2.

The Australian General’s Plan

‘A perfected modern battle plan is like a score for an orchestral composition, where the various arms and units are the instruments.’

Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash

ON 18 JUNE 1918, the Australian Corps had its headquarters at Chateau de Bertangles in Picardy, eight kilometres north of the city of Amiens. That once pretty city, now in ruins, occupied a vital Somme rail junction the German Army had been striving to take as part of their spring offensive. From Amiens, the Germans had planned to follow the Somme the short distance it ran to the English Channel, thus splitting Allied troops in northern France and Belgium from Paris and the rest of France, and gaining the Channel ports.

Some time back, Amiens had been totally evacuated of its population. It was now nothing but a ghost of a city. Despite this, Amiens’ ruin was exacerbated nightly by bombs dropped by German Gotha bomber aircraft that droned in from the east, whilst, during the day, massive 12-inch and 15-inch German naval guns mounted on rail trucks pounded the city from forty kilometres away.

Sprawling Chateau Bertangles on the other hand, sitting amid a park of chestnut and beech trees and rolling lawns, had avoided German attention and looked for all the world to be an oasis of charm and calm, far removed from the destruction of Amiens and the bloody, exhausting war being fought in the Somme trenches not so many kilometres to the east. Here at the chateau, the commander of the Australian Corps and his three hundred staff shared the mansion with its owner, the elderly Marquis de Clermont-Tonnerre, and ran this corner of the war as they plotted the downfall of their shared German enemy. And here, on this third Tuesday in June, a group of Australian generals sat down around a conference table to agree on a plan that would change the war.

Back on 30 May, two days before it was officially announced, a new commander had taken charge of the Australian Corps. Born and raised in West Melbourne, Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash was the first native Australian to hold the post. His predecessor, Lieutenant-General Sir William ‘Birdie’ Birdwood, who had been promoted to the command of the British Fifth Army, had been born in India to English parents.

In the present day, it would be unthinkable for anyone other than an Australian to have overall command of Australia’s largest and principal fighting force, but back then it had taken several years of increasingly intense lobbying from Australia before the British Government had agreed to let an Australian lead the nation’s fighting men. This was eight months after the Canadians had been permitted their own native-born corps commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie, who, like Monash, had been a part-time militia soldier before the war.

Whilst the Australian Corps was the largest to come under the aegis of the British Army – corps were ordinarily made up of four divisions – its five divisions comprised only a small part of the much larger overall British Army of fifty-three divisions of British and Empire troops on the Western Front, representing 9.5 per cent of British strength and five per cent of total Allied military strength in France.⁴

Just nineteen days into his new job, General Monash chaired this meeting of his divisional commanders and their chiefs of staff, the first time in history that commanders of the Australian divisions had come together under an Australian commander-in-chief. Just weeks away from his fifty-third birthday, Monash was the son of a German-speaking Polish Jew from West Prussia who had migrated to Victoria during the gold-rush years and become a shopkeeper. John, an only son, had attended Scotch College, excelling as a student. Going on to the University of Melbourne, he had taken three degrees, in art, law and engineering, at the same time helping found the university union and editing the university review.

By the time Monash began an engineering partnership in 1894, he had married local Jewish girl Victoria ‘Vic’ Moss and was a lieutenant in the part-time Victorian Garrison Artillery. Back then, his primary interest in the military was its ability to offer him an entree into business and social circles. With Australia in the depths of a severe economic depression, for the next seven years Monash had worked hard but struggled financially. He would be saved by reinforced concrete. In 1901, deeply in debt, Monash became a partner in the Monier Pipe company, which led, via hard work and influential friends, to his becoming a partner and supervising engineer with Reinforced Concrete & Monier Pipe four years later. This made him wealthy, enabling him to buy a mansion in the elite Melbourne suburb of Toorak. A decade later, he was one of Melbourne’s most successful businessmen, controlling four companies and sitting on the boards of numerous organisations.

