The significance of the Somme
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The Battle of the Somme was also significant because it was the first major First World War offensive in which British soldiers, rather than the French, played the leading part – and it was the first in which a British army volunteers, rather than regular soldiers, were the main victims.
Troops rescue the wounded, pinned down by heavy artillery fire,
but many died unnecessarily, before overstretched medical services
could help them
Imperial War Museum (Q1303)
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Not only did the British Army suffer the worst casualties in the country's military history, but the image of inexperienced schoolboy soldiers walking across No Man's Land, and being mown down by German machine-gun fire has been imprinted indelibly on our cultural memory.
Prime Minister David Lloyd George believed that the Battle of the Somme had been a 'ghastly failure'. So horrific was the experience of thousands of young soldiers on the Somme that the battle quickly became a symbol of all that is wrong with war.
On the First Day on the Somme, thousands of British soldiers were killed in a few minutes – for example, on 1 July, 3,500 men from Manchester and more than 5,000 from London died within minutes of one another.
Many of the Pals units came from the same community in Britain, so the high casualty rates meant that a large percentage of young men from that community were dead or wounded. In many communities, as a result of these massacres, young women outnumbered young men after the war.
Since youth symbolises hope, then the death of so many young people was a blow to the expectations and ambitions of thousands of families all over Britain. After the war, their view of the future was bleak.
Why fight on?
At the time, the losses at the Somme did make many people in Britain doubt the wisdom of carrying on with the war. Those that watched Geoffrey Malins' documentary film of the fighting, released in late summer 1916, began to realise the truth about the dreadful conditions of trench warfare. And that film was made before the rains turned the battlefield into a quagmire.
But, with Germany still occupying parts of France and Belgium, it was impossible to stop fighting, because that would be to admit defeat and encourage Germany to seize the land of other countries. Besides, many people – including the young soldiers who had survived but had watched their friends being killed and wounded – wanted to get their own back and avenge their loss.