"Zero Hour Z Day 1st July 1916": a review

We all love a good clichē, don't we, and if your interest lies in the First World War, then you have rich pickings. While there has been a lot of revisionist history published since the 1960s that attempts to debunk many of these they still persist, and Rowan Atkinson's representation of the classic WW1 British clichē is one of the best. 

I have just finished reading the first volume of what is perhaps the most thorough debunking of some of the myth surrounding world war 1 that I have seen: 'Zero Hour Z Day 1st July 1916', by Jonathan Porter. I was gifted the first two volumes which, upon arrival, came with a courier sticker that declared their net weight at 2.6kg, so these are weighty tomes in both the intellectual and the physical senses.

This first volume analyses the operations of XIII Corps operating between Maricourt and Mametz, on the British right adjoining the French army. XIII Corps has the distinction of being the only Corps to have achieved all of its objectives for 1st July in a battle that has been analysed to the nth degree in the nearly 110 years since. Porter begins with an overview of the situation with Fourth Army and the formulation of its offensive plan. He includes in this preliminary stage an analysis of the geology of the area of operations, an issue that had a significant impact on the Corps' success. He gives a detailed breakdown of the opposing forces, the preparations, the preliminary bombardment (if you want to know how many shrapnel vs HE shells a battery fired, this is your place to go), and a detailed description of that first day of the battle for each battalion, brigade, and division in the corps.

He makes extensive reference to unit war diaries in a way I have not seen done before, even though this primary source material has been available for most of the time that has passed since. These references provide an unprecedented level of detail, and it is here that Porter debunks much of the myth. The narrative is also provided with plenty of colour with Porter's use of fragments from personal diaries and letters, and of course the obligatory official histories.

Porter's almost hour by hour narrative provides an extraordinary level of detail. Such is the detail that even before I had reached his final chapter offering his analysis and interpretation, I had arrived at several conclusions of my own about how the Corps achieved this level of success. Included in my thinking were issues of thorough preparation and rehearsal, innovative use of what in modern parlance we call minor tactics (tactics at section, platoon, and company level),enabled by a high level of trust in the initiative of junior leaders especially, and the emphasis on innovative use of lewis gun and stokes mortar teams. I had not realised how flexibly the 3" stokes mortar batteries had been employed once the battle began.

In discussing these minor tactics for example, in his chapter on 53rd Brigade Porter says:

It would be suicide to advance in extended line so a change of tactic was established. Sections and half sections would advance in short rushes using whatever cover was available - shell craters or hollows. While one section moved, another would provide covering fire. (P 407)

In modern parlance we'd call this 'bounding'.

The issue of the subsurface geology of the battlefield I found fascinating. In the XIIIth Corps area south of Mametz , the soil was "a deep layer of top soil and/or clay and then chalk" whereas north of their area there was a shallow layer of topsoil with underlying hard chalk. The chalk had the effect of protecting deep bunkers, whereas the topsoil and clay does not. Hence many of the deep bunkers dug to protect troops of the German garrison were collapsed or rendered unusable by the preliminary bombardment. An additional effect of this was that the defenders withdrew most of their troops to the third and fourth trench lines, leaving sentries, and some MMGs, to give early warning and hold up any attack until it reached their main defensive line. Combined with the effective wire cutting bombardments, this meant that many units gained quick access to the German first lines. From there, where further attack across the open was halted by small arms and MG fire from the main bodies of troops, bombing parties (specialists armed primarily with mills grenades) proceeded to fight down communication trenches, clearing as they went, in order to then attack the main defences.

In his final analysis Porter ascribes XIII Corps' success to five key factors:

1. Command and leadership, from the Corp and divisional commanders, right down to platoon and section leaders. Each divisional commander had created a leadership culture that emphasised individual initiative, and repeated and thorough rehearsal meant that every man knew what was expected of him, what he had to do and where he needed to be, so that when successive layers of leadership became casualties, those below were capable of stepping in to fill the void.
2. Training and rehearsals. Porter shows that XIII Corps units spent on average several more days in rehearsals than units elsewhere in Fourth Army
3. Special weapons and mining, from the use of mines of up to 5000lbs of explosive to livens flame projectors, gas, and 4" stokes mortars laying planned smoke screens (something I'd not previous been aware of)
4. Innovative tactics which included specialist teams as described previously, but also in deployment in the attack which mean that reserves were right where they needed to be when needed
5. Artillery support, which included several batteries of French 220 mm mortars. An essential part of the artillery fire plan had included what proved to be a very effective programme of wire cutting from the many batteries of 18pdrs, and the 2" stokes mortars, and effective counter battery work which reduced the opposing German artillery to near (but not quite) impotence 

Porter uses a combination of text, contemporary maps and aerial photographs, and perhaps most helpfully modern day oblique colour photographs to describe and explain the actions of the day down to individual platoons and sections. This combination makes it very easy to understand how action across the battlefield unfolded during the day.

An example of a modern oblique photographic guide to each attack

Despite XIII Corps' success, there was still an awful toll, 6100 officers and ORs were killed or wounded on the day. John Steinbeck said "All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal", and whether 1 man or 100 men, the cost is too much. However when compared with other action in the war, XIII Corps came out of the day comparatively lightly. Porter gives many of the men are given faces, and where known he acknowledges the places of their eventual burial, although the final resting places of too many men remain unknown, to be commemorated only on the enormous Thiepval memorial.

Source: https://roathlocalhistorysociety.org/thiepval-memorial/

The books are printed on high quality stock which in itself also contributes to their physical weight. My only criticism is that the text would have benefited from a good editor. There are typographical errors and at times awkward sentence construction that a good editor would have picked up (although from my own publication experiences authoring six books I am only too well aware that even professional editors miss things). That should not however put you off purchasing a copy. If you have any interest in the 'real oil' of what went down on that first day of the Somme, this is a damned fine investment. Thank you Mr Porter for an invaluable contribution to the scholarship of the first world war. Now to read the second volume, and apparently there are more to come.

You can buy your copies here.