All the while, Monash had been progressing up the ranks of Australia’s militia forces, which became the foundation of the Australian Imperial Force when war broke out in August 1914. When Monash sailed for Egypt that December, he was five feet ten inches tall, a portly fifteen stone (97.5 kilograms) colonel, a heavy smoker, and commander of the 4th Infantry Brigade. After the disasters of the Gallipoli campaign, during which Monash made his share of errors, but learned from them, he made his mark on the Western Front through 1916 and 1917 with promotion to major-general and command of Australia’s 3rd Division. With that command had come the latitude to make many of his own decisions, and so to make his name.

Yet Monash was a reluctant general. ‘I hate the business of war,’ he had written to his wife Vic in 1917, ‘the awful horror of it, the waste, the destruction, the inefficiency. Many a time I could have wished that wounds or sickness, or a breakdown of health, would have enabled me to retire honourably from the field of action.’ Only his sense of duty to his Australian soldiers had kept him at the helm of his division, and now of his corps. Vic had suggested in one of her letters that he think about making the army his profession after the war, but he’d responded that he would only consider becoming a paid servant of the state as a last resort. ‘I have fought all my life for personal independence, and shall not give up what I have won.’⁵

The past four years had changed him. He still retained his love of music, literature and art. He still had a keen sense of humour. But now, as commander of the Australian Corps, Monash was, in the words of one of his biographers, ‘a slim, darkly handsome man, prematurely aged and greyed by the strain of war’.⁶ In the fashion of the day, Monash wore a neat moustache, and his mature good looks made him attractive to women; at this very moment the married Monash had a mistress in London.

When Monash spoke, his words were chosen with care. Those words, sometimes used to stir and motivate, other times to console, showed his great compassion, his joy of life and a total command of his subject. His eyes took in everything. Behind those eyes worked as clever a mind as has ever led an army. ‘No shrewder judge of men and things has ever lived,’ Frederick Cutlack, his divisional intelligence officer in 1917, was to say of Monash.⁷ Britain’s World War Two Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery later declared, ‘I would name Sir John Monash as the best general on the Western Front.’⁸

Monash had an elevated ego; that he would never deny. Every general, like a brain surgeon, has to believe he has superior skills that equip him, or her, to perform their job better than anyone else as they make life and death decisions, and play God. Sometimes that belief is misplaced, and comes across as arrogance. But when self-belief is warranted, as it was in Monash’s case, the result is an aura of confidence that is infectious, and inspiring. Besides, Australia’s fighting men had gained such a reputation on the Western Front they gave Monash every reason to be confident, in them as much as in his own abilities.

Looking around his divisional commanders, Monash took in the faces of men he had come to know well over the past few years. Until recently, he had been their equal, a colleague in arms. His recent promotion had required a new mindset. ‘I was now called upon to consider their personalities and temperaments as subordinates,’ Monash himself would say. Monash was now the boss, but, as a superb man manager, ‘the Old Man’, as his staff called him, would let every general express his views before making a decision or issuing an order. Once that order was given Monash would expect every subordinate to make sure it was carried out, to the letter.⁹

Commanding the Australian 1st Division was Major-General Thomas Glasgow, a forty-two-year-old Queenslander. Serving in the Boer War as a lieutenant with the Queensland Mounted Infantry and winning the Distinguished Service Order, Glasgow had been a shopkeeper and cattleman prior to this war, which he’d entered as a major with the Australian Light Horse. Clean-shaven, well-built and forthright, Glasgow presaged the act of an American commander at Bastogne a quarter of a century later by telling Germans who’d surrounded his troops and called for their surrender to ‘Go to Hell!’ Monash didn’t think Glasgow a great tactician, but credited his success as a commander to his strength of personality. ‘He always got to where he wanted to get,’ Monash said admiringly. Glasgow was, said Monash, ‘consistently loyal to the Australian ideal, and intensely proud of the Australian soldier’.¹⁰

For the moment, Glasgow’s 1st Division was engaged in the defence of Hazebrouck in Flanders, to the north, holding the front line there as part of the British Army. Monash was anxious to bring all the Australian divisions under his direct control and put Glasgow’s driving determination to work for the success of the Australian Corps, but with British GHQ reluctant to release it from the Flanders front, the 1st would not join the rest of Monash’s Australian fighting forces for some time yet.

Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal commanded the 2nd Division. ‘A massive man whose build belies his extraordinary physical energy,’ according to Monash. Forty-three-year-old Rosenthal, from Berrima, New South Wales, had come to divisional command via the artillery. Another officer with a militia background, prior to the war Rosenthal had been an architect. Monash considered him a perpetual optimist. ‘He always was,’ said Monash, ‘incapable of recognising failure.’¹¹

Commanding the 3rd Division was forty-five-year-old Major-General John Gellibrand. Born and bred in Tasmania, Gellibrand had graduated from Sandhurst Military College in England and served in the British Army before returning to Tasmania to become an apple orchardist. An intelligent man, Gellibrand made a better philosopher than a warrior, but his determination to do his duty had seen him appointed to take Monash’s place when Monash had recently been elevated from command of the 3rd to take over the entire Australian Corps.

The 4th Division had been commanded for some time by a Scotsman, Major-General Ewen Sinclair-Maclagan, a forty-nine-year-old professional infantry officer who had been loaned to Australia by the British Government prior to the war to help oversee the creation of the Royal Military College at Duntroon, Canberra, and train Australia’s future fulltime military officers. Monash considered the Scot tactful, industrious, but a pessimist. Yet, despite his pessimism, Maclagan would always move mountains to achieve goals he frequently argued against.

Short, slight Major-General Sir Talbot Hobbs was commander of the 5th Division. Another militia officer, another architect, another artilleryman – he had commanded the artillery of the first Australian contingent that had sailed for Europe in October 1914 – and also another Briton, Hobbs was several months older than Monash. While ‘he would be the last to lay claim to special brilliance, or outstanding military genius’, Monash was to say that in his opinion Hobbs displayed ‘sound common sense’ and had a ‘sane attitude to every problem that confronted him’.¹² Hobbs and Sinclair-Maclagan had both spent a number of years in Australia – Hobbs in Perth, WA, after migrating there in his twenties. In fact, Hobbs had become so Australianised he appeared to think of himself as an Aussie. Certainly, Monash credited him with being, ‘first and foremost, a lover of the Australian soldier’.¹³

Monash was now in charge of more than 166,000 men. ‘My command is more than two-and-a-half times the size of the British Army under the Duke of Wellington, or the French Army under Napoleon Bonaparte, at the Battle of Waterloo,’ he had proudly written to Vic in Melbourne in May. To put the size of Monash’s new command in perspective, he controlled 10,000 more men than would be landed by the Allies at Normandy on D-Day, 1944.

In Monash’s opinion, the Australian Corps was ‘the backbone of the Allied armies’ in 1918. It was by far the largest of any of the ‘British’ corps in France. Apart from the five Aussie infantry divisions it included the 13th Australian Light Horse, ten brigades of Australian artillery, two massive 12-inch railway guns, several battalions of British tanks, a battalion of cyclists, signal units, engineers, labour battalions, supply columns, ammunition dumps, mobile workshops, and the Australian Flying Corps’ Number 3 Squadron.¹⁴

Close to a third of the men under Monash’s direct command were not Australian. One thousand were noncombat troops of the American 108th Engineer Regiment, whilst 50,000 were British troops. Half of these Brits were regulars, with the balance conscripts, unlike the Australian troops, who were all volunteers. Many Australian officers and men had little time for British troops, considering them feckless at most times and useless if they lost their officers. This view would be reflected by Australian war correspondent Charles Bean who, in the postwar Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, would describe the British ‘Tommy’ as ‘extraordinarily guileless’ and ‘humble-minded to a degree’.

General Monash had no problem with the British Army’s rank and file, considering them no less courageous than any other soldier at the front. He did question the ability of many British field and staff officers. As a consequence, he relegated most of his British troops to support roles. Monash gave his Australians the toughest assignments, because he knew they would not let him down.

At this stage of the war, the Allied armies in France were on the defensive, licking their wounds and catching their breath. The British north of the Somme and the French south of it were content to occupy the lines they had been driven back to by the German Army’s spring offensive in March and April. That offensive, called the Michael-Schlacht or Operation Michael by the Germans, had been fuelled by the infusion of numerous German divisions transferred from fighting the Russians and Romanians on the Eastern Front after the Russians had sued for peace as their Bolshevik revolution took them out of the war.

