The Battle of the Somme Trivia Quiz

Answer: Picardy

Though Flanders is perhaps a more evocative name when recalling the trench warfare of the Great War, the river Somme flows through the heart of Picardy, between Flanders and Paris. The surprisingly compact battlefield is in the north of the region and consists of a gently rolling upland plain used mainly for agricultural purposes.

Answer: Albert-Bapaume

At the beginning of the battle, Albert was about a mile-and-a-half behind the British front line, and the Madonna-and-Child statue on the tower of the Notre Dame de Berbieres church in the town could be seen by the Germans. Bapaume, about 8 miles to the north-east, was a logistical and assembly centre for the Germans, and a key British target on the first day of the campaign in July.

When the battle finally ground to a halt in the mid-November mud, Bapaume was still firmly in German hands.

Answer: Verdun

Although the British under Commander-in-Chief General Douglas Haig had long visualised a major campaign in France for the summer of 1916, the relief of pressure on the desperate French armies defending Verdun 150 miles to the south-east became an increasingly urgent factor in the planning. By May 1916, the German intention to bleed dry the French armies in Lorraine was beginning to have a critical effect on both morale and numbers.

It was hoped that a campaign in Picardy could draw vital German forces away from Verdun.

Answer: July 1st

British and Empire losses on the first day of the Somme are usually put at 60,000, of which around 20,000 were killed. A large proportion of the casualties were sustained in the first hour of the assault, despite a prolonged artillery barrage on the German positions which in some places had lasted longer than a fortnight. The inexperienced British were still unfamiliar with German expertise in the construction of trenches and bunkers which were largely able to protect their front-line troops.

Although standard British practice was to begin assaults before dawn, on this occasion the French had requested a delay in order to be able to assess the damage done by their artillery, and to adjust their attack accordingly at the latest possible moment. As a result, the heavily laden troops began to go over the top at 7.30 a.m. in bright sunlight, easy targets for the German defenders who recognised the cessation of the artillery barrage as a signal for the beginning of an assault, and who were given vital minutes to get into their trench positions.

Answer: Newfoundland

The Newfoundlanders formed part of a secondary wave which was intended to consolidate ground won earlier in the morning of July 1st. Arriving at their front-line trenches, they found their progress hampered by the dead and injured of the first wave attack, which itself had barely been able to get out of the trench system into 'No Man's Land'. The inexperienced but potentially elite battalion struggled up a coverless and gently sloping incline towards the German positions, but was virtually wiped out by machine-gun fire from well-sited emplacements. Were it not for the practice of holding back a percentage of a regiment's strength in order to form a new unit around a veteran nucleus in case of catastrophe, the 1st Newfoundland would have ceased to exist. During the course of the war, it is estimated that the personnel of this battalion was effectively replaced six times. The Newfoundland Memorial at Beaumont-Hamel is surmounted by the statue of a caribou, howling in grief at the old German lines.

This German position at 'Y Ravine', Beaumont-Hamel, was finally stormed by men of the 51st (Highland) Division in mid-November.

Answer: bodily smothering a live bomb in his own trenches

A rugby-playing Ulsterman, William McFadzean's strapping physique made him an obvious candidate for the role of 'bomber' (grenadier), because of the strength required to carry heavy crates of grenades around the battlefield.

On July 1st 1916 at Thiepval Wood whilst McFadzean was distributing grenades in preparation for the coming attack, an accident upset one such crate, sending two live bombs into a trench crowded with men of the Royal Irish Rifles. Instantly recognising the danger to his comrades, McFadzean dived on to the bombs in order to smother the inevitable explosion. He was killed instantly, but his selfless action prevented any other casualties. His remains were lost shortly after in a German counter-barrage, and he is commemorated on both the Thiepval Monument to the missing and on a plaque in the grounds of the Ulster Tower Memorial not far from the spot he died.

Answer: French Foreign Legion

Harvard graduate Alan Seeger was living in the Latin Quarter of Paris when war broke out in 1914, and immediately joined the Foreign Legion. He was killed by machine-gun fire during an attack on the heavily defended village of Belloy-en-Santerre in the French sector of the Somme battlefield. One of Belloy's main squares is named after him.

In his most famous poem, 'Rendezvous', he had written, 'I have a rendezvous with death/On some scarred slope or battered hill ...'. His fateful words came true on the first day of the battle.

