Pozieres

by Scott Bennett

  Legge was universally recognised as a good administrator and a prodigious worker. He possessed the constitution of an ox and, with the occasional cup of tea and biscuit, could work for 18 hours a day and still feel fit at the end of it.48 But was he a ‘fighting solider’? His appointment to a field command was viewed as something of an experiment. His only recent command experience was limited to organising the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force for service in New Guinea.

  Many British officers and imperialist-leaning Australian officers, including White, also resented Legge’s ‘holier than thou’ Australian-nationalist bent.49 He’d previously clashed with White in Egypt over the appointment of British officers to posts he thought should have been taken by Australians. Chris Coulthard-Clark, in No Australian Need Apply, wrote that Legge disputed Birdie’s decision to appoint Hooky Walker, rather than himself, temporarily in charge of I Anzac Corps in April 1916. ‘He [Legge] does not have the full confidence of those serving under him, while Walker most distinctly does,’ Birdie curtly explained in a letter to governor-general Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson.50 The tactful Bean thought Birdie passed over Legge because of his inclination to ‘cry out Australia for the Australians’, meaning Legge lobbied for Australian officers rather than British officers to be appointed to senior roles in the Australian Imperial Force.51 Pozières would provide Legge the opportunity to prove his detractors wrong.

  Like clockwork, Pozières came alive with the crash of shells at 9.00 a.m. on 27 July — the Germans were bombarding the village for a fourth consecutive day. Arthur Clifford had just finished digging a deeper trench when it started. ‘The Germans did not spare us once daylight revealed our whereabouts,’ he noted.52

  The troops in and around the village had no duty that day other than to remain there hour after hour. One officer remembered a group of men caught under the bombardment trying to occupy their minds by playing cards. As one player was killed, another close by would take his hand. When the officer passed their way again, all four players had been killed.53

  The Australians were still overcrowding their forward trenches. As the hours continued, the casualties became sickening in their number. Shelling targeted Holmes’s troops. ‘We sat in Kay Trench, hour after hour, waiting to be killed or buried by the collapsing banks,’ remembered Clifford. ‘By evening, half of my company was gone.’54

  Legge’s preparations appeared to be running into trouble. He had already lost valuable reserves, and the 1st Division’s artillery commander told him he couldn’t guarantee that belts of barbed wire in front of the first and second trench would be cut, due to the haze hanging over Pozières. If it remained uncut, advancing troops risked becoming entangled on it. Patrols sent out throughout the hot and cloudless day brought back mixed reports, saying that the wire protecting the German trenches had been cut in some places but remained intact in others. Spotter aeroplanes sent up to assess the state of the wire reported back that dust and smoke had obscured their view. Pioneers attempted to dig jumping-off trenches along the length of the old railway line but, as soon as they were close to completion, German shelling destroyed them. Even if they had remained intact, the soldiers still would have had 600 to 700 yards of open ground to cover — three times the distance recommended by General Headquarters. With no other actions planned that night, the Germans could concentrate the full weight of their artillery on the Australians. German artillery observers had seen the Australians digging their trenches, and expected an attack. 55

  Legge’s preparations may have seemed flawed but, with Gough’s continued goading and the relentless shelling of his troops, there seemed no alternative but to adhere to his tight schedule. Bean had once warned Birdie that Legge had a tendency to jump to big conclusions without working out all the finicky detail between.56 Yet in this case, it was impossible to check such detail. By necessity, Legge’s headquarters was in Albert, close to decision-makers like Gough and Birdie; this prevented him from going forward to observe preparations. He relied on his officers to be his eyes and ears but, unlike Hooky, he did not have an officer of Blamey’s calibre upon whom to depend. Although Legge had elements of true genius, he possibly didn’t yet have the experience to pick up those subtle clues that things were awry.57 With the chaos thrown up by war, Legge likely reasoned that no one could expect arrangements to be perfect.

