Happy Super Bowl Sunday to all forum members! In my last post, IR 169 received its first blooding of the war in the Battle of Mulhouse, 9 August 1914. For the next series of blogs, we are going time warp a bit and jump forward to the 1916 Battle of the Somme.
From mid-October 1914 through mid-March 1915, IR 169 fought in the war’s incipient trench combat in Flanders, alongside the infamous La Bassee Canal. It was a miserable and bloody ordeal, with the regiment suffering approximately 2,300 casualties. My grandfather, Albert Rieth, was on that tally, where in mid-January 1915, he suffered his fourth and final wound of the war, leading to his medical discharge later that year.
In mid-March 1915, IR 169 was reassigned to the 52nd Division and relocated 30 miles south to what then was considered a quiet sector – the Somme. The assembly point for IR 169 was in the large town of Bapaume, 12 miles west of what would soon be the regiment’s front line posting at Gommecourt. The regiment remained in Gommecourt through May 1916, when it took up a position in the Serre sector. The British, on the opposing side of the trenches, were preparing for their mighty, 1 July offensive.
When IR 169 took control of Serre, they inherited, and then improved, a strongly fortified village that was surrounded by a four-deep trench network. The thick barbed wire fields around Serre were arrayed in a manner to create false entrances that channeled attacking troops into machine gun covered killing fields. The village itself served as yet another defensive line. Most of the structures of the town were on the eastern side of the road, making them well-suited to serve as individual strong points. Some of the dugouts were 30 feet deep and with cellars used as barracks. Over time, as the buildings were reduced to rubble and the earthworks grew in height, the actual structures were no longer visible above the ground.
It is at this point where we are introduced to the voice of Otto Lais, whose three books of his service with IR 169 provides a detailed account of IR 169 from 1916 to the war’s end. Otto Lais, aged 19, joined IR 169 ranks in the spring of 1916 and was assigned, in the rank sergeant, as a machine gun squad leader in the regiment’s 2nd MG Company. Lais grew up in the small Baden village of Wilferdingen, near Karlsruhe, where he displayed early talents in the fields of music, art and horsemanship. Prior to his assignment with IR 169, Lais served in an engineering battalion that saw duty in the Aisne region of France in 1915.
It is important here to recognize the work of my friend Andrew Jackson, whose research of Lais’ account of the 1 July 1916 battle is referenced in virtually every modern book on the Battle of the Somme. Andrew is a true authority on the 11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment, the Accrington Pals, and his book, The Accrington Pals; the Full Story, provides an excellent account a British regiment that attacked Serre on 1 July. Andrew was kind enough to give me two-day, personal tour of the Somme battlefields in June 2019. I am indebted to Andrew for his assistance in my research. Forum member Ralph Whitehead’s writings in his superb The Other Side of the Wire series, was another invaluable resource in my research of this phase of IR 169’s history.
Lais began his account of IR 169’s history in the Somme with this rendering of the defenses at Serre:
“There is an old Latin proverb: “Ora et labora!” In German it means “Bete und arbeite” [pray and work]. ‘Curse and work’ was our trench-motto in the positions in front of Bapaume in the Artois! This motto was a reference to the endless digging, to the drawing of wire entanglements, and to the never-ending construction of dugouts. One swore, one grumbled, one groaned at the nightly hauling of the rolls of barbed wire, the barricades, the wooden frames and all the other ‘treasured’ things in the life of an infantryman.
