New website on German Casualties on the Somme, 24-30 June and 1 July 1916

[phil andrade]

Ralph,

 

Any help you can offer here would be greatly appreciated.  I’m hoping to make a kind of extrapolation here.  The Sanitätsbericht figures are hard work, very detailed and meticulous , but written in a language I don’t know and in a kind of font that looks positively gothic .

 

The figures do, however, yield a surprisingly low proportion of killed amongst the total battle casualties, especially when compared with the regimental histories that you’ve been so good at using.  

 

If I can get just a sense of how many of the nearly two thousand casualties from the bombardment period  that you’ve been able to cite from regimental histories  were posted as killed, it would make a useful starting point for a rough and ready comparison.  

I’m wondering how plausible it might be to apply the regimental proportion of confirmed fatalities to the casualty totals compiled in the Sanitätsbericht.   The CWGC database can really help me get a feel for the true number of British deaths in these big battles : the difference between these and the number posted as killed in the casualty returns is sometimes staggering.  There is no research tool available that I know of that gives us the same facility for assessing the German experience of the Somme, but I think your investigations offer a priceless advantage here.  Then again, the number confirmed as killed, even in the regimental records, might need to be revised as men who were mortally wounded, or who were posted as missing and subsequently counted as dead, are taken into account.  The Sanitätsbericht records about 416,000 battle casualties for the Somme 21 June to 20 November 1916, of whom some 58,000 are posted as killed.  My belief is that the true number of deaths exceeded 100,000, if the criteria for mortally wounded and missing are included.

 

Phil

[Sasho Todorov]

On 17/10/2020 at 05:43, phil andrade said:

Ralph,

 

Any help you can offer here would be greatly appreciated.  I’m hoping to make a kind of extrapolation here.  The Sanitätsbericht figures are hard work, very detailed and meticulous , but written in a language I don’t know and in a kind of font that looks positively gothic .

 

The figures do, however, yield a surprisingly low proportion of killed amongst the total battle casualties, especially when compared with the regimental histories that you’ve been so good at using.  

 

If I can get just a sense of how many of the nearly two thousand casualties from the bombardment period  that you’ve been able to cite from regimental histories  were posted as killed, it would make a useful starting point for a rough and ready comparison.  

I’m wondering how plausible it might be to apply the regimental proportion of confirmed fatalities to the casualty totals compiled in the Sanitätsbericht.   The CWGC database can really help me get a feel for the true number of British deaths in these big battles : the difference between these and the number posted as killed in the casualty returns is sometimes staggering.  There is no research tool available that I know of that gives us the same facility for assessing the German experience of the Somme, but I think your investigations offer a priceless advantage here.  Then again, the number confirmed as killed, even in the regimental records, might need to be revised as men who were mortally wounded, or who were posted as missing and subsequently counted as dead, are taken into account.  The Sanitätsbericht records about 416,000 battle casualties for the Somme 21 June to 20 November 1916, of whom some 58,000 are posted as killed.  My belief is that the true number of deaths exceeded 100,000, if the criteria for mortally wounded and missing are included.

 

Phil

 

The Sanitat indeed badly undercounts the killed in action. There are two core problems: the first is the mechanics of the German casualty system. The Sanitat is an entry based system--- the type of loss is recorded as of the entry of the casualty into the medical system. This means that it badly undercounts those who died of wounds (1/4 of the deaths as the Germans counted it, 1/3 as the British did--mostly a product of the time scale at which someone was counted as "wounded" before "died of wounds"). Luckily the Sanitat actually provides an out here. For the 10 day block reports it gives (such as 1 AOK at the Somme), it actually tells you the number of wounded who died of wounds. In the case of 1 AOK, of the 154,587 wounded, 7,930 would die of their wounds. In my own work on the battles what I do is use this to extrapolate a global DOW rate (in this case 5.1%), and then I apply it to the wounded and killed figures (as in multiplying the wounded by .95 and then adding the 7930 to the killed) to get the final number.

