Walking the Somme: Gommecourt

In our first episode of Season 9, we walk the northern part of the Somme battlefield from Foncquevillers out to the ground before Gommecourt, and examine the attack here by the 46th (North Midland) Division on 1st July 1916. We examine the Court of Enquiry, the roles of the commanders Major-General Edward James Montagu-Stuart-Wortley and Lieutenant General Sir Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow, and hear the voices of the ordinary soldiers who fought and fell at Gommecourt on the First Day of the Battle of the Somme.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

With the start of a new season, in this case Season 9 of the Old Front Line, and approaching our sixth year of podcasting, incredibly, we begin the season, as we often do, on the Somme battlefields in northern France. The Somme is part of the landscape of the Western Front. We've covered it many times on this podcast, and while we have spent many podcast hours walking its lanes, crossing its muddy fields and peeling back the canopy of its woods there's still much to discuss and discover I think and it's a battlefield I'm sure we will return to again and again there is something about the Somme and when I say that I think many of you will know what I mean it's a landscape past and present often where past and present cross over it's history the stories of those Somehow, it almost defines the way we see the Great War. And for this episode, technically, we find ourselves outside what is today the department of the Somme in the neighbouring Pas-de-Calais. And our journey will take us across the ground between two villages in that area, Foncavilliers and Goncourt. We visited the Goncourt battlefield before, examining the story of the fighting between the Somme and the Somme. nearby Hebutern and Gomercore with the 56th London Division from the perspective of two veterans who were there Malcolm Vivian and Harry Coates and looked at the fighting that took place there on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and we'll retain our interest in that day for this podcast but instead we're going to focus on the neighbouring attack by the 46th North Midland Division in that sector just to the north. So where do we begin? Well we're just to the west of Fonkeville village at the Fonkeville military cemetery it's down a wood tree-lined lane very much in a rural location surrounded by trees for the nature lovers who return to the landscape of the Western Front it is a place which is full of bird life at different times of the year a kind of secluded place where we find those crisscross paths of the Great War and we can find peace and tranquility and reach out and touch that past through the stories that are in cemeteries like this. This particular cemetery was started by the French. This was part of the French sector in the early years of the Great War where French troops clashed in the open fields beyond all of these villages with Germans in that late summer of 1914 and then the trench systems were established There were some minor operations in this area in 1915 to the south, the Battle of Serre-Hébuterne, and most of the French soldiers that were once buried in here, something like over 300 of them in this particular cemetery, were French poilus, French bonhommes, who were killed in the day-to-day activities of trench warfare rather than big attacks. And those graves were moved after the war, as was very common in this region, where there were quite a few British cemeteries that contained substantial plots of French soldiers. Those graves were removed and either repatriated back home to family graves within France itself or taken to a nearby military cemetery. This sector was then taken over by the British in the summer of 1915. British troops moved from the northern part of France as the size of the BEF grew and grew. The French, who were the major partners on the Western Front, wanted the British to take a greater responsibility responsibility on that western front and gradually the British began to extend their line in different parts of that front and in the summer of 1915 while the French were still occupying the area around Arras to the north British troops were sent down to this area to begin to take over this Somme front if you like. Many of them had come from Flanders, quite a lot of them were territorials and then gradually new army divisions moved down here as well and the first burial in this cemetery was from a new army battalion the kitcheners army battalion the 10th battalion raw fusiliers the stockbrokers battalion formed from stockbrokers and those who worked in the financial sector of london and banks and all kinds of jobs associated with stockbroking that battalion had been formed in 1914 come across to the western front and although this wasn't their first casualty they've been in the line elsewhere they made the first burial here when Private William Bradley was buried here who had died on the 6th of September 1915 aged 30 Bradley was a vicar's son from Dulwich his number was STK 40 so they had a prefix STK for all the original stockbrokers who joined the battalion and he was the 40th man to enlist and he'd actually enlisted at the London Stock Exchange and is listed on their memorial and been in France since July of 1915 so his war was sadly a very short one. After this once the British established their kind of infrastructure at the village of Foncavilliers or funky villas as they called it the field ambulances of the Royal Army Medical Corps so the divisional level medical arrangements they moved in and took over buildings within the village and they then managed the burials within the cemetery itself with men who died in their field ambulances or were killed up in the front line and brought back here for burial and that use of the cemetery by field ambulances continued until March of 1917 when the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg line and the cemetery was used again by fighting units in 1918 in the final battles in this area after the Great War 74 burials were brought in from the wider area into what is now plot 2 and plot 3 but largely it is an original cemetery with original burials. So it gives us quite a good kind of cross-section of the men that were in this sector of the line from 1915 through to the Battle of the Somme and indeed beyond. In terms of the burials, there's 625 British burials, 12 New Zealand, 6 Australian, 2 men from the Chinese Labour Corps, 4 Germans who died of wounds as prisoners, 1 French burial remains and that brings it to a total of 647. Of these, 53 are unidentified, so they're unknown soldiers, and there are special memorials to two casualties who are known to be buried amongst them. The vast majority of the burials in this cemetery link us to the 46th North Midland Division and their attack at Gomakaw, which we're going to look at on the 1st of July 1916, and that's the walk across this part of the Somme battlefields. Plot one, Rowell in particular in this cemetery has many of those recovered from the frontline trenches and the jumping off positions just in front of the British lines which that division used on the first day of the Somme. So those men who were killed literally in the act of going over the top, their bodies could be recovered and they were brought back here for burial. Most of the dead from that division's attack were out in no man There was no truce here on the 2nd of July as there were in some other locations