The bombardment prevented anyone from entering or leaving the village. The exhausted Australians only received half of their daily rations. The wounded could not be transported out — ‘the stretcher-bearers are having a terrible time some blown to pieces together with their living freight,’ recorded Albert Coates in his diary.18 Telephone wires remained severed; commanders relied on runners, as well as pigeons, which shellfire sometimes shredded, to get their messages through. The dirt road leading to the village, heavily pounded and littered with dead, would later become known as Dead Man’s Road.19 ‘Many men buried or torn to pieces by the high explosives,’ noted Coates. ‘For a mile behind the trenches it is a perfect hell of shellfire.’
The troops worked hard to reconstruct their battered trenches; however, as fast as one portion of the trench was cleared, another was blown in. ‘There were no dugouts in which men on post could take shelter, and the only thing to do was grin and bear it,’ recorded John Harris.20 Owen Howell-Price, Harris’s commanding officer, paced up and down the trench line, continually cajoling his men whenever the shelling eased to dig deeper trenches. Perhaps the weary troops wondered whether they were digging their own graves.
All British artillery attempts to counter the German barrage failed. An aeroplane sent up mid-morning tried to direct British counter-barrage fire, but the German guns didn’t let up. At 7.00 p.m., II British Corps fired a paltry handful of shells into Courcelette. ‘Our artillery is not replying,’ observed one British gunner in despair, as he watched the plumes of smoke and spurts of fire leaping into the air from the ruins of Pozières.21
Eventually, the shelling on Pozières slackened. The 3rd Battalion history recorded that half its troops in the front and support lines had been killed or wounded, while the survivors were parched and exhausted.22 Foxcroft’s platoon had been hit hard: ‘What was left of us hung on until 5 p.m. when B Company relieved us … We went back to support lines and mustered 13 men out of a platoon of 60.’23 According to Bean’s tally of casualties, almost 2000 Australians had been killed, wounded, or captured in the fighting of the previous two days. The 2nd and 11th battalions suffered most, losing almost 1000 men.24 The 11th Battalion history, Legs-eleven, summed up the collective experience of its troops, and possibly all Australians — it asserted that Pozières on 24 July ‘was certainly the world’s most frightful spot that day’.25 What the Australians didn’t realise was that the next day would be much worse.
When Hooky’s troops awoke to their second dawn in Pozières — the sun slowly rising above the horizon to replace the dull first light — they had no premonition of what they would confront over the next 24 hours. They didn’t realise they would be expected to attack the OG lines on the Pozières ridge in the early hours of Tuesday 25 July and that the Germans were planning their own counterattack to recapture the village at 4.30 p.m. the following day.
On 24 July, preparations for the Australian attack continued throughout the day and into the evening. Just before dusk, the British and Australian heavy batteries had methodically shelled the OG lines.26 As the German bombardment had prevented them from digging jumping-off trenches, they would have to rely on a solitary line of white tape to mark the jumping-off points. The engineers responsible for laying the tapes, unnerved by the heavy shelling, had positioned the last portion of the tape obliquely to the OG lines, rather than square on.27 This meant that those troops starting out from the mislaid tape risked advancing across the battlefield rather than directly toward the OG lines.
The first attack, south of the Bapaume road, would start at 2.00 a.m. Two companies of Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Jess’s Victorian 7th Battalion would advance in the arc between the Bapaume road and the old light railway; Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Le Maistre’s Victorian 5th Battalion would advance in the arc between the railway and Pozières Trench, while the 10th Battalion would protect and bomb up Le Maistre’s right flank.
By 10.00 p.m., darkness shrouded the battlefield. At 12.00 a.m., Jess’s 7th Battalion was supposed to move up to the assembly area; however, one company got caught behind the 5th Battalion troops, who were sharing the same approach. Subsequently, only one of Jess’s platoons — fewer than 60 men — made it to their attacking position between the road and railway line.
