Sidney Appleyard of Queen Victoria’s Rifles. “We were informed by all officers from the colonel downwards that after our tremendous artillery bombardment there would be very few Germans left to show fight,” recalled Lance Cpl. The hail of shells was intended to wipe out German barbed wire, front-line trenches, artillery-and the morale of the German army. British Artillery Shells Failed to Detonateīritish General Sir Douglas Haig ordered a week-long artillery bombardment of more than a million shells starting on June 24.
The location and timing of the attack was also intended to relieve pressure on Verdun, where French troops were enduring a punishing German attack. The campaign, staged along an 18-mile stretch around the Somme River in France, was a joint French and British offensive to expel German forces. By the 141-day battle’s end, the Allies and Central Powers suffered more than a million casualties combined. The nearly 20,000 British troops killed on day one of the infantry assault was so high it remains the single worst day in British military history. On the first day alone, the British endured more than 57,000 casualties.
“So both sides were locked into a frighteningly small area onto which an enormous amount of firepower was poured.” “The German doctrine was that not a single yard of ground should be surrendered and the French and the British were determined to never stop the attack,” says Spencer Jones, senior lecturer in Armed Forces and War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton.
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