so there was no possibility of burying the dead. These men killed on the 1st of July buried in here could be recovered. The vast majority of their comrades who fell lay out in no man's land until March 1917 when the Germans withdrew. But one of the burials that is in here that connects us very strongly to that first day of the Battle of the Somme is Captain John Leslie Green of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was the regimental medical officer of the 1st 5th Sherwood Foresters, the Knots and Derby Regiment. Born at Huntingdon, he was the son of a JP. He was privately educated and studied at Cambridge, where he was a keen oarsman and rode for his college. He then studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London and moved back to Huntingdon after qualifying as a doctor in 1911 and worked as a local doctor. He was commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1914 when a call for qualified doctors went out to join the REMC. He served with the South Staffordshire Regiment initially and then in a field ambulance of the Royal Army Medical Corps and became the RMO, the medical officer of the 1st 5th Sherwoods, possibly because his brother Edward was an officer serving with the unit. Sadly Edward was killed at the Battle of Luz in October 1915. Greens Victoria Cross was posthumously awarded for bravery on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July 1916, and his citation reads, For most conspicuous devotion to duty, although himself wounded, he went to the assistance of an officer who had been wounded and was hung up on the enemy's wire entanglements, and succeeded in dragging him to a shell hole where he dressed his wounds, notwithstanding that bombs and rifle grenades were thrown at him the whole time. Captain Green then endeavoured to to bring the wounded officer into safe cover and had nearly succeeded in doing so when he was killed himself. The officer he went to rescue in that episode was a brigade machine gun officer, Captain Frank Bradbury Robinson, who was wounded and hanging on the German wire. Captain Green went forward and managed to remove Robinson from the wire, dressed his wounds and evacuated him back towards the British trenches. They both came under heavy fire, as the citation says, explains it being broad daylight by then, but got back to the British front line where Robinson was wounded again and Green mortally wounded as he brought him in. Sadly, Captain Robinson died two days later at the 20th Casualty Clearing Station and he's buried at Wildencore Holt Cemetery where there are many 46th Division men from Gomercore who died of wounds received in that attack at Gomercore on the 1st of July. There's a statement in one of the records from the ADMS to the 46th North Midland Division. That's the assistant director of medical services, the chief medic, if you like, of the division. He later stated, I have to record a sad lesson to us all. Captain Green, the medical officer to the 5th Sherwood Foresters, had stopped to dress a friend's wounds in the abdomen close to the German first-line wire. Captain Green was also hit, but he was struggling back to our lines with his wounded comrade when a bullet killed him instantly, piercing his brain. Now I repeat that in a charge no one should stop to assist the wounded. Captain Green was a valiant and capable officer. It's an interesting kind of note really. What he's saying is, is it the duty of a medical officer to go out and pick up individual men or is it his duty to remain at the regimental aid post, receive the wounded and then triage them back to the next line of medical treatment, the field ambulance, back in the nearest village or wherever it is located but I think it underestimates how involved medical officers were within their own battalions, they were part of that culture of the battalion that was almost the same kind of view as a padre this was their parish and they weren't just going to turn a blind eye to people they knew who were lying wounded on a battlefield so I guess sitting in a headquarter somewhere it's possibly easy to come up with a phrase like that but on the battlefield when you can see that a An attack is falling apart and there's wounded everywhere. You're going to try and do your best to treat as many as you can find. And Green, of course, could give no more than his own life. And he gave his life in that Battle of Gomercourt on the 1st of July 1916. Green had married Edith Mary Nesbitt Moss, MBBS, of Stanifield Hall, Lincolnshire, on the 1st of January 1916. But sadly, they had no children. She too was a qualified... doctor and later became a doctor in a military hospital and remarried after the Great War. Following Captain Green's death on the battlefield at Gommacore, a memorial was erected in the high street in Buckden by his father near to the family home and it was also in memory of his brother who had died and all the local lads who'd fallen in the Great War. Mourning is always a strong subject in cemeteries like these when we consider how the deaths of these men affected families on so many different levels and we can see that with the memorialisation of Green and his brother by his father and not far from his burial in this cemetery we find the headstone of Private George Thomas Palmer Palmer was from Leicester an original member of the 1st 4th Battalion of the Leicestershire Regiment Territorials and he'd served from 1915 on the Western Front at Luz and then later on the Somme was killed on the 28th of February 1917, aged 21, just before the Germans began their major withdrawal from this area to the Hindenburg line. His mother had the following inscription placed on his headstone. Will some kind hand in a foreign land place a flower on my son's grave? Many who come here, and I've seen pictures of this headstone posted many, many times on social media, many believe it's a unique inscription, but it is in fact one of at least half a dozen headstones with this inscription or a similar inscription it might have kind of tapped into something of the popular consciousness of the day that in the early 20s perhaps many families felt they would never get a chance to visit these graves and that's what it kind of calls out to I may never as his mother be able to come here and see my boy's grave but will you if you've come there will you place a flower on my son's grave for me I hope that perhaps on one of those interwar pilgrimages she finally got to see his grave finally got to place her own flowers here but it's a powerful very powerful inscription and its symbolism really never fails to move I don't think plot one Rose C&M of this cemetery have quite a lot of 56 London division graves I'm not really looking at their attack in this podcast but they moved into this section after the 1st of July taking over the trenches as the 46th Division pulled out they had taken a lot of casualties in the fighting at Gomercourt and then they made up their numbers from men from the base and lots of different London battalions that had identities like the Post Office Rifles and the Queen Victoria Rifles and the Westminster Rifles found themselves being sent to whichever battalion needed replacement so it kind of broke down the cohesion of quite a lot of these units and the burials in this part of the cemetery very much reflect that in what was essentially a quiet and inverted commas period following the big attack here on the 1st of July. Leaving the cemetery behind we'll walk out through