by Will Davies
The Matunga sailed from Port Moresby through the night to Cooktown. She made it through without coming under German attack, but two years later would not be so lucky. In August 1916, returning from Rabaul she was captured by the German raider Wolf. The Matunga was forced to go westward to Waigeo Island, off the remote northwestern tip of West Irian, where the crew, the passengers and the cargo were offloaded and taken aboard the Wolf. The Germans sank the Matunga, and the Wolf returned to Kiel in February 1918 to a hero’s welcome. She had made the longest sea voyage of a warship during the First World War and had returned with not only substantial quantities of rubber, copper, zinc, brass, silk, copra, cocoa and other essential materials for the German war effort, but also 467 prisoners of war. All of her crew were awarded the Iron Cross and her commander, Captain Nerger, the highest German decoration, the Pour le Mérite. The captured crew and passengers of the Matunga remained in Germany for the duration of the war.
Woodward’s journey on the Matunga lasted two days: he disembarked at Cooktown and made his way to Mount Morgan, a booming mining community south of Rockhampton, to report to his bosses. He spent a fortnight debriefing them about the Papuan mining operations, and then, sick with continual bouts of malaria, which he had contracted while away, he headed south to visit his family in Tenterfield, in northeastern New South Wales. There he rested and began his recovery.
He had grown up in rural Tenterfield, and in 1901, at the age of 15, was sent to board at Newington College, a Methodist school for boys in the Sydney suburb of Stanmore. It was a boarding school based on the classic English model, with little comfort: boys were given the bare minimum of food; they froze in winter and sweltered in summer; discipline was harsh, and humiliation was considered character building. Boarders learnt fast that to survive you needed independence, strength of body and character, rat cunning, and a certain degree of invisibility. Woodward excelled as an athlete, was awarded colours in rugby and cricket, and served in the cadets. He received a trophy for shooting, an important skill for young men at this time. A boy from the bush, he was self-assured and confident, and could handle a rifle and a horse.
The post-Victorian era was a time of morality, Imperial splendour and social change. Woodward was brought up to be loyal to Britain and a royalist, yet to be a proud Australian. Though at Newington he would have rubbed shoulders with the old money of Sydney – the sons of the squattocracy and the wealthy Protestant immigrants – he retained the egalitarian nature of his rural roots.
After school he had worked in mines at Irvinebank, North Queensland. Then he headed south to Charters Towers, in Queensland. There he worked underground as a labourer for three years, mining gold and studying at the Charters Towers School of Mines part time to become a mining engineer.3 He received high marks and was awarded two prestigious medals, the W. H. Browne medal for mining in 1909 and the medal for metallurgy in 1910. After further experience underground, he qualified as a mine manager and worked in copper mines at Mount Morgan and Broken Hill before being sent to the newly opened mines in Papua.
Now back in Australia, Oliver Woodward was faced with a dilemma. Copper was an important ingredient for munitions, so his job was a protected occupation.
On the one hand, he believed this was ‘a very slender excuse for a young and able-bodied man’. Yet he ‘honestly felt that there was some reasonable argument’ why he should at least delay enlisting: ‘The general opinion was that the Australians, due to lack of training, would never be active participants in the fighting but that garrison duty in Egypt would be their role. I felt that I was not justified in sacrificing my professional career merely to seek adventure.’4 So he returned to Mount Morgan and his work underground.
It was not long before he was receiving white feathers anonymously in the mail.
At first it was expected that the war would be over by Christmas. But by November, the British and French armies found themselves mired in a stalemate with the Germans.
Flurries of snow were making life terrible; men froze and their feet and lower limbs went black with frostbite and trench foot. Neither side was making progress, but there were a few active hot spots along the front. One of the hottest was a small area hardly bigger than a football field: the notorious and deadly Hill 60.
Height is everything in war. It is important strategically, whether it be a small platoon-sized engagement or a full-scale battle. Holding the high ground not only allows you to fire down on your enemy while they have to attack up, but it gives you the advantage of being able to observe your surroundings. The higher ground south of the town of Ypres and the village of Zillebeke, in Belgium, was intersected by a railway line that ran from Ypres to Comines on the France–Belgium border. A cutting had been made through it, and the spoil had been deposited on each side of the railway cutting, forming slightly higher hillocks. The hillock to the east of the railway line was 60 metres above sea level: it became known as Hill 60. The spoil dump on the western side of the line, which was S-shaped, was dubbed the Caterpillar. It was 55 metres above sea level. (These man-made high points were similar to the famous Mound at St Eloi, just to the north along the same ridgeline, or the much fought over Butte de Warlencourt between Pozières and Bapaume, on the Somme.)
Hill 60 was crucial high ground as it provided excellent views to the north across the British lines at Zillebeke, and of Ypres, four kilometres away. Ypres was of paramount importance for it stood between the German army and the English Channel. The Allies simply could not afford to lose Ypres.
