Brave Battalion

by Mark Zuehlke

  When the battalion recall rocket arced into the sky, Johnston’s first thought was that he hated to leave. But he realized their luck would soon run out when the Germans rallied, as they surely would. Johnston and Cpl. Stuart Rankin hung back, ensuring all the party got safely away with the prisoners in tow. Then not wanting to carry back their remaining twenty-pound ammonal charge, the two men hunkered beside a dugout, yanked the gas curtain back and were just about to chuck it in when Johnston saw that the occupants were “two Huns, youngsters; badly scared and apparently wounded. As they were wounded we left them, but the corporal didn’t like the idea of letting them be an excuse for not putting the mobile charge down, but I chased him along to the next dug-out.

  “We are just preparing to leave the trench when a light and a moving figure appears in No Man’s Land coming along above the trench. Wind-up; think it’s a counter attack. We crouch down in the trench and against the sky-line see one man—very large. I yelled at him our half pass-word and to my surprise got the other half back. Then towards us stalked this figure, cursing to beat blazes—it’s Gus Lyons, my company commander; and he came over by himself to see what the blankety blank, etc., was keeping us. He stood on the top of the trench and just gave us the very devil. So the three of us started back across No Man’s Land walking, talking and using our flash lamps—no war at all. However, when we reach our line it isn’t so pleasant, an awful strafe of minnies and funs is on, but we barge through the strafe with our six prisoners and a machine gun as jubilant and happy a crowd as could be imagined.”30

  Trench raids provided valuable intelligence and kept the opposing side on its guard, but they could not yield victory. Save a negotiated peace, victory would go to the side that succeeded in breaking free of the trench system and marched either to Paris or Berlin. On March 21, 1918, in a stunning reversal for the Allies, the Germans struck first along a 50-mile-long front between Arras and St. Quentin held by British Fifth Army. The offensive’s mastermind, Gen. Erich Ludendorff, believed he could shatter the British before the French could rally to their aid. In an all-or-nothing effort, the Germans struck with their very best troops in the lead. After less than three days all the gains won during the Somme offensive were erased and entire British divisions annihilated as the Germans drove a wedge between the British and French forces. Ludendorff kept enlarging this hole, pushing the British toward the sea while the French contributed to its size by swinging to the east to protect Paris. Within a week, however, the offensive fell victim to the problem that had plagued everyone since the war began—Ludendorff ’s storm troops outran their supplies and reinforcement stream while suffering huge casualties for the ground won. On April 5, with British resistance stiffening, the offensive sputtered to a halt while the Germans were still short of their primary objective of Amiens, a town at the juncture of the Somme River and its major tributary, the Avre. The butcher’s bill was 163,500 British and 77,000 French casualties compared to 238,000 German losses. But most of Germany’s best troops were now dead or wounded.

  Canadian Corps played no part in meeting the German offensive. But the crisis had almost precipitated its dissolution when Haig sought to send the Canadian divisions individually to plug holes in the shattered line. Only Lt.-Gen. Currie’s vigorous objections saved the corps this fate. As it was, to enable First Army to send divisions to reinforce the beleaguered Fifth Army, the Canadian 1st and 2nd Divisions were allocated as a reserve to the former army. Currie was left with just two divisions holding a 10-mile front, which he charged was “altogether too much, but owing to lack of men in British Army it cannot be helped. I am told we have 430,000 men in Mesopotamia. What a splendid place for a reserve!”31

  When the crisis passed, 1st Division returned, but the corps remained stretched thin and not until five British divisions relieved the Canadians in the first week of May was the situation corrected. The Canadian Corps went into a rest period that lasted until July 15. The interval was spent honing skills, with emphasis placed on “infiltration,” where the “attacking troops were trained to work around strong points and machine-gun nests that were putting up stiff resistance; to find the line of least resistance, push in, and isolate garrisons still fighting. More distant objectives, involving the capture of ground from the enemy’s outpost zones back to his gun lines and beyond, were also allotted to battalions.

