53 Bde attack on Delville Wood 19 July 1916

[David_Blanchard]

Hi TEW

 

yes, have managed to download the 6 Berks and the Narrative of events from 9 Divisions- interesting order received which I will quote later when I get home!

 

 Also managed to arrange a phonecall with Peter Simkins tomorrow morning to get his take on events of 19 July- especially interested in the 18 Division. 
 

Would like to see what he thinks about this attack as a good example of a ‘penny packet’ attack- and ask him who coined the phrase.

Edited 16 July , 2020 by David_Blanchard

[David_Blanchard]

I also have accessed the WD of the 9 Division- 

 

the ref for this appears to be WO 95/1744 although section on July is missing.

 

Checked reference to 9 Division in Prior & Wilson page 329- here 9 Division 'Narrative of Events' 9 Division War Diary July 1916 WO 95/1735

 

This seems very strange- I am not sure if I hadn't checked in Prior, that I would have come across the diary for July 1916- different WO 95 entries. 

 

 

 

 

Also a download of 9th Scottish Division Reg Hist from British Library here:

 

http://access.bl.uk/item/viewer/ark:/81055/vdc_100022558494.0x000002#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=0&xywh=-2026%2C-297%2C5881%2C3038

 

 

 

 

On another note the battalion WD for 8 Suffolk on the July attack is the most thorough of the battalion WDs for units involved in the action on 19 July- complete with an after action report by the CO. 

[TEW]

 WO 95/1744 is Adjutant and QM diary 9th Division.

 

WO 95/1735 is General Staff, a whopping 232Mb diary just for July

 

TEW

[David_Blanchard]

Yes, that’s the one- certainly involved. 

[MaxD]

You may wish to glance at the 9 Div CRA diary for August 1916 WO 95/1746 which has a "lessons learned from the [July] Somme" piece.  It touches upon Delville Wood.  The July diary isn't a great deal of use at a cursory glance.

 

Max

[phil andrade]

CWGC database reveals 1,184 commemorations of UK soldiers in France for 19 July 1916.

 

Bearing in mind the significant loss suffered by a British division assisting the Australians at Fromelles, and the fatalities suffered in other sectors of the Somme and the rest of France, might we attribute a maximum of half the day’s commemorations to this Delville Wood attack by 9th Division and 53rd Brigade ?  This implies a total of roughly two thousand casualties ( killed, wounded and missing) for the British units engaged in a penny packet attack.  Is my guesswork reasonable ?  It would interesting to see what the official returns have to say about this.

 

Phil 

Edited 17 July , 2020 by phil andrade

[David_Blanchard]

1 hour ago, MaxD said:

You may wish to glance at the 9 Div CRA diary for August 1916 WO 95/1746 which has a "lessons learned from the [July] Somme" piece.  It touches upon Delville Wood.  The July diary isn't a great deal of use at a cursory glance.

 

Max

 
Max,

 

thanks I will take a look at this- 9 Div provided the artillery for the attack- or not as the case maybe- the diary may well be instructive in this regard.

[David_Blanchard]

21 minutes ago, phil andrade said:

CWGC database reveals 1,184 commemorations of UK soldiers in France for 19 July 1916.

 

Bearing in mind the significant loss suffered by a British division assisting the Australians at Fromelles, and the fatalities suffered in other sectors of the Somme and the rest of France, might we attribute a maximum of half the day’s commemorations to this Delville Wood attack by 9th Division and 53rd Brigade ?  This implies a total of roughly two thousand casualties ( killed, wounded and missing) for the British units engaged in a penny packet attack.  Is my guesswork reasonable ?  It would interesting to see what the official returns have to say about this.

 

Phil 

You may well be on to something here. Will have to look closely at the Bn WD to get an angle on the casualty rate vis a vis each unit.

[PRC]

From The 18th Division in the Great War, by G. H. F. Nichols.

