Welcome to today's deep dive. Today we're looking
at a battle that, well, it often gets completely
lost in the overwhelming tragedy of 1915 on the
Western Front. It really does. There's just so
much ground to cover in that year alone. Right.
We're talking about the Battle of Festubert.
And I know it's incredibly easy to just gloss
over these early engagements, but Festubert represents
a massive, fundamental tactical pivot. A completely,
completely transformative moment for how the
war was fought. Exactly. So our mission for you
today is to cut right through the dry dates and
the endless casualty lists. If you look closely
at the mud of Festivere, you find the exact moment
when military minds were forced to change how
modern wars are fought. And alongside that, you
find deeply personal, culturally devastating
stories of the people who are actually there.
So to really grasp the gravity of this, we need
to look at the landscape. Give us the overview.
Well, it's the spring of 1915, and we are looking
at a geopolitical landscape defined by a massive,
deadly deadlock. We're in the Artois region of
France. Just south of Neuve -Chapelle, right?
Yeah. Right. Exactly. And the British First Army,
which is under General Sir Douglas Haig, along
with the French 10th Army, are desperately trying
to find a way to break through these deeply entrenched
German lines. And the pressure is just immense.
Oh, it's unbelievable. The learning curve for
fighting a modern industrialized war was incredibly
steep, and the cost of every single lesson they
were learning was being paid in human lives.
And the broader context for you to keep in mind
here is the Second Battle of Artois. This was
a massive offense of stretching from early May
all the way to mid -June. It involved coordinated
efforts between the French and the British against
the German Empire. But the British military leaders
weren't just flawlessly executing some grand
master plan. They were scrambling. They were
absolutely scrambling to adapt. Just throwing
everything at the wall to see what would break
the stalemate. They really were. And to understand
the specific decisions made at Festiveri... Right.
May 9th. Yes. On May 9th, the British Army suffered
a catastrophic failure at a place called Auburs
Ridge. The tactics they had relied on up to that
point completely fell apart. Okay, let's unpack
this because that direct background is crucial
for what happens next. At Auburs Ridge, the British
command used what they called hurricane bombardments.
Right, hurricane bombardments. Which meant an
intense, relatively short burst of artillery
fire. The goal was rapid shock and awe. and then
the infantry would advance with what they called
unlimited objectives. Unlimited objectives is
such a telling phrase, isn't it? It really highlights
the mindset. I mean, it meant they were aiming
for a massive sweeping breakthrough. They were
hoping to push the line forward by an astonishing
3 ,000 yards. It's about 1 .7 miles. Right, 1
.7 miles deep into enemy territory in basically
a single sprint. But it failed miserably. The
hurricane bombardment just didn't do the job.
It didn't sufficiently cut the barbed wire. didn't
destroy the machine gun nests. The German defenses
held completely and the British infantry were
just cut to pieces. So within a matter of days,
the British command had to completely rethink
their entire approach. Which brings us to the
major tactical pivot we mentioned. The British
look at their own failure at Auburs Ridge and
then they look over at their allies. The French.
Yeah, the French, who were seeing slightly more
success with a completely different method. So
the British command decides to scrap the hurricane
bombardment idea entirely. Instead, they adopt
the French tactic, which is slow, deliberate
artillery fire. It is a fundamental shift in
military psychology. They went from trying to
sprint through a brick wall to trying to slowly
dismantle it brick by brick. Nepotically preparing
the way for the infantry. Exactly. Slowly, continuously
cutting through the barbed wire and systematically
demolishing German strong points over a period
of days, not minutes. And they dramatically lowered
their expectations for the infantry, right? They
abandoned that deeply ambitious 3000 yard breakthrough.
Yes. For Festubert, the goal was narrowed down
to capturing a trench line just 1 ,000 yards
forward. A third of the distance. A third of
the distance. It was designed as a continuous
attack plan. It involved one division pushing
from a spot known as Rue du Bois to Chocolat
Manier Corner and another division attacking
about 600 yards further north. If we connect
this to the bigger picture. And this is vital.
The Battle of Festubert officially goes down
as the very first British attempt at a strategy
of attrition in the first. World War. Attrition.