the main gate into that tree-lined avenue that takes us down past quite a large farm into the village of Foncavilliers itself, Funky Villas. This, when it was taken over by the British, was a village in fairly good condition in the summer of 1915. There'd been no big battle here. There'd been bombardments by the Germans. The church tower had been pretty much knocked off. But the village itself was pretty well preserved. There were no villagers living in it at that stage. They'd been evacuated further back because it was too near to the front line. And although the buildings were often quite large and substantial, it wasn't really safe to stay within them at ground level. level so beneath this village was a whole complex of cellars very common with French houses and the French had connected up a lot of them the British then did the same and essentially when units were in the line here during the daylight hours nobody was seen in the streets of this village they were all beneath the village in the cellars and the tunnels and the dugouts that had been prepared and added to once the British built up their infrastructure here and then at night the village would come alive men would come up out of the dugouts come up out of the cellars move up to the front line take up food take up material to the trenches then relieve a unit in the front line others will then come back into the village itself and make use of those nighttime hours the darkness to shield their activities until dawn when the whole village would go quiet again and when you read the accounts of some of the men who were here there's quite a few territorial battalions passed through here in that summer and through to the beginning of the Battle of the Somme of 1916 then we see that they describe it almost as like a ghost town that during the daylight hours there was no one in these streets because it wasn't safe to move about. It wasn't that the Germans were necessarily in direct observation of the village but they knew of course that the British were there and the French before them and bombarded it on a regular basis. We've got this description of Foncavilliers from the first fifth Battalion of the Leicestershire Regiment who wrote a very good battalion history and they describe having moved down here in June 1916 from the Vimy sector. Foncavilliers was a nice quiet part of the line. The German trenches were about 300 yards away which was a gentlemanly distance and not like living and dying indecently close to the enemy as at Kemmel and Ypres where some trenches were only 20 and 30 yards apart. Life was quiet but work was hard. Saps were being made. A disused front line was being cleared and rebuilt. Bomb and ammunition stores and Royal Engineer dumps were being constructed. June days were spent in perspiration in the trenches. June nights were spent in exploration in no man's land. The communication trenches had familiar names such as Lincoln Lane, Stafford Avenue and Stoneygate Road. Once upon a time, Foncavilliers had a church, but this was now in ruins the crucifix however remained intact like many others on the western front and as they passed by the more academic officers would say to one another strange isn't it and the less erudite privates would grunt damn funny if it never gets hit but some there who as they gazed suddenly remembered the words of a certain company commander 1900 years before surely this was the son of god it rained and it rained mud was everywhere the communication tree So who were the 46th North Midland Division? Well they were a North Midland Territorial Division. Before the POWs ever existed, Territorials were locally recruited units and when you look at all the different battalions of this division from the Leicestershire Regiment from the Lincolns from the North and the South Staffordshire Regiment and from the Sherwood Foresters you can see each one has an attachment to a geographical area where it recruited and before the Great War all of these territorial battalions would have had 8 infantry companies each with their own drill hall again recruiting in a specific area so when they went into battle units like this and they suffered heavy losses it could often have a catastrophic effect on these local communities. Like many territorial formations at the beginning of the First World War, not all of its battalions were at full strength. They were made up with new recruits who enlisted into these battalions in 1914, and then eventually the division was sent overseas in 1915, took part in the Battle of Loos, in the attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt right at the end of the Loos Battle on the 13th of October 1915, where it suffered suffered thousands of casualties in the assault there. After Loos, its battalions were made up of reinforcements from some of the second-line territorial battalions of these regiments, so reserve battalions that were back in Britain, not necessarily always having the same kind of attachment to a specific area or a community. And then suddenly it had orders to proceed to Marseille to head off to the Suez Canal because it looks as if the Ottoman Turks, the Turkish Empire, about to come across the border and try and seize control of the suez canal and quite a few units were sent there to deal with this and the division was packed off to head off to suez some of the units made it there but almost as soon as they had arrived a new order came to send the division back to the western front so some units were still at marseille about to board ships some were on ships they were pulled off sent back to the shore put on trains sent back towards the Western Front and then the units that were in Egypt were then brought back by ship and then returned to the trenches in France. It was a kind of strange decision really. They then took over the Vimy Ridge sector following their kind of regrouping as a division and then in June 1916 moved down to take part in the Battle of the Somme. They were here at that stage commanded by Major General Edward James Montague Stuart Wortley. He was a veteran of the Zulu War and his core commander was Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Doyley Snow who is historian Dan Snow's great grandfather and back in 2008 I was very much on this battlefield with Dan Snow making an episode of My Family at War, a special series that the BBC did for the 90th anniversary of the Great War in which they took well known people like Dan to these battlefields to discover their personal connection to it. Now most of these celebrities, inverted commas, had kind of ordinary soldiers, perhaps a few officers. Dan was the only one who had a general as an ancestor and we looked at some of the uncomfortable history really of his ancestors' role in this battle here on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and we will return to that. But what this was here, this attack by this division, was not really part of the main Somme advance. This was part of a diversionary attack on this northern flank of the Somme battlefields, two divisions with attack in what was called the Gommerkorps salient, because if you look at the maps, Gommerkorps sits at a kind of lynchpin there, and the trenches come round it, forming a kind of a salient around the village, and the purpose of the attack, I guess, would be twofold, to draw German attention away from other, particularly northern areas of the Somme advance, to confuse the Germans as to where the true intention of the attack lay, And