The Battle of the Somme
British and French forces launched a vast offensive against German lines on 1 July 1916. The British Army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties on the first day alone. By November more than a million men had been killed or wounded, for an advance of about 10 km.
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What happened
By 1916 the Western Front was locked in trench warfare. British and French commanders planned a great joint offensive astride the River Somme, partly to relieve the French army, which was bleeding at Verdun. A week-long artillery barrage of some 1.5 million shells was meant to destroy German wire and defences so the infantry could simply walk across.
It failed. When the attack began on 1 July 1916, many German dugouts were intact and the wire uncut. The British Army suffered 57,470 casualties that day, including more than 19,000 dead, the bloodiest day in its history. Whole 'Pals battalions' of friends and neighbours from the same towns were wiped out together.
The battle ground on for four and a half months. In September tanks were used in combat for the first time, with mixed results. By the time it ended in November, the Allies had advanced about 10 km and more than a million men on all sides had been killed or wounded. The Somme became a byword for the futility and scale of industrial war, though historians still debate how much it weakened the German army.
Around the same time
- The Russian Revolution, Petrograd, Russia, 1917 to 1918
- The Panama Canal opens, Panama Canal Zone, 1904 to 1914
- The San Francisco earthquake and fire, San Francisco, USA, 1906
- The Golden Twenties, Berlin, Germany, 1924 to 1929
Earlier: The San Francisco earthquake and fire, 1906 · Later: The Russian Revolution, 1917 to 1918
Further reading
Encyclopedia article: Battle of the Somme (en.wikipedia.org)