In his draft plan of the Somme attack, Rawlinson
envisaged a bold advance in which the Allies killed 'as many Germans
as possible with the least loss to ourselves'. When the campaign
was ended, the first-day objective of Bapaume still lay six miles
distant.
While German casualty rates were indeed high - roughly 450,000
men killed or wounded - Britain and France fared even worse, with
a combined total of 650,000 casualties. The unprecedented carnage
of the Battle of the Somme marked a turning point in public perceptions
of the war in Britain. In military terms, it was the first time
that the Allied strategy of pursuing a 'war of attrition' was seriously
brought into question. Nonetheless, it was not until 1918 that the
Allies adopted a more flexible and mobile method of attack on the
Western Front.
In the meantime, as the British prime minister
David
Lloyd George remarked after the Battle of Passchendaele
(July-November 1917), it was hard to avoid the impression that 'Haig
does not care how many men he loses. He just squanders the lives
of these boys.'
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