by Graham Seal
The general position of the 5th Divisional front at 7.30 p.m. on the 19th was that the attack was definitely held up from the right brigade sector, and successful on the central and left sectors. The 59th and 60th Battalions had suffered terribly, and in the 53rd, 54th, 31st, and 32nd Battalions, the percentage of losses, especially amongst the officers, was very high, and still mounting steadily. The line held was an indifferent one. Consolidation was difficult; the line was not continuous, and later communication along it was irregular and uncertain.
General Elliott received official news of the failure of the 61st Imperial Division (on the right) at about 7.30 p.m., by which time he was also aware that the 59th and 60th Battalions were badly cut up, and quite unable to advance without assistance. On receipt of information at 7.52 that he could use two companies of the 58th to support his attack, in conjunction with the attack of the 184th Imperial Brigade on the Sugar Loaf, he took immediate steps to make the necessary arrangement. Command of the attack was entrusted to Major Hutchinson. Few more gallant episodes than this dashing, hopeless assault exist in the annals of any army in the world. The attack of the 61st Imperial Division had been abandoned (without the battalion knowing it), and the Sugar Loaf defences were thus enabled to concentrate the whole of their organised machine-gun fire on the one thin Australian line which now endeavoured to penetrate it. With wonderful dash the companies pressed on, losing at every step, but undaunted to the end. They reached the remnants of the 59th and 60th Battalions, where they lay grimly waiting in their shallow, improvised positions. They caught them up and carried them on towards the enemy by the impetus of their own heroic charge. Impeded by broken ground and shell holes, the thinning line searched brokenly forward, reeling under the enfilade, enduring everything but the thought of failing. It was in vain. At the enemy wire the fire became hellish, irresistible. Major Hutchinson perished gloriously close to the German parapet. The attack melted into nothingness.
The information that the 8th Brigade could no longer maintain the left flank against the increasing enemy pressure was received at Divisional Headquarters at about 5 a.m. on the 20th. At this moment General Munro, commanding the 1st Army, was, with Major-General McCay and other officers, at Sailly, in conference on the situation, and it was immediately decided that the 14th Brigade should be withdrawn forthwith, from its precarious position. Communication was difficult at this time, and none of the first seven runners despatched succeeded in reaching Lieutenant-Colonel Cass. The eighth runner had better success, and Lieut-Colonel Cass acknowledged the receipt of retiring instructions at 7.50 a.m. He instructed Lieut-Colonel McConaghy who was still in the enemy front line, to provide from his command a rearguard to hold back the enemy during the withdrawal, and Captain Gibbons and several other officers, with about 50 men of the 55th Battalion, were detailed for this desperate duty. Long before the movement was completed Captain Gibbons’ small rearguard found itself fighting bitterly against overwhelming numbers of the victorious enemy. No one thought of himself—no one thought of yielding. No one thought of anything save holding on with his last ounce of strength till the brigade could be extricated. So one by one they fell at their posts, and of this gallant band scarce a man was left alive when the last file of their comrades had passed through the trench to safety. Thus it was at about 9 a.m. on July 20, 1916, the survivors of the 14th Brigade regained their old front line and the battle of Fromelles ended.
The total casualties among the Australians from noon on July 19 to noon on July 20 were 178 officers and 5,335 of other ranks.
The Australians are here!
The actions of Anzacs in France and Belgium were deeply appreciated by many of the local villagers, and even today there are many positive memories of the Australian contribution to the ultimate victory on the western front. So well regarded were the Australians that even the simple fact of their return to the fighting could instil great confidence in the battered local populations, as described in this account.
