‘It failed for a variety of reasons.’
Major-General John Fuller, British Tank Corps, on the disastrous 1917 Bullecourt tank assault
AT THE VERY time the Americans were moving down into the Australians’ sector, the Australian 15th Battalion’s Sergeant Edward George Searle, or Ned to his friends and family, was standing looking at brown metal monsters arrayed before him on the grass of a French valley.
‘Bloody tanks!’ he cursed.
Blue-eyed, fair-haired Ned, of average height and build, was the eldest of four boys who had been raised in the northern Tasmanian farming village of Westbury. Commencing life as home to a British Army garrison when Tasmania was still known as Van Diemen’s Land, Westbury had housed a detachment of British troops in the early nineteenth century, with retired veterans from the Duke of Wellington’s army at the Battle of Waterloo being settled there. Three of the four Searle brothers had enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe. Ned, the eldest, had been the last to volunteer.
All the Searle boys had been accustomed to the outdoor life. Almost 1600 years earlier, Roman writer Vegetius, who penned a military handbook for the emperor Valentinian, had felt that country boys made the best soldiers: ‘For they, from their infancy, have been exposed to all kinds of weather and have been brought up to the hardest labour.’59 This well described the Searle brothers, who all worked as farm labourers, seasonal apple pickers and blacksmiths’ assistants. Yet each differed from the next enormously.
Ray, the youngest, the most idealistic and the most naive of the brothers, had been in the militia when war broke out. Within days, rash Ray had been the first in the family to enlist in the new AIF. Middle brother Viv, a gifted, bowtie-wearing poet and teetotaller who had ambitions to become a clergyman after the war, had quickly followed suit, to look after his little brother. Twenty-six-year-old Ned was the black sheep of the family, a typical hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-gambling, hard-swearing Australian ‘larrikin’, or lovable rogue. He had resisted volunteering at first, only signing up a month after his younger brothers to impress his schoolteacher girlfriend Win Watson, being convinced that the war would be over by Christmas.
Three-and-a-half years later, come the eve of the Battle of Hamel, Ned was the only one of the three brothers still alive. Middle brother Viv had been with the 12th Battalion in the first wave of the Gallipoli landing in April 1915. Three months later, a temporary corporal, Viv had been shot in the head by a Turkish sniper while leading an Australian sniping detail. Ned was also on Gallipoli by that stage. Twice wounded there, he survived to be sent to the Western Front with the 15th Battalion.
There, Ned had reunited with baby brother Ray, who was serving with the 52nd Battalion. Ray was subsequently killed near Messines, in 1917, when a German shell collapsed his trench and entombed him. Ned had been wounded twice more, firstly by shrapnel when collecting water and then taking a German machinegun bullet in the hand while leading a patrol. Recovering in an English hospital, Ned had learned that back home Win Watson had dumped him for another man.
Having lost his two brothers and the love of his life to this war, Ned had spiralled into depression. The shattered metacarpal bone in his hand should have knitted in six to eight weeks, but every time it looked like healing Ned would surreptitiously smash it against the corner of a table, maiming himself anew. Ned had had enough of soldiering. ‘I have no true friends in the army,’ he’d written home to his mother. All his 15th Battalion friends from the Gallipoli days had been killed by this time. ‘I hold all men in contempt,’ he told his mother. ‘Whether it is the army that has done this I do not know, but I am different from other chaps.’60
In hospital, Ned had kept to himself, shying away from other wounded Aussies who had only recently tasted battle for the first time and boasted of what they would do to the Germans once they got back to the front. ‘I do not make friends and am really sick of hearing men talk,’ Ned confessed to his mother. ‘You can imagine how the army has had an effect on me.’61
When the Germans launched their spring offensive in March 1918, Ned was still in hospital in England, and wooing a Scottish nurse. Reading in April in the British press of the tough fighting the Australians had put in to halt the Germans on the Somme, he had been overcome with guilt, and let his hand heal. On Saturday 18 May, Ned had rejoined the 15th Battalion’s D Company near Villers-Bretonneux. Being a rare Gallipoli veteran in his platoon, and surrounded by strangers, Ned, now promoted to sergeant, was put in charge of a six-man section.
