While the 15th Brigade’s attack foundered on the deadly Sugar Loaf machine guns, the 14th Brigade, to its left, was making good progress. The left-hand flank of the 53rd Battalion and, alongside it, the 54th Battalion swept into the German front-line trenches, captured two machine guns and cleared the position. As per their orders, while this first wave of the attackers then set about clearing the front trench, the following waves leap-frogged them and set about finding the support trenches which they had been told were 100 metres or so deeper into the German territory. When they had cleared the enemy from the front line, the first wave of attackers moved forward to help their comrades consolidate their defence of the reserve enemy trenches.
An aerial view of the Fromelles battlefield showing the German trenches captured by the Australians during the battle. Delangré Farm is to the south of the German lines. (AWM PHOTO J03376)
The Germans set up a line of riflemen near the area known as Rouges Bancs in front of the 14th Australian Brigade’s line. They were tasked with picking off the Australian officers as they led their men across the open ground. The tactic soon began to pay rich dividends. By the time the attackers had made it past the German front line and support works searching for the second line of breastworks, almost all their officers had been killed or wounded. The 53rd Battalion’s leadership in the attack by now fell to a 21-year-old Duntroon graduate, Captain Charles Arblaster.
Arblaster and his men expected to see the objective they had been briefed to secure – the second and third German breastworks marked on their briefing maps around 100 metres beyond the front line – but as Bean wrote:
they found instead, stretching away to the distance, only low open fields covered with coarse grass and traversed here and there by hedges or rows of trees. Away to the left were the broken white walls and tree stumps of Delangré Farm, which according to the original plan was to have been taken by the 8th Brigade; to the right front were one or two similar clusters receding into a distant background of trees and hedgerows.
They pushed forward, looking for their non-existent objective. However, the aerial photographs on which Haking had based his objectives were flawed – or, perhaps more accurately, the interpreters of the photos were deceived by what appeared to be a second line of breastworks. In fact it was first one, then a second, water-logged ditch or drain – at best a long-abandoned shallow trench, probably from the German’s defence against Haking’s disastrous attacks in the summer of 1915 but abandoned the following autumn when flooded by the River Laies. The attackers continued on still further until they were more than 250 metres past the German front line with still no second or third line of breastworks evident. Then, as Bean notes, they knew they were in a dilemma:
By this time their leaders realised that the second or third trenches must either have been non-existent in that part of the front or else were represented by these two ditches. Accordingly, the surviving officers stopped their men at the farther ditch and ordered them to begin rendering it defensible by cleaning it out, filling their sandbags, and placing them along its edge.
Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Toll led the 31st Battalion at Fromelles, breaking through the enemy front lines and taking his men far into German territory in search of the non-existent second and third lines of trenches. He dug in and held on until ordered to withdraw. Toll survived Fromelles, winning the DSO for his leadership. In later fighting he won a bar to his DSO before being badly gassed at Polygon Wood and finishing the war at HQ in London. He was one of the founders of the RSL. (AWM PHOTO E01572)
By now, the attacking troops had discovered why the Germans were able to withstand the bombardment so successfully. The German front line had comprised 75 shelters dug into the parapet, each protected by 20 centimetres of concrete, and 60 of these 75 shelters were undamaged by the Australian artillery bombardment. The Diggers also found an alleyway ten metres behind the front line that led to a series of dugouts protected by an earth roof about a metre and a half thick. Another ten metres back they found far more substantial shelters. Up to six metres underground and reached by stairways, they contained large comfortable chambers and galleries. Some even had wood panelling and wallpaper, with ammunition supplies and some unexpected comforts like cigars and rations. One, taken over by Colonel Cass of the 54th Battalion as his temporary HQ, had bunks, an armchair, a stove and electric light. (As we see later, the German defensive positions were in reality far more sophisticated than the Australians believed – as revealed by British historian Peter Barton who trawled through the remarkable Munich Archives in late 2007.)
On the far left flank of the Australian attack, the 8th Brigade had made good progress since its first wave went over at 5.53 pm. The vast majority of them were seeing action for the first time and were determined to live up to the expectations of their mates and those from the other units who had already fought at Gallipoli.
Their part of no-man’s land was the narrowest along the attacking line – around 100 metres – and while they suffered substantial early casualties the German front line melted away as soon as the first wave of attackers reached it. Thus, the subsequent waves of attackers had an easier time making it through the German front lines and into the meadows behind them. Like the men of the 14th Brigade on their right, the 8th Brigade troops could find no trace of the second and third German lines of breastworks. After checking well forward for the objectives and briefly attacking the German stronghold at Delangré Farm, which they found too well defended, they too fell back to a small hollow just beyond a flooded drainage ditch around 200 metres behind the German front lines. They hastily set about digging in there after being harassed by a hidden machine-gun emplacement in front of them. Their leader, Colonel Toll, then sent a message explaining his actions back to his brigade commander by the fastest way then possible – by carrier pigeon!