  Legge perhaps sensed that the fighting in the OG trenches had weakened Holmes’s 5th Brigade; and the heavy German bombardment, Gellibrand’s 6th Brigade. In a bold move, he brought forward Paton’s fresh 7th Brigade to lead the attack. The other two brigades would now protect its flanks. Gellibrand thought Legge was courting disaster, as the 7th did not have time to get its bearings or complete reconnaissance — aside from which, it was the weakest of the three brigades. In Bean’s opinion, it was plagued with bad discipline and officers of poor quality, who were often appointed based on seniority rather than performance.58

  Jack Gellibrand, by this point, ‘seriously doubted’ that the attack could succeed.59 Gellibrand — a tall man with a thick moustache — usually wore a private’s tunic and a battered felt hat, and lived simply among his men. A deep thinker prone to theorising, his unconventional opinions and behaviour polarised others: William Bridges criticised his performance on Gallipoli, and Birdie disliked his choice of dress and blunt manner, while White thought he had the tendency to wilt in situations of pressure.60 Although Gellibrand had a strained relationship with some peers, after he had transferred to his 2nd Division he had formed a close relationship with Legge, who had enough faith to appoint him commander of the 12th Battalion, and, in March 1916, the 6th Brigade.61

  Gellibrand moulded his staff into a tight and cohesive team. Lieutenant Richard Casey said the commander had a rare gift of being able to conceal his rank and age. ‘This gave the younger man a degree of confidence in expression and discussion that was very marked and most useful, so long as it wasn’t abused,’ he observed.62 Doubtless, some officers of the hierarchical British army considered this egalitarian management approach heresy.

  Could Gellibrand be a decisive leader in battle? There had already been murmurings that his brigade headquarters, set up two miles behind the front line, deep inside a captured German dugout, was too far back to control the battle. And it was 16 years since his last field command, leading a company in South Africa.63 Pozières would be the biggest challenge yet faced by Legge or Gellibrand in their professional careers. Gellibrand already feared that the attack to seize the OG lines would fail; no doubt the planned operation under these trying conditions would not only cost more lives in the coming days, but would also end promising careers.

  Map 4. 2nd Division’s Advance on OG lines

  chapter nine

  Legge’s Reckoning

  ‘Never interfere with an enemy that is in the process of committing suicide.’

  — attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte

  On Friday 28 July, Gordon Legge — imbued with a sense of optimism and possibly unaware of the difficulties facing his troops — continued his hurried preparations for the attack upon the OG lines.1 His pioneer battalions dug strongpoints between Pozières and the OG trenches; heavy batteries carried out their preparatory bombardment; 7th Brigade officers — who hadn’t yet occupied any part of the front — completed a rushed reconnaissance of the attack area; and brigade commanders reviewed divisional orders. Many troops in the front line for the first time were unnerved by the heavy shelling and the stink in the air. ‘Some of the old hands in our platoon were just as nervous and scared-looking as ourselves,’ recorded Private Walter Elkington, of Bingara, New South Wales, in his war memoirs.2 Private Ernest Norgard spent long hours thinking of home to distract himself from the barrage and the awful smells.3

  At sunset, Paton’s untried troops marched toward the front line while officers, who had probably just received the coded message indicating the attack time (‘pays will be
issued at 12.15’), synchronised their watches.

  Heavy German shelling had continued to hamper Legge’s preparations throughout the day, inflicting 1521 casualties on his division by the day’s end. Legge’s 6th Brigade commander, Jack Gellibrand, estimated that two of his battalions — the 22nd and 24th — had lost 25 per cent of their strength from the shelling.4 Gellibrand, sensing the depressed mood of his troops, issued the following message: ‘It has been said that when you go out 25% of you will be killed. You will be killed if you go forward, you will be killed if you go back — It is better to be killed going forward.’ There is no record of how Gellibrand’s troops responded to his sober message, although it is difficult to imagine it motivating them.5

