<P> The Battle of the Somme was one of the costliest battles of World War I . The original Allied estimate of casualties on the Somme, made at the Chantilly Conference on 15 November 1916, was 485,000 British and French casualties and 630,000 German . As one German officer wrote, </P> <P> Somme . The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word . </P> <P> In 1931, Wendt published a comparison of German and British - French casualties which showed an average of 30 percent more Allied casualties than German losses on the Somme . In the first 1916 volume of the British Official History (1932), J.E. Edmonds wrote that comparisons of casualties were inexact, because of different methods of calculation by the belligerents but that British casualties were 419,654, from total British casualties in France in the period of 498,054, French Somme casualties were 194,451 and German casualties were c. 445,322, to which should be added 27 percent for woundings, which would have been counted as casualties using British criteria; Anglo - French casualties on the Somme were over 600,000 and German casualties were under 600,000 . </P> <P> The addition by Edmonds of c. 30 percent to German figures, to make them comparable to British criteria, was criticised as "spurious" by M.J. Williams in 1964 . McRandle and Quirk in 2006 cast doubt on the Edmonds calculations but counted 729,000 German casualties on the Western Front from July to December against 631,000 by Churchill, concluding that German losses were fewer than Anglo - French casualties but the ability of the German army to inflict disproportionate losses had been eroded by attrition . Sheffield wrote that the calculation by Edmonds of Anglo - French casualties was correct but the one for German casualties was discredited, quoting the official German figure of 500,000 casualties . In the second 1916 volume of the British Official History (1938), Miles wrote that total German casualties in the battle were 660,000--680,000, against Anglo - French casualties of fewer than 630,000, using "fresh data" from the French and German official accounts . </P>

Who fought in the battle of the somme ww1