the Somme and their line was now creeping towards that objective But the weather proved decisive and the battle ended in a snowstorm on the 18th of November 1916. I say ended, but fighting continued on and off throughout the next winter of 1916-17, that cold winter of the war in places like the Ankara Heights and Boom Ravine and in the French sector.

But historians like to classify and they like to categorise and for most, the official historian anyway, the Battle of the Somme took place between the 1st of July and the 18th of November 1916. And in that period, more than 450,000 Germans were killed, wounded or taken prisoner and over 650,000 British Commonwealth and French soldiers were killed, wounded or missing.

So the Somme had become the graveyard really of those volunteers from Britain and the Commonwealth who joined up in those early months of the war.

As that winter began to settle in and the snow covered the battlefield with a white blanket, the Germans realised that from their point of view, although the British had not broken through on the Somme front, they were now left holding a line that could not be held indefinitely so they began to make plans to withdraw from the Somme front and began to build new defences the Siegfriedstellung or the Hindenburg line as we called it which the Germans then withdrew to in the early part of 1917 the

fighting then moved on to other battlefields but returned to the Somme area in March when the Germans broke through the town of Albea which had been that pivotal point in the British advance in 1916 was captured by the Germans but the line held between Albert and Amiens.

The front stabilised until in the summer of 1918 British, Canadian, Australian and French troops in the Battle of Amiens on the 8th of August 1918 broke through and that was the black day of the German army which signalled the beginning of the end of the war and the last hundred days of the conflict. But for most the Somme would always be a battle connected to the events there of 1916. A.J.P.

Taylor said that that for him the 20th century began on the 1st of July 1916, the move from the old world to the new, a new world of industrial warfare and killing on industrial scale, which would characterise much of the rest of the 20th century. So that's some background to the Somme, and we now move on to the first part of our journey as we visit the Somme in a day. We're to begin our visit to the Somme.

We're coming into the northern area of the battlefield on the road that runs from Amiens to Arras and ahead of us is a large military cemetery, Serre Road No. 2. Beyond that is the village of Serre, really nothing much more than a hamlet even today. And to the north of that is Gomercourt, the very northern area of the advance.

In many respects that was a separate operation because it was in the next army area and it was the site of a diversionary attack with the 56th London Division and the 46th North Midland Division attacking the village of Gomercourt to draw the Germans' attention away from the northern area of the main Somme advance.

Serre ahead of us is a battlefield forever associated with those Powells who came to the Somme in 1916, and we'll learn more of their story when we get up to that part of the battlefield shortly. But as you come into any battlefield, one of the keys to understanding the First World War is getting a glimpse into the sheer scale of it, the size of it. And here at Sayre Road No. 2 Cemetery, this is the largest British and Commonwealth cemetery on the Somme battlefields.

It's a Lutyens-designed cemetery, and we'll come across Lutyens a few times during the in the course of this Somme in a day, and there are more than 7,100 burials here covering Britain and all of the Commonwealth nations that took part in the Somme battle in 1916. Of that total, more than 4,900, so the majority of them are unidentified. This was a concentration cemetery.

There's a main plot one in the middle, the original plot, which was a battlefield cemetery made after the final advance here in November of 1916 and then all of the orderly plots around it that original plot is a slightly different angle to the others the other plots are all made up of graves brought in from the surrounding battlefields and all over the Somme region one of the very first men to die on the Somme British soldiers in 1914 just crossing the Somme river a soldier of the army service

corps who died there then he's buried here so it's from a wide Somme area and it represents almost every aspect of the battle of the Somme in different ways. In that original plot one, it's one of the graves that I always go and see when I visit this cemetery, it's one of my Great War lodestars, 2nd Lieutenant Gilbert Waterhouse of the 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment, who was killed here on the first day of the Somme, the 1st of July 1916.

