Battle of the Somme, by Terry Wright
Terry Wright, provided a presentation on the ‘Battle of the Somme’ in commemoration of the Battle’s 110th Anniversary. He was joined by Helen Slane who is the Anniversary’s Steering Committee’s Chairperson.
Terry, was born and raised in Plymouth, is now lives in Ayr, and very much involved with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the RNLI at Girvan Lifeboat. He is a veteran of the Royal Air Force where, as a radar engineer, Terry trained on airfield and air defence equipment, specialising in electronic warfare and electronic counter measures. Eventually joining the National Air Traffic Control Centre at Sumburgh Airport in the Shetland before moving to the Air Traffic Control Centre a Prestwick before retiring in 2014.
Terry is currently the Scottish Ambassador involved with the charity ‘Standing with Giants’, which is very much focussed with this year’s 110th Anniversary in commemoration of the ‘Battle of the Somme’ the subject of his talk.
Much has been written about the Battle of the Somme, however Terry’s logical, easily understandable battle field strategies explanations, miscalculations, short term territorial gains and awful carnage, brought home the waste of human lives, with all adversaries. At the start of 1916, most of the British Army was an inexperienced and patchily trained mass of volunteers. The Somme was a great test for Kitchener’s Army, created by Kitchener’s call for recruits at the start of the war. The British volunteers were often the fittest, most enthusiastic and best- educated citizens but were inexperienced and it has been claimed that their loss was of lesser military significance than the losses of the remaining peacetime-trained officers and men of the Imperial German Army British casualties on the first day were the worst in the history of the British Army, with 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of whom were killed. A war of attrition was a logical strategy for Britain against Germany, which was also at war with France and Russia.
Lieutenant Colonel on the Western Front Winston Churchill objected to the way the battle was being fought in August 1916, and Prime Minister at the time, David Lloyd George criticised attrition warfare frequently and condemned the battle in his post-war memoirs. In the 1930s a new orthodoxy of “mud, blood and futility” emerged and gained more emphasis in the 1960s when the 50th anniversaries of the Great War battles were commemorated.
Colin Vooght delivered a worthy vote of thanks.