Ned returned to the front with a determination to take out his bitterness on the Germans, avenging his brothers and making a name for himself. A medal would be nice. The Victoria Cross would be nicest of all. The highest gallantry award for British and Empire soldiers and the equivalent of the American Medal of Honor, the Victoria Cross had been inaugurated in 1856 during the Crimean War. The 999th VC had only recently been awarded. No one in the 15th Battalion had yet to receive a VC, and the idea of showing off the 1000th VC ever minted in the pub back in Westbury was an appealing one. And, perhaps, winning a VC would finally secure Ned the approval of his mother, Elizabeth Annie Searle.
Throughout the war, Elizabeth Annie had treated her sons with outward equality, writing to each of them every Sunday night and sending identical gift packages at special times such as Christmas, birthdays, and following family weddings. But Ned knew that Viv had been the apple of his mother’s eye, and that young Ray had not come far behind in her affections, with Ned about as popular with her as the Westbury night-cart driver. Just as his heavy drinking had offended his Methodist mother, it had temporarily lost him his girlfriend Win just prior to the war. It was only by enlisting in September 1914 and promising to straighten himself out and marry her on his return from the conflict that Ned had won Win back after she had ended their relationship that autumn.
Yes, Ned had no doubts it would take a VC to elevate him to the top of the popularity table in the Searle household. The fact that Ned still kept his former girlfriend’s photo in a breast pocket of his tunic suggested that he thought he might even win her back a second time with a spectacular feat of bravery on the battlefield. He’d had his hopes of a medal raised following the Battle of Bullecourt. ‘All of us that were left were recommended,’ he’d written home, ‘but our colonel [McSharry] is a Roman Catholic, and all the chaps that got anything were Micks and Pats, so we missed out, this time.’62 As he rejoined his unit, the lustre of a Victoria Cross shone bright in Ned’s ambitions. All ranks had to salute a Victoria Cross winner. Even General Monash would have to salute Ned if he won a VC!
Ned had been back with his battalion in the Somme trenches for forty days when he and all the other 15th Battalion platoon and section leaders had been ordered on 29 June to the rear, to the village of Vaux-en-Amiénois, for a training exercise. When they arrived in a field outside the town, Ned and his comrades saw that they were joining fellow platoon and section leaders from three Australian brigades for a day of training with British tanks. The sight of the lumbering armoured vehicles was enough to make Ned vomit.
In April the previous year, Ned and thousands of other Australians of the 4th and 11th Brigades had launched an assault on the Germans’ Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt, north of the Somme. The ‘Inderbugs Line’, Ned called it. The Aussies were supposed to be supported in the attack by newfangled tanks of the British Tank Corps; this had been the first experience Australian troops had of armoured vehicles.
After the Mark IV tanks assigned to the assault had been caught in a blizzard and failed to reach the starting point, the operation’s start had been put off for twenty-four hours.63 Uneasy Australian commanders, seeing how the tanks had succumbed to the wintry conditions and doubting their reliability, had asked for the Bullecourt operation to be suspended. Overall British commander Lieutenant-General Sir Hubert Gough had dismissed the Australian concerns and insisted the assault proceed. It was Gough who would ultimately be dismissed, relieved of his post by the high command, but that would be no consolation to the Aussies.
When the Australians finally charged across No Man’s Land on the day of the assault, the tanks had failed them, badly. Some had broken down. Others had been quickly knocked out by German artillery and machineguns. The crews of the remaining tanks seemed to have no stomach for the fight and deserted the Aussies, who, in savage fighting and with heavy losses, nevertheless seized and occupied the heavily defended German trenches they had been ordered to take.
