Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The First Day of the Somme About this episode In partnership with Findmypast, Dan narrates the extraordinary story of the bloodiest day of the First World War. The first day of the Somme saw units wiped out as men charged from their trenches directly into German fire. The losses were devastating, exacerbated by the tragic reality that units were often composed of groups of friends, co-workers, and teammates from the same communities who had been encouraged to sign up together in ‘Pals’ battalions.
Genealogist and specialist researcher for Findmypast, Jen Baldwin, joins Dan to explore how and why the first day of the Somme went so disastrously wrong through the rich and detailed records left by the men in the Pals Battalions. Using newspapers, census records, and letters available on findmypast.co.uk http://findmypast.co.uk, she has pieced together never-before-heard stories of what happened that day and how the men and their families experienced it.
You too can search the incredible records in the Findmypast archive to piece together your own family’s forgotten heroes. To mark Remembrance Day, millions of military records are completely free to access and explore from 7th -13th November. Visit findmypast.co.uk/remembrance https://www.findmypast.co.uk/remembrance?utm_source=history-hit&utm_medium=somme-podcast-description&utm_campaign=remembranceto start delving into your family’s war stories.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges, Jen Baldwin, and edited by Dougal Patmore.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 12,080 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dan Snow? Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.
0:32 Dan Snow? In the summer of 1916, an army gathered in Picardie in northern France. An army the likes of which the British had never fielded before. Alongside the men was a gigantic amount of materiel, the stuff of war. Shells, guns, explosives, bullets. The men and the equipment was gathered together in that rolling chalk downland. A place, well Sussex really, wide fields, villages hidden in the folds of the ground, copse of trees, sunken roads. In a valley at the southern end of the British Imperial Army was what one soldier described
1:17 Dan Snow? as a kind of muddy stream. It was midsummer, the water levels were low. It was the River Somme. And that muddy trickle would give its name to a battle fought by that army. A battle that began on the 1st of July 1916. A terrible battle in the Somme basin.
1:43 Dan Snow? It would become the biggest and bloodiest in British history. It remains one of the largest battles ever fought by any nation. It dragged on for 141 days officially. Although men continued to punch and stab and shoot and kill each other all through the winter that followed in the snow and the rain and the mud. The number of troops amassed from around Britain, Ireland and the Empire for that battle is very difficult to comprehend, particularly when you remember that each one of those men was a son, a cousin, perhaps a father, an uncle, nearly always a friend.
2:21 Dan Snow? Each of them had a whole world, a whole community, a set of hopes and dreams and ambitions. All of them marched off that front line with no promise that they would return. Many of those men were persuaded to do that, to march off to the front line to join the army, by a recruitment initiative I'm sure you've heard of. It's called the Pals battalions. They were men who volunteered to serve in the army if they could do so alongside their friends, their teammates, their neighbours, their work colleagues. The government guessed that these men would be more willing to volunteer if they could serve with their mates, and it did seem successful in bringing in recruits. Men were keener to
3:00 Dan Snow? fight alongside those they knew and trusted from civilian life, but men who fought together died together. The dark side of the Pals recruitment drive soon became apparent. The Somme proved devastating for them and their communities. Towns were decimated as thousands of loved ones were killed and wounded, were ripped apart by the loss of a good proportion of their young male populations. So in this episode, I'm going to tell you the story of the first day of the Somme and how it went disastrously wrong, particularly through the lens of the Pals battalions, how it devastated those units and the communities back home.
3:42 Dan Snow? I'm lucky to be joined by genealogist and research specialist for Find My Past, Jen Baldwin. She's undertaken really remarkable research to piece together the stories of the Pals. It's the first time this has ever really been done in such detail, and some of the records she's found in the Find My Past archive are truly astonishing. So it's worth me saying now that some of the accounts recorded by these men contain harrowing and upsetting details, so proceed with caution. And I need to let you know that if you've got family connections to the First World War, and nearly all of us do, you can use the Find My Past vast archive of records and newspapers to piece together your own personal poignant stories, just like the ones you'll hear today. Unlike other genealogy websites, Find My Past offers so much more than the names and
4:23 Dan Snow? dates on a family tree. It helps you delve deeper into your ancestors' lives to really understand British and Irish culture, communities, and the events that shaped them. The detail-rich collection of records and newspapers and family tree features on Find My Past guarantees you a family research experience unmatched.
4:41 Dan Snow? In colour and context. I really recommend it folks, but for now, this is Dan Snow's History and the Story of the First Day of the Somme.
4:52 Dan Snow? If you'd told a British official 10 years or so before the Somme, 1906 around there, that a decade later, a massive British army would be taking on the Germans in a huge conventional battle in northern France, I think he would have been surprised. For much of the 19th century, Britain had sought to avoid the expensive European entanglements in which she'd been enmeshed for so much of the 18th century, and focus instead on global Britain, trade, the oceans, the maintenance of the world's largest navy, and their ever-growing empire. Britain's army was small. It was often described as an imperial policing force. So when war came to the European continent in August 1914,
5:37 Dan Snow? and Britain sent divisions to support the French and Belgians against the German invasion, Britain had a problem. Its army was much, much smaller than that of Germany. It hadn't taken part really in large-scale exercises like the German army had. The German army was really prepared for massive warfare in Western Europe. The British army wasn't. Kitchener, who was a war hero, fought and won campaigns in Sudan and Southern Africa and elsewhere, realised this instantly. He was not one of those people who claimed the war would be over by Christmas. He knew the war would be long, hard, industrial, and attritional. And he immediately set about trying to build a massive volunteer British
6:17 Dan Snow? army. In the end, there weren't enough volunteers, and Britain would switch to conscription. And by the end of the war, something like five million men would end up passing through the British army. That's equivalent to a quarter of all UK men, but that figure does include troops from around the empire as well. So Kitchener started recruiting. Initially, the volunteering campaign, people have seen the posters, Kitchener Needs You, the Greek man himself with his big moustache, looking out at people, pointing, hoping to inspire a rush of patriotic young men to the colours. And so an idea was born. The idea of the Powell's Battalion. So from Jen at Baldwin. You can understand why they thought they were a great idea, right? Just explain what was the thinking behind them.
7:01 Speaker 01 The thinking really is the lack of the army, right? The battalions are raised in 1914 and 1915. First World War is still quite new. The nation is kind of swept up in this patriotic enthusiasm. So there is a wave of volunteers that come in. But Lord Kitchener, of course, recognizes that he needs a mass army and he needs it quite quickly. Britain doesn't have conscription at that point. Every man who served had to volunteer and he needed more people. This isn't a problem in Europe. On the continent, every man, if military age, already belongs to the state in some capacity. France, Germany, Austria, Hungary. All of these young men went through years of compulsory service and remained in the reserves. So when the war breaks out, millions could have been called up instantly and untrained and already slotted into regiments.