It's a grim, deeply cynical concept. It meant
the generals were officially acknowledging that
a glorious, rapid breakthrough to win the war
quickly was no longer the reality. Warfare had
permanently changed. It was now about the slow,
agonizing, grinding down of the opponent's resources
and manpower. You accept that you will take heavy
losses, strictly in order to inflict heavy losses
on the enemy. It's the horrific realization that
you aren't going to win by outmaneuvering the
enemy. You're going to win by out surviving them.
But what makes this specific shift to attrition
at Festy Bear even more complex is the overarching
strategic goal behind it. Because you might think
an attack of this scale was about capturing a
vital town or a major supply railway. But it
wasn't. This entire offensive was actually designed
as a massive distraction. The primary motivation
for the British 1st Army resuming the offensive
here was to act as a decoy. While the French
10th Army was simultaneously launching a massive
attack against Vimy Ridge, which is further south
near Arras, the British attack at Festubert was
explicitly intended to attract German divisions
away from the French front. The British command
wanted the Germans to send their reinforcements
north to face them rather than reinforcing the
defenders holding off the French at Vimy. So
the soldiers on the ground are being sent into
a meat grinder, testing out this grueling new
attrition warfare entirely to serve as a magnet
for enemy artillery and reinforcements. It sets
a terrifying tone for the execution of the battle.
Now, the assault targeted a salient, a piece
of land jutting out into enemy territory in the
German lines between New Chappelle and the village
of Festubert. It was a three mile front. and
they prepared to hit it with an unprecedented
level of firepower. To execute this deliberate,
methodical French style of bombardment, they
massed 433 artillery pieces. And instead of a
short hurricane barrage, they bombarded the German
lines continuously for 60 hours. 60 hours. That's
two and a half days of nonstop deafening explosions.
They fired roughly a hundred thousand shells
into that three -mile stretch. The sheer noise
and the constant vibration of the earth must
have been mind -bending. Oh, absolutely paralyzing.
The intention was to completely obliterate the
wire and level the strong points of the German
6th Army. And after all that buildup, the way
they actually launched the infantry assault was
a historic first. Here's where it gets really
interesting. The attack officially began at 1130
p .m. on the night of May 15th, 1915. This was
the very first British night attack of the entire
war. Visualizing a night attack in 1915 is chilling.
The darkness would have added an unimaginable
layer of chaos. You have thousands of men trying
to navigate through a landscape that has just
been completely pulverized by artillery. It's
littered with craters and debris in pitch black.
Trying to maintain formation and coordination
without any modern communications equipment.
Knowing the enemy is out there in the dark. So
if you're an infantryman going over the top at
1130 p .m., you're probably expecting to walk
into a shattered landscape where the enemy has
been annihilated by those 100 ,000 shells. You
would hope so, yeah. But what actually happened
when they crossed no man's land? What's fascinating
here is, despite that unimaginable volume of
explosive power, the 60 -hour bombardment fundamentally
failed. It failed completely. It did not significantly
damaged the frontline defenses of the German
6th Army. How does that even happen? You drop
a hundred thousand shells on a three -mile front
and the enemy's front door is still locked. It
comes down to a few critical factors of early
trench warfare. First, the Germans were already
learning to dig deep. They were creating reinforced
dugouts that could withstand a lot of the standard
field artillery of the time. Right. Second, a
massive portion of the British shells were shrapnel
shells. Which are designed to burst in the air.
Exactly. They boost in the air and rain down
metal to kill troops in the open. They are practically
useless for destroying earthworks or cutting
thick belts of barbed wire. You need high explosive
shells for that. And the British simply didn't
have enough of them. And finally, the terrain
itself in Artois was incredibly mushy. A lot
of those shells simply plunged deep into the
soft mud and exploded underground. Muffling the
blast. Muffling the blast and leaving the defenses
above ground relatively intact. So the infantry
steps out into the pitch black, expecting ruined
trenches, and instead they hit a solid wall of
German machine gun fire. From there, the timeline
of the battle becomes a horrific grinding slog.
During that initial night attack, only the 6th
Brigade made any real progress. And that was
mainly because the weather conditions were relatively
good that first night. But that minor success
was incredibly fleeting. The initial night attack
on the 15th achieves almost nothing strategically,
so the command decides to try again the very
next afternoon. Right. At 3 .15 p .m. on May
16th, they push forward again in broad daylight.
The original brigades attack, and they are joined
by the 7th Division, which opens up a completely
new front further to the south. But they are
running into the exact same unbroken defenses.