The second, the third, the ninth trench gets deeper and deeper dugouts. Thirty, forty and fifty steps go deep down. Hewed tree-trunks, beams and T-bars, sacks of angle irons and scaffolding clamps are hauled from the supply depots. The entrances to the shelters, the dugout recesses are strengthened and reinforced. Even some of the approach trenches, the L3, the L5 and the notorious and feared L6 get dugouts and depots are strengthen in rear areas. Our divisional commander, our beloved ‘Little Excellency’ (he is of small stature) often made daily inspections, coming in all weathers and at worse’ times! Usually unaccompanied, wearing a shabby windcheater, he went along the trenches, climbed down into the dugouts, clambered over the spoil, squeezed at night through the lanes of barbed wire, was here, was there, was everywhere. He had a particular liking for his machine gunners and it always gave us special pleasure when we were allowed to show and demonstrate our spick-and-span weapon to him. Generalleutnant [Major-General] von Borries never made a big deal of himself or of the performance of his division, just as his favorite Regiment 169 never made a fuss of itself and its successes.
So it was that on the gentle hill of Serre, to left and to right of the Bapaume – Puisieux – Serre – Mailly – Albert road, an ingeniously organized infantry fortress came into being.
Our grumbling falls silent, as the enemy calmly finds its range, as we realize that ‘it starts’ soon.”
The massive British artillery barrage was launched at 7:00 am on 24 June 1916. The crash of artillery could be heard all the way to England. The British fired 1,500,000 artillery rounds in the seven-day bombardment period of the battle. IR 169’s Regimental History described the unrelenting artillery attack:
“On 24 June a hurricane-like barrage began with one blow. Massed artillery batteries and mortars, which had previously ranged in individually, began a devastating coordinated attack. In the course of the war we had experienced a number of artillery attacks and had become generally accustomed to them. But what now took place was unknown, terrifying, and frightful. This raging fire simply did not stop. Sometimes increasing, sometimes letting up, but continuously by day and night hundreds and thousands of rounds rained down on our trenches. By day and by night maddening explosions roared, shrapnel screamed and the earth trembled.
Here, the expression Trommelfeuer (drum fire) was introduced for the first time. This continuous fire soon rendered our defensive positions into rubble. No speck of earth was left untouched. Every square meter of earth was rooted up; every centimeter lay in the trajectory of millions of shell fragments and pieces of shrapnel. The trenches were torn apart. Beams, planks, and barriers blocked the ones that still existed. Soon there was no more communication with one of the positions. Although circumstances allowed for some return fire, they were simply not protected against direct hits from this caliber of weapon.”
Otto Lais provided this account of the bombardment:
“On 24th June, hell broke in upon us. There was an unimaginable fury of an uninterrupted week-long drumfire by all calibers into the infantry trenches and artillery emplacements.
Over more than a 50 km breadth, the gentle hills of the Somme and of the Ancre River sink behind the brown curtain of millions of shell-bursts. Those of us whose dugouts had not been crushed, crouched below on the alert, took breaths, whether of smoke, dust or shell-bursts, gasping and with difficulty, believed by the third day that the unrelenting booming, rolling, cracking and bursting, on top of the shaking and trembling of the earth, would drive us mad. On the sixth and seventh days the fury seemed to increase, the dugout entrances were mostly blocked, leaving only a small crawl space to exit. The nerves of the occupiers were dulled, a suppressed rage lay in the tortured minds and souls of the defenders, one thought dominating all: when will they finally come?“
Many of the Germans later recalled that they were ready, and even eager, for the ground assault to begin. An extract of a war diary (borrowed from Ralph Whitehead’s The Other Side of the Wire, Volume 2), provides this account from a member of IR 169’s 6th Company:
“If the English thought they could wear us out after the unprecedented fire of the past few days they were badly mistaken… The most ardent wish that we all cherished was that they would finally come. Everyone was aware of their duty. The look-outs were standing when the shrapnel flew like hailstones. The actions of our company commander, Hauptmann Haufer, acted as a shining example to us all. Almost constantly, day and night, he was in the trench and looked out. Who could have hidden their cowardice? Now everyone knows that the hour of retaliation will soon come. Cartridges and hand grenade reserves are made ready; everything is ready.”
The next series of blogs will cover IR 169’s defense of Serre through the remainder of 1916. Citations for references can be found in the book Imperial Germany’s Iron Regiment of the First World War I (www.ironregiment169.com).
