Beneath Hill 60

by Will Davies

  Fortunately, his experience in managing large numbers of men was recognised and he was sent to the Officer Training School for the Mining Battalion. Woodward and a group of men with similar experience were given the non-commissioned rank of second corporal, just one rank up from private. Along with a number of second lieutenants they were marched from Victoria Barracks to the nearby Sydney Cricket Ground and placed in one large dormitory under the Members Stand. The Members Dining Room became the Officers Mess. Here Woodward first encountered the military pecking order. The second lieutenants were not happy sharing their mess with mere second corporals. ‘For a time the atmosphere was tense,’ he wrote, ‘but we 2nd Corporals found satisfaction in the realisation that it was easy to create 2nd Lieutenants but difficult to create gentlemen.’6

  Overseas, the Australians had become renowned for being anti-authoritarian and defying the rules. The training camps were no different, as Woodward learnt when he and the other second corporals were given guard duty. Men who were on leave were due back at 11 pm, but many would arrive ‘in the wee small hours of the morning’, carrying their leave pass in one hand and a packet of fish and chips in the other. ‘Being true soldiers, and knowing in full the advantage of taking the initiative, the Fish and Chips would be forced into one’s hand while the Sapper streaked off to his tent.’7

  Woodward found the army’s training seriously lacking. In addition to the usual marching and basic training, he found himself learning skills that he felt little prepared him for an engineer’s war, let alone that of an officer, such as the tying of ropes, knots and lashings. Once he reached the muddy trenches and dark tunnels of the Western Front he would remember with a degree of amusement the hours he spent learning how to construct wooden observation towers.

  In particular, he was deeply concerned about the preparedness of the officers who would be responsible for large numbers of men on the field of battle:

  The weakness in our training lay in the fact that from the Colonel downwards, all officers were amateurs, each knowing about as much as the other in regard to Military matters. Without any reservation, I definitely say that so far as training was concerned, no single officer of the Mining Battalion was qualified to leave Australia with commissioned rank.8

  Yet on the morning of 23 December 1915, he and 20 other young officers were promoted to second lieutenant.

  I was appalled by the thought that I was about to embark for Active Service as an officer whose knowledge of Military Training was so lamentably poor. Can you wonder that I experienced a feeling of doubt as to my right to take charge of a body of men in actual War when I knew so little of Military matters? The fact that the majority of officers and men of the Battalion made good is no answer to the arguments that undue risk was taken. Even to this day the grounds of this appointment remain a mystery.9

  For Oliver Woodward, the arrival of the New Year was filled with sadness. He was in Tenterfield on his last leave before he would depart for the war. Having just had Christmas dinner with his family, he was unsure when, or if, he would ever see them again. He wrote many years later that the memory of his anguish at parting with his family was still etched in his mind and would remain with him forever.

  No doubt also on his mind was the girl he loved, Marjorie, in north Queensland. The two had known each other for many years but only recently had their relationship blossomed. Marjorie’s father, William Waddell, had met the Woodward family decades before and had even nursed Oliver when he was a baby. Waddell was a Scotsman who had moved with his three brothers to join their cousin John Moffat, who managed a mine at Irvinebank in north Queensland.

  It was not until June 1907, when Woodward was 21, that he met William Waddell’s daughter, Marjorie, for the first time. They were guests at a ‘Grand Picnic’ at John Moffat’s property, Loudoun House, to mark the official opening of the Stannary Hills to Irvinebank Tramway. Woodward, who was mining in Irvinebank and attended the party, recalled: ‘The younger folk romped and danced in the dining room … Among those whom I danced with was a nine year old, auburn haired girl Marjorie. On this our first meeting, I found her to be a charming child, mature beyond her years.’10 Little did he imagine that this sweet child would grow up to be the woman he would marry.