then it would also bite off this salient, making an easier part of the line to hold. And this was outside of the main 4th Army sector of the Somme. Rawlinson's 4th Army would make the main assault. This was in Allenby's 3rd Army sector. And the two divisions, both territorial divisions, the 46th North Midland Division on the northern part of the battlefield and the 56th London Division on the southern part, were chosen to make this diversionary attack. And essentially, as Major General Hull, who was the commander the London Division said their job, their purpose was to attract as much German attention as possible and to present themselves as targets essentially to the enemy. So it was really not an attack that necessarily was destined to succeed. Obviously they were hoping for some success. The idea was that the 46th Division would attack in the north, come down through Gommacore Wood into the village and the 56 division would attack in the south come round the southern flank of what was called Gomakaw Park where the chateau was and come up into that bit of the village and the two divisions would meet there having bit off if you like that Gomakaw salient and drawn in German reserves to try and throw them back so there was some hope of a success but the purpose was to attract the attention of the enemy the Germans and bring in their troops so it was a different kind of battle really whether all the men who were to take part in it really truly understood this I don't know when you kind of read the memoirs of some of those who were there who were ordinary soldiers I interviewed quite a few men who were in the 56th London division they weren't really 100% sure of this I think at the time some of them came to know about this through their later reading of the divisional history or their regimental history for example but I think at the time they just saw this as an attack it was their job they were going over the top the Battle of the Somme was beginning and this was their part in it so that's the kind of background to it and the division that was here that essentially I guess in the minds of some people had failed at Luz I mean when you look at that attack that they made on the Hohenzollern Redoubt it really stood no chance of success open ground no cover not a proper bombardment to protect them or even neutralise the German defenders of the Redoubt when they went over and wave after wave of infantry went forward and wave after wave of north midland infantry were just cut down by german machine gun trench mortars and shell fire so while there may have been those who doubted the ability of a territorial division like this and even before the first world war territorials were known as saturday night soldiers they were not seen as proper soldiers there was a lot of kind of prejudice against them and i think sometimes senior officers who'd spent their life in the and perhaps not necessarily paying attention to how this new war was developing, didn't entirely understood that some attacks were always, in some respects, doomed to failure if you didn't properly plan them. Nevertheless, there was a kind of shroud over the history of this division. And I guess the hope of those who'd been at Luz, survived Luz, was that the division would make that right in this forthcoming attack. So from here, we're going to walk out through the village. onto that ground east of Funke Villas and get out onto the battlefield where the division made its attack on that fateful day of the 1st of July 1916. Walking out of the village we follow the road and it bends at one point and we're very close there to the British front line. We can see the next village Gormachor in the distance and to the left of the road beyond the village Gormachor Wood not to be confused with Gormachor Park which was the larger wooded area just beyond the chateau in Gormachor itself and just up ahead of us on the right is quite a large military cemetery with a high wall and some steps. And before we get to looking at the cemetery itself, let's first walk up those steps at the entrance to the cemetery and stand on the raised terrace and look at what we can see from here. It's a very good vantage point. I've stood here many, many times with friends, with groups over the years to explain this part of the battlefield. The where the 46th North Midland Division made their attack on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. To our left is Foncavilliers village, where the British front line was just located. We're looking straight down the middle of no man's land here. To our right is Gomercourt village. We can see a track heading across the fields to our right. That's very close to where the German front line was. So you can visibly see really where the two front lines were located. We've got a bit of technology like linesman with the trench maps on it. You can match that up exactly. Just beyond the track, just beyond the village itself is Gomakaw Wood, which you can see very clearly. And then in the far distance as the track goes across those big open fields, and we can see how this ground is pretty much devoid of cover where the main attack went in. We can see another little clump of trees down there next to a position that's marked on the trench maps the Z and little Z and that's the kind of northern end far end of the battlefield in terms of the 46th North Midland Division attack so this is the ground where they went over on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and because as we can see of this open nature of the ground that's here that's one of the great things about coming to battlefields and walking the ground like this as you can see what there is today offered the same kind of challenges to that generation more than 100 years ago when they were going to fight here. So open ground with no cover meant that if your men advanced in daylight, which was what the plan was all about, attacking at that time of the morning, then this meant you needed to have some degree of created cover, which was smoke. So smoke was used to try and screen an attack that was going to take place in broad daylight. And the special brigade of the Royal Engineers were those who were detailed to supply this. The smoke that was released was incredibly dense. It lost direction in the wind when it was released. So this was a huge kind of smoke cloud essentially. And in the end, it caused more confusion than help. And widening gaps in it as it began to disperse created kill zones for the Germans who'd survived the bombardment. Suddenly the smoke began to disperse and lines of men could be seen in these gaps and the Germans concentrated their fire on that and wiped them out. And what they found, the men who survived these attacks, when they saw the fire coming at them, a lot of it was coming from Gommachor Wood in the German second line positions. The front line had been knocked about, there'd obviously been some casualties there and the Germans, as they often did, kept the bulk of their forces not in the front line but in the next line of defence and that line was bristling with defences and was probably also the location of most of their machine guns firing indirectly onto no man's land. In terms of the British attack here, there were two infantry brigades in the front line. So with four infantry battalions per brigade, that was eight battalions, but not all of those would be committed to the initial assault. So in fact, five were part of the first wave and the others were a