A DIVERSIONARY ATTACK at Fromelles, forty-five miles north of the Somme, was being planned for 19 July 1916, to be carried out by Australian troops. The Australians, many of whom had fought the previous summer, autumn and winter at Gallipoli, treated their harsh new tasks with characteristic irreverence, singing, to the tune of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’:
We are the Anzac Army,
The A.N.Z.A.C.,
We cannot shoot, we don’t salute,
What bloody good are we?
And when we get to Ber-lin
The Kaiser he will say,
‘Hoch, Hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody odd lot
To get six bob a day!’
This was to be the Anzacs’ first offensive action on the Western Front. Its aim was to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements to the Somme. On the eve of the battle, General H. E. Elliott, the senior Australian officer at Fromelles, alarmed by the strength of the German position, asked a British Staff Officer, Major H. C. L. Howard, for his estimate of how the attack would go. Howard replied, ‘If you put it to me like that sir, I must answer you in the same way as man to man. It is going to be a bloody holocaust.’
General Elliott asked Howard to report his view back to Haig. He did so, his report coinciding with intelligence information that there was no longer any urgency for an attack, as German troops were not being transferred to the Somme, and did not therefore need to be pinned down. The XI Corps commander, General Sir Richard Haking, wanted the attack to go on, however, the headquarters record noting that ‘he was quite confident of the success of the operation, and considered that the ammunition at his disposal was ample to put the infantry there and keep them in.’
Pressed to agree to a delay in the attack, Haking was emphatic: ‘The troops are worked up to it, were ready and anxious to do it’; he considered that ‘any change of plan would have a bad effect on the troops now.’
Two miles south of Fromelles was the high ground of Aubers Ridge, the objective of the attack. The attack itself lay across a low, wet No-Man’s Land towards the strongly fortified German salient, the Sugar Loaf, which overlooked the attackers’ approach. ‘I know you will do your best for the sake of our lads who are fighting down south,’ Haking told the Australians on the eve of battle.
In the church tower at Fromelles, reinforced by a concrete stairwell, with a loophole specially designed for an observer, the Germans could see, throughout July 18, the preparations being made for the attack both in the front-line trenches and in those behind them.
The assault began in the late afternoon of July 19, preceded by a day-long artillery barrage. The first Anzac casualties were caused by the Australians’ own shells falling short, and by some heavy German artillery fire. When the attack began, the German machine guns in the salient opened fire: the artillery had failed to silence the defending guns before the assault.
An hour after the first men had gone over the top, General Elliott reported, ‘Every man who rises is being shot down. Reports from the wounded indicate that the attack is failing from want of support.’
The wounded were streaming back. A British attack on the other side of the salient was also beaten back with heavy British casualties. Then, at a point in the line a little way from the Sugar Loaf, the Australians reached a main German trench. ‘The enemy was caught in the act of manning his parapets, and some bitter hand-to-hand fighting followed,’ the battle’s historian, Captain A. D. Ellis, later wrote. ‘It terminated, as all such hand-to-hand fighting terminated throughout the war, in the absolute triumph of the Australians and the extinction or termination of the Germans.’
The Sugar Loaf salient, which General Haking had ordered to be assaulted ‘throughout the night’, eluded its attackers. As dawn broke, more wounded tried to get back to the Australian lines. Many of them lay out in No-Man’s Land, ‘trying to call back to us’, Sergeant H. R. Williams later wrote, ‘and in doing so made of themselves a target for the German machine gunners’. Those who managed to get back were like men ‘awakened from a nightmare’, Williams recalled. ‘The ordeal of the night was plainly visible on all faces, ghastly white showing through masks of grime and dried sweat, eyes glassy, protruding and full of that horror seen only on the faces of men who have lived through a heavy bombardment.’
During the night, one group of Anzacs and some British soldiers had reached the outer wire of the Sugar Loaf, but were unable to push through it. The Australian official war historian, C. E. W. Bean, visiting the battlefield in November 1918, shortly after the Armistice, wrote, ‘We found the No-Man’s Land simply full of dead. In the narrow sector west of the Sugar Loaf Salient, the skulls and bones and torn uniforms were lying about everywhere. I found a bit of Australian kit lying fifty yards from the corner of the salient, and the bones of an Australian officer and several men within a hundred yards of it. Further round, immediately on their flank, were a few British – you could tell them by their leather equipment.’
Amid the hundreds of cemeteries on the Western Front, VC Corner Australian Cemetery Memorial, a mile north of Fromelles, the only completely Australian cemetery in France, contains the graves of 410 Australians who had fought in the battle. Not a single one of them could be identified, and there are no headstones. Half a mile east of Sugar Loaf there is now an Australian Memorial Park.
Also killed at Fromelles were at least 400 British troops. Nearly 4,000 British and Australian troops were wounded. The German dead and wounded were fewer than 1,500 in all. Four hundred Australians were taken prisoner: they were marched by the Germans through Lille, France’s most important industrial city, which had been occupied by Germany from the first months of the war.
The Anzacs were withdrawn. Their casualties had been too heavy to sustain a renewed assault. Captain Wilfrid Miles, the official British military historian of the Battle of the Somme after July 1, reflected a decade later, ‘To have delivered battle at all, after hurried preparation, with troops of all arms handicapped by their lack of experience and training in offensive trench warfare, betrayed a grave under-estimate of the enemy’s powers of resistance.’ Even if the German defences had been ‘completely shattered’ by the British artillery bombardment and the infantry assault had succeeded, ‘it would probably have proved impossible to hold the objective under the concentrated fire of the enemy’s artillery directed by excellent observation.’