Landships II

Centurion · Legend

Somme numbers

Roger Todd · Legend

Nothing in detail, I'm afraid, but Gordon Corrigan (in Mud, Blood and Poppycock) states:

The main British attacking force would be the Fourth Army, of sixteen divisions and nearly half a million men. The Third Army (Allenby), to the north, would assist with diversionary attacks, and the Reserve Army (Gough) would stand by to reinforce and to roll up the German flanks if breakthrough was achieved.

It's odd that virtually every time one reads about the first day of the Somme battles the casualty figures are always mentioned, but I've never seen anywhere a figure for total numbers of combatants.

Rhomboid · Field Marshal

Lyn Macdonald in "Somme" gives a figure of 150,000 British troops going over the top on July 1st. John Keegan, in "The First World War", states that 100,000 entered no man's land. Martin Middlebrook, in "The First Day on the Somme", says that 143 battalions attacked, and that the 57,000 casualties represented almost exactly half of their strength.

Roger Todd · Legend

This quote tends to bear out what you say:

At 0730 hours on the 1st July 1916, the first wave of 66,000 British Tommies responded to their officer's whistles and, rifles held �at the port� across their chests, left their trenches en masse, or rose to their feet where they had lain hidden in No Man�s Land. They �Went over the Top� at a slow walk towards the German barbed wire entanglements and trenches. Another 40,000 Tommies followed in subsequent waves of infantrymen.

It's from here: Somme Article

Presumably Corrigan's figure of 'nearly half a million men' was the total strength of the Fourth Army, of whom only a relatively small proportion would have actually gone over the top.

Peter Kempf · Field Marshal

That's a common enough error: as the logistical tail of modern armies tend to grow and grow, to get the proper perspective on losses, you'll have to set the losses in proportion of the number of men in actual combat, really in harms way, not just milling about in the area.

But "in harms way" is another problem, of course. I believe that in order to be said to have been a combat veteran in WW2 (in the US Army), you simply have had to spend at least some part of your service within the range of enemy artillery.

So I concur: to understand the scale of the British losses during the first day on the Somme, you have to set them in proportion to how many men who actually climbed out of the trenches that morning.

-- Edited by Peter Kempf at 10:41, 2006-08-13

Centurion · Legend

Peter Kempf wrote:

But "in harms way" is another problem, of course. I believe that in order to be said to have been a combat veteran in WW2 (in the US Army), you simply have had to spend at least some part of your service within the range of enemy artillery.

-- Edited by Peter Kempf at 10:41, 2006-08-13

A number of US Generals (Paton included) strongly disagreed with this definition basically saying that being in a combat zone and being in combat were two different matters.

Enemy artillery range is also a variable concept. During Desert Shield/Storm (and for some months after) the US defined sizeable parts of the Northern Gulf as being within range of Iraqi artillery, as the Scud and Al Hussaini missiles could reach that far, and paid combat rates to soldiers in that area. In the months after the end of that conflict I met a reservist US army captain in Al Khobar, Saudi, who was responsible for disposing of all the equipment (including things like PCs) that the army didn't want to have to ship back to the US and was surplus. He was a combination of Milo Milebender (Catch 22) and Sgt Bilko with lots of 'private' deals on the side. He found it hillarious that he was getting combat pay - a Southern Democrat he was still a big fan of G Bush (snr) for that very reason.