reserve that was were ordered to follow on behind. And then you had a third brigade with another four battalions in reserve behind them to hopefully exploit any success. From beneath where we're standing now on this cemetery wall, looking down onto the battlefield, the first six South Staffordshire's, the first six North Staffordshire's, they went over side by side on this ground just before us. And then beyond them, the first fifth, the first seventh and the first eighth Sherwood Foresters, Knots and Derby Regiment, they went over the top in that part of the battlefield. So they were the five battalions leading the assault. The men in the very first waves reached the German wire, but they found it mostly uncut, in some cases undamaged, and in many places, which surprised them, it had been repaired. Considering that there had been a seven-day bombardment here, how had the Germans had an opportunity to repair Only the odd gap existed, and these were now being swept with German machine gun fire, making them kill zones. Officer casualties in all of the battalions that went over were very high indeed, with a lot of battalions being led into action by their commanding officer, the lieutenant colonel commanding the battalion, getting hit often in the very first moments of the battle, along with company commanders, second in command, and that meant very quickly the whole command and control of these battalions broke down very, very quickly indeed. In the exposed ground, with absolutely no cover and the smoke having failed, soldiers took cover in folds of ground or shell holes. Some did make it into the German trenches, but after a brief fight were overwhelmed by the numbers that were there and were captured, and the Germans then used rifle fire and grenades at close range against the men that they could visibly see in cover just beyond their wire in no man's land further attempts to push the attack forward failed when more battlefield commanders became casualties the trenches were full of mud you remember that description from the Leicester lads as to how the trenches were like rivers and waist high in water and that had drained away a little bit but the trenches were now literally kind of liquid mud and movement within them was very very very difficult indeed and that prevented the movement of troops to come up to assist in the attack and also the movement of ammunition and bombs and everything else to continue with the fight one battalion commander cancelled his attack as he looked across the battlefield and saw what was unfolding it was clear to him that the assault was a complete failure and he couldn't see any purpose in trying to advance under those kind of conditions and while aircraft flying above the battlefield did see some red flares from small parties in the German lines and these flares were to be let off to indicate as to how far forward the attacking troops had got. These were seen near to Gomakaw Wood. Those men were in very small numbers indeed and most were never heard of again, either being overwhelmed, killed or taken prisoner. The attacking units had suffered as much as 80% casualties in some cases not all of the battalion had gone over when we look at the figures they don't look that high they're in the kind of four or five hundreds which is still high but if you think a battalion paper is 1100 officers and men it looks to be quite small casualties but only a proportion of each battalion had gone over in the initial assault and when we look at that we see that the percentage of men that actually went over and became casualties in all of the attacking units here on the 1st of July were very very high indeed and for the 46th North Midland Division the attack had clearly failed this was their second time in action and their second failure just like Lou's in October of 1915 failure in terms of their inability to having captured the objective that lay before them some men had gone into the German lines none of them had made it to the point where they should have with the 56th London Division men. Some of those men had actually got to that point where they were meant to meet the Midlanders and had not seen them there. And I think this kind of led to a bit of a complaint subsequently from Major General Hull, who commanded the 56th London Division, that his men had done their job, they'd offered themselves as targets, they'd made their work pretty obvious to the enemy. The men who dug the assembly trenches in no man's land had been heavily bombarded. You can find their graves in Hebutern Cemetery. But despite all that, they got through the German lines, got through and into Gomercourt village, and some of their men had got to that rendezvous point, but had then been thrown back and there was no sign of the neighbouring division. But of course, when we look at this, what does failure mean? These men had gone over the top, they'd advanced through that smoke cloud, expecting to find the German wire uncut. It wasn't uncut, the smoke had caused more problems than it was trying to solve. The German Germans had survived the bombardment and their machine guns and their rifle teams and their rifle grenades and everything else played merry hell with the attacking troops that were caught in broad daylight in open ground with no cover and it's not surprising that the division suffered something like two and a half thousand casualties in this ground that we're looking at now. So that's an overview of what happens on this ground from where we're standing now and when we take the track and walk parallel to the German front line we'll look at it again a little bit further into this journey but what of the cemetery what of Gomakaw Ward new cemetery where we're standing now there are 748 burials here of which 464 are unidentified so it's very different from the cemetery where we started where most of the men are known soldiers in here we can quickly see by scanning our eyes across the rows of headstones that the vast majority are unknown. A rank may be known, a regiment, and a date of death perhaps, but not their identity. The vast majority are unknown. And amongst the burials here, there are 222 British, 56 New Zealand, and one Australian. The burials are from smaller cemeteries in this area, and also from the post-war clearance of this ground. When the Germans withdrew in March 1917, the trenches and the battlefield and the shell holes were cleared of dead many of the bodies from the 1st of July were still hanging on the German wire buried close to the German wire in very shallow graves they weren't even proper graves they'd really been buried by the circumstance of battle by shell fire and so that clearance resulted in the recovery of human remains but the chances of identification after so long in the open were very very slim indeed which is why so many in this cemetery are not identified. You can see the cap badges of 46 division units amongst the unknowns so that gives you a bit of indication these are men who almost certainly fell in this ground attacking these positions on the first day of the Battle of the Somme but there was not enough left with them to give them an identity. There are a few exceptions to that including one of the battalion commanders Lieutenant Colonel Charles Edmund Boot who commanded the 1st 6th Battalion North Staffordshire Regiment and was killed on the first day of the Somme aged 41. Educated at Shrewsbury School he was a veteran of the Boer War and he ran the family firm of tile makers at