What challenges did "the battle of the Somme" face?

Question

What challenges did "the battle of the Somme" face?

Answer 1

You mean what challenges did the armies face at the battle of the Somme?

They were both dug into trenches, where they had been ever since 1914. In other words the trenches were extremely well defended, with barbed wire, machine gun nests and deep underground bunkers.

Obviously this was mainly a problem for the attackers (the British). They had to cross several hundred meters of open ground in  full view of the Germans, who could rake them with machine gun fire. On the first day of the battle, 20,000 British soldiers were killed and 40,000 wounded, which was the bloodiest day in the history of the British army.

Military technology in those days favoured the defender. Tanks were extremely slow and primitive,and only available in small numbers (the first ones saw action on the Somme in September, but were not very effective because there were too few of them). This meant the only way to attack the enemy was on foot!

In order to try and weaken the strong defences, the British bombarded them for several days with artillery. This wasn't very effective (the Germans were deep underground, safe from the artillery). However, it meant that the Germans knew the attack was coming, so they were ready and waiting!

Communications were another problem. In those days there were no military radios. So instead armies had to communicate using runners! This meant that the generals usually didn't know what exactly was happening, or where exactly their troops were. That made it very difficult to direct the battle, or send supplies and reinforcements to where they were needed.

With artillery pounding the same ground for days on end, the whole battlefield was quickly turned to mud, making it even more difficult to advance or send supplies.

Not surprisingly the Somme offensive was a failure, although almost a million men had died on both sides before the battle was over. It was one of the bloodiest battles in history.

Answer 2

Mud, logistics, morale, manpower, communication,nasty rough men fighting each other, idiot Allied generals and German clever but ultimately clueless commanders.

Flesh opposed to explosives, steel, lead and chemicals including barbed wire.

Trench warfare was siege warfare so tunnelling was a required skill as well.

Aircraft complicated things as did the fact that the Allies hadn't got the hang of keeping the artillery barrage (meant to keep the Germans in their shelters in their trenches) so that attacking infantry eventually lost the barrage and also had to contend with German shelling across their stretched lines of communication back to the Allied front line.