By noon, the battle was over and the Australians watched German troops help the Allied wounded in the wire, or shoot those beyond help. For two hours, both sides respected an informal truce as stretcher-bearers retrieved their wounded. When snow began falling, the Germans called out ‘Finish hospital’ and the men returned to their lines.
A tank going into action near Messines, Belgium.
Alexander Turnbull Library PA1-f-091-H391
Mitchell and others stumbled back towards their camp. They were utterly exhausted and barely able to stand, so they staggered into an abandoned factory beside the road, built a fire with window frames and drank tea made from melted snow. Mitchell fell asleep in a bed he made from German coats.
The 4th Division had been the first to storm and hold the new Hindenburg Line, but at a great cost—over 3000 had been killed, wounded or captured. In Mitchell’s battalion alone, only 42 men out of 630 were left standing. The attack with tanks had failed miserably and the Australians’ confidence in the British command had been further shaken; it was a long time before they fought willingly alongside tanks again.
Four days later, on 15 April, 4000 men of the 1st Australian Division holding a one-kilometre sector next to Bulle-court were attacked by 16,000 Germans troops, whose commanders wanted them to destroy the artillery and as many men as possible, then withdraw. The Germans overran the lightly held front-line and 21 guns, but an Australian counterattack drove them back. Over 1000 Australians were killed or wounded; 2000 Germans lay dead or wounded and 362 had been captured. The German POWs were sent back to wire cages or labour camps, where, after having their details taken, they were fed, and were allowed to write home, but only about their health and general treatment. Afterwards, they were used as labourers to repair roads and other infrastructure.
LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER
The following day, the French attack at the Chemin des Dames failed miserably. The Germans had found battle orders for the attack on the body of a dead despatch-rider and, knowing the day and the time of the attack, had mowed the French down. The French soldiers began to mutiny, complaining that they were being slaughtered because their generals had no idea what they were doing. Young draftees marched through a village baa-ing like sheep being led to an abattoir. Large numbers of troops in the front-line refused to follow orders; others stationed in towns behind the front refused to return to the line. There were fears that France was on the brink of revolution and that, if Germany discovered that the French line was in disarray, the war could be lost then and there. Mass arrests and mass trials followed, but the new French general Henri-Philippe Pétain also decided to cease attacks until the troops’ strength and spirit improved, and the Americans arrived. This increased the pressure on the British and other Allies enormously; they were now responsible for winning the war and for diverting German attention away from the problems with the French line.
A new British attack was ordered for 3 May. On the extreme left of a 25-kilometre front—the widest Allied advance yet—the Canadians would attack from Vimy Ridge, while on the extreme right, the 2nd Australian Division would attack to the right of Bullecourt. It was the same plan as last time, except that instead of tanks the Australians would follow a creeping barrage, seize the Hindenburg Line, then push on for 800 metres and take the village of Riencourt— in all, a 2700-metre advance. The 62nd British Division to their left was to capture the rubble heap of Bullecourt.
Above the soldiers, brightly coloured biplanes and Sop-with triplanes were fighting in the skies. The Albatros biplanes were part of Captain Manfred von Richthofen’s ‘Flying Circus’. He was nicknamed ‘the Red Baron’—red after the colour of his triplane. In April alone—‘Bloody April’, as it was called by the Royal Flying Corps—Richthofen shot down 22 aeroplanes. With German pilots winning supremacy of the skies, their spotters observed the battle preparations below. One day before the attack, a downed German pilot asked his Australian captors ‘What time is zero?’ The Germans knew an attack was coming; they just didn’t know the exact day or time.
BAY BY BAY
The full moon was so bright on the night of 2 May that the 2nd Division sheathed their bayonets to stop the moonlight reflecting off them. When it sank, they moved to the jumping-off line to wait for zero hour. The 6th Brigade was on the left, closest to Bullecourt, while the 5th Brigade was on the right. A sunken road that ran from their line through to the Hindenburg Line separated them.
