Our Darkest Day

by Patrick Lindsay

  There is little doubt that Hitler passionately believed these words. The famous photograph of the crowd in Munich’s city square, the Odeonplatz, taken on 1 August 1914, shows him clearly in the crowd – a young man swept up in the moment, perhaps finding a cause giving meaning to his life for the first time.

  Hitler joined up within days. An Austrian, he sought and won a dispensation to join a Bavarian unit, the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. Hitler was given the regimental number 148 and posted, initially to the 1st Company and later the 3rd Company. In October 1914, after just a few months training, his regiment was sent to the front.

  Hitler took part in the First Battle of Ypres and the Race to the Sea when his regiment suffered heavy casualties. He wrote in Mein Kampf of the impact of this introduction to the stark reality of warfare:

  Caught in the crowd in the Odeonplatz in Munich as war is declared in August 1914 is a 25-year-old Adolf Hitler. Clearly transfixed, he joined up within days. Although he was an Austrian, he sought and gained permission to enlist in a Bavarian infantry unit.

  Adolf Hitler around the time he wrote his manifesto, Mein Kampf, aged 36 in 1925. The photo was taken nine years after Fromelles and eight years before Hitler rose to power as Chancellor of Germany.

  From right to left: Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler, aged 27, his friend and later fellow Nazi founder Max Amann and a comrade from the Bavarian List Regiment (16BRIR) at Fromelles in 1916. The dog is Hitler’s constant companion Fucshl, who wandered across no-man’s land from the British lines.

  Boys of seventeen looked now like grown men. The rank and file of the List Regiment had not been trained properly in the art of warfare, but they knew how to die like old soldiers.

  That was the beginning. And thus we carried on from year to year. A feeling of horror replaced the romantic fighting spirit.

  Enthusiasm cooled down gradually and exuberant spirits were quelled by the fear of the ever-present Death … Already in the winter of 1915-16 I had come through that inner struggle. The will had asserted its incontestable mastery. Whereas in the early days I went into the fight with a cheer and a laugh, I was now habitually calm and resolute. And that frame of mind endured. Fate might now put me through the final test without my nerves or reason giving way. The young volunteer had become an old soldier.

  On 2 December 1914, aged 25, this ‘old soldier’ won the Iron Cross, Second Class, for bravery under fire at Wytschaete. Hitler was wounded on 7 October 1916 and gassed in 1918. Late in the war, around August 1918, he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, although the Official History of the List Regiment has no mention of this feat. (Interestingly, author Robin Corfield reports that in Hitler’s later life, the only decoration he wore was his Iron Cross, Second Class.)

  Hitler’s job as a despatch runner at Fromelles was a very dangerous one with a short life expectancy in the front lines. Indeed, years later, during World War II, he claimed that his experiences in that role enabled him to look at warfare through the eyes of the common soldier and thus to understand their needs and views.

  Hitler was with 16RIR when it faced and repulsed Haking’s attack at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915. The initial success of the British assault galvanised the regiment into a massive re-think of its defences and attitudes. Sixteen months later, at the height of the Battle of Fromelles, Hitler would find himself under direct fire from the advancing Australians as he carried his despatches back to the reserves. Many a World War I Digger later rued the missed opportunity to change the course of history with a single shot.

  Some of Hitler’s comrades at the battle rose to play significant roles in the Third Reich. One of his sergeants, Max Amann, shown with Hitler’s arm around him in a photo that survived the period, rose to become a founding member of the Nazi Party (member #3) and its business manager. Amann, who formed an arrangement from the start under which he was answerable only to Hitler, became the Party’s secretary general and its publisher. He served prison time with Hitler after the 1923 Putsch and, during that time, Hitler dictated part of Mein Kampf to Amann. Later, Amann published the book, accounting for all the considerable royalties to Hitler down the years. He eventually became the most powerful publisher in Germany – at one stage controlling more than 80 per cent of its thousand or so newspapers.

  Hitler’s experiences in the trenches in Flanders formed many of his subsequent views, including an early realisation of the potential of propaganda, as he wrote in Mein Kampf:

  through the medium of the schools, the press and the comic papers, an idea of the Englishman was gradually formed which was bound eventually to lead to the worst kind of self-deception … the delusion was so profound that the Englishman was looked upon as a shrewd business man, but personally a coward even to an incredible degree …

  I can vividly recall to mind the astonished looks of my comrades when they found themselves personally face to face with the Tommies in Flanders. After a few days of fighting the consciousness slowly dawned on our soldiers that those Scotsmen were not like the ones we had seen described and caricatured in the comic papers and mentioned in the communiqués.

  It was then that I formed my first ideas of the efficiency of various forms of propaganda.

  During much of his time in the Fromelles area, Hitler had a dog called Fuchsl (‘Little Fox’), which apparently strayed over no-man’s land from the British lines near Neuve Chapelle around January 1915. He patiently taught it tricks and it appears in many photographs with Hitler and his comrades. As he did later in his life, Hitler apparently found it easier to give affection to his dog than to other humans. In Fromelles and during his service elsewhere on the Western Front, Fuchsl rarely left his master’s side, sleeping by him at night and sometimes even accompanying him on his rounds delivering despatches. Hitler made sure he took the dog with him whenever he could find the time during the quiet periods to wander off and paint landscapes, some of which survive. They are architecturally accurate but lack warmth or virtuosity.

