‘I can never be sufficiently grateful to Brigadier-General Courage.’
Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash
TWO THOUSAND YEARS ago, the Romans turned the employment of artillery into an art form. Every Roman legion through the first several hundred years of the imperial era had its own artillery section firing a variety of missiles. Catapults called ballistas – from where we get the word ‘ballistic’ – fired specially rounded stones that were the equivalent of later cannonballs. These ballista stones, which were delivered to the catapult crews packed in crates like apples, ranged in weight from a few kilograms to a massive missile called a Wagon Stone, which was so large it required a wagon to carry it. Primarily used to batter down enemy emplacements, ballista stones were fired with such a velocity they could and did take the head off any human opponent unfortunate enough to be in their path. The scorpio was another Roman artillery piece, a light anti-personnel weapon on wooden legs that fired large arrows called ‘bolts’. Numerous skeletons have been unearthed at Roman siege sites with the metal heads of scorpio bolts lodged in their spines as a consequence of falling victim to legion scorpios.
By the nineteenth century, artillery was an indispensable part of any field army. Napoleon commenced his military career as an artillery officer, and just as Napoleon always took great care in the effective provision, placement and use of artillery in his many campaigns, a century later General John Monash, who had also started out with the artillery, was well aware of the extraordinary power of artillery to influence the outcome of an infantry battle, and laid his plans accordingly.
For the Battle of Hamel, at Monash’s request General Rawlinson attached his efficient personal artillery adviser Major-General Charles Budworth to Monash’s headquarters, to act as overall artillery commander, and Monash took full advantage of Budworth’s expertise. When Monash took over the Australian Corps it already possessed a powerful artillery arm: ‘More than six times as numerous and more than a hundred times as powerful as that commanded by the Duke of Wellington,’ in Monash’s own words.72
From the eight he already had on the Somme, Monash also asked for his artillery brigades to be doubled for the Hamel operation. And, with Haig’s full support, this was what Rawlinson gave him, sending elements of nine British artillery brigades with hundreds of additional big guns to supplement the Australian Corps’ existing Aussie artillery. By the night of the Battle of Hamel, Monash would possess a total of 639 artillery pieces to pound German positions on a Hamel front just 5.6 kilometres wide and 1.5 kilometres deep – 326 of them would be field guns, 313 heavy guns including howitzers.
According to remarkably accurate intelligence reports in Monash’s hands, the enemy had 477 artillery pieces in place to cover the Hamel salient and capable of countering his assault. Monash’s multi-point plan required that his hundreds of additional artillery pieces all be secretly moved up and into place on the night of 2 July. In the meantime, in preparation for the guns’ arrival, labour battalions and engineers were secretly building and camouflaging new gun emplacements by night. Ammunition would also be moved up to all guns in darkness.
At one point on the River Somme, every night for several days at the beginning of July engineers built a temporary bridge to speed the arrival of supplies, artillery and men for the Hamel assault, then took it down again before dawn so the Germans had no idea what was going on, only to rebuild it the following night. To fool Fritz, a dummy bridge was also prepared further along the river, but it wasn’t used in the end because the local artillery commander protested that German artillery would shell it and probably hit his nearby camouflaged gun positions.
Monash had a hand in, and an eye on, all the details of the preparations in every unit and department. According to one of his aides, ‘Without interfering with their work he insisted upon knowing every detail of the organisation under his command in all operations.’73 As part of his 118-point plan, Monash gave his artillery commanders precise instructions, requiring a nightly barrage in the days leading up to the attack and a barrage that accompanied the assault itself.
July was the height of the northern summer, and in central France at this time the sun sets late in the evening and rises early in the morning. On 4 July 1918, the sun was expected to rise around 3.30 am. Australian commanders invariably launched their infantry attacks at dawn, as this allowed their men to move up to the start line in darkness undetected. Monash therefore specified that ‘Z Hour’, the time for the commencement of the Hamel operation, would be 3.10 am on 4 July. This meant that by the time the infantry reached enemy positions as they advanced behind a supporting artillery barrage, they would go into attack mode at first light.