At 3.45 a.m. the drum-roll roar of the creeping barrage erupted. Unsheathing their bayonets, the Australians marched forward. The dead from the April attack still hung in the wire. On the right of the sunken road, the Germans spotted the 5th Brigade, and, despite shells exploding around them, the Germans opened fire with such intensity that an Australian officer panicked and yelled at his men, ‘Pull out— retire—get back for your lives.’
On the left of the sunken road, the 6th Brigade scrambled into the first and then the second German trench the moment the barrage lifted. They rolled bombs into the dugouts—the speed of the attack caught the Germans still inside—then slowly bombed the trenches towards Bulle-court, which the British had failed to capture. At a cross-trench, the Germans sheltering in a dugout had set up a machine gun and, with an ample supply of bombs, fought to stall the advance. The fighting for each bay was fierce and violent. Led by Lieutenants John Jennings and William Braithwaite, the Australian bombers threw captured grenades as well as their own. Bombs blew off Jennings’ fingers and wounded Braithwaite in both arms, but they didn’t stop. As Stokes mortar bombs rained down, the Germans pulled back to another dugout entrance to continue the fight.
* * *
PILOTS
Australian and New Zealand pilots flew with the Royal Flying Corps or, from September 1917, with one of three Australian air squadrons stationed in France. The pilots— some of whom had already served as infantry in the trenches—flew in open cockpits, exposed to the weather. They carried out bombing raids and surveillance work, flew over German artillery positions directing their own gunners to destroy the gun-pits, bombed and machine-gunned enemy troops and engaged in dogfights with German aeroplanes. observer described the dogfights as being:
Fighter pilots flew in single-seater biplanes and triplanes with a machine gun that fired through the propellers. Surveillance aeroplanes were two-seaters; the observer sat behind the pilot with a machine gun.
Although training to fly the new inventions was as dangerous as combat—over one-third of pilots were killed in training accidents—many feared the day they would fight. Australian fighter-pilot ‘ace’ Captain Arthur ‘Harry’ Cobby would have done anything to delay going into combat. The dogfights were chaotic, and no sooner would a pilot have an aeroplane in their sights than there would be ‘the old familiar “pop-pop-pop-pop”’ of a German pilot getting into position behind them. An
every man for himself. We go hell-for-leather at those snub-nosed, black crossed busses of the Hun, and they at us…Hectic work. Half-rolling, diving, zooming, stalling, “split-slipping”, by inches you miss collision with friend or foe. Cool precise marksmanship is out of the question.
In one battle, Lieutenant Percival Schafer escaped an attack by three red German Albatros D.III triplanes, returning with 62 bullet holes in his machine.
Major Keith Caldwell, flying with the British, was New Zealand’s leading ace, with 25 victories. In 1917, pursued by a crack German pilot, Caldwell pretended his Nieuport biplane had been hit, and spun to the earth, only just pulling up at the last second. On another occasion, when his machine was cork-screwing towards the ground after a wing strut was damaged by a collision with an Allied biplane, Caldwell stepped out of the cockpit and onto the wing. Grabbing the damaged wing strut, he levelled his machine with one hand, using the other to steer it back over the British line. At the last second, just before it hit the ground, Cadwell jumped clear, to the astonishment of the watching British soldiers.
* * *
The attack was failing
. Only the 6th Brigade had got into the Hindenburg trenches, and they desperately needed support. On the other side of the road, the 5th Brigade launched a bombing attack up the German trench, led by an unknown officer in a grey cardigan. His steel helmet and jacket discarded, the officer clambered out of the trench into the open to throw bombs, forcing the Germans back up their trench. Slowly, bay by bay, they were winning with bombs what they’d failed to capture by charging. But at 7.45 a.m., when the officer fell, the fight turned and the Australians were bombed back to the road. After hurriedly barricading the trench mouth, they fired mortar after mortar horizontally, like rockets, down the trench. When the Germans retreated, six volunteers gave chase with bombs and after retaking the section of trench just lost, they barricaded it with sandbags and dead bodies.