7:46 Speaker 01 But Britain didn't have anything like that. And Lord Kitchener comes up with this idea simply to drive recruitment. And it works in large scales in those first months. The territorials exist, the small professional army exists, but this mass reserve of trained men just isn't there. So he has to pull all these people together and they do come from all walks of life. So you've got shop clerks and dock workers and schoolteachers, all the way up to first sons in the peerage, transforming themselves into soldiers essentially overnight.
8:15 Dan Snow? So why did it prove so popular? The idea that you knew who you'd be serving with, right? They'd all be from your community. Is that the real draw?
8:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that is. And there's also this sense of community pride and there's a sense of local pride, right? It's not just a gimmick. It's not just a recruitment plan. If your football captain, your foreman, your brother in law are all signing up and going, how could you not? Right, it kind of creates this wave of population morale, community morale, a sense of honor. So you have towns like Accrington or Leeds where you could really say with a lot of pride that they had raised their own battalion. It's their boys, their colors, their contribution to the war. So you have whole battalions that are recruited from single towns, some cases even single streets that make up an entire battalion.
9:00 Dan Snow? And we should say at this point, a battalion is what, so about up to a thousand men?
9:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right.
9:04 Dan Snow? What are some of the most famous ones?
9:07 Speaker 01 You know, Accrington, Challey, Leeds is a big one, Sheffield City Battalion, the Grimsby Chums. We're going to talk about all of those in our stories that we uncover today, Dan.
9:18 Dan Snow? In May 1915, the first so-called Kitchener units, the new units of the British Army, arrived on the Western Front. The Battle of Lus saw a big deployment of so-called Kitchener men. So did Gallipoli, which ran through the summer and autumn of 1915, the attempt to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula on the Bosporus and allow British forces to move on from there to Istanbul to knock Turkish Empire out of the war. So these new soldiers were on the battlefield by the summer of 1915, and that was a disappointing year. So 1916 was looked forward to as a year where they could really turn the tide of the First World War, and the British Army, Kitchener's new expanded British Army, was
9:59 Dan Snow? central to that. Britain was an industrial, it was a naval superpower, and now Britain had built itself a big army for the first time in the modern era. Planners believed that it was time for massive concerted assaults on the Western Front to drive back the Germans. The commander of the British Expeditionary Force was Douglas Haig. He'd taken over after some of those setbacks of 1915. His focus was Ypres. He'd fought there with distinction in 1914. Ypres was in Belgium, reasonably close to the Channel coast. It was part of the little enclave of Belgium that the Allies were able to hold on to, and Haig wanted
10:40 Dan Snow? to drive up the coast of Belgium, the coast of Flanders. He wanted to turn the German flank. He wanted to stop U-boats operating in German bases on the Channel coast, and he believed this flanking attack was the place to launch the big British assault. But the French, for obvious reasons, wanted it in France. They were less concerned with liberating Belgium. They were less concerned with the U-boat threat. They wanted a massive assault against the Germans occupying northern France. And at this stage of the war, the French were still the dominant partner on the Western Front. In December of 1915, when the Allies met at Chantilly, there was a conference, and by that stage, the French were managing over 300 miles of the Western Front. The
11:23 Dan Snow? British, less than 100 miles, and the Belgians, 25, 30 miles or so. So you can see that the French were dominant, and they wanted a war-winning offensive, British and French troops fighting together in France. And the obvious place, the place it had to be, was where the British and French armies met each other, and they met each other on the Somme. In the beginning of 1916, the Germans launched their own, surprise, enormous offensive on the French town of Verdun. This became one of the most terrible battles in history, sucking in vast reserves of men and material from both sides. The German army sought to "bleed the French white", was their expression, and both sides ended up bleeding each other almost to the point
12:08 Dan Snow? of extinction. As Verdun went on, the French had to send more and more reinforcements, which they'd been hoping to earmark for this great joint offensive, into the Verdun sector. The French element of the Somme battle shrank and shrank and shrank. They'd hoped to deploy about 42 divisions, that's more than half a million men, that halved down to 18 divisions that would take part in the final assault. And with that shrinking commitment came a sort of shrinking of ambition. Rather than being a giant breakthrough battle, this became a battle to inflict damage on the Germans, to cause attritional losses to the Germans and take the pressure off the French.
12:50 Dan Snow? And it might not seem like much, but the difference between those two ideas, one fighting a giant breakthrough battle, the other a kind of break-in and attritional battle, led to there being ambiguities throughout the planning process that would come to hamper British efforts on the day. The French also put enormous pressure on the British to bring forward the date of the attack. They were desperate in Verdun, and they needed a counter-offensive to try and stop the Germans putting more and more pressure on the Verdun front. So the British had to attack in a place where they hadn't really wanted to, with a much lower French component, with a plan that had been heavily modified, at a time earlier than their choosing. It wasn't the best of preparations.
13:34 Dan Snow? British military might flooded into the zone just behind the Somme front. Divisions of new army soldiers took their place between divisions of old army, professional soldiers, so that this new force was kind of intermixed, and the new army would gain strength and support from the more experienced veteran units on their flanks. The Germans could see this was happening, and one of the reasons was they had the best positions. In 1914, the Germans had advanced into France and Belgium, and when it became clear there was stalemate, the Germans had pulled back. They decided to sit back on their haunches and dig in, and that meant they were able to take the high ground, places where they could observe what was going on in the valleys below, and that was certainly true at the Somme.
14:16 Dan Snow? They had excellent observation, and they could see the British stockpiling, building new railways, marching huge numbers of men into position. At that stage of the war, the importance of secrecy was underappreciated, and the levels at which they had to go to by 1918 was just not common practice. So the Germans could see them coming, and the Germans made their own preparations. In front of the German positions, there were two bands of barbed wire, 30 metres wide, perhaps 15 metres apart, two metres or so high, just terrifying obstacles. Behind that, there was a front-line trench that was traversed, so it was zigzag, so
14:58 Dan Snow? explosive blasts couldn't just clear out huge portions of trench. There were sentry posts and concrete recesses built into the sides of the trench, and then there were dugouts as well. Not as many dugouts in the first line as they were in the second line. 200 metres behind this front-line trench, there would be a second-line trench, and that was where the bulk of the German infantry were. They'd learned their lesson. Then Germans knew that in any assault, the front-line trench would be battered with artillery fire in the days and hours leading up to the assault, so they kept the majority of their troops in this second line, and they were deep, deep underground. There were dugouts, they could be two metres deep, but they could be 10 metres down, concrete with carpet, electricity, beds, cooking facilities.