 

The other core problem is the missing in action issue, of which a significant chunk would actually be killed in action. This is a more difficult issue. The advantage of the CWGC and French Memoires Des Hommes data is that they take into account the very in depth Red Cross reports re: prisoners of war in order to get an accurate track of deaths. I've actually been able to use the two to create daily division by division death counts. The Germans unfortunately, thanks in part to the archives getting bombed, never engaged in such a granular level of correcting that issue.

 

However, it's not the end of the world. While killed in action were very important for the post-war recoveries of nations, the most important metric during the war is irrecoverable losses-- KIA, POW, and wounded incapable of returning either to the colors (~18%) or to the frontline infantry (~33%). Over-concentration on killed can actually result in missing the degree of defender losses, as the hallmark of a successful assault was bags of prisoners (MIA) while a similarly effective defense would instead be mostly reflected as KIA.

 

As a side note, the MIA issue is especially bad when it comes to reporting French losses. As the French (in my view smartly) grouped missing+killed+prisoners together, even good historians like Philpott end up overestimating French dead by counting them all as dead. So, for example, the battle of Verdun is usually estimated at 163,000 French dead, but in fact, under my KIA studies (adding up the dead for the days a division was attached to II army), you actually end up with ~100,000 dead and 63,000 wounded counted as missing or prisoners. You were the one who first clued me into this, which inspired my French KIA project, actually! 

 

As for being able to read the Sanitat proper, this is a good reminder for me to complete and post my edited version of the Sanitat, based on the file you sent me. I translated the table of contents and created a thorough set of bookmarks which describe in English what the table says. After a while you get used to seeing the words, so you pick up what's going on even without knowing the language. I had to put my OCR -> Times New Roman PDF version project on hold, but I transcribed a good deal of the tables into Excel, still not sure how to hose them.

Edited 3 November , 2020 by Sasho Todorov

[Sasho Todorov]

On 27/09/2020 at 09:19, Ralph J. Whitehead said:

For many years I had wanted to see if the German casualties from the bombardment period, 24-30 June, and on 1 July 1916 could be determined with any degree of accuracy. This had proven elusive as there were only a few sources of information available; casualty details provided by the German regimental histories and estimates provided by Allied historians. The latter were all too often just guesses.

 

In recent years numerous records have been made available on line from various archives that have allowed an accurate review of the casualties suffered by the Germans on the Somme at the start of the battle. In many cases not only the date of the casualty but also detailed information as to the type of injury. After reviewing the available archive records I have been able to document the losses suffered by many of the units that were present on 1 July 1916 and with the invaluable assistance of Iain Hawkins I have been able to share the findings on a new website: 

http://www.sommeschlacht.com/index.php

 

Hopefully the information provided will be of some use to the members of the forum in understanding the events that occurred to the Germans on the Somme. I am hoping to expand the database so that every casualty can one day be included and to add photographs of the men listed on the database. If anyone has information that could add to the database or photos of the men who are listed please consider allowing me to add them to the web site. 

 

Ralph

 

This is incredible work, and it really brings home just how damn frustrating it is that Compgen's otherwise excellent team decided not to make recording the type of loss an automatic part of the Verlustlisten transcription process. Wouldn't have been a major time addition at all and would have unlocked worlds of analysis as to patterns of German casualty incurrences. I can't complain too much though, as Compgen has been quite generous in giving access to their core databases. 

[phil andrade]

On 03/11/2020 at 21:14, Sasho Todorov said:

 

The Sanitat indeed badly undercounts the killed in action. There are two core problems: the first is the mechanics of the German casualty system. The Sanitat is an entry based system--- the type of loss is recorded as of the entry of the casualty into the medical system. This means that it badly undercounts those who died of wounds (1/4 of the deaths as the Germans counted it, 1/3 as the British did--mostly a product of the time scale at which someone was counted as "wounded" before "died of wounds"). Luckily the Sanitat actually provides an out here. For the 10 day block reports it gives (such as 1 AOK at the Somme), it actually tells you the number of wounded who died of wounds. In the case of 1 AOK, of the 154,587 wounded, 7,930 would die of their wounds. In my own work on the battles what I do is use this to extrapolate a global DOW rate (in this case 5.1%), and then I apply it to the wounded and killed figures (as in multiplying the wounded by .95 and then adding the 7930 to the killed) to get the final number.