The casualties mount at an astronomical rate.
By the next day, May 17th, the situation is so
dire that the 4th Guards Brigade of the 2nd Division
has to be sent in just to relieve elements of
the battered 7th Division. And even with fresh
elite troops, they only manage to secure minor,
agonizingly slow advances. It just keeps grinding
on. This is the reality of the new attrition
strategy. By May 19th, just four days after the
initial night attack, the fighting capacity of
the units involved is simply gone. The casualties
are so devastating that both the 2nd Division
and the 7th Division have to be withdrawn from
the battle entirely. And the main objectives
they set out to capture on May 15th. Still firmly
in German hands. And as those original divisions
were shattered and pulled off the line, the British
command had to feed new forces into the meat
grinder to keep the distraction going. The troops
fighting this battle weren't just from the United
Kingdom. This offensive relied on the incredible
diversity of a global empire. Right there in
the initial assaults, you had Indian troops from
the Garwall Brigade and the 7th Meerut Division.
And then on May 18th, the 1st Canadian Division
is ordered into the fray. Assisted by the 51st
Highland Division. But by the time the Canadians
and the Highlanders enter the battle, The environmental
conditions have completely deteriorated. The
relatively clear weather of the initial assault
is gone. They are ordered to attack in heavy
rain. The battlefield, which was already marshy
and cratered by artillery, turns into an absolute
quagmire of deep thick mud. Charging a fortified
machine gun position is terrifying enough. Now
imagine doing it in a torrential downpour, slipping
and sinking into the mud with artillery shells
geysering water and earth all around you. The
Canadians and the Highlanders threw themselves
at the German lines but made very little progress
in the face of intense artillery fire. The British
forces eventually had to just stop the forward
momentum and violently dig in to hold their new
slightly advanced front line right there in the
heavy rain. And while the British Empire forces
were bogging down in the mud, the Germans were
using the time efficiently. They brought up reinforcements
and strengthened their secondary defensive positions
even further. The British attempted to resume
the attack from May 20th all the way to May 25th,
but it was completely futile. They made virtually
no further progress. The Battle of Festubert
finally sputtered to an exhausted halt. So what
does this all mean when the guns finally stopped
on May 25th? What did this grand shift to attrition
actually achieve? We have to look at the numbers.
Let's break down the sobering math of this 10
-day battle. For all that planning, the 60 -hour
bombardment, the night attacks, the endless waves
of global troops, the offensive resulted in a
total advance of just 1 .9 miles. That is about
three kilometers. You could comfortably walk
that distance in your neighborhood in less than
40 minutes. The cost of that 1 .9 miles of muddy
French territory is staggering. The British Empire
suffered 16 ,648 casualties. To break that down,
the 2nd Division alone suffered over 5 ,400 casualties.
The 7th Division lost over 4 ,100. The 47th Division
lost over 2 ,300. The 1st Canadian Division suffered
over 2 ,200 casualties. And the 7th Miroot Division
suffered over 2 ,500. Over 16 ,000 men killed,
wounded, or missing for a 40 -minute walk. And
what about the German side, the defenders who
were supposed to be ground down by this new strategy
of attrition? How many losses did they take?
The German 6th Army suffered around 5 ,000 casualties,
which includes about 800 men who were taken prisoner.
So the strategy of attrition in this very first
British iteration resulted in the attackers taking
more than three times the casualties of the defenders
they were trying to grind down. Taking three
times the losses of your enemy is a horrifying
way to wage a war. And to really understand the
scale of the violence happening across the Western
Front in the spring of 1915, we have to look
at those numbers in the context of the broader
Second Battle of Artois. Right, because Festubert
didn't happen in a vacuum. While the British
were fighting and dying at Festubert, the French
were fighting their own grueling battles to the
south. French casualties during the wider Artois
offensive reached over 102 ,000 men. Wow. Total
German casualties across the entire sector were
over 73 ,000. 16 ,000 casualties at Pfisterberg.
A hundred thousand French casualties. Those numbers
are so vast, they can easily become abstract.
They lose their human scale. Exactly. But what
if we look at exactly who made up those numbers?
Because of how the British Army recruited at
the time, those casualties weren't spread evenly
across the country. They were hyper concentrated.
