‘In the hearts of these [American] men, the adventure of battle is greater than its chance of pain or death.’
Philip Gibbs, English War Correspondent
THE LORRY BUMPED and swayed along the uneven, shell-battered road from Amiens. Hanging on in the bouncing cab beside the grinning Australian driver, forty-one-year-old English war correspondent Philip Gibbs, a bony, hawkfaced man, noted with surprise that, in all the French villages he now passed through, French and American flags were flying in equal number. It was 4 July 1918. Gibbs was aware that it was American Independence Day, but he’d never imagined the French villagers would also know it, and celebrate it.
The French civilian population clearly knew that American troops were in this sector. That was why Gibbs was here. Since 1915, the experienced journalist had been covering this meat-grinder of a war for London’s Daily Telegraph and Daily Chronicle. He’d initially pulled back when the British Government imposed tight censorship on reporting from the battlefield, requiring correspondents to submit their articles for approval and frequently requiring cuts. But, determined to make the most of a bad situation, Gibbs had agreed to become one of five British war correspondents officially recognised by Whitehall and permitted to go into the war zones. Since then he’d been reporting the conflict with a mixture of pride in the men he saw fight and die and disgust for the inept and sometimes callous leadership he witnessed at the highest levels of the British Army.
The arrival of the Americans was the Allies’ great hope to turn the bloody stalemate on the Western Front into victory. Since the United States had declared war on the Central Powers on 4 April 1917, it had taken more than a year for its first troops to reach the war zone. Now, they were here at last, on the Somme, and just days before this Gibbs had received a tip-off from British General Headquarters, or GHQ, that, tonight, Americans were going to participate in ‘a little show’ with the hardy Australians.
Gibbs had no doubts that the Aussies would give ‘Fritz’ a fright, as usual. ‘The Australians have never lost the initiative since the day of March 26,’ he would write, ‘when at the end of the first phase of the German offensive they arrived on the [Somme] battlefield with one battalion, increased to four that afternoon when they thrust back the German outposts and helped to bar the way to Amiens. Since then they have made several successful attacks, driving the enemy’s lines back from Villers-Bretonneux and the valley of the Somme in front of Moriancourt.’1
As far as Gibbs was concerned, the Australians were a known, and fearsome, quantity. He wasn’t as convinced that the Yanks yet had what it took to make the Germans quake with fear. This would be the American Expeditionary Forces’ first offensive action of the war, and Gibbs was keen to see and report on how they fared. Millions of fresh troops from across the Atlantic were expected to turn the tide against the ‘Hun’. But what if, instead, the Americans turned out to be a flop as a fighting force? The USA had possessed only a small standing army at the time it declared war. The millions of men it was sending to Europe comprised a smattering of reservists and a host of conscripts.
Gibbs had been present at Pierregot several days before his visit to the Australian part of the front, and had heard the commander of the American 33rd Division, Major-General George Bell Jr, tell his assembled troops, ‘America expects you boys to make good. You are going in with the Australians, and those lads always deliver the goods. We expect you to do the same.’2
The English war correspondent had seen the eyes of American ‘Doughboys’ light up at the sound of these words. ‘They were ready to take all risks to prove their mettle,’ Gibbs would write in a despatch. ‘They were sure of themselves and tuned up to a high pitch of nervous intensity at the thought of going into battle for the first time.’ They were clearly keen to accept General Bell’s challenge. ‘In the hearts of these men, new to war and fresh out in France, the adventure of battle is greater than its chance of pain or death, and calls to the hunter’s instinct in them.’3
But what of their prey? The German Army facing the untried Americans had close to four years’ experience of war. The French called their Germanic foe le Boche, a contemptuous slang term of vague origin whose meaning ranged from ‘cabbage-eater’ to ‘blockhead’. The Americans were soon also calling Germans by the derisory ‘Boche’ term; men of African-American regiments of the AEF, which were assigned to French commands, came to call the Germans the ‘Bush-Boche’. But German soldiers, when well led, had shown they were tough and disciplined. What was more, the Boche had developed a constitution for trench warfare, living like rats in holes and then surging out to drive back their Allied opponents with bullet, bomb and bayonet. Could and would America’s youth be up to this? That was what Gibbs was here to find out.
Jumping down from the truck when it halted by an Australian artillery battery nestled into the shelled-out ruins of a farmhouse on the outskirts of Corbie, Gibbs, wearing the uniform of a British officer without insignia of rank or unit, asked the way to the headquarters of the Australian 15th Battalion. Following direction from an Aussie traffic control NCO, Gibbs set off to find the battalion’s HQ, and its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Terence McSharry. Like all good war correspondents, Gibbs knew that a true and accurate picture of this conflict could only be told through the eyes of the individuals who fought it. The 15th Battalion would be ‘going over the top’ with men from the 33rd American Division in tow, and Gibbs wanted to see and talk to those Americans.
With heavy-smoking, hard-swearing Australian rear echelon troops paying him little heed as he passed, and the nearby bark of artillery reminding him he was perilously close to the front line, Gibbs, knapsack on his shoulder, began winding his way through the maze of communication trenches in search of the battalion HQ.