He was one of the minor Great War poets, and he wrote a series of poems about the fictitious village in the wood of Somme Corps, which, if you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that is my Twitter handle so Gilbert Waterhouse is one of those people that's always fascinated me and I like to have in these cemeteries of the Great War that we visit in places like this someone that I'm somehow connected to or know their story to go and visit and often then that takes you through the cemetery and you

find other graves of other individuals and you get inspired to look up their story to find out more about their life and their service on the Western Front These cemeteries, all of these cemeteries, these silent cities of the Great War, are really not so silent. They're like time capsules of that conflict and can tell us so much about that generation and the events that took place there. It's a very large cemetery this. You get a sense of the size of the armies that marched to the Somme in 1916.

It's not as big, obviously, as Tyne Cot, but I think it has the same impact. And whenever I've taken groups here on Ledger Holidays Battlefield Tours, they've always been staggered by the size of it. If you go right to the back of the cemetery, there are two shelters where there's a long curved wall behind them. And all those years ago, when I was doing my research for walking the Somme, I discovered that the Thiebval Memorial wasn't the original name for that memorial.

It wasn't even going to be at Thiebval. It was probably going to be on the main road, the Albay-Bapone Road at Pozières. It was originally going to be called the Ankra Heights Memorial. And there was talk of there being several memorials on the Somme because of the scale of the missing here. And when you look at the wall that connects these two shelters at the back of this cemetery, I often wonder if they'd planned some kind of memorial to the missing here, but it was never built.

Walking back down through the cemetery, just over the cemetery wall in the next field, you can see there's a small cross. It's a private memorial to Lieutenant Val Braithwaite. He was also killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme with the 1st Battalion Somerset line infantry. The memorial was originally in the field to the left of the cemetery as you go in, close to a position called the Heidenkopf or the Heathen's Head. Valentine Braithwaite was a regular soldier.

He was one of the first officers of the British Army to be awarded the Military Cross at Plug Street in 1914. His father was a senior officer and he served with his father at Gallipoli in 1915 and then when the Gallipoli campaign was over, he returned to the Western Front.

His father was promoted to command the 62nd West Riding Division, a Yorkshire territorial and Val was killed here on the first day of the Somme and when his father's division came to the Western Front and served in this sector during the winter of 1916-17 his dad was coming up to the front line on a regular basis to look to see if he could find his son's grave or his body on the battlefield he never did and when the war was over he purchased the ground where his son had fallen and preserved it

as a permanent memorial he then invested some money with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Imperial War Graves Commission as they were the and they now maintain the memorial. It's one of a large number of these private memorials scattered across the battlefields.

Continuing down the main Amiens Arras road, we pass a French cemetery on the left-hand side from the fighting here in 1914-15, and a memorial chapel to the Battle of Serre-Hebuterne that took place here in June of 1915, prior to the arrival of British forces. And we come to another British cemetery, Serre Road No.

1, not as big as the previous cemetery we've just come from, again a post-war concentration cemetery with an original plot of graves at the back including the very young soldier Horace Eales of the Leeds Pals who fell aged 15 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme but this serves as a good place to park your car and then take the track up the hill to the battlefield cemeteries on the top of the ridge here this brings us up onto that Serre battlefield as we walk up the track over to our

right is the village the Hamlet of Serre sitting on that rising ground we're roughly following the front line positions as we walk up here and we come to several battlefield cemeteries. The first of these is Sayre Road No. 2. Beyond it is Queen Cemetery, Poiseuille and then Luke Cop Cemetery and out of view behind the trees is Railway Hollow.

And these are small comrade cemeteries, men who had joined up together, had served together and sadly here on the Somme had died together, buried in these field graves made on this battlefield, not during the battle itself but once the Germans had withdrawn to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. So sadly we see here the graves of men who lay out in no man's land from the 1st of July right through to the following spring of 1917. And we notice a predominance of Yorkshire related regiments.

The East Yorkshire Regiment, the West Yorkshire Regiment and the York and Lancs. But also the East Lancashire Regiment and the Durham Line Infantry. And when we do a bit of research we find that these are connected by virtue of being POWs battalions of the British 31st Division. An entire division of these POWs units raised largely in the north of England and sent out to First Suez in 1915 and then took part in their first attack here on the Somme on the 1st of July.

