The 2nd Australian Division now replaced the 1st. They had to endure the same intensity of shell fire. Haig told Gough to keep a close eye on these new Australian troops. He was beginning to find some of the Australian commanders a touch arrogant and wrote in his diary that some of their generals ‘are so ignorant and (like many Colonials) so conceited, that they cannot be trusted [to work out proper plans of attack]’.21 However, Major-General Legge, commander of the 2nd Australian Division, was rushed into launching a series of offensives and the division suffered heavy losses for minimal gain. German observers at the windmill still had a clear view of the Australian and British lines and could watch the preparations for every assault as they were made.
Haig called for ‘methodical progress’ along this stretch of the front, by which he meant a series of relatively small-scale but continuous assaults, advancing from Pozières north to Mouquet Farm in order to seize control of the heights of the ridge, wear down the enemy and draw in his reserves.22 After one such failed assault on 28 July, parties were sent into No Man’s Land at night to dig jumping-off trenches three feet deep in preparation for the next attack, known as saps. Each man in the entrenching party was to dig two yards of trench. It sounded simple enough to a staff officer in brigade headquarters a couple of miles behind the front. But for men who had spent all day under shell fire, living in an atmosphere that reeked in the heat of long summer days with the foul smell of decaying bodies, these night-time trench-digging parties could be appalling. The Germans often mistook them in the darkness for an actual assault and brought down on them a further barrage of fire.
On the night of 31 July, 200 men of the 23rd Victoria Battalion were ordered to dig a sap in No Man’s Land that would be used as a jumping-off point for an assault planned the following night. In the party, leading his platoon, was Lieutenant John Alexander Raws. Aged thirty-three and a well-known sportsman in Australia, Raws was an excellent cricketer and a tennis champion who frequently played for the state of Victoria. He had also been a journalist on the Melbourne Argus before the war. He left a vivid account of the effect of being under constant enemy shell fire while trying to carry out their task. ‘We do all our fighting and moving at night, and the confusion of passing through a barrage of enemy shells in the dark is pretty appalling … We went in single file along narrow communication trenches. We were shelled all the way up, but got absolute hell when passing through a particularly heavy curtain of fire which the enemy were playing on the ruined village [Pozières].’
Raws and his group finally joined the digging party in No Man’s Land, only to find that ‘Our leader was shot and the strain had sent two other officers mad.’ Raws and another officer took command and the party began digging the sap. At the approach of dawn he led the men back on another journey through hell. ‘I was buried twice and thrown down several times – buried with dead and dying. The ground was covered with bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation and I would, after struggling free from the earth, pick up a body by me to try to lift him out with me, and find him a decayed corpse. I pulled a head off – was covered with blood. The horror was indescribable. In the dim misty light of dawn I collected about 50 men and sent them off, mad with terror, on the right track for home.’
Raws summed up the state of his own strained nerves: ‘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 – courage does not count here. It is all nerve – once that goes one becomes a gibbering maniac. The noise of our own guns, the enemy’s shells, and getting lost in the darkness … Only the men you would have trusted and believed in before proved equal to it. One or two of my friends stood splendidly, like granite rocks round which the seas stormed in vain. They were all junior officers; but many other fine men broke to pieces. Everyone called it shell shock, but shell shock is very rare. What 90% get is justifiable funk, due to the collapse of the helm – of self control.’
Raws continued: ‘We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless … I have one puttee, a dead man’s helmet, another dead man’s gas protector, a dead man’s bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood, and partly spattered with a comrade’s brains … The sad part is that one can see no end of this. If we live tonight, we have to go through tomorrow night, and next week and next month. Poor wounded devils you meet on the stretchers are laughing with glee. One cannot blame them. They are getting out of this.’23 Raws did survive for a few more nights but was killed in action three weeks later on 23 August.
