in the early morning of July 1st 1916 as London residents slept some would have awoken to the sound of a distant boom it was no matter London was a rockus city many would have gone back to bed trying their best to ignore the faint reverberation across the English Channel however near the river s what londoners perceived to be a distant Rumble was in fact a cacophony of Destruction the deadliest day in British military history had begun we made a companion episode covering British tanks in World War I more information at the end of this video
by the end of 1915 the first world war had devolved into a bloody stalemate and the antant powers of France Britain Russia Italy and Serbia were desperate for Solutions throughout 1915 a key problem facing the antant had been the unexpected maneuverability of German forces which had allowed them to rapidly transfer troops between the different fronts of the war to combat this problem the leaders of the anant decided that in 1916 they would launch major offensives all simultaneously stretching the German Army to its limit and breaking the might of the Kaiser for good while the Italians
struck in the South and the Russians marched East the British and French would launch their attack on the the S the a river in northern France was the place on the Western Front where British and French forces met essentially devoid of strategic significance it was for this reason and this reason alone that it was chosen as the site of the upcoming angl French offensive facing off against two heavily defended German trench lines with a third under construction the initial plan envisioned 39 battle hardened French divisions advanced in the South while still inexperienced British and Commonwealth
forces launched a supporting attack in the north though theoretically sound this plan assumed that the Germans would not launch an offensive of their own in this regard the anant guessed wrong in February of 1916 the Germans Unleashed a massive assault on the French Fortress city of Verdon as more and more French troops were drawn into the resulting Whirlpool of death the the number of French divisions allotted to the upcoming s offensive dropped from 39 down to 12 the anon's major offensive would now be a primarily British Affair despite this change of plans British commander sir
dougas ha was optimistic after all the ongoing Battle of Verdon had placed an enormous strain on the German Army furthermore after years of production hag believed that the British army now possessed an equate supply of artillery and ammunition to carry out a truly massive assault against the advice of his more cautious subordinate Sir Henry rollinson he decided that British forces would seize the first two lines of the German defenses simultaneously maximizing their chance for a decisive breakthrough Having learned the importance of artillery in previous campaigns ha sought to obliterate German positions at the song while
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to the offensive more than 1,500 British guns slammed 1.7 million rounds into the German front line on the morning of July 1st this bomb G intensified even further and almost A4 million shells were fired in barely an hour adding to the Carnage at 7:28 a.m. the British detonated 10 massive mines that they had carefully placed under the German defenses as British soldiers went over the top 2 minutes later they must have asked themselves if any German could have possibly survived such a murderous barrage the immediate rattle of enemy machine gun fire soon answered their question
while the British bombardment had been intense its Effectiveness had been severely limited by a critical lack of heavy guns out of the over 1,500 artillery pieces utilized by the British only 233 were large enough to cause serious damage to German defenses furthermore up to 30% of the shells fired by the British were duds and hag's decision to seize both German trenches simultaneously meant that the bombardment was diluted over a much larger area than it could have been as a result of these miscalculations most of the German defenses of the S were dazed but still very
much alive as British troops rushed to achieve their overly optimistic objectives on the morning of July 1st a Slaughter ensued Laden with up to 60 lbs of Gear British soldiers struggled uphill to reach the German trench lines as machine gun and artillery fire r down on them with gaps in their own barbed wire cut too small British soldiers were moaned down in their hundreds as they bunched together desperate to break through in the first hour alone the British suffered 30,000 casualties with 500 men killed wounded or captured every single minute units such as the first
New Finland regiment lost up to 91% of their combat strength in a single attack in the devire regiment 59 men were killed by a single German machine gun amidst the Armageddon however there were some successes in fact south of the bom Road British forces actually achieved a majority of their objectives even further to the South the French were also remarkably effective capturing all of their objectives and taking 4,000 German prisoners without even having to call in their reserves the successes in this region of the battlefield can be attributed to weaker German defenses more effective French
artillery and Innovative tactics despite these accomplishments the first day of the P had been a cataclysmic failure for the cost of 57,000 British casualties heg had still failed to achieve the majority of his objectives though the true scale of the slaughter slowly became known to British commanders after several days the offensive itself was never reconsidered as the French bled verun it was of critical importance that the British keep up the pressure on the Germans the battle of the S would rage on in the aftermath of the first day both the Germans and British attempted to