  Hitler’s experiences at Fromelles clearly made a deep impression on him. In 1942 he arranged for this memorial plaque to be erected on the wall of his 1916 billet in nearby Fournes. The plaque was smashed after World War II but was restored and is now on display at the l’Association pour le Souvenir de la Bataille de Fromelles museum above the Fromelles Town Hall. (PATRICK LINDSAY PHOTO)

  Immediately after his army defeated France on 25 June 1940, Hitler set off on a tour of the Fromelles battlefield with his comrades from the 1916 List Regiment. He also visited the building where he had been billeted in Fournes-en-Weppes, his regimental cemetery and the blockhouse where he had taken refuge from the attacking Australians during the battle.

  Fuchsl survived the battles at Fromelles, and later at the Somme and Arras, but Hitler was shattered when the dog was apparently stolen, along with his painting equipment, during a train journey.

  The true impact of Fromelles on Hitler was shown when, in 1940, after his army had invaded France and he had signed the surrender documents – in the same train as was used to sign the German surrender in 1918 – he immediately set off on a tour of French Flanders. On 25 June 1940, Hitler, accompanied by his List Regiment comrades, Max Amann and Ernst Schmidt, spent the night near Fromelles quietly celebrating the time the Armistice would officially come into effect, at 1.35 am.

  Hitler and his comrades-in-arms toured the old Fromelles battlefield, visited the building in which he was billeted in Fournes-en-Weppes, his regiment’s cemetery at Fournes and the blockhouse where he took refuge during the battle. On 20 April 1942 Hitler arranged for a stone plaque to be solemnly affixed to the wall on his former billet. The plaque was smashed after the liberation in 1945 but was later recovered and reconstructed. Today it is on display at the Fromelles Museum, above the town hall. The Hitler blockhouse still stands near the Fromelles football oval behind Rouges Bancs. Another blockhouse on the Aubers Road is often referred to as Hitler’s bunker, but the photos taken on his 1940 visit clearly show him at t
he former bunker.

  6

  IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH

  We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go.

  PAUL A. RUBENS, ‘YOUR KING AND COUNTRY WANT YOU’, 1914

  As so often happens in war, the Australians were soon swept up in events far removed from them and over which they had no control.

  The bitter reality was the war was a learn-as-you-go experience for both sides, but especially the Allies. First the Germans, with their massive artillery pieces, and then the Allies, realised this Great War was a completely different animal from previous conflicts. At the cutting edge, infantrymen still charged against their opposite numbers. But the real killing was done by mighty unseen guns that spewed death and destruction from 10 or 20 kilometres behind the front lines and by the nests of machine guns that sprayed no-man’s land with lethal effect. Against these twin agents of death, the resolution of the humble infantryman counted for little.

  In short, manpower had given way to firepower. But it took many commanders a long time and countless casualties before they adapted to the new ways of war. They were still in the process of this transition when the Australians arrived.

  While the High Command plotted the next major offensives, the Australians were about to settle into their new homes in the rich marshy soil of French Flanders. Because the water table was so high there the trenches were technically breastworks (shallow trenches were dug down a metre or so to the water level with parapets facing the enemy and parados on the trench wall behind them, all built up by sandbags of soil piled two metres or more above ground level). With experience the troops learned to build the parados higher than the parapet to prevent being silhouetted. The walls of these breastworks were five or six metres thick and could withstand all but the heaviest artillery shells. They usually had wooden floors called duckboards (timber walkways) to keep the troops out of the slush. The front-line trenches and the support lines, 200 to 300 metres further back, were linked by communication trenches that ran back away from the front lines every couple of hundred metres. These communication trenches had walls on both sides to conceal and protect troops moving up to and back from the front lines. The communication trenches had street names: VC Avenue, Bond Street, Brompton Road and Pinney’s Avenue.

  Originally, the Somme Offensive had been mooted for Flanders. Later, the Allied High Command decided on a major offensive against the German line along a 24-kilometre front just south of the Somme River in Picardy in northern France, where the French and the British Armies’ lines joined. This action was to take place about 80 kilometres south of the Australians’ position at Fromelles.

  Because of the losses sustained by the British Expeditionary Force since the start of the war, its original six divisions of regular army troops had effectively ceased to exist. They were replaced by a combination of the volunteers of the Territorial Force (equivalent to the Australian militia forces) and the units known as Kitchener’s New Army (troops who enlisted after the start of the war following a campaign headed by Lord Horatio Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War). A combined force of 13 British divisions to the north of the Somme River and 11 French divisions to its south would carry out the offensive. They would line up against 11 divisions of the German Second Army under General Fritz von Below. The battle would grow into one of the bloodiest in history, running from 1 July through to 18 November 1916, dragging in 50 divisions from each of the British, French and German armies, and resulting in casualties of more than a million men.

