Constitutional bonds were underpinned by strong social links — 98 per cent of Australia’s population was of English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh descent.26 Its national identity was closely linked to Britain’s; many people still referred to themselves as ‘independent Australian–Britons’. Schools reinforced these close ties: in 1900, every school was provided with a Union Jack flag and a recommended ceremony for saluting it; world maps were pinned to every classroom wall, with Britain’s vast empire shaded in red; and Australians solemnly observed Empire Day each year. ‘We were encouraged to believe that we were English in all respects but born and living in Australia. The word Australian was seldom if ever used,’ recalled Donovan Joynt in his autobiography.27
Australia’s economy was also tied to Britain’s. Australia’s development largely depended upon the flow of British capital. In The Anzac Illusion, Eric Andrews explained that in the 1870s, Britain was Australia’s main trading partner, accounting for two-thirds of its exports and imports.28 The governor-general summed up the net effect of these strong links in August 1914: ‘There is indescribable enthusiasm and entire unanimity throughout Australia in support of all that tends to provide for the security of the Empire in war.’29
On 15 August 1914, Scottish-born Brigadier-General William Bridges was chosen to lead the expeditionary force of 20,000 soldiers that Cook had promised Britain. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that volunteers rushed forward to offer their services.30 By mid-September, Bridges had a full complement of soldiers, who would form the 1st Australian Infantry Division of the Australian Imperial Force.
Why did tens of thousands of men leave their jobs, families, and homes to enlist in Bridges’ expeditionary force? Were they all selflessly motivated to offer their services to the empire? Although Bridges’ men were, undoubtedly, infected by a spirit of imperial enthusiasm, Jane Ross in The Myth of the Digger suggested there were also other reasons why they enlisted: some joined because they were unemployed, and a number were excited by the opportunities for adventure. The diaries and letters of those soldiers poised to storm Pozières in July 1916 suggest that Ross’s research was accurate. For Foxcroft, soldiering offered the prospect of steadier employment than farming during the severe drought of 1914. He also expressed a patriotic desire to offer his ‘services to the empire’ to ‘fight against the Germans and her allies’. Iven Mackay and Donovan Joynt were citizen–soldiers, and so joining the expeditionary force upon the outbreak of war seemed the natural thing to do, although Joynt also recognised it as the start of a ‘stirring adventure’. Similarly, the 11th Battalion history recorded that many Outback workers from the frontier state of Western Australia downed their tools and rushed to Perth to join up, filled with a spirit of adventure.31
Gallipoli led to a surge of enlistments. Lloyd Robson said that the first enlistment period (August 1914 to June 1915) was marked by minimal official efforts to stimulate recruiting, and there was an average of 9940 enlistments per month. The second enlistment period (July 1915 to August 1916) was fuelled by recruiting drives but, more importantly, by the Gallipoli campaign, which many Australians believed was the most important event in the nation’s short history. The campaign, wistfully reported in the newspapers, appealed to the imagination of Australian men. A few months after the landing, in July 1915, monthly enlistments peaked at an all-time high of 36,575 — a significant increase on the previous peak of about 20,000, achieved in August 1914. The overall enlistments for this second period averaged 14,640 per month — a 47 per cent increase on the first. According to Ernest Scott, no Australian enlisting in 1914 and early 1915 could have predicted that nearly 60,000 of their fellow soldiers in the ‘prime of life and physical capacity were marked for death, and that 140,000 more would suffer maiming, as a consequence of what had happened at Sarajevo’.32
Why did Australians place such high importance on Gallipoli and why did it motivate thousands of men to enlist? Prior to the Great War, Australians struggled to define themselves and their place in the world. Although federation had legally linked all the colonies into one commonwealth, nothing seemed to link its disparate people. There was little in the Australians’ early history, wrote Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore, that citizens could point to with pride.33 Henry Lawson, whose rousing poetry captured the nationalist mood of Australians at the turn of the century, believed that war would be the glue to bind the colony into nationhood. He predicted in ‘The Star of Australasia’ that one day the boys in the ‘city slum’ and in the ‘home of wealth and pride’ would unite and ‘fight for it [one home] side by side’.34 Therefore, on 25 April 1915, when 48 wooden rowboats beached on what was to become known as Anzac Cove, they were not only laden with Australian troops but also with the high expectations of all Australians who sought to forge a national identity.