  After Woodward had finished his studies at the School of Mines in Charters Towers, he was a frequent visitor to Loudoun House, and it was here that he met Marjorie again in late 1911, when he was 26 and she 14. ‘In the interval of time, Marjorie had developed and was now a charming girl. I enjoyed her company so much that I had begun to regret the disparity in our ages,’ he wrote.11

  Moffat resigned his position as manager of the Irvinebank mine and was replaced by Woodward’s uncle, John Reid. Woodward was sent to Koorboora, where the Waddells lived, to redraw plans for a tungsten mine. It was decided he should stay at the Waddells’ as the local pub was of a poor standard. Woodward wrote:

  I was delighted with the thought of being in the house with Mr. and Mrs. Waddell as I had much regard for the family and in particular for Marjorie. There was something stronger than friendship for this lovely girl in her teens. When my thoughts went beyond the bonds of friendship, I came up against the disparity in age which in those days seemed a blank, impenetrable wall.12

  The task of redrawing the plans was completed within a week, the time passing ‘pleasantly, but all too quickly’ for Woodward.13

  When he returned to Australia after his time in Papua New Guinea, Woodward moved to Broken Hill to gain experience in underground mining. In February 1915, he travelled to Sydney and stayed with relatives at Cremorne Point. Here he was surprised to learn that Marjorie Waddell was in Sydney attending Miss Hale’s Business College. It had been three years since he had last seen her. ‘In that period of time, the memory of this charming girl frequently came to mind,’ he wrote. ‘I confess my heart missed a beat when I held her hand in greeting.’14 He was relieved she had ‘no inkling’ of his regard for her ‘other than that of friendship’. Between February and September 1915, Woodward spent eight days in Sydney and met Marjorie as often as possible.

  Woodward wrote to Mr and Mrs Waddell, asking their permission to write to Marjorie. So it was on 11 May 1915 that he wrote his first letter to her, beginning a correspondence that would continue right up until their marriage in 1920.

  When Woodward was at the Rifle Club, the pair regularly met in the grounds of Government House to share sandwiches in the gardens. In due course Marjorie finished her classes and had to return to her family in north Queensland. Woodward saw her off on a ship. ‘After the ship sailed, I set off for Moore Park depot feeling very depressed,’ he recalled.15

  Now, as the New Year dawned and they were just beginning to get close, war was about to separate them.

  On 2 January 1916, Second Lieutenant Woodward returned from Tenterfield to Victoria Barracks. Next day, he took the train to Liverpool and reported to the massive army camp at Casula. On these hot, dusty paddocks the other ranks had been undergoing their training. Men from across Australia had poured in, most without any military training, many unable to read or write, but with mining skills and experience in working in claustrophobic conditions underground. Now the men and the officers who would lead them were to begin their joint training. The battalion comprised 51 officers and 1075 other ranks. The following morning, Woodward was allocated to 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, which comprised four sections. He joined No. 1 section.

  Initially, training focused on marching and drill, which Woodward, like all soldiers, quickly came to loathe: ‘The monotony of this soon became almost unbearable. As a 2nd Lieutenant my position was at the rear of the Section and I had to patiently march behind, turning, wheeling and halting at the word of command.’16 Then commenced a period of training in military mining. He was introduced to the Wombat Borer, a motor-driven auger with a diameter of about 20 centimetres that was used to dig a narrow borehole from an Australian trench to the enemy’s. A torpedo-like explosive charge was pushed
into this hole, then fired remotely from the Allied line.

  The ‘Wombat’, which had been developed in secrecy by Captain Stanley Hunter of the Geological Survey of Victoria, had been used with limited success at Gallipoli. The hope now was that it could be rapidly deployed on the Western Front as an offensive weapon. But as it could drill no more than about 60 metres, it could only be used where the opposing frontlines were close together. And operating the machine close to a hostile enemy position was likely to be problematic, especially given the amount of noise and smoke produced by the motor, which was crude by today’s standards.

  Second Lieutenant Woodward and other men with mining experience were not impressed by the machine. Woodward tried to imagine what a German sentry, gazing through his periscope across no-man’s-land, might make when he saw a drill head, deflected upwards, burst through the surface and leap two metres into the air, thrashing and gyrating. Would he think this was some new Allied secret weapon when in reality it was just the good old Aussie Wombat Borer? Only experienced miners were chosen to run the Wombat Borer, yet in training aspects of its operation were considered unsafe. Even before the men set sail for the war, the future for the Wombat Borer looked decidedly shaky. Nevertheless, training in its use took up much of Woodward and his men’s time.