Answer: Mash Valley

To the men of the British 8th Division, Mash Valley, overlooked by the northern flank of the village of La Boisselle, represented around half a mile of No Man's Land which had to be crossed in broad daylight on July 1st 1916. The defenders did not open fire until their targets were within 100-200 yards of the German trenches, causing predictably heavy casualties.

Amazingly, around 60 or 70 men from an assortment of units temporarily gained a foothold in the German front line, rallied by the commanding officer of the 2nd Lincolnshire Batallion, Lt.-Col. Reginald Bastard, a man clearly worth following to hell and back for his name alone. The small group was unable to hold the position in the face of overwhelming numbers and had to fall back in difficult circumstances. Lt.-Col. Bastard, a veteran of the Boer War, was awarded a second D.S.O.(Distinguished Service Order) for his efforts in Mash Valley, and survived active service in both this World War and the next.

Answer: Lochnagar

Taking its name from the trench where the mine's access tunnel was started and said to be the largest crater ever made in anger by man, Lochnagar is the only surviving unfilled crater of its type on the Western Front. It was detonated using around 60,000 lbs of the explosive ammonal at 7.28 on the morning of the attack on July 1st, 1916. Although a series of dugouts was obliterated, the effectiveness of the mine in terms of casualties is unclear. It is possible that a message intercepted on a tapped British telephone line gave away the presence of the mine shortly before its detonation, giving the Germans time to evacuate a proportion of their troops. During the carnage which followed, dozens of men from the 10th Btn, the Lincolnshire Regiment (the 'Grimsby Pals') and from the Northumberland Fusiliers (the 'Tyneside Scottish') found some shelter in the newly-created 400-foot diameter crater.

The time and effort which it took to construct such mines, and the danger inherent in their creation, were brought vividly to the attention of the reading public in Sebastian Faulks' 1993 novel 'Birdsong'.

Answer: Schwaben (Swabia)

The Schwaben Redoubt was a massive warren dug into the Thiepval Ridge which was a keystone of the German lines on the Somme. It resisted all British assaults until late September, and even then northern parts of it remained in German hands. A heroic action by the 109th Brigade of the 36th (Ulster) Division on July 1st actually saw parts of the redoubt temporarily occupied, but poor progress to the north and south of the position meant that the Ulstermen were exposed to fire from three sides, and had to withdraw. The massive effort that day cost the division over 5,000 casualties, commemorated at the Ulster Tower Memorial, which overlooks the Schwaben Redoubt.

Unusually, many of the headstones in the nearby Mill Road Cemetery are laid flat on the floor, because of the fear of subsidence. The cemetery stands directly above tunnels and dugouts of the old German position.

Answer: Wales

The Welsh paid a heavy price for failing to occupy the wood on July 8th, 1916, when it appears to have been relatively lightly held by the Germans, who reinforced the position overnight. The divisional commander, General Ivor Phillips, was relieved of his command by Douglas Haig for the apparent oversight. Two brigades of the 38th (Welsh) Division were earmarked for an assault the next day. In the face of hellish conditions and stubborn German opposition, the wood had been cleared by the 12th. The division's casualties were such that the Welsh were not sent into action again for over a year.

Reduced to splinters during the fighting, Mametz Wood stands today grim, impenetrable and uninviting above the bright red 38th Division Welsh Dragon memorial which faces it defiantly, a shred of torn barbed wire in its outstretched claw. As many as 2,000 British soldiers, and at least as many Germans, are said to lie in unmarked graves in the wood which fell into private hands shortly after the war, and which was not as thoroughly 'swept' for bodies as many other places.

Answer: volunteers

Although leavened by the type of regular unit which had stood in the front line since the beginning of the war, the force used on the Somme was essentially volunteer recruits. It included the "Pals' Battalions" which were supposed to make up in morale what they may have lacked in training under the assumption that, as friends, they would live, fight and die for each other. This theory was tested almost literally to destruction by General Haig's attritional strategy, and memorials to battalions raised particularly in England's northern industrial towns and cities such as Sheffield, Accrington and Barnsley litter the battlefield. Sadly, the devastating effect of the destruction of such battalions on their tightly-knit source communities does not appear to have been taken into account.

Even before the Somme, word of the true nature of the war was getting back to Britain, and the stream of volunteers was running dry. For the first time in its history, Great Britain introduced conscription in January 1916.

