Battle of the Somme: 110th Anniversary

Debate between Julian Lewis and Neil Shastri-Hurst

Thursday 12th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Over a century after the appalling losses on the western front, historians still debate whether any alternatives existed. Some blame political intrigue and poor generalship; others emphasise technology, with the battlefield dominated by interlocking fields of fire, which ensured that slowly advancing troops would be mown down by machine guns before making any worthwhile inroads into the enemy’s trenches. Minor advances that were occasionally achieved were usually reversed by counter-attacks or simply absorbed into a new, static confrontation a short distance from the original one.

We heard echoes of some of those controversies, with the pendulum ascribing guilt and responsibility swinging first one way, then another, in the very perceptive speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper). I was first influenced by a work of fiction—a rather more in-depth work of fiction than the immensely entertaining television series to which he alluded. It was a book by a Sheffield journalist and writer called John Harris, entitled “Covenant with Death” and published in 1961.

In 1961, the people who had fought on the Somme were still living, and John Harris interviewed many of them. He says in the introduction to his great novel that although the characters are fictitious, the real people will recognise many of the incidents that he describes. The story is based on the Sheffield City Battalion. On 1 July 1916, the battalion sent 700 men over the top. The majority of them—nearly 500 men—became casualties, half of whom were killed, and only four of their officers survived the battle.

[Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is giving an incredibly powerful speech. He is recognising quite properly those who were in teeth arms and running towards the ballistics and bullets coming at them, but will he also recognise the military medics? They were so important and often ran into danger, and they included Captain Noel Chavasse, who won not only the Military Cross and bar but the Victoria Cross in the Somme.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Yes, indeed. I believe I am right in thinking that he won the VC twice overall—one of three people to do so—and I am delighted that my hon. and gallant Friend has put that on the record.

In more recent years, there has been a swing of the pendulum that has tried to justify the scale of loss on the Somme by saying that it was necessary for lessons to be learned for the ultimately successful campaigns of 1918. Some of the people who have put forward that proposition undoubtedly know more about the history of the first world war and its battles than I do, but I simply do not buy that. You should not have to waste the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers to learn lessons, some of which ought to have been obvious from the beginning.

One of those lessons was the need for surprise. Before 1 July 1916, there was a seven-day bombardment by British artillery on the Somme. Everybody knew what was going to happen and where it was going to happen. In 1918, at the start of the successful 100 days offensive—the phenomenal, brilliantly fought campaign that led to Germany suing for armistice in November 1918—everybody had secrecy impressed on them. Every officer and man had a passbook in which it was deemed essential that they must not say anything about what preparations were being made.

Similarly, when the Germans mounted their spring offensive in March 1918—which, for a while, looked as if it could have put Britain out of the war—one of the reasons it succeeded was that they too had an element of surprise. They had three alternative plans and decided on one of them, the Operation Michael attack, very much at the last minute before it was launched. You did not have to be a strategic genius to know that you needed an element of surprise in order to achieve tactical success. Similarly, the lessons of the Somme were not learned very quickly, because the same thing happened again in April 1918 with the second battle of Arras and, later in the year, with the third battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele.

Let me conclude by quoting someone who was not an amateur historian: a man called Sholto Douglas, who later became Marshal of the Royal Air Force. He stated that, as he looked down from his aircraft at the field of Passchendaele in 1917, his mind was full of the sort of questions that many people have asked about the futility of the tactics. He said then, and I agree with him now, that those questions are very, very difficult to answer.