‘You’re going into action with some mighty celebrated troops guaranteed to win.’
Major-General George W. Read Jr, Commander American II Corps
AS THE AMERICAN 131st Regiment marched to the front, Colonel Joseph B. Sanborn smiled with satisfaction as his men watched German shells lob in from long-range guns somewhere away to the east. The Americans observed this new phenomenon more with fascination than fear. The enemy guns seemed to be taking pot luck, firing without any precise target in mind. Sanborn would later note that he saw only a few of these shells cause casualties, while some destroyed buildings, roads and bridges and occasionally obliterated a British field gun or ‘some luckless village’, which, in Sanborn’s words, ‘became a havoc of smoking ruin’.38
Like his Illinois boys, Joe Sanborn was in good spirits, and ready to come to grips with the Germans. A stout sixty-two-year-old with white hair and moustache, he was by any standard rather old to be leading soldiers into battle. In fact, senior British officers who met him in June considered Sanborn a ‘fussy’ old man who should have been sent into retirement instead of being sent to the Western Front.39 But Sanborn had made this regiment what it was. He was determined to fuss after the needs of his boys, and to do no less than he asked of them when the order came to go into the attack.
The Chicago-based 131st Regiment had started life in 1874 as the 1st Regiment of Infantry, Illinois State Guard. Retitled the 1st Illinois Volunteer Infantry, it had served in the 1898 Santiago campaign in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, with a younger, fitter Joe Sanborn one of its battalion commanders. As it happened, back then Sanborn had outranked his later corps commander, General Read, who would experience rapid promotion once the United States entered the Great War. Sanborn, a native of New Hampshire, had joined the 131st in Chicago as a twenty-four-year-old private in 1880, receiving a commission as a second lieutenant two years later. After a series of promotions, Sanborn had been made a colonel and commander of the regiment in December 1898. By that stage, he had also found success in business in Chicago as head of his own mercantile agency, J. B. Sanborn Co.
Sanborn had continued to command the regiment over the next seventeen years, and led it south in 1916 when the US Government mobilised 300,000 National Guard troops and sent them to the southern border to deal with the marauding Mexican general Pancho Villa, whose troops had raided Columbus, New Mexico and killed eighteen American citizens. Under Sanborn’s efficient leadership, the 1st Illinois had been the first National Guard unit to reach the border, but, like all the other American troops sent to confront Villa, they had failed to see any action. Instead, the Illinois boys had spent four months kicking the Texas dust in camp at San Antonio. They had returned to Texas the following year to train for Great War service. This time reconstituted as the 131st Regiment and assigned to the 66th Brigade, which was in turn part of the 33rd Division, the unit had spent close to a year training at Houston’s Camp Logan before finally being shipped to Europe.
After landing at Brest on 30 May, the regiment had been billeted there before being transferred east by rail to billets at the town of Eu. From Eu, Colonel Sanborn and his personal staff had proceeded to spend 12 to 16 June attached to the Australians, at the headquarters of Brigadier-General G. E. ‘Pompey’ Elliott’s 15th Brigade. Simultaneously, Colonel Abel Davis, commander of the American 132nd Regiment, had spent these four days at the HQ of General Charles Brand’s Australian 4th Brigade. Davis, an Illinois state senator and county recorder in civilian life, was Sanborn’s protege and junior, having for some years commanded the 131st Regiment’s 1st Battalion. Davis’s appointment to lead the 132nd, the old 2nd Illinois, had been on Sanborn’s recommendation.