From the moment that Field-Marshal Haig approved the Hamel operation, Monash ordered his existing artillery to fire an eight-minute barrage at German positions in the Hamel salient every morning from 3.00 am. This preliminary barrage, which had a sneaky tactical purpose that would only become apparent on the morning of the assault, was made up of a combination of heavy explosive, smoke and gas shells. In 1915 the Germans had been the first to use chlorine gas as a weapon; it became known as mustard gas because of its yellowy colour. The Allies had been quick to follow suit, and both sides now routinely lobbed poison gas of various kinds at each other. As a result, every British soldier always carried a gas mask, the Small Box Respirator, which he quickly pulled over his face after hearing an alarm gong sounding or the shouted warning: ‘Gas! Gas! Gas!’
To support the tank and infantry advance on 4 July, after a two-minute pause following the end of the regular preliminary barrage, Monash’s plan called for what he referred to as a ‘jumping barrage’. Others called it a ‘creeping barrage’. Monash specified that from 3.10 all his guns would fire at the same target range just ahead of the waiting infantry and tanks for three minutes, then lift their range by precisely one hundred yards and fire for another three minutes, before another one hundred yard lift, and so on, until the barrage had jumped forward a total of half a mile, the halfway point in the planned advance.
Meanwhile, the tanks and infantry were to steadily advance immediately behind the barrage at walking pace, taking twenty minutes to reach this halfway point by 3.30. There would be a ten-minute pause to allow tanks and infantry to attack enemy front-line positions as the sun began to rise, before the creeping barrage resumed. This would bombard enemy reserve lines for four minutes at a time before again lifting range by a hundred yards, and so on. In all, Monash called for twenty-five lifts of range in the mile-deep advance, as far as an old British line of trenches on the ridge east of Hamel, which the Australians were to occupy and make the new Allied front line, linking up with Allied lines north and south of the Hamel salient.
However, Monash’s plan for the massive use of artillery was directly at odds with the tactical principles that the Tank Corps had established for the deployment of its tanks. General Elles and his subordinates were of the belief that the new Mark V was such a superior weapon it could eliminate an entrenched enemy without the need for artillery support. So, they were dead against any form of creeping barrage, fearing that their precious beasts would be damaged or destroyed by shortfalls of friendly fire. Monash appears not to have told the 5th Tank Brigade’s CO Brigadier-General Courage about his planned ‘jumping barrage’ in support of the assault, because when Courage and his deputy Lieutenant-Colonel J. D. Y. Bingham attended their first operational planning meeting at General Maclagan’s 4th Division HQ at Bussy-lès-Daours, both made strenous efforts to have the artillery barrage eliminated from the assault plan.
With Maclagan’s bitter dislike and distrust of tanks, anything the tankers were likely to propose would not have gone down well with the pessimistic Scot. And Australian infantry officers would have been incensed that the British tank men were fearful of their metal boxes on tracks being hit by the barrage, when the Aussie infantry was fully prepared to advance out in the open, under the same barrage and facing the same lethal risk, without the protection of centimetres of armour plate. Maclagan and every other Australian Corps officer attending this meeting were unanimous in their agreement that the artillery barrage was essential, to protect the advance and ensure the assault’s success. Courage and Bingham were shouted down.
Courage subsequently complained about this to Major-General Archibald Montgomery, General Rawlinson’s chief of staff at British Fourth Army, and Montgomery, fully endorsing Courage’s position, complained to his superior Rawlinson. But with Rawlinson a total enthusiast for Monash’s plan, all such complaints fell on deaf ears. So, Monash’s plan went forward unamended, with tanks, even though the operation’s commander Maclagan despised them, and with massive artillery support, even though the Tank Corps was vehemently opposed to it.
In the end, General Courage applied his renowned powers of organisation and leadership to meeting General Monash’s requirements of the Tank Corps at Hamel, even if he did doubt the wisdom of the Australian commander’s insistence on close support of tanks by artillery. Monash would later say, ‘I can never be sufficiently grateful to Brigadier-General Courage of the 5th Tank Brigade for his diligent assistance, and for his loyal acceptance of the onerous conditions which the tactical methods that I finally decided upon imposed on the tanks.’74