[The following is in regards to the Somme Offensive.]
The Germans (who were fighting for their lives) had practiced bringing their machine guns up the steps from their deep dugouts hundreds of times. F. L. Cassell, a German survivor, recalled “the shout of the sentry, ‘They are coming’… Helmet, belt and rifle and up the steps… in the trench a headless body. The sentry had lost his life to a last shell… there they come, the khaki-yellows, they are not twenty metres in front of our trench… They advance slowly fully equipped… machine-gun fire tears holes in their ranks.”
The machine guns reached even inside the British front line in places, to hit troops who had not reached no man’s land. A sergeant of the 3rd Tyneside Irish recalled seeing “away to my left and right, long lines of men. Then I heard the ‘patter, patter’ of machine guns in the distance. By the time I’d gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; by the time I had gone twenty yards, I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit myself.”
The whole of the Tyneside Irish Brigade, of four battalions, nearly three thousand men, was brought to a halt inside British lines, with appalling loss of life. One of its battalions lost 500 men killed or wounded, another 600. In offensive terms, the advance had achieved nothing. Most of the dead were killed on ground the British held before the advance began.
Source:
Keegan, John. "The Year of Battles." The First World War. New York: A. Knopf :, 1999. 295. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
M. Browne, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, London, 1996, p. 67.
Keegan, Face, p. 245.
Further Reading:
Bataille de la Somme / Schlacht an der Somme (Battle of the Somme) / Somme Offensive
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