<<Zero
Hour | <<South
of the Ancre 7.30-9.00am | <<South
of the Ancre 9.00am-midday
North of the Ancre 7.30-midday | Midday
to nightfall: gradual retreat>>
A famous photograph
from the war : a ration party of the Royal Irish Rifles resting in a communication
trench at the Somme 1 July 1916. Most of the men in this photograph have
now been identified and
you can find out more about this photograph in the Remembrance section.
North
of the Ancre 7.30am - midday
North of the river, the front line troops had made for the German trenches.
The first waves encountered the ravine - seventy yards wide, fifteen to
twenty feet high in places, and steep. Despite instructions to walk, they
broke into a gallop. They arrived at the first German line and found the
wire fairly well cut and their path to the parapet easy. There was little
opposition. They were in the front trenches. One group of men made it
right through the third line and headed for Beaucourt Station.
But the second wave was just beginning to be caught by machine-gun fire,
as Germans who had come up from their dugouts began to man their posts.
In particular, gun-fire came from Beaumont-Hamel with its elevated position.
As the third and fourth waves clambered up the ravine the fire intensified
and men fell to the ground, bleeding and in agony.
The Mid Antrim Volunteers, arriving at the German lines, encountered ‘great
rolls of wire with barbs as long as a mans thumb’. They found that
the artillery shells had not done a wholly effective job in their area.
The gaps in the wire were few and far between, so the men quickly clustered
there, and on them the German machine-guns were quickly trained. Clearly
the dugouts had not been severely damaged by the barrage. The clusters
of Ulstermen were prime targets. On three occasions the mid Antrim men
tried to get into the German trenches. Only a group of five to ten men
managed it: scores were casualties. Severely injured and dying soldiers
lay all around. The orders had been not to assist wounded colleagues,
but to leave them to be picked up by supporting platoons and stretcher
bearers.
While some advance parties of the Armagh Volunteers and a few Mid Antrim
men pushed on towards Beaucourt station, in considerable isolation, German
Infantry filtered in from the flanks. These Ulstermen were soon fired
on from three sides - from Germans guarding the station, from the Germans
re-entering the lines to the rear and from the enemy positions to the
north of Beaumont-Hamel. The 29th Division had made no progress against
the Germans in that sector, so they were able to turn south and fire down
on the Ulstermen.
Divisional HQ was informed that the enemy had regained his front line.
A substational part of both attacking Battalions were dead or wounded,
most of the rest trapped. The remainder of the morning would merely involve
salvage operations and the minimisation of damage. The British artillery
could hardly land shells on the German front lines again for fear of hitting
many of their own men, who, at least in theory if not in practice, ought
to be there.
Those who made it into the German trenches came back, retreating one by
one, or else paid the price as the enemy attacked them. The men trapped
near the station had to decide whether to surrender or try to jettison
heavier equipment and head back; if they could, to their lines ......
“When we were in an old German trench, a sargent asked us
if we wanted to surrender ‘NO SURRENDER, NO HOME RULE, FOR GOD AND
ULSTER’ was the reply”.
A long scene at the junction of a communication trench
and a reserve trench shows a Corporal, a Warrant Officer, and their men
fixing bayonets and moving up the communication trench directed by a Second
Lieutenant.
[Footage
© the Imperial War Museum]
For
the wounded, lying in agony in the blaze of the sun in no-mans-land, the
arrival of stretcher bearers or returning comrades was a heavenly sight,
but the journey back to the home trenches could be excruciating. Throughout
the rest of the morning, stragglers and the slightly and seriously wounded
arrived back in little groups. Sometimes lone individuals arrived.
The attack north of the Ancre cannont be seen as anything other than a
military failure. The sheer waste of that July morning is apparent from
a look at the fate of one Battalion. The Armagh Volunteers had been decimated.
Nearly two years of hard work and training in the Army and, for many,
several months of previous training in the UVF had come to nothing, due
to a complete inadequacy in military strategy. The bombardment had failed
to cut wire and destroy dugouts, and it was quite inflexible for the targeting
in emergency situations. The ravine had been far too difficult to negotiate.
The Germans had been very swift to their guns, and their machine-gun superiority
had been visible and effective. The German occupation of the high ground
was invaluable, and the rigid wave formation of attack was quite inappropriate.
And above all, it had been a nonsense to expect less than a massacre if
the Divisions flanking the Ulstermen to the North did not wipe out the
Beaumont-Hamel machine-guns. There were no emergency procedures for such
an eventuality.
The statistics speak for themselves. Blacker’s Boys, the Armagh,
Monaghan and Cavan Volunteers, like any Infantry Battalion, had a fighting
strength of roughly 800 men. Approximately 600 with 15 officers, went
over the parapet at zero hour, according to the war diarist, who used
the not inappropriate word ‘annihilated’ in describing what
happened to his men. According to the figures given by Martin Middlebrook,
the 9th Fusiliers lost a minium of 518 and 14 officers in their assault
on the German lines - this included the dead, wounded and missing. By
the end of the day 532 of Blackers Boys were victims. A mere handful of
those who had gone over the top at zero hour were left unscathed. In the
space of a hours a fine Battalion had been destroyed, in a monumental
waste of military resource and human potential.
The attack of the 36th , north of the Ancre
<<Zero
Hour | <<South
of the Ancre 7.30-9.00am | <<South
of the Ancre 9.00am-midday
North of the Ancre 7.30-midday | Midday
to nightfall: gradual retreat>>
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