15:43 Dan Snow? They could be large enough for 25 men, embedded into the chalk rock around them, very, very difficult for even heavy Allied guns to reach. There was then a third-line trench for reserves, and behind that, there were also strong points which were specially commissioned, as the Germans realised this would be the focus of an Allied assault. Now, these were actually outside the range of Allied artillery altogether, so the Allies had no way even of touching them. The German infantry in those trenches further up were connected by telephone to their artillerymen five miles back. Those telephone lines were dug in, two metres or so below the soil, so they had a good chance of not being smashed by Allied artillery. And so that when the Germans saw assaults coming,
16:27 Dan Snow? they could phone their own artillery and speak to them in real time, directing their fire down on the hapless soldiers moving towards them. This was probably the most formidable defensive position in the history of warfare to that point. And the British didn't know the full scale and depth of these defences, but they knew that they'd be extraordinarily hard nut to crack. And that's why they planned to fire the largest bombardment in history. They would fire more than 1.5 million shells at these German positions over the space of a week. It would be the most dreadful bombardment in history, and they confidently believed that nothing could survive it. General Rawlinson was the commander of the British Fourth Army,
17:11 Dan Snow? the principal army involved in the offensive. And he wrote, "Nothing could exist at the conclusion of the bombardment in the area covered by it." That was widely repeated by the men. "Nothing will survive, not even a rat", was one of the expressions at the time. And there was the idea that all the British would have to do was get out of their trenches and walk across this battered moonscape and take possession of the enemy lines. At the end of June 1916, the most gigantic bombardment of the war to that point took place. The British would fire more shells than they'd fired in the whole of the first year of the First World War.
17:52 Dan Snow? The guns could apparently be heard on Hampstead Heath in London, around 150 miles away.
18:02 Dan Snow? The French had fired comparable bombardments, but no British army had ever come close. Many of those shells, as we'll hear, failed to detonate. And today, as you travel round the Somme, you still see piles of unexploded ammunition discovered by farmers left by the roadside for proper demolition removal. We're still reaping the iron harvest that was sown in that week in 1916.
18:30 Dan Snow? There had been rain at the end of June, but by the early hours of the first of July, there were clear skies. There was mist. At 6am, up and down the line, over a hundred thousand men prepared to go into battle.
18:48 Dan Snow? One of those men was James Snaylam of the Chorley Pals. Jen, tell me about the story of somebody who joined a Pals Battalion, James Snaylam.
18:57 Speaker 01 James was quite young when he joined. So he's 16, actually, a very eager teenager in today's terms. Born in 1898, he's the son of a single mother, Ellen. And when war breaks out, of course, he's just a child, right? He's just a boy. He plays football with his friends on the village team, and he goes to school, and he supports his mom in the best way that he can. Of course, you had to be 18 to join and 19 to serve overseas. But most of the Pals, and of course, across the army as a whole, thousands of these soldiers are underage. Some as young as 15, and in James's case, he's 16.
19:31 Dan Snow? And that was allowed?
19:32 Speaker 01 Recruiting officers often turned a blind eye. They were under a lot of pressure to fill the ranks. So if a lad looked sturdy enough, they'd kind of wave him through. And sometimes they even helped. A doctor might send a boy away for lunch and tell him to come back later and just kind of pretend he's never been through the line before and declare him fit, no questions asked. And that's exactly what happened to James. We actually have personal testimony from James. He survives the war, and he lives quite a long life. He actually ends up being the last living survivor of the Chorley Pals when he passes away in the 1990s. But he's interviewed several times about his experience. And so we have some personal testimony from James. And he tells the story of how he enlisted. He actually said, and so this is a quote, "We were changing after a match. And they
20:16 Speaker 01 said, Jimmy, we're going to enlisting on Monday. Are you coming with us?" And he kind of stammers a little bit, says, "I don't know. I think I will." So he tells a story about how they walked the three miles to Chorley. The army doctor could see that he was too young, but James really begs him to bring him in. They're joining, I play with them every Saturday and I wanted to go with them. So the doctor sends him home for dinner and tells him to come back later. And when he did, he passes him through.
20:39 Dan Snow? And he would have been present on the first day of the Somme?
20:42 Speaker 01 He was indeed. They actually started the day before, of course, the march leaving at 6:15 PM the night before from their reserve position, marching to their new positions up on the line. The unit was actually in the assembly trenches, but it's all part of the line of the East Lancashire Regiment. So they're third in position and they're in that position by 4:00 AM in the morning. And of course, this is a heavy and laborious task, right? Just the march itself was exhausting, carrying between 60 to 70 pounds of equipment, sometimes through knee deep mud. The whole environment, of course, was just devastated already. The shelling had been already going on for quite a while. But Germany, of course, anticipates the attack. The machine gunners are waiting.
21:25 Speaker 01 So at 7:30 AM, when they blow the whistles, they go up and over the line. And but by 8:00 AM, the attack had completely stalled. So some of the men reached the outskirts of Serre. That's where his position was. But the vast majority did not. The bodies of those men were not found until February 1917, when the Germans retired to new positions back on the Händenberg Line. So in that first 20 minutes of battle, 235 men of the 11th East Lancashire were killed, another 350 wounded, most of whom would die as a result of their wounds.
21:58 Dan Snow? So I mean, that's appalling casualties. That's more than half of the many who went over the top that day. Is our man among them?
22:04 Speaker 01 He is, and he actually describes this as well. He gives this story kind of in abbreviated terms, but a very personal look at the day of battle. So he's now 18, right? He joined two years earlier. It's the 1st of July, 1916. This is his first major engagement. He goes over the top and he remembers it in the following way. He says, "Men were lying all over the damn show. I hadn't run far before a shell burst above me and I got shrapnel, a six inch piece sticking through my leg. The only thing I got to know about my friends, they were dead. My best friends were gone because we were all running together, you see, when the shell burst came. We hadn't a cat in hell's chance. As soon as we bobbed out of our communication trench, chaps were rolling back in the cavity."
22:48 Dan Snow? Right, so he is surrounded by his dead and dying and wounded. Not only comrades, but childhood best friends. And we're now seeing the terrible drawback of the pals idea.
22:59 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. The devastation that hits these communities happens essentially all in 24 hours. The Somme is the first battle where the pals are really engaged. And it's essentially almost the last because the leadership of the British Army recognizes that this recruitment drive was successful, but in reality, on the field of battle, it really doesn't work.
23:19 Dan Snow? You keep talking about these interviews he gave later. If he's wounded, lying out in no man's land, how did he survive?
23:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, he manages to survive. He actually ends up crawling from shell hole to shell hole with that wound in his leg. And he tells us, "I went over the top at 7:30 and my next door pal was killed straight away. I kept going and going, being the youngest and daftest, I suppose. I got as far as the jerry wire before a shell exploded and a lump went through my leg. I laid there until 7 o'clock in the evening. I crawled back into every shell hole I came to and there were lads wounded shouting, 'Send somebody, they are wounded here.' And eventually I got back to our trench." So he really just crawls his way back to the trench and is able to survive his wounds and get treatment. But you have to remember, he wouldn't have actually made it that far, right? The line hadn't moved, they hadn't progressed very far.
24:08 Speaker 01 So while he's going from shell hole to shell hole, it takes him a very long time, it takes him 12 hours to make that journey back. But that does tell you a little bit about how bad the wound was and how hard it was to get through no man's land, even in a short geographical space.
24:22 Dan Snow? Amazing, he's very lucky to have survived.
24:24 Speaker 01 He is indeed.