Over the next 13 hours, the Australians lost and recaptured this section four more times, fighting all day until the sun set and German flares lit the dust-blurred night. Fit men had little choice but to leave the wounded to fend for themselves. One corporal with shrapnel in his knee piggybacked a more seriously wounded soldier to a field hospital. Another soldier, with a gaping hole in his stomach, replied to his officer’s encouragement to ‘Stick it out, lad’, with ‘Don’t worry about me, Sir, but give the bastards hell!’, then put his rifle between his feet and shot himself. Just after midnight, fresh troops from the 1st Division relieved the exhausted soldiers. At the end of the first day of battle across a 25-kilometre front, only the Canadians on the left and the Australians on the right still held any captured ground.
At dawn, British troops made a second attempt to capture Bullecourt. The Germans had been living in deep dugouts hidden so well under piles of rubble that even their own supply parties struggled to find them, leaving those in the village to survive on rations taken from the British dead. German sentries watched for attacks from the entrances and, at the dawn ‘stand to’, the soldiers crowding the stairs spotted the British advance. They poured out of their dugouts, lay down, and destroyed the attack.
PULLING PINS
Fresh troops of the 1st Division massed in the sunken road and waited until midday for their turn to drive the attack up the trench on the right.
On either side of the road, no-man’s-land was littered with the dead, dying and wounded. When stretcher-bearer Corporal Granville Johnson noticed a wounded man waving a handkerchief near a disabled tank, he begged his officer to let him rescue the man. As he walked out with fellow stretcher-bearer Private Harold Ringland, a German riflemen and a machine-gunner opened fire. Bullets tore up the ground. The Australians got the wounded soldier onto the stretcher, but as they carried him back, Ringland was killed. Twenty-four-year-old Private Arthur Carlson raced out and helped carry in the stretcher. When other wounded men called for help, Carlson risked the bullets three more times. As he bandaged a man’s wound out in no-man’s-land, another stretcher-bearer, Private James Paul, tried to help him but was killed. From shell hole to shell hole, Carlson carried the wounded man until hit in the hip by a bullet. Refusing to give up, he crawled back, dragging the man with him. His actions raised the spirits of the Australians, but also created more bitterness towards the Germans, who would have known they were shooting at unarmed stretcher-bearers.
The 1st Division chased the exploding shells up the trench, keeping close to the German bomb-throwers so their stick bombs would explode harmlessly behind them. They fought stripped to the waist. Lieutenants John O’Connell and John Moy, with revolvers in one hand and bombs in the other, pulled the pins with their teeth before hurling the bombs into the next bay. Whenever the German bombs subsided, two ‘bayonet men’ and the lieutenants rushed around the corners, shooting and stabbing any Germans left alive. For four hours they bombed and shot their way from bay to bay, trampling and tripping over a carpet of Australian and German dead. Reaching the same barricades built and lost by the 5th Brigade the day before, the exhausted bombers stopped.
HOLDING ON
The 1st Division now held over 1000 metres of the Hinden-burg Line. As the British attacks ended, newspaper headlines and the world’s attention focused on the Australians at Bullecourt and the fighting that continued for the next 12 days. All through the night of 5 May, German shells shattered posts and buried men alive as their troops attacked the barricades, but the Australians held them back. On 6 May, 80 German soldiers and bombers advanced behind a flamethrower, the roaring flame burning up the dark. Most of the Australians ran, but Captain Alexander MacNeil hid until the flame had passed, then killed the flamethrower with a well-timed bomb. When MacNeil left the trench to bomb a second flamethrower, he was cut off, and panic spread through the remaining Australians as the Germans advanced towards them and the sunken road.
When 24-year-old New South Wales builder Corporal George Howell saw the retreating Australians, he rushed across the road, then ran along the parapet, throwing bombs down onto the Germans. After jumping into the trench, he attacked with his bayonet. The Germans scrambled back, chased by those Australians who’d initially fled. They leaped over the badly wounded Howell, who’d single-handedly stopped the German advance, and didn’t halt until they’d recaptured the section of trench just lost. For his actions, Howell was awarded a Victoria Cross, the highest military award.
