Beneath Hill 60

by Will Davies

  As an engineer, Woodward understood the landscape, the water table and, most importantly, the well-established drainage systems and graded watercourses that for centuries had allowed this waterlogged land to be productive farmland. However, the drainage systems were quickly smashed by the Allied bombardment. Now the water had nowhere to go and ran into the shell craters and trenches, and turned the landscape into a quagmire. Passage through this muddy wasteland was virtually impossible. The conditions were unbelievably atrocious, with men, guns, horses and tanks sinking into the mud and disappearing – due to the ignorance, obstinacy and blind stupidity of the British commanders, who had not grasped the terrain or the weather.

  While the Australian 5th Division threw themselves into a battle, their first since being decimated at Fromelles over a year before, Woodward and his men had their work cut out keeping the roads open for the reinforcements, the food and medical supplies and the ammunition needed at the frontline. With the battle raging, the lines of communication were never free from strafing and relentless attack, the men never allowed to get organised, the roads never allowed to be repaired and no one allowed to feel safe. Two officers and 130 men worked on the road that ran over the water-filled craters from Westhoek Ridge up to Zonnebeke, alternating between one day’s work on the road and one day’s work bringing up road materials, timber and supplies.

  In his diary, Oliver Woodward relates a story of an Australian supply column – one man riding a mule and leading another – taking ammunition to Anzac Ridge. When they were slowly meandering back down the narrow, muddy duckboard track, returning to the Menin Road, there was a massive explosion. One mule received a direct hit from a shell, and vanished. The man leading the mule was unhurt; he was more surprised about the sudden disappearance of the animal. Not swallowed up by the mud that engulfed so many corpses of men and beasts here, this mule had been blown to smithereens by the intensity of the explosion. Woodward was amazed. ‘As a matter of genuine interest I examined the area and can truthfully say there was no sign of the horse, either in the form of blood or fragments,’ he wrote.4 To him it offered an explanation for the fate of men who had similarly been lost without a trace on the battlefields.

  By the end of October, Polygon Wood was in Australian hands, but the casualties were high, with 5452 killed or wounded in the two Australian divisions. While the battle raged towards the village of Passchendaele and the infantry died in their thousands in the mud and slime, the tunnellers were ordered to construct winter quarters for the Allied armies along the Ypres front.

  Into 1918 the work of the tunnellers continued, not as they were recruited and trained before the Hill 60 attack, but now as sappers and military engineers. In early 1918 Aboriginal tunneller Herbert Murray joined the 2nd Australian Tunnelling Company. He was one of approximately 400 Aboriginals who fought in the war, but there were only four Aboriginal tunnellers (the others – brothers Alfred and John Ponton, and Alfred O’Neill – were in the 3rd Australian Tunnelling Company).

  Wherever there was something to be built or something to knock down the tunnellers were called upon. In January 1918 the local constable at Zonnebeke told the Allies that there was a crypt under the church that might make a good Allied dugout. Captain Woodward had his men dig a passage through the foundations and then a longitudinal drive – a short tunnel – across and under the church, but no crypt was found. However, all this digging did in fact make an excellent dugout, which served as a battalion headquarters and Casualty Clearing Station.

  Much of the Australians’ work was far more dangerous. On 13 March 1918, a shift of Woodward’s men, moving up the Potijze–Zonnebeke Road came under a fierce mustard-gas attack. Fifty men of the company were severely affected and had to be evacuated. Mustard gas had been first used by the Germans in July 1917 near Ypres, and although the standard-issue British gas masks were quite effective against inhalation, mustard gas burned exposed skin, which blistered and became infected.

  On 21 March 1918, Germany suddenly launched Operation Michael, a massive offensive along a 100-kilometre front from Arras to St Quentin. Utilising the added firepower of an additional 63 divisions, withdrawn from the Eastern Front after the collapse of the Russian armies and the signing with Russia of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early March 1918, the Germans planned to drive the Allies back and take Paris before the might of America could be brought to bear.

  Following a five-hour bombardment by several thousand guns, the German infantry pushed the British back, forcing a demoralising retreat over the hard-won battlefields of the previous two years. The Germans hoped to drive a wedge between the British and the French fronts that met along the old Roman road that ran from Amiens to Peronne, take the large provincial city of Amiens, and then catch the train to Paris. Even if they failed, they could force upon Britain more generous ceasefire or armistice conditions and do this before the full weight of the American contribution really affected the balance of manpower and the outcome of the war.

  Within days, the Australians were racing to various points along the front to stop the German advance. The 3rd and 4th Australian Divisions moved south. Near Hébuterne south of Arras, men of the 4th Division met French refugees fleeing westward away from the fighting. It is documented that upon seeing the Australians and recognising their strange hats, the refugees stopped their carts and began unloading. When asked why they were not running, the reply came back: ‘Pas necessaire maintenant – vous les tiendrez!’ (Not necessary now – you’ll hold them!)5

  On 28 March, one week after the opening of the German offensive, Woodward, his officers and men were rushed south from their camp to the French village of Saulty, just to the north of the Arras–Doullens Road, 40 kilometres to the north of Amiens. Here they were to work on the GHQ Defence Line, a defensive line for the retreating troops to fall back onto and hopefully make a stand. Immediately they began work building trenches, machine-gun emplacements and mortar positions protected by barbed-wire entanglements.