Burslem before the war and originally served with the 1st 5th North Staffordshire Regiment until he was promoted to take over the 1st 6th. Boot led some 400 of his men into no man's land on the 1st of July 1916 of whom whom perhaps only 20 ever returned to the British trenches, and his body was found and identified very close to the German wire when this ground was cleared in March of 1917. One account said he was a good officer and a very gallant gentleman. Boot is the only senior officer killed at Gommacore with a known grave. The others are all on the Chapval Memorial to the missing, and Lieutenant Colonel D.D. Wilson who was an Indian Army officer attached to the 1st 5th Sherwood Foresters he's on the Indian Memorial at Neuve Chapelle I first came across his name in Martin Middlebrook's book he lists the senior officer casualties in one of his appendices at the back of the first day of the Somme and he notes that he couldn't find out what the fate of Lieutenant Colonel D.D. Wilson was now Middlebrook did that research in the late 60s and early 70s long before the access to the kind of records cause that we have in front of us online today so it's interesting that he couldn't find him and I guess that he didn't think to look at Nouve Chapelle at the Indian Memorial because he hadn't joined the dots in terms of an Indian Army officer being posted to a territorial British Army territorial battalion but that's where you'll find D.D. Wilson's name he's perhaps commemorated the furthest from his place of death than any other Somme casualty in many respects. But that high level of loss amongst senior officers here at Gomel Corps on the 1st of July was definitely a major contribution to the failure, the breakdown of the attack. When the commanding officer gets killed or wounded and the company commanders get killed or wounded, the whole direction of any assault is going to break down no matter how well trained these men were at that point in the war. It wasn't that they lacked initiative or ability that was the kind of structure of these units and how they operated and how their training for this attack had taken place all of that of course would eventually change as the war moved on but the scenes had not happened and the battlefields and the battles of 1918 were not yet reached so the Somme was all part of that journey I guess to that point. One other feature in this cemetery that's very very easy to miss when you're come here is that the 46th North Midland Division have one of their divisional memorials here. Now when we talk about divisional memorials we tend to think of an obelisk or a statue or whatever it is and the 46th Division have three divisional memorials. They have a basic kind of concrete cross that stands on the edge of the road near Vermeule looking towards the Hohenzollern Redoubt battlefield. There is a more recent one much closer to the Hohenzollern Redoubt itself that was placed there I think just before the centenary but of the original memorials there's the cross at Hohenzollern and then there's a later one for the battles in 1918 which we'll mention later on in this walk and there's one here and it's not a big obelisk and it's not a statue it's a tiny little plaque in the wall of the cemetery and I'll put a picture of that and some other aspects of the battlefield here at Gommacore onto the podcast website it's incredibly small for a divisional memorial just a little plaque but I think it reflects perhaps the feeling at the time about this battle. This was the second strike against their name the second failure and a catastrophic battle in terms of losses. There was no room for a statue here there was no room for an obelisk or any grand memorial that would have been inappropriate to those who'd survived this battle but something had to be placed here to mark that loss and it's this simple little plaque and it just shows how these memorials really speak volumes beyond their shape or size or design and tell us so much about loss and how soldiers viewed perhaps a particular battle so from the cemetery we're going to go back down the steps onto the road walk towards the edge of Gomakaw village we're not going to go into the village on this walk the The village was rebuilt in the 1920s. There is still a chateau there today in the heart of the village, kind of a 1920s building, very different to the one that had been there before. The woods grew up in the same kind of shape, Gomacaw Wood and Gomacaw Park. And it's very easy to kind of overlay the maps of the Great War onto the modern maps of this area. Very little has changed. But there have been a few minor changes. When I first used to come here on this edge of Gomakaw village just on the right as you come into the village there's a little bit of grass there now but there was part of a concrete German bunker entrance there that was very very prominent raised up above ground in a kind of an angled shape with the entrance covered over with a bit of wobbly tin and it went down apparently I never went into it unfortunately but it went down into the German dugouts and positions that were beneath this side of Gomakaw village that disappeared sometime I think in the 1990s about the time that I first moved to the Somme I remember coming up there having worked on my route for walking the Somme which was about to go into print and discovered that it was gone and that was another part of the landscape of the First World War that had sadly disappeared but before the main entrance to the village itself there's a track that goes off to the left and again as usual I'll put a map onto the podcast website so you can follow this route and that track takes us running roughly parallel to the German front line and as we walk along it we can get to a point where we can stop look back to our left towards where the cemetery is sitting in the middle of no man's land we can see the church spire the foncavilliers in the distance ahead of us and then to our right the big stretch of open ground where those five battalions of the 46th North Midland Division made their attack at zero hour on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. And looking at it like this from the German perspective, we can see the incredible fields of fire. It's not quite a billiard table here. There are a few folds in the ground, but there is essentially no cover. Any attacking force that's going to come over that open ground needs either a dominance of artillery and firepower to neutralize the defenders who were dug in where we're standing or it needs smoke perhaps as well it needs smoke to protect it as it moves forward none of those attacking here on the first day of the Somme had that they were thrown out into the open the smoke had failed and they didn't have superior firepower and the bombardment had not cut the German wire and it had not destroyed the German positions and more importantly it had not neutralized the German defenders and we can see what ability they had to command this ground with their weapon systems, with their machine guns, trench mortars, rifle grenades, small arms and even grenades thrown at short distance. What ability they had to throw an attack back and it's not surprising that is exactly what happened here. One of the things you can see as you walk down this track just to the left of it is a series of mounds and they've been here for certainly as long as I've been walking and I've inquired with a couple of the local farmers who are in the belief that this bit of