consolidate their positions at the for the Germans this meant pulling men and material from Verdan reinforcing their already strong defensive positions by July 10th French intelligence concluded that the German defenses were stronger than they had been at the start of the battle British attention on the other hand was focused on preparing for a second offensive slated for July 14th learning from their mistakes on the first day this attack would have much more limited objectives and take place over a much smaller front the leadup to July 14th was hardly quiet at the S German tactical thinking
insisted on retaking every inch of lost ground with bloody counterattacks and British forces launched disord organized attacks of their own in an attempt to secure more favorable positions to launch their offensive from when the second major British offensive at the S finally came it was preceded by a whirlwind bombardment followed just minutes later by a massive infantry assault though the overall strength of the British bombardment on July 14th was smaller than the one at the beginning of the battle British artillery power was concentrated over a much smaller area of the front meaning that every square
yard of German defenses received five times the number of shells than it had 2 weeks prior at sir rollinson insistence this attack was also launched at night as a result of ha and rollinson adaptations the attack on July 14th was much more successful than their first offensive largely capturing the second line of German defenses for relatively few casualties nevertheless the decisive breakthrough had not been achieved the next phase of the battle which stretched from July 15th to September 14th is sometimes referred to as the period of Forgotten battles during this phase ha and rollinson attempted
to seize areas around Highwood Delville wood and gilmont in preparation for their next major assault scheduled for September 15th what resulted was a confused and disorganized series of attacks which failed to gain any significant ific ground or properly integrate French support in one especially brutal episode Australian forces attempted to seize the village of poier in just 6 weeks of fighting nearly as many Australians were killed here than in 8 months of galipoli the British attack on September 15th was envisioned by rollinson as a more limited operation but hay once again was determined to break the
entirety of the German defense in one fell swoo like the first day of the S this ambition resulted in artillery fire being diluted to a less effective density unlike the first day however egg had a secret weapon development of the tank had begun in 1915 in the hopes of providing a weapon that could support vulnerable infantry advances across No Man's Land despite some of his shortcomings ha was an enthusiastic supporter of innovative military technology and saw potential in the tank placing an order for 150 of these vehicles however by September 15th only 49 tanks had
arrived in France with only 18 actually arriving on the battlefield without breaking down regardless the attack went forward as planned the British assault on September 15th introduced the world to the tank but it also clearly demonstrated that the new weapons were still in their infancy only being able to move at a measly 2 mph in Battlefield conditions and unable to navigate large craters ha and rollinson were forced to leave gaps in their own artillery barrage to facilitate the vehicle's Advance these pauses in artillery fire often led to British troops assaulting underhell German positions to predictably
fatal results however when combined with accurate artillery fire tanks proved to be a potentially potent force in the center of the British offensive 12 tanks were able to support a successful infantry advance of around 3,000 yards even if all of them had broken down by midafternoon the first use of the tank was a qualified success with their slow speed and abysmal reliability tanks were clearly not capable of single-handedly ending the war however Hig has been Vindicated by modern historians for using the tank as best as he could and immediately placed an order for 1,000 more
of these vehicles after another successful assault on September 25th ha hoped to continue offensive operations and Achieve his long sought after breakthrough however newly constructed German defenses meant that any such breakthrough would be monumentally challenging to pull off heavy October rains also complicated any potential offensives further bloody fighting continued until November with British and French forces making limited advances in in the North and South but these small successes failed to Breathe new life into the 140-day long battle with increasingly poor weather making further operations fruitless Allied commanders finally began to acknowledge that there could be
no decisive breakthrough and on November 18th 1916 the battle of the S finally came to an end the cost of the S had been staggering the British suffered 420,000 000 casualties while the French suffered 205,000 German casualty figures are controversial but are usually estimated at between 500,000 and 600,000 in return for these hundreds of thousands of lives the anant had Advanced just 7 miles after the war the battle of the S came to be viewed as one of the defining cataclysms of the Great War demonstrating the senseless Slaughter of the conflict however some Modern historians
have begun to offer a different View Painting the battle as a costly though necessary victory for the anant while hag and other British commanders made a number of key mistakes the battle of the S also caused the Germans to pull back their forces from Veron reconsider their positions on the Western Front and eventually withdraw to the Hindenburg line in 1917 pivotally the casualties suffered by the Germans at the S also made them desperate enough to begin un unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic a strategy that would eventually lead to war with the United States and
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