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Enlisted-St Pauls

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

On 1st July 1916 The British Army launched a massive offensive along a section of the front line running north of the River Somme. The French attacked south of it. The first day was a disaster for the British army which suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, 19,000 of whom were killed, and made hardly any inroads into the enemy lines. But the battle had to go on, if for no other reason than to relieve pressure on the French at Verdun where they had been facing the full onslaught of the powerful German Army. 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 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.

On 14th July, 1916, a second major offensive was launched, this time against the German second line of defences stretching from Longueval to Bazentin-le-Petit, but unfortunately, after a promising start which saw some important gains on the first day, the British Army once again reverted to a series of uncoordinated attacks, using out dated tactics. Not surprisingly they soon found themselves engaged in a war of attrition as they attempted to push the enemy further back across the Somme battlefield. This was no more so the case than in the fight to capture the village of Longueval and Delville Wood that lay next to it; a struggle that went on for many weeks through the summer of 1916.

The South African Brigade of 9th Division had been involved in vicious fighting here in the early hours of 19th July, 53 Brigade of 18th Division, on loan to 9th Division,  arrived to resume the attack. They had moved up over night, were unfed and ignorant of the ground over which they had to attack all of which did not auger well for their foray into Delville Wood.  At 7.15am on 19th July, 8th Norfolk advanced from the south-west edge of Longueval but in the confusion they were  too late to take advantage of the artillery barrage that preceded the attack. Nevertheless they cleared the southern part of Delville Wood despite enemy reinforcements arriving on the scene. The rest of 53 Brigade, 10th Essex, 6th Royal Berkshire and 8th Suffolk moved up during the course of the day and renewed the attack but ran into machine gun fire from hidden positions and were hit by artillery fire, both German and their own, falling short. For a while they managed to gain a footing along Princes Street, a bridleway that ran west to east through the middle of the wood but after hard fighting all day they fell back to their original starting line. There were many casualties for the battalions of 53 Brigade on 19th July, one of whom was Arthur Linde of  8th Norfolk.