The nine-month Gallipoli campaign gave Australians what they sought: a ‘baptism of fire’ to crown the nation’s bloodless federation. Australia’s flag was stained with the blood of 8700 boys, and their sacrifice proved that Australia was a country worth dying for. Robert Hughes believed that Gallipoli was Australia’s equivalent of Thermopylae, while Charles Bean suggested that it contributed to Australia becoming fully conscious of itself as a nation.35 Australians gleefully drank from the Anzac chalice; the nation had finally made its spectacular debut on the world stage.
The British viewed Gallipoli differently from the Australians. For them, the evacuation and Allied casualties — 205,000 — represented an unmitigated disaster. There was no grandeur in defeat. Their international prestige took a battering because Turkey, a corrupt empire thought to be on the brink of collapse, had defeated them. Politicians lost a measure of faith in their military leaders, and tightened their rein on them. The architect of the campaign, Winston Churchill, lost his position as Lord of the Admiralty, and Ian Hamilton, commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, never held a command of any substance again. The failure contributed to the downfall of the British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, in late 1916. The British did the obligatory post-mortems, assigned blame, and then consigned the whole regretful episode to history.
Gallipoli inspired the boy who was to become my great-uncle, 14-year-old Ernie Lee, to join up. Lee’s family came from the bush town of Mossiface in Gippsland, Victoria, where his father, Herman, ran a selection called Greville Farm. For 15 years, Herman had struggled to clear the gnarly land, but it would not give. It gradually wore him down, crippling his back and breaking his spirit.
The Great War, not farming, was what interested Lee. A few weeks after the last troops evacuated Gallipoli, he bought his first pair of long pants, caught a cable tram up Swanston Street, and presented himself to the recruiting officer at Melbourne Town Hall. On 8 January 1915, Lee completed his attestation papers: he falsely recorded his name as ‘Ernest John Jeffries’ and stated that he was 18 years old, a trained mechanic, and that his parents were deceased. Lee’s papers, which are in the National Archives of Australia, reveal that he weighed only 115 pounds and was a shade over five-foot tall when he enlisted. Within months, this ‘boy–soldier’ would find himself on the Western Front alongside Gallipoli veterans.36 Like many of the soldiers who enlisted in 1915, he had little idea of what lay in store, and how dramatically the experience would change him.
Map 3. The Battlefield Between 22 July and 5 September
chapter five
Storming Pozières
‘If I fight, I win.’
— attributed to Confucius
By Saturday 22 July 1916, Hooky Walker’s 1st Division troops were prepared for what was to become the first crucial stage in the campaign for Pozières. They almost certainly knew the importance that British high command placed on gaining the village. What they could not possibly have known was how many of them would die or be maimed in the coming days in order to capture a few miles of cratered landscape, or what emotional and physical scars they would bear fo
r the rest of their lives.
The battle plan was relatively straightforward. The Anzacs would aim to seize three objectives: Pozières Trench; the light railway that sat in front of the hedges on the outskirts of the village; and the portion of the village south of the Bapaume road. The Anzacs would attack from the south-west in three staggered lines. Each line would consist of three waves of troops spaced 20 to 50 yards apart, with scouts and wire cutters in the first wave, the main attacking force in the second, and parties carrying bombs, shovels, and supplies in the third. The first line was to leave their freshly dug jumping-off trenches at 12.30 a.m.; the other two lines, positioned further back, would then leapfrog the first line at preordained times to move on to their respective objectives. A lifting barrage, which consisted of a wall of continuous shellfire that extended in range at planned intervals, would be employed to neutralise the Germans further back from Pozières Trench and to protect the advancing troops. The 48th British Division would attack from the north side of the road, hoping to capture a series of communication trenches that led to the village and intersected with K Trench. The theory was impressive, yet attacking at night and relying on numerous armies to execute a complex preparatory and lifting barrage added a significant degree of complexity to a relatively simple infantry battle plan.