But his work and that of the other trench-digging parties had not been in vain. At 9.15 p.m. on the night of 4 August, after a three-minute bombardment, the Australians left their jumping-off points about 200 yards from the enemy forward trench. They rushed the German lines and took control before most of the defenders had emerged from their dugouts – in this case decisively winning the ‘race for the parapet’. During the night they finally captured the windmill and took control of the Pozières heights. They captured 500 prisoners and fought off a German counter-attack at dawn. By mid-morning, from this position the Allies had been fighting for since the beginning of July, the Australians could look down the slope of the ridge right across the German positions from Courcelette to Mouquet Farm and Thiepval.
As if to congratulate them, the German gunners laid down an even fiercer salvo of fire on the positions they had just captured. The men of the 2nd Division, utterly exhausted after a week of fighting by day and night, were replaced by the 4th Australian Division. During a major counter-attack on 7 August the Australian line buckled. Lieutenant Albert Jacka of the 14th Victoria Battalion led his men behind a party of German troops who had advanced over the trench in which he was sheltering. Rallying a small group around him, Jacka fought a furious encounter using bombs, bayonets and rifles, and eventually overpowered the Germans, all of whom were killed or finally surrendered. Jacka had already won a VC at Gallipoli, and the Australian Official History described the action of 7 August as ‘the most dramatic and effective act of individual audacity in the history of the Australian Imperial Force.’24 The Australian line held and there were no further German attempts to recapture Pozières.
The German bombardment continued for day after day. Cases of shell shock continued to pour in to the medical aid posts. The Anzac Corps had taken over the CCS at Vadencourt. In early August, an eyewitness reported that nearly every man who waited patiently for his wounds to be treated there was ‘shaking like an aspen leaf’, a sure sign that they were also suffering from some sort of shell shock.25 The commander of Fourth Army, Rawlinson, began to grow seriously concerned about the ‘wastage’ from shell shock. Casualties in Fourth Army were now calculated to total 125,000 officers and men. Rawlinson’s chief of staff, Major-General Sir Archibald Montgomery, issued a questionnaire to his corps, division and some brigade commanders asking what lessons should be learned from the last four weeks of battle. Senior officers wrote back extensively about the need for sufficient preparation time for an assault, the need to secure flanks, the best way to advance in line, the most efficient method to shell a wood, to deploy machine guns, and so on.26 The army was quickly learning an immense number of lessons, and the notes provided a useful and realistic corrective to the rigid and inadequate Tactical Notes issued by Fourth Army in May.
For the rest of August, the Australians pushed forward down the slope from Pozières ridge towards Mouquet Farm, the objective that the Lonsdales had expected to capture by midday on 1 July, and the German fortifications at the head of Nab Valley, from where the machine guns had fired into their ranks as they assembled that morning. But the farm proved too tough a nut even for the Australians to crack. On 21 August, the 12th South and West Australia and Tasmania Battalion reached the farm, but their numbers were too small to enable them to hold off the inevitable counter-attack and they had to withdraw. They realised that the interlinked cellars of the farm made it into a formidable defensive stronghold.
On the same day, the 4
th Gloucestershire Battalion and the 1st Wiltshire Battalion of the 25th Division captured the trenches in the south-eastern face of the Leipzig salient. They consolidated their position, picking up where the 17th Highlanders had left off on 1 July. These forward movements were met every time by German counter-attacks that often proved costly. At the end of August the weather started to change and heavy rain turned the ground into a sea of chalky slime. The Australians continued to push on to Mouquet Farm, but were unable to take and hold it, suffering 6,300 casualties in the attempt.