The military used what they called the Pals Battalion
system or localized territorial forces. Men from
the same villages, the same factories or the
same sports teams were actively encouraged to
enlist together and serve shoulder. to shoulder.
Which meant that a single bad afternoon on the
front line could literally wipe out a generation
of men from one specific town. Which brings us
to a deeply specific cultural impact that shows
how a battle in France rippled out and devastated
communities far away. We have to look at the
Scottish Highlands and a traditional stick and
ball game called Shinty. Shinty has incredibly
deep cultural roots in the Scottish Highlands.
These Shinty teams weren't just random guys playing
a weekend game. They were the absolute anchors
of their communities. And because of those localized
recruitment strategies, these tight knit Shinty
playing communities were disproportionately devastated
by the losses at the Battle of Festuber. Whole
teams enlisted together, fought together and
fell together in the mud of Artois. The impact
on these small Highland towns was so profound
and lasting that a full century later, the one
100th anniversary of the battle in 2015 wasn't
just marked by politicians laying wreaths in
London. It was marked intimately by the sports
teams themselves. Show tee clubs representing
areas that lost a massive portion of their young
men organized their own centennial commemorations.
Records of the 2015 commemorations show specific
teams coming together to mourn. Skye Kamenock
and Kingussie Kamenock, two areas that lost a
great many men at Festubert, joined up with the
British force's own Shinty team, known as Scotts
Kamenock. They held an entire weekend of commemorations,
lectures, memorial services, and Shinty matches
on the Isle of Skye, strictly to remember the
players who never came back from that 1 .9 mile
advance. A week after that event on the Isle
of Skye, another club, the Beule Shinty Club,
held their own memorial. They specifically chose
to rename their local sports pavilion to honor
two brothers who died in the battle. Donald and
Alastair Patterson. You hear those names and
suddenly it's not 16 ,000 anonymous casualties
on a ledger anymore. It's Donald and Alastair.
Just two years before the battle in 1913, the
Patterson brothers were part of the Beule team
that won the Kaminok Cup, which is essentially
the holy grail of the sport. They were local
champions, athletic, young, the pride of their
entire town. And by May of 1915, they were both
killed at Festuber. The loss of men like the
Patterson brothers ripped a hole in the social
fabric of these highland towns that took generations
to heal. But there is one final haunting detail
regarding Donald Patterson that really bridges
the gap between the pulverized battlefield in
France and the community left behind in Scotland.
Donald played the bagpipes. Yes. And decades
after he was killed in the battle in the early
1980s, his personal bagpipes were somehow recovered
along with his other effects. It's incredible
to think of a wooden instrument surviving the
destruction of that battlefield and making its
way back home decades later. And what's truly
chilling is that during those deeply emotional
100th anniversary commemorations in 2015, those
exact same bagpipes, Donald Patterson's bagpipes
were played. A century after the artillery of
Festubert silenced him, his music was heard again
by the communities still mourning him. That really
just encapsulates how a 1 .9 mile stretch of
muddy French territory represented this massive
shift in world history. the dawn of attrition
warfare, the first British night attack, and
the tragic intersection of a global war with
local communities. This raises an important question.
One that really lingers when you look at the
totality of what happened over those 10 days.
We have to remember the strategic reality we
discussed at the very beginning. Right. This
entire battle, the 60 hour bombardment, the terrifying
night attacks, the desperate charges in the rain
by troops from across the globe was fundamentally
designed as a decoy. It was a strategic move
by high command to draw German attention away
from the French fighting at Vimy Ridge. It forces
you to ponder the deeply chilling mathematics
of modern warfare. You have to consider the minds
of the military planners who sat in relatively
safe rooms looking at broad maps and weighed
the deliberate sacrifice of 16 ,000 of their
own men. They accepted the devastation of entire
cultural communities, erasing local champions
like the Scottish shinty players, all to act
as a distraction for an ally miles away. It requires
a level of calculated ruthlessness that is incredibly
difficult to fully comprehend today. It's a heavy
thought, and it's exactly the kind of perspective
we hope you take away from these deep dives.
We want to thank you so much for joining us.
The history we think we know is always infinitely
more complex and often far more heartbreaking
when we actually take the time to unpack the
tactical realities and the human cost. Keep asking
questions, keep looking past the casualty list,
and keep questioning the history you thought
you knew. We'll see you next time.