To the southwest of Hill 60 and the Caterpillar was the Messines Ridge, stretching between the villages of St Eloi and Messines. It was only of modest height – at Messines village it was 60 metres above sea level. What made it so important in the First World War was its height relative to the flat lands around it.
When Britain had declared war on Germany, it had not expected to make any real military contribution, certainly not in Europe. Other European nations, especially France and Germany, had military strategies in place, but Britain had relied instead on accords and agreements with its European allies. It also relied heavily on the power of the navy should a show of strength be required. With only a small army focused on colonial problems – most recently the Boer War in South Africa – Britain was unprepared for a large-scale European war. The hastily formed British Expeditionary Force (BEF) consisted of only one cavalry and six infantry divisions, a total of about 86,000 men. Initially it was anticipated they would be absorbed into the French army, holding the extreme left of the French line in northwestern Belgium through to the coast, where it was believed little fighting would take place.
The Germans, however, had something else in mind. They had been developing since 1900 the Schlieffen Plan, in which Germany would invade France by first crossing Belgium, thus evading massive concrete underground defensive systems constructed by France in the early 1870s, then wheel southwest and pass to the west of Paris to cut off the French army. The Germans felt they needed to knock France out of the war quickly, as the Russian army was a threat in the east.
By 20 August, Brussels had fallen to the Germans. Then, with an eye on the Channel ports, they pushed westward. On 23 August 1914, the BEF made contact with the rapidly advancing German army at Mons, but were pushed back in ‘the great retreat’ to virtually the outskirts of Paris. Here the BEF and the French held the Germans at the River Marne before launching a counterattack, pushing the Germans back 50 kilometres to the high ground on the other side of the River Aisne. As the British and French armies struggled to take the German high ground, the frontline stalled and the armies dug in. This was the end of the German advance and their chance for a quick knockout blow against France. Suddenly Germany found itself committed to a war on two fronts that would not, as hoped, be over by Christmas. And the beginnings of trench warfare brought with it stalemate.
Two massive Russian armies had pushed westward into Prussia, but between 26 and 31 August 1914, the Germans had encircled the Russian 2
nd Army at Tannenberg, capturing 100,000 men. Fearing further annihilation, the Russian 1st Army then fell back into East Prussia and was defeated at the Battle of Masurian Lakes, with the loss of a further 125,000 men and 200 guns. This quickly ended the threat of Russian occupation, taking some of the pressure off the Germans on the Eastern Front.
The only real movement on the frontline now was westward. The Germans, under General Falkenhayn, were trying to outflank the Allies in ‘the race for the sea’. Their aim was to take the Channel ports of Dunkirk and Calais, enabling German ships to operate in the English Channel, hence cutting off supplies to Britain, France and Belgium. Ypres, which was held by the Allies, stood directly in the Germans’ path and was the key to this part of the front. On 17 October, General Falkenhayn launched a massive offensive supported by heavy artillery and eight divisions. Thrown into the battle were poorly trained German troops, many of them young university students. They failed to take the British line that extended in an arc around the city. This was the beginning of what became known by the Allies as the First Battle of Ypres but by the Germans as Kindermord von Ypres, ‘the massacre of the innocents at Ypres’.
Next, seven German divisions attacked on a narrow front between Messines and Gheluvelt. Their objective was the high ground that stretched from the village of Passchendaele, northeast of Ypres, to the southern end of the ridge, at the town of Messines. The Germans attacked westward on 21 October, quickly taking some small villages to the east of Messines, but their attack up the ridge was halted by British troops dug in along a line of disconnected trenches.
Determined to take the ridge, the Germans brought up heavy artillery and pounded the shallow British trenches from close range. Then wave after wave of fresh German troops assaulted the thin line of defenders, and after savage hand-to-hand fighting the British fell back, abandoning Messines and retiring to the nearby village of Wulvergem. To the north at Wytschaete, Indian troops also put up a gallant fight, but they too were driven off the ridge, and the high ground fell to the Germans.
By early November, the lines had stabilised, with the Germans holding the ridgeline extending north from Messines through Wytschaete and on to Hooge, while the British retained the high ground to the southwest at Hill 63, near Ploegsteert Wood, which enabled them to observe their front along the Douve River. The French held Hill 60.
By 22 November 1914, the First Battle of Ypres was over, and the British held a fragile line around the town. The Germans, however, now held the high ground extending along more than 20 kilometres of the line, and behind this, some of the most important and productive industrial regions of France and Belgium. High Command on both sides saw Ypres as crucial to their future strategy, but it had become a symbol of British defiance and would remain so for the rest of the war.
After just four months, the frontline ran more than 650 kilometres, from the Swiss border in the south to the coast between Dunkirk and Ostend. Trench lines, breastworks and a mass of supportive infrastructure were starting to evolve, but for the most part, the location of the line would not change for the rest of the war. Both sides had fought to a standstill and accepted the new military state of stalemate.
Participating in the First Battle of Ypres was a German private named Adolf Hitler, who was a member of the List Regiment. The regiment had a brief period of training, then after being reviewed by the Bavarian King, Ludwig III, and his son Rupprecht, the commander-in-chief of the German 6th Army, they marched 40 kilometres to the frontline near the villages of Besalaere and Gheluvelt, to the north of the Menin Road.
