page_title: Capture of La Boisselle
section_title: Air operations
hierarchical_section_title: Capture of La Boisselle / Battle / Air operations
caption_attribution_description: English: Morane-Saulnier L French First World War two seat reconnaissance parasol monoplane drawing
context_page_description: The Capture of La Boisselle was a tactical incident during the Battle of Albert, the name given by the British to the first two weeks of the Battle of the Somme. The village of La Boisselle forms part of the small commune of Ovillers-la-Boisselle about 22 mi north-east of Amiens in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France. To the north-east of La Boisselle lies Ovillers; by 1916, the village was called Ovillers by the British Expeditionary Force to avoid confusion with La Boisselle, south of the road.
  On 1 July 1916, the first day on the Somme, La Boisselle was attacked by the 34th Division as part of the III Corps but the bombardment had not damaged the German deep-mined dug-outs and a German listening post overheard a British telephone conversation the day before, which gave away the attack. The III Corps divisions lost more than 11,000 casualties and failed to capture La Boisselle or Ovillers, gaining only small footholds near the boundary with XV Corps to the south and at Schwabenhöhe, after the Lochnagar mine explosion had destroyed some of the defences of Reserve Infantry Regiment 110.
context_section_description: The explosion of the Lochnagar and Y Sap mines was witnessed from the air by 2nd Lieutenant C.A. Lewis of 3 Squadron, flying a Morane Parasol;
  At Boisselle the earth heaved and flashed, a tremendous and magnificent column rose up in the sky. There was an ear-splitting roar drowning all the guns, flinging the machine sideways in the repercussing air. The earth column rose higher and higher to almost 4,000 ft (1,200 m). There it hung, or seemed to hang, for a moment in the air, like the silhouette of some great cypress tree, then fell away in a widening cone of dust and debris. A moment later came the second mine. Again the roar, the upflung machine, the strange gaunt silhouette invading the sky. Then the dust cleared and we saw the two white eyes of the craters. The barrage had lifted to the second-line trenches, the infantry were over the top, the attack had begun.
  — Cecil Lewis
  aircraft of 3 Squadron flew over the III Corps sector and observers reported that the 34th Division had reached Peake Wood on the right flank, increasing the size of the salient driven into the German lines north of Fricourt. The villages of La Boisselle and Ovillers had not fallen. On 3 July, air observers noted flares lit in the village during the evening, which were used to plot the positions reached by British infantry.
caption: Morane-Saulnier L 3-view
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