The battle for Bullecourt eventually required the 5th Australian Division as well—the third Australian division used—and continued until 17 May, when the Germans decided it was no longer worth holding Bullecourt and retreated. Field Marshal Haig’s plan to distract the Germans while the French recovered had gained little except the killing or wounding of 7000 Australians and thousands more British and Canadians. Nine days later the last Australians withdrew from the Hindenburg Line, exhausted and in desperate need of rest and reinforcement for Haig’s fast-approaching Belgian offensive.
KILLED IN ACTION
____________________
PRIVATE JAMES NITCHIE
Labourer. 19 July 1916
PRIVATE LESLIE NITCHIE
Barman. 4 August 1916
LIEUTENANT JOHN JENNINGS
Commercial traveller. 3 May 1917
PRIVATE HAROLD RINGLAND
Clerk. 4 May 1917
PRIVATE JAMES PAUL
Farm hand. 4 May 1917
CORPORAL GRANVILL E JOHNSON
Shop assistant. 11 September 1918
LIEUTENANT WILLIAM BRAITHWAITE
Tanner. 3 October 1918
CHAPTER EIGHT
MESSINES, 1917
A trench,
A stench,
Some scraps of French
Some horrible German vapours.
A shell,
A yell,
No more to tell,
Bar a paragraph in the papers.
ANONYMOUS
THE YPRES SALIENT in Flanders, Belgium, was already well known to the Australians and New Zealanders. Since the start of the war, the British had fought desperately to hold Ypres—the battered town was now a symbol of British resistance.
Seven to eight kilometres in front of Ypres, a low, sickle-shaped chain of hills, rising sharply at Messines, curved for 32 kilometres around Ypres before petering out into long spurs. The Germans had held the ridges and spurs since 1915, after using gas against the British. On these heights were the towns of Broodseinde and Passchendaele, the gaunt, shattered stumps of Polygon Wood, and Menin Road—names which now spoke of famous battles and bloodshed. From the heights, the Germans observed Ypres and the low, destroyed farmland in front of the town, and shelled anything that moved or could be used for observation. It was one of the deadliest and most heavily shelled areas on the Western Front. In 25 square kilometres, hundreds of thousands of men had already been killed.
With the French Army in disarray and unable to take part in joint offensives, Field Marshal Haig returned to his plan to attack in Flanders. He wanted to push the Germans off the heights surrounding Ypres, believing they would sacrifice division after division to hold them. The British War Council wa
s reluctant after the heavy casualties of the Somme but agreed to his plan.
Before the Germans could be forced from the Ypres heights, the lower ridgeline ending at the mediaeval town of Messines had to be captured. General Sir Herbert Plumer, whose 2nd Army had been located in the area for two years, was a methodical and careful planner. He favoured a new step-by-step method of fighting, in which the troops would not advance beyond the range of their artillery. Over the previous two years, he had also overseen the digging of 21 tunnels under the German lines, which, packed with explosives, would be detonated just before zero hour on the day of the planned offensive, 7 June.
After the explosions, three British corps were to advance to capture the ridge. The II Anzac Corps, which had been reorganised to include the New Zealand Division, the 25th British Division and the 3rd Australian Division, would be on the far-right flank below Messines. All three divisions would advance beyond Messines village, which the New Zealanders were to capture, and dig in just beyond the crest of the ridge. Then the 4th Australian Division, on loan to the corps, was to capture the second German defences—the Oosttaverne Line—1600 metres on, once the artillery had softened them. Many of the 4th Division felt they hadn’t had long enough to rest after Bullecourt. It was to be the 3rd Division’s first battle. Commanded by General John Monash, the men had arrived from England in November 1916 and were nicknamed ‘Dinks’, after the saying ‘fair dinkum’. They hadn’t signed up during the high spirits at the outbreak of the war but afterwards, knowing it was going to be a long and hard campaign.
From the end of April, the Australians and New Zealanders camped in Ploegsteert Wood. In front of them, perched at the top of a steep hill, was Messines. As the offensive drew closer, the men inspected a miniature model of what they were expected to capture, complete with farms, streams and villages. Below them, battles raged between Australian and German miners.
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