Triumph and tragedy

The 90th anniversary of the start of the battle of the Somme falls on 1 July. Several books mark it; it made a scar on the nation’s memory that is still severe, and it is still often called the day when the army suffered its worst casualties. Strictly, this is not true, for General Perceval in Singapore surrendered 80,000 men to a smaller force of Japanese on 15 February 1942. But on 1 July 1916 the army did suffer its worst total of dead on a single day: 19,240, and nearly 40,000 more were wounded or went missing. It was the first major action in which Kitchener’s new armies fought; whole battalions of ‘Pals’ from northern industrial towns were almost wiped out.

There is an unhappy mismatch between the view military historians nowadays take of the battle and the picture of it which is held in popular memory and regularly perpetuated in the news media.