The 5th Battalion was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Denis Draper of Sutton Junction, Quebec. The 5th Battalion was one of 5 Battalions (1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 8th) organized in the 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade led by Brigadier-General J.H. Elmsley. The 8th Brigade was part of the 3rd Canadian Division under the command of Major-General L.J. Lipsett. There were five Canadian Divisions that were eventually reorganized into four Canadian Divisions by war’s end. (They needed to spread out the dwindling supply of fighting men among four battalions to keep them “whole”.
Lance Corporal George Main of Strathroy was enlisted in the 5th Battalion of the Canadian Mounted Rifles at the time of his death in France on January 16, 1917.
Although Lance Corporal Main died on January 16, 1917, he was first wounded on October 4th, 1916. This date is the tail end of the Allied Offensive of 1916.
The 5th Battalion, of the 8th Brigade, of the 3rd Canadian Division, of the Canadian Corps commanded by Lieutenant-General Hon. Sir Julian Byng, became part of what is known as the Battle of the Somme.
The Battle of the Ancre Heights
“By the beginning of October 1916, the three-month struggle of the Battle of the Somme had claimed several hundred thousand killed and wounded. General Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, decided to renew the offensive on a greater scale.53
One historian has examined the overall strategy of the Somme in the context of an integrated campaign with the French:
The September battle on the Somme was not, as it has usually been depicted, a renewed British attack to pull along a weakening and dispirited French army. Nor was it an overambitious flight of hubristic fancy on the part of the British commander-in-chief (although reading his own account in isolation does give grounds for such a conclusion). Examined individually (and normally only the British attacks on 15 and 26 September are examined in any detail), the operations in September 1916 appear to be merely more of the same, more extensive but still relatively localised attritional fights with modest results – some villages won here, a few trenches taken there. Seen collectively, however, Foch’s renewed offensive represented something new; and Haig’s plans make sense in this context. For these reasons, a true picture of the French army’s repeated efforts during September, more and larger than those of the British, is a vital missing piece of the Somme jigsaw puzzle. As far as was possible with such a diverse and crude instrument as the allied armies of 1916, Foch had them working as a fairly well-oiled war machine: if not a truly combined offensive, by September it was at least a concerted one.54
When Thiepval fell to the Reserve Army on 27 September, it marked the last of a series of “piston thrusts” that exemplified “how an attritional offensive was supposed to proceed, and it brought the defence to crisis point.”55
The Canadian Corps was faced with yet another series of attacks on German trench lines, this time a set of entrenchments dubbed Regina Trench by the Canadians. These attacks were to be the most futile and costly of all the Canadian efforts in the Somme fighting. Just two days after the exhausting fighting for the Hessian Trench, the 5th Brigade (2nd Division) and 8th Brigade (3rd Division) once again went into the attack on 1 October. The operation was a disaster, beginning with short-falling artillery plastering the jumping-off positions. The preparatory barrage also failed to hit the German lines, and German wire was not cut by the artillery in most places. Casualties were heavy during the assault as machine gun fire laced into entire assault companies caught up in No Man’s Land. The few survivors that managed to reach Regina Trench were driven out or overwhelmed by German counter-attacks, and half the assault force was dead or wounded by day’s end with no gain to show for their efforts.”
[Source: Canadian Soldiers]
This map shows the location of the 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade during the Regina Trench battle in which Lance Corporal Main was a combatant.