When the British hurricane bombardment lengthened from OG1 to OG2 at about 2.00 a.m., the first waves of Le Maistre’s 5th and Jess’s depleted 7th battalions advanced. ‘Rallying round their officers,’ recorded the 5th Battalion history, ‘the men sought the enemy in all directions, much to the danger of their comrades.’28
Within minutes, it became obvious that Jess’s plan was in disarray. The Germans responded to the Australian advance with a counter-bombardment. Machine guns opened up with fierce crossfire, which meant that the Australians were targeted by guns positioned on their flanks. These well-placed guns laid down interlocking fields of fire and inflicted many casualties on the advancing troops.29
Twenty-year-old Private Vincent Keane of the 7th Battalion sensed that things were going badly when he came across a sergeant standing still in no-man’s-land, seemingly oblivious to the bombardment.
‘What are you doing?’ yelled Keane.
‘Keep quiet,’ the sergeant shouted back. ‘I’m thinking things out.’30
While the sergeant thought, troops struggled across the cratered ground. George Londey of the 5th Battalion remembered dozens of flares going up from the German lines, and intense machine-gun fire. ‘Our artillery kept a screen of fire in front of us but owing to having a very hazy idea of the direction we were to take and the distance to go I think some of us ran under our own shellfire for a while,’ he recorded in his diary.31 Some soldiers got lost in the darkness, while others advanced across the battlefield rather than directly toward the OG lines. ‘There was a moment of wild confusion in which the line split into groups, each searching for [OG1], some making south-east, others north-east,’ Londey noted. Those who eventually stumbled on OG1 discovered that shelling had demolished the trench; all that remained was a series of linked shell holes littered with abandoned equipment.
One company of the 7th Battalion got lost in the darkness. Shaken by the deafening noise of exploding shells, they inadvertently advanced toward Pozières rather than the OG lines. Eventually, Private William Peach’s company came across a trench and captured it. ‘We were greatly surprised when B Company charged us a few minutes later with bayonets fixed,’ Peach noted. It was their own communication trench. ‘Lucky we got them to understand things and both companies set out in search of the enemy.’32
The German shelling and machine-gun fire pinned Jess’s lone platoon down well short of the OG lines, leaving Le Maistre’s northern flank exposed. Meanwhile, some of Le Maistre’s troops had stumbled through to OG2, while the Germans were still holding sections of OG1. Twenty-six-year-old Private Eric Moorhead of Malvern, Victoria, was one of Le Maistre’s soldiers groping about in the darkness. He wrote in his diary that there was confusion, disorder, and a lack of discipline; officers argued about what to do: ‘Orders were given to two companies to hold and consolidate the trench — two officers to get on and take the next.’ Moorhead claimed that a drunken officer gave the order to continue onto OG2, which was nothing more than debris-filled furrows along a line of splintered trees.33
Meanwhile, the Germans had infiltrated OG1, where only a handful of Australians remained. Captain Cyril Lillie made the decision to evacuate OG2 and retake OG1. Fortunately, those soldiers who risked being cut off discovered a communication trench linking the OG trenches, and worked their way back to OG1, unsighted by the Germans. ‘We were ordered to cease digging in,’ recorded Moorhead. ‘We then retired to our first line of captured trench, all our work being wasted.’
The wounded had to be left behind — ‘All I could do was to leave water bottles in their reach,’ remembered Londey.34 A party later returned and tried to rescue the men. ‘The horrifyin
g part is that not all the men were brought in and are out there still unless the Huns found them,’ recorded Londey the next morning. ‘Poor old Ruggles must be out there still. It is worrying me every moment.’ Unbeknown to Londey, his mate, Private Charles Ruggles, was dead.
The 5th Battalion tried to hold OG1, rather than withdraw, while both sides furiously pitched bombs at each other in a desperate battle for control. The Germans were able to work their way up on the Australians’ flanks. The Australians responded by cobbling together barricades with anything they could get their hands on, in the hope of slowing them down. Despite ‘the dead and dying and wounded, the smell of blood and explosives’, as George Londey described it, the 5th Battalion clung onto the position.