 

The other core problem is the missing in action issue, of which a significant chunk would actually be killed in action. This is a more difficult issue. The advantage of the CWGC and French Memoires Des Hommes data is that they take into account the very in depth Red Cross reports re: prisoners of war in order to get an accurate track of deaths. I've actually been able to use the two to create daily division by division death counts. The Germans unfortunately, thanks in part to the archives getting bombed, never engaged in such a granular level of correcting that issue.

 

However, it's not the end of the world. While killed in action were very important for the post-war recoveries of nations, the most important metric during the war is irrecoverable losses-- KIA, POW, and wounded incapable of returning either to the colors (~18%) or to the frontline infantry (~33%). Over-concentration on killed can actually result in missing the degree of defender losses, as the hallmark of a successful assault was bags of prisoners (MIA) while a similarly effective defense would instead be mostly reflected as KIA.

 

As a side note, the MIA issue is especially bad when it comes to reporting French losses. As the French (in my view smartly) grouped missing+killed+prisoners together, even good historians like Philpott end up overestimating French dead by counting them all as dead. So, for example, the battle of Verdun is usually estimated at 163,000 French dead, but in fact, under my KIA studies (adding up the dead for the days a division was attached to II army), you actually end up with ~100,000 dead and 63,000 wounded counted as missing or prisoners. You were the one who first clued me into this, which inspired my French KIA project, actually! 

 

As for being able to read the Sanitat proper, this is a good reminder for me to complete and post my edited version of the Sanitat, based on the file you sent me. I translated the table of contents and created a thorough set of bookmarks which describe in English what the table says. After a while you get used to seeing the words, so you pick up what's going on even without knowing the language. I had to put my OCR -> Times New Roman PDF version project on hold, but I transcribed a good deal of the tables into Excel, still not sure how to hose them.

 

Sasho,

 

The French Army history did provide a separate categorisation of killed and missing : the Verdun figures being returned as 61,289 killed and 101,151 missing, in addition to 216,337 wounded, for the entire ten months of the 1916 battle.  We have to take a guess as to how many of the  missing were dead.  Most of them were prisoners, because the Germans claimed to have captured more than 65,000 by mid July.  I would reckon that the figure for confirmed killed might be increased by 50% if we allow for the missing who were dead ; but I don't know what to make of the mortality among the wounded.  It's significant that the Germans reported fewer men killed or missing, but more men wounded, than the French.  This certainly undermines the claim by the British Official Historian that the Germans understated their wounded by excluding slight wounds that were contained in the Allied figures.

 

Editing again : Here's something that really shows how much more catastrophic the losses in other battles were than those suffered at Verdun. and also how, in one set of compilations, the French records do categorise their killed and missing separately. During the  Champagne-Artois Offensives of late September and earlier October 1915 - in a period of ten, or maybe twenty days - the four French armies engaged  reported 191,797 casualties : almost exactly half the total sustained in ten months at Verdun.  The proportions are almost exactly the same, too : 30,386 killed, 50,686 missing and 110,725 wounded.  In this case, I would think that most of the missing were dead, since the French were capturing prisoners rather than yielding them ; the opposite of the most intense period at Verdun. For the Somme, and I cite from memory, the figures were 37,000 killed, 29,000 missing and 130,000 wounded with, again, the missing being more likely dead than prisoners.

 

These returns, cited in the massive French Army History of The Great War, do indeed differ from the formula used in citations to the French Parliament, where, as you say, the killed and missing are conflated in one figure.  I note that the figures in the latter are significantly " worse" than those compiled by the Armies, with a much higher number of dead and missing in the most catastrophic period of August and September 1914.  In much the same way, the killed and missing numbers compiled in the sanitatsbericht tend to be significantly lower than those in the reichsarchiv tables. Rambling a bit here, sorry....