  Legge’s three brigades would each play a role in the attack. Gellibrand’s 6th Brigade would attack with one battalion — Goldy and Alec Raws’s fresh 23rd — in the northern sector of the battlefield, toward the Ovillers–Courcelette track. Paton’s 7th Brigade would spearhead the attack with three battalions — the 25th, 26th, and 28th — in the arc between the Ovillers–Courcelette track and the Bapaume road. Holmes’s 5th Brigade would launch a subsidiary attack south of the Bapaume road, using the 20th Battalion. Bean doubted the wisdom of allowing Paton’s brigade to lead the attack, noting in his diary that Legge had placed the troops ‘into trenches they don’t know and opposite a front they haven’t any experience of’.6

  Legge, like many commanders new to the Western Front, had little appreciation of the best artillery plan to support an attack and dutifully accepted the one presented to him by the divisional ‘artillery commanders’, making only one alteration.7 By the period of the Somme battles, artillery management had evolved into a complex science that was beyond the grasp of many infantry commanders. Artillery was divided between the division, corps, and army. Planned bombardments, like the one preceding the 2nd Division’s attack, could have a number of objectives — destroying trenches, subduing counter-barrages, protecting advancing troops, cutting wire, or deceiving the enemy. A bombardment could be a mixture of shrapnel shells to cut wire, high-explosive shells to destroy trench positions, smoke to cover the advance of troops, or gas to disorientate the enemy. Add to this the different calibres of guns, fuse types, and explosive mixtures, and it was little wonder that there seemed to be ‘a squad of mathematicians around every gun, doing sums, reading graphs, setting sights, calculating fuse lengths and getting in each others way’.8

  The plan the artillery commanders presented to Legge was for the 2nd Division’s attack to be preceded by 12 minutes of silence from midnight, followed by an intense three-minute barrage at 12.12 a.m. Legge’s alteration was to request normal fire from midnight until 12.14 a.m., followed by one minute of intense barrage. At 12.15 a.m., the barrage delivered by six Australian brigades and two British divisions would lengthen as troops moved forward.9 The final plan contrasted with the bombardment preceding the 1st Division’s attack on Pozières, which had lasted days and destroyed virtually everything; this time, planners deemed surprise to be critically important. Yet, unbeknown to the Australians, the Germans had watched them dig their jumping-off trenches and lay out their white tapes to mark the assembly areas well before the attack commenced.10

  Brigadier-General James Birch, Haig’s artillery advisor at General Headquarters, was concerned with Legge’s artillery plans. That evening, he told Haig that the 2nd Division would attack virtually without artillery because they believed that machine-gun fire could not do them much harm. Birch was referring to the original artillery plan that called for 12 minutes’ silence, possibly unaware that it had changed. Haig, somewhat uneasy about Legge’s seemingly slapdash plan, wrote in his diary: ‘The Australians are splendid fellows but very ignorant.’11

  Legge’s troops had mixed emotions about the looming attack. Some, like Charles Turner, were fatalistic. ‘Our battalion the 23rd is going into the front line of trenches tonight and making a charge upon the German trenches tomorrow,’ he recorded. ‘There is a chance that there will be a lot of us never come out of it.’12

  Fred Hocking, also of the 23rd Battalion, mocked his major, who told him: ‘There will be very few men if any in the trenches.’

  ‘Not arf,’ responded a disbelieving Hocking.13

  Twenty-one-year-old Bunbury farmer Corporal Percy Blythe wrote that every 28th Battalion man was ‘game and anxious’ and not one man doubted ‘himself or his comrade’.14

  By dusk, the artillery batteries had completed their preparatory work, and troops, including Turner, Hocking, and Blythe, had worked up to their assigned locations. They passed Holmes’s brigade, which had been in the line for the last few days. ‘Most of them were broken men: big strong fellows shook like leaves,’ noted Western Australian farmer Corporal Francis Mauger.

  Toward midnight, the battlefield, dusted with dew, remained ‘uncannily quiet’, as a German soldier reinforcing Mouquet Farm noted.15 At Gellibrand’s brigade headquarters, officers anxiously scanned the night sky, watching for flashes: a flurry of flares would mean the Germans had spotted the Australians, whereas none would suggest all was well. While his officers peered into the darkness, Gellibrand — who, Bean noted in his diary, was as ‘cool as ice’ that evening — stole short naps in his wallpapered and wood-panelled underground bunkroom.16 At 11.40 p.m. the southern part of the battlefield suddenly lit up like day — masses of red and white flares fizzed into the night sky, flowering to light before falling slowly to earth.17 Without any shelling to keep the German forward sentries in their dugouts, they observed Holmes’s 20th Battalion working toward them.