At this stage, the Americans had no idea that General Monash would soon ask for them to join his corps. Sanborn was to say that over these four days at 15th Brigade HQ he had many talks with Pompey Elliott, a no-nonsense veteran of Australian campaigns on Gallipoli, in Flanders and on the Somme. Elliott and Brand, who had taken over command of General Monash’s one-time brigade in 1916, were just the men to school Sanborn and Davis in the realities of trench warfare. Sanborn and Davis, for their part, were eager to listen and learn. Following this four-day attachment, Davis promptly wrote to Brand, thanking him for his invaluable time and advice and telling him how much he had enjoyed the experience. Davis had added, ‘I hope that I shall have the opportunity to serve with you and your troops.’40
Australian officers had been equally impressed with their American counterparts. Said the 4th Brigade’s Lieutenant Ted Rule, ‘These Yanks view things much the same as we do, and their general trend of ideas was very sensible indeed.’41
On Friday 21 June, the day that General Monash submitted his written Hamel plan for approval, Colonels Sanborn and Davis obeyed orders from American II Corps HQ to move their regiments to Pierregot, northwest of Amiens, to join the British 4th Army’s III Corps for training, with the front line and the Germans just fifteen kilometres to their east. At Pierregot, both the 131st and 132nd had received orders on 29 June to join the Australian Corps for ‘a raid of some kind’ against the Germans. This, said the written order that came out of the American II Corps headquarters, was ‘considered valuable training’.42
Major-General George Bell Jr, commander of the American 33rd Division, had told Colonel Sanborn about instructions he’d received from General Read regarding the move. Read had urged Bell, when addressing his troops, ‘Tell them, “You’re going in with some mighty celebrated troops guaranteed to win, and you’ve got to get up to their level and stay with them.”’43
Bell was a career soldier who’d graduated from West Point military academy the same year that Joe Sanborn enlisted in the part-time State Guard as a private. Field-Marshal Haig described Bell as ‘a typical Yankee, with a little goatee beard and moustache’.44 In fact, to modern eyes, the handsome Bell would look a great deal like Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. With no time for delay or excuse, Bell had gained the nickname of ‘Do It Now’ from his troops. He had duly exhorted Sanborn to ensure his boys made ready to make good when they went over the top with the Australians. ‘The bravery, efficiency and skill of Australian soldiers,’ he was to say, ‘are fully appreciated by this division as they are known to the entire world.’45
Neither Sanborn nor his troops had been impressed by the lethargic, unenthusiastic, war-weary British III Corps troops and their overcautious officers they encountered at Pierregot. ‘The British were not contemplating any offensive, but were rather picking out the points on which to retire if pressed,’ Sanborn would later say.46
The Americans were not alone in their critical assessment of the British Army. Privately, General Monash said, ‘The best troops of the United Kingdom have been long ago used up and we now have a class of man who is without initiative or individuality. They are brave enough, but simply unskilful. They would be alright if properly led, but their officers, particularly the junior officers, are poor young men from the professions and from office stools in the English cities, who have had no experience whatever of independent responsibility or leadership.’47
The Germans also considered British troops the weakest link in the Allied line, and were secretly planning a strike against the British Army in Flanders at this very time, a strike that would be cancelled once Monash went on the offensive. So, the Americans were thrilled to be joining the Australians. Just as the fighting prowess of the Australians was well known to the Americans, it was acknowledged by the Germans, whose press declared that the British were trying to climb to victory over the corpses of their Australian and Canadian troops.48
‘There were great manifestations of joy,’ Sanborn would say, when the order came in from brigade HQ at 2.35 pm on 29 June for the regiment’s C and E companies, plus one platoon from K Company added to bring E Company up to full strength, to march to Allonville and report ‘for training’ with the Australian 4th Brigade.49 The following day, a further six companies from the 131st were ordered to move south to take up reserve positions in the rear of the front line held by the Australian Corps and make ready to also participate in the Hamel attack. As Sanborn and his men marched into the Australian sector they were met by Australian officers and men who welcomed them warmly.
‘Are you going to win the war for us?’ one wisecracking Australian called to the Americans with a grin as they passed.
‘Well,’ a Yank came back, ‘we hope we fight like the Australians.’50
Far from boasting that they were going to win the war, the Americans only wanted to learn from and emulate the Australians, which immediately enamoured them to the men from Down Under, who welcomed them like long-lost brothers. ‘The Australians appeared to be more akin to our class [than the British and French],’ Colonel Sanborn would say, ‘in that they were an independent, alert, energetic lot of men and splendid fighters.’51 As Sanborn noted, the Americans and Australians had a lot in common. Not only had both their nations been born out of British colonialism, Yanks and Aussies valued individualism. These men also looked much alike, being generally taller and stronger than the average short, pale British squaddie as a result of more protein in their diet while growing up, and more of an outdoor life.