  “These were tactics which called for an exceptional degree of daring and resources in the infantry. Front-line men had not only to close with the enemy in circumstances of comparative isolation—that is, without the moral support of the old close order formation—but they had to think and co-operate skillfully with the other troops engaged alongside of them; there could be no more blind charging. ‘Cannon fodder’ had to give place to a high type of disciplined manhood, if attacks, under the new methods, were to carry the day in the face of a determined enemy.”32

  The Canadian Scottish diligently studied the new syllabus and then applied it for real in a front-line tour toward the end of July by conducting raids with ever greater numbers of men involved. On August 4, the battalion boarded a train and headed north. The men had no idea of their destination, but knew they must be headed again toward a great battle. It would come in just four days at a place called Amiens.

  chapter ten

  Decision at Amiens

  - AUGUST 8-20, 1918 -

  The failed March offensive did not deter the Germans from continuing to pursue a decisive victory over ensuing months. Gen. Erich Ludendorff recognized that Germany was running out of time, for soon the Allies would have thousands more troops available. Although the United States had declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917, its army had been too small, poorly trained, and ill-equipped to have any impact on the war. A year after the declaration the Americans had managed to deploy only nine divisions to Europe, but the pace of its military buildup was quickening and before 1918 was out a powerful expeditionary force would be ready for combat. The numerical superiority the Germans currently enjoyed on the Western Front would be reversed.

  Ludendorff did not believe his armies could triumph once they were outnumbered. On April 9, therefore, he had ordered a new offensive in Flanders. By month’s end the Allies had contained it, but Passchendaele, Messines, Ploegsteert, Wytschaete, Merville, and Mount Kemmel were all in Germans hands. Only Ypres and a fragment of the salient remained in Allied hands. At the end of May the Germans struck in the Champagne region north of Reims with an advance aimed at Paris that came within 30 miles—so close the Germans could see the Eiffel Tower—before being stopped by a French commitment of its entire reserve of twenty-seven divisions aided by two green American divisions.

  “Again and again our thoughts returned to the idea of an offensive in Flanders,” Ludendorff wrote, but clearly the Allies—there now being American divisions employed there alongside the British and French—were too strong. Hoping to leech off some of this strength, Ludendorff launched a two-pronged offensive from Reims on July 15. Prepared, the French Fourth Army dealt the eastern prong a sharp defeat. But the German Seventh Army, constituting the western prong, managed to get six divisions across the Marne between Château Thierry and Epernay, creating a salient eight miles wide by four miles deep. The French counterattacked in force on July 18, and by August 7, had driven the Germans back on the defensive behind the Vesle River to the west of Reims. Ludendorff’s “great gamble” had ended with the loss of a million irreplaceable troops either killed, wounded, or lost as prisoners. Of Germany’s 201 divisions on the Western Front, 106 were now unfit for battle. In the British sector were fifty-three British and Commonwealth divisions with thirty-six on the front lines. Also supporting the British as a reserve were four American divisions and one Portuguese. The French had eighty-four divisions up front—seven of these being American and three British. The French-sector reserve numbered thirty-nine divisions, of which seven were American, one British, and two Italian.1

  On May 8, sixty-seven-year-old Gen. Ferdinand
Foch had been appointed commander in chief of the Allied armies to ensure operations on the Western Front were fully co-ordinated. Credited with the French victories on the Marne in 1914 that had stemmed the initial invasion, the “Hero of the Marne” was offensively minded, but could only remain on the defensive until the German offensives ran their course. By July, however, Foch saw opportunity for a limited British offensive “astride the Somme, in an easterly direction, from the Luce and Ancre [rivers], with the object of disengaging Amiens.”2The French would also undertake a series of small offensives. “How long these different operations will take and how far they will carry us cannot be determined now,” Foch told Field Marshal Douglas Haig. “Nevertheless, if the results at which they aim are attained before too late in the year, we can from now onwards look forward to an offensive to be launched at the end of the summer or during the autumn of such importance as will increase our advantages and leave no respite to the enemy.”3

  Amiens was ideal for offensive operations, its rolling plateau hardened now by the summer’s sun and unchurned by shelling. Already the Australian Corps had launched a limited attack at the beginning of July that utilized the tactics first employed at Cambrai of advancing a massed tank force in concert with a surprise artillery bombardment. The town of Hamel had been retaken and Lt.-Gen. John Monash, the Australian Corps commander, had since vocally advocated a larger-scale operation.