Amongst them were the Accrington Pals, the Barnsley Pals, the Bradford Pals, the Leeds Pals, the Sheffield City Battalion and the Durham Pals. John Harris, who had fictionalised the account of the Sheffield City Battalion, the Sheffield Pals, said that of these men, they were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destruction.

And on the morning of the 1st of July, they emerged from their trenches out into the waist-high grass of no man's land and were cut to pieces by German machine gun fire and German artillery fire. The cemeteries really marked the high tide of the 1st of July advance. Only a small group from the Accrington POWs got into the German trenches here. The rest were pushed back in no man's land and hardly advanced more than a few yards from their front line wire.

History repeated itself with these POWs battalions here at the end of the Somme on the 13th of November when the Hull Pows, the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th East Yorks went into the attack over the same ground and they too suffered a similar fate and the dead from that two ends of the Somme battle can be found in these battlefield cemeteries here.

It was such a catastrophic event for Sheffield that they purchased some of the ground here, and the Sheffield Memorial Park, which includes some preserved trenches, some of the assembly trenches, a bit of communication trench, quite a lot of shell holes, was left in its wartime state and planted with trees, and the Sheffield Memorial was placed at its centre.

Behind it is the Railway Hollow Cemetery, where you find the grave of Alf Goodlad, who served and died with the Sheffield City Battalion on the 1st of July 1916 his parents added the inscription from Alf's letter onto his grave France is a grand nation worth fighting for And while this is a Sheffield Memorial Park since the 1980s, a lot of the other POWs units that served here added their memorials, or the descendants of those POWs added their memorials.

So the Accrington POWs, the ruined brick wall that commemorates them, the Chorley POWs, the Bradford POWs, and the Barnsley POWs, whose two battalions went into action here, and it became one of the most devastating days for the town of Barnsley in the entire Great War.

Here you can walk from the assembly trenches on the edge of the memorial park up that gentle grass path that takes you to Queen's Cemetery and in doing so you're crossing the British front line emerging into the old no man's land and this is where things like linesmen come into their own you can follow that on the screen with your digital trench maps but what it does when you walk that landscape and you see the low rise of Sear ahead of you you can see what killing fields these were in 1916 From

here we'll continue on our journey, return back down the hill, get back in our car and drive up over the next ridge, which is the Red Ann Ridge that connects Sare with the next village of Beaumont Hamel. Here we'll drive out of the village, towards where the front lines were in 1916, to a sunken lane and park here. This is the famous sunken lane in front of Beaumont Hamel.

It was in no man's land on the 1st of July, but in the preceding days a tunnel had been dug from the British front line into the sunken lane and then in the early hours of the 1st of July men from the 1st Battalion, the Lancashire Fusiliers, trench mortar men and machine gun men went into the sunken lane to use it as a jumping off position to make their advance.

Also there was Geoffrey Mallins, an official cinematographer who filmed the men in the lane before he took his camera back to an observation post further down the chalk escarpment beyond the sunken lane where he set up in preparation for the explosion of a But these images that he took here that day have become really iconic images, not just of the Great War, but of conflict in the 20th century.

The Sunken Lane has always been one of those incredible locations on the Somme where you can almost reach out and touch the past. When you've seen that film, including the restored, colourised version of it made for the centenary, it looks as if it was yesterday when you stand here in that lane and you look down and you imagine the men of the Lancashire Fusiliers looking back at the camera, at Malin's camera, not knowing what their fate was going to be that morning.

Over 450 of them became casualties, so many men whose faces that we see in that film most likely ended their war here whether with wounds or being killed in action and buried in the small Beaumont Hamel British Cemetery just beyond which again like the cemeteries at Sayre in some respects marks the high tide of the British advance here on the first day of the Somme. But the Battle of the Somme is always a battle of two ends.

The fighting on the 1st of July looked more back to Waterloo, but the memorial that stands at the beginning of the sunken lane to the men of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, part of the 51st Highland Division, who fought here on the 13th of November 1916, that was a very different Battle of the Somme, a battle that looked really forward to the fighting in Normandy. It was the emergence of the Somme, the emergence of armies on the Western Front from the old world of warfare into the new.