Despite the traumas these birds must have endured in battle, they were swift and reliable. Bean reports that they were used on many occasions during the battle, having been brought to the front from the divisional pigeon loft. They took just seventeen minutes to fly from the front lines to the divisional HQ about 8 kilometres away at Sailly-sur-la-Lys.
While his men feverishly dug in, Colonel Toll took his messenger – and the pigeon basket – and reconnoitred his front, moving ahead another 200 metres or so without seeing anything resembling the German secondary defences. When he reached a road that he recognised from the map as being well in front of the phantom objective, he halted. Toll later reported that he saw a German stronghold, which Bean believed to be the one known as Grashof, and saw small parties of the 14th Brigade away to his right but could not make contact with them. When he returned to his men Toll was concerned that the line they were creating was greatly exposed because it was out of touch with the Australian units on either side. Bean set the scene and the choices facing Toll:
The sun was setting, and from Ferme Delangré [Delangré Farm] and the houses of Les Clochers village beyond there came the incessant chatter of machine-guns. The enemy’s artillery had found and was effectively shelling the unprotected troops, who were also caught by occasional shells from their own artillery. The men were consequently under no small strain, and German reinforcements could be seen moving from the rear to Delangré Farm. Concluding that the advanced position was unsafe, Toll decided at 7.14 [pm] to make his main position the old German front line, that being the only defensible work he had seen.
9
LOST IN THE FOG OF WAR
The ditch was full of wounded and dying men – like a butcher’s
shop – men groaning and crying and shrieking.
DIGGER, FROMELLES, 1916
Already the key factors playing against the Australians’ ability to hold the territory they had captured were evident. First, the massive casualties they had suffered during the attack meant that they had insufficient numbers to man the line they held without gaps. Second, Haking’s order that they ignore the German front-line trenches and occupy t
he deeper lines was already leading to major confusion and would soon expose them to German counter-attacks from their rear. Third, they had lost so many officers that organising the defences and coordinating between the separate groups was extremely difficult. And fourth, communication between the attackers and their HQs was virtually non-existent.
To add to the confusion, around 8 pm, heavy smoke started spewing from the ammunition dumps in the 8th and 14th Brigades’ support areas in the Australian lines after they were hit by artillery fire. As this smoke billowed across the battlefield it melded into the smoke rising from fires from hits on both Delangré Farm and Les Clochers. This haze combined with the setting sun to exacerbate the poor visibility that was endemic on the battlefield because of the flatness of the terrain. It was almost impossible to distinguish the different features and extremely hard for the various attacking groups to make contact with each other. Finally, it destroyed plans for the Royal Flying Corps to act as spotters for the artillery and to report back on the attackers’ progress and the enemy’s responses.
Back at his HQ at Sailly Chateau, General Haking had little understanding, either of the true situation on the battlefield or of the massive task facing the attackers as they tried to hold on to their small gains, as Bean wrote:
Whereas, therefore, Haking and his staff assumed that the troops would be transferring the sandbag parapet from one side to the other of an inhabited trench-line, the 8th and 14th Brigades, often knee-deep in water, were endeavouring to fill their few sandbags with mud dug from their grassy ditches. Being short of shovels, the men worked at first with entrenching tools, and so clayey was the soil that it often had to be pulled off the spade with the fingers. To build up in this fashion a defensible breastwork seemed to many of the workers an almost hopeless task.
In the Australian lines, the support troops who were waiting to carry supplies and ammunition across no-man’s land to back up the attackers were also stretched to breaking point. The first support troops had followed the fourth wave of attackers across. When the German observers saw this they immediately called their artillery to focus on no-man’s land and turned their journey into a deadly lottery. Bean quotes a nameless NCO who was wounded bringing across a machine gun in support:
The moment they cleared the top of the parapet it became hideous with machine-gun fire. There was a slight slope – our line [of men] ran down it, and then went splash into the ditch up to their waists in water. It was slimy, but it gave some protection. The leading Lewis [machine] gunner turned to the right and led the guns along the ditch, and then to the left along a continuation of it, which ran straight towards the German line. It was very good protection for the guns. About 40 yards along it the leader got hit in the neck by a machine-gun bullet. He choked – one of our gunners tied him up, and, with another, they lay there for half an hour or longer. The ditch was full of wounded and dying men – like a butcher’s shop – men groaning and crying and shrieking.
Many of these carrying parties were sent straight to the ditches where the attackers were trying to rebuild the defences. They were then often absorbed into the digging teams, with little resistance, as few were keen to make the hazardous journey back to their own lines. Unfortunately, this meant that very few of the carriers came back for a second or subsequent load of the desperately needed supplies.
Added to this was the growing complication caused by the gaps between the four groups trying to build the temporary Australian line in German territory. Colonel Cass (of the 54th Battalion) and Colonel Toll (of the 31st) had set up their defensive positions in the old German front line because they couldn’t find anywhere else that was satisfactory. The other two battalions who had made it through had dug in more than 100 metres further into German territory. So, left to right facing the Germans, the 32nd was on the left flank, forward of Toll’s 31st. To their right was Cass’ 54th and then, further forward, the 53rd. As author Les Carlyon vividly put it in his wonderful book, The Great War, they were ‘four islands in a sea of Germans’. Perhaps even more potentially dangerous was the way the flanks of the attacking line were exposed to German counter-attack.