  Foch agreed, formally ordering on July 28 an offensive by the British Fourth Army and French First Army that would advance “as far as possible in the direction of Roye,” almost 15 miles behind German lines. Gen. Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army was really the British Fifth Army rebuilt after its near destruction during the German March offensive. Rawlinson had just two corps, the British III and the Australian Corps, so Haig sent him the Canadian Corps. On July 30 the Canadians travelled in great secrecy by train and bus to a concentration area southwest of Amiens. Without surprise the offensive would surely fail. Considering the Canadians among B.E.F.’s best shock troops, the Germans carefully tracked their whereabouts in expectation that wherever Canadian Corps appeared an offensive might follow. To throw the Germans off the scent Allied intelligence leaked falsified reports that placed Canadian Corps near Ypres.4

  Dawn of August 7 found 100,000 Canadians with all their guns and transport hidden in the cover of dense forests little more than three miles from the German front lines. Overhead, Royal Air Force spotter planes scanned the woods to make sure no sign of the troops could be seen while bombers droned loudly over the German front to mask the sounds of 604 massing tanks. Fourth Army’s 1,386 field guns were each assigned to cover a mere 29 yards of frontage, while each of the 684 heavies would concentrate on 59 yards. The French brought to the front another 780 field and 826 heavy or super-heavy guns.

  Rawlinson followed the script devised at Cambrai. From left to right he lined up III Corps, the Australians, and then the Canadians, who rubbed shoulders with the French. The artillery barrage would begin twenty minutes before the troops went over the top. It would fall to the tanks to tear holes in the wire for the infantry to pass through, and tank fire would also have to suppress German machine guns. As the British III Corps had been badly mauled in the spring, Rawlinson was counting on the tenacity of the Australians and Canadians to carry the day. The plan called for an advance in two stages, with the final objective being a line running from Harbonnières on the left past Cayeux in the centre, to just north of Mézières on the right—distances ranging from 4 to 6 miles. Once the final objective was secured, the Cavalry Corps would plunge through to capture the old Outer Amiens Defence Line, 3 to 4 miles farther along. Zero Hour was set for 0420 on August 8.

  Lt.-Gen. Arthur Currie put the 2nd Division on the left, the 1st in the centre, and the 3rd to the right. In 1st Division’s sector, Maj.-Gen. Archie Macdonell had 3rd Brigade forward and its commander, Brig. George Tuxford, assigned the right flank to 16th Battalion, the centre to 13th, and the left to 14th.5Once 3rd Brigade reached the Green Line, as the objective for the first bound was designated, 1st Brigade would leapfrog forward and be passed in turn by 2nd Brigade. Everything, Tuxford told his battalion commanders, depended on speed.6

  Although generally favourable ground for tanks, several tributaries of the Somme and Ancre rivers had cut narrow valleys in Fourth Army’s sector. The Canadian Corps sector was particularly affected. Although the knee-deep Luce was only 30 feet wide, over the centuries it had carved out a 200-foot-deep by 200-foot-wide gully that was heavily wooded and wound in the direction of the advance while various little tributaries had created gullies that cut across the Canadian frontage.