ground has never been touched is because beneath those mounds are concrete structures that may well have been entrances to the German dugouts here or could have been machine gun positions or trench mortar positions in this part of the German line. It's one of those places that is long overdue for some kind of investigation, I believe. And one of the things as you walk further down this track and you come into the area where they cultivate the ground on a regular basis, you certainly find the detritus of war. Shell cases, bullets, shrapnel, shrapnel balls, and all the other things you'd expect to find in a typical Somme field. And then, increasingly, as you pull away from the edge of the village, further out into the vast expanse of open fields, you get a clear view of Gommacore Wood on your right, where that German second line was located, where the of their troops were where probably their machine guns were placed to fire enfilade and angle across the battlefield down onto no man's land and where their trench mortars would have been as well and probably where their observation posts for their artillery was located as well because a lot of shell fire was dropped into no man's land by the germans as this attack began as well and as we walk further not quite to the end of this track but certainly towards its end there's a bit at the far end where it drops off to the left and and you can go around into another part of Foncavilliers and do this as a kind of circular walk. As we get to that far end, near to where today the vast, vast electrical pylons are located, there's a little kind of wooded, copsy area there, where if you go into that, it's very close to the site of the Z and the little Z, those positions marked on the British trench maps. This was where the 1st, 7th Sherwood Foresters went over on the first day of the Battle of the Somme when you go into that little wooded area you will find the remains of some of the German trenches there they're not particularly deep although some are deeper than others it is a private area sometimes they shoot in it and there are traps for the birds in there so the best thing if you want to explore it properly go and see the mayor of Gormecourt get permission to go in there but you can stand on the edge of it and visibly see the remains of the archaeology if you like of the German trenches that were there more than 100 years ago in 1916 and I think what you get and not many walk down this track I think but what you get is you get in so many places on this landscape of the Great War across the Western Front is that the landscape really tells you so much as to why the outcome of the battle played out in the way that it did once you get to the far end of this track and look back towards the cemetery and again kind see that open landscape with the German positions on the left and the British positions would have been on the right then you can see that this was a classic kill zone that the attackers really stood no chance whatsoever of crossing that ground unless they dominated this ground already and they had something to protect them to get into those German those enemy positions and indeed beyond and while everyone that survived this battle came back from it understanding why it had failed because men can't advance in broad daylight when the enemy positions have not been taken and they're bristling with firepower. Not everyone saw it the same way. Gomakor was a bloody failure on a day of bloody failures but one unusual aspect of the battle here was that the failure resulted in a court of inquiry. This was the second time the 46th North Midland Division had seemingly failed in battle, in an attack. Previously they'd been thrown back, as we've mentioned, at the Hovenzollern Redoubt at Loos on the 13th of October 1915. This time they again had been destroyed in no man's land and seemingly few of them got into the German trenches and none had made it to that area beyond Gomercourt where they were due to meet up with the men from the 56th London Division. The inquiry called together surviving senior officers, several of the brigade majors these were officers that were attached to brigade staff who were to be the eyes and the ears and the visible presence of the brigade commander on the battlefield itself and also they interviewed some junior officers who had survived the attack as well but there were so few officers that had survived that in the end they had to interview many ordinary soldiers as well and that made this inquiry a bit unusual as the But normally, perhaps they would just speak to officers because officers were gentlemen and their word was their bond and all that kind of stuff. The other ranks weren't normally called upon for their opinion. But because most of the officers had become casualties and that the survivors were largely ordinary soldiers, this inquiry tapped into their voices and it makes it an interesting document to look at. It survives in the archives of the National Archives and it's there for all to consult a friend of mine transcribed it and typed it up on his Amstrad computer that kind of dates me now all those years ago and gave me a copy of it and I re-read it for the preparation for this podcast it is a fascinating document and I saw quite a few names in it of people that I recognised from different elements of research Captain Bill Brown of the 96 siege batteries in there he was Malcolm Vivian's friend he'd been spotting for their one half of their siege battery that had been covering the foot division attack and Malcolm had been doing the same for their guns covering the 56th division attack just to the south and Bill Brown went forward to explain what his work was and what the role of the heavy guns were and he's quoted in this report but I think that the voice that they gave to ordinary soldiers and they just transcribed what they said is one of those rare examples in which we hear ordinary working class lads in the contemporary context of the war itself giving their view of what happened and I think that's what makes it such an important document. Anyway I could go on for another hour reciting bits of these different reports and the statements of the ordinary soldiers but I thought I'd just give you one example and that is a statement made by Sergeant H Fitzgerald of the 1st 6th North Staffordshire Regiment who said I advanced in the front wave and got as far as the German wire which was very thick and not cut. We couldn't get through. The enemy opened machine gun fire so I got in a shell hole and remained there till dark. The gun was on top of the parapet, not an emplacement. Just at dusk, the enemy sent small parties out on each side of us and started cutting their wire towards us. We withdrew. The enemy started calling us back saying, come back you English bastards, come back you buggers. A good number of them shouted in English. Now I guess that the staff officers and those who'd convened this court of inquiry were perhaps not really ready or prepared for ordinary soldiers to be talking in that kind of language. So that's why I think this court of inquiry and the pages within it and the accounts that are there are so important. The report is long, it's fascinating and perhaps does deserve a podcast in its own right but essentially you sense when you read it they're looking for someone or groups of people to blame for this failure there's a lot about the lack of communications and the direction of the battle on the 1st of July and the officers