 

Page 70 (again!). Delville Wood was the grave of the 53rd Brigade as it was consitutued when it landed in France: the casualties amounted to 12 officers killed and 39 wounded, and 181 other ranks killed and 773 wounded.

 

This would be the casualties over several days, (19th to the relief on the evening of the 21st/22nd), not just the 19th.

 

Cheers,

Peter

[David_Blanchard]

This is the after battle report by Colonel Hill of the 8 Suffolk Regiment- pulls no punches in his assessment of the action on 19 July. 

[phil andrade]

42 minutes ago, PRC said:

From The 18th Division in the Great War, by G. H. F. Nichols.

 

Page 70 (again!). Delville Wood was the grave of the 53rd Brigade as it was consitutued when it landed in France: the casualties amounted to 12 officers killed and 39 wounded, and 181 other ranks killed and 773 wounded.

 

This would be the casualties over several days, (19th to the relief on the evening of the 21st/22nd), not just the 19th.

 

Cheers,

Peter

 

Peter ( and David) ,

 

Thanks for those references to the casualties.  It looks as if my guess of two thousand for the 19th is quite a sober one, judging by the 1,005 posted for the 53rd Brigade alone : admittedly , for the extended period of two or three days, but - did you notice this ? - no allusion to any posted as missing, which is very unusual .  The vignette for the 8th Suffolks that David posted shows 11 ORs missing....presumably these were killed, judging by the low proportion of killed to wounded in the initial report.  Perhaps the figures for the 53rd Brigade conflated the missing with the killed.

 

Phil

[David_Blanchard]

Thanks everyone who has contributed to the this thread so far. I think a further investigation into the 53 Bde action in 19 July 1916 deserves further study as a classic example of a small scale attack on the Somme. J P Harris in his biography of Haig sees a general purpose in these attacks as giving the Germans no respite to reorganise their defences and replenish their resources. Also needless numbers of men were squandered in the inevitable counter attack to regain lost ground.

 

Conversely Prior and Wilson take a contrary position on these small scale operations as ill judged and wasteful- the 19 July is particularly condemned in this respect as not a yard of territory was gained.

I suppose the true nature of the attacks lies somewhere between these two opposing viewpoints. But where? I suppose the task is to investigate and provide a new synthesis.  

 

[David_Blanchard]

3 hours ago, MaxD said:

You may wish to glance at the 9 Div CRA diary for August 1916 WO 95/1746 which has a "lessons learned from the [July] Somme" piece.  It touches upon Delville Wood.  The July diary isn't a great deal of use at a cursory glance.

 

Max

 
Do you mean WO 95/1746/2 which covers 1916?

[phil andrade]

3 hours ago, David_Blanchard said:

J P Harris in his biography of Haig sees a general purpose in these attacks as giving the Germans no respite to reorganise their defences and replenish their resources. Also needless numbers of men were squandered in the inevitable counter attack to regain lost ground.

 

 

 

 

David,

 

In this instance, wasn't the engineer hoist with his own petard ? The Suffolk's report states that they were counter attacking, as opposed to the Germans....although, if  I understand JP Harris correctly, he was alluding to the bite and hold concept of pressuring the Germans to counter attack.

 

It's usually a  trope of the history of the Battle of the Somme that the Germans were persistently counter attacking, and suffering thereby....but this action leads one to suspect otherwise.

 

Phil

 

 

Edited 17 July , 2020 by phil andrade

[David_Blanchard]

Phil,

 

You might well be right. I was making a general point about the ‘penny packet’ attacks. I will have to look you to see if I can find out more about the German role on 19 July. 

[PRC]

5 hours ago, phil andrade said:

Thanks for those references to the casualties.  It looks as if my guess of two thousand for the 19th is quite a sober one, judging by the 1,005 posted for the 53rd Brigade alone : admittedly , for the extended period of two or three days, but - did you notice this ? - no allusion to any posted as missing, which is very unusual .

