Chapter 11

The Somme Crossings

Most of the men were lying like dead men, tired out … Some of them were shaving off five days’ growth of beard. There could not have been more than 1,500 able-bodied men left out of each division.

Paul Maze on passing the remnants of the 20th and 36th Divisions

At the beginning of March 1918 the 8th Division was in the Steenvoorde area to the west of Poperinge. Up until this point the possibility of a German offensive south of Arras was purely academic, a situation which occupied passing conversation and speculation, all of which changed on 13 March when the division was moved to Tilques and was officially placed in GHQ Reserve. Suddenly the time and nature of the much talked about German offensive became of great interest and, as many now realised, the division was highly likely to be drawn into the battle at some point. That moment came at 9.00am on 21 March when orders were received to begin preparations immediately for the division to entrain for the south.

Commanding the division was 51-years-old Major General William ‘Billy’ Heneker, a Canadian national who had accepted a commission with the 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers as a second lieutenant on 5 September 1888. Although he had been in command of the division since December 1916, the briefing he received at Fifth Army Headquarters must have given him and his staff some cause for alarm. The division was to be deployed on the XIX Corps front along a line east of the River Somme; all the available reserves had been thrown in to the battle; the third and last defensive zone had been breached and an immediate retreat to the bridgehead positions west of the Somme was in progress. The retiring troops of the 50th Division and the remnants of the XIX Corps divisions were to retire through them and after blowing the bridges, the German advance was to be held on the line of the river.

For Heneker’s division this meant only one thing, it was going to be placed in the same situation that the 50th Division faced on the Green Line, in that it would be given little time to put the Somme line into a state of defence. No time would be given for any reconnaissance of the positions it was to occupy and, like the men of the 50th Division, its troops would be turned straight into battle. It was an unenviable prospect which was exacerbated considerably by a change in orders at the last minute, switching the divisional line from the east to the west bank of the river! One can only imagine the difficulties this caused Heneker’s staff as they feverishly sought to issue new orders. Captain Richard Brooke recalled the exasperation that was apparent at divisional headquarters:

‘The difficulty of intercepting the units of the 23rd and 24th Infantry Brigades now on the march to their allotted areas east of the Somme on a pitch black night with the roads crowded with troops and transport can better be imagined than described, but somehow or another by about 5.00am on 23rd [the] advanced troops of the 24th Brigade began to arrive at the Somme line and the division gradually filtered into its 15,000 yards of front.’¹

In fact 23 Brigade was not in position until the afternoon of 23 March with 24 Brigade arriving even later. According to Captain Maurice Toye, serving with the 2nd Battalion Middlesex Regiment (2/Middlesex), the advance parties of 24 Brigade which had crossed the Somme were surrounded by the enemy and had to fight their way back to the positions on the west bank, ‘with the result that the division went into action piecemeal’. The Somme frontage that was finally occupied by the 8th Division now ran from the confluence of the l’Ingon stream with the Canal du Nord at Rouy-le-Petit in the south, to Eterpigny in the north, a line of defence correctly estimated by Brooke as roughly eight miles and considerably longer than that previously allocated to the 50th Division on the Green Line.

There was however, one problem. The integrity of the river line did not only depend on the 8th Division, the Crozat Canal had already been crossed at Tergnier on 22 March and early on 23 March the railway bridge east of Ham had been taken by German infantry enabling their units to link up with the German bridgehead at Jussy and St Simon. Thus the whole front from the River Oise in the south to the Somme Canal at Ham was now being advanced, endangering the west bank of the river and threatening to roll up the whole of the Fifth Army line from the south.

Brigadier General Ferdinand Stanley commanding 89 Brigade – whom we last met near St Quentin – had effectively lost his brigade on 22 March when his three battalions were split up to reinforce the XVIII Corps divisions. After moving his headquarters to Villers-St-Christophe as ordered, he heard nothing more until he was ordered to Ham:

‘I arrived there about 10 o’clock, I should imagine, and found the Corps Headquarters staff just clearing out. Soon after our arrival I was told that, being free, I was to undertake the defence of Ham. Certain troops had already been dug in. On asking what troops would be available, I was informed that the only troops for this purpose were the two entrenching battalions, two companies of special RE, five platoons from the Corps of Reinforcements and a corps of cyclists.’²