Summary Of Battle Of The Somme By Otto Lais

“Fire; pause; barrel change; fetch ammunition; lay the dead on the floor of the crater,” Otto Lais explains in his personal memoir. The First World War was truly “the Great War.” Its scale and costs were vast, its military impact revolutionary, and its results leading to the next major war. Nations fought in two groups: the Allied Powers and the Central Powers. After months of deadlock on the Western Front (the area where Germany, Britain, and France fought) a joint British and French offensive was planned to break through the German lines north of the River Somme in mid-1916 It went down as one of the most famous events in British military history. The clear winner that first day of the Battle of the Somme was the German Empire due to the

On July 1, 1916, thousands of British soldiers began an attack against the German trench line, which was supposed to have been destroyed by an earlier artillery strike. It wasn't. The British began taking heavy casualties and, over the next 12 hours, 72,470 Tommies (British soldiers) were killed and many more wounded. Otto Lais, a German machine gunner, claims, “The British keep charging forward. Despite the fact that hundreds are already lying dead in the shell holes in our front, fresh waves keep emerging from the assault trenches…18,000 rounds!” At the end of the day, the Germans had lost only 8,000 lives compared to the 57,720 British deaths. The British lost tons of artillery shells during the opening bombardment, where they fired 1.6 million shells, which had little effect. The grave amount of lives lost, from the statistics and explained by Otto Lais, wouldn’t have happened if British commanders had known of the damage their artillery had

The Germans had a complex defense system of barbed wire, which they had reinforced before battle: the wire motivated the British into creating the tank later in the battle. However, the tank was not yet invented. Instead there were walls of barbed wire in the way of thousands. British machine gunner, George Coppard, explains what he saw on the day after the first day, “Quite as many died on the enemy wire as on the ground, like fish caught in the net.” Without the German defences fully damaged , soldiers became entangled in the wire and were shot in their struggle. In Fact, the British artillery strike only made the situation worse; it didn’t destroy the wire, and instead mangled it even more. The sheer mass of the barbed wire was shown later in Mr. Coppard’s account saying, “Had they studied the black density of it through their powerful