Holding the line between the British and the French, the Australians on the Somme mounted regular surprise raids across No Man’s Land to seize German prisoners and materiel and to generally keep Fritz uneasy, operating from the trenches they had been occupying since stopping the German advance short of Amiens in April. The Australians called these raids Peaceful Penetration. Perhaps there was an intended irony in this title, for the rationale behind these raids was to ensure the German troops facing the Australians never had any peace.

Monash’s first order on taking over the Australian Corps at the end of May had been a defensive one, requiring the strengthening of the corp’s support trenches behind the front line to enable his Australians to put up one hell of a fight if the Germans attempted a fresh push towards Amiens. Information from intelligence sources including the British Secret Service made available to Monash since he’d become a corps commander told him that Amiens had been and remained a key German objective. But Monash was itching to go on the offensive. ‘It was high time,’ he’d confided to his wife, ‘that some commanders on our side of No Man’s Land should begin to “think offensively”, and cease to look over their shoulders in order to estimate how far it still was to the coast.’¹⁵

As British war correspondent Philip Gibbs had noted, in late March the Australians had made their mark on the Somme after an entire British corps had broken and fled at 4.00 pm on the 26th in the face of the German offensive. General Monash and troops of his 3rd Australian Division and others of the 4th Australian Division had stepped in and changed the course of the war. ‘We have stood firm,’ he wrote at the time, ‘the road to Amiens is closed.’ As a result, he said, ‘we, and the 4th Australians, and the New Zealanders to the north steadied up the entire British line’.¹⁶

Then, on 4 April, the British 14th Division, holding the Allied line at and around the village of Le Hamel in the Somme Valley to the northeast of Villers-Bretonneux, had been routed by five German divisions and driven from the village and nearby woods. The German advance had swept on British heels to the outskirts of Villers-Bretonneux, where they were stopped by an unexpected charge from Australian troops.

The enemy’s gains beyond Hamel had given the German Army a salient providing excellent artillery positions on high and well concealed wooded ground near Hamel, creating a ‘bubble’ in the Allied line that protruded well behind the broader front on the Somme. Back then, Monash had proposed a counterattack by his 3rd Division to eliminate this bubble, but to his frustration then corps commander General Birdwood had turned him down; in Monash’s words, ‘for reasons doubtless satisfactory at that time’.¹⁷

Ever since, said Monash, the enemy’s Hamel salient had been ‘a source of annoyance and anxiety to me’. Now that the proactive Monash was corps commander, he intended undertaking that operation to eliminate the salient, as a prelude to a much larger offensive. That was what this council of war at Chateau Bertangles was all about. By the end of the meeting, Monash and his generals had agreed a plan to retake Hamel and the nearby Hamel and Vaire Woods, popping the German bubble and smoothening the front line.¹⁸

‘The main thing is always to have a plan,’ said Monash when he took charge of the Australian Corps and at last had a certain freedom of command. ‘If it is not the best plan, it is at least better than no plan at all.’¹⁹ Monash, as events were to prove, would create a masterly plan or two before this war was over. He approached each problem with the mind of an engineer. Engineers work to plans, pulling together all the material and expertise necessary to build something solid that will serve its purpose well. This particular plan now being hatched by Monash would be unlike any drawn up by either side to date in this war. Incredible as it seems today, for the first time in the Great War this operational plan called for a surprise attack integrating infantry, artillery, tanks and air power, all with their assigned roles, objectives and timetables, working as one.

Monash had said in April, two days before the original British setback at Hamel, that to succeed in his task as a commander he had to inject optimism into all branches of his command and ‘deal with every task and every situation on the basis of simple business propositions, differing in no way from the problems of civil life, except that they are governed by a simple [military] technique’. Just such a simple business plan was born at Chateau Bertangles.²⁰

As Monash and his generals were meeting, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of the British 4th Army, of which the Australian Corps formed part, arrived at the chateau. Scrawny, balding, a little taller than Monash, Rawlinson had the aura of a provincial bank manager. After Monash sent his commanders away bubbling with optimism and enthusiasm for the Hamel operation, he explained to Rawlinson, who was his immediate superior, his concept for an integrated attack on the Hamel salient spearheaded by tanks, adding that for the operation to succeed he would need more tanks, more artillery and more aircraft.

