By the end of the year Indian troops were shivering on the damp and chilly fields of Flanders. The Australian Imperial Force of one division and a brigade, supported by New Zealand troops, had sailed for Egypt. Canadians were beginning to arrive in England and France. And a white South Africa brigade was training in Cape Town.
The newly formed Australian and New Zealand Corps, the Anzacs, saw their first action when they landed with British troops on the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915, following the failure of the British and French navies to ‘force the Dardanelles’ and capture Constantinople (Istanbul), the Ottoman Turkish capital. Lord Kitchener personally appointed the commander of the expedition, General Sir Ian Hamilton, who was given a single small folder of intelligence papers and orders to plan an amphibious operation, and was told to be ready in just a few weeks. Unsurprisingly, the amphibious landings were ill-conceived and poorly executed. The men had not trained for landing on a hostile shore and the Turks fought bitterly to defend even this remote corner of their homeland. Overall Hamilton proved weak and indecisive. For months, a form of trench warfare bogged down tens of thousands of Anzac and British troops in stalemate. With summer came heat, endless flies and endemic dysentery. Losses mounted to horrifying levels.
Additional landings at Suvla Bay in August met little opposition but their commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, failed to press his advantage. On the afternoon of the landings, officers were seen having a swim off the beach while Stopford took a nap. By the time they moved forward the Turks had arrived in large numbers and the result was stalemate again. Stopford was sent home.
So intense was the fighting that by the end of the year practically every man leaving the peninsula was found to be suffering from shell shock, ‘whether he was supposed to be fit or not’. A physician noted that ‘Very few could hold their hands out without shaking.’1 In December, it was decided the campaign was lost and over a period of weeks the remaining men were evacuated. This was the only successful operation in the entire campaign. Total Allied losses amounted to 132,000, of whom 25,700 were Australians and 7,100 New Zealanders.
The Anzac troops’ blood sacrifice nevertheless began to generate a new sense of pride in these young countries at the beginning of their journey towards becoming mature and independent nations. Their bravery was largely defined in reaction to British leadership. In Anzac eyes, the incompetence of the blimpish British generals played a large part in shaping the myth of their ‘glorious defeat’. Moreover, the Anzac units were not so class-oriented as their British counterparts and enjoyed less formal military discipline. Officers were not always addressed as ‘Sir’. Sometimes men referred to each other by their Christian names.2 The Australians thought British officers were aloof, stiff and too obsessed with discipline. Conversely British officers never doubted that Australians were good fighters, but were constantly shocked by their uncouth behaviour, sloppy dress and lack of deference. They thought the Australians were rowdy, crude and undisciplined.
The effect in Australia of the news of such losses and setbacks had been to galvanise recruitment. Even with the restrictions imposed by military censorship, the limitations of distance and the spread of rumours, Australians could tell the war was not going well. In the eight months after the Gallipoli landings, more than 120,000 volunteers came forward. When the dynamic William Morris Hughes became Prime Minister, the war effort intensified. A new force was gathered in Egypt to train and to defend the Suez Canal from an expected Turkish assault. In March 1916, the first of five Australian divisions and one from New Zealand sailed for France, where the demand for men was growing weekly. As they arrived in Marseilles, a young Australian chaplain preached to the men, saying, ‘We know what we have come for and we know that it is right. We have all read of the things that happened in France. We know that the Germans invaded a peaceful country and brought these horrors into it … We came of our own free wills – to say that this sort of thing shall not happen in the world as long as we are in it … With our dear ones behind, and God above, and our friends on each side, and only the enemy in front – what more do we wish than that.’3 It was a great rallying cry. The Australians were coming.