Ahead of us on the rising ground is a clump of trees that marks the site of the Hawthorne mine crater. There was a German redoubt up there called the Hawthorne redoubt, so named because there was a small Hawthorne tree that could be visibly seen in no man's land. That's what Malins filmed from his observation post just over to our right along the far end of the chalk escarpment there, close to where there's a water pumping station today.

You can walk down there and take a very good matching then and now from his film and the stills made by Lieutenant Baby Brooks who was the official photographer who was working alongside him.

mine crater for many many years was overgrown it was used by hunters it had not suffered the same fate as some mine craters on the Somme being used as a garbage pit to throw rubbish into but a group of British Great War enthusiasts the Hawthorne Crater Association have got a long lease on the site now to actively preserve it and make it open to visitors and really it is more accessible now than it has ever been you can take a very safe and easy path up to the top of the ridge to go to the crater

to see the size of it is in fact a double crater because the one blown by 252 Tunneling Company here on the 1st of July took off the nose of the German Redoubt and in the second attack in November they dug underneath the crater which the Germans had turned into a defensive position and blew another mine and so it's like a figure of eight shape with two slightly overlapping craters. When you stand there you can see the enormity of it clear Thank you very much.

From the sunken lane, we'll continue our journey through the next village, Auchanville, or Ocean Villas, as the British soldiers called it, and that'll take us through to an area of actively preserved battlefield at the Newfoundland Memorial Park. Newfoundland, the smallest colony in the British Empire to raise its own regiment, the Newfoundland Regiment, later in the war, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.

It had served at Gallipoli in 1915, and then here on the Western Front from 1916 until the end of the war. The Newfoundland government decided to mark its sacrifice with a series of bronze caribous. Caribou, a native animal of Newfoundland, was also the symbol used on the regimental badge. The attack on Beaumont Hamel on the 1st of July 1916 was their first engagement on the Western Front and their costliest. Of the 800 or so Newfoundlanders that went into action that day, 710 became casualties.

The unit was almost entirely wiped out.

And because of that terrible sacrifice, the plan was not just to erect a bronze caribou here, the widows and the mothers of the Newfoundland soldiers who died there purchased the land from the farmer and preserved the battlefield So we have here a snapshot of the Western Front, a complete set of British trenches, front line, support line, reserve line, communication trenches, no man's land and then the German positions beyond around the so called Wire Ravine a prehistoric quarry that snakes its

way back to the village of Beaumont Hamel. What we can see here is a representation of the Western Front as it was more than 100 years ago.

It's grassed over there's no battlefield noise or smell but it does give us an insight and it's quite good to come here sometimes at dusk when it's quiet when the visitors have gone you can wander through the park and get a sense of the atmosphere and you can also go up onto the area of the caribou itself not literally onto its back but you can stand there on a viewing platform and look over the trenches and look over the battlefield and within it are several battlefield cemeteries the wire

ravine cemetery hunters cemetery made in a shell hole following the highland division attack here in November 1916 and Hawthorne Ridge number one. We covered the park in some detail in a previous podcast so you can go back to find out more in that episode. So having seen a battlefield with a powers fort, having viewed the sunken lane and a mine crater from 1916 and seen a whole area of preserved battlefield we'll continue with our journey down into the next village of Hamel.

It'll take us down into the Onkra Valley. The river Onk or the anchor cuts through this part of the battlefield and and we'll turn right here and head down towards the town of Albea, the main staging post of British and Commonwealth forces on the Somme in 1916. That'll take us through Avaluie Wood, the largest area of wood just behind the British lines on the Somme in 1916.

It was said that on any day during the battle, at least 10,000 British soldiers were in this wood, either moving up to the front to take part in an attack or coming back. And there's some very good descriptions of it in the memoirs of George Copland, who wrote with a machine gun to Cambrai and he served here with the Machine Gun Corps in the early summer of 1916.

In Avaluie Village we'll turn left, cross over the River Onk and we'll see it doesn't look much more than a stream here but in 1916 particularly with the heavy rain it flooded a good area of the battlefield particularly in this valley going up towards the northern area of the front. Following the road we go past one of the positions known on the battlefield as Crucifix Corner. There's a big crucifix amongst the trees there today.