 

Agreed - I don't know whether the figures were contemporary of a post-war adjustment. Even then potentially not all the missing were actually killed, and even if captured they were not necessarily wounded, so an additional category of PoW unwounded or something similar would seem appropriate if it was a post-war reconciliation.

 

The Norfolk Battalion War diary records that the action at Delville Wood on the 19th / 20th alone cost the Battalion:-

3 Officers killed and 8 wounded

76 O.R’s killed, 2 Died of Wounds, 174 wounded, 36 missing.

 

A casualty list that appeared in the Eastern Daily Press, a local Norfolk newspaper, on the 28th September 1916 included 7 Norfolk Regiment men listed as missing - all now on SDGW as 8th Norfolks & KiA, with date there and on CWGC shown as the 19th July 1916. Most have MiC's showing "Died on or since 19-7-16".  An additional list appeared in the Eastern Daily Press on the 4th October 1916 with an additional 8 missing. A check of SDGW, CWGC & MiC records shows them as SDGW, CWGC & MiC 8th Battalion, KiA and died 19-7-16.

 

It may be that other units lost more as prisoners of war, in which case a possible explanation for the Norfolks  comes from the Lieutenant-Colonel Fergusons narrative which shows an element of no quarter given.

 

"(2) The advance through the Wood.

 

At 7.15 a.m., the two companies advanced and met stubborn resistance, particularly on the left flank. The officers leading the first two waves of "A" Company were killed, the men themselves suffering heavy casualties from machine gun fire and snipers concealed in trees. Several Germans surrendered as soon as we advanced but our men had been infuriated by the enemy's sniping methods and they were shot."

 

Page 74 of The 18th Division in the Great War. By G. H. F. Nichols. may also explain a relatively low level of those unaccounted for:-

 

"Captain Ackroyd, the medical officer of the Berks, was a heroic figure during those two days. The fighting was so condused and the wood so hard to search that the difficulties of evacuating the wounded seemed unconquerable. But Captain Ackroyd, bespectacled and stooping, a Cambridge don before he joined the forces, was so cool, purposeful and methodical that he cleared the whole wood of wounded, British and Boche as well. Later, he was to do more magnificent work, to win the Victoria Cross, and to sacrifice his life while tending to the dying on a Flanders battlefield."

 

 

Harold Ackroyd MC VC. Image sourced from the Wellcome Library via Wikipedia. Made available under the terms of the Creative Commons licence - see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Ackroyd#/media/File:Harold_Ackroyd.jpg

 

His  MC according to the Wikipedia article was for his actions at Delville Wood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Ackroyd

 

Cheers,

Peter

Edited 17 July , 2020 by PRC
Add Casualty list date

[David_Blanchard]

Excellent post Peter. It appears that the enemy were well and truly in position in the Wood and it would appear that there was no need to counter attack. Will have to see if I can find any German sources to back this up. 

[johnboy]

Does the war diary give the number of MGs allocated for the attack?

[David_Blanchard]

Possibly but I haven’t really picked up on the role of MGs

[johnboy]

The reason i ask is that  2 months later [the attack on Thiepval] only 2 guns were allocated to the lead battalion.Again the losses were large.54 brigade worked closely with 53 brigade

[PRC]

5 hours ago, David_Blanchard said:

Conversely Prior and Wilson take a contrary position on these small scale operations as ill judged and wasteful- the 19 July is particularly condemned in this respect as not a yard of territory was gained.

 

It could just be semantics, but if the British had "taken" the wood, then the South African Brigade "lost" the wood, but then the 53rd retook part of the wood, then you could argue not a single "new" yard of territory had been gained, but thats seems a rather ingenuous interpretation of warfare. Over what period do you measure such things - by the 27th the woods were back in British hands, only to be given up without a fight in the German spring offensive of 1918 and subsequently retaken.

 

And in this context the British forces had attacked, the Germans had counter-attacked and regained what were probably prepared positions, and they now faced a counter-counter-attack from the 53rd Brigade to which they would respond with local counter-counter-counter-attacks. At what point do you call a halt to adding "counters" and just accept it as the ebb and flow of small area warfare.