24:27 Dan Snow? Siegfried Sassoon called it a sunlit picture of hell. 120,000 men attacking along 25 kilometres, wave after wave. The men climbed ladders, they scrambled out of their trenches. The weight of their equipment, their rifle, helmet and everything else was around 66 pounds in all. They had clothing with them, they had spare equipment with them, they had biscuits with them, they had ammunition, they had to carry everything they might need for perhaps another whole day of fighting after this one. Because they knew that even if they were successful, they'd probably be cut off on the far side of no man's land. There were no armoured vehicles like we have today to bring up replenishment and resupply. They would have to survive with what they were able to carry with them.
25:11 Dan Snow? As the air throbbed with the sound of artillery and aircraft, row upon row of steel-hatted men with bayonets fixed slowly marched forward towards the German parapets.
25:32 Dan Snow? It must have been the most incredible sight. But quickly, it became one of the most devastating sights imaginable. It became the worst slaughter in the history of the British military.
25:44 Dan Snow? The plan went catastrophically wrong. British troops marched evenly with regularity across no man's land. And the first thing they discovered was the German barbed wire had not been cut as had been promised to them. Worse still, much that barbed wire was festooned with unexploded shells from the British guns. And still more of them were littering the ground around them. There was much, much worse to come. It was the northern end of the 4th Army Sector. It was a place called Sair. This is where the Kitchener Pals battalions famously or infamously went into action. The Accrington Pals, the Barnsley Pals, the Leeds Pals. Just seconds after they left their trenches, they suffered between 80 and 90% casualties. One survivor famously said,
26:30 Dan Snow? "We were two years in the making, 10 minutes in the destruction." Tom Wiley of the Leeds Pals was one of those men. Here's Jen.
26:39 Speaker 01 He was 19 when he joined. He was the son of a Leeds MP, was educated at Harrow, actually. And we know that because we actually have his school records and his photograph from when he was at that school as a young boy, just 14, 15, looking very bright and cheerful before the war starts.
26:56 Dan Snow? And he's convinced to join up, as you say, son of an MP, so he's kind of an upper-class kind of guy. But he joins up as a common soldier, as he is in this Pals battalion.
27:03 Speaker 01 He does, although this Pals Battalion is a little bit different. Not all Pals, of course, look the same. Some of the units were drawn from these more middle-class circles. Most of the Pals were very much working class, but the Leeds Pals were made up largely of clerks, teachers, office workers, men who came from professional families, right? Wore suits to work, often had some education, certainly beyond the basics. And this distinction actually makes a really big difference. It shapes how the battalion see themselves and how they're remembered today. A unit like the Leeds Pals carried a strong sense of civic pride and professional identity. Society saw them as young men with a bright future, whereas many of the other units were kind of bound by this workplace solidarity and shared hardship.
27:47 Speaker 01 So the model of the Pals Battalion is the same, but probably the motivation behind them is slightly different.
27:53 Dan Snow? That's interesting. I suppose also how they're remembered, because they would have had wealthier family that would have mourned them and put notices in newspapers and carvings up in local churches, things like that.
28:02 Speaker 01 And that's exactly actually what happens with Tom. His family is, of course, quite well off. He grows up in this environment with nurses and household servants. When he dies, his parents install a memorial window, actually, in their parish church, and then a new family vault to recognize his loss. When his father dies a couple of years later, also tragically on the 1st of July, he's buried in that vault, so directly across from that window. And the intent absolutely was that he would be connected with his son forever.
28:33 Dan Snow? He does die, but if you're in Leeds Pals Battalion on the 1st of July, 1916, there's a reasonably high chance that.
28:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. They've got units stacked up, of course. And the unit that Tom is with is part of the 31st Division, so they're also lined up to hit the German trenches near Seeer. And again, 7:30 in the morning, that whistle blows, they climb up out of their trenches. Of course, we know the enemy wire had not been cut through the bombardment. And of course, these men, again, were smashed with these machine guns. So almost immediately, the Pals come under this devastating fire. The newspapers reported in the contemporary period that many were cut down within yards of leaving their trenches. So the reporting even back home is quite clear on how devastating the loss is going to be. Some of them reached the German wire, of course, but they couldn't break through. And by nightfall, we know the attack has completely failed.
29:21 Dan Snow? And again, casualties-wise, over 50% casualties in this battalion?
29:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, the Leeds Pals suffered around 500 casualties. They went over the top with about 900 men.
29:30 Dan Snow? And among them is our boy. How did the poor old family hear the story of their son's death?
29:35 Speaker 01 So they definitely would have received the official telegram, but it is of course listed in the newspapers as well. And unfortunately, in most cases, it's listed repeatedly, right? So local newspapers tended to republish the same list of dead or casualty lists over and over to make sure that the word had gone out, that people had seen it. So you might see a name in a newspaper once, but you also might see it 20 times because it would be published for the next 20 weeks after the battle. And that's what happens with Tom. Because, again, he's so well-known, his story keeps being brought up, right? When Tom's father dies, the local newspaper recounts his death at the Somme again, over and over again. So even years after the fact, the Wiley's family is just publicly in mourning the entire time.
30:20 Dan Snow? How did you really come across the story and add such flesh on the bones when you were digging in the Find My Past archives?
30:26 Speaker 01 When you search through the British Army service records on Find My Past, there's really very obvious ways to see that this person was engaged in significant battle or not. Those records, of course, get longer the more time they spend in the army. But I think what captures me the most about this family is actually the newspaper coverage in our archive. It tells the story of his mother being this opera prima donna who left the stage after marriage and how she was discovered in India and brought over to England. It talks about his father being a solicitor and then an MP. So his career is covered extensively, of course. So we know all of these backstory pieces about Tom's family. And then we get Tom himself as a boy, right? At school in our photograph collection, this
31:07 Speaker 01 very youthful, fresh face in the 1911 census that shows the Wiley's in Leeds in their very comfortable, middle-class household and of a world away from the rest of the community with the mill towns and the dockyards. And then, of course, the Somme hits and it's not just about listing names, it is trying to express to the people at home what happened that day and how the contemporary newspapers actually expressed the events of the day, noting that, of course, some of those newspapers had to be sanctioned by the government. Sometimes they were very careful in their word choice and what they could say and what they couldn't say. But then this story doesn't actually end there. We have a number of memorials and in memoriam notices in the newspaper that continue on for years.
31:52 Speaker 01 And it actually turns out that Tom's cousin, a man named Charteris Elliott, worked with Barclays Bank. He traveled extensively. We can see him in the migration records on Find My Pass in the West Indies and New York and Madeira. But every July, no matter where he was, he sent one of these notices back to the Yorkshire Evening Post. So year after year, Tom's name is kept alive in print. It wasn't something that you forgot, right, to some. It was something that returned to you every summer, as kind of as raw as the day it happened. Today, those notices are preserved in these digitized newspapers, and they really stand as a tradition of remembrance. Ordinary families finding a way to hold on to these memories to these people that they lost.
32:38 Dan Snow? One signaler wrote, "They were mown down like meadow grass. I felt sick at the sight of the carnage and remember weeping."