On 1 July 1916, only one set of troops in Fourth Army to go over the top had not been of Anglo-Irish origin. These were the Newfoundlanders, who sustained one of the day’s highest casualty rates.4 Another unit from the Dominions, the South African Brigade, had ‘covered themselves with glory’ from 15 to 20 July in the struggle to take Delville Wood.5 Now it was the turn of the Australians. In April the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions, veterans from Gallipoli, had been assigned to a quiet section of the front near Armentières where they were involved in extensive trench raiding. From this they gained useful experience of trench fighting in France. In July they were sent south to the Somme sector to await their entry into the battle raging there.
Meanwhile, the newly arrived 5th Australian Division was involved in a disastrous action at Fromelles on 19 July, intended as a diversionary operation to draw German reinforcements from the Somme front. Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Haking, commander of XI Corps, enthusiastically supported a plan to attack across waterlogged Flanders countryside against well-defended German lines. The Germans watched the detailed preparations for the assault from an observation post on the top of nearby Aubers Ridge. After a heavy bombardment, the Australians and British troops from 61st Division went forward during the evening. It was horribly reminiscent of 1 July. The artillery had not done enough damage to the enemy lines, so defensive machine gun and artillery fire poured down upon the advancing troops. As the Official History put it, the inability of the artillery to ‘reduce the defenders to a state of collapse before the assault’ meant that ‘the infantry, advancing in broad daylight, paid the price.’6 In places men reached the German lines and overpowered enemy resistance. But, as on 1 July, they could not hold on to these gains and either withdrew or were killed. On the next morning the assault was cancelled.
The Australians suffered 5,333 casualties in the single night of 19–20 July, equivalent to the total Australian casualties in the Boer War, the Korean War and the war in Vietnam combined. The Australian War Memorial has called it not just the worst 24 hours in Australian military history but ‘the worst 24 hours in Australia’s entire history’.7 Fromelles was a ghastly failure, succeeding only in further undermining Australian faith in British generals. The fiasco gained additional poignancy when in 2008 battlefield archaeologists discovered a mass grave dug by the Germans that contained the remains of 250 Australian and British soldiers. About half of the bodies were identified from personal artefacts and DNA evidence, and they were all reburied in the Pheasant Wood Military Cemetery at Fromelles.8
At the same time as the Fromelles disaster, in mid-July, the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions were added to Gough’s Reserve Army (later to be called Fifth Army). Gough had taken over from Rawlinson the responsibility for an assault on Pozières. Before the war the village had been a small agricultural community consisting of a few farms and orchards, and it was of little interest except for its position at the highest point of the Thiepval ridge. In July 1916 it was an outpost of the German second defensive line. The Albert–Bapaume road went through the middle of the village. Three hundred yards further up the road lay the ruins of a windmill that stood at the crest of the ridge. This commanding position looked north towards Thiepval, which had not been captured on 1 July and still remained firmly in German hands, and south towards Bazentin-le-Petit and the woods over which the two sides were still fighting bitterly. Control of Pozières would offer the opportunity to advance behind the German lines either to the north or south. By means of four assaults the British line inched closer to Pozières and the artillery pounded the village into a pile of rubble.
Gough, ever impatient to move forward, summoned General Walker, commander of the 1st Australian Division, to his headquarters on 18 July. Walker and his men had only just arrived in the Somme region, but Goug
h told him, ‘I want you to go into the line and attack Pozières tomorrow night!’9 Walker pleaded for a delay but ordered his men immediately to begin to march the twelve miles to the front; this itself took a couple of days. The Australians were wide eyed as they clambered across congested trenches still piled high with unburied German and British dead. They came under attack from a new kind of shell that did not explode on landing but gave off a gentle, aromatic, grassy smell. The Australians thought the shells were duds until they realised they contained a new poison gas named phosgene. Ten times more toxic than chlorine gas, which had been in use for more than a year, phosgene did not always have an immediate effect and sometimes it was only after several hours that a victim developed symptoms which started with a burning sensation in the eyes, progressed to vomiting and nausea and led to a slow process of suffocation. It was a terrible weapon to come up against and the use of phosgene marked a deadly escalation in chemical warfare.
