The British Army on the Western Front 1916

Mission

At the start of the second year of World War I, the Expeditionary Force had two great tasks to accomplish. The first was to finish the job of converting itself into a large, powerful and thoroughly modern army - one that could help the French Army to strike a decisive, war-winning blow against the German forces in the west. The second was to prevent any of the other Allied powers - whether Russia, Italy, Serbia, or even France - from concluding a separate peace with Germany. Unfortunately, these two tasks were very much at odds with each other. The first required the careful husbanding of forces, as well as a gargantuan effort to build up the infrastructure of schools, depots, rest camps, bakeries, butcheries, workshops, warehouses, hospitals, railways, aerodromes, ammunition dumps and headquarters needed to keep such an army in fighting trim. The second required aggressive offensive enterprises, attacks on a scale large enough to create the possibility of a substantial penetration of the German front line. These were necessary, not merely to tie down the largest possible number of German divisions, but also to prove to the governments and people of Allied countries that the British Empire was as willing as they were to sacrifice its sons for the sake of the common cause.

Neither the expansion of the Expeditionary Force nor the offensives launched in support of the French and Russian armies were, however, ends in themselves. In the minds of the Allied strategists, both served the larger purpose of setting the stage for a series of large-scale offensives that would, at the very least, drive the Germans out of much of the French and Belgian territory that they had conquered in 1914. As the French Army had already exhausted every significant source of military manpower, both French and British leaders agreed that the Expeditionary Force would provide the lion's share of the forces taking part in these offensives.

With this in mind, the Expeditionary Force began to assemble a powerful operational reserve behind the Western Front. Consisting of recently formed divisions that had just crossed the English Channel, divisions transferred from the Middle East, and divisions withdrawn from front-line service, this reserve was to give the British leadership the ability to launch its first offensive at some point in the spring or summer of 1916. Until that time, it served the secondary purpose of allowing new divisions to complete their training and exhausted ones to rest.

On 21 February 1916, the German offensive in the vicinity of Verdun put a half to British plans for a massive spring offensive. Instead of building up their strength for the great push, the divisions of the operational reserve were sent forward to take responsibility for defensive positions that had previously been held by French formations. At the same time, the British leadership began planning a very different sort of offensive - one designed to relieve pressure on the hard-pressed French Army rather than drive the Germans out of a substantial piece of French territory. This offensive, which began on 1 July 1916, was the famous battle of the Somme.