32:50 Dan Snow? Why were they mown down? Well, the answer is that the bombardment had not worked. It had not destroyed the German army in the field. The Germans had taken refuge in those deep dugouts that I mentioned. They'd taken refuge further back, further away from the frontline trenches. And although it had been a miserable, traumatic, shattering experience for many of them being bombarded for a week constantly, they were physically able, as soon as they heard those whistles blow on the other side of no man's land, they were able to rush up to their fire steps, or even any old shell holes that they found on the surface, take cover, mount their machine guns, shoulder their rifles, and start firing, pouring down a withering fire
33:31 Dan Snow? on the British troops that on that perfect July morning were walking towards them in lines. One German officer, Otto Lys, said there was wild firing slamming into masses of the enemy. All around us rushing, whistling, and roaring of a storm. Belt after belt was fired. Despite the fact that hundreds are already lying dead, fresh waves kept emerging to assault the trenches. The German testimonies of this slaughter are absolutely fascinating. I’ll read one out from a man called Castle. He’s a German soldier. “More than a week we’d lived with the deafening noise of the battle. Dull and apathetic we were, lying in our dugouts, secluded from life but prepared to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. On the 1st of July at 7:30, the shout of the century ‘They are coming’ tore me out of apathy.
34:16 Dan Snow? Helmet, belt, rifle, and up the steps. On the step something white and bloody. In the trench a headless body. The century had lost his life by a last shell, before the fire was directed to the rear, and it paid the price for his vigilance with his life. We rushed to the ramparts, there they come, the khaki yellows. They’re not more than twenty metres in front of our trench. They advance, fully equipped, slowly, to march across our bodies into the open country. But no, boys, we are still alive, the moles come out of their holes. Machine-gun fire tears holes in their rows. They discover our presence, throw themselves on the ground, now a mass of craters welcomed by hand grenades and gunfire, and have now to sell their lives themselves.” Another German observer was called Stefan Vestman, he was a medical officer, and he
35:01 Dan Snow? describes how “The German machine gunners and infantrymen crawled back out of their holes with inflamed and sunken eyes. Their faces blackened by fire, their uniforms splashed with the blood of their wounded comrades. It was a kind of relief to be able to come out, even into the air still filled with smoke and the smell of cordite. They started firing furiously, and the British had frightful losses.” Now, another reason for the British disaster on this first de la Somme was actually hinted at by one of those Germans. He talks about the artillery fire moving on. And in the absence of any battlefield communication, nowadays if you’re advancing, you’re on the radio constantly with your artillery, with your air, and you are able to say, “We’re just here, please deal with this obstacle in front of us.” There was no way of communicating back then in that manner.
35:43 Dan Snow? Very primitive ideas with lamps and flags, runners of course, you could be a machine gun and killed, very, very slow. It’s very difficult to lay telephone cables as you advanced, it was vulnerable to German shellfire. And so, the solution they came up with was a rigid timetable. The artillery would blast the German trenches, and then it would lift, it would move forward. The idea is that you can advance behind a kind of curtain of fire and steel if you're in artillery. So it's battering the German trenches, then it stops, it lifts, you advance forward, seize those trenches. But the artillery then starts firing just beyond those German trenches to stop anyone coming to their aid, reinforcements or counterattacks. Which is great in theory, but in practice it has to go to a regular timetable. And if you're behind that timetable,
36:28 Dan Snow? then you can't call back the artillery. So there'd be infantry advancing, and they're watching as their artillery goes 100 feet further every two minutes. The trouble is they're not going 100 feet every two minutes. They're stuck in the same place, dealing with the Germans who are now emerging from their strong points. Then your British artillery is off pounding positions way, way, way further back that's having no impact on your fate on the battlefield. As the First World War goes on, cooperation between infantry and artillery reaches an extraordinarily impressive pitch. But at this point, you're pretty near the beginning. And British infantry watched as its artillery support disappeared off, and they were left alone to deal with the Germans.
37:12 Dan Snow? By the afternoon, the Allied assault was collapsing. Communication was breaking down, casualties were enormous. Many of the pals battalions had been decimated, and German fire meant that many of the wounded could not be evacuated. They were stranded in the hell of No Man's Land.
37:37 Dan Snow? It's impossible to imagine what that must have been like. Lying among the dead and wounded, the near-constant bombardment, the smell, the blood, the twitches of the corpses that piled on top of you as bullets rattled into them. The screams around you slowly petering out as the afternoon dragged on and more men died where they lay.
37:58 Dan Snow? There's another story in the Find My Past archives that Jen has pieced together through records that gives us an insight into the first day of the Somme. The story of the twins that were also pals. Jen, we've talked about Yorkshire, we've talked about Lancashire. Let's move over to a Liverpool pals story. Tell me about them.
38:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, so the key character in our Liverpool pals story is actually Harold Kitchen. The kitchens of Liverpool appear before the war in the 1911 census in a bustling household. There's a father, a mother, Joseph and Annie, seven children packed into this house. So a relatively average family of this period. Harold actually joins the pals, the Liverpool pals, and he goes forward with the battalion at Montebon. They're heavily hit near the Glats Redoubt. They lose 500 men and Harold, of course, is one of those men. But his death was not instantaneous at all. He's hit by shrapnel and according to the newspapers, shrapnel was kind of the great killer of the Somme. Shells exploded above the ground, throwing these jagged pieces of hot metal across the open fields.
39:00 Speaker 01 So to be hit didn't always mean death. It might mean a chunk of steel through the arm or leg tearing muscle and bone. We see that with James earlier in the day. You know, a man could be left bleeding, unable to move, but still conscious. So you're stranded in no man's land. You've got shrapnel in you. You're laying for hours under the burning sun or the rain in the mud, possibly nothing but a water bottle with you in your heavy pack. Wounded men called out for stretcher bearers, for friends, for anyone really to come and help them, but they couldn't get across no man's land. Gunfire is too fierce, the ground is too exposed. So there's this process of Harold's death that really sadly, tragically, takes hours to go through. So he is part of that initial attack, but he struggles throughout the rest of the day.
39:45 Speaker 01 It's something to really, in your brain, you have to think about and imagine. The ground is basically a graveyard at this point. It's littered with bodies. There's wounded being found everywhere. There's just wounded everywhere. Shell holes become these makeshift refugees, filled with men too injured to move. No one could reach them. The smell would have been phenomenal. Explosives, the smoke, the blood, thousands of casualties in the heat of July. Some bodies are already decomposing. Survivors remembered the silence of the battlefield, broken really only by those voices that are screaming from and yelling for help. And of course, they fade as the day wears on. So Harold becomes one of those many voices that survivors bring back with them.
40:30 Dan Snow? So sadly, the family are mourning two boys because both of the twin boys, I mean, it's just too unbearable to think about, but they both are killed in the space of months.
40:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, they are. So Harold's twin is Percy. They enlisted together in a pals unit, right? They did exactly what the recruitment officers wanted them to do, coming into a pals unit together. They enlisted in September 1914. They were both privates in the 18th Kings Liverpool Regiment. They both worked as office boys before the war. Percy's killed first in January of 1916. There wasn't a specific battle or engagement. It's just kind of routine warfare, probably something like holding the trench line or patrolling or preparing for what was about to come. And their mother had already died as well at some point between 1911 and 1914. So Father Joseph is left to mourn alone, his wife and his two children within the span of a couple of years.