  One day, while hard at work, Oliver Woodward was confronted by the British engineer-general in charge of the construction of the defensive line. He demanded that the Australians work from dawn to dusk, but they were not going to have any of this and were quick to let him know. The British general worked himself into a frenzy and appeared to be on the point of bursting with rage. ‘We expected to see an explosion compared with which the Hill 60 Mines would be insignificant!’ joked Woodward.6 He calmed the enraged general down by suggesting a way of working that would increase the men’s output by 50 per cent and the officer was satisfied. The Australians got to work and made good progress. ‘Later when watching our men at work he was man enough to express surprise and unstinted praise for our efforts,’ wrote Woodward.7

  The tunnellers got stuck into their trench digging, their wiring and their defensive work, well aware they were turning the lovely French countryside into another battlefield. While Woodward was pleased with the ‘fields of fire’ he had created for the machine guns, he was also disturbed that the beautiful woods of Chatalet and St Pierre were suffering the same fate as the shattered woods he had seen in northern France and along the Menin Road in Belgium.8

  The men worked hard, but they still managed to uphold the Australian soldiers’ reputation for skylarking. They were billeted at a nearby farm, and one day a man was running along the narrow wall of the farm’s waste pit when he tumbled in, landing fair and square in the slimy green water. Woodward and the officers, sitting quietly in the farmhouse with the windows open, were suddenly overcome by a terrible stench. They rushed outside to find the poor sapper pulling himself from the pit, covered from head to toe with the most vile muck, to the mirth of the men and the officers alike. Woodward dryly remarked, ‘This episode cost the Australian Nation a complete Uniform, and I think it was many a day before that Sapper got rid of the smell.’9

  Early one morning as the men were about to commence work digging a trench, they saw an old French farmer planting potatoes by hand. Th
e ground was wet after a period of rain, and a low, wispy fog hung over the ground. Wishing to augment their awful rations with some potatoes, and the temptation being too great to resist, the men quietly followed the farmer, digging up the potatoes as fast as he planted them, collecting in the process about 70 kilograms. When the news of this stunt leaked out, the farmer demanded compensation, which was covered by the company’s canteen fund.

  In early June, Woodward and his men were sent further north, to Bouvigny-Boyeffles, very close to the large regional city of Lens. Now for the first time in many months they were back under the German guns. At night they could look from the ridge behind the town and see the frontline illuminated with flares, and behind the lines, the sheet lightning of the artillery as the nightly duels were played out. ‘It looked like a beautiful pyrotechnic display,’ wrote Woodward, ‘that is, to those who could view it from a safe distance. To the men in the line, it was a very different story.’10

  They were given the job of excavating a set of stairs from a trench down into an ancient underground chalk pit. Over the centuries, blocks of hard chalk, used in building materials, had been cut out and removed, while pillars had been left to support the roof. Now there was a maze of caverns, which the Allies were planning to use as underground shelter for their troops.

  By the end of June 1918, the German advance had been halted and the lines re-established. The Allies had begun planning for the push back towards Germany, now supported by American troops in large numbers. In the three months they were in this area, Woodward’s section of 110 men had worked on a frontline of 34 kilometres, had built four kilometres of GHQ Defence Line and erected 30 machine-gun emplacements. They were proud of their achievement.

  Woodward suffered a bout of malaria on 30 June and was sick for four days. ‘On the 5th July my leave pass came through and I staged a remarkable recovery,’ he dryly noted in his diary.11 When he returned, the next task for him and his men was constructing artillery positions between Bussy and the village of Querrieu just to the east of Amiens, where they arrived on 30 June 1918.

  Then, with a major Allied offensive about to start, they built a large Brigade Headquarters dugout between Hamelet and Le Hamel, very close to where the Australian National Memorial now stands. They were also detailed to remove time-delay mines and search for booby traps left by the Germans. On 8 August, the great attack started, spearheaded by Australian, Canadian and New Zealand troops who pushed east along the Amiens to Peronne Road in what became known to the Allies as the Battle of Amiens. For the Germans it would be referred to as ‘the black day of the German Army’. By the end of the battle, four days later, the AIF were digging in on a new line near Proyart. In some places, the frontline had moved forward ten kilometres and the Australians had captured 8000 prisoners, 350 machine guns, 40 trench mortars and over 80 field guns. The following day, the new commander of the Australian Corps, General Sir John Monash, was knighted by King George V, the first time in 200 years that a British monarch had knighted a commander on the field of battle.

