THE 1st Battalion of the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment was in the centre of a massed assault on German-held defences between the French villages of Serre and Beaumont Hammel on the morning of July 1 a century ago.

A total of 37 officers and 906 men from the North Lancashire battalion had gone into action and by the end of the day just 16 officers and 519 men remained.

Despite heroic efforts, by evening the survivors had nothing to show for their efforts.

An extract from the battalion war diary, on display in the regimental museum at Lancaster, shows that an advance party of 21 men set off at 8.41am – thinly spread along a 500 yard front and still behind their own front line trenches.

Five minutes later the rest of the battalion left its assembly area – into a torrent of bullets and shells.

The diary noted: “Directly the advance commenced the battalion came under heavy machine gun fire and there seems no doubt that a large number of casualties occurred before reaching our own from line.

“The two left companies seemed to have suffered most heavily up to this point.

“The advance still continued, however, a large number of killed and wounded were brought in from no-man’s land.”

The 1st King’s and 2nd Essex battalions were following the 1/8th Royal Warwickshires towards the German bastion of the Heidenkopf – being fired on by machine-guns at the Redan Redoubt.

Two small German mines were set off as the men of the King’s Own approached the Heidenkopf, causing more casualties.

The Lancashire and Essex men kept going towards Munich trench, in the general direction of Serre.

They reached the western edge of Penant Copse against all the odds but didn’t have enough men left to cling on to what they had gained.

Pte J. Stanley, of 1 st Kings noted after the battle: “When we got to the second line the scrapping began in real earnest and when we had finished there the corporal and officer and myself were the only ones left of the section – one dead and three wounded we left in the trench.

“We then attached ourselves to another section and went forward to the next line.”

With bombs used up, the survivors clung on with rifle fire for most of the day before being forced to withdraw.

Aircraft flying over the battlefield at a height of just 50 feet couldn’t see through the smoke to let senior officers know what was going on.

The battle of the Somme had started with a seven day bombardment by artillery of the German positions, and then on the morning of July 1, seven large mines, and many smaller ones, were detonated under German positions.

It was then the turn of the infantry to attack.

The 1st Battalion King's Own had seen service in France since August 1914 but by July 1916 there were now only a handful of 1914 men still with the battalion.

In June 1916 they had prepared for the attack, a copy of the German trench system, as revealed by aerial photographs, was made and a scale model some 20 feet by 15 feet was used.

On the morning of July 1 at 1.30am, the 1st Battalion moved into assembly trenches.

The sun rose at 4am and the battalion found themselves in the centre of the massed assault on the fortified villages of Thiepval, Beaumont Hamel, Serre and Gommecourt.

The first troops moved off, and found that the barbed wire was uncut and dug-outs were undamaged after the bombardment.

German artillery, the presence of which had been unsuspected, opened up, and many men of the King's Own were killed or wounded by shells.

Among those to be killed was Major John Bromilow, the commanding officer.

The battle itself continued until November 17, 1916 when the mud eventually won and both sides were bogged down and unable to move.

A total of five battalions of the King's Own fought in the Battle of the Somme between July and November 1916 – and more than 940 men were killed.