The conflict degenerated into a war of attrition where both sides threw men and machinery into the charnel house in ever-increasing numbers. The tactics were a throwback to the mediaeval days of siege warfare. It was a bizarre clash of the time machine: where the ever more sophisticated killing machinery of the Industrial Age met the military tactics of the Napoleonic Age. As they did at the Somme in 1916, soldiers marched into the teeth of machine guns capable of firing 500 rounds a minute. It was flesh against steel, and madness: death and destruction on a hitherto unimagined scale. In a war in which an astonishing 65 million men took up arms, 37.5 million people would be killed, wounded, missing or taken prisoner.
To understand the maelstrom into which the Diggers were being thrust it’s necessary to consider the extent of the Battle of the Somme, a gigantic confrontation that would ultimately claim more than 300,000 lives and more than a million casualties. The British opened the Somme offensive on 1 July 1916 with an artillery barrage that lasted five days and threw almost two million shells against the German lines. This colossal bombardment rattled windows in London, 260 kilometres away.
The British completely overestimated the impact of their guns and grossly underestimated the strength of the sophisticated German defences. When later that day the Tommies moved across the flat, muddy no-man’s land in neat, slow-moving lines, they walked into the sights of the German machine guns, which had rapidly emerged from their purpose-built concrete bunkers. By the end of the first day, the British had suffered an astounding 57,000 casualties, with 19,000 killed, against German casualties of about 8000. Some regiments, like the Newfoundlanders, were almost completely wiped out. Drawn from a country of around 250,000 people, the Newfoundlanders’ battalion went into battle about 800-strong. The next day, 68 men answered the rollcall.
As the fighting continued on the Somme, the British lost, on average, around 2000 men each day. The British High Command had to act. They knew the Germans were drawing reinforcements from quieter areas along the front and they determined to hold them in place. One area supplying German reinforcements was around the large French industrial city of Lille, which had been in German hands from the early days of the war. British intelligence identified nine German battalions from the Lille area that had been moved to the Somme.
The British commander in the Lille area, an old-school officer named General Sir Richard Cyril Byrne Haking, was a friend of the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig. Aged 53, Haking was full of certainty and bluster. Haig liked him and called him ‘a thruster’, a commander with an attacking mindset. In reality he was a glory-seeker whose past form showed him to be cavalier with the lives of his men. In the previous six months he had twice unsuccessfully tried to take the key high ground dominating the approach to Lille at Aubers Ridge at a cost of 20,000 casualties. Haking now proposed another mad crack at the ridge – and glory. But this time he planned to use Australian lives.
Each of Haking’s previous attempts to take Aubers Ridge had suffered from poor intelligence and reconnaissance, lack of surprise, an insufficient bombardment, chaotic behind-the-lines organisation of the reinforcements and casualty evacuation, and poor and insufficient training and acclimatisation. Now, with the need to hold the Germans in the area to prevent them being sent to the Somme, he had another opportunity. Tragically, he seemed to have learned nothing from his previous defeats and he proposed a reprise. (This would not have come as a surprise to those who knew Haking. One of his contemporaries, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Philip Game – later to dismiss New South Wales Premier Jack Lang when he was the state’s governor – described Haking as ‘really impossible, untruthful and a bully and not to be trusted’.)
Such was the man into whose command the first Australians to fight on the Western Front were entrusted. When in May 1916 One Anzac Corps took over the position in front of Fromelles, just west of Lille, the sector had returned to relatively quiet normality after Haking’s recent and spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to grab the nearby high ground. Facing the Australians across no-man’s land was a Bavarian division that had held the position for more than a year and it had recently substantially strengthened its defences. On 12 July 1916, almost a fortnight after the Somme offensive commenced, the Australian 5th Division of Two Anzac Corps took over the position in front of Fromelles. Its troops had barely unbuckled their gear before they were ordered to prepare for a major assault.
In his proposals to the High Command, Haking originally suggested a ‘feint’, or diversion – an artillery barrage linked with a pretence at attacking – aimed at keeping the Germans guessing and holding them in the line, and away from the Somme. This, of course, would have exposed the Diggers to little danger. Then Haking’s plan underwent a bewildering range of transformations: it became a major advance, then was rejected; went back to an artillery demonstration; then artillery with infantry added; then it was almost cancelled before finally being hastily reinstated as an urgent full-on attack in which the Australian 5th Division, alongside the British 61st Division, was thrown against an experienced, heavily entrenched German defensive force that had held their position for more than 18 months.
The men of the Australian 5th Division comprised roughly half Gallipoli veterans and half reinforcements who had never fired a shot in anger. Not only were they inexperienced in trench warfare, they had no time to properly reconnoitre their new position. The Aussies realised they were facing a far more sophisticated enemy than they had faced at Gallipoli. The German Army was state-of-the-art, with troops who were more experienced, better equipped and better trained than the Turks. At Fromelles they occupied a heavily fortified concrete-bunker defensive system, organised in depth, which they had been constantly working on for almost two years. They held the only high ground in the region and they had reinforcements stationed within easy reach.