who were left who came to the court explained this by the fact that all of the signalers which had gone over had been killed or wounded so there was no one left on the battlefield to run the communications the signalers had all gone into action and and they'd all become casualties. The failure of the bombardment is also noted, and many of the witnesses spoke about how the German wire had been repaired. They got to the German wire, and as I mentioned earlier, they'd been very surprised to see that the Germans had had an opportunity to repair it. How was that possible if there'd been a continuous seven-day bombardment? And what came out is that the bombardment in this area had been stopped numerous times so that patrols could go out and assess the damage to the wire, assess how effective that bombardment had been. And that gave the Germans ample time and opportunity to effect repairs. So in reporting on how the bombardment was going and stopping it to enable that to happen had given the Germans a vital window of opportunity to repair the damage. that had been done. There was also mention of how the assault battalions had had to bring up all the kit and this was another facet of this attack rather than have carrying parties to carry up all of the equipment that would be needed for the assault the men actually making the assault were being asked to do that themselves and in the conditions within those trenches which we've already spoken about of mud and of water it made that very very challenging indeed and exhausted many of the attacking troops even before they got ready to get into their assembly positions and the whole issue of the weather and how the trenches had been flooded and the mud that was highlighted as one of the key factors in the inability to move men around and it also hampered communication and supply on the battlefield itself so all of these elements came out during this inquiry but Generally reading it, you feel like someone's head is on the chopping block here. And in the end, that rested with the divisional commander, Major General Edward James Montague Stuart Wortley. And while the plan rested in the lap of the core commander, Lieutenant General Snow, he accused the men of Wortley's division, the men of the 46th North Midland Division, of a lack of offensive spirit. This was not Snow's finest hour. He was not a well man. At this point in the war, he'd been a good divisional commander in 1914-15 at the Battle of Le Cateau and the Second Battle of Ypres. He'd then been promoted to corps level. And sometimes men, when they promoted beyond their original position, they weren't as good at the next one. And that was definitely true with Snow. He was a good defensive general at Le Cateau. He'd been on the defensive at the Second Battle of Ypres. He'd been on the defensive there. And his last major battle on the Western Front when he defended the ground south of Cambrai during the German counter-attack there that was also a successful battle. After that his health deteriorated even further and he was then eventually sent home. But in a war that required an offensive spirit which he accused these men of having a lack of he himself perhaps was guilty of that charge. He was good defending ground but not good in attacking it. His day was perhaps done long before the battle at Gommacore so it cast a shadow really over his war his performance and it's not a good epitaph to give your men who had proudly gone into battle without any complaint accusing them of a lack of offensive spirit when the battlefield is littered with their dead perhaps is not something that will endear you to the men that you command so Stuart Wortley became the fall guy here and he was dismissed and sent home and the 46th North Midland Division who in the eyes of those who commanded on the Western Front had now failed twice they were sidelined they were sent off to quiet sectors they were up at Lens for a very long while and they held the line when other divisions needed to be relieved to go off and take part in the fighting at Arras or at Messines or at Third Eap or at Combray but they weren't involved in any of those operations they were just holding the line and when you think that the men within that division knew what the army the rest of the army thought of them and the way they'd been so obviously sidelined in this manner morale in that division must have been pretty low indeed but there is a better outcome to their eventual history in the battles on the western front in the late summer of 1918 they were given a new Commander, Major General Jerry Boyd. Boyd was an old soldier, and amongst his decorations was a Distinguished Service Order, but also he wore the ribbon of the DCM, the Distinguished Conduct Medal, an Ordinary Soldier's Award, not an Officer's Medal. So here was a man who had started in the ranks, and this perhaps made the men within the division who had been sidelined for so long perhaps think again about their position on this battlefield in this war because here was a man who had once shared their privations in fact he had joined as an ordinary soldier in the British Army in 1895 and was awarded the DCM in the Boer War then commissioned and by 1914 he was a brigade major and by 1918 a divisional commander so in 18 years he'd gone from an ordinary soldier to commanding a division of 20,000 men and one of the accounts said that it was clear from the initial training as they prepared for their next their perhaps final battle on the western front that this was a very different mentality that he brought with him to this division one of them said that he wielded the north midland division like a sword and with that sword he struck the hindenburg line in september 1918 that classic battle where they advanced on the st quentin canal the german and defences around the St Quentin Canal and part of their task in that attack was to capture one of the bridges over the cutting of that canal to enable the advance to continue which they did and that famous photograph of men from the 137th Staffordshire Brigade on the banks of the canal cutting with their brigades commander the Tally Ho VC Brigadier General Campbell addressing the men, thanking them for their great success. It was a turning point in the war, the battles on the Hindenburg Line, and a final turning of the page of the history of the 46th North Midland Division. A moment of victory, a moment of glory. But behind that victory, behind every victory, was a price. Not just the dead who'd made it possible, but those who'd fought and fallen in those earlier battles which the Division had taken part in at Loos and at Gommacore. I'm fairly blamed for failure. They'd all been volunteers, those early men, and no man can give more than his own life, and these men had laid that on the line, no matter what the outcome. So for the veterans of the North Midland Division, whose final triumphant memorial stood high as a column above the St Quentin Canal and at noon its pinnacle cast long shadows across that ground, shadows back to Gomakor and all those earlier pathways which had defined its time along the old front line. you've been listening to an episode of the old front line with me military historian paul reed you can follow me on twitter at somcor you can follow the podcast at old front line pod check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast and if you feel like supporting us you can go to our patreon page patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.