 

 

 

Phil

Edited 5 November , 2020 by phil andrade

[phil andrade]

Ralph and Sasho,

 

You’ve both done such a lot of heavy lifting on these statistics, that I’m feeling a bit aware of my comparatively cursory forays which entail little more than a survey and a bit too much extrapolation and rather hasty interpretation.  Sometimes, though, a brief glance can be discerning, and I think that I’ve had a moment of epiphany here.

 

There is something consistent in the bewildering array of different statistics.  This is the ratio of died of wounds to the confirmed killed in action, and the additional revision when the missing are subsequently counted as dead.  Here I allude to battle fatalities only, with no accounting of died from disease, accidental injury etc.

 

The British Medical Statistics ( Western Front )  tabulate 381,261 posted as killed, 151,356 died of wounds and 144,898 missing in action who were finally counted as dead.  Note the proportions : from a total of 677,515 battle deaths, 56.27% were confirmed as killed, 22.34% were posted as died from wounds, and 21.39% were missing who were also dead.

 

There is a French counterpart , Medical Statistics compiled by J. Toubert, and these yield figures in striking harmony with those of the British : confirmed killed in action , 674,700 ; died from wounds , 250,596 ; and initially posted as missing but subsequently counted as dead, 252,900.  The total battle deaths of 1,178,196 are comprised of 57.27% confirmed killed ; 21.27% were died from wounds, and 21.46% who were missing and perished on the battlefields.  

 

This is almost uncanny, but I find it compelling.

 

As for the German sanitatsbericht, the story - up to a point - follows the same trajectory.  The tabulations are very incomplete, since they are excluding the entire period of the war from August to November 1918, but, up until July 31st 1918, they post 772,687  confirmed killed in action and 289,053 died from wounds.  There is no comparable figure for missing subsequently counted as dead which have been consigned to the Franco British returns, but I would draw attention to the proportion of died of wounds to confirmed killed in action : in this case, 37.4%.  The British counterpart is 39.7%, and the French 37.14%.

 

The German figures are obviously too low, but the almost identical proportions with those of the Entente armies make a convincing case for comparison.

 

Phil

 

[dickaren]

Fantastic work by all you guys.

Richard

[sheldrake]

On 03/10/2020 at 19:41, phil andrade said:

By that criterion, it’s tantamount to one German casualty for every 1,000 shells fired by the British 24-30 June.

 

 

 

That is fairly good by the WW1 and WW2 standard.  It took a lot of C20th firepower to inflict a casualty. A US study of the Italian campaign calculated it took 80,000 rounds of all calibres per German fatal casualty.  The extensive aerial bombardment of the German  positions in Northern France during the three weeks before D Day in June 1944 resulted in fewer than 2,000 German military casualties.  HMSO says that in the 8-10 weeks before the D Day the allies lost around 2,000 aircraft and their crews - some 12,000 KIA or PW

[phil andrade]

11 hours ago, sheldrake said:

 

That is fairly good by the WW1 and WW2 standard.  It took a lot of C20th firepower to inflict a casualty. A US study of the Italian campaign calculated it took 80,000 rounds of all calibres per German fatal casualty.  The extensive aerial bombardment of the German  positions in Northern France during the three weeks before D Day in June 1944 resulted in fewer than 2,000 German military casualties.  HMSO says that in the 8-10 weeks before the D Day the allies lost around 2,000 aircraft and their crews - some 12,000 KIA or PW

 

That’s interesting : the US study of the Italian Campaign that you allude to cites 80,000 rounds of all calibres per German  fatality.  Does the figure for rounds include small arms fire ?  The reference to fatalities as opposed to casualties is also pertinent, since the wounded outnumber the killed significantly.  If I’ve already mentioned this, forgive me, but at Verdun between February and July 1916, the French succeeded in inflicting more than  one German casualty for every hundred shells fired.

 

Phil

Edited 18 November , 2020 by phil andrade

[sheldrake]

9 hours ago, phil andrade said:

 

That’s interesting : the US study of the Italian Campaign that you allude to cites 80,000 rounds of all calibres per German  fatality.  Does the figure for rounds include small arms fire ?  The reference to fatalities as opposed to casualties is also pertinent, since the wounded outnumber the killed significantly.  If I’ve already mentioned this, forgive me, but at Verdun between February and July 1916, the French succeeded in inflicting more than  one German casualty for every hundred shells fired.

