Was it the bitter lessons from defeat in The Somme which allowed the British to finally turn the tide of the First World War? Robert Foley considers the evidence

With almost 60,000 British casualties on the first day (about 60 percent of the British attacking troops) and with some 360,000 other British casualties between 2 July and 13 November 1916, the battle of the Somme has traditionally been regarded by historians as an unmitigated British disaster. As observers looked back at the war in the years after the Treaty of Versailles, the battle of the Somme came to demonstrate the barrenness of British military thought, both at the battlefield tactical level and at the higher strategic level.

Bounded by the defeat at Loos in 1915 and the defeat in the battle of Passchendaele in 1917, the battle was seen merely as one more bloody and senseless effort by British generals to break through an unbreakable German defensive line using bad tactics. Consequently, the battle came to epitomize the futility of the First World War. As A.J.P. Taylor put it in his influential book, The First World War: An Illustrated History, first published in 1963: ‘The Somme set the picture by which future generations saw the First World War: brave helpless soldiers; blundering obstinate generals; nothing achieved.’

Indeed, the question of the outcome of the battle of the Somme has been inextricably bound together with the leadership of Sir Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force from late 1915 to the victory in November 1918. Haig has generally been portrayed as a deeply conservative general, who was reluctant to recognize the changed nature of the First World War battlefield.

As a consequence, many observers believed that he prevented the British army from learning how to fight effectively on a modern battlefield dominated by trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns. Haig’s decision to continue the battle of the Somme for 4½ months and his continual belief that one more push would decide the battle and the war when it should have been clear that the German defence could not be broken seemed to confirm this pessimistic view of Haig and his pernicious effects on British tactics.

This interpretation of the battle of the Somme and the leadership of the British commander-in-chief has proved remarkably resilient and has been accepted by a wide range of historians. Although John Terraine long offered a lone voice against this view, it has only been recently that this comfortable consensus has been rigorously and widely questioned. British military historians such as Paddy Griffith, Peter Simpkins, John Lee and Gary Sheffield have argued that although the battle of the Somme may not have won the war in 1916, it was an important step in the ultimate German defeat, a defeat that these historians believe was inflicted by the much-maligned Sir Douglas Haig and his British Expeditionary Force.

To these historians, the battle of the Somme provided an important learning experience for all who survived. Their research has demonstrated that the traditional view of the British army as a force of ‘lions led by donkeys’ is incorrect. Instead, they have shown that the British army underwent a tactical learning curve that took the army from a small army fit mainly for colonial warfare to a massive force capable of fighting sophisticated, modern battles. Indeed, they have even revealed that the British army evolved tactically during the battle of the Somme, for example developing better cooperation between the attacking infantry and artillery by means of a creeping barrage. They have argued that this tactical innovation resulted in an army that by 1918 was the most tactically advanced on the Western Front and that this advantage resulted in the German defeat in November 1918. To this new generation of revisionists, the battle of the Somme was one of the most important elements in this learning curve.

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