Rawlinson was a Briton, and an anti-Semite. Whether Monash was aware of, or was ever on the receiving end of, this anti-semitism, he never revealed, but, two years after this, Rawlinson would privately describe Monash as ‘a clever, slippery, creepy crawly Jew’.²¹ By comparison, in public at least, Monash was always complimentary about Rawlinson. ‘His qualities of broad outlook, searching insight, great sagacity, and strong determination, tempered by wise restraint, never failed to impress me,’ Monash would write just a year later.²² ‘Wise restraint’ was Monash’s code for ‘overcautious’. Rawlinson, like all senior British commanders of the time, was ruled by a dread of failure. Years of British reverses and grievous losses on the Western Front had made him a cynic, and perhaps even a fatalist.

But then, Rawlinson also knew that Monash had the favour and the ear of British commander-in-chief Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. Rawlinson, a ‘ready talker, full of ambition and suspected to be not incapable of intrigue’, according to Haig’s biographer Duff Cooper, knew that his own present position and future prospects now largely depended on Monash’s success.

Rawlinson warmed to Monash’s idea for an integrated attack spearheaded by the Australians, especially as it involved straightening the front line in the sector he controlled. Experience had also taught him that any attack carried out by the Australians stood a very good chance of succeeding. And if it failed, the Australians could be blamed, not the English. Finding himself in a win-win situation, Rawlinson asked Monash for a concrete proposal in writing, one he could submit to Field-Marshal Haig for approval.

Within days of Monash taking charge of the Australian Corps, he had been invited to Vaux-en-Amiénois, a small village in a quiet valley to the northwest of Amiens. His host was Brigadier-General Hugh Elles, commander of the British Tank Corps. With British GHQ ambivalent about the potential role of tanks to defeat the Germans, General Elles had been determined to convince the most imaginative general on the Western Front of what they could do for his corps, and prove to Monash that his new Mark V was a very different animal from the unreliable old Mark IV.

Only arriving in France on 23 March, the first Mark Vs had re-equipped the 5th Tank Brigade at Vaux-en-Amiénois, replacing the unit’s discredited Mark IVs. Now, the 5th Tank Brigade was on offer to the Australian Corps. General Monash and his chief of staff Brigadier-General Thomas Blamey had accepted Elles’ invitation, and on a sunny mid-June day, as Monash, Blamey, Elles and Brigadier-General Anthony Courage, commander of the 5th Tank Brigade, watched on, the Mark Vs had gone through their paces.

‘Sir John,’ Elles had said as the massive twenty-three-ton monsters churned the grass in front of them, ‘tanks are an arm which the enemy is not fully prepared to counter.’²³

The Germans had yet to realise the potential of armoured vehicles. They had produced a handful of their own version of the tank, the massive and ungainly A7V, which required a crew of sixteen. The Australians would capture an A7V, Mephisto, on 22 July, and ship it back to Australia. There it remains today, on display, the sole remaining original A7V in the world. The German Army was also using a number of captured British tanks, but without any conception of the role the tank could and should play in infantry warfare. Instead, the Germans had invested heavily in anti-tank guns and armour-piercing machinegun bullets.

‘The eventual counter to the tank can to my mind only be the tank,’ Elles confidently told Monash, just as he’d told his GHQ. ‘In the meantime, we have an opportunity. Once tank meets tank, the opportunity will vanish.’²⁴

Monash the engineer nodded as he took in the smoke-belching metal beasts frolicking in the Vaux valley for his benefit. By the end of the day, he had come away convinced that Elles was right – the tank could be an infantry weapon par excellence, if deployed wisely. The Mark V tank had more powerful engines than its predecessor, meaning it travelled a little faster and had the capacity to get itself out of mud, snow and shell craters, which had invariably slowed or halted the Mark IV. The new tank also had thicker armour, and its internal efficiency was greater – instead of requiring four crewmen working together to steer it, as had been the case with the Mark IV, the Mark V needed just a single driver.

