Number missing' first day of the Somme

[Beselare]

I recently heard someone quote a figure of 12,000 men marked as 'missing' on the first day of the Somme.  I have tried to verify that figure but have drawn a blank.  Perhaps I have missed a posting or internet entry somewhere.  Can anyone help?

 

Many thanks

Bob

[phil andrade]

Bob,

You will  find, I think, that very large numbers  of men were  posted as " missing " in the immediate returns that were made available ASAP after the first day.

 

It must have taken months before the men posted as missing could be accounted for.  Many of them were dead, of course. A remarkably small number - not much more than five hundred - were found to be prisoners.  A significant number were men who were torn loose from their commands and turned up sooner or later.

 

I don't have Middlebook's book with me here, but I think that he gives a brief summary of how the casualties were categorised in the initial reports, and if I remember correctly, the number posted as missing exceeded the number who were reported as killed or died from wounds.  The final reckoning changed this dramatically, with 19,240 confirmed as dead ; there were an additional 2,152 missing who were never accounted for, a figure which is sometimes added on to the confirmed deaths.....I don't know what to make of that.

 

And so that figure of twelve thousand missing that you cite probably reflects immediate post battle returns that were in need of drastic alteration as the lethal  fate of so many of those men became apparent in the ensuing weeks , months and, perhaps, years.

 

Phil

 

 

[phil andrade]

Here's what Middlebrook tells us ( not verbatim) in his book on the First Day of the Somme:

 

The first returns compiled as soon as battalions came out of action gave a figure of 17,758 missing. Of these, 585 were confirmed as prisoners and 4,316 returned unharmed to their units. The majority - 10,705 - were subsequently declared dead, and another 2,152 were not accounted for, and, in Middlebook's opinion, were probably dead too.

 

pages 262-263.

 

Phil

 

[Beselare]

Hello Phil - thank you very much for that information.  I can see now that some rounded up or down figures were used when the person I referred to (a French tour guide) quoted the figure of 12,000.  

 

Bob

[phil andrade]

Bob,

 

Delighted to be of help .

 

Might it be that the provenance of that twelve thousand figure for missing that you cited lies in aggregating the well over ten thousand  missing who were subsequently declared dead and the additional two thousand or so who were not accounted for ?

 

I note that in the first post battle returns, based on earliest battalion musters, " only" eight thousand or so were confirmed as killed or died from wounds : the actual figure, of course, was in the region of twenty thousand , with  those twelve thousand plus missing holding the balance....the clarification of their fate massively inflating the record of fatality.

 

Phil

 

 

[Beselare]

Phil - being someone who likes to keep things simple, the data you provided from Martin Middlebrook's book fits the bill nicely.  Any other information crammed into my limited memory space is likely to go missing!

 

Bob

[Bart150]

Middlebrook (p263) says ‘The fate of .. 2,152 men was, in most cases, never discovered. They had been killed and their bodies lost.’

Immediately afterwards in a table Middlebrook gives two separate figures:

Killed or died of wounds 19,249

Missing 2,152.

 

I have a couple of observations:

1. I presume men included in this Missing figure are named on the Thiepval memorial to those with no known grave, along with those whose death was witnessed but whose body was not recovered. That implies that they are considered to be just as dead as those included in the 'Killed or died of wounds' figure.

2. I don’t see why Middlebrook refrains from adding  the two numbers together and saying that the total of those who died in the day’s fighting was 21,399. I don’t see why many other sources, eg Wikipedia, give a figure of 19,249 killed without mentioning the additional 2,152 at all.

3 Was the distinction between ‘Killed’ and ‘Missing’ really that sharp? Certainly if a witness reported that he saw Private X killed by a bullet that would count as ‘Killed’, even if the body was never found. Certainly if the body of Private Y was found and recognised, that would count as ‘Killed’, even though nobody had seen him being killed. But there must have been many less clear cases. Suppose, for example, Private Z was part of a platoon that captured a trench but which was later observed from a distance to be annihilated by a counter-attack; and suppose no bodies from that platoon were ever recovered. Does Private Z then count as ‘Killed’ or ‘Missing’?

 

[Dai Bach y Sowldiwr]

12 minutes ago, Bart150 said:

Middlebrook (p263) says ‘The fate of .. 2,152 men was, in most cases, never discovered. They had been killed and their bodies lost.’

 

Immediately afterwards in a table Middlebrook gives two separate figures:

 

Killed or died of wounds 19,249

 

Missing 2,152.

I have a couple of observations:

 

2. I don’t see why Middlebrook refrains from adding  the two numbers together and saying that the total of those who died in the day’s fighting was 21,399.

 

Yes I agree entirely.

Evidently, none of those missing ever made themselves known to the army or their families over the following 100 years, so it would be logical to conclude they were dead.

Consequently should we now use the 21,399 figure as the true death toll for the first day?

[phil andrade]

The trouble is, the CWGC database does not support the figures cited.