Martin Middlebrook records in the first day of the Somme how a group of volunteers marching up to the front was chastised by a regular soldier who called them fools for having voluntarily come to take part in a battle like this. A portent of doom for many of them as they march on a one-way ticket to take part in the Battle of the Somme. Following it round we climb up onto the next bit of high ground and we've got excellent views across to the right down into the town of Albert.

We can see the Basilica, the main church with the golden figure of Mary on top, hit the at that 90 degree angle the Leaning Virgin or the Golden Virgin as British soldiers called it could be seen from many of their front line trenches and as the road bends again that takes us down running parallel to Mash Valley there was a sausage valley here in the village of La Boisselle with a sausage shaped German observation balloon and if you have a sausage valley you have to have a Mash Valley as well.

Mash Valley was the longest distance across no man's land that any British soldiers had to advance on the first day of the Somme well over 700 yards at its greatest distance and unit after unit went into the attack here. A mine was blown, the Weissap mine, but the German defences remained intact and the unit that attacked here lost well over 6,000 casualties in this valley on the first day of the battle.

That takes us up and through the village of La Boiselle into the street of La Grande Mine, the large mine crater and that's the Loch Nagar crater. The Weissap mine was filled in in the 1970s and an Englishman and Richard Dunning purchased the Loch Nagar crater to preserve it. When he did that in the late 70s, he could never have known the number of people that would just decades later come to see this remnant of the Somme battle. In the centenary, hundreds of thousands of people came here.

Richard Dunning is still alive, still actively involved in its preservation but now the friends of Loch Nagar are the organisation that maintain this site and it's good to come and see it as well as the Hawthorne crater to get an insight into the underground war on the Western Front and the placing of these huge charges. People often ask how many Germans were killed when these mines like Hawthorne and Loch Nagar went off.

We know from the German records that at Hawthorne Ridge less than 30 Germans were killed by the mine explosions and for this one at Loch Nagar probably only about 50 so it was a very small number and one of the things that we learnt from the placement of these mines and the capture of the German trenches was the Germans did not keep the bulk of their troops in the front line so blowing a mine under the front line did not do as much damage to the garrison that defended it as if you blew it in

their second line where all their dugouts were and that was something that was done the following year for the Battle of Messines in June 1917 with devastating effect and enabling the British and Commonwealth forces to advance.

From Loch Nagaal, we'll retrace our steps through the village of La Boiselle, back out onto the main road, the Albert-Bapome Road, the old Roman road that runs through the middle of the battlefield here, go up over the high ground of the Tara-Usna Hills, named by the Highland Division who were here in 1915.

There's a good view back over the battlefield towards the Loch Nagaal crater from here, and that'll take us into the town of Albert, a town that we've covered in a previous podcast, podcast and serves as a good late lunch stop on this day on the Somme here we'll pause and begin our journey in the second part of our visit around the Somme battlefields As we emerge from the town of Albert we take the road to Perron and we pass the British and Commonwealth graves in Albert communal cemetery

extension on the right hand side. And further up before we get to the ring road that surrounds this side of the town of Albert we see the French cemetery on the left hand side as well. So two nations, the two nations that fought side by side on the Somme in 1916 represented in these two cemeteries within the town itself. Continuing on the Perron road, we head towards the village of Freecore. A first day of the Somme objective.

It wasn't taken until several days into the battle by men of the 17th Northern Division. And we turn off and go up through what was one of the larger villages on this side of the Somme battlefield, up to visit the German Soldatenfriedhof, the German military cemetery that is located here. Any visit to the battlefields should always include a visit to a German cemetery. Battlefield touring is not just about cemeteries.

But for the German side of the Great War to understand it, get a glimpse into it, there are not many reminders of their participation in the war on the landscape today, for obvious reasons. During the Battle of the Somme, almost every village behind the German lines had a military cemetery. Many of these were damaged or almost destroyed during the battle in 1916. And when the war was over, a decision was made to move the majority of them into concentration cemeteries in main areas.