Like its predecessors, the Mark V did have one major fault. It was incredibly noisy and could be heard kilometres away, especially on quiet nights, the very time that Australian infantry moved into position to launch their surprise assaults. As things stood, that noise precluded the tank participating in such attacks – the enemy would be well and truly alerted to its presence long before it lumbered into view, and would be given precious time to take defensive measures.

Following the instructive Tank Corps demonstration, as Monash climbed into his Rolls-Royce staff car at Vaux to return to his HQ, he invited General Courage to send him a memorandum setting out how the Mark V could best cooperate with infantry in a surprise attack, as long as the problem of noise could be overcome.

On 21 June, Monash received Courage’s memo, just as he was putting the finishing touches to his written Hamel proposal. The Tank Corps had developed a fixed mentality on how tanks should be used, and this dictated the first of Courage’s recommendations. He wrote that his new tanks could operate in an attack without the need for close artillery support. The tankers were worried that shells from supporting artillery could fall on their own advancing machines. Courage also said that tanks should advance in three waves, mixed with the infantry, with the infantry leading the assault.

As for the noise problem, Courage came up with a novel recommendation of his own. Only one other war machine was as noisy as a tank, the aircraft, and Courage suggested that aircraft be employed to fly low over the battlefield, drowning out the noise of advancing tanks and dropping bombs on the enemy’s positions and keeping heads down, thus retaining the element of surprise as far as the tanks were concerned. Once Monash read Courage’s report he dispensed with most of the tank man’s recommendations, but was intrigued by Courage’s original idea involving aircraft.

That same day, 21 June, Monash delivered the requested written proposal for the Hamel operation to General Rawlinson. Brief but precise, it read like a business plan. Covering seven points, it spelled out the pluses and minuses of the Hamel attack. As Monash and his divisional commanders had agreed in their council of war, this would be primarily an attack by 7500 infantry, but led by tanks. Contrary to Courage’s recommendation, Monash’s proposal called for extensive artillery support. But he did adopt Courage’s idea for low-flying aircraft.

The main disadvantage of the operation, Monash wrote, was the potential depletion of his corps through casualties sustained in the attack. At this stage of the war, the supply of reinforcements from Australia had almost dried up, and heavy losses sustained from now on could not be replenished. A pitiful total of 5221 Australian reinforcements were then available at depots in England and Le Havre in France. However, the Australian divisions were already understrength by 8255 men as a result of casualties and illness. Major losses in this attack could make it necessary to abolish one of the five Aussie divisions and consolidate all remaining Australian infantry into four divisions.²⁵

On the positive side, if the operation proceeded precisely as he proposed, with speed and precision, Monash said his losses would be minimal, and those casualties would be more than compensated for by the gain of the Hamel salient and the dent the success of the surprise assault would assuredly deliver to German morale. As for a date for the operation, Monash stated that his corps would be ready to mount it in the first week of July, when, his meteorological experts told him, he could expect clear weather and a waning moon; meaning, the surprise attack would not be illuminated by strong moonlight.

On 23 June, General Rawlinson submitted Monash’s plan to Field-Marshal Haig at British GHQ at Montreuil-sur-Mer. This seaside town in the Pas-de-Calais region, where Jean Valjean served as mayor in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, had been occupied by the British General Headquarters since 1916. Haig had his quarters in a chateau outside the town. Rawlinson added his recommendation to Monash’s proposal that it be approved for implementation as set out by the Australian general, asking that a Royal Air Force squadron also be assigned to the operation to double Monash’s air resources. Rawlinson expressed the opinion that the Hamel attack would be a great blow to German morale and a great launching platform for future larger attacks by the Australians.