On top of the failure of the tanks, further troops had not been sent in after the first wave to consolidate the gains. British commanders also failed to provide the Australians with artillery cover, overconfidently believing that the tanks would sweep all before them. As the Germans mounted fierce counterattacks to retake their trenches from the Australians, Ned and his mates had fought them off until they ran out of ammunition. In a hopeless situation, the Australian survivors decided they had two options – surrender, or try to run back over open ground under heavy German fire to the trenches they had started out from. Ned was one of the few who made a run for it and miraculously made it back unharmed. Wounded Australians in the German trenches were going nowhere and had no choice but to surrender.64
Of the 3000 men of the 4th Brigade who had gone into the Bullecourt assault, 2339 had been killed, wounded or captured. Ned Searle had been one of just eighty-two from the 4th Brigade’s 15th Battalion to make it back to Australian lines. Ned, a master of understatement, had said, after the battle, ‘We had a rough time of it while it lasted.’ No wonder Ned and fellow Australian survivors had lost faith in British generals, and in British tanks.65
Major-General John ‘Boney’ Fuller, then a colonel and a senior staff officer with the Tank Corps, blamed the failure of the Bullecourt operation on a variety of factors: haste of preparation, changes in the plan of attack the night before the assault, ‘unavoidable’ lack of artillery support, ‘insufficiency of tanks for such an operation’, and ‘the lack of confidence on the part of the infantry in the tanks themselves’.66
If the Australians had lack of confidence in tanks prior to the battle, following it Ned Searle and his comrades absolutely detested the beasts and would have nothing to do with them for the next fifteen months. General Monash knew this well, yet he still made tanks the centrepiece of his Hamel battle plan, later declaring, ‘That tanks, appropriately utilised, were destined to exert a paramount influence on the course of the war was apparent to those who could envisage the future.’ Monash, for one, could envisage the mechanised future of land warfare.67
He had several reasons for his confidence in armoured vehicles. Since the Bullecourt disaster, the new Mark V tank had been developed. The Battle of Hamel would be the first time it was deployed in combat, and the Australians and accompanying Americans would be the first infantry to go into battle with it. At Monash’s request, Field-Marshal Haig assigned the entire 5th Tank Brigade to the Australian Corps for the Hamel operation, and the brigade’s commander Brigadier-General Anthony Courage gave General Monash all the more reason to be confident that the Tank Corps would not let down the Australians a second time. Courage, who possessed only half a jaw, the other half having been shot away by a Boche bullet during fighting at Ypres, was a capable organiser and an inspiring leader. According to Major-General Fuller, ‘No detail escaped his eye, no trouble was too great.’ Courage was just the man for detail-conscious Monash.68
With fifty-eight tanks at his disposal for the battle – roughly the same number as the Australian Army operates in total today – Monash had to convince his own troops to willingly work with them. This was a particularly difficult task because, as it happened, the very same Australian brigades that had been butchered at Bullecourt because of the failure of British tanks were to take part in the Hamel operation. In his initial written proposal of 21 June, Monash had said it was imperative that a day be set aside to demonstrate the new Mark V’s capabilities to his men leading up to the battle, to rebuild his troops’ trust in tanks.69
Under different circumstances, Monash would almost certainly have asked the British to hand over fifty or sixty of their new tanks for Australian crews to man. In March that year, British GHQ had in fact offered the Australians enough tanks to form their own armoured battalion, but Australian Corps commander General Birdwood had turned down the offer. One Mark IV tank did end up in Aussie hands; it was sent to Australia to support recruitment drives. That machine is today at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
There was no question that Australian infantry would storm the gates of Hell if they had Australian-crewed tanks supporting them. But it would have taken weeks, if not months, for Australians to train to operate tanks with proficiency. Monash didn’t have the luxury of weeks or months. Eager to strike quickly at Hamel, he was prepared to use British tanks with British crews as long as they did what he told them to do, and as long as his Australian infantry willingly cooperated with them. That was what this training day at Vaux was all about.