  A minute later, a bouquet of fizzing red flares shot into the sky from two places, signalling for intense German artillery support in those southern sectors. It came almost immediately: shrapnel pellets ripped through what was left of the foliage, tearing at leaves and smacking against broken trunks; machine-gun fire raked no-man’s-land, striking the Australians just a few yards from the trenches they had crawled from. ‘Pieces of shell were whizzing and humming and the ground seemed to heave as if an earthquake was on,’ remembered one soldier.18 Trench mortar crews worked frantically to silence the German machine guns, but failed.19 The 20th Battalion diary summed up the debacle: troops were disorganised and out of position, and did not get forward at all. The battalion suffered 60 casualties.20 Holmes’s subsidiary attack south of the Bapauame road had failed before the main attack at 12.15 a.m., north of the road, had even been launched.

  The light from the flares made any further advance by the 20th Battalion impossible. When the machine-gun fire subsided at about 3.00 a.m., the few survivors crawled back to their trenches, leaving their wounded stranded.

  Paton’s three fresh but untested battalions were to attack between the Ovillers–Courcelette track and the Bapaume road.21 When midnight came, Paton’s 28th Battalion troops crawled from their trenches and shell holes toward the OG lines, aiming to be closer to the German lines when the one-minute hurricane bombardment ended. Having left its trenches, Ernest Norgard’s platoon found itself under heavy artillery fire; some soldiers crawled back to the trench, about 60 yards away, to seek shelter.

  At 12.08 a.m., an alert German machine-gunner spotted the 28th Battalion’s advance, and fired at the men. Other Germans saw the Australians moving up the hill toward them, and opened up with machine guns and rifles.22 At 12.14 a.m., the firing dropped off, suppressed by the one-minute hurricane bombardment. Stretcher-bearer Private Tom Young remembered the troops continuing their uphill advance as if they were marching on a parade ground with their own shells screaming overhead and the German shells blowing them to bits. ‘The men dropped like flies, the German wire remained intact and they could go neither forward nor back,’ recalled Young.23

  Soldiers in the first waves discovered the German barbed wire uncut. Some hacked their way through using rifle butts and wire cutters, while others wrenched out the corkscrew stakes with their bare hands.
Wire snagged uniforms and flesh while the Germans sprayed them with fire. Percy Blythe sought shelter in a shell hole under the German entanglements, realising he couldn’t advance any further. He threw his bombs at the Germans, then checked on the wounded caught on the wire and tried to drag them to a safer position.

  German flares and exploding shells illuminated those hopelessly ‘hung up’ on the wire. The remaining waves of soldiers surged forward, oblivious to the problems of the first waves, leading to a bunching in no-man’s-land. 24

  Nineteen-year-old Private John Stuart, whose father had only permitted him to enlist on the condition that he served with the Red Cross, watched this hopeless spectacle unfold.25 ‘Men were dropping killed and wounded everywhere. It was sickening to hear the moans and groans of our chaps,’ recalled Stuart.26

  ‘In about 15 minutes the 28th had ceased to exist as a Battalion,’ recorded Francis Mauger, who was also caught in no-man’s-land. ‘The Germans had a perfect barrier of bursting bombs all along their wire, and in a few minutes it was all over. We never had a chance.’

  The Germans’ ability to target Australians was made easier by the seemingly insane requirement for troops to wear metallic discs between their shoulder blades, in order for observers in spotter aeroplanes to assess how far they had advanced. Commanders had reassured their men that the Germans could not see the discs.27 Private Percy Perry of the 25th Battalion was one of the many troops who begged to differ: he recorded that the German flares ‘reflected on the tins tied to their backs’, resulting in ‘dozens of machine-guns blazing into them’.28