The Australians eventually got into position to the south of Pozières. Despite their ghastly march to the front they were supremely optimistic. Lance Corporal Horton later summed up the anxious but confident mood: ‘though every hour brought more certainly before us the uncertainty of the future, yet this new realization of the instability of existence once over the top did not lessen our desire to make good or shake our knowledge of the fact that absolute success would be ours. All it conveyed was this: on the morrow when the success had been attained, some of us would not be there. It did not affect our will to do or die. It did not detract one iota from the dash of the charge. It simply gave us knowledge and new thoughts – that was all.’10
Inspecting Australian troops earlier, Sir Douglas Haig had picked up on their high morale. He had written, ‘The men were looking splendid, fine physique, very hard and determined-looking … The Australians are mad keen to kill Germans and to start doing it at once!’11 According to the Australian Official History the men waiting to attack were the best Australia had to offer. ‘In physique and morale they were not surpassed.’12 Now they wanted to show everyone, the British just as much as the Germans, what they were capable of.
The Australian assault at Pozières formed the left wing of what was to be the third major offensive of the Somme campaign. Six divisions drew up to attack in a line running south-east from the Australians’ position: at Bazentin-le-Petit, at High Wood, which had been reoccupied by the Germans after the cavalry were withdrawn, at Delville Wood, and at Guillemont, near where the British lines adjoined those of the French. It was hoped that the French would join the attack also but they pulled out, saying they were not ready. A makeshift artillery barrage was quickly organised and on the evening of 22 July, before the moon had come up, the guns opened fire along the German front. In the Australian lines, an officer recorded in his diary, ‘we saw the skyline simply alive with light. Flashes like summer lightning were quite continuous, making one flickering band of light, but this was away in the east behind Fricourt and Montauban. Clearly the British were doing something there. Every now and then a low lurid red flush, very angry, lit the horizon.’13 The Australians were new to the great barrages of the Western Front and like everyone who had witnessed such a sight before them, they were suitably impressed.
Soon after midnight, on Sunday 23 July, following a hurricane artillery bombardment of only two minutes, the Australians advanced and soon overpowered the few Germans left in their front line. The second wave went forward and despite the growing German artillery fire now pouring down on them, quickly advanced further to occupy most of what remained of Pozières, to the south of the main road. The Australians then began a process of what they called ‘ratting’, throwing phosphorus bombs into the German dugouts and killing or capturing the survivors as they came up. They then moved forward to the main German line, just beyond the village at the windmill. Here they met much more stubborn resistance. As dawn came up, however, the Australians had captured most of Pozières, firmly entrenched their position and had brought up Vickers machine guns. The Germans mounted a series of spirited counter-attacks, but they were fought off and suffered heavy losses.
Too hastily organised, the British attack on the Australian right was a failure. Battalion officers had not had time to carry out recces and the artillery had once again been spread too thinly. It seemed that the lessons of the successful assault on 14 July had been forgotten already. British troops failed to take an inch of ground. After the previous success this was a bitter disappointment to their commanders. The battle would continue in a series of piecemeal assaults, to straighten the line or to take out a German strongpoint, and the struggle for the woods that could have been taken in early July carried on, clocking up heavy losses. The British failure on the night of 23–24 July made the Australian capture of Pozières look even more impressive and the commander of the adjoining British division sent a message to the Australians saying his men were proud to be fighting alongside them.
Within a few days the Australian 1st Division completed its capture of Pozières village, but the main German line running through the windmill remained unattainable. By now the men of the 1st Australian Division were exhausted, having fought day and night for more than seventy-two hours.
At this point a new German commander arrived opposite the Pozières sector. General Max von Boehn and his XI Reserve Corps relieved General von Arnim’s IV Corps. Boehn had been at Verdun and his was one of several corps transferred to the Somme. That the Somme was beginning to relieve pressure on the French at Verdun was a sign that at least one of the objectives of the battle had been achieved. After the defeat of the infantry counter-attacks, Boehn decided to change tactics and called for a massive artillery bombardment on Pozières to make the Australian positions impossible to maintain. The battle now entered a new phase. The Australians continued to mount assaults, trying to take advantage of their control of the high ground. But the intense and continuous artillery bombardment slowly began to break their spirit.