Answer: Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon's journey from committed patriot to disillusioned objector must have been typical of many lower profile figures who experienced the Great War at first hand, and this progress is reflected in the development of his poetry. Although he had been awarded the Military Cross for his bravery, in 1917, he took a public stand against the horrors of the war. Rather than court-martial a bona fide and well-known war hero, the authorities sent him to the military hospital at Craiglockhart in Scotland with the implication that he had been psychologically damaged by his experiences. He was eventually sent back to the trenches, but a head wound saw him returned permanently to England.

During the war, Sassoon's path crossed that of other literary figures such as Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. A fictionalised account of this period of his life is the basis for Pat Barker's celebrated 1991 novel 'Regeneration'.

Answer: Pozieres

Because of its strategically important position high in the centre of the battlefield, the Germans were particularly unwilling to relinquish their hold on the area around the village of Pozieres, and had stubbornly resisted a series of British attacks in mid-July.

In a systematic but nevertheless costly night attack on July 23rd, the ever-reliable Australians took a large part of the village. However, the bulk of the casualties were sustained over the following days by the Australian 2nd Division, when less well-planned attacks were sent against German troops hanging on in vital positions just to the east of the village. By the time the Germans were squeezed out on August 5th, the Australian 2nd Division had lost nearly 7,000 men in less than a fortnight.

The Australian flag still flies over Pozieres in recognition of the sacrifice made there by the ANZACs.

Answer: He later won a second Victoria Cross

Attached to the 1/10th battalion of the King's Liverpool Regiment ('The Liverpool Scottish'), Cpt. Chavasse was to win a second Victoria Cross for similar actions a year later near Ypres. Sadly, the second award was a posthumous one since Chavasse died of wounds sustained whilst attending to the injured. Of the tens of thousands of headstones in cemeteries on the Western Front, his (at Brandhoek New Military Cemetery, Vlamertinge) is unique in having the double VC engravement. He is one of only three men to have been awarded a VC 'and bar'.

Chavasse was a renowned sportsman who had represented Great Britain in athletics at the 1908 London Olympics. His father was a Bishop of Liverpool, and Chavasse Park in central Liverpool is named for him. His twin brother Christopher was appointed Bishop of Rochester in 1940.

Answer: Delville Wood

Like 'Pozieres', 'Beaumont-Hamel' and 'Mametz', 'Delville Wood' is a name seared into the consciousness of a nation, in this case South Africa. Between 14th and 20th July 1916 in some of the most bitter and concentrated fighting of the entire war, the 1st South African Brigade, attached to the 9th (Scottish) Division, took and held most of this exposed wood in the face of constant German bombardment and counter-attack. When they were finally relieved, nearly 2000 of the 3100-strong Brigade were dead and around 400 wounded. The incredibly high dead-to-wounded ratio bears testimony to the ferocity of the fighting in 'Devil's Wood'. Historically, the South African assessment has been that the position at Delville Wood was of negligible strategic importance.

The dignified Memorial was unveiled in 1926, and a museum commemorating all of South Africa's dead in 20th century conflict opened in the late 1980s.

Answer: Harold Macmillan

Serving in 4th Btn, Grenadier Guards, Cpt. Harold MacMillan was eventually discovered in a shell-hole with a bullet in his pelvis by his Company Sergeant-Major who barked out in parade-ground manner, "Thank you, Sir, for permission to carry you away!". Once out of the immediate battle zone, Macmillan had to find his own way back to a dressing station in extremely hazardous circumstances which weakened him further, and he was eventually evacuated to Britain.

'Supermac' succeeded Anthony Eden as British Prime Minister in 1957 and held the office till 1963.

Answer: tank

Douglas Haig's decision to give much-needed impetus to the Somme campaign by introducing Britain's new secret weapon to the battlefield in September 1916 has been criticised for being premature. The 'tanks' were untested and known to be mechanically unreliable and at that time were unavailable in sufficient numbers to make a decisive impact on the flow of battle.

On 15th September, around half of the assembled 32 vehicles made it to the front line and enjoyed some success, taking shocked Germans prisoner and proving notably instrumental in occupying the village of Flers, where a reconnaissance pilot memorably reported "a Tank walking up the High Street" with "the British army cheering behind." However, the unveiling of the weapon allowed the Germans to begin working on tactics to combat the new menace.

