I have just completed William Philpott's book Three Armies on the Somme. As a younger man I read quite deeply in military history, and then stopped, and am now delving back into this literature. I am sure that at least some of the push comes from the centennial of the war's outbreak in August of 1914, and my own dissertation was vaguely a Great War topic, so perhaps I am not returning so much as re-awakening an interest.
It is a tome, so I won't bore you with a detailed review, but what I enjoyed most about the book was its direct argument. In the decades after the end of the war, the 1916 Battle of the Somme was held up by historians, especially British historians, as the finest example of the stupidity of the generals and the noble sacrifice of the commoners of Great Britain, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, India, and Canada. The 95,000 dead from the British Commonwealth, and the 420,000 casualties in total would be the rallying cry for isolationists, appeasement advocates, and scholars against the war and to expose the dull reality that modern mass society had led rather directly to mass death on a factory scale.
But Philpott advances a provocative argument; one that I find compelling. In short, the Battle of Somme was the first successful Allied campaign of the war, even though it failed utterly of its stated purpose. The battle did forge an effective mass modern army for Great Britain, essential for its contribution in the last two years of the war. The battle revealed that the principle Allied advantage was in material and manufacturing. The war would only be won with material, and that required the exact grind-it-out practices that the Somme so bloodily illustrated. What broke the back of the Central Powers was their inability to sustain the losses of men and material as well as the Allies could and the acceptance by the Allies that victory was only possible through an extended war of attrition.