At first, the Australians were blasé about the barrage and took a cocky attitude towards enemy shell fire. So as to impress their mates, men carrying food or supplies to the front past their fellow soldiers would not duck or even turn their heads when a shell landed nearby. Stretcher bearers would carry on helping the wounded regardless of incoming shells. If they judged the risk was worth taking, the men would carry on without flinching. ‘Give it a go’ became their catchphrase, expressing the attitude they wanted to portray.14 But it was impossible to sustain such an approach for long against one of the heaviest bombardments yet put down by the German artillery. Slowly even the tough and confident Australians started to succumb. A sergeant in the 4th New South Wales Battalion wrote in his diary under a barrage from 5.9-inch howitzers, ‘Sitting down under heavy High Explosive shellfire is … very nerve shattering.’15
The first cases of shell shock began to appear. Major Rowlands of the 2nd New South Wales Battalion reported ‘eight men with shell shock praying to be paraded before the doctor’. One of the battalion’s company commanders went down with a bad case of shell shock, while in the adjoining battalion ‘nearly everyone has been buried at least once and we are kept busy digging ourselves out of the blown-down trench.’ The German shells continued to rain down, and Captain Harris of the 3rd New South Wales Battalion wrote: ‘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 to grin and bear it … The bombardment lasted all day. And during its worst period four shells a minute were falling in or near the company’s sector … The wounded were so many that the stretcher bearers, who were working like heroes, could not get them away. The men who were not wounded were kept busy digging out men who were buried alive by the explosions caving in the trench sides.’16 All the conditions that made for a high incidence of shell shock were present. The constant whine of the shells, the temptation to guess what each shell was and speculate as to where it would fall, combined to cause
intense strain on the nerves – especially in those who had been buried by a previous shell and pulled out by their mates.
As Pozières marked the only area where, at the end of July, the Allies were gaining ground, the fighting here grew in intensity. General Fritz von Below, a tough Prussian, commander of the German Second Army on the Somme, announced that any officer who surrendered a trench would be court-martialled. Few proud German officers wanted to suffer this ignominy. But attempted counter-attacks failed, with heavy losses, and for the first time the commanding officers of German divisions that had failed to recapture lost ground were sent home in disgrace, as in the British army.
However, the Germans maintained their artillery bombardment. On 25 July it was even heavier than on the day before. An Australian officer reported that ‘one shell merely filled up the hole the last shell made’, while Colonel Elliott of the 12th South and West Australia and Tasmania Battalion described the shelling as ‘the worst we ever suffered.’ He would serve with the battalion for the rest of the war, yet as he wrote, ‘Later we experienced many hurricane bombardments lasting half an hour or more of far greater intensity, but I do not remember any other so severe for such a long time.’17
This was one of the rare occasions when the medical services kept a detailed note of those reported wounded and those who were suffering from shell shock. On 24 July, 29 per cent of all wounded were evacuated because of shell shock; on 25 July it was 22 per cent; on 26 July 24 per cent. These were some of the highest percentages recorded during the Battle of the Somme.18 The Australian Official History stated that in addition to those officially evacuated with shell shock, a ‘large number’ of the remainder who had come through without seeking medical attention had suffered ‘effects which in peacetime would be diagnosed as “nervous breakdown”.’19
On the night of 26 July, the 1st Australian Division was finally withdrawn from the line having lost more than 5,200 men. An Australian sergeant who saw the men as they filed back through Albert thought even the survivors appeared shell-shocked. He wrote, ‘They looked like men who had been in Hell. Almost without exception, each man looked drawn and haggard, and so dazed that they appeared to be walking in a dream, and their eyes looked glassy and starey … I have never seen men quite so shaken up as these.’20
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