Seven-thirty in the morning. The whistles blow along a 15-mile front. The men of the British Fourth Army climb out of their trenches and walk — because officers have been told the German defences are destroyed and there is no need to run — toward the German line. The artillery bombardment had begun seven days earlier. One and a half million shells. The planners believed no one could survive it. They were wrong.

The Theory and Its Failure

The Battle of the Somme was designed to relieve pressure on the French at Verdun. The preliminary bombardment was supposed to destroy the German wire, collapse the deep dugouts, and kill the defenders. The German defensive system had been two years in construction. Their dugouts were reinforced concrete chambers 25 to 40 feet below the surface — deep enough to survive anything available in 1916. When the British bombardment began, German troops went underground and waited.

An estimated 30 percent of shells were duds — defective ammunition from rushed wartime production. The wire in front of German lines was cut in some sectors and left intact in others.

Zero Hour

At 7:28 AM on July 1, 1916, enormous mines detonated beneath German positions. Two minutes later, the British barrage lifted. German troops emerged from their shelters, assembled their machine guns, and looked out across no man's land. The British infantry were advancing in waves, in some sectors ordered to walk at a steady pace, carrying equipment weighing between 60 and 70 pounds.

The German machine gunners opened fire.

The Numbers

By nightfall on July 1, 1916, the British Army had suffered 57,470 casualties — dead, wounded, and missing. Of these, approximately 19,240 were killed. The Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel suffered 90 percent casualties — 710 of 790 men — in under half an hour. The machine gun positions in Y Ravine, which British commanders had assured them would be destroyed by the artillery, were intact and manned.

The Campaign Continues and the Memory

Despite the losses on July 1, the battle continued for 141 days until November 18, 1916. By its conclusion, British Empire forces had suffered approximately 419,654 casualties; French forces approximately 204,253; German forces an estimated 465,000 to 600,000.

The scale of the losses — entire Pals battalions recruited from the same towns, men who enlisted together and died together — meant that few communities in Britain were left untouched. The debate about the conduct of the Somme has continued for more than a century. What is not debated are the numbers.