 

Finally, my focus is on the 8th Norfolks, so I'm not so much aware of the bigger picture. Were the South African units part of XIII Corps - if so how much was throwing in the 53rd Brigade in an attempt to sort out the mess in house, before a Corps Commanders' 'failings' could become an issue for an Army Commander. Would failure to hold Delville Wood, and so a delay to the next phase of the campaign have been career limiting event?

 

Fascinating stuff,

Peter

Edited 17 July , 2020 by PRC
Typo

[David_Blanchard]

I think the main reason for using the 53 Bde was to clear the Wood- and give those troops an easier starting position for the next phase of attacks across a wide frontage: which was not just on this part of the battlefield but to the north as well at High Wood and Pozieres - with Corps from both the 4 Army and 5 Reserve Army involved in a more broad based offensive.

 

This was envisaged as a follow up to the successful night attack of 14 July- and the subsequent actions at Delville Wood were in many respects seen as small scale actions a preparatory phase of the bigger assault which took place later in the month. Of course the best laid plans etc forced Rawlinson to commit more and more troops than he initially intended. 

[PRC]

12 minutes ago, johnboy said:

The reason i ask is that  2 months later [the attack on Thiepval] only 2 guns were allocated to the lead battalion.Again the losses were large.54 brigade worked closely with 53 brigade

 

War Diary of the 53rd Company shows one section was allocated to each of the four infantry battalions of the brigade.

 

No.2 section were with the Norfolks and are stated to have left valley that was the Brigade rendezvous (S22d) and moved towards the village at 7 a.m. ("little barrage at this time")

No 3 section were with the Essex and left at 8.15 a.m.

No.4 section were with the Royal Berks and left at 8.45 a.m.

No.1 section were with the Suffolks and left at 9.30 a.m.

 

There are then details of movements, casualties incurred and positions taken up.

 

The month end summary records that between July 19 & July 22 they fired 19,000 rounds. It records they lost three guns temporarily as a result of casualties to personel and 1 gun temporarily as a result of a broken ??(fugee \ fuzee??) spring. Casualties are records as 4 officers, 26 other ranks and 32 attached, but no breakdown is provided.

 

There is a broader narrative at the end of the July Diary entry, the relevant part of which starts:-

 

"Fouth phase. The attack on Longueval and Delville Wood.

 

Owing to the extremely unfavourable nature of the ground and the rapidity with which preparations for the attack were pushed forward, the company went into action one section with each battalion of the Brigade. Under the circumstances which could hardly be avoided, the guns and teams were for a long time in the open, exposed to heavy shell fire + unable to reply. It was not till midday to late afternoon that the guns got into position."

 

So sounds like they were of no-use in the initial attack, but would subsequently go on to bolster the defence against local German counter-attacks.

 

Hope that helps,

Peter

 

[johnboy]

Thanks for that.

[David_Blanchard]

In the concluding paragraph concerned with the 6 Berkshire’s attack on Delville Wood, the booklet ‘On the Somme: The Kitchener Battalions of the Royal Berkshire Regiment 1916’ (Page 30) has this to say:

 

’On the 19 July a quickly improvised small-scale attack failed in conditions which perhaps demanded too much of command as well as of the men. A remarkably frank telephone exchange was received at Haig’s headquarters at 7.50 am on 19 July stating that Fourth Army did not know who was in command either at Longueval or at Montauban and neither did XIII Corps. All wires appeared to be cut and the communication possible was by runner. Haig’s somewhat starchy response was: ‘ I do not think this indicates sufficient method. In order to win, the first essential is to organise a sound system of command.’ 
 

There is no source provided- so who, I wonder, was responsible for making the frank telephone call? Congreve? And where could this source be found?

Just checked edited diaries of Haig- no mention here of the phonecall.

 

Edited 18 July , 2020 by David_Blanchard