Today, visitors walking the battlefield at Fromelles almost 100 years after the event are struck by the sheer insanity of Haking’s plan of attack. The ground is virtually unchanged. You can clearly see where the two front lines stood. The no-man’s land that separated them is still football-field flat farmland. On the right-hand side of the Australian attacking line, the no-man’s land was about three football fields long. On the left-hand side, it gradually closed to about one field in length, around 100 metres. Not only is the ground flat and featureless, it’s also a great flood plain with a watertable only a metre below the surface. That meant the Allies could not dig normal trenches. Instead they had to create breastworks: shallow trenches with 2-or 3-metre high walls on either side made from piled sandbags. Having held their lines for so long, the Germans had created an interlinked skein of thick concrete bunker systems, set deep into the ground and drained by pumps. They contained a myriad of creature comforts and many even had electricity.
The right flank of the Australian attacking line had to deal with another deadly threat, a protrusion that poked out from the German line (in military terms, a salient) known as the Sugar Loaf, because it roughly resembled a loaf of the local bread. The Germans had sited a massive nest of machine guns on this feature – each capable of firing 500 rounds a minute, accurate to 1000 metres – and they could fire to the front and to both sides down the length of no-man’s land (known as enfilade fire). To make matters worse, the Germans could clearly see the Australian preparation for the attack from the high ground at Aubers Ridge and they began raining down artillery fire on the Australian front trenches. The Diggers’ fate was out of their hands. Charles Bean summed up their situation:
For the first time in the war an Australian attacking force was actually meeting the contingency most dreaded by commanders: its intentions had been discovered, and the enemy barrage was crashing upon its assembly position with the object of destroying the attack.
The respected commander of the 15th Brigade at Fromelles, Brigadier Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, had made representations to have the attack called off, or at least postponed so the Australians could carry out proper reconnaissa
nce. His calls were ignored. He later described Haking’s battle plan as ‘a wretched, hybrid scheme, which might well be termed a tactical abortion’.
Lieutenant John Raws, a journalist from Adelaide, waited with his mates in the trenches:
I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far. The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all often lose it – one becomes a gibbering maniac … Only the men you have trusted and believed in proved equal to it.
One or two of my friends stood splendidly, like granite rocks round which the seas rage in vain. They were all junior officers: but many other fine men broke to pieces. Everyone called it shell-shock but shell-shock [i.e. shell concussion] is very rare. What 90 per cent get is justifiable funk due to the collapse of the helm of self-control.
After enduring a seemingly endless German bombardment, followed by seven hours of their own barrage – which also caused many Australian casualties from ‘drop-shorts’, or inaccurate shots – the Diggers went over the top (or, as they called it, ‘hopped the bags’) at 5.34 pm on 19 July 1916, in full daylight on a fine French summer’s day. Sergeant Clair Whiteside later described the scene to his mother:
Well, we hugged the trenches for a few hours while the curtain raiser, the artillery duel was on. When its chief job was done, viz wire-cutting, the hour was up. The first thin line of heroes get on the parapet and make off for the opposing lines. The first lines fare the best – for the terrible machine gun is deadly once he sees the game is properly on. It looked like putting up cardboard nine-pins in a hurricane – only it was human beings who were facing up to it. A good number were wounded before the charge, but a short distance into No-Man’s Land and the grass was thick with them.
The Diggers advanced on three fronts, the 8th Brigade on the left, the 14th in the centre and the 15th on the right. Those on the right, Pompey Elliott’s 15th Brigade, attacking the Sugar Loaf, were virtually annihilated. Private Jimmy Dowling of the 57th Battalion watched horrified as he waited with the reserve battalions:
Stammering scores of machine-guns spluttered violently, drowning the noise of the cannonade. The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat, criss-cross lattice of death … hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb … Men were cut in two by streams of bullets [that] swept like whirling knives … it was the Charge of the Light Brigade once more, but more terrible, more hopeless – magnificent, but not war – a valley of death filled by somebody’s blunder.
Around 7000 Diggers attacked that day; some 5500 ended as casualties, including almost 2000 dead. The dead included 24 sets of brothers and a father and son. It was – and it remains – the worst loss of life in a single day in the nation’s history: greater than the combined losses of the Boer, the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Despite the grievous losses, the Diggers who attacked on the left side of the Australian line managed to break through the German front line and push forward into their territory. Once they got there, they saw why the enemy’s lines had held up so well against the artillery bombardment. The German front line comprised about 75 shelters, each protected by at least 20 centimetres of concrete. About 60 of these shelters emerged relatively unscathed from the barrage. About 10 metres back from the front line the Germans had constructed even more substantial shelters – with massive concrete walls, up to 6 metres underground, some with large rooms and electricity from Lille, which powered lights and pumps to hold the rising groundwater at bay.