  Throughout the day preceding the attack, the Canadian Scottish lay hidden in wait. Lt.-Col. Cyrus Peck permitted only small reconnaissance parties sent forward one after the other to inspect the offensive terrain. To prevent the Germans from realizing a buildup of forces had taken place, the Australian Corps had extended its lines so that it occupied the frontage assigned to the Canadians. Come the evening the Australians would slip to the side as the Canadians moved up. The 16th Battalion would relieve 49th Australian Battalion. So shrouded in secrecy was the planned offensive that when officers from one Can Scot reconnaissance party quizzed the Australians they “knew nothing of the intended offensive, or the fact that tens of thousands of Canadians lay under cover a few hundred yards behind.… No direct questions affecting the operation could therefore be asked of its officers, a rather unsatisfactory state of affairs, as the jumping-off area bordered the outpost line, which was 800 yards ahead of the main trench and inaccessible by day.”7

  Just before midnight, the Canadian Scottish assembled by companies to receive battle supplies and rations. What would normally be a quickly executed process dragged on for hours. In order to prevent the noise of large parties coming forward from tipping the Germans to the fact something was up, the Canadian battalions were all supplied by small parties coming up one after the other. Zero Hour was almost upon them before the process was complete. Peck had anxiously watched the supplies being doled out and finally accepted that his troops would not be ready “until the last minute.”8

  Their kit, though, was lighter than ever before. To emphasize speed the heavy packs were left behind. Instead they slung small, light haversacks on their backs. But stuffed with 170 rounds, four grenades, forty-eight hours’ worth of iron rations, water bottles, and a ground sheet, the haversacks bulged to capacity. The Lewis gun crews crammed fifty magazines into pouches and still worried about running dry.9But the troops were assured that the twenty-two tanks supporting the brigade, seven of which would advance with the Can Scots, would provide them with a mobile source of supply. Each tank was loaded with 21,000 bullets and an array of shovels, picks, water canisters, and grenades.

  Peck told his officers that the Zero Hour barrage would “be laid down 200 yards in front of the jumping off position, remaining there three minutes. It will then lift 100 yards every two minutes for 2 lifts, 100 yards every three minutes for 8 lifts and then 100 yards every 4 minutes until the limit of the barrage is reached. M.Gs. will barrage after this. One mobile brigade of field artillery will move forward with the attack. A protective barrage of smoke will be placed on Green Line during the halt.”10

  After issuing these orders, Peck chanced into Padre Frederick Scott, who had come to join 16th Battalion in going over the top. “If anything happens to me don’t make any fuss over me; just say a few words over me in a shell hole,” Peck told his friend. “You will be all right, Colonel. There will be no shell hole for you,” Scott replied firmly.11

  As the battalion marched out of the woods and down a slope toward the battle front, the starlit night was silent except for an occasional gun and the explosion of the odd German shell directed at a nearby crossroad. By 0345 hours the men were in their jumping-off position. So quickly had the move to Amiens come about that some officers were missing because they had been away on leave. A few others were sick. This meant the roster in p
lace through the spring had been modified for the attack. Major James Scroggie consequently served as battalion second-in-command, so Captain Cyril Jones led his No. 2 Company. No. 3 Company was commanded by Major Thomas Floyd and No. 4 by Major McKenzie Render, while Captain Gus Lyons, as he had for so long, led No. 1 Company. Nos. 3 and 4 Companies would lead with the other two following close behind.12

  “Bronzed, fit, and confident, at the zenith of its power, [the corps] lay ready to give battle,” Major Hugh Urquhart later wrote. “Nurtured by wise leadership, consummated by the long summer training of 1918, Corps unity and strength—terms which in the spring of 1917 had little meaning for Canadians—had become a reality, and had begotten by that morning of August 8th such a mighty instrument as should, for all generations, be the pride of Canada and the source of inspiration to every citizen within her borders.”13

  Shortly before Zero Hour, Peck walked to the front line “and found everything in readiness. Dense fog hung over the land.”14 The fog had risen out of the marshes bordering the Luce’s northern bank just twenty minutes before the assault was to begin and had quickly enveloped the entire battle front. Caught in the middle of forming their assault lines, the Canadian Scottish were so blinded that they had difficulty getting properly positioned. At the last minute Peck was told the two leading companies were not brushing shoulders. Not knowing if this was true, Peck ordered Lt. Bill Mackie, recently promoted from the rank of CSM, to plug any gap with his No. 1 Company Platoon if he saw that one actually existed.