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Enlisted-Wembley

Born-Bloomsbury

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 12th October, after a month either in the trenches at Hebuterne, where things were somewhat quieter, or in reserve in camps or billets, 17th King’s Royal Rifle Corps moved into the front line in the southern half of the Schwaben Redoubt, a former German stronghold to the north of Thiepval. The enemy still held the northern half of this maze of trenches and it was a very dangerous place to be. No more so than early in the morning of 14th October when two companies were sent forward to assist 4/5th Black Watch who had attacked the northern face of the redoubt. The operation was a successful one and a portion of the German line was taken and consolidated. They remained in these advanced positions all through the next during which the two German counter-attacks were launched against them, both of which were repelled. And of course the enemy artillery was constantly busy, bombarding the front line and the communication trenches leading up to it, causing the casualty list to grow longer. One of those whose name was added to it was John Blake on 15th October.