Current Information:

Age-34

9, Princes Street, Southwark Street, Blackfriars

Connaught Cemetery, Thiepval, Somme

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.

39th Division arrived in France in March, 1916 and at the end of August had moved down to the Somme. Here they joined the Reserve Army which was holding the line along the northern stretch of the battlefield. The bulk of the fighting at this time was being conducted by the Fourth Army to the south of the Albert-Bapaume road but by September, the struggle was being resumed further north as witnessed by the attack astride the River Ancre on 3rd September in which 17th King’s Royal Rifle Corps of 117 Brigade suffered dreadful losses. On 20th October the battalion moved into the front line in the Schwaben Redoubt, a former German stronghold to the north of Thiepval. This was a fiercely fought over part of the front line and 17th King’s Royal Rifle Corps had been involved in an attack the previous week that had wrested control of much of the northern face of the redoubt from the enemy. The Germans were not going to take this lying down and at 5am on 21st October, after a fifteen minute intense artillery barrage on the front line trenches held by 17th King’s Royal Rifle Corps, they launched a counter attack by a force estimated to have been around 400 and with the use of flamenwerfer (flame throwers) as well. The enemy managed to gain a footing in two sections of the British front line but after some fierce fighting they were evicted, with many of them being captured. 17th King’s Royal Rifle Corps sustained nearly 100 casualties during this attack and counter-attack, one of them being Arthur Gale.