  ‘We felt that once again we were on top, and that we would eventually win the War,’ Woodward wrote. ‘How and when this end would be reached did not concern the individual. The essential fact was that one and all recognised we had the game well in hand and eventually the winning goal would be kicked. Our whole view-point had been changed in a few hours.’ The following morning, he inspected the area that had been captured and found it hard to imagine, ‘except for the sound of the guns ahead’, that just 24 hours before this had been German territory and far behind their lines.12

  For Woodward and the Australians the success of the attack relieved months of tension. After the successful retaking of Villers-Bretonneux in April–May and the attack at Le Hamel in early July, there was a residual fear that the Germans would launch another massive offensive and that it might be more successful than Operation Michael. They could not foresee that offensives by France in July and an American attack against the enemy’s vulnerable salient in Champagne would prevent such a move. Nor could they have known that by late July, it was clear to the German generals that there was now no hope of winning the war and the best they could do was establish a line and work for an attractive ceasefire and armistice.

  From early August until late September, Woodward’s tunnellers worked to support the rapidly advancing Allied front. They worked with the Canadians to repair the railway yards at Villers-Bretonneux, then moved eastward, building roads, repairing water supplies, dismantling German demolition charges, fixing railway lines and erecting pre-fabricated metal Nissen huts and accommodation.

  While camped outside Cartigny, Woodward and his men were attacked nightly by German bombers. The British searchlights and anti-aircraft guns proved totally ineffective. Night after night the Germans came, bombed and strafed the Allied lines and flew off without any problems. One particular night, however, the tables were turned. When the enemy planes came over, they were picked up by the searchlights as usual, but this time British fighters were circling at a high altitude. They swooped down on the German fighters caught in the beam of light and, with their machine guns rattling, quickly shot down two of the enemy, who went spinning and burning to earth.13

  The Australians now increasingly found themselves working alongside American troops. Woodward wrote in his diary of being at a temporary camp in Tincourt Wood when a group of Americans – five officers and 20 men – arrived, without the faintest idea where they were or where the rest of their regiment was camped. Woodward fed them and helped them on their way, but it was the first of a number of occasions that would make him contemptuous of their training, tactics and competence as fighting troops.14

  On 26 September 1918 Woodward’s section had completed work on a road from Tincourt to St Emilie, in preparation for an American attack on the Hindenburg Line planned for 27 September. An American engineering company was assigned to assist him, and together they completed the roadworks. The attack was a failure as the American troops did not ‘mop up’ after themselves by eliminating any Germans who had been missed when the attack had gone through. As a result, the remaining Germans simply waited in their deep bunkers until the Americans had passed, then re-emerged, set up their machine guns and fired into their backs. Woodward was appalled:

  It was tragic to observe the state of disorganisation which existed among the American troops. Probably as individuals they were not to be blamed, but their behaviour under fire showed clearly that in modern warfare it was of little avail to launch an attack with men untrained in war even though the bravery of the individual men may not be questioned. In effect so far as the Americans were concerned it was a case of a mob let loose, all plans forgotten and no definite objective in view. No wonder the German Machine Gunners had a field day. They must have felt like poor sportsmen shooting sitting game.15

  Woodward was further angered when he later discovered that the Americans had erected a memorial to the men of the Tennessee Brigade ‘who broke the Hindenburg Line’. Had it been a British or French memorial it would have been erected in memory of the men killed, rather than making ‘absurd claims as to the part they had played in winning the War. If the American Nation had any self respect, it should demolish this monument to their bragging, and not ridicule the men of Tennessee who gave their lives to the common cause.’16

  When the Australians attacked on the 29th, their artillery could not provide a creeping barrage, for fear of hitting the Americans, who were now sandwiched between the main German army and a line of machine gunners they had missed in their advance. When the attack commenced, the Australians, including Woodward’s own men, ‘suffered terrific casualties – Australians murdered simply because the Yanks failed to obey orders’.17 Just after the attack started at 5.50 am, Woodward, along with 82 Australians and 65 Americans, began road repair work close to the firing line, at Bony. As they approached Quennet Copse and Guennemont Farm, they came under machine-gun fire. One officer and a sapper were killed, and 20 other
s were wounded. Receiving orders to inspect the condition of the road towards Hargicourt, he went out with a sapper to inspect it, in the midst of artillery and machine-gun fire.

  Woodward had shown great bravery and leadership that day, and he was awarded a Bar to his Military Cross. ‘By his courage and resourcefulness in patrolling the roads and organising the work he succeeded in carrying the work forward, thus enabling the subsequent attacks to be carried through. He set a fine example to his men at a time when casualties were heavy,’ read the citation.

  The Allied advance was now pushing forward, in some places so fast that only the cavalry could keep up with the retreating Germans. Moving with the advancing troops, between La Haie Menneresse and St Souplet, Woodward came upon a long line of Americans killed by Allied artillery fire. The plan had been to withdraw the infantry back 500 metres and then the Australians would lay down a creeping artillery barrage. ‘The American staff failed to carry out the plans, with the result that our own barrage dropped right on the Americans, and they were killed in hundreds,’ wrote Woodward. ‘The bodies lay in a rough line marking what was the original Front Line position.’18

  After their harrowing time on the frontline, Woodward and his men had ten days’ rest in Cartigny, well behind the line. They returned to Becquigny, and on the night of 29 October their bivouac was bombed by German aircraft. A bomb landed right in the middle of the tent lines, and five men were killed and a further eight wounded.

  It was just ten days before the Armistice and the end of the long, dangerous war. But as is often the case in war, there was one more job to do and one more chance to get killed.