Current Information:

Age-19

Attached from 11th London

118, Conway Road, Southgate

The Battle of the Somme (July-November, 1916)

By the beginning of October, 1916,  the Battle of the Somme had been raging for three months. Thousands of men had already been killed or wounded or were simply missing, never to be seen again and and just a few square miles of the French countryside, all in the southern part of the battlefield, had been captured from the enemy. Mistakes had been made by the various commanders and would be continued to be made but there was no turning back as the British, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders and Canadians carried on battering away at the German defences in the hope of a breakthrough, So it continued all the way through to November with nearly every battalion and division then in France being drawn into it at some stage. In the end the German trenches had been pushed back a few more miles along most of the line but the cost in lives had been staggering. By the end of the fighting in November, 1916, British Army casualties numbered over 400,000, killed, wounded and missing.

The Battle of Transloy Ridge

On 1st October, 1916, a new offensive was begun by the British Army. The Battle of Transloy Ridge was the last major operation fought during the battle of the Somme and it continued throughout the first three weeks of the month until the terrible conditions of rain, mud and cold coupled with the sheer exhaustion of the troops, brought things to a standstill. The aim had been to push the enemy further back to the next ridge of higher ground running between Le Transloy and Warlencourt. It was a very hard fight, progress was painfully slow, the casualty figure was shockingly high and the final objective was not achieved despite the best efforts of the attacking divisions. Three factors worked against its success. The first was the weather. It was simply awful. The second was the miles of war torn terrain which soon became a quagmire over which troops, guns, ammunition and all the other supplies had to cross to reach the front and keep the momentum of the offensive going. For the Germans, falling back on their own supply lines across relatively unscathed ground, this was not such a problem. The third factor was the new methods of defence employed by the enemy. They defended in depth without a well defined front line but instead setting up machine-gun nests in shell holes and other strategically important sites where just a few men could hold up an entire battalion. And of course, the German artillery had the whole area covered.

56th Division were to be heavily involved in this battle and on 1st October, 1916, the 5th London battalion of 169 Brigade were near Guillemont, digging new trenches and supplying burying parties for the many dead bodies to be found there. The next day they relieved 16th and 9th London in reserve trenches in front of Les Boeufs from where they supplied carrying parties taking ammunition to the front line until relieved by 14th London on 3rd October.  During this relief there were subjected to sudden and severe shelling but this was not followed up by an infantry attack. Due to the awful weather and congestion on the roads, the battalion finally made it back to trenches between Bernafay and Trones Woods at 8.30am on 4th October and for the next three days they remained in these trenches providing various working parties. All the battalion’s casualties for early October are recorded as being on 4th October. It could be the case that they were all killed and injured during the relief on the night of 3rd/4th October but the battalion diary makes no mention of this. It was more likely that they became casualties at various times during their stay in the forward trenches but that their deaths were not recorded until the got back to comparative safety on 4th October. Among those killed was Charles Cole.