On the Somme in 1916 New Zealand troops experienced the full horror of industrialised warfare. While machine guns were lethal for troops in the open, artillery ruled the battlefield on the Western Front. The war was characterised by not only a growing scale of artillery but also increasing sophistication in its use.
The gunners shaped the battlefield. Villages, woods and fields were reduced to drab wilderness by relentless shellfire and blighted by the squalid apparatus needed to support hordes of soldiers. No-man’s-land became so featureless that it was easy to get lost and blunder into the enemy’s lines.
The development of quick-firing guns able to deliver large quantities of high-explosive shells made such a war possible. The harnessing of economies to the demands of total war since 1914 enabled the deployment of growing numbers of these guns. Initial problems with shell supply were overcome during 1915. Massive munitions stocks were increasingly available: the British army in France received 16 million shells in the second half of 1915. The war had become a clash between machines as much as between men.
To protect themselves from both machine-gun and artillery fire, the troops had no alternative but to go below ground level. Both sides dug for their lives. During 1915 trench systems grew ever more complex, with specific styles for front, main, reserve and communication trenches. The Germans dug deep dugouts, which would serve them well when the Allies attacked them on the Somme. The Allies, committed to pushing the enemy out of France and Belgium, developed far less extensive underground works, on the assumption that they would soon be moving forward.
Although artillery was essential to any attack, men on foot had to secure the ground. They faced seemingly impossible odds. Many were killed before an attack even began by shells landing in the assembly trenches. Both sides also fired poison-gas shells when the wind was blowing in the right direction. After going over the top, or ‘hopping the bags’ as the troops called it, the advancing infantry, weighed down by their packs, often had to negotiate their way through mud and shell craters. Facing them were extensive barbed-wire obstructions, hopefully so shattered by artillery fire that they could be easily penetrated.
Crossing no-man’s-land exposed men to enemy artillery fire. Although high-explosive shells tended to bury themselves in mud before exploding, reducing their lethality, men in the open had no protection from shrapnel shells bursting in the air and raining metal balls down on them. As they approached the enemy line, machine guns added to the carnage. Fired from a flanking (or enfilading) position, these could be devastating for advancing troops.
The big guns
Shellfire inflicted most of the casualties in the Great War. In trench warfare being killed or maimed by a random shell falling without warning was a constant danger, and one that caused a steady stream of casualties. But it was prolonged bombardments that really shook men’s nerves. They often emerged from such episodes in a state of shock, numbed and hardly able to speak. Constant concussions and the fear of imminent oblivion by being blown to pieces, shattered by shell fragments or buried alive was almost impossible to bear.
‘A steady pandemonium’
Men were jolted from sleep as explosions ‘pounded the tortured ground; the splitting hiss and bang of the field-guns screaming above the deep, earth-shaking thud! thud! of the heavies until they blended into a steady pandemonium. The trenches rocked and trembled, while their garrisons, blinded by the flashes, choked by the acrid fumes, pressed themselves tight to the sodden walls.’
Sidney Rogerson, Twelve days on the Somme: a memoir of the trenches, 1916, Greenhill Books, London, 2006
Despite the threat posed by artillery, many attacks did succeed, even on the Somme. Infantrymen’s greatest protection was the ability of their artillery to keep the enemy’s heads down for the crucial period they were in the open. As techniques for locating enemy batteries improved, later attempts to suppress enemy artillery during assaults were more successful.
Constant efforts were made to refine tactics to minimise the effect of enemy firepower and maximise the effect of one’s own. This was demonstrated during the Battle of the Somme by the emergence of the creeping barrage. This tactic, which required much greater coordination between artillery and infantry than hitherto, involved the use of artillery to minimise the danger from enemy machine guns while the troops were crossing no-man’s-land. A curtain of fire would shield the troops as they approached the enemy line, and prevent enemy machine-gunners taking up position to fire on the approaching attackers.