In early September, after six weeks in which the three Australian divisions of the Anzac Corps had rotated in and out of the line, the Australians were withdrawn to rest and recover, and relieved by the Canadian Corps. The Australians had conducted nineteen separate assaults across a front of about one mile, but none had been as successful as the first on the village of Pozières itself and the capture of the windmill ten days later. They had moved the line forward, a few hundred yards here, half a mile there. But Mouquet Farm was still in German hands. The Australians were exhausted by the toll of battle and shattered by the continuous bombardment. They had suffered a total of 23,000 casualties in forty-five days, nearly as many as the casualties in nine full months of fighting at Gallipoli. (British casualties alongside them had been on a similar scale.) Private Athol Dunlop wrote to his sister, ‘Anyway, I’m proud of being an Australian and can say without boasting that as fighters they have no superiors and damned few equals.’27 Artillery barrages were from now on to be judged by comparison to that of Pozières, and very few matched it in intensity of fire and length of continuous bombardment.
However, from the remnants of the Anzac Corps a new story began to emerge. Pozières on the Somme, like Gallipoli, became sacred ground and an important stage in the building of a sense of national identity. Once again, as at Gallipoli, there was a strong sense of bitterness towards the British commanders, and especially towards Haig, who had kept up his policy of launching small-scale attacks against heavily defended German lines. Lieutenant Raws in his last letter home wrote of the ‘murder’ of many of his friends ‘through the incompetence, callousness and personal vanity of those high in authority’.28 And Australian troops developed an aversion to serving under Haig, a reaction which would become even more pronounced in the following year. During the Battle of the Somme, Australians had without question fought valiantly and stubbornly. Although Australian commanders had led their men in the field, it was British generals who were blamed for failures. And it was Australian heroes who were credited with victories.
Accompanying the Australian forces was an official war correspondent. Charles Bean was a tall, thin, bespectacled figure never far from the centre of the action, usually with a pencil and notepad in hand. He was, in today’s parlance, ‘embedded’ with the Anzac Corps. Having landed at Gallipoli only hours after the first troops, he had endured the same hardships as those troops, was wounded in the Battle of Sari Bair, and he remained on the peninsula, departing only two days before the final evacuation. At Pozières he had again spent time with the men in the trenches, had endured the constant shell fire, had seen exhausted troops stagger out of the line and newly refreshed men march eagerly forward, and had watched and written about all that had happened. He was very moved by seeing men brought down by shell shock. He saw no shame in the fact that cheery, confident and physically first-rate soldiers were reduced to ‘gibbering maniacs’ by the effect of shell fire and he reported on this regularly. But he was a fierce patriot and immensely proud of the fighting spirit he witnessed daily among the ‘Diggers’, the common Australian soldiers.
After the war he was granted access to official documents and started to write the Australian Official History, in which he would include the powerful testimony of the men he had lived with.29 Pozières and Mouquet Farm had shown that even the toughest, most confident troops could suffer from a high incidence of shell shock. No one who served on the Great War battlefield was immune to the strain on their nerves. But the battle still had a long way to run.
Haig was determined to keep up constant pressure on the German army along the Somme throughout the summer. At times this was as clumsy as using a battering ram to smash relentlessly against a fortified castle wall. On other occasions, when the lessons of 14 July were applied and artillery fire was concentrated against a small defensive area, the assaults brought unexpected success. Such was the nature of a war of attrition. The casualty figures rarely dropped below 2,500 per day.
But the consequences were not one-sided. The German army was suffering terribly too. More reinforcements were thrown into the mashing machine along the Somme. German accounts stress the horror of trying to live through British artillery bombardments. Friedrich Steinbrecher, a theology student in Leipzig before the war, was a young German officer on the Somme. In a letter he described his journey to the front. ‘During the lorry and train journey we were still quite cheery … [Then] we were rushed up through shell shattered villages and barrage into the turmoil of war. The enemy was firing with 12-inch guns. There was a perfect torrent of shells … Now one’s eyes begin to see things. I want to keep running on – to stand still and look is horrible. “A wall of dead and wounded.” How often have I read that phrase? Now I know what it means … Day melts into night. We are always on the alert … Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.’30
During August, Haig gave up on the idea of a breakthrough and concentrated on ‘straightening the line’, a process that sounds clear and simple but was rarely either. The purpose of ‘straightening the line’ was to make artillery fire against the opposing German line more effective. But still strongpoints like Beaumont-Hamel, Thiepval, Mouquet Farm, High Wood and Guillemont remained in enemy hands. In the south, the French too kept up the pressure, General Fayolle’s Sixth Army taking more ground in early September. Everywhere, the Allies were advancing, but their progress was measured in yards or metres, not in miles or kilometres.
