bleeaaahhh, I write too formally....

Somme Day

The Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916 began and ended in major destruction and loss of life. There are many reasons for this, some of them being the most simple mistakes of the war, but they turned out to be the most deadly. There were problems with lack of preparation, lack of armament, faulty equipment, and miscommunication between officers.

The Battle of the Somme was going to be one of the biggest attacks and the largest successive assault against the German line of defense in the trenches in France. Had the Allies been better prepared to fight, the battle would not have gone so awry. As such, Allied preparation was in short supply, new troops being sent in having only 3 days of training or less before their transferral to the Somme. Thus they were not prepared for or aware of the kind of fighting that lay before them, giving one reason why death tolls were so high.

Armament, or rather the lack thereof, was another notable reason why Allied success was unattainable. Many of the troops did not have the proper arms with which to fight and destroy the enemy. Plus, Allied heads of state did not send adequate battery supplies to Somme officials to use in the 3 day bombardment of enemy lines. Because of this, German troops were not as hurt or destroyed as fully as was hoped and planned for prior to the attack on July 1.

The Battle of the Somme was a huge assault against the German lines. It was definitely a show of force - the Allied forces having sent showers of shells for 3 days straight into the German trenches in the heaviest bombardment of the war so far, but it turned out to be woefully inadequate for the kind of assault being planned to follow it. For one, the weather of the previous days refused to allow Allied troops the convenience of aerial eyes to tell exactly how close or how far away their bombardment was from the German lines (accuracy in the first World War was hard to acquire and maintain). For another, quite a notable amount of artillery from British manufacturers turned out to be faulty and would fail in its function, either by breakages in the guns, or the shells’ failure to explode at the moment of impact on enemy lines. Thus, far less damage was acquired for Allied success than was required for this attack to be a success, in the end increasing the death toll for all Allied forces.

Miscommunication was another major factor of the death tolls in the Battle of the Somme. Officials did not have enough discussion about what would happen and what action would be taken for any and all different fighting situations. All that was planned for were successes on the battlefield, not a massacre of nearly all troops and divisions. As such, reinforcements of troops were continuously sent out after each other, victories being assumed and assumptions made that the divisions would need reinforcements to help sustain and gain more control of the enemy trenches. Instead, the result was that more and more waves of Allied troops were being sent to their deaths on German machine guns and shells - unknown to them because of the lack of information being sent back to headquarters and the lack of communication between those officers.

This battle at the Somme needn’t have been so bloody or deadly. There were so many things that could have been done better or differently that would have changed the outcome of the battle, but by happenstance they instead put everyone involved in more danger than was necessary. As such, more than 100,000 men died that day because of a great lack of Allied enthusiasm in areas such as preparation, armament, munitions, and communication, for winning this battle.