Our Darkest Day

by Patrick Lindsay

  The flat Flanders farmlands on which the Battle of Fromelles was fought. This is one of a series of photos taken from near Fleurbaix in 1915 and covering the area from Bois-Grenier to Fromelles. (AWM PHOTO H15912J)

  Although the ridge only rose to a maximum of 36 metres above sea level it was the highest ground in the area and the Germans clearly held the superior position. They could observe any movement on the British side without the need for aerial observation. This was to prove a telling advantage in the battles to come.

  Fromelles occupied ancient land that had seen conflicts for thousands of years, from Roman times through the Normans to the Hundred Years’ War which started in 1337. The Battle of Agincourt, where England’s Henry V defeated the French army in 1415, was fought only 60 kilometres from Fromelles. Later that century the region was controlled, first by the Holy Roman Empire, then by Spain. By 1618, it was embroiled in the Thirty Years’ War which involved most of Europe’s major powers. Twenty years after that conflict ended, in 1667, Louis XIV waged war against the Spanish Netherlands and besieged Lille, just 16 kilometres east of Fromelles. With Louis’ victory, the region became French. Fromelles enjoyed its longest period without conflict after Napoleon was defeated in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo, about 120 kilometres away.

  By the outbreak of World War I, Fromelles was a rural township of around 1000 people in a little over 200 houses. The railway had arrived in 1902 and the rich, well-irrigated soil of the surrounding 60 farms supplied the town with meat, vegetables and grains like wheat and maize. Just before war broke out in 1914, electricity reached the town’s main street and a weaving mill was opened to join the brewery, distillery, laundry, taverns, butchery, bakery, school, the tailors, the doctor, the tobacconist, the blacksmith, the grocer and a dozen other shops. The Fromelles church and its tower dominated the skyline, just as it had done from the late fourteenth century.

  The overwhelming impression of Fromelles and the surrounding countryside is its flatness. At its highest, Fromelles is just 25 metres above sea level. The village of Aubers, about 3 kilometres south-west, is only 11 metres higher. Yet such is the bowling-green terrain of the region that these meagre vantage points became vital strategic positions.

  The Germans regarded Lille, an industrial centre with almost a million inhabitants, as a crucial asset from the beginning. That made the surrounding countryside strategically important territory because, in order to attack Lille, the Allies would need to win the high ground at Aubers Ridge and Fromelles. The Germans supported their front lines with a covering network of artillery placed well behind the high ground and with reserves housed in underground bunkers.

  In the early stages of the war, some positions changed hands a number of times as the two sides sparred to establish their dominance and to lay claim to positions of strategic value. Neuve Chapelle was one of them. A small town on an important crossroads, a few kilometres south-west of Fromelles, between La Bassée and Béthune and the road to the city of Armentières, it was taken by the Germans in early October 1914, won back by the British on 16 October and then reclaimed by the Germans on 27 October.

  By March 1915, British plans were well advanced to retake Neuve Chapelle and then advance on Lille. Two British and two Indian divisions would attack Lille through Neuve Chapelle while another British force would recapture the town of La Bassée.

  Germans bury their dead somewhere on the Western Front. Germany mobilised 11 million men during World War I. Of these, 7 million, or 65 per cent, were either killed, wounded, missing or taken prisoner.

  The chief members of the Armistice Commission which sat in Spa, Belgium, in November 1918. The first three members in uniform are: General R.C.B. Haking (British), General Nudan (French) and General Dellobe (Belgian). (AWM PHOTO H09449)

  In what would be a preview of the disastrous Battle of Fromelles a year later, the attack was a deadly amalgam of miscalculations, mismanagement and mistakes. Poor coordination of the infantry charge and its artillery support saw the attackers charging into their own bombardment. In some areas, communication breakdowns saw them being thrown against undamaged defences instead of being sent to the battered parts of the enemy’s front line. At one stage the commanders believed that the Middlesex Regiment had broken through successfully, ‘for not a man came back to report otherwise’. Later they found out none came back because they were all dead.