Lieutenant Eric Chinner, of the 32nd Battalion, died heroically at Fromelles. He was fighting a desperate rearguard action behind the German lines, holding off the advancing German counter-attack with grenades, when he dropped one in the act of throwing it. He was mortally wounded when he smothered the grenade rather than allow it to harm his men. (AWM PHOTO A02699)
This danger had been anticipated by the 5th Division’s CO, General McCay, at least as it related to the left flank, which he knew would be completely exposed because it was the extent of the original Australian attack. The right flank should have been supported by the 61st British troops who were attacking alongside the Australians. McCay had ordered that the 8th Brigade (making up the left side of the attack) must barricade all trenches on its flank or towards the German rear.
Lieutenant Eric Chinner, the bombing officer of the 32nd Battalion, was assigned to block and hold the old German line on the left flank. A company of the 30th Battalion was to work with the engineers on the Herculean task of digging a trench from the left of the original Australian front trenches, across no-man’s land, to form part of the reconstituted front line at the old German front trenches. When the Germans saw what the Australians were trying to do, they rained artillery fire down on them and continually raked the area with machine-gun fire, causing many casualties and making progress extremely difficult. The engineers brilliantly adapted to the danger by pushing out sandbags and creating a screen against the machine-gunners and slowly proceeded with their digging.
On the positive side, on the extreme left of their line, the men of the 32nd Battalion had driven the Germans out of a communications trench they called the Kastenweg (German for ‘Chest Way’ because it was created by earth-filled ammunition chests). By doing this and securing the adjoining old German front line, they had temporarily secured the Australian’s left flank.
But the main problem still remained: the inability of the scattered Australian groups adrift in German territory to link up with each other to protect themselves from the inevitable German counter-attacks. When a party of the 53rd Battalion, to the right of Colonel Cass’ 54th Battalion, discovered that the troops occupying the trenches to its right were not Australians but Germans, things started to come unstuck. This party, now reduced to just seven unwounded men, had captured twenty Germans. It had called for reinforcements but with none in prospect, and having thrown all their grenades, they decided to withdraw back to the Australian trenches with their prisoners rather than risk being overrun. Because of the poor communications neither Cass of the 54th, nor even the remaining members of the 53rd, knew they were pulling back. The situation was fast becoming untenable, as Bean noted:
at the front the shattered waves of the 15th Brigade were pinned down in no-man’s land, and on the right flank of the 14th a section of the old German front line, after being temporarily seized, was now lying unoccupied by either side. A hundred yards beyond, in the open fields, Captain Arblaster and the advanced flank of the 53rd, utterly ignorant of the new situation in their rear, but fending off with small bombing parties the Germans whom they knew to be in the old trenches on their right, were busily digging their new front line.
By now, the British attackers were trying to improve their position. Two of their three brigade commanders sought permission from Haking to use some of their reserves and make new attacks. They would try to support their troops on the right which had penetrated the German defences and were then being counter-attacked and to break through elsewhere where they had earlier failed. Brigadier-General Carter, the commander of the 184th Brigade, which was fighting alongside the Australian 15th Brigade at the Sugar Loaf, had earlier arranged with his divisional HQ that they would concentrate their artillery on the Sugar Loaf until 9 pm and then the 184th would try to attack it again.
The ruins of a brick chimney in 1918, all that is
left of Delangré Farm on the left flank of the Australian attack at Fromelles two years after the battle. Barbed-wire entanglements can be seen in the foreground. (AWM PHOTO E04044)
This photo, taken after the Armistice in 1918, shows some of the massive German blockhouses near Fromelles against which the Australians launched their attack. These fortresses were originally protected by a network of sandbags and an earthwork parapet. (AWM PHOTO E03970)
At 7.52 pm Elliott received a message from Carter: ‘Am attacking at 9pm. Can your battalion co-operate?’
McCay had just given Pompey Elliott permission to use his two reserve companies of the 58th Battalion (about 250 men) to strengthen his greatly depleted attacking force. Pompey now ordered them to prepare to support the British attack on the Sugar Loaf. He moved his remaining reserves, two companies of the 57th Battalion, to move up to the reserve trench line and asked Haking to send reinforcements. Haking declined.
In the meantime, learning of the true position of the British attack, Haking decided to withdraw the whole British line back to its starting point under the cover of darkness with a view to regrouping and renewing the attack the next day. He cancelled the planned 9 pm attack on the Sugar Loaf by the 184th Brigade.
But Haking failed to inform McCay’s HQ (or therefore Elliott) that he had cancelled the British attack. Bean suggests that Haking may not have been aware that Elliott had been asked to join it. The first the Australians knew of the changes was when McCay’s HQ received this message from the HQ of the British division at 8.35 pm:
Under instructions from corps commander [Haking] am withdrawing from captured enemy line after dark.
Our Darkest Day Page 12