By late afternoon, the final movements of Smyth’s 1st and Sinclair-MacLagan’s 3rd brigade troops were almost complete. Those responsible for seizing the first and second objectives were in the front-line area before dusk. Those responsible for capturing the third objective would begin their final ascent toward the assembly trenches after dark at 10.00 p.m.1 Paul Maze, who accompanied the first and second lines through the trenches, described the scene: ‘Everything was burnt up by the sun; the light was still very glary … The men carrying heavy loads leaned and rested against the hot parapet, wiping the sweat off their flushed faces.’2
As the troops trudged forward, the shells of the preliminary bombardment screamed overhead and hammered Pozières, prompt-ing Maze to speculate as to whether there would be anything left of the village to take. According to the Official History, the intense bombardment that he witnessed reflected British command’s determination ‘to make a certainty of Pozières this time’.3 Maze admitted to feeling apprehensive as he trudged past the ‘scarlet-faced Australians’, who had their shirt sleeves rolled up and appeared to be preparing for battle by either having tea or cleaning their rifles by sliding the breech up or down.
Maze recalled that, gradually, moist evening air replaced the relentless heat of the day, and faint dew dusted the broken ground. As the sun receded behind the hills and ‘nature sunk into a peculiar stillness’, he began to feel strangely detached from the shells rushing past and their resounding crashes upon impact. His apprehension gradually ebbed, replaced by a momentary sense of peace. He arrived at a reserve position packed with Australians awaiting the cover of darkness to proceed to their assembly positions, and remembered a soldier asking, ‘Well Captain, are you coming over with us tonight?’ He felt strangely glad to say that he was.
He continued moving through the trench. ‘Men were merely moving shadows, barging into me with their kit,’ he recalled. At one location, he observed a group attending to an officer who, upon looking too long over the parapet, had been shot through the head. It prompted Maze to assess his chances of surviving the attack. ‘I could not easily give up life,’ he concluded. It seemed too alluring and precious: ‘Its grip on me was tightening, and more than ever I wanted to live.’4
Unbeknown to the Australians shuffling through the trenches, the Germans were aware of and prepared for the midnight attack. Their intelligence had gleaned a critical advantage when a captured British soldier disclosed that Pozières was about to be stormed. Defences were bolstered; fresh troops from the 117th Division were moved in to replace the weakened Burkhardt Division and cover the vital area between Thiepval and the Bapaume road. German commanders sent notes to the front lines to stiffen the resolve of their troops. ‘Not an inch of trench must be abandoned to the enemy … and if the enemy penetrates … drive him out at once,’ read one note.5 First German Army commander Fritz von Below, who held the sector that included Pozières, sent an apocalyptic standing order stating that the enemy should have to carve its way over heaps of corpses to advance.6
As magnificent as its armies were, Germany was feeling the immense strain of fighting multiple enemies on multiple fronts. United against the Germans were the British, Russians, French, Italians, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, Portuguese, Serbs, and Belgians. By Germany’s own admission, its armies had suffered a staggering 3.1 million casualties since the war started.7 The elite divisions had wilted under the constant strain, and the reserves were not of the same fighting calibre. The Germans undoubtedly knew that if they didn’t hold their fortified positions on the Somme at locations such as Pozières, they could possibly be swept out of France and back into their homeland. Commanders, referring to the ruined villages on the Somme, forewarned their troops: ‘My boys, there you see what will happen if you let the English and French drive you back into Germany. Those villages will be your villages and towns. The misery of those old men and women and those children will be the misery of your father, mother, your wife and children.’8