  The military ranking system continued to grate on Woodward. As a second lieutenant, the most junior rank for a commissioned officer, he was ‘not admitted to the charmed circle, the members of which were Colonels, Majors and Captains’.17 He went on to note wryly that when it came to paying mess dues, though, the second lieutenants and senior officers had equality.

  Many of the men saw being in the army as like any other job, with officers as bosses. After providing their eight hours of labour a day, they felt they should be free to do as they pleased. Trying to impose military discipline onto these free-spirited and independent men was difficult. One night, Woodward gave instructions to be woken in time to take charge of a 4 am shift overseeing a training exercise. He was duly awakened, but by the persistent shaking of the tent flap and a very Australian voice bellowing, ‘Eh, mate, are you awake?’ A private soldier calling an officer ‘mate’ sounded sacrilegious to Woodward’s ears. But later, in the mud of the Somme or the deep tunnels beneath Hill 60, he would come to know that ‘no officer could ask for a higher compliment than to be considered a mate of his men’.18

  Woodward himself sometimes found his superiors’ demands for formality ridiculous. While overseeing men using the Wombat Borer one day, he issued the command, ‘Push her in.’ This brought a severe reprimand from his commanding officer. ‘Advance the drill’ is what he should have said. ‘I cannot put in writing the terms used by the Sappers!’ joked Woodward in his diary.19

  Some of the men at Casula had such little regard for authority that they even mounted a strike, although Woodward noted in his diary that his men refused to join it, which brought them high praise from the public and the press. ‘We were hailed as Soldiers true and staunch,’ wrote Woodward.20 The reasons they stayed at their posts were, however, perhaps less than heroic. He believed that they resented the fact that other men had organised the strike without first consulting them and that ‘they were heartily sick of Camp life and feared that participation in the strike would postpone the date of embarkation’. He quipped: ‘That a miner would purposely miss participating in a strike shows what he thought of Camp Life!’21 So for Oliver Woodward and the men of the Mining Battalion, there was a sense of relief when it was announced that a date had been set for their embarkation: 20 February 1916.

  At Gallipoli, after the Allies’ failure to break through at Suvla in August 1915, tunnels had been started from a number of additional positions along the Australian front, including the Nek, Lone Pine and Johnston’s Jolly. Near Lone Pine, ammonal – a compound of ammonium nitrate, aluminium and TNT that the British had recently begun using on the Western Front – failed to blow through to the Turkish trenches above, and when a number of men went into the tunnel, they died after breathing in carbon monoxide gas, which was given off by exploding mines and camouflets. In late November, the Australians blew a charge of 225 kilograms of ammonal at Russell’s Top, which ended Turkish tunnelling in this area. The Australians also laid explosives in a number of large, deep galleries along the Turkish front. These mines were never fired, but had they been blown simultaneously the effect would have been similar to the huge explosions at Hill 60 and all along Messines Ridge in June 1917.

  With the frontlines still stalemated and the Australians taking terrible casualties, preparations began for the evacuation of Gallipoli, and the mines took on a new role: to be ready should the Turks attack during the evacuation. Rather than offensive tunnelling, the miners and engineers turned their attention to building better accommodation for the diggers, whose appalling living conditions only became worse when the winter snows arrived. They also worked on drainage as it was feared heavy winter rains could wash away defence works and break down trench walls.

  A new aspect to the Gallipoli fighting left many of the miners’ existing works in tatters: the arrival in late November of four heavy Austrian siege howitzers. Beginning on the morning of 29 November, the Turks shelled the Australian positions at Lone Pine, the shells exploding four metres below the surface, shattering tunnels and galleries and collapsing trenches. Suddenly massive holes appeared eight metres in diameter, large chunks of debris were thrown into the air and men were blown apart and buried.

