Springboks On the Somme--South Africa in the Great War 1914--1918 by Bill Nasson

Author:Bill Nasson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143027164
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2010-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Somme: Delville Wood and Longueval

Division command was still well short of its objective of clearing the village by dawn and dampening things down in readiness for a dawn attack on Delville Wood by the South African Brigade on 15 July. But the assault was to go ahead in the early hours of the morning.

Before dawn, minus those of its troops still battling in Longueval and a couple of companies engaged elsewhere on the Somme, the Brigade moved forward from Montauban to take up trench positions on the southwestern edge of the wood. Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel William Tanner, just over 3,000 men pressed into Delville Wood as Germans ahead of them staged a tactical withdrawal to duck any artillery bombardment. Encountering relatively light resistance, Tanner’s Springboks took the eastern front within a few hours, loping forward from the east as far as the Strand, one of a number of grassy corridors or ‘streets’ that bisected Delville Wood. Named after prominent London or Edinburgh streets such as Regent, Princes and Bond, these deep ‘rides’ were a characteristic feature of the Somme woods, cut as clearances for maintenance, horse riding or hunting.

Spread thin across a wide front, the attackers dug in to hold captured ground but found this a tall order given knotty undergrowth, impacted root systems, and a cascading tangle of trees and branches brought down by artillery fire. All the while, repeated German counter-attacks from the northeast and east were also having to be beaten off. Still, by the afternoon of the first day, Tanner’s advancing force appeared to have done sufficient killing and capturing of their enemy, and clearing of stretches of woodland, for Lukin to be advised that virtually all of Delville Wood had been taken. The nagging exception was its fortified northwest corner, bristling with German machine-gun nests and able to hold out easily against South African rifle fire. Breaking that would take a renewed frontal onslaught.

However, as one authoritative Somme battlefield guide has it, far from being on the verge of capturing the wood, ‘in a real sense, the Brigade was in a trap’.7 For the odds against the attacking South Africans were massive. At around 7,000 men, German troop strength was more than double that of a Union contingent which mustered about 3,150 on entry to Delville Wood. Furthermore, the Germans still held the initiative by being extremely well sited for a telling counter-attack. With batteries in the north, east and southeast able to blanket the wood with great accuracy, it was the most easily observable artillery target on the German line at this point. German trenches ringed much of the perimeter of the wood, and command of its approaches was strengthened by continued possession of Longueval with its tunnel systems through which forces could be fed into the Delville position. With neighbouring Guillemont also still in the Germans’ grasp, as well as all the higher ground around and southeast of High Wood along with the valleys between the wood and Flers and Ginchy, Lukin’s Brigade would be collecting many more of its dead before Delville Wood was over.

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