So Free Corps is the main German cemetery for this part of the Somme. There are other German cemeteries on other parts of the Somme battlefield, down towards the Mandeville, for example. But some of the German wartime cemeteries that were behind their lines that had casualties coming back to them from the Somme area are in the next department, in an area that we don't always associate with the Somme.

So in places like Sapigny and Aschiette, you'll find German cemeteries that have quite a lot of Somme casualties in them. But here in this quite large German cemetery, there are more than seven 17,000 burials. Over 11,000 of those are in Kameradengraben, comrades' graves.

So these were burials moved here largely in the 50s from German cemeteries that existed in other areas that had been closed and then moved in following the outcome of a Second World War when the German Volksbund decided to close the majority of German cemeteries in the First World War because they were now having to cater to commemorate the dead of the Second World War and there simply wasn't enough money to commemorate commemorate both on the scale that there had been with the Great War, so

that's why many German cemeteries were closed and moved into mass graves during this period. Of that 17,000 burials, nearly 6,500 of them are unidentified. It was a cemetery originally established in 1920 and there have been recent burials here in the last few decades as well. All the soldiers that are buried here are buried individually outside of the Kameraden Graben, the mass graves.

But when you look at the black wrought iron crosses that mark the graves here, you'll see typically two names on the front and two names on the back, making many people believe that there are four soldiers in each grave. It's just that there's one grave marker per four soldiers. It's a slightly different mathematics there. But one thing that is obvious in cemeteries like this where there are wrought iron crosses are the Jewish graves. Again, this is something that was done in the 1950s.

Prior to that, all of the German graves were marked by crosses. And this, of course, gives us an insight into the size of the German Jewish population that existed at the time of the Great War and the losses they sustained in the trenches of the Western Front. Leaving Frecore we return to the Perron Road and continue and take a little side road and park just beneath the Devonshire Cemetery at Mametz.

We covered this in a previous podcast in quite some detail and coming here and parking your car is not just about visiting the cemetery but walking the battlefield beneath it, going from the edge of Mansell Copse where the cemetery is, across the Perron Road, up towards the civil cemetery on the outskirts of Mametz village at a position known on the British maps as the shrine where German machine guns were located and from there looking back towards the Devonshire cemetery you get a German view

of the battlefield and again see what a killing ground this potentially was in 1916. But in the cemetery as we walk up the little steps following the line of the trench into the area where the Devonshires are buried there's a memorial at the entrance that says the Devonshires held this trench the Devonshires hold it still. And those words now carved in stone were once on a wooden panel here. It's a very evocative cemetery, the Devonshire Cemetery.

We can walk through it and see the same cat badge repeated on all but two of the graves. There were two gunners here from later on in the battle. And we find the headstone of Duncan Lennox Martin, the company commander who made a plasticine model of the battlefield here and almost predicted his own death. And the minor war poet William Noel Hodgson who wrote before action in which again he predicted his death on the battlefield here.

It seems to a degree there was more pessimism in these units than some of the others. perhaps rightly so because these men had fought in the Battle of Loos in 1915 and had been told at Loos it would be a walkover and were perhaps understandably sceptical when they were told that again in the approach to the Battle of the Somme.

A lot of people come here to the Devonshire Cemetery but it is a quiet corner of the Somme, a place where you can stand and reflect on the men who marched down these lanes into Picardy in 1916. Returning to the Perron road, we'll run parallel to the British line and then turn off when we get to the village of Maricourt. This is at the point in which the British and the French lines joined. Beyond Maricourt were the Poilus, were the French army.

We'll turn left and head up towards the village of Montaubat, the southernmost village attacked on the British front on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Here the men of the Powell's battalions from Liverpool and Manchester went into action side by side, either side of a long strip of woodland called the Talu Boise. Ahead of them was the village of Montaubat on rising ground flanked by some woods to the east, Bernefay Wood and Trones Wood.

This was a successful advance, not without loss, but the ground here was captured. The involvement of the French artillery to pound the German positions here had a significant effect and was one of the lessons learned from this early phase of the Somme. The utilisation of heavy guns was key to success when you would take on German defences like this.