  Despite all these difficulties, the British troops burst through the German defences and took Neuve Chapelle on 10 March. But their observers did not see the German support lines on the higher ground behind the town and, while the British High Command dithered over the next step, the Germans rushed in reinforcements and then began a massive artillery barrage from behind Aubers Ridge which shattered the British lines. The first German counter-attack was beaten back on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle. Then the British Commander Sir Douglas Haig tried to gain the upper hand by attacking Aubers Ridge with an infantry charge. By the time he called off the assault, he had lost almost 13,000 men against the German machine guns and artillery for no territorial gain.

  Despite these shattering losses, less than two months later the British tried to storm Aubers Ridge again. The attack ran along a 15 kilometre front from Bois-Grenier, just south of Armentières, to Festubert, south-east of Neuve Chapelle, with the main thrust at Rouges Bancs, on the flat in front of Fromelles.

  After the first attack, the Germans had worked overtime to repair and then greatly improve their defences, building thicker concrete bunkers and emplacements and adding shrapnel-resistant, heavy-gauge barbed-wire entanglements protected by earthworks. These were covered by a patchwork of machine-gun emplacements that could direct withering fire at troops held up by the entanglements.

  The British attack was once again a costly failure. Around Aubers Ridge when the offensive was called off after less than 24 hours, 10,000 British and Indian casualties had fallen victim to the German machine guns and artillery. Among the thousands who perished around Neuve Chapelle was 31-year-old New Zealand-born Anthony Wilding, one of the finest tennis players of his generation, who had won Wimbledon from 1910 to 1913 and who was beaten in the final in 1914 by Australia’s Norman Brookes. To the south-east at Festubert, the fighting continued for two weeks before the British High Command ordered the troops there to dig in and hold the line. Another failure, another 17,000 British casualties.

  It was symptomatic of the system and the times that neither of the key British commanders of these total failures was held accountable. In fact, both Haig and the Corps Commander, General Sir Richard Haking, emerged with their reputations unsullied. Haking was to play a seminal role in the Battle of Fromelles, but before that he would reprise his failure at Aubers Ridge in late September 1915 at Loos, about 15 kilometres to the south.

  At Loos, for the first time, Haking commanded the British XI Corps – two divisions totalling perhaps 40,000 troops. As always, Haking brimmed with confidence before the battle, as author Lyn MacDonald wrote in 1915: The Death of Innocence:

  He compared the German line to a crust of pie – one thrust and it would be broken and behind it he expected there would be so little resistance that they would have no trouble in carving a way through.

  The now recurrent Haking characteristics were again present: poor intelligence and reconnaissance; lack of surprise; insufficient preliminary bombardment; chaotic behind-the-lines organisation of reinforcements and casualty evacuation; flawed and insufficient training and acclimatisation; and, bizarrely, the removal of cooking facilities so that many men went into battle hungry.

  Nevertheless, Haking threw his troops against the German ‘pie crust’ with abandon, only to see two of his divisions destroyed and then replaced by another two which he fed into the meat grinder. Apparently, neither he nor Haig considered the impossible odds facing their men as they poured them into the killing zone. Alan Clark, in The Donkeys, writes that Haking’s men were

  expected to cross No-Man’s Land in broad daylight with
no gas or smoke cloud to cover them, with no artillery support below divisional level, and attack a position as strongly manned as had been the front defences and protected by a formidable and intact barbed wire entanglement.

  The slaughter was so terrible that even the Germans were moved and they didn’t fire a single shot at the British for the rest of the day. In three and a half hours, the British had lost more than 8000 men. The Germans did not lose a single man. Author Robin Corfield notes in Don’t Forget Me, Cobber! that of 59,247 total British losses in the battle, Haking’s command contributed 16,830. In six months, he had racked up more than 20,000 casualties.

  Such was the man and the situation awaiting the Australians.

