At 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, whistles blew along the British military line in northern France, and tens of thousands of men climbed from their trenches into one of the darkest mornings in British military history.
The Battle of the Somme, among the bloodiest and most infamous battles in history, was intended to break the enemy lines and bring World War I closer to an Allied victory against the German Imperial Army. Instead, the first day became the epitome of the unnecessary industrial slaughter that the war represents. By nightfall, the British Army had suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 deaths. It remains the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.
The battle itself did not end that day, dragging on until November 18, 1916, through mud, shellfire, failed assaults, limited advances, and appalling losses. By the time heavy rain and exhaustion brought the offensive to a close, more than one million men from all sides had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Typical of the trench warfare of the time, the Allies had advanced only about eight kilometers.
Hidden inside those enormous numbers were Jewish soldiers from Britain’s towns, cities, and immigrant neighborhoods. Some came from established Anglo-Jewish families, while others were the sons of Jews who had arrived from Eastern Europe only a generation earlier. They served in the same trenches, crossed the same no man’s land, and, in many cases, died the same deaths as their comrades.
A century later, volunteer researcher Lola Fraser, working with the Jewish Military Museum collection and the British Jewry Book of Honour, helped recover some of those names. The Book of Honour, compiled after the war by Rev. Michael Adler, the first Jewish chaplain to serve in Britain’s armed forces, recorded the service of tens of thousands of Jews who fought in the British and colonial forces during the First World War.
Tens of thousands of British Jews served in the Great War
Fraser found that 35 Jewish men are listed as having died on July 1, 1916, the opening day of the Somme, although the museum notes that some may have died elsewhere. All came from England: 26 from London, four from Manchester, two from Liverpool, and one each from Birmingham, Leeds, and Harrogate.
The Somme was a vast plain of death, and some records remain imperfect. Some of the men were buried under names that were incomplete or uncertain, while others were buried under the wrong religion, and some disappeared altogether. But the list provides us with the names, allows us to put faces to them, and lets us tell their stories.
One of those men was 2nd Lieutenant Michael Graham Klean of the Northumberland Fusiliers. Klean was 38 when he died on July 1, older than many of the young officers and privates who went over the top that morning. He was unmarried, and after the war, one of his sisters applied for his medals. Imperial War Museums records identify him as having been killed in action on the first day of the Somme Offensive while serving with the 16th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers. He is buried at Lonsdale Cemetery, Authuille.
Another was 2nd Lieutenant Joseph Josephs of the 1/12th Battalion, London Regiment, known as The Rangers. He died on July 1, 1916, during the opening day of the Somme. His battalion was involved in the attack around Gommecourt, where the German barbed wire had not been cut, and many men were caught in machine-gun fire. Josephs was given a grave, but the record attached to it reportedly reads “believed to be J. Josephs.” It is a small phrase, but a devastating one. If it was not Josephs in that grave, then who was it? And if it was, why could they not be certain?
Captain Raymond Litten of the 6th Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment, offers another glimpse into the Jewish dead of that first day. Born in 1883, the son of Tobias Raphael and Frances Litten, he lived with his five sisters at Pembridge Villas in Notting Hill, London. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records that he served as a captain and was killed in action on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme campaign. His mother chose a personal inscription for his headstone: “All you had hoped for, all you had you gave, for the good of mankind.”
In that epitaph alone is the grief, pride, and honor of a generation who made an unbearable sacrifice.
The story of 2nd Lieutenant Wilfrid Arthur Kohn shows the scale of destruction that individual names can sometimes conceal. Kohn, who served with the 11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment, died on July 1, aged 22. In the war diary researched by Fraser, the battalion’s losses for the previous day were recorded at 1 a.m. on July 2. Seven officers were killed, one was missing, and 13 were wounded, including the commanding officer. Among the other ranks, 86 were killed, 140 were missing, and 338 were wounded.
Kohn was one of the seven officers.
100,000 Jewish soldiers served in the German Army; 12,000 fell
It is also important to remember the other side. Historians estimate that out of the roughly 100,000 Jewish soldiers who served in the Imperial German Army during World War I, about 12,000 died in action across all fronts. Many of them will also have fallen at the Somme.
For the men in the trenches, the ordinary rhythm of trench warfare was itself a test of endurance. Soldiers might spend days on the front line, then move to close reserve, then to rest positions, before the cycle began again. In reserve, they had to be ready to reinforce the front at short notice. Reliefs were dangerous because movement, noise, and confusion could draw shellfire. Even when no major attack was underway, men were posted as sentries, assigned to wiring parties, sent to repair trenches, or ordered to carry supplies through darkness and mud.
The conditions were filthy. Men lived surrounded by discarded food, empty tins, overflowing latrines, rats, lice, flies, and the remains of human and animal bodies. They could go days or weeks without properly washing or changing. Boredom and terror sat beside one another.
The Somme also produced a particular kind of anguish when death could not be confirmed, and families were left in limbo. Jack Melnick was not among the July 1 dead. He went missing on the Somme on September 9, 1916. But his story, preserved in a series of letters in the Jewish Military Museum collection, shows what happened after the telegrams arrived and the answers did not.
The Melnick family had come to England from Eastern Europe in 1894. Jack became a British citizen in 1906 and worked at a traveling penny bazaar. After moving to East London, he married Matilda Posener, and their daughter Eva was born in 1912. When Matilda died of tuberculosis in 1915, Jack joined the army and told his brother Aaron that he did not intend to return. He served as a private in the 1/12th Rangers Battalion, London Regiment.
When Jack vanished, Aaron searched desperately for news. He wrote to the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and other organizations, trying to discover what had happened to his brother. Jack’s body was never found.
This, too, was the Somme. It was not just the men who died at 7:30 in the morning or in the first wave of attack, but those who disappeared weeks later, leaving families to live with absence instead of certainty.
For British Jews, World War I became part of a broader story of belonging and loss. It was the first conflict after many thousands of immigrants had arrived in the late 19th century and early 20th century from the Russian Empire. In July 1916, the same month the Somme began, Home Secretary Herbert Samuel announced a policy giving thousands of Russian Jewish immigrants living in Britain an ultimatum. They must either enlist in the British Army or face deportation to Russia to serve in the Russian army; many thousands embraced their new home country and joined the British Army (the writer’s great-grandfather among them).
The British Jewry Book of Honour recorded approximately 50,000 Jews who served. Their names sit within the history of Britain’s war effort, but they also speak to a Jewish community eager to preserve its own memory of service and sacrifice.
One hundred and ten years later, the Somme is still remembered through numbers. The 57,470 British casualties on the first day and more than one million casualties by the end of the campaign.
But it is also important to remember the names and faces of those who fought and fell.
In the cemeteries of northern France, the white headstones still stretch across the old battlefields where the poppies now grow. Some bear crosses, while some bear Stars of David.
Among the dead of the Somme were Jewish sons of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, and Harrogate. They were part of Britain’s bloodiest day, and thanks to the hard work of researchers more than a century later, they are no longer only part of the number.