Somme Ends: One Million Casualties for Seven Miles

British commander Douglas Haig finally called off the Battle of the Somme after 141 days of fighting that had advanced the front line approximately seven miles at a cost of more than one million casualties on both sides. The battle, which had opened with the bloodiest single day in British military history, became the defining catastrophe of World War I and a permanent symbol of the futility of industrial warfare directed by commanders who seemed unable to learn from their own failures. The offensive began on July 1, 1916, after a week-long artillery bombardment that fired 1.75 million shells at the German positions. The barrage was supposed to destroy the deep German dugouts and cut the barbed wire. It did neither. When British infantry went over the top at 7:30 a.m., advancing in rigid lines at walking pace across no man's land, they met intact machine gun positions. The first day produced 57,470 British casualties, including 19,240 dead, most falling in the first hour. Haig continued the offensive for four and a half more months. The tactical approach evolved, with creeping barrages, night attacks, and small-unit infiltration replacing the massed charges of July. The British debut of tanks at Flers-Courcelette on September 15 demonstrated a potential breakthrough weapon, though the early Mark I tanks were too slow, too unreliable, and too few to be decisive. The Germans suffered nearly as heavily as the attackers. Falkenhayn's policy of immediate counterattack to recapture any lost ground meant German soldiers were fed into the same meat grinder. Total German casualties are estimated at 450,000 to 600,000. The battle consumed divisions on both sides at a rate that neither army could indefinitely sustain.