The reception of the Australians by the local population was unmistakable and made their return to the Somme a high romance. In many of the farms and village houses were found still pinned to the walls photographs of individual Australians and flags commemorating Anzac Day 1916. For this country hereabouts had very nearly come to be a little bit of Australia by association during the summer and winter campaigns of that year. Some of the Diggers here found themselves known by name and remembered like intimate friends. They had fought and played, lived and died about the countryside not merely as soldiers but like patriots defending their own homes. And not in vain. To say that the French women and children rejoiced to see them again is to report the fact but mildly. As the Australian advance guards appeared many of these people, packing their old wagons to flee, were suddenly seized with new heart and a great emotion; they tore their household goods from off the carts again, and dragged the old people and the youngest children to the roadside to shout ‘Vivent les Australiens’; the word ran from village to village ahead announcing the arrival of the saviours of France. And that they had come to save France the Australians were tempted to believe, not only on the enthusiasm aroused in every man of them by this great reception, but also by their uplifting confidence in themselves and their capacity to thrash the Hun wherever they should meet him. ‘Finish retreat’, they told the villagers ‘beaucoup Australians ici.’
The Roo de Kanga
In September 1917 a correspondent for an unnamed English newspaper visited the western front. The unnamed journalist closely observed the recently victorious diggers and was struck by their casual attitude towards the business of war and their irreverent sense of humour, among other characteristics. Australian forces had just broken the German lines at Mont St Quentin and Peronne in France. Three VCs were won, but the Australians suffered around 3000 casualties.
To test one’s psychological impression of the war solely by the Australian front would be rash. For the Australian Corps is very individualistic, and, after its recent victories, very happy, so that it strikes one less as part of a tragic world contest than as a band of Elizabethan adventurers in great fettle, engaged on a high emprise of their own which they pursue with ardour, gaiety, and an immense confidence. The note is well struck in PERONNE. Here and there in the cleared space between shapeless heaps of brick and mortar which is the main street of that town one may pick out the signs of five occupations. Very faint are the traces of its peaceful day . . . The German notice boards of the first occupation are commoner, with traces of the French return superimposed upon them. But in his last tenure, the enemy had plastered it all afresh . . . And suddenly one comes on the largest notice board of all. The effect is like that of a clean and merry wind blowing through a swamp. The board bears the title ‘Roo de Kanga,’ and it marks the Australian conquest of the ruins of Sept. 1.
And what of the ‘Digger’, as the Australian private is content to call himself? One could learn much of him quickly, for he has no servility and little shyness. Sometimes one had a quite uncomfortable revelation of him, as when four self-conscious civilians who arrived, not without misgivings, in the forward area met a battalion of him fresh from the trenches and were greeted with the crushing comment: ‘Thank God, the Americans at last!’ Or one would note him crowding, in the highest spirits, round a cageful of newly captured Germans, comparing notes in a dispassionately professional vein on the recent engagement, or offering, not without success, to exchange a tin of bully beef for an Iron Cross. In the major features of his thirty-mile push the Digger is less interested than in such sporting venture as that of a little party of Australians who pushed across the SOMME into CHIPILLY, whence the enemy was enfilading the line, and bluffed a German force many times their size into surrender. He is delighted, too, with the mule who was set to draw a dummy tank, and did so dejectedly, for a while, but later, satisfying himself with an inquisitive sniff that the thing was vulnerable, kicked it to smithereens. He is, too, most boyishly gleeful about the colossal German g
un which he came on in a peaceful glade in the course of his forward rush . . . Its great bulking carriage towers from its concrete base among the trees, a tremendous monument of man’s madness. The Digger has written on it ‘captured by Waacs,’ and Australian names are graven all over it, from that of the Prime Minister downwards.
And everywhere he will have sport. You can see him with his brown chest and arms gleaming in the sun, defending a wicket on a pitch in a bend of the SOMME that he has just captured; or scarcely to be stopped from that super-energetic sort of rugby that is played under his code to watch the ‘Archies’ peppering a Boche airman; or cheering a famous Australian jockey pelting along in a mule race on a course improvised where the shell holes are fewest. In lazier moments he is regaled by one of the troops of entertainers for which his Corps is famous in a theatre he has knocked together out of nothing; or he is to be found studying with much interest one of the large maps of the front, with which he is kept in touch with the latest news of the whole line, and deciding what he would do at this or the next place if he were Foch [commander of the French forces].
