The 1916 Battle of the Somme: A Reappraisal

by Peter H. Liddle

More British soldiers died on the Somme in 1916 than in all of World War II. A distinguished scholar draws on untapped sources for a vivid account of World War I’s most tragic battle.

Genres: Military History, World War I, History, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Dr Peter Liddle, FRHistS is a historian and author specialising in the study of the First and Second World Wars.

While teaching and lecturing during the 1960s, Liddle began collecting historical memorabilia in order to bring history to life for students. He founded the Liddle Collection which he continued to build for the next 30 years. The Liddle Collection was made up of personal experience documentation and memorabilia connected to the First World War. The collection is permanently housed at the University of Leeds.

Reviews

[Dimitri · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a disappointment. With a title like this, one looks forward to a dominant amount of analysis and historical debate, but these make up only a third of the pages. The most interesting parts of the book are thus the first and final chapters. In the first, the current trends in historiography are under discussion.

Broadly speaking, the consensus be situated halfway between the Lions led by Donkeys school of the 1960's and the merciless revisionism of notable Commonwealth historians. The controversy surrending the direction of the battle still centers on Field Marshall Douglas Haig, demonised in Denis Winters' Haigs Command: A Reassessment (1991) but since moderately rehabilited in works such as Haig: A Re-Appraisal 80 Years On.

From this deducts that some of the criticisms voiced by enfant terribles Tim Travers ( The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare ........ ,1987) and Trevor&Wilson (The Somme ,2005) have gained acceptance, but not all.

The academic debate still searches for better solutions to the operational quagmire of the Somme than "More guns. Always add more guns." but agrees, for example, that the notion that the Somme offensive was a knee-jerk reaction of the Entente to the attack on Verdun must be banished from the popular mind; an offensive on such a scale couldn't have been organised on such short notice; the British just took up a larger part of the task so that the French Army could maximize its Moria system on the Meuse front. Of note is also that the heavily burdened greenhorns of the British New Armies did not uniformily advance shoulder to shoulder, but locally adapted more open formation, sometimes inspired by the seasoned habits of the French infantry on the right wing. The kicking of a football across No Man's Land is a famous example of this.

The four chapters making up the middle are a conventional, if usefully brief, history of the battle. If you read this diagonally, there's a lot of operational analysis to the point on offer; it beats weeding through the hundreds of pages by Trevor & Wilson. Some of the testimonials shed light on lesser-known aspects of the Somme battle, such as the attritional cost among pilots to establish air suppremacy.

The final chapter "A verdict" tries to assign credit and blame where due, but it is clear that when framed in the larger context of the war, without the benefit of hindsight, without material constraints or a 21st-century mentality frame, the fight went as well as it could. One of the small plates attached to the planks of the walkway around the Lochnagar mine quotes a veteran who died in 1990 : "I did what I had to do". The contemporary voice definitely seems to make less fuss over the possibility of a less-than-perfect direction.

[Jur]

In het kader van mijn bezoek over een paar weken aan London voor de megagame over de slag aan de Somme heb ik ook maar een simpel boek erover gekocht. Ik heb nog wel wat andere dingen over de slag in de kast staan, maar een overzicht had ik nog niet.

[Mark Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though this is a very readable account of the Somme I didn't really feel that anything was reconsidered! There's lots of books on this battle and every book can't have everything so there were a few accounts I didn't know but on the whole I found it dissappointing.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short book tries to do three things: give a military narrative of the battle of the Somme, convey something of the experiences of the soldiers who fought there, and assess to validity of the old 'Lions led by donkeys' judgement of British generals. It sort of succeeds with all three, but it might have been better in a book of this length to focus on one. I have read attempts at two and three by, for example, Malcolm Brown and Gary Sheffield, which worked better because they limited their aims. Fitting, I suppose for a book on this topic. That said, this is a decent short introduction to the subject.

[John Somers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readable and very informative account of the battle of the Somme. Draw heavily on primary sources (diary entries etc.) and threads them into a coherent whole. His central points that the Somme was required both by the strategic situation at the time and the alliance with France and that the mistakes that were made were not fault of Haig and incompetence and indifference in the high command, that the Somme did not cause a huge erosion in British morale and that the battle did in fact make a valuable contribution to an eventual allied victory as he feels that this was a battle of attrition in which the allies defeated the Germans. For each of these he makes a valid and convincing argument however I did feel that he was too quick to defend Haig and the staff. All in all quite a good book.