Sinclair-MacLagan reinforced Le Maistre’s beleaguered 5th Battalion with 7th and 9th battalion units, who ferried boxes of bombs forward so the surrounded soldiers could continue fighting. In support, riflemen and Lewis gunners trained their guns on the OG lines and fired at the Germans whenever they raised themselves to throw their bombs — in some cases, severing their outstretched arms.35
By 8.00 a.m. on 25 July, the 5th Battalion troops had secured a section of OG1 between the road and the railway line. It represented about a quarter of their intended objective, and provided no tactical advantage. Holding the isolated section of trench would cost lives.
The second attack, north of the Bapaume road, was timed to start at 3.30 a.m. on 25 July. As planned, prior to the attack and sometime after midnight the 12th Battalion left the relative safety of the village to dig posts in no-man’s-land, but were caught in a torrent of crossfire directed at the attacking battalions on the south side of the road. Trapped in the open, they had no choice but to withdraw.36 The Western Australian 11th Battalion, one of the units responsible for attacking to the north of the Bapaume road, suffered a shattering blow as it approached Pozières from the relative safety of the British lines. Legs-eleven explained that as the troops moved through the village, some men fell from unexpected rifle fire coming from their rear. They fired back wildly into the darkness. As the light gradually improved, Lewis gun officer Lieutenant Louis Le Nay began to peer through his field glasses toward the enemy. Something seemed wrong: in the grey of daybreak the uniforms looked remarkably like their own, even down to the red-and-white unit badges on their tunics. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop firing. They’re our own chaps!’ yelled Le Nay. The ceasefire whistle sounded, and the shooting stopped abruptly. The soldiers threw their rifles down in disgust, but bodies lay everywhere. Some 11th Battalion troops cursed, others stood quietly in disbelief, and others abused those they thought responsible for the death of 14 comrades.
Following the incident, the 11th Battalion troops struggled to describe their feelings. Captain Walter Belford commented: ‘[S]ome boys were so shocked by this mistake that war, which up to this time had been a kind of game, even if a deadly one, ceased to interest them.’ Others blamed the tragedy on staff officers, who were responsible for the organisation of battle activity.37 The Official History attributed it to the officers being unaware of neighbouring units’ orders due to the damage to communication wires.38 Understandably, the soldiers lost a measure of confidence in the ‘brass hats’.
Brigadier-General Nevill ‘Sphinx’ Smyth commanded the five battalions responsible for taking the OG lines north of the Bapaume road. He’d received a rough outline of orders earlier in the day, telling him to attack the following day, Wednesday 26 July.39 Divisional staff communicated the correct orders to him at about midnight. He recalled his officers, who had been dismissed some time earlier. Lieutenant-Colonel Iven Mackay remembered Smyth, in the dim light, calmly dictating new orders to a small crowd of battalion and company commanders. He remembered them listening intently, many with unlit cigarettes pursed on their lips. Smyth’s cool composure amazed Mackay: he was ‘not too upset by the emergency’.40 When Smyth finished, the officers scrambled away and roused their sleeping men.
The main objective for Smyth’s troops was K Trench, which ran along the forward edge of the village and on to Mouquet Farm. Belatedly, at 3.55 a.m., the lead companies of Mackay’s 4th Battalion worked their way down the winding trench, flushing the Germans out into the open country. Apcar de Vine recalled that the trench was captured as far as the cemetery. ‘Many Germans hid in the shellholes, which provided excellent targets for our machine guns and snipers,’ he wrote in his diary.41 The Official History noted that many Germans, finding their way out of K Trench barred, tried to surrender. The Australians, realising that managing hundreds of prisoners while in the midst of battle would be dangerous, continued to fire. It was another example of the practicalities of the battlefield taking precedence over moral or legal obligations to show mercy to surrendering or unarmed enemy soldiers.
A group of Australians, led by Sergeant-Major Frank Goodwin, a farmer from Geelong, managed to push up the trench for about a mile. In the grey of dawn, they crossed a slight rise and found themselves standing upon the ruins of the soon-to-be-famous Mouquet Farm.42
At dawn, the full extent of the failure became clear. Yet who was to blame? Could Le Maistre have halted the attack south of the road if he had been made aware of the 7th Battalion’s chaotic preparations? Would the result have been different if Smyth had received the correct orders earlier? Why were the 11th and 8th battalions unaware of each other’s movements?