While the Australians took this well-earned rest along the ‘Roo de Kanga’ they were commended by the commander of the British army to which they were attached. General Rawlinson of the Fourth Army, in the language of the period, paid tribute to the diggers and looked forward to the end of the war.
Since the Australian Corps joined the Fourth Army on April 8th, 1918, they have passed through a period of hard and uniformly successful fighting, of which all ranks have every right to feel proud.
Now that it has been possible to give the Australian Corps a well-earned period of rest, I wish to express to them my gratitude for all they have one. I have watched with the greatest interest and admiration the various stages through which they have passed, from the hard times of FLERS and POZIERES to their culminating victories at MONT ST QUENTIN and the great Hindenburg system at BONY, BELLICOURT TUNNEL AND MONTBREHAIN. During the summer of 1918 the safety of Amiens has been principally due to their determination, tenacity and valour.
The story of what they have accomplished as a fighting Army Corps, of the diligence, gallantry, and skill which they have so thoroughly learned and so successfully applied, has gained for all Australians a place of honour amongst nations and amongst the English-speaking races in particular.
It has been my privilege to lead the Australian Corps in the Fourth Army during the decisive battles since August 8, which bid fair to bring the war to a successful conclusion at no distant date. No one realises more than I do the very prominent part they have played, for I have watched from day to day every detail of their fighting, and learned to value beyond measure the prowess and determination of all ranks.
In once more congratulating the Corps on a series of successes unsurpassed in this great war, I feel that no more words of mine can adequately express the renown that they have won for themselves and the position that they have established for the Australian nation, not only in France, but throughout the world.
I wish every officer, NCO, and man all possible good fortune in the future, and a speedy and safe return to their beloved Australia.
The only gleams of sunshine
Private Vernon Carter left Australia in November 1915, and after training in Egypt went to France in June 1916. He was wounded in the battle of Fromelles where he was taken prisoner and transported at first to Dülmen prison camp in Germany.
For about ten weeks I was in Dulmen camp, and my arm got better. They then sent me through to within eight or ten miles of the Russian border, to what was really an outpost of Schneidemuhl camp. They put me at once to work in a sugar factory, where they work two shifts of twelve hours each, with only a half hour break in the shift. All they gave us was a thing called soup, which you could have put through a colander without a trace of solids being left. It was little better than colored water. Sometimes the diet was varied by a little bit of bread containing strange ingredients, including sawdust. We were entitled to 250 grammes of bread per day, but the stuff was so sodden that the ration would seem no larger than a slice off a toast loaf. I was in that wretched place for five weeks, and during that time they knocked a lot of chaps about. Until that time I had a clean skin, and had not fallen out with any of our oppressors. Some of the men were most cruelly treated, for no reason which we could see, unless it was that none of us understood German.
On the Sunday morning when the five weeks of which I spoke were up a dreadful blizzard commenced to blow—I suppose you can imagine what a blizzard in that place would be like—and we decided to strike work. We had to go to work at 6 o’clock on the night shift. The men, tired of ill-treatment, refused to work. The guards flourished their bayonets over their heads for an hour in the hope of frightening us into working. They got no satisfaction from that, however, so they rang up an officer and told him what had happened. The officer replied that if we refused to work we could stand at attention in the snow until we repented and returned to our toil. But this threat failed to move the men, and they were forced to experience a bitter taste of disciplinary kultur. We had had nothing to eat and nothing to drink since 12 o’clock midday; yet from 7 o’clock that night, strangers to food, we stood to attention in that blizzard till 12 o’clock next day. It was a form of punishment so cruel that few would care to undergo it a second time. (I may say here that we have handed to the British authorities the names of the officials responsible for the horror and the British Government is ‘pushing it’ with the object of having the tyrants punished.)