Passing by Montaubat and Bernafay Wood to our right we follow the road down into the dip past Bernafay Wood Cemetery and come into the outskirts of the village of Longavale passing Longavale Road Cemetery itself. In the middle of the village we turn right and we head out towards Bois de Delville, Delville Wood.

Here on the 14th of July the 9th Scottish Division attack from the ground around Bernafay Wood where we've just come from up into the the village, took the village, its two Scottish brigades took the village, and then its third brigade, after the Battle of Loos, one of its Scottish brigades had been disbanded and replaced by the South African brigade, four battalions of South African infantry, commanded by Brigadier General Lukin.

Lukin took his men through the jocks, into the edge of Delville Wood, and his orders were simple, hold it against all comers until relieved. His men spent six days in the wood, three and a half thousand of them marched in, six 750 of them marched out. It became the greatest place of South African sacrifice on any part of the Great War battlefields. So after the war, the South Africans bought the wood from the owner and preserved it.

It was already beginning to regrow and they placed at the centre of it, which we'll find there today, the South African National Memorial. Delville Wood Cemetery does have some South African graves in, but most of their dead are missing. Their names are recorded on the panels of the Thiepval Memorial, which we'll see later on in this video. tour. The wood itself, after the South Africans were here for those six days, remained at the centre of combat here for the next two months.

Regiment after regiment of the British Army then passed through here, and it became known as Devil's Wood to the troops that took part in the fighting in this corner of the Somme. So the cemetery reflects the cap badges of the different regiments that took part in the Delville Wood Battles.

When we go into the wood, there's a new museum at the back of the South African Memorial, but amongst the trees we see the signs of the trenches and the shell craters and there are some areas where the undergrowth is cleared. There's marker stones commemorating Brigadier General Lukin's headquarters and memorials to some of the other units that served here. Each of the rides, the pathways that cut through the wood were named on the maps and those names are perpetuated on marker stones today.

The natural world has recovered this ground of death and gas and shell of 1916. Of a summer's evening today, owls call from the trees and deer walk the pathways through the wood. A place of death and destruction now feels somehow at peace.

And from Delville Wood, we go back through the village of Longerval into this area which Martin Middlebrook calls the Horseshoe of Woods, the area where there's so many areas of important woodland that figured in the battle, up to the ground at Highwood, one of the most fought over parts of the Somme battle. Again, we have a previous podcast episode covering this in greater depth.

But at Highwood, we find water-filled mine craters on the edge of the wood, memorials to the troops that fought here and the London Cemetery and Extension. and we can look from the corner of the wood across the fields towards the village of Bazintan-la-Petit and see where the Indian and British cavalry made their cavalry assault on the 14th of July 1916 towards the German positions here, the one and only cavalry charge on the Somme in 1916.

Even in trench warfare these mounted troops were always lurking on the sidelines hoping for an opportunity and at High Wood in July 1916 there was such an opportunity. Unlike Delville Wood, where you feel that degree of peace today, for many who come to Highwood, knowing that more than 8,000 British soldiers fell in the capture of this position in 1916, the atmosphere at times feels dark here.

It's forbidden to go in the wood, and the traces of the war, although erased by shellfire, there are no trenches in there, even shell craters are hard to see, it feels here at Highwood as if the war is ever present.

Leaving the wood, we continue into the village of Martinpuy, captured by Scottish troops using the first deployment of tanks in September of 1916, and that brings us back out onto the Albert-Bapone Road, the old Roman road, where we turn left and go down to the highest point on the Somme battlefields of 1916, the site of the Pozières windmill. Here we find the monument to the 2nd Australian Division, who took this ground in August of 1916. And opposite is the memorial to the tanks.

This was the forming up point of the tanks that assisted the Canadians in the capture of the village of Courcelette, which is just down the slopes, just north of the road here. The tanks, that birth of tank warfare on the 15th of September 1916 in the Battle of Fleurs-Courcelette, the memorial marks that turning point, not just in the Battle of the Somme and the Great War, but in history.