 

It's a confusing, not to say confounding , business.

 

Let's say that twenty thousand men were killed or died of their wounds....how many, I wonder, of the men who died from wounds perished in the following few days, or were just left to die on the battlefield ?

 

Most - perhaps all - of the latter category would have been posted as missing.

 

Phil

[Bart150]

I assume that when Middlebrook (and many others) say that the number of Killed or Died of Wounds was 19,249, what they mean, expressed more precisely, is this:

Based on all available information now long after the war, the number killed by the fighting of 1 July - ie either on that day or subsequently of wounds received on that day - was 19,249.

 

Thus if a man was wounded on 1 July and died on, say, 7 July in a hospital in Boulogne he would be included in that total.

This makes it practically impossible to use the CWGC database to arrive at any figure.

[phil andrade]

Yes, it would be madness  to argue with that.

 

Phil

[Gibbo]

Middlebrook says that the final casualty figures took a researcher on the Official Historian's staff six months to compile: footnote on p. 263.

[phil andrade]

It's interesting to see that there was awareness at the time, not only of the size of the casualty list, but also of its appalling  composition.

 

In his August  1916 Memorandum, Churchill wrote :  

 

What were the British losses ?  They were certainly down to midnight on the 2nd July not less than 60,000, and of these more than  20,000 were missing..

 

Phil

 

 

[MartH]

3 hours ago, Gibbo said:

Middlebrook says that the final casualty figures took a researcher on the Official Historian's staff six months to compile: footnote on p. 263.

 

This is in Edmonds biography too, IRC there was more than one person involved, it took over six months and they where not convinced how accurate it was.

 

As a result Edmonds and his staff never attempted to calculate casualty figures for say the first day of 3rd Ypres the same way.

[phil andrade]

It must have been a nightmare trying to compile an accurate casualty count for just one day, when battles in that war were protracted and relentless.

 

Authoritative figures for the opening phase of Third Ypres have been compiled : 31,850 for the first three ( or four?) days, of which roughly half can be attributed to the first day....but there was not the same meticulous degree of categorisation, and those who were posted as missing were not redistributed into killed/died of wounds as they had been on the first day of the Somme.

 

Likewise for Loos and all the other major battles I can think of.

 

What makes the casualty record of the first day of the Somme - apart from its very size - unique, is the thorough attempt to identify the fate of such a huge number of missing.  I refer here to the BOH.

 

It's something of an anomaly in historiographical terms that, while the breakdown of the toll of the Somme's first day was analysed and categorised, that of the battle as a whole was not subjected to such an excercise. 

 

We're just left with an official total of 415,690 battle casualties, without a breakdown as to how many were posted as killed, wounded or missing.

 

I suppose that the massive undertaking of recording the details of July 1st 1916 was so onerous that the researching teams were unwilling to try it again.

 

We have to rely on CWGC data to indicate the cost of individual days, and even this approach is susceptible to distortions of one kind or another.

 

I note that the Medical volume of the Australian Official History does provide more concise accounting for the battle casualties of individual engagements than the BOH.

 

Phil

[Dai Bach y Sowldiwr]

No one is denying the enormity of the task, and the difficulty in getting in getting an exact figure.

But if we are to use an exact figure, it should be as correct as possible.

We all understand that in the heat of the battle, the initial 'missing' figure will be large, but then diminish over time, as the fate of those initially recorded as 'missing' becomes clear.

Many will still have an unknown fate, and will remain 'missing', but looking back from 2016 we can be almost 100% certainty that they were dead on or soon after July 1st 1916.

 

On 16/07/2016 at 16:39, phil andrade said:

 The final reckoning changed this dramatically, with 19,240 confirmed as dead ; there were an additional 2,152 missing who were never accounted for, a figure which is sometimes added on to the confirmed deaths.

 

So we should now use the figure of 21,399 as the most accurate available figure for deaths as a result of the fighting on July 1st 1916?
 

[tharkin56]

heres a concept which i am currently checking out, read all war diaries i and cross check every name against the CWGC database, so if men were posted as missing 1st and that regiment never went back into action but men who fell from that regiment were given a date of death of the 2/7 or 3/7, chances are they fell on the 1st July.

 

would this give a better number.....

[Bart150]

@tharkin56

A necessary preliminary step would be to find out how the CWGC records the death date of somebody missing at the end of 1st July and never heard of again.

 

[phil andrade]

It's enough to settle on the terrible fact that roughly one third of the nearly sixty thousand casualties of the day were fatal.

 

Again, I refer to Churchill's August 1916 Memorandum : he cited the twenty thousand who had gone missing, and added a significant admonition : The Cabinet should require precise figures.

 

I wonder if that rather peremptory comment had anything to do with those searches that made the analysis of the day's casualties unique.

 

Am I right in stating that the British official historian alluded to the fifty thousand casualties of Loos, and referred to the nearly sixteen thousand of these who  were killed - and this is crucial - or went missing and   were never seen again ?