Field-Marshal Haig liked and admired John Monash, and had been a prime mover in the Australian’s recent promotion. An inarticulate man given to prolonged silences, Haig was also a man of little originality, and, indeed, according to some critics, of little compassion. Haig at least recognised talent in others, and in the articulate, urbane and sociable Monash in particular. Haig was delighted that, via the Monash plan, the British Army would be going on the attack after taking a battering in the Germans’ spring offensive. Even if the Australians’ attack was to be only on a relatively small scale at this point, it would still be, in Monash’s words, ‘the first offensive operation on any substantial scale’ to be ‘fought by the Allies since the previous autumn’.²⁶

Haig was anxious to relieve pressure on Amiens, which he knew the Germans were keen to seize. The field-marshal also liked the fact that Monash was prepared to trust the much-maligned British tank. To Haig’s credit, and to Monash’s benefit, the commander-in-chief was a supporter of innovation. When, earlier in the war, others had scorned the introduction of tanks, considering them a desperate and last-ditch measure, Haig had encouraged their development and deployment. No one had been more disappointed than him by their failures to date. Monash’s operation offered an opportunity to restore the tank’s reputation. The field-marshal promptly approved the Hamel operation, and instructed Rawlinson and GHQ to give Monash all the tanks, artillery and aircraft he asked for.

Intensive, detailed preparations began at Chateau Bertangles, as General Monash, his department heads and staff began to quickly put together a detailed operational plan that would be both scrupulous and ingenious. In the end, it would involve 118 elements dictated by Monash, plus another eighteen added by subordinates, elements that had to be organised and integrated. These ranged, apart from the battlefield assault plan for 4 July, from supply to aerial reconnaissance, camouflage to diversions, in the days and hours leading up to the Hamel attack.

Monash considered an army a machine. According to his aide Frederick Cutlack, ‘The work of the machine fascinated him, and its efficiency was a passion with him.’²⁷ Like the components of a machine, every one of the Hamel plan’s 136 elements was vital to the operation’s success. Should any component prove faulty, the whole thing might break down. Monash likened himself to the conductor of an orchestra, and his plan to a musical score. ‘A perfected modern battle plan is like nothing so much as a score for an orchestral composition,’ he said, ‘where the various arms and units are the instruments, and the tasks they perform are their respective musical phases.’²⁸

Some Australian officers who received General Monash’s written ‘score’ for the Battle of Hamel complained there was too much paperwork. Others would later express the belief that the paperwork, and the detail, was the minimum required to ensure success. Either way, the 136 elements became the blueprint for the operation. With secrecy essential to ensuring the Germans had no idea about the build-up of men and equipment taking place opposite Hamel, or the reason for it, only very senior Australian and British officers were at this stage aware that an attack on the Hamel salient was being prepared. For the same reason, the movement of supplies and equipment towards the battle zone was restricted to the hours of darkness.

To undertake the Hamel assault, Monash selected General Sinclair-Maclagan’s 4th Division, with Maclagan therefore the operational commander who would call the shots once the assault got underway. Monash bolstered Maclagan’s force with the addition of the 6th Brigade from the 2nd Division and the 11th Brigade from the 3rd Division, with both brigades temporarily coming under Maclagan’s command for the operation. When Monash informed Maclagan that he would be in charge of the assault, and that it would be led by tanks, the Scot flatly refused to have anything to do with tanks, having been badly let down by them in the past.

‘Maclagan is not overjoyed by the prospect of tanks,’ Monash told General Rawlinson.

‘Don’t worry,’ Rawlinson responded, ‘we will talk him round.’ And they did.²⁹

At this time, too, Monash had a brainwave. He knew that elements of the raw American 33rd ‘Prairie’ Division, which was part of the American Expeditionary Forces’ II Corps, had been sent to the Amiens sector to train with the British Fourth Army for six weeks after landing in France from the USA on 30 May, the day Monash took over the Australian Corps. Monash was a great admirer of the United States. With his wife, he had visited the US in 1910 as part of a world tour, and it had excited him. ‘Fascinating, stimulating and wonderful,’ he had written to a friend.³⁰

Over the years, too, Monash had studied America’s military history in depth, the American Civil War in particular. So, Monash put in a request to General Rawlinson for 2000 American combat troops to be assigned to the Australian Corps to take part in the Hamel assault alongside the Aussies. Rawlinson would subsequently take credit for involving the Yanks. Certainly, he was the one to make the official request for them, but Monash would later make clear that the idea, and the original request, was his.