  The evacuation began soon after, on 19–20 December. Carre Riddell, the officer in charge of the mines opposite Johnston’s Jolly, wrote late on the last day: ‘It seems very sad to give up the work now after all the lives and money it has cost, but we had to realise that we could not have got through without sacrificing ten times more than all which had gone before and that we were needed elsewhere.’1

  On the Western Front, the formidable John Griffiths was working on the most ambitious mining plan ever conceived. It would tear apart the Messines Ridge and alter the course of the war, and Australian tunnellers were to play a crucial role in its success.

  The Germans had taken the lead in offensive mining on the Western Front, but week by week the number and strength of the British tunnelling companies had increased, driven on by the passion and enthusiasm of Griffiths. The first five tunnelling units, numbers 170 to 174, were rushed into the fighting. But companies 175 and 176 instead spent time first at a special training area near their billets behind the line.2 Unlike the early haphazard use of mining companies, there was a new focus on offensive mining. Once they had finished their training, the 176th Company was ordered to begin mining near the Orchard at Bois du Biez,3 while the 175th Company received orders to start tunnelling at Railway Wood, Hooge and Armagh Wood. One of their sites was just 2.5 kilometres away from Hill 60, on the northern side of the Menin Road, at Hooge, a large property with a chateau and a number of outbuildings, including stables and a coach house. It was a dangerous area as the frontlines were very close, the Germans holding a strong defensive line within the ruins of the chateau, while the British line ran through the stables. High Command had given orders to drive the Germans out. The British also wanted to use the attack as a diversion – or, in the terms of the time, a ‘demonstration’ – to draw the Germans’ attention away from an upcoming attack at Loos.

  In mid-June 1915, volunteers were sought to undertake the perilous mission of mining the site. After a few shots of apricot brandy from the local brigadier general, Lieutenant Geoffrey Cassels volunteered. Cassels and his CO, Major Hunter Cowan RE, set out from Ypres a few days later to conduct a recce of the British frontline. The land here was slightly higher than the surrounding countryside, so it had been continuously fought over since late 1914. The ground was strewn with the dead; the corpses were black and rat-eaten and gave off a nauseating smell.

  The two officers looked for a suitable site to start their tunnelling. They needed somewhere close to the frontline, to minimise digging, but
far enough away to be reasonably safe. Looking around, they decided on the shattered stables as their thick walls would give some level of protection and also hide the tunnel entrance and mine workings.

  Cassels was placed in charge of the operation. He was provided with 40 men from the 175th Company. Many of the men were new to the front, having just been recruited, kitted out at Chatham and sent over. So Cassels had a job on his hands for the first week or so, getting the men used to the horrendous living conditions and the battle that raged around them. Unlike most units in the Allied army, the miners were issued copious quantities of rum sent up in stone demijohns bearing three simple letters: SRD, meaning ‘Strong Rum – Dilute’. They certainly needed it.

  The tunnellers soon encountered problems. Instead of solid ground, they found wet running sand, virtually impossible to dig through and contain. They drove piles but found that their pumps could not cope with the sand and water. To try to contain the wet sand, they stripped the kilts from dead soldiers of a Scottish Highland regiment and stuffed these behind the piles, to no avail.

  Cassels set out to find a more suitable location to begin work on the new shaft. German snipers were active and, with the two frontlines so close, movement was extremely dangerous. He made it to the gardener’s cottage on the estate, where he found a deep cellar and an ideal starting point for the shaft. The ground here was drier and the cellar afforded protection. He quickly moved in his men and had them begin digging. Forcing the pace, the men sank a ten-metre shaft and hit blue clay, much to the delight of the clay kickers.

  The Germans were in the midst of constructing two concrete redoubts, and the ruined chateau now held few German troops and had become more of a sniper’s post. It was decided that the tunnel should be redirected towards the concrete redoubts rather than the chateau as originally planned. Cassels was given three weeks to drive a 60-metre-long tunnel beneath the larger of the two redoubts, plus a branch tunnel of 30 metres under the other.