A memorial marking the point at which tanks first went into action is located on the road east of Pozieres. This monument from the 'War to end Wars' still bears bullet scars from a strafing attack by US aircraft on a German convoy in 1944.

Answer: Adolf Hitler

Serving in the extremely dangerous role of message runner in the 16th Bavarian Infantry Reserve Regiment, in October 1916 Hitler found himself deployed near Bapaume. His runners' dugout was on the receiving end of a direct artillery hit and he was extremely fortunate to escape with a thigh wound when others were killed outright.

Some gun crew in the Royal Field Artillery would never realise how close it came to altering the future course of world history with a single shot.

Answer: Hindenburg

In August 1916, largely as a result of the failure of the Germans to make a breakthrough at Verdun, the Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn was replaced by Paul von Hindenburg, who took command of the Western Front. With him he brought his trusted adviser Erich Ludendorff.

Realising that the Germans were unnecessarily heavily committed in the Somme salient, Hindenburg ordered the construction of a defensive line designed to shorten the front by 30 miles, and effectively release a dozen experienced divisions for deployment elsewhere. The section of the line built behind the Somme battlefield was known as the 'Siegfried-Stellung', and was ready by February 1917. The fields over which hundreds of thousands of men on both sides had fought and died were given up virtually overnight as the Germans moved into their heavily defended new positions.

The Hindenburg Line was breached 20 miles north of the Somme battlefield at Vimy Ridge in a famous Canadian action in April 1917. Many of the Canadian units had previously served with great distinction on the Somme, notably at Courcelette.

Answer: Ferdinand Foch

The French contribution to the battle of the Somme is often ignored, but under Marshal Foch the French armies straddling the river Somme in the southern part of the battlefield made the only significant gains in the early days of the campaign. This was put down to their greater experience and the fact that the German troops facing them were less well dug in.

The French advances were important since it allowed them to provide much-needed artillery support from advanced positions for the British and Empire troops who were making slow progress to the French left. The French lost around 200,000 men on the Somme only months after sustaining even greater casualties at Verdun.

Foch was made Supreme Allied Commander in March 1918.

Answer: 450,000 - 600,000

Precise casualty figures are difficult to establish, but it is clear that the suffering on both sides was without precedent. Total Allied losses were around 600,000-650,000. If the battle is now regarded in Britain and the Commonwealth as a pitiful waste of life, it is possible that it was an even greater catastrophe for the Germans.

Their losses included much of the irreplaceable heart of their tenacious professional army and many of its most experienced middle- and lower-ranking officers. Many regarded the Somme as the "muddy graveyard of the German army", after which its quality was diluted by ever-increasing numbers of less committed conscript troops.

Answer: Thiepval

The spectacular Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval stands nearly 50 yards high and is visible from many parts of the old battlefield. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and inaugurated in 1932, it commemorates 73,000 British and South African soldiers who died in combat on the Somme but who have no known grave.

It has been said that every surname in Britain found in the 1911 national census is represented on the massive redbrick and Portland stone monument.

Answer: Indiana Jones

In 1992, a modern generation was introduced to the (today) almost inconceivable conditions of the Somme battlefield in an episode of the 'Young Indiana Jones Chronicles'. In an unusually sombre story, 17-year old Indy comes close to despair when the Belgian unit in which he is serving is subject to an unending trial of gas attacks, artillery bombardments and sudden death.

Indy avoids the fate of many of his comrades when he is captured and sent to a Prisoner-of-War camp, from which he eventually escapes after befriending a young French officer by the name of Charles de Gaulle.

Answer: 'Known Unto God'

For any visitor to the Somme battlefield, the apparently unremarkable phrase takes on an immense power when it is encountered again and again in the region's many military cemeteries. Known as 'KUG' to functionaries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the words are a reminder of the difficult circumstances in which the battle was fought, the bodies of large numbers of men often being retrieved long after the fighting had finished, by which time they were no longer identifiable. Rank, unit or nationality is sometimes engraved on the headstones depending on how much could be established, for example, 'A soldier of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, Known unto God'.

Rudyard Kipling, who was asked to devise the headstone epitaph, lost his only son, John, at the battle of Loos in 1915. He spent many years searching for the whereabouts of his son's body but was unsuccessful. Years later, in 1992, it was decided that the remains of a Second Lieutenant of the Irish Guards could only be John Kipling, since all the others of that rank had been exhaustively accounted for, and Lt. Kipling finally got his headstone.