The next phase of the Somme offensive was launched on 15 September. Like that of 1 July, the attack took place on a broad front after an intense artillery bombardment in which nearly one million shells were fired at enemy positions. As on the first day of the Somme, Haig hoped for a breakthrough and the cavalry were standing by to break out, seize Bapaume and roll up the German defences. Likewise, as on 1 July, Rawlinson saw the attack in more limited terms. And as on the first day, the attacks were initially successful in many places but overall they failed to deliver the victory that was hoped for. The German line buckled but did not give way.
The Battle of Flers-Courcelette, as the offensive became known, is best remembered for the first use of tanks, one of the few new weapons of war to emerge between 1914 and 1918. The story of the development of the tank has been told many times.31 Their first use on the battlefield was highly controversial. There were very few of them available. Their crews lacked training. Tactics for working with the infantry had not been worked out. But most of all they were extremely slow, advancing at about 2 m.p.h., and mechanically very unreliable. They could cross barbed wire and fire into enemy lines, but thick mud and deep shell holes presented an insurmountable obstacle. Only forty-nine tanks were ready for action that day, not enough to make much difference even if they had all performed magnificently. Of these, roughly one-third, seventeen, broke down or failed to reach their starting positions. The remaining thirty-two rumbled slowly forward as best they could. Nine tanks did creditably well and their crews dealt with the obstacles they encountered. Nine more made such slow progress that the infantry soon overtook them. The other fourteen broke down during the advance or were stranded in shell holes or trenches. Many of the tank crews inside their noisy, hot, dangerous machines, nearly suffocating on petrol fumes, suffered from nervous breakdown and shell shock.32
It was an inauspicious beginning for the new weapon of war. Haig was blamed for wasting the opportunity by revealing the tanks for the first time when they were still
in such short supply.33 On the other hand, if he had not done so he would no doubt have been blamed for failing to use what some protagonists were claiming was a war-winning weapon during the biggest and bloodiest battle ever fought by the British army. The fact was that with tanks available in growing numbers in France by September 1916 their presence would not have remained a secret for long. There had to be a first time for their use, and this was it.
An early morning mist on 15 September soon cleared into a bright autumn day. The barrage moved back from the German front line at 6.20 a.m., when the infantry went over the top with the tanks. On the right wing of the British offensive a German defensive structure known as the Quadrilateral held up the assault, its occupants firing into the flanks of the attacking troops. The hardened and experienced Guards Division did however succeed in advancing for about a mile into the German third line. On their left, the inexperienced 41st Division, which had only been in France for a few months, also did well and captured the town of Flers. An RFC observer reported seeing a tank entering the town, prompting some excited reporting about ‘a Leviathan … a Behemoth … a Tank … rolling majestically and alone down the empty main street of Flers long before the place was ours’.34
Further north along the front, the New Zealand Division undertook its first major action in France. The New Zealanders had built up a formidable reputation at Gallipoli and now had a chance to show the Germans what they were worth. They did not disappoint and succeeded in capturing their objective known as the Switch Line, although at times their enthusiasm ran away with them and they advanced too quickly and into the British barrage. On their left, the 47th (London) Division had a major struggle to capture High Wood, where the tanks proved useless among the shattered tree stumps; their commanders said they should never have been deployed. But the 47th finally succeeded in occupying the wood that could have been taken two months before on 14 July. Exhausted, they could go no further. Major-General Barter, their commander, was sent home for not pressing on beyond High Wood. To their left, the 15th (Scottish) Division captured the village of Martinpuich, while the 2nd Canadian Division, attacking up the Albert–Bapaume road, seized Courcelette.
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