What lay at the heart of the failure was poor communication. Despite the technological advances of this war — aeroplanes, machine guns, and new forms of artillery — communication methods remained antiquated. Commanders often couldn’t contact their artillery, troops, or fellow commanders during an attack because bombardments cut the telephone wires, even though they were buried up to six feet underground. Runners were unreliable and slow to cover the cratered ground; sometimes they got lost or were cut down by shells. Signalling aeroplanes depended on clear weather and an experienced signaller being on hand. If communication couldn’t be guaranteed, it became impossible to coordinate multiple battalions and synchronise their movements with artillery units.43
Without the immediacy of telephone communication, com-manders often received cryptic messages from runners that were hours old and out of date. They had to carefully assess the scant information they received. Was it still relevant? Had circumstances on the battlefield changed? Could the sender be trusted to interpret events accurately?
The Australians attacked at night to minimise casualties and catch the Germans off guard. Yet this tactic had drawbacks: troops were often exhausted during the attack, sometimes going without sleep for 48 hours beforehand; they were easily confused and disorientated in the darkness, which contributed to the 8th and 11th battalions firing on each other; and it was hard for them to distinguish objectives, as evidenced by Le Maistre’s 5th Battalion unwittingly passing through the partly demolished OG1 trench.
The small Allied foothold in OG1 provided no tactical advantage and would needlessly chew up lives as long as the Australians clung to it. The 1st Division had expended most of its reserves; those unscathed were exhausted and incapable of mounting another attack. The weakened division was susceptible to counterattack. Luckily, the Germans’ planned 4.30 p.m. attack would be, according to Bean, ‘more or less shattered’ by its own disasters.44
Hooky Walker, in his detailed report to corps headquarters, avoided referring to the attack as a failure:
I would like to bring to notice the spirit of initiative shown by all subordinate commanders from brigadiers to platoon leaders and the gallantry and tenacity of the troops throughout the whole of the protracted and trying exercise.45
He appended to the report an itemised list of so-called trophies that the division had captured, including prisoners, right down to spare parts and toolboxes. These ‘trophies’ provided little consolation for the enormous losses of life.
Just after daybreak on Tuesday 25 July, the Germans opened up
with a bombardment that was heavier than the previous day’s. Sergeant Leonard Elvin of the 1st Battalion wrote in his diary that it was ‘simply murder’, with shells ‘falling like hail during a storm’.46 An exhausted Arthur Foxcroft tried to get rest for an hour or two, but was afraid to go to sleep for fear of being buried by shells. ‘Wounded lying all along the trench waiting to be taken in. Could not tell whether they were alive or dead,’ he recorded.47
At about 10.00 a.m., and again at 1.00 p.m., the shellfire eased for a short period. During the first interval, units of General John Forsyth’s 2nd Brigade — which had been largely held in reserve, providing carrying parties in support of the other brigades — began to take over positions in and around Pozières from troops of the 1st and 3rd brigades.48 Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon Bennett, the 29-year-old commander of the relieving 6th Battalion, reconnoitred his new position under the heavy bombardment before leading his men forward. ‘I moved into Hell itself,’ he recorded.
Bennett selected a line of defence. He knew he couldn’t bring the battalion through the barrage without heavy losses. ‘I prayed most earnestly to the Almighty for His Guidance,’ he recalled. Then, suddenly, the shelling stopped, and most of his men got through to Pozières.49 Yet the last platoon found themselves caught in the open when the bombardment recommenced; over 20 men were lost within a few minutes. The platoon’s commander, Second-Lieutenant Henry Eggington, was left with a portion of his intestine hanging out. ‘The Medical Officer quickly effected temporary repairs and sent him back to hospital with little or no chance of recovery,’ the lieutenant-colonel noted.50 Luck, or some form of divine intervention, seemed to favour Bennett, yet Eggington did not share in this. He survived, but became an invalid and lived out his days on a pension of four pounds a week.51
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