The Battle of the Somme took place over 141 days in 1916.

In the southern area of the battlefield, beyond the villages of Mometz and Montabas,

as the attack continued, the British army found itself in a horseshoe of woods,

a nightmare of tangled roots and smashed trees where attack after attack took

place. Having commemorated the 105th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme a few

weeks ago, I thought it would be good for us to continue to look at the SOM from the perspective

of 105 years

with some regular episodes of doing a bit of a round-up really

of what was happening during that month in 1916.

It's easy to think the SOM perhaps like the Normandy campaign of the Second World War

was defined by a single day.

The 1st of July 1916 for the Somme and the 6th of June, 1944 for D-Day and the Normandy Campaign of World War II. But a battle like the Somme was long and complex and lasted for 141 days from the 1st of July through to the 18th of November 1916.

And in this episode we'll look at what happened on the Somme following that bloody first day, that black day of the British Army, when 57,000 men became casualties in a single day, nearly 20,000 of them killed in action or died of wounds.

Essentially, on the SOM, what happened next?

Well, one of the first things that people often ask about, when did the high command really have any sense of those losses?

And that's a good question, because when you look at the units that went into battle that day the casualties particularly amongst officers were very very high indeed and the number of adjudants that were killed or wounded on the first day of the so on and these are the officer within a battalion within an infantry battalion whose job it is to write up the war diary and so when we look at some of the war diaries for that period

they are very scant in detail and the casualties are just estimated in some cases it just says

a rounded up number an an approximate number. And when

we look at that now through other sources, like soldiers died in the Great War, which has now

been digitised, and then we look at some of the higher commands war diary. So the next step up from

a battalion, the brigade headquarters diary or the divisional headquarters diary, who begin to

try and analyse what's happened

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