At 12 o’clock on the Monday, when it was found that this harsh treatment had not broken our spirits, we were sent back to camp, reaching there about 3 o’clock the next morning. And still we had had nothing to eat. We got a little food about 8 o’clock, when some English prisoners gave us some of theirs before we were put into the ‘clink.’ After five days in confinement we were sent among a party of 500 Russians, French and others to Westphalia, and from December 21, 1916, to August 20, 1918, I worked in a coal mine. For a month I worked on the surface, but was afterwards sent below, where they work shifts of eight hours. It takes an hour going to the face and an hour to return, and the prisoners are the first to go down and the last to return. For a year and eight months I worked in a drive [tunnel] no higher than a table, pushing trucks, and my hips bear the marks today of the knocks I got while slaving in that position. The only thing that saved me from being ill-treated then was that I had the ‘boss’ bluffed. He was a sergeant who had had twelve months in hospital—no man has a boss-ship in a mine unless he has been a sergeant in the army. Three or four of us had threatened to throw him down a shaft if he did not leave us alone.
About this time I went into hospital with a poisoned foot. At this mine men were beaten every day. If they did not do enough work they were reported to the boss and were kept at attention until they caved in and went back to work. After having spent eleven weeks in hospital with my poisoned foot I was sent to work on a farm and was there until the armistice was signed, and I was soon afterwards given my liberty.
Private Carter was understandably bitter about his harsh treatment as a prisoner of war. His weight had fallen from his normal 14 stone to only 10. But there had been at least one bright spot in the experience:
I cannot conclude without paying the highest possible tribute to the work of the Australian Red Cross. It was wonderful. The packages we got from its workers in Australia, which in my case sometimes included articles from Toolondo and other places near home, were the only gleams of sunshine in the whole dark picture. It is not too much to say that every man’s life depended upon them, and that without them not many of us would be alive to-day.
The underground artillery
The 2nd Australian Tunnelling Company (originally No. 2 Company of the Australian Mining Corps) specialised in the highly dangerous job of ‘sapping’—burrowing deep beneath enemy lines to place explosives beneath their fortifications. On the western front, the tunnellers beca
me known as ‘the underground artillery’. Some of their story was told by one of their number under the pen name ‘Willie Wombat’.
It was a certain place in a sector of considerable strategic and tactical importance in which there were at that time keen and active mining operations by the enemy. This part of the line was held by Australians, and with the advent of the miners at this particular period the Huns, for the first time on the Western front, were confronted by Australians in every department of war with the exception of aerial work . . . The enemy knew they were up against Australians, for did they not welcome them by displaying a notice over the parapet with the inscription, ‘Advance Australia. If you can!’ and the arrival of the miners gave them further opportunity in their publicity department to display in a like manner ‘Welcome 500 Australian Miners.’
With these taunts in their minds it was quite natural that our army—I include the New Zealanders—would not take things lying down. Many of the men were hardened veterans of Gallipoli and Egypt, and they very soon put into practice the adage that there should be no peace for the wicked, they organised all sorts of ‘stunts,’ anything and everything to pester Fritz. ‘Keep tickling him up’ was their motto; and they did. And, as was only natural to suppose this method of procedure drew retaliation—what was really asked for. Events soon became interesting.
A blow by either party would quickly go the rounds, and, as this branch of warfare increased in activity the front-liners declared that the Miners were pumping more good stuff into the Hun than the artillery, and so it came to pass that as banter continued some wag referred to the diggers as ‘the underground artillery.’ To be nicknamed by brother-soldiers from the same sunny clime was considered a very great honour and full of good fortune, as well as being accepted in a grand form of brotherly comradeship, for it was on this field that many old mates renewed friendship, and where brothers met, and father and son clasped hands for the first time since the main Expeditionary Force left Australian shores. To the Miners it appeared as a happy omen that they should take up their posts in the front battle line, with their own kith and kin, and as a result a great national pride soon became established throughout the company. It was only natural that they should try to acquit themselves as creditably and as gloriously as their veteran brothers. And I believe this lucky commencement was the real beginning of the fame and honour that have been their reward since coming to France, for today to its credit it must be recorded that it is regarded by General Headquarters as the crack mining company of the Western front.