The tremendous bombardment of Pozières, which reduced the village to a heap of powdered foundations, took its toll on the Germans. One soldier, who probably expressed the dread of many, wrote in a letter to his wife: ‘The Gods only know if I am writing for the last time … I have given up hope of life … to my last moment I shall think of you. There is really no possibility that we shall see each other again. Should I fall — then farewell.’9
Just after 10.00 p.m., the Germans, who had been awaiting daily the attack on Pozières, launched a precautionary barrage of high-explosive shells, shrapnel shells, and phosgene gas, aimed at disrupting the Allies’ attack preparations. It disorientated some of the battalions attempting to reach their assembly trenches. Other battalions were still short of their intended positions at 10.00 p.m., having lost their way or become entangled with neighbouring units. The disorientated 10th Battalion stumbled about aimlessly in the shadows while their guides argued among themselves; eventually, it had no other choice but to retrace its footsteps back to the starting point, and set out again. Elsewhere, 4th Battalion soldiers lost their bearings when gas shells (which, upon explosion, sounded like a paper bag bursting and had the pungent smell of crushed nettles) began falling among them. The 3rd Battalion, after wandering in the ‘outer darkness’ like ‘tourists’, managed to reach its assigned location about four hours early, at 9.00 p.m. With time to spare, the officers attempted to reorganise their attacking lines; however, constant German machine-gun fire and shelling confused the men, resulting in the lines becoming muddled. Fortunately, the shrapnel shells ‘burst high and though the pellets rattled down like hail no one was hit’, John Harris noted.10
Despite the initial confusion, the Australians gradually reached the assembly trenches, which resembled ditches freshly prepared for drainpipes, just before midnight. ‘The atmosphere became tenser,’ recalled Maze, and except for a few runners ‘threading their way through with messages, movement had completely ceased’.11 Nineteen-year-old dental apprentice Lance-Corporal Ben Champion, of the 1st Battalion, couldn’t stop urinating as he waited anxiously for the Allied barrage to begin. ‘When it did, it seemed the earth opened up with a crash,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘The ground shook and trembled … it was impossible to hear ourselves speak.’ He recounted how men crept together for protection, and no motioning from officers could make them move apart.12
Ten minutes after midnight, and 20 minutes before the Allied barrage lifted, the first line of Australians left their jumping-off trenches and crawled over the thistle tufts to within 40 yards of Pozières Trench. As the new moon peeked over the horizon, flares lit up the sky. At 12.23 a
.m., according to Douglas Horton, word passed along: ‘Five minutes to go.’ At 12.24 a.m., six minutes before the attack, a German rocket flare burst into stars, and machine guns opened fire. The increase in retaliatory fire from the Germans worried some Australian officers: had they spotted their troops crawling toward Pozières Trench? Would they now respond with a crushing bombardment? Yet, to the officers’ relief, the German fire gradually subsided to levels expected on an ordinary night — possibly because the Germans had expected the attack on Pozières to fall between 1.00 a.m. and 2.00 a.m. At 12.26 a.m., word was passed along: ‘Two minutes to go.’13
‘Exactly at the tick of 12.28 a.m.,’ recalled Sergeant Raymond Brownell, who was manning an artillery battery a few miles back in Sausage Valley, ‘we got “Action, Gun, Fire”, and all hell let loose.’14 According to the Official History, the full fire of the 1st Australian Division’s field artillery burst upon Pozières Trench. For two minutes, gunners such as Brownell fired as fast as they could load, while the troops crouching in the front line watched as Pozières Trench was illuminated by ‘a continuous band of bursting shrapnel’.15 As the Australian barrage obliterated Pozières Trench, the British 25th and 48th division batteries simultaneously fired on the north side of Pozières, and the British 34th Division and some French artillery fired on the OG lines.
Pozieres Page 7