Ned Searle saw a group of generals standing across the field to watch the fun as he and numerous other men from the Australian 4th, 6th and 11th Brigades stepped down from buses that had brought them to Vaux from their positions just behind the lines. To begin with, the Australian troops formed up by battalion and were conducted on manoeuvres with the tanks. Red flags had been placed to indicate the location of supposed enemy machinegun posts. Between the Australians and the flags stretched lengths of dreaded barbed-wire entanglements. Australian infantry platoons, each pairing up with a tank, advanced with fixed bayonets towards the flags.
At eight kilometres per hour, a little faster than the speed of the walking troops, the tank rolled ahead, mashing the wire into the earth and creating a path through the entanglement via which the troops poured through. With bloodthirsty yells the infantry charged past the tanks towards the flags, and, with grins, captured them and lifted them, fluttering, aloft.
Next, the tanks showed off their ability to climb over trenches dug for the demonstration, and to straddle said trenches and fire into and along them using the cannon and machineguns in the cupolas on their sides. Selected infantrymen were then equipped with rifle grenades and shown how, after they fired a grenade at a supposed enemy strongpoint, the grenade emitted white smoke, which summoned a tank. That tank then came lumbering up to the strongpoints indicated by the white smoke, and, in the words of General Monash, who was watching on with keen interest, ‘Pirouetting around and around, [it] would blot them out, much as a man’s heel would crush a scorpion.’70
The impressive display was followed by a picnic lunch on the grass. This affair was a long way from the normal wartime grind, although Ned would have liked a beer to wash down his sandwiches. The tanks then held ‘open house’, with the Australians encouraged to clamber all over and inside them. Following this the tankers took the Australian NCOs for joyrides all over the field, with some even given a chance to drive them. Meanwhile, Australian junior officers in charge of companies and platoons debated the merits of various combined tank and infantry tactics with British tank officers and agreed ways of improving their interaction.
Whilst wireless sets had been introduced to higher level HQs for the transmission of messages, tanks were not at this time fitted with radios for communication. To send messages to their headquarters they were equipped with carrier pigeons. For communication between individual tank commanders and troops around them on the battlefield, there was a bell attached to the rear of each machine. When this bell was rung, the commander, in theory, would open a ‘port’ and speak directly with an infantry officer who required tank support to attack a particular target. In addition, the tanks would fly small flags to indicate their status. A red, white and blue flag would indicate ‘I am coming out of action’, while a red and yellow one would signify ‘I am broken down/ immobilised’.
None of these communication methods engendered a great deal of confidence among the already sceptical Australian infantrymen. What if the tank commander didn’t hear or respond to the bell? What if a flag had been shot away, or wasn’t raised in the first place? Then there was the question of the use of white smoke grenades to mark targets for tanks. Whilst fine in theory, the effectiveness of this method was doubted by the Australians, who pointed out that this grenade smoke could be obscured by smoke emitted by the hundreds of smoke shells lobbed onto the battlefield in the opening artillery barrage.
So, two important improvised battlefield signals were also agreed between the Australians and the tankers. Firstly, to indicate ‘Tanks needed here’, the infantry were instructed to jam a bayonet into the ground, place a helmet on top, and lie down and wait for a tank to come to their aid. There was also great concern in infantry ranks that tank drivers would not see wounded men lying on the ground and roll right over them, killing them, especially if the wounded were lying in wheatfields. To prevent this, the location of a wounded man would be marked by a rifle jammed into the ground and white tape tied around the top of a nearby stand of wheat.
By the time the Australians reboarded the buses to return to their bivouacs, all were in good spirits, and General Monash was convinced the day’s outing had converted his rank and file into tank enthusiasts. Certainly, the Australians felt warmer towards tank crews, but for a number of men, like Ned Searle, it remained to be seen whether the tanks and their Tommy crews could and would meet their promise and back them up on the battlefield.71