41:23 Dan Snow? What stories have you been able to glean about them and their family?
41:26 Speaker 01 You know, I think this family is really representative of, I think we could probably say, the average family in England at this point. So Father Joseph is going through this unthinkable situation, right? They have sisters at home that are kind of recognizing that their brothers are gone. There's one brother that survives, Leslie, but he doesn't have any children. So the kitchen name comes to an end for this family, if you will, on that battlefield. The losses weren't just felt in the present, of course. They're carried into the future. So when multiple sons are killed and whole bloodlines end, parents are left with empty homes, sisters grow up without brothers, and in some cases, the family name just completely dies out. In the 1921 census after the war, Joseph, the father, is at home with his three daughters.
42:11 Speaker 01 And the census record for Joseph kind of reads like a roll call of absence, if you will, especially when you compare it to the busy household in 1911. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the 1939 register on Find My Past finds Joseph living in Cheshire with his one surviving son. He's retired, but kind of surrounded by the ghosts of his family. And you take something like these dry records, right? A lot of people think census records can be quite boring, but in reality, it's a window to the story of the family that kind of sits behind that government form, that piece of paper. So the the kitchen family really kind of reveals the hidden cost of the Somme. It's not just about the lives lost, but the lives that never got to live. The First World War obviously leaves gaps in
42:54 Speaker 01 every family. There's a whole generation of young men that fight shoulder to shoulder in these trenches, but of course, many never come home. They never marry. They never have children to remember them. But we, as a community today, can honor their legacies by finding their names in the records, in family trees. Maybe it's our grandfather's brother or our great grandmother's cousin. And then we can delve deeper into the records and the newspaper archives on Find My Past to discover these stories that really tell us a lot more about their life, more than just they were killed on the first of July, 1916. So over a century later, we still have this opportunity to bring their stories home and to remember them in a way that is really much more than just the war memorial in your local village.
43:36 Dan Snow? There were some small successes for the Allies on the first day of the Somme, if only marginal. The French were able to do a couple of important things. First of all, they had heavier guns. Their big, heavier guns had more effectively penetrated into the earth and smashed up some of those deep German bunkers. Secondly, the French had learned through bitter, bitter experience on the Western Front, that you had to focus on counter-battery fire. And that is blasting the German gun batteries, not necessarily the battlefield where the infantry are all hiding in their trenches, but further back, the gun batteries, because that's going to do the real damage to any attack. And so they poured down a relentless fire on the German batteries. So they were unable in turn to focus on the advancing British and French.
44:22 Dan Snow? As well as a huge bombardment rained on the Germans from above, the British decided to lay at least three enormous mines under German lines, using British expertise in mining. Of course, Britain's a coal superpower in this period. So miners would dig right under the German lines and pack them with high explosives, enormous, enormous amounts of high explosives, sending German defences sky high. Now, in the north, that hadn't really worked. The Hawthorn Ridge Mine had been detonated 10 minutes before zero at 7:20, and that enabled the Germans to put together some kind of plan to deal with the eventual attack. They manned the parapet of this new crater, and as the British troops surged in and around it,
45:07 Dan Snow? the Germans poured down a terrible fire on them. So despite the Royal Engineers digging a thousand-feet-long mine, despite them packing it with something like 40,000 pounds of high explosives, 75 feet beneath German positions, it didn't have the effect that they were hoping for. Down south, they were slightly more effective. One veteran remembers that "our people began creeping out to the attack, and the earth rocked with two enormous mine explosions." In fact, there's a Royal Flying Corps pilot Cecil Arthur Lewis, who remembers seeing a tremendous and magnificent column of earth rising to about 4,000 feet from those two explosions in the southern end of the line. Down in the south is where you get the extraordinary story from the Eighth East Surrey's kicking footballs.
45:52 Dan Snow? It was applauded in the press as a sign of British sporting gallantry. It was derided by the Germans as an absurd English affectation. But those footballs were kicked ahead into no man's land. But the great tragedy of the Somme is that there was an opportunity to advance beyond Montombor. In fact, the troops remember seeing the green fields beyond. They'd penetrated, they thought, nearly all the way through German defences. But there was no way at this point of the war to respond, to react, to send reinforcements, to reinforce success. And there was this very stayed-fire plan, as I mentioned, an infantry plan. If you met your objective, you stopped there and you waited for another plan to be made. And so the glimpse, the possibility of a breakthrough,
46:35 Dan Snow? was lost as the men watched the Germans scramble to recover their defences, dig new positions, lay new barbed wire, and build another terrible line of defence. Down to the south of them, General Marie-Émile Faure's sixth French army struck— we ignore this in Britain, it was probably the most effective blow yet struck on the Western Front. His heavy guns did smash the German defences, his lighter guns provided covering fire as five divisions seized the German front line almost in its entirety. One of his colonial corps, made up of French North African soldiers, seized the German second line, and the French lost just 1,600 men, mostly lightly wounded.
47:19 Dan Snow? The infantry moved forward in slightly different ways to the British, they did not walk in lines, they were more highly trained, it was not their first experience of battle, they were able to move forward in dispersed formations, to look for weak points, to infiltrate a little bit more, rather than just march forward in a long line. I mentioned the French had 1,600 casualties. Well, the British suffered far worse. Fifty-seven thousand casualties in one day, 20,000 of which were killed, or who died of wounds. That's more than the death toll of the Crimean War and the Boer War combined, and the vast majority of those men were killed in the first 30 minutes of the attack. And in return, the British had so little to show for it.
48:04 Dan Snow? Many of the men, of course, who took part, were traumatised for the rest of their lives.
48:13 Dan Snow? As night fell on the 1st of July 1916, the battlefield of the Somme was littered with the dead and dying. Tens of thousands of British soldiers had fallen in just a few hours, their bodies were now scattered across no man's land. Many were calling out for help that could not come to them. In the darkness, stretcher bearers tried, they crept forward under fire, they dragged back, a few wounded where they could, but the vast majority were left where they fell. In the trenches, those who survived the slaughter tried to come to terms with what they'd been through. The attack had failed almost everywhere, that barbed wire had remained largely uncut, the German line was still strong.
48:55 Dan Snow? In the days and weeks that followed, those same exhausted, grief-stricken men would be ordered to go again, to climb back over the top, across ground already soaked with their friend's blood.
49:18 Dan Snow? The Grimsby Chums had been decimated on that first day. They'd been part of the first wave. They'd rushed forward to occupy the Loch Nagal Crater, so called. It'd been created by a huge mine. But many of them had charged into that crater. They'd become trapped in there and they'd suffered from both German and British artillery fire throughout the day. As a result, they suffered over 500 casualties. That's most of the battalion. Only two officers and around 100 men returned unwounded. Jen, right, we're back to the east coast now. We're going to Grimsby where there's a Chums Battalion, presumably pals just in a different guise.
49:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's exactly right, actually. The Grimsby Chums were a pals battalion. The idea's the same, friends enlisting together, fighting side by side. But the word chum in this period carries kind of a little bit of a different feel. It's the language of schoolboy comics and magazines in the contemporary period. So it really resonates with innocence and loyalty. And these local recruiters in Grimsby really knew that it would strike a chord. So this was about belonging, about mateship. And so the Grimsby Battalion becomes the Chums and the nickname sticks, sticks with them through the war, into the newspapers, even of course into memory. That's how we refer to them today.
50:30 Dan Snow? You're seeing these astonishing, astonishing casualties. And we should say, for no lasting tactical advantage either, the front line was largely the same at the end of the day as it was at the start.
50:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's the real tragedy of the day, right? It's just pointless.
50:44 Dan Snow? What do you know about John Robert McFul, one of the men you found in the archive? Tell me about his life before the war. How did you come to sign up and what was he doing before?
50:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, so his story is quite iconic, I think, for Grimsby. He's a house painter before the war, just like his father. They were well known and seemed to be kind of your average working class family, but living a pretty decent life. He was also really well known in local football circles. He'd played for several clubs with the Grimsby and District Football League. So he was, from all accounts, quite a popular young man around town and enjoyed his time on the pitch.
51:17 Dan Snow? And were many of them part of this football scene?
51:20 Speaker 01 So this is a community that is almost centered around this kind of culture of collaboration, right? So Grimsby in 1914 is a town, close to 100,000 people. It's a major port, a fishing powerhouse. So at the docks, thousands of men worked together, unloading the trawlers, gutting the fish, repairing the nets. So the families here are kind of tied to this culture of community and working together, often working on the same vessels. But we see it also in that culture of football. Grimsby had been playing league football for decades. Local amateur leagues were thriving. So men like John, who worked during the day, would have spent their evenings and their weekends on the pitch. The Grimsby Town Football Club, the Mariners, had been playing since 1892 and
52:03 Speaker 01 drew thousands of spectators every Saturday. So when the war comes and the call goes out for volunteers, it's really not much of a surprise that the Chums Battalion was raised. Entire teams enlisted together. Dock workers signed up alongside their coworkers. The battalion is made up of the same kind of tight bonds that had always defined Grimsby to a certain extent. So we've got this culture of community and brotherhood that just kind of naturally merges into the war effort.
52:31 Dan Snow? What happened to him on that first day of the Somme?
52:33 Speaker 01 So he joined the Grimsby Chums on the 16th of February 1915. He arrives in France on the 9th of January 1916. And then, of course, he dies on the 1st of July 1916. He spent a total of 501 days in military duty. So almost all of this time was spent in service, in training, and then in reserve trenches until the Somme. We know from a letter that was written by one of his comrades, Lance Corporal Normandale, he writes this letter from his hospital bed after the Somme, and then it's reprinted in the local newspapers. And this Lance Corporal says, "It is a sad blow to me, as if I had lost a brother." After La Boselle was blown up and we had gone over, many fell before they had
53:17 Speaker 01 got 20 yards, large shells tearing holes in the ranks, but they still went on. No thoughts of turning back to certain death. He remembers McFaul as, quote, "the idol of the section, generous to a fault. Refuses to be made an NCO, although he was asked more than once." So he's well respected. He's well liked by his brothers in arms, his battalion. The letter goes on to talk about how the night before the attack, McFaul had actually shared his last parcel from home with all of his friends. So that's kind of the image we're left with, this young man, 22 years old, giving away his last comforts and walking forward into machine gunfire.
53:51 Dan Snow? What a wonderful resource. If you're a family historian, and whether you're not descended from him or relate to him or not, I find that very moving. But imagine if you're a family historian and you come across that letter. What a treasure trove.
54:01 Speaker 01 The newspapers are really just one of the richest sources we have, I think, for understanding the First World War. And the great advantage, of course, is digitization is happening at a lightning rate at this point. So we add more papers every week. And so you've got this opportunity that really never stops for research like this. And understanding these local papers is really important, right? So they've got casualty lists and the obituaries and the memorial notices, but they also have these really personal testimonies. Just like today, they wanted to print local stories that appealed to their readers. So the local paper in this case calls the chum's sacrifice, quote, "the halo of glory." So these are words of pride, but beneath them, if you read enough of the paper,
54:45 Speaker 01 you can really hear the devastation in a town where every street kind of knew loss. So to modern ears, it sounds almost like spin and really kind of this attempt to turn unbearable grief into something noble. And that's exactly what it was. Communities had to find meaning in loss that was really just too great to comprehend. So the language of glory, it was a way of coping, of insisting that the pain must at least have purpose. Towns like Grimsby, newspapers become these obituary columns, but also this place for these community memorials, right? A place for the community to mourn. So the Grimsby Telegraph, which is available on Find My Past, printed McFaul's name, his football ties, his photograph, the sort of details that we now use to kind of recover and piece together these stories.
55:30 Speaker 01 And if you think about walking down the street in Grimsby that summer and what that would have looked like, right? Every window shuttered, every doorway marked with the black crepe, every neighbor carrying the same silent grief. But it didn't stop there, and then the newspapers tell us that as well. Grimsby continued to recruit men. The Grimsby News published a photo of the newest battalion to head to Europe under the Grimsby Chums title on the first of September, 1916. So exactly three months after the opening day of the Somme, they are proudly printing a photograph of the next set of Grimsby Chums.
56:03 Dan Snow? Wow. And is there an element of censorship? Is it self censorship or is it government censorship of these newspapers? As you say, if you kind of read between the lines, but are they writing articles about how horrific it is on the front as well?
56:12 Speaker 01 So there's a drive really to keep the community engaged, to keep them involved in the war effort, to keep them sending their sons and their brothers to war. But of course, we have to acknowledge that they didn't print the whole truth. They just weren't allowed to. They could publish these stirring tributes, right? The halo of glory language, but they couldn't necessarily show you a full picture of shuttered streets or families plunged into this grief that wouldn't be positive for the war effort. So casualty numbers were printed, truthfully, but they were sometimes delayed or sometimes even softened. Photographs, of course, very carefully chosen.
56:48 Dan Snow? So the record show about how the community remembered him and processed their grief.
56:52 Speaker 01 I think one of the most interesting bits about this particular story actually happens 12 years after the Somme. So it's 1928. The Prince of Wales visits Grimsby. Local newspapers describe thousands of people in People's Park. They bring together 120 survivors of the Chums, 600 war orphans, 300 disabled people kind of displayed before the prince as part of this royal ceremony. On the surface, it's really triumphant. There's bands playing and bunting and banners waving, loyalty really on display, but beneath the spectacle is just long lasting strain, right? The veterans and the orphans putting out their like symbols really, right? The community is still carrying the weight of 1916 and now that the grief is kind of just being folded into this national performance a bit.