The Diggers were then faced with an even more pressing problem: Haking’s command had misread the aerial photos of the German positions. What they thought were the second and third lines of enemy trenches were in fact waterlogged ditches. Haking had ordered the Diggers to move forward to capture these positions but he had failed to order them to secure the old German front line, now behind them. While the Australians struggled to find the non-existent German second and third lines, the enemy’s reinforcements circled behind the Diggers, reoccupied their old front trenches and trapped them. Most of the Australian officers had fallen, leading from the front in the original charges. Now the surviving troops, encircled behind the enemy lines, had to reorganise themselves under persistent, heavy fire. Ferocious hand-to-hand fighting continued deep into the night, but gradually the weight of the German numbers and steel began to take its toll and the Australians were forced to turn and fight their way through the recaptured German front line to try to make it back to their own lines. A sprinkling made it through to safety but many were killed in the attempt, and the rest – about 400, out of ammunition and faced with certain death – were forced to surrender.
The next morning, 20 July, the real cost was apparent. The 60th Battalion, part of the 15th Brigade, which had been thrown against the Sugar Loaf, went into the battle with 887 men. One officer and 106 men answered the morning rollcall. Pompey Elliott, who was with his men in the front trenches during the battle, wept openly as he greeted the survivors of his brigade. Other battalions lost 90 per cent of their fighting strength. The wounded piled up at the casualty dressing stations. The main stations processed around 3300 – at the rate of one casualty every minute for 55 hours!
Some of the greatest heroics in the battle took place during the rescue of the wounded lying in no-man’s land. Men went out scores of times trying to find their mates and many lost their lives doing it, but they saved perhaps 300 who would otherwise certainly have perished. Lieutenant Hugh Knyvett, of the 59th Battalion, later wrote about one unnamed Australian sergeant helping him to pick up a very badly wounded Digger:
When we tried to pick him up, one by the shoulders and the other by the feet, it almost seemed that we would pull him apart. The blood was gushing from his mouth, where he had bitten through his lips and tongue, so that he might not jeopardise, by groaning, the chances of some other man who was less badly wounded than he.
He begged us to put him out of his misery, but we were determined we would give him his chance, though we did not expect him to live.
But the sergeant threw himself down on the ground and made of his body a human sledge. Some others joined us and we put the wounded man on his back and dragged them thus across no-man’s-land, through the broken barbed wire and shell-torn ground, where every few inches there was a piece of jagged shell, and in and out of the shell holes.
So anxious were we to get to safety that we did not notice the condition of the man underneath until we got to our trenches; then it was hard to see which was the worse wounded of the two. The sergeant had his hands, face and body torn to ribbons, and we had never guessed it, for never once did he ask us to ‘go slow’ or ‘wait a bit’. Such is the stuff that men are made of.
The sergeant was in all likelihood Alexander Gordon Ross of the 57th Battalion, later awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his gallantry during the rescues. The recommendation for his award was signed by Pompey Elliott. More than 200 Diggers won bravery medals for their actions during the battle. One, Major Arthur Hutchinson, a young Duntroon graduate who led his men of the 58th Battalion against the Sugar Loaf ‘in the most gallant manner under appalling fire until he fell riddled with machine-gun bullets close to the German parapet’, was recommended by Elliott for a posthumous Victoria Cross. The recommendation was supported up the chain of command but inexplicably Hutchinson’s file is marked ‘no trace of award’.
The British attack on the Australians’ right also met with heavy resistance from the entrenched Germans and could not break through their front line. The British casualties totalled about 1500, around the same number as the Germans.
During the rescue period after the battle, the Germans offered a truce so each side could recover its wounded and dead from no-man’s land. While they waited for the High Command to decide on the offer, an informal truce started and both sides began leaving their trenches and bringing in their casualties. But the Australian divisional commander, Major General James Whiteside McCay, an enigmatic former Minister for Defence an
d Gallipoli veteran, refused the offer, claiming he was bound by specific orders from General Headquarters forbidding negotiations ‘of any kind, on any subject’ with the enemy.
Of course, the end of the informal truce did not mean the end of the rescue work. For days small groups and individual Diggers roamed no-man’s land searching for their mates, all the while under fire from the German lines. The work is immortalised by the superb sculpture Cobbers, by Melbourne artist Peter Corlett, in the Australian Memorial Park at Fromelles, with a replica near the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. The Cobbers statue depicts Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Simon Fraser of the 57th Battalion as he carries a wounded Digger to safety on his back. It represents one of scores rescued by Fraser. The name comes from a call Fraser heard as he worked from a wounded Digger obscured in a shellhole: ‘Don’t forget me, cobber!’ (Sadly, Fraser himself later fell at the Battle of Bullecourt and his body was never recovered.)
Once again, an Australian fighting force had been dashed against a brick wall to little ultimate effect. Charles Bean said: ‘The value of the result, if any, was tragically disproportionate to the cost.’ Indeed, the terrible toll at Fromelles didn’t even stop the Germans from moving some of their troops down to the Somme, its original aim. The Germans continued to hold the area around Fromelles for the rest of the war.
It wasn’t until the armistice on 11 November 1918, more than two years after the battle, that the Australians could recover their dead from the no-man’s land at Fromelles. Not one of the remains of 410 Diggers found there could be identified. They were buried in ten graves, each containing 41 bodies, in VC Corner Military Cemetery, near the old Australian front line. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission built a memorial wall at VC Corner containing the names of 1299 Diggers who died at Fromelles and who had no known grave.
The Spirit of the Digger Page 12