 

That's a general comment, that avoids the meticulous analysis of the first day of the Somme, but conveys the same impression of large numbers of missing who were subsequently counted as dead.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

 

[tharkin56]

bart150

 

I have a number of names of men that were posted as missing on the 1st July and given a date of death upto the 6/7, they were never seen again and accounts give them as being seen killed or injured on the 1st July. I don't know how a death was recorded as the 1/7/1916 bit guess it was do to with the records written at the time. I.e if the adjutant was killed and the war diary not up-to scratch would a roll call on the 6/7 establish they were still missing and use that as the date of death.

 

Not entirely sue but perhaps some could clarify.

 

Thanks

 

 

 

[phil andrade]

Thanks for that contribution, tharkin56, that really hits the nail on the head.

 

John Keegan made the point well in his ground breaking book THE FACE OF BATTLE, which transformed military history forty years ago.

 

He describes how the enormous number of men who perished as a result of the Somme's first day was inflated by the thousands who were left wounded in No Man's Land and could not be recovered, dying by inches, condemned to the worst fate that can befall the soldier in battle.

 

These, surely, were the men who, in several thousand cases, were reported as missing.

 

Their deaths were subsequently attributed to 1st July 1916, but we can only know that that was the day they were struck down : their actual deaths might have occurred after days of excruciating suffering.

 

Phil

[phil andrade]

It's difficult - if not impossible - to reconcile the data from the CGWC with the confirmed total of 19,240 deaths attributed to the First Day of the Somme, let alone with an additional 2,152 unaccounted for missing. CWGC suggests a rather lower figure.

 

I must use the word suggests because, ultimately, precision is beyond the reach of us.

 

This is in marked contrast with the first day of the Battle of Loos, 25th September 1915, for which CWGC figures imply a much larger total of deaths than the official history implies.

 

For the record, here are CWGC daily totals of British Empire army deaths in France for the first week of July 1916 :  

 

July 1st : 18,548

 

July 2nd : 1,310

 

July 3rd : 2,394

 

July 4th : 705

 

July 5th : 901

 

July 6th : 528

 

July 7th : 2,085

 

I find myself at a loss trying to account for the seeming deficiency for the first of July.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

[Dai Bach y Sowldiwr]

Thanks Phil,

We do understand the difficulty in getting the exact figures to tally, I've done searches myself on the CWGC database myself and found similar discrepancies. As Bart150 says in post #7 above-  Presumably the 2152 missing are commemorated on Thiepval?

And if they're  on Thiepval, then surely they're  in the CWGC database and they should  already be  included in the 19,240.

 

Thiepval has 72,000 names on it, some 60000 of whom went missing between 1/7/1916 and November 1916 and have no known grave, yet all are accepted as killed. So why is the 2152 figure still quoted?

 

 

It would be useful to have some names for some of those missing, just to see how CWGC classifies and commemorates them.

I can't believe that many of them are uncommemorated?

And if most are commemorated, then perhaps we can stop referring to the 19240 killed AND 2152 missing?

 

[phil andrade]

Some of the missing on the Thiepval panels were definitely recorded as killed, and even given identified burial- for a time - until their graves were destroyed or lost.

 

I should think that many such would have had their " honoured and identified" burials violated by the advance of the Germans in the spring of 1918, with their temporary cemeteries obliterated by the ebb and flow of battle.

 

This problem of accounting for the missing varies so much : for example, the proportion of men posted as missing among the British casualties in the fighting of March and April 1918 was huge - much greater than it had been on 1 July 1916 - but the great majority of these were prisoners, and lived to tell the tale. Likewise for the battles of August to November 1914.

 

For the first day of the Somme, however, we have a startling difference - the number of men taken prisoner amounted to barely one per cent of the total casualties ....the designation ' missing' had a much more fatal implication.

 

Phil

[tharkin56]

Ok lets take John Claude Murray, teacher at Bablake School in Coventry.

 

Went into battle 1/7/1916 posted as missing in the war diary, date of death http://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/1546786/MURRAY, JOHN CLAUDE

 

Maybe his file will give some details....or the war diary for other days may have him turning up and going back into battle.

 

Most officers come across posted as missing have a date of the 3/7/1916 J C Murray unusually late .

 

I come across today in a war diary for the 1st July which was unusual ' Considerable enjoyment was given to our troops by Lt Robinson who made the prisoners run across the open through their own artillery barrage, upon reaching our line these men were kept out of our dugouts by the sharp end of a bayonet'....

 

From VIII Corps I have about 8 officers thus far

 

Now heres a thing if you were attached to a different Battalion could you date of death been when that battalion were informed, J C Murray attached 2nd from 9th.

 

Captain G R Cockerill were both killed crossing the 1st german trench, data of death 3/7/1916 with Captain H F Mott who was given a date of death as the 1/7/1916.