  The preliminary bombardment began on 24 June and lasted for five days. Its unprecedented intensity rattled windows in London 260 kilometres away. The British artillery alone fired almost two million shells before the assault began across the entire Somme front at 7.30 am on 1 July, as witnessed by English poet John Masefield:

  The price of war! The living mingle with the dead as troops shelter between actions on the Western Front.

  all along that old front line of the English came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across no-man’s land to begin the Battle of the Somme.

  Despite the extraordinary opening barrage, the German front line remained intact in many areas and their machine-gunners took a terrifying toll of the cumbersome British infantry. (It was later ascertained that up to 30 per cent of the British shells had been duds.) Burdened with equipment weighing more than 30 kilograms and organised into slow-moving lines, the British attackers fell like ninepins in the face of the unwavering German artillery, machine-gun and rifle fire.

  Thanks to their superior artillery, the French to the south fared much better and in some of their sectors they met all of their first-day objectives. But the first day of the battle was an unmitigated disaster for the British. Communications broke down completely and for some days the British commanders had no accurate idea of progress or the scale of their losses. When the casualty figures eventually came in for that first day they showed the British had lost 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2152 missing and 585 taken as prisoners, for a total loss of 57,470. By contrast, the German forces against them suffered a total loss of about 8000. That revered and faithful reporter of the facts, The Times, reported the opening attack as follows:

  EVERYTHING HAS GONE WELL

  Our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counterattacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners taken.

  The reality was summed up by a British captain quoted in Malcolm Brown’s Tommy Goes to War:

  The trench was a horrible sight. The dead were stretched out on one side, one on top of each other six feet high. I thought at the time I should never get the peculiar disgusting smell of the vapour of warm human blood heated by the sun out of my nostrils. I would rather have smelt gas a hundred times. I can never describe that faint sickening, horrible smell which several times nearly knocked me up altogether.

  Some of the British units suffered cataclysmic losses. The Newfoundland Regiment was virtually wiped out. This redoubtable band of men from what was then the Dominion of Newfoundland, a vast island in the Gulf of St Lawrence off the Canadian mainland, was the only North American unit to have fought in the Gallipoli campaign and was one of the last to leave as part of the British rearguard in January 1916. During the Somme offensive the regiment went into battle with the British at Beaumont-Hamel, 9 kilometres north of the town of Albert. Unable to reach even its starting point in the forward trenches because of the massive German bombardment, the Newfoundlanders were forced to attack from the reserve lines. The bulk of the regiment was killed before they even reached no-man’s land. Of the 801 Newfoundlanders who attacked, only 68 answered the roll call the next day. Over 550 were killed. The unit had a total casualty rate of 91 per cent, and this from a country with a population of around 250,000.

  In fact these devastating losses to the island’s male gene pool caused lasting social and economic damage and contributed to Newfoundland’s decision to become a Canadian province in 1949. To this day, 1 July is a day of solemn remembrance for Newfoundlanders for the sacrifices of their youth on the Somme.

  In early July, the Germans fell back in some southern areas of the offensive and opportunities opened to break through their line. But the fleeting chances slipped by, thanks in part to British losses and poor communications, and the Germans rushed reinforcements in from other sectors.

  While the British dithered, the French continued to make inroads. They pushed back the German line as much as 10 kilometres in some areas while taking 12,000 prisoners and capturing considerable numbers of armaments. The British tardiness brought conflict between the two allies as the French were forced to halt their advance to avoid opening a gap between their forces and the British.

  Despite these setbacks, the offensive on the Somme did bring some benefits to the Allied cause because it forced the Germans to scale down their offensive at Verd
un and to rush divisions from other parts of their line to ease the pressure of the British and French along the Somme front. Initially, the Germans moved fourteen divisions into their line against the British on the Somme, along the way to throwing in a total of more than 40 additional divisions. The British response to these German reinforcements had a direct and devastating impact on the Australians just taking their place in the line at Fromelles.

  The Australian 59th Battalion heading up to the front line at Fromelles in July 1916. Most of these men would have been killed or wounded in the battle. The 59th, which was one of the battalions attacking the Sugar Loaf salient, was devastated by the German machine-gunners there and suffered almost 700 casualties. (KNYVETT PHOTO)

  The Diggers of the 59th Battalion calmly await the order to move up into their front-line trenches at Fromelles around 11 July 1916. Within a week, more than 90 per cent of these men would become casualties. (KNYVETT PHOTO)

  On 5 July, the British on the Somme identified a newly arrived German unit, the 13th Jager Battalion, as one that had been previously defending the area near the Sugar Loaf. A total of nine enemy battalions had been identified as having come to the Somme from the Lille area.

  The British Corps Commander, General Godley, issued the following order to II Anzac Corps:

  It is imperative that raids and all possible offensive should be undertaken at once by both divisions of the corps in order to make a certainty of holding on our front such German troops as may be there.

  Raids must therefore take place immediately and must be on a larger scale than has hitherto been attempted – about 200 men or a company [around 100 men] …