 

Phil

I suspect the lethality of artillery might be accounted for in the different level of exposure to artillery fire.  An enemy in a mainly defensive posture is mainly hiding under cover e.g. the Germans in Italy or XIV corps waiting for the Somme offensive.  An enemy attacking "over the top" either at Verdun or attempting to recapture lost ground in the Somme July - December was much more vulnerable.  If artillery inflicted 75% of casualties then how many shells fir4ed by the British and French on the Somme were needed to inflict 400,000 German casualties?  

[phil andrade]

1 hour ago, sheldrake said:

I suspect the lethality of artillery might be accounted for in the different level of exposure to artillery fire.  An enemy in a mainly defensive posture is mainly hiding under cover e.g. the Germans in Italy or XIV corps waiting for the Somme offensive.  An enemy attacking "over the top" either at Verdun or attempting to recapture lost ground in the Somme July - December was much more vulnerable.  If artillery inflicted 75% of casualties then how many shells fir4ed by the British and French on the Somme were needed to inflict 400,000 German casualties?  

 

Does anyone know how many shells the Anglo French artillery fired in the Somme battles of 1916 ?

 

I don’t know, but I would hazard a guess and suggest about forty million.  If forty million shells inflicted 400,000 casualties, then we’re in the region of one hundred shells for each victim : that smells like the Verdun ratios that I’ve mentioned....which makes some kind of sense.

 

It reminds me of the words of a song I learnt at school : The Walrus and The Carpenter .....

 

” If a million maids with a million mops swept for a million years...”

 

I hope I’ve got the words right !

 

One thing I must say, the US figure of eighty thousand rounds for each German killed in Italy 1943-45 can only work if it includes bullets as well as shells.

 

Editing : Apologies to Lewis Carroll ...If seven maids with seven mops swept for half a year

 

Phil

Edited 18 November , 2020 by phil andrade

[sheldrake]

2 hours ago, phil andrade said:

 

Does anyone know how many shells the Anglo French artillery fired in the Somme battles of 1916 ?

 

I don’t know, but I would hazard a guess and suggest about forty million.  If forty million shells inflicted 400,000 casualties, then we’re in the region of one hundred shells for each victim : that smells like the Verdun ratios that I’ve mentioned....which makes some kind of sense.

 

It reminds me of the words of a song I learnt at school : The Walrus and The Carpenter .....

 

” If a million maids with a million mops swept for a million years...”

 

I hope I’ve got the words right !

 

One thing I must say, the US figure of eighty thousand rounds for each German killed in Italy 1943-45 can only work if it includes bullets as well as shells.

 

Editing : Apologies to Lewis Carroll ...If seven maids with seven mops swept for half a year

 

Phil

 

2 hours ago, phil andrade said:

 

Does anyone know how many shells the Anglo French artillery fired in the Somme battles of 1916 ?

 

I don’t know, but I would hazard a guess and suggest about forty million.  If forty million shells inflicted 400,000 casualties, then we’re in the region of one hundred shells for each victim : that smells like the Verdun ratios that I’ve mentioned....which makes some kind of sense.

 

It reminds me of the words of a song I learnt at school : The Walrus and The Carpenter .....

 

” If a million maids with a million mops swept for a million years...”

 

I hope I’ve got the words right !

 

One thing I must say, the US figure of eighty thousand rounds for each German killed in Italy 1943-45 can only work if it includes bullets as well as shells.

 

Editing : Apologies to Lewis Carroll ...If seven maids with seven mops swept for half a year

 

Phil

You are right. The US figure included small arms and probably AA as well.

 

Where did you get the figure of 1000 shells per German casualty? I read somewhere that the French fired 10 million shells in Verdun.    

[phil andrade]

The 1000 shells per German casualty comes from Ralph’s identification of 1,450 in the period 24-30 June, which I conflated with 1,500,000 British shells fired in that period.  Very rough and ready, I confess, and it’s important to mention that Ralph is constantly finding more casualties in his epic research.  This was alluded to earlier on in the thread.

 

The French are supposed to have fired fifteen million artillery shells at Verdun by mid July 1916, and with German casualties there reaching 250,000 by that time, we’re being reasonable if we assume that there was a better rate than one hit for every one hundred shells.....two thirds or more of the casualties being attributable to artillery fire.

 

The folklore of the American Civil War declared that it took a man’s weight in lead to kill him in battle.  A couple of thousand bullets fired for every man killed on the spot, and 250 to achieve a hit.  That’s muzzle loading black powder warfare, of course, in which many battles were fought in woods where men could find cover. 

 

The artillery fire of the Great War entailed expenditure of shells on the same scale that rifle bullets had been fired fifty years before.

 

If it took two thousand muzzle loading rounds to kill a man outright in the American Civil War- with two or three rounds a minute being the rate of fire -  then the exponential increase in automatic firepower in Italy in the Second World War makes the 80,000 equivalent seem feasible....a forty fold multiplication in the rate of fire.

 

Editing here, with another nerdish observation : the British Somme bombardment in the week commencing 24 June entailed 25,000 tons of munitions being expended ( I hope memory serves me here).  Allowing for extra German casualties that Ralph might identify in the period, we might get roughly 2,500 Germans being hit by that fire....ten tons for every casualty inflicted, which is stupefying ! Then again, this was largely fire directed against lines of communication and wire entanglements....as you point out, very different from direct anti personnel effect.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

Edited 19 November , 2020 by phil andrade

[Sasho Todorov]

Unfortunately we don't have great specific information about the consumption of munitions at the Somme. The transcribed consumption data from Statistics of the Military Effort gives weekly consumption for the entire BEF, which could probably be roughly allocated via some global % to the battle. The French are worse off (working with French data is a mess)-- as they give only monthly figures for 1915 and 1916, not army by army (and then don't give consumption data for 1917 and 1918!). 

 

In terms of the bombardment, I'd make a note here that the pre-offensive bombardments were a question of psychological wearing down and destruction of defenses, if you look at casualty production they weren't killers. While artillery was the number 1 killer of the war, the best analogy I've found is that of the pheasant hunt. Friendly infantry was critical to act, on the offensive, as "beaters", flushing the enemy into the open where they could be killed, and in the defensive you needed the infantry to keep the enemy in the open in NML for as long as possible for it to really reap a toll.

[phil andrade]

Sasho,

 

Surely you're right to suggest that we could apply a notional % rate of munitions expenditure to the Somme.  My guess is that the British fired no fewer than twenty million, and perhaps twenty five million, shells in the five months of the battle, and that this would equate to about 85% of all expenditure by them on the entire Western Front in that period.  If anyone can cite some SMEBE numbers, I'd be grateful.  I might end up looking damned  silly, but I'll risk it.

 

In regard to the effects of the British artillery, I must say that I was quite shocked - on reading Jack Sheldon's book about the Germans on the Somme - at the frequency of references to German soldiers being buried alive by the shelling.  So many harrowing accounts of men frantically trying to recue their comrades from collapsed dug outs or trenches - or even from shell holes -  only to recover them when they were dead or dying, or, in so many cases, failing to get them out at all.  There can be few things as horrible as the prospect of this entombment. If memory serves me, this applied more to the subsequent fighting than to the preliminary bombardment.

 

Editing again : I've just done some heavy lifting here myself, and went online to SMEBE and added up figures for total artillery ammunition expenditure on the Western Front between weeks ending 2 July and 26 November 1916.   Total : 26,718,297.  Allocating 85% of these to The Battle of the Somme yields a figure of 22,710,552.

 

Phew !

 

Phil

Edited 20 November , 2020 by phil andrade

[Ralph J. Whitehead]

Sorry to be absent from this topic for so long. Between the rise in Covid and the election nonsense it seems my time has been eaten up. I am continuing to add regiments to the overall list on the casualty web site. The most recent that should appear shortly is RIR 99. This regiment has a special meaning to me as it was the regiment that started all of my research relating to the web site and my book series. 