There are four bronze models of Great War tanks that surround the memorial, two Mark IV tanks, a Whippet tank and an artillery tractor. The little fence that is around the memorial is made up of six pounder gun barrels and the chains that move the tracks around the rhombus shape of the tank. And at this memorial, the First and Second World War crisscross as this was on a line of the German supply route into Normandy in 1944 and was regularly bombarded and strafed.

And the six-pounder gun barrels that mark the fence of this monument have impact marks from shrapnel and gunfire and there's an embedded bullet in the back of the whippet tank. From this spot we can look north on a clear day and see the water tower on the edge of Gomakor village, the northern part of the battlefield.

And walking round the hedge on the site of the radio mast that is close to the tank memorial, we can look to the south and see the church spire of Montaba on the southern end, the whole swathe of the Somme front at the beginning of the battle. From there we'll drop down through Corselet, and that's my old home on the Somme, which we've covered in quite a few episodes of the podcast.

There were 24,000 Canadian casualties here in 1916, 8,500 of those killed in action and more than 6,000 of them missing. This was very much one of the anvils of Canada's sacrifice on the Western Front during the Great War. This then drops us down into the village of Miramont. This was behind the German lines for the whole of the 1916 operations.

It was their advance headquarters, this was the site of their medical facilities in this part of the battlefield and there were some substantial Germans cemeteries here up until the end of the war. They were moved to other locations post-war. This brings us back into the Ankara valley where we were earlier on in the visits and we'll weave our way down the valley through the village of Gronkor and then up towards the village of Thiepval.

Ahead of us we can see the mighty archways of the Thiepval memorial to the missing. Sitting on the Thiepval ridge, a memorial designed by Edwin Lutyens, one of the principal architects of the Imperial War Graves Commission to commemorate the missing of the Somme. This is our journey's end on the Somme, but there's a lot to see here. The Thiepval Visitor Centre has excellent exhibitions connected to the fighting.

There are databases of the dead, databases of the missing that you can look up details, a superb film to watch, and an extension to it opened during the centenary that tells further the story of the Battle of the Somme. But it's not just the centre and the museum that we've come to see here. The focus of our visit is beyond that as we walk down the gravel path into the grounds of the Thietval Memorial. We can see how mighty this archway is. It speaks of empire.

Its panels commemorate more than 72,000 missing soldiers of the Great War who fell on the Somme front from the summer of 1915 until the 20th of March 1918, the day before the German offensive. The Pozières Memorial, then takes over from Thietval and commemorates the missing from the Somme in that final phase of the fighting here in 1918. But most of the names on the memorial, most of those 72,000 names, are men who died in the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Every regiment of the British Army is here.

Naval names from the Royal Naval Division, Britain Sea Soldiers, who took part in the Somme fighting in November of 1916, and Commonwealth soldiers from South Africa, who were serving with the South African Brigade in the fighting at Delville Wood, and later in the fighting around the Butte de Wallen Corps in October of 1916. The size and scale of Thiepval is at times a little overwhelming as you walk up the main steps and begin to look at those names on the panel.

It's as if the names go into infinity. There's so many of them. Almost half the dead on the Somme in 1916 had no known grave, and probably more than two-thirds of those who died on the first day of the battle, the 1st of July 1916, are commemorated here at Thiepval. The missing of the Somme when we say it feels not just like a statement of fact, but almost like an incantation. Here are the names of those men who marched the roads of Picardy in 1916 and who never returned and were never found.

It's a profoundly moving experience to come here and to see the small Anglo-French cemetery beneath it with 300 French crosses, 300 British headstones, symbolising the sacrifice of both nations on the Somme in 1916. When we're here, Thiepval feels like a beacon to the Great War. We discover on its walls the reality of conflict more than a century ago, but it doesn't give us all the answers.

It makes us ponder and want to discover more and return, ever return, to the fields and lanes that take us across and along the old front line. You've been listening to an episode of The Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reid. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor. You can follow the podcast at oldfrontlinepod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast.

And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline or support us on Buy Me A Coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our websites. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.