The Aussies were in fact a sight for sore American eyes. ‘From the first when our soldiers came in contact with them,’ said Sanborn, ‘they mixed well and took kindly to each other.’52 As the two forces assimilated, word quickly also reached Australian commanders that their men considered the Americans ‘good blokes’, with similar outlooks. ‘They swear a little less, they drink coffee rather than tea,’ one Australian officer reported, ‘but otherwise might as well be our own fellows.’53
An Australian war correspondent who saw the American troops arriving in the Amiens sector was immediately impressed by what he saw. ‘Fine looking men,’ he would write, ‘just arrived by march today in their dusty boots, green-yellow canvas gaiters, coats shaped to the waist, and felt Puritan hats.’ At a glance, once the Americans donned the same British-style steel helmets that the Australians wore, Yanks and Aussies were difficult to tell apart. Same impressive height and build, and a similar tunic design, of a similar khaki-colour, which the Yanks called ‘drab’. On closer inspection, the American tunic had a stand-up collar that differed from the Australian tunic’s flat collar.54
As Colonel Sanborn’s headquarters and medical staff also joined their Australian counterparts, the 131st Regiment’s Company C dossed down with the Australian 42nd Battalion, and Company E, with the addition of the platoon from Company K, joined the 43rd Battalion. Simultaneously, the 132nd Regiment’s Company A joined the Australian 13th Battalion and its Company G amalgamated with the 15th Battalion.
At 2.00 in the morning of 1 July, Indiana native Captain Carroll M. Gale, a police inspector in Chicago until a little more than a year before this, led his weary Company C men of Colonel Sanborn’s 131st Regiment to the Australian 11th Brigade reserve trench line, where they were to join the Aussie 42nd Battalion. Thirty-eight-year-old Gale knew that something big was in the wind, but still didn’t know exactly what. As he was departing Pierregot, a bright-eyed General Bell, who knew all about the planned Hamel attack but was sworn to secrecy by General Read, had told Gale as much as he dare. ‘The Australians might let us take part in a show they are planning,’ he’d said with a sparkle in his eye.55
At the reserve trenches, Gale was met by Major Edward Dibdin, who was commanding the 42nd Battalion, a Queensland unit. Prior to the war a company secretary in Rockhampton, Dibdin now warmly welcomed Gale and showed him where his men could bed down. Gale was surprised by how the Australian battalion had been reduced in numbers by its years of fighting the Germans, a fact he remarked on to the Australian major.
Dibdin shrugged philosophically. ‘Yes, my companies are small,’ he agreed. ‘The entire battalion is little stronger than your company.’56
Gale nodded. His company was sixty men strong, while, in his estimation, the entire 42nd Battalion contained just one hundred men. That compared to a full-strength battalion of 900, although every one of the hundred Queenslanders Gale saw looked tough and battle ready. So, Gale made a suggestion. ‘So that my men can mix more with your Australians and learn more from them, I suggest I detail one of my platoons with each of your companies.’57
Dibdin readily agreed, and the American platoons split up and divided themselves among the Australian companies, with much handshaking, backslapping and friendly banter exchanged. In daylight, more American platoons arrived. Some of the new arrivals were also distributed among the Australian companies, while fifty Americans and an equal number of Australians were sent to the rear to form a battalion reserve that could be quickly brought forward in an emergency to support the men of the first line.
Nearby, when Captain James W. Luke’s Company E from the 131st Infantry joined the South Australians of the 43rd Battalion, a similar division of Americans was made among the Australian companies. The addition of American reinforcements permitted the equally understrength 43rd to re-establish its fourth company. The same sort of division and union took place when Colonel Davis’s 132nd Regiment joined the 4th Brigade. Commented one 4th Brigade staff officer, ‘These American soldiers seem an exceptionally smart lot and are most keen to learn. They are getting on exceptionally well with the officers and men of the brigade.’58
It was a marriage made in soldiers’ heaven, and both the Australians and the Americans were eager to go into action together as soon as possible, but with different motives. The hard-bitten Aussies were determined to do whatever it took to bring victory and an end to the war closer. Meanwhile, the Yanks were keen to impress the Aussies with their enthusiasm and courage, and to win their share of glory.