Here they were immediately thrown into the battle and suffered appalling casualties. They lost more than a third of their troops, 349 men, on the first day of the attack. More than half of the regiment’s officers were killed, including the popular Colonel List. By the time Hitler’s shattered regiment was relieved on 1 November and marched back to Wervick, between Menin and Messines, more than two-thirds of its men were dead, wounded or captured, and it could no longer be considered a functional frontline unit. Hitler rose from infantryman to dispatch runner, was promoted in the field to the rank of corporal (which he remained until the end of the war) and was nominated for the Iron Cross Second Class. But most of all, against all odds, he survived.
After a week’s rest, the List Regiment, under a new commanding officer, took over trenches at Messines on 8 November and then positions near Wytschaete opposite the French. It was here that Hitler won his Iron Cross, supposedly for placing himself in front of his commanding officer to protect him from machine-gun fire. Undertaking the dangerous job of delivering messages between his rear headquarters and the frontline, Hitler survived a number of narrow escapes, each one reinforcing his belief in divine providence and that he was being preserved for greater things later in life.
Though brave and resolute, Hitler was not popular. He harangued his comrades about their lack of commitment and bravery, their need to confront danger and death, and the general conduct of the war. These rantings not only left him friendless but probably adversely affected any chance of promotion. He spent his spare time reading newspapers and books on politics, and painting watercolour scenes around this sector of the front. One of these, of the destroyed Messines church, is today in a museum in the town.
Finally, on 20 November, after 18 days in the frontline, the shattered List Regiment was relieved and moved to rest areas in the rear. Here they received new reinforcements, and the men recovered from their wounds, undertook training and prepared for the next move to the front. This was not long in coming and Corporal Hitler was soon back running messages in the frontline and defying death.
Though the frontline was largely static, smaller-scale offensives were carried out on occasion in certain strategic places. On 10 December 1914, the Germans captured both Hill 60 and the Caterpillar from the French, and the Messines Ridge. The British, extending their line towards Ypres, took over from the French and immediately began making plans to wrest Hill 60 and the Caterpillar back from the Germans. Included in these plans was the extension of some shallow defensive tunnels begun by the French in the opening stage of the war. In the months and years to come, these small hills would become some of the most tunnelled and mined areas of the Western Front. Oliver Woodward’s skills as a mining engineer would soon be in demand on the battlefield.
Ironically, the man who perhaps did the most to initiate a British response to the German tunnelling threat on the Western Front came not from Allied High Command. He was in fact a large, brusque and domineering Conservative MP named John Griffiths, later known as John Norton-Griffiths.
Griffiths was a man of the age: strong, educated, flamboyant and an adventurer. Strongly built and over six feet tall, with dark hair and clear green eyes, he was 43 years old when war broke out. In 1888, at the age of 17, he had sailed to South Africa and worked in remote parts of the country as a miner and in engineering and excavation. He fought in Africa in the Second Matabele War of 1896 and later in the Boer War. He had a great sense of Empire and Britain’s part in the world, and soon found himself building railways and other engineering projects in Africa and America. This led him to found his own company, Griffiths and Co., a structural engineering firm specialising in major infrastructure projects, including tunnelling.
Since the early 1900s, ‘Empire Jack’, as Griffiths was affectionately known, had been doing very well. He had contracts all over Britain – including the construction of the City of South London Underground, the Battersea Power Station and the sewerage system for Manchester – and in other parts of the world. A project to build railway and port facilities in Australia was abandoned when war was looming.
In the days leading up to the declaration of war, Griffiths advertised in the London press for the raising of a private irregular regiment made up of veterans who had served in the various recent South African wars. Men flooded in, and hordes of British and colonial veterans pushed and shoved at his recruiting tables to be selected. The 2nd King Edward’s
Horse was formed. Griffiths, who’d had military training in South Africa, enlisted in his own regiment and gave himself the rank of major. He put £40,000 into equipping the regiment and became the second-in-command with Lieutenant Colonel Montagu Craddock the commanding officer.1 Griffiths was soon to move on to another wartime role, though.
Griffiths had men working on the Manchester sewer system and the thought came to him that these skilled tunnellers might also be able to make a contribution to Britain’s war effort. Tunnelling in Manchester and for the London Underground involved working in clay, which posed problems in tight and low spaces where there was no room to swing a pick. Clay tunnellers had developed a unique system of digging known as ‘clay kicking’ or ‘working on the cross’. Lying on his back at 45 degrees, supported by a T-shaped backrest, a tunneller would use his feet to dig the clay with a special lightweight pointed spade. The spade had a longer handle and a footrest on which the tunneller placed his booted foot and then pushed, kicking the spade away from his body. The clay fell away as he dug and was collected, bagged up and taken back along the tunnel using light rail with small rolling stock. The men pushed the tunnel forward, picking up the backrest and repositioning it as they progressed.