  The Germans defending the high ground around Aubers Ridge learned their lessons well from their shock loss of Neuve Chapelle. They increased their troops from two divisions to three in the front line and redoubled their efforts at improving their defences. The new troops in the German line, the 6th Bavarian Reserve Division, took over the sector in front of Fromelles. They had been rushed across from Lille during the early stages of the Neuve Chapelle attacks. Official Australian World War I historian, C.E.W. Bean described the unit as having been

  raised immediately after the outbreak of war from untrained men under or over military age, with a proportion of fully trained but elderly reservists.

  While they may have been inexperienced ‘trench’ troops rather than crack infantrymen, the Bavarians soon adapted superbly to defensive trench warfare. They built an extensive network of interlinked breastworks, incorporating reinforced machine-gun pits, introduced pumps to drain their positions and created massive blockhouses and concealed concrete-reinforced strong-points in farms, churches and other buildings. Their defences extended kilometres back from the front lines. The second line of troops held the strong-points and blockhouses perhaps a kilometre behind the front line and a third line looked down from the Aubers ridgeline. Some of their massive concrete strongholds even had electricity for their pumps and lighting. Reserve units were sprinkled around the surrounding villages, ready for deployment to plug any holes and to counter-attack. It was an imposing and cleverly interwoven defensive system giving maximum protection to its troops and allowing lethal firepower to be brought to bear on attackers.

  3

  THE ANZACS’ JOURNEY

  I don’t care for war, there’s far too much luck in it for my liking.

  NAPOLEON III, 1859

  In November 1914 Ottoman Turkey had thrown its hand in with Germany on the side known as the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria – so named because they fell between Russia on the east and France and Britain to the west). The Allies (or the Entente Powers) were France, Britain and her Dominions, Belgium and Russia. Many other nations, including Italy, Japan and the United States, joined the Allied side as the war progressed.

  Turkey’s entry into the war changed the initial equation. As early as 2 August 1914, the Young Turks, led by Enver Pasha and bypassing their Cabinet, had concluded a secret alliance with Germany. Enver saw the possibility of a new Turkic Empire and succumbed to Germany’s bribes and the pretence of the sale of two German warships. He declared a jihad against Russia and the Allies and called on his countrymen to join the battle for ‘victory, martyrdom and paradise’.

  Responding to German requests to distract the Russians, the Turkish fleet harried the Russian Black Sea ports and Enver personally led an attack against the Russians at Sarikamis, an Anatolian town the Turks had lost to the Russians in 1878. Enver set out in December 1914 but he and his troops were trapped as winter intervened and more than 25,000 froze to death before they even made contact with the Russians. Although the Turks made some inroads with their remaining troops, the Russians counter-attacked and drove them back through Armenia. Enver and the Turks blamed Armenians serving with the Russians for the defeat. They enforced a mass deportation of Armenians in a deadly exodus to Syria (then Turkish territory) which saw some 800,000 die.

  Australians from all walks of life joined the growing number of recruitment marches from inland towns to join up. After Gallipoli, the average monthly enlistments jumped from around 6000 to 36,000. (KNYVETT PHOTO)

  The Russians called on their Allies to relieve the pressure on them by launching an offensive against Turkey. The response would be the genesis of the Gallipoli campaign.

  Meanwhile, the Russians were locked in an increasingly costly campaign against the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians on the Eastern Front, a logistic nightmare that ran from the Urals to the Alps.

  At the outbreak of war, the Allies had known that the Russians would take much longer than Britain or France to mobilise their massive forces. Things started off well as the Russians initially invaded Germany and forced the German Army back 160 kilometres. But the Germans rallied and halted the Russian advance at the Battle of Tannenberg where about 150,000 German troops completely demolished the Russian Second Army of about 190,000 men. The Germans killed or wounded around 30,000 and captured almost 100,000. The Russian commander, General Alexander Samsonov, shot himself rather than report the disaster to the Tsar.