Ever since America had entered the war in April 1917, Monash had been looking forward to the arrival of American troops on the Western Front, envisioning their units being broken down to battalion size and distributed among British armies along the front. Nothing prepares a man for war better than war itself, Monash would have reminded Rawlinson. Since 13 June, a thousand noncombatants of the American 33rd Division’s 108th Engineer Regiment had been attached to the Australian Corps, and all reports had them mixing well with the Australians. Knowing that no US combat troops had yet to be involved in an offensive action in France, it pleased Monash to think that he might be the one to give the United States its baptism of fire.

General Rawlinson thought Monash’s suggestion a splendid idea, and contacted Major-General George W. Read, commander of the American II Corps. Rather than tell Read he wanted to throw 2000 Yanks into an attack against the Germans, Rawlinson suggested American participation with the Australian Corps in the most casual terms. ‘Certain smaller units of your division might be permitted to take part in a raid of some kind which we contemplate making against the enemy some time in the near future,’ he said. He added that Read should consider it ‘valuable training’ for his men. To meet Monash’s request for 2000 American combat troops that could be spread through the Australian brigades, Rawlinson specifically asked Read for the American contribution to be in the form of platoons or companies.³¹

In General Monash’s estimation, ‘Read was a man of sound common sense and clear judgement.’³² The white-haired, moustachioed, fifty-eight-year-old Read, an Iowa native, was a West Point graduate and professional soldier. For four years he had been assistant professor of military science at the University of Iowa, and during the Spanish-American War had served in Cuba as a captain in the ordnance department. General Read knew of the stellar fighting reputation of the Australians, and also knew that, while the British were content to sit pat in their trenches, the Aussies were making frequent raids across No Man’s Land into the German front line and keeping the Kaiser’s men on their toes.

Read, who had only been promoted from command of the American 30th Division to that of II Corps that month, saw this invitation to participate with the Aussies as an ideal opportunity to swiftly lift the level of battle preparedness of some of his men, without any risk of sending them into a situation where they might face defeat. To his mind, the Australians were guaranteed to succeed in any operation they undertook. According to Monash, who would develop an excellent working relationship with Read, ‘His only desire was the success of his divisions.’ So, without hesitation, Read agreed to the idea, and on 27 June his headquarters issued orders to the 33rd American Division to assign the 131st and 132nd Infantry Regiments to join the Australian Corps for the planned ‘raid’.³³

Read made just one stipulation when agreeing to his men joining the Australian Corps, that the Americans were not to be split up and scattered individually among Australian units. He required that they serve at the very least as complete platoons, and under their own platoon commanders. When Rawlinson passed this requirement on to Monash, the Australian general saw no problem, considering it a ‘very proper condition’.³⁴ It was a condition he would adhere to, although some American medical personnel, runners and officers would be pragmatically salted solo or in small groups through Australian ranks as conditions dictated.

Three days later, at Chateau Bertangles, when General Monash held the final Hamel battle conference with his divisional commanders and departmental chiefs, including the commanders of Number 3 Squadron AFC and Number 9 Squadron Royal Air Force, after initially considering 2 July as the date for the assault he set 4 July as the day. ‘This selection was prompted,’ Monash would later say, ‘partly by the desire to allow ample time for the completion of all arrangements.’³⁵

Monash particularly wanted to involve his 11th Brigade, which had previously formed part of his 3rd Division command and which he considered the fittest of all the Australian brigades for the Hamel operation. The 11th was currently undergoing a scheduled spell behind the lines and was only due to return to the trenches the day before the Fourth of July. ‘But there were also sentimental grounds, because this was the anniversary of the American national holiday.’³⁶

American troops had already been involved in combat on the Western Front, in small defensive actions – two enlisted men of the 369th Regiment, an all-black National Guard unit from Harlem in New York City, had been awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French after fighting off a 14 May German raid on their guard post in the Argonne. But 4 July would be the first time American troops had gone on the offensive, and the Battle of Hamel, Monash’s first operation in command of the Australian Corps, was quite deliberately and very confidently now set down by him to take place on American Independence Day, 1918, a day that Monash intended would give Americans every reason to remember and celebrate.³⁷