57:38 Speaker 01 The tone of the reporting, the censorship, the careful messaging, it doesn't make newspapers any less valuable, of course, as a resource. In fact, I think it makes them even more fascinating. They show us both what happened and how it was presented to the public, but it also shows us this very personal, real side of the war. When you read a notice about your ancestor in the paper, you don't just see their story, but you also see this world of propaganda and censorship that shaped how their story was told. It helps you kind of go beyond the names and dates on your family tree and kind of that traditional pedigree and really understand the customs and events that shaped your ancestors' lives and shaped the lives of everybody across the country at the time.
58:17 Dan Snow? So how should we think about the first day of the Battle of Somme? It was clearly a catastrophe. It was clearly disaster. In a brutal sense, it was a learning experience. The British did refine their offensive operations in the weeks and months and years that followed. The British Army was on a very steep learning curve. It improved. There was a terrible, appalling, unprecedented cost to that process, but lessons were learned. A French officer observing the British said, "The British infantry is very brave, but undergoing a costly apprenticeship." And by the end of the Battle of Somme, the British had ground their way forward. Many NCOs, many young officers, many staff officers had gained battle experience that would prove vital, war-winning in the years that followed.
59:02 Dan Snow? The cost, though, was astonishing. The British and French would lose around 600,000 men. The Germans, over 400,000 men. It was not a breakthrough battle. It did succeed in the terrible logic of the First World War and inflicting casualties on the Germans at a higher level than they could sustain. The Battle of Somme could be regarded as defeat for Germany. One German soldier has written, "The tragedy of the Somme Battle was that the best soldiers, the stoutest-hearted men, were lost. Their numbers were replaceable, but their spiritual worth never could be." And Ernst Junger, the legendary First World War soldier, veteran, writer of Storm of Steel, wrote about the Somme that it was the muddy grave
59:46 Dan Snow? of the German field army. He believed that that German army never recovered from the loss of so many experienced junior and non-commissioned officers.
59:57 Dan Snow? But those are the statistics. That's the strategic level. But I think when we're talking about the first day in particular, it's difficult to see beyond the suffering of the individuals who were caught up in that terrible storm of steel and high explosives. Do we hear anything about the Pals when they later in the war or when they come home?
1:00:16 Speaker 01 So the Pals units are essentially integrated into the regular British Army. After these devastating losses at the Somme, the leadership really understands that this recruitment drive and the idea of an entire village of men serving together probably isn't their best way to go forward. And they know the war isn't going to end anytime soon. So they disable what we think of as the Pals battalions over the next several months. And anybody surviving kind of gets integrated into other units. It's the same for people who are wounded. When you come back to the front, you're going to be reassigned to a different battalion. So you're not necessarily serving with your brother and your cousin and your best friend.
1:00:55 Dan Snow? So the loss of the First World War is so infamous to this day in Britain. But what makes those Pals battalions unique, do you think?
1:01:01 Speaker 01 The Pals are so distinctive because the casualties aren't scattered across the army. They are concentrated in these really localized units. So there are a lot of small archives and museums and materials that are collected in letters and diaries and in the local newspaper where this loss is felt on a very regional, very localized level. These kinds of concentrated casualties are really devastating. Accrington lost 81% of its men that morning. Leeds, 83%. So the percentages are high, but the numbers are really striking. Take away the percentage and think about it just in numbers of souls. Chorley Pals had 175 that day. 93 of them were lost.
1:01:44 Speaker 01 So 81% makes it sound like, oh, that could be anything. But really, 81% is a huge number of families that are impacted. So you've got workspaces, football teams wiped out in a single day. In some cases, many siblings lost on one day. There's a newspaper after the battle that publishes this line that I think is really powerful. And the newspaper says, "From the desk and the counter, from the mines and the shop, from the schools and the workshops, they had passed from a civil life to a military one. And in their new status, they feared only the epitome of the amateur." So modern ear, right? That what they're really saying is they dread being seen as second rate. They're men playing at soldiering. But because they had come from these everyday jobs, when it mattered, they wanted
1:02:28 Speaker 01 to prove that they were as professional, as brave, as any career soldier. And so that legacy of the Pals really stands out, right? It's this concentrated regional impact, but it's also taking a population of men who are not regular army and doing something extraordinary with them. And what they did was really extraordinary.
1:02:47 Dan Snow? It was certainly extraordinary. How can people go on the same journey that you've been on? How can they research these Pals battalions and others in the British Army in the First World War?
1:02:56 Speaker 01 Find My Pass is the home of British and Irish family history. And that's what we do. That's what we specialize in. That's what we're passionate about. So British Army service records, the census collection, the 1911 census, and then the 1921 census after the war, medal rolls, war diaries, the newspaper archive with both national and regional titles. So you can explore these very personal moments as well as kind of alongside the big stories of the war. The military service memorial collection, there's records of specific units like the Pals or the Coldstream Guards. And we've talked about the Army today, but we also have collections for the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. It's just an incredible amass amount of material. And I typically recommend you start with something like the 1911 census, which is available on Find My Pass because it's right before the war starts.
1:03:40 Speaker 01 Then you can move into the military records, the service records, medal rolls. All of those are readily available. War diaries describe their actions kind of day by day. And then these newspaper archives really carry their photos, obituaries, the poetry, all of these big, heavy stories. So put together, the records reveal what was lost, the families, the neighborhoods, the whole bloodlines that are cut short. And sometimes those lives are closer to your own family than you might imagine. The problem with the Pals is that there is no one big national database saying this man was a member of a Pals battalion. That's the piece that's missing. So at Find My Pass, we're working to bring these sources together. We want to highlight collections that are tied directly to the Pals because these men, these families, their communities deserve to be remembered.
1:04:25 Speaker 01 They're not just numbers on a casualty list. They're individuals who made choices, they had friendships. They were lost, right? So these sources are crucially important, but it's more than just the records because there's no central source. Find My Pass is trying to fill that gap in the historical record. But we can't do it alone. So we're asking if you are interested in this history, or if you have just a bit of time to take some research down, find a battalion, an individual soldier, delve deeper into millions of records and detail-rich newspapers, then share your discoveries with us. And together, we'll remember, record, and reunite the pals.
1:05:04 Dan Snow? Thank you very much.
1:05:08 Dan Snow? As Jen mentioned, you too can discover your family's forgotten heroes on Find My Past. To mark Remembrance Day, millions of military records are completely free to access and explore from the 7th to 13th of November. Visit findmypast.co.uk/remembrance and start delving into your family's war stories. And you can join me and Jen again next Monday. We'll be charting the course of the Battle of Passchendaele through those relentless months between August and November 1917. Drenched in unrelenting rain, churned into a sea of mud, Passchendaele became one of the most infamous battles in the First World War, in fact, in military history. Men, horses, tanks disappeared into the mire. The word Passchendaele really is synonymous, I think, with hell. We'll be telling the stories of
1:05:50 Dan Snow? those men who were lost and those who survived through more groundbreaking research provided by the Find My Past archives. So make sure you hit follow in your podcast player so you don't miss it. See you next time.
1:06:10 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com/subscribe.
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