  Diggers preparing to move up into the line on the southern side of Lone Pine, Gallipoli, in August 1915. In four days of uncompromising conflict more than 4000 Turks and 2200 Anzacs died. The battle saw seven Australians win the Victoria Cross. (AWM PHOTO A00847)

  Despite the massive setback at Tannenberg, the Russian numbers began to take a toll on the Austro-Hungarian troops facing them, forcing the Germans to step in. By winter of 1915, the Germans had moved eight divisions from the Western Front to the East. Their plan was to attack Russia with the aim of forcing the Russians to make a separate peace with them, thus neutralising the Eastern Front and leaving them free to concentrate on the Western Front. The German offensive began well and the Russians fell back in disarray as the Germans claimed Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Belarus and Ukraine – the most successful German territorial gains of the whole war.

  On the sidelines, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania waited, weighing up which side they would support. As the conflict drew on, Romania, Italy and Greece joined the Allies while Bulgaria chose the Central Powers after being promised a share of a defeated Serbia’s territory following Germany’s attack on Serbia in the winter of 1915.

  The Serbian Army and many of its people retreated on foot, heading for the Mediterranean and hoping to sail to safety. Someone called it the ‘funeral procession of the Serbian State’. By the time they reached sanctuary on the island of Corfu, more than half of the Serbian Army – 200,000 troops – had died on the march.

  By this time, Australian and New Zealand troops had travelled halfway around the world and had landed on Turkish soil on the Gallipoli Peninsula on 25 April 1915. Against the odds, and despite the ultimate failure of the campaign, the Anzacs acquitted themselves with great distinction against the Turks and looked forward to making a contribution to the main theatre on the Western Front.

  After their brilliantly executed evacuation from Gallipoli on 20 December the Australians were in high spirits as they sailed, first to Lemnos for a few days, and then to Alexandria. They made their camp at Tel-el-Kebir, near Cairo, where they were reshuffled into new units by integrating the Gallipoli veterans with the influx of new reinforcements who joined them from Australia. This was part of an overarching plan to reorganise the AIF in preparation for its service in Europe on the Western Front, giving it something of a self-contained Australian command structure.

  The force was split into two army Corps. General William Riddell Birdwood commanded I Anzac Corps, comprising the 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions together with the New Zealand Division, and General Alexander Godley, another British officer, was in command of II Anzac Corps, made up of the newly raised 4th and 5th Australian Divisions.

  Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, who had led the Anzacs at Gallipoli, was the commander of the 1 Anzac Corps, 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian
Divisions. (AWM PHOTO P03717.009)

  The AIF’s wonderful achievements in the Gallipoli campaign, combined with the realisation that the war in Europe was going poorly, prompted a surge in recruitment back home. The numbers jumped from just on 6000 in April 1915 to more than 36,000 in July (perhaps also kicked along by a reduction in the height restriction from 5 foot 6 inches to 5 foot 2 inches and the news that a German submarine had infamously sunk the British passenger liner the Lusitania on 7 May). The situation was subsequently energised by Australia’s new prime minister, William Morris Hughes, who took office in October and immediately offered to increase the monthly quota of 9500 reinforcements being sent to the war zone. Hughes carried out an audit of the available pool of eligible men in Australia. It revealed 215,000 potential recruits within the military age group. Hughes offered the British War Office an additional 50,000 troops. Not surprisingly, they jumped at the offer.

  The newly created Australian divisions would soon be sent to France and one, the 5th Division AIF, became the first Division of the AIF to see action there. The 5th Division comprised three brigades of infantry – the 8th, 14th and 15th – each, in turn, made up of four battalions and support troops. The 8th Brigade (drawn from South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria) comprised the 29th, 30th, 31st and 32nd Battalions; the 14th Brigade (from New South Wales) the 53rd, 54th, 55th and 56th Battalions; and the 15th Brigade (from Victoria) the 57th, 58th, 59th and 60th Battalions.

  The integration of the reinforcements with the veterans required a massive readjustment. It also opened up many opportunities for promotion. Gallipoli veteran, Captain Roy Harrison, was promoted to major and given temporary command of the 54th Battalion. He was charged with forming the battalion and training it while his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Cass, recuperated in hospital. As revealed in Neville Kidd’s well-researched self-published biography of Harrison, An Impression Which Will Never Fade, Harrison wrote to his cousin Emily on 17 February 1916: