7.

The Blindsiding of General Pershing

‘As the use of Americans at this time was directly contrary to the arrangement, naturally it did not meet with my approval.’

General John J. Pershing, Commander-In-Chief, American Expeditionary Forces

THROUGHOUT THE DAY on 1 July, officers from the American 131st and 132nd Regiments were taken in small groups forward to the front line by Australian intelligence officers, to see the lay of the land and to familiarise themselves with the Australian methods of issuing orders, so that there was no confusion during the assault. From concealed vantage points such as a ruined farmhouse in the village of Vaire-sous-Corbie to the east of Corbie, the Americans were shown the landscape that was destined to become a battlefield in three days’ time.

‘Rolling, hilly and wooded with flats,’ Colonel Sanborn of the 131st noted following his viewing. Sanborn had already established that Hamel was located about 2000 metres south of the River Somme, 5500 metres southwest of the town of Chipilly, and 5000 metres east of the town of Corbie, which was in Australian hands.

Checking what they saw via the naked eye against aerial photographs, the American officers were able to put into perspective the battle plan’s main objective, that of seizing the old British trenches on the 100-metre-high ridge beyond Hamel. They were also able to size up the three individual primary objectives on the way to securing those blue line trenches. Objective one: to the left, three 11th Brigade battalions would take Notamel Wood and Hamel township. Objective two: in the centre, three 4th Brigade battalions would take