 

Unfortunately, the Stammrolle records do not exist today and up until recently very little was known as to the casualties the regiment reported, the dates, etc. With some related resources it has been possible to make some headway into the casualty details. I am still hopeful that a casualty pattern can be established in the original listing but this will take some time. Until then I am happy with the progress so far.

 

The casualty list published for RIR 99 was over 2,000 names and covered a lengthy period of time, from just before the bombardment until several weeks after 1 July. As of today I was able to identify 17 men who were injured in the bombardment period (some 450 were reported for this time) and I have been able to identify 318 men who were casualties on 1 July. If additional names are discovered I will update the site. It is a slow process, requiring the review of hundreds of related records and later editions of the Verlustlisten. 

 

I hope to answer some of the outstanding items from earlier posts in the near future. 

 

Ralph

 

[phil andrade]

On 20/11/2020 at 01:49, Sasho Todorov said:

Unfortunately we don't have great specific information about the consumption of munitions at the Somme. The transcribed consumption data from Statistics of the Military Effort gives weekly consumption for the entire BEF, which could probably be roughly allocated via some global % to the battle. The French are worse off (working with French data is a mess)-- as they give only monthly figures for 1915 and 1916, not army by army (and then don't give consumption data for 1917 and 1918!). 

 

 

 

Sasho,

 

My guesswork will, I hope, stand up to scrutiny.  If, as I suggest, the British artillery expenditure in the Battle of the Somme aggregated something in the order of twenty two million plus shells, then I would be tempted to suggest that the French would have fired significantly more than half that amount in their sectors of the battle. They were, it seems, more adept at substituting metal for  flesh and blood than were their British counterparts, having had a compelled husbandry imposed on them by Verdun. 

 

In regard to Verdun, I note that the British fired as many shells at the Germans on the Somme in five months as the Germans fired at the French on the Meuse in a similar time period  between February and mid July 1916. The 22 million figure has a resonance !

 

Phil

Edited 22 November , 2020 by phil andrade

[Ralph J. Whitehead]

Iain Hawkins and I have been fine tuning the Sommeschlacht site, making it possible to edit, correct, add, etc. Actually, Iain is doing the heavy lifting on the web site, I am just providing the information and asking many questions on what would be possible.

 

One aspect is the site that is functional is the ability to add photos of the men from the lists. I have experimented with this and added four so far. I need to gather the others I have and add them accordingly.

 

If anyone has a photo of a man shown on the list I would appreciate it if you would consider sending a copy to me so it can be posted. The photo should be in JPEG form, reasonably small in size. My email should be on my profile, but just in case it is: Ralphjustus2000@yahoo.com

 

Ralph

 

p.s. Three new lists are being completed for the site, 2nd Coy 1st Musketen Battalion, MGSST 161 and MGSST 198. More to follow. Below: Alfred Dessecker, IR 180 who was killed on 1 July 1916.

[tharkin56]

This site if you have not used it before has a host of photographs of all men killed on the day chosen at the top

 

https://culturepics.org/on-this-day/index.php?source=&collection=&day=1&month=7&year=1916

 

If you scroll down you will find German casualties

https://culturepics.org/on-this-day/index.php?source=&collection=&day=1&month=7&year=1916#europeana_916106_vbg_photo_VMOJ0291

 

 

https://culturepics.org/on-this-day/index.php?source=&collection=&day=1&month=7&year=1916&page=2#europeana_916105_bhm_photo_UMFA53690_16573

 

You may have to click next on several pages

 

 

[Ralph J. Whitehead]

Thanks for the info, I will take a look.

 

Ralph

[tharkin56]

DOUST, Second Lieutenant, Charles Bowden. Killed at Gommecourt, 1^st  July 1916. He emerged from the smoke screen and was shot by Gerfreiter Frederick Fuchte the commander of No. 8 gun, 73^rd Machine Gun Marksmen Section, Fuchte was killed shortly after this by a grenade thrown by one of the Second Lieutenant Doust’s team.  This if from Alan MacDonald's Book Pro Patria Mori