1916

Hyde Soldiers 1916-2016 talk by General Sir Tony Walker KCB

One hundred years ago there was no such thing as a top-twenty chart but in 1916, ‘Somewhere a Voice is calling’ was the best-selling piece of sheet music in that year. It is typical of the sentimental ballads which so appealed to those who were separated from their loved ones by the war.  They gave a little, temporary colour to a picture which had become increasingly dark and in 1916 was to become darker still.    

When the clocks of Winchester chimed to mark the start of the year 1916, there were already 16 names ready for inscription on the Hyde war memorial.  By the time they rang out at the end of the year that number had grown to 34.  The casualty list was growing in the air, on land - and on the sea. 

JUTLAND

We call this event Hyde Soldiers.  But in 1916 three of those whose names are on the memorial were in fact sailors.  For this is the centenary of the Battle of Jutland, the biggest battle fought by the Royal Navy during the war. 

In 1916 the British Grand Fleet had effectively two components. The  Dreadnought battleships, commanded by Admiral Jellicoe, were located in Scapa Flow in the Orkneys.  The battle-cruiser squadron, under the command of the rather more dashing Admiral Beatty, was further south at Rosyth on the east coast of Scotland.  

The German navy conceived a plan to draw Beatty and his lighter ships out of port on 31 May and lure him on to the guns of their fleet.  And at first the German plan succeeded.  Beatty sailed and was engaged.  HMS Indefatigable was sunk with the loss of 1000 men and two survivors.  HMS Invincible went down with another 1000 men, including two from Hyde.  When half an hour later HMS Queen Mary blew up with 1200 crew lost and just 18 survivors, Beatty lowered his binoculars and made the laconic (and possibly apocryphal) comment “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today”.

Argument continues as to what that “something” might have been.  Some blame a design fault.  Others suggest that our gun-crews took short-cuts to increase their rate of fire and that fire doors to the ammunition magazines were deliberately left open and vulnerable.

What the Germans did not know (and here we have a fascinating anticipation of Bletchley Park and the Enigma code-breaking success in the 2nd World War) was that we had an outstanding intercept service in Room 40 of the Admiralty and we were able to read their high-level ciphered signals. So knowing the German plan, Jellicoe and the rest of the Grand Fleet also left port for the battle area off Denmark.

It was at about 1800 hours on the 31st the German fleet became aware that the British Dreadnoughts were bearing down on them, already at a range of only about 15 miles.  Remember we are talking of the days before radar or extensive aerial cover.  The Mark 1 naval eyeball, assisted by the Mark 1 issue telescope, was the technique of choice – indeed, often the only choice.

After a day of manoeuvring and shelling, Jellicoe narrowly missed cutting off the German High Seas Fleet from its home port of Wilhemshaven.  But reach it they did, although never to re-emerge as an effective fighting force.  On that basis the British claimed victory at Jutland, although our losses – in men and ships -  were about twice as heavy than those of our enemy.  For that reason, the Germans asserted that they had won and the Kaiser told his admirals “You have broken the spell of Trafalgar.”

The fact remains that Britain retained control of the high seas and the blockade of Germany, including food, remained in place, leading to increasing deprivation for their civilian population.

But there was another, unintended consequence which can be ascribed to the Battle of Jutland.  As a result of the mauling taken by their surface ships and in an attempt to break the blockade, the German navy stepped up its use of U-boats against neutral merchant shipping.  This included American merchantmen, one factor which eventually encouraged the United States to enter the war on the allied side.  NOT what the Germans had planned!

IRELAND

There were two significant military events in 1916 which had profound effects for the United Kingdom and which we need to remember even if they did not directly involve soldiers from Hyde. On 23 April this church would have been full for the Easter Sunday services.  The next day, 24 April, Easter Monday, parties of armed Irish republican insurgents seized a series of important locations in Dublin and declared the establishment of an independent Irish republic, free of British rule.  Home Rule for Ireland!

The Easter Uprising – as it was named -  lasted six days. To put it down, the British used soldiers and armed police, artillery and even a gunboat off-shore.  They also executed its ringleaders.  This is not the time for a detailed examination of the politics and tactics of the Uprising, except to say two things. The British Government remained concerned about the situation in Ireland throughout the war: it was a nagging, background distraction. And some of us know from personal experience that the aftermath of the Uprising was still causing troubles 60 years later.

But secondly, Irish soldiers from both sides of what became the border fought bravely and contributed substantially to our success in Europe. There was what one might call an Irish situation in which Germany was persuaded to support the Uprising, if not with men then certainly with the supply of arms, while at the same time Irishmen were engaged doing their gallant best fighting for the Allies on the Western Front.

VERDUN

The longest and possibly the bloodiest battle of World War 1 took place in 1916 between the French and the Germans.  The British did not take part although the indirect aim was to involve them. This was the battle of Verdun.

The Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, believed that the war could only be won on the Western Front and that France had to be defeated first, after which the British could be overwhelmed or, more likely, would sue for peace.  He therefore drew up a plan which, in his words, would “bleed the French Army white.”  He wanted lives, not territory.  He got them.

He chose to attack at Verdun, a town on the river Meuse, some 150 miles east of Paris, in Lorraine.  It had a number of attractions for him. First, the French held a salient – that is, a projection – into the German lines, which meant he could attack them on several sides at once. Secondly, and more subtly, Verdun was a defended town guarded by several French forts.  It had been over-run by the Prussians in 1792 and was the last fortress to surrender 100 years later in the Franco-Prussian war.  So the French had considerable emotional baggage involved and Falkenhayn calculated that national pride would draw them in to his mincing machine.

The battle opened on 21 February 1916 with a German artillery bombardment which lasted nine hours, using 850 guns on an eight-mile front and is calculated to have fired 2 million shells, including gas. This was followed by an infantry advance into the French defences which had been pulverised by the shell-fire. 

A French corporal at the battle said “Of every five of our men, two have been buried alive, two are wounded and one is waiting.”

 But the French were determined that Verdun would not fall and the battle ebbed and flowed for months – until December.  When I say ebbed and flowed, for example the little village of Fleury changed hands 16 times in June to August.

French resupply was restricted by the fact that only one rather indifferent road led from their lines into Verdun.  But keep it open they did and it has passed into French history as La Voie Sacree – the Sacred Way.  

And it is not coincidental that at the end of the Great War, the French Unknown Soldier was chosen from among the 150,000 of his fellow-countrymen who died in the battle.  Falkenhayn had got his butcher’s bill.  

THE SOMME

While the French were fighting desperately at Verdun, the British were planning their own major assault in a pleasant little river valley in Picardy.

A pleasant little river valley whose very name now sounds to us like a funeral bell tolling for the industrial-scale slaughter which took place in its fields between July and November 1916 – 310,000 men dead, Allied and German.  The Somme.  The Somme.

The first British assault took place on 1 July, following a seven-day artillery barrage.  The theory was that the German defences would have been so ground down by the shelling that the British infantry would be among them before they had time to recover.  So confident were we in our plan that battalions were ordered to march – not run – towards the German lines.

Unfortunately, the theory was flawed.  The artillery bombardment, in which we now believe that one in three shells failed to explode, did not incapacitate the Germans who had deep, well prepared trenches in the chalky soil of the valley – 30 feet down in some places.  They were able to surface before the attacking infantry reached them, man their machine-guns and mow down the approaching troops.  19,240 British soldiers died on that July day.

19,240 dead.  This was the bloodiest day in our military history. Made worse, perhaps, for those at home because this was the first major battle for Kitchener’s New Army – those volunteers who had enlisted in the heady, early days of the war and who formed the Pals Battalions from single villages or trades or businesses.  So their casualties were similarly grouped together.  

This grim scene was to be repeated over and over again in the next 141 days.  Dire losses for little or no gain.  Among the losses were 7 men from Hyde, some of whom have no known grave but whose names are recorded on the Thiepval Memorial.

Men continued to fall in the doleful “Somme scenario” which has already been played and replayed in the media during this centenary year.  You will be well familiar with it and I do not propose to rehearse it again this evening.  Let me, instead, offer two shafts of sunlight from the gloom of the Somme.

The first shone on 15 September when in a battle for the village of Flers a new British weapon appeared.  His Majesty’s Landships – or to give them their nickname which happily stuck – tanks.  The first tracked vehicles were slow, cumbersome, unreliable and dreadful to work in. You can see them down the road in the Tank Museum at Bovington.   But they started to tip the balance away from the defence and the machine gun.  And they had the ability to cross barbed wire.  To quote from the Times newspaper’s contemporary account of the battle “The troops regard them as something between a mascot, a Leviathan and a fairy godmother.”  We will have to wait another year to see the deployment of tanks en masse in 1917, but here at last was a technological change which was to affect the face of land warfare to this day.  

The second was not so much a sunbeam as a lightening of the sky.  The Somme was followed by changes of command in both London and Berlin.  British battalions – increasingly made up of conscripts – were reorganised and they had learned on the Somme how to fight, with a combination of all arms and techniques such as the creeping barrage, where the infantry followed close on the heels of artillery fire as it moved yard by yard towards the enemy’s trenches.  And British morale did not crack.  None of this mitigates the slaughter, but it did in time lead on to victory. 

HOME FRONT

1916 was the year in which events on the battlefield began truly to impact life at home.  Increasingly, there was government control of civilian life.  Movement, war production, direction of labour and even the content of newspapers, all became regulated to a greater or lesser extent. But the most significant event was the introduction, in February, of conscription.

After the early rush of volunteers in 1914, the flow of men volunteering for the Armed Forces had dried to a trickle. So for the first time in our history, nation-wide compulsory service was introduced.  It started with fairly narrow boundaries: only single men and only up to the age of 40.  As the war went on those restrictions were gradually extended and by the end of the war a total of about 2¼ million men had been called up: single, married and in the end up to the age of 56.  Incidentally, although the initial exclusion of married men was a recognition of their family responsibilities, it was also welcomed by the Treasury, fearful of the amount of widows’ pensions for which it might become liable.  

One consequence of conscription was an expansion of the roles of women in society.  Many were already working as nurses or in the ammunition factories where they were nick-named “canaries” because the chemicals tended to turn their skin yellow.  But absence of men meant much wider scope for women.  1916 was the first year in which female typists were employed in Scotland Yard, although when the Commissioner of Police was asked if there would soon be women police officers on the beat, he replied “Never!  Not if the war should last fifty years!”  One year later, in 1917,  he was directed by the Home Secretary to start the recruitment of women as police constables.

Most of us are familiar with the war poets – Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Rudyard Kipling and so on.  A less familiar name may be Jessie Pope.  But she was described in her time as Britain’s greatest humourist.   And she wrote this poem which she called “War Girls” and which I think perfectly sums up the women's war role, or, rather, the variety of those roles:

But there was of course a far, far sadder role for the many, many women who as wives, sweethearts, sisters, mothers, grieved for men who would not return.  I know of no better memorial for them than the poem by Samantha Kelly.  It’s called “Waiting” and tells of a woman, towards the end of her life, looking back on her years of loss.

Let me suggest one further anniversary from 1916 in which we can all share.  In March of that year, Sir Hubert Parry, then Director of the Royal College of Music, was invited to provide a setting for William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”.   The commission was for an organisation called ‘Fight for Right’ which was dedicated to emphasising the spiritual dimension of the war and glorifying sacrifice. 

Parry did as he was asked, but soon fell out of sympathy with the jingoism of Fight for Right. So he passed the copyright of his work to the Suffragette movement and it became their anthem.  Then in 1928, when the Suffragettes were effectively wound up, the rights passed to the Women's Institute who use it to this day.

You will find the words of “Jerusalem” on your programme.  I invite you to stand and sing it tonight in memory of the men and women of Hyde who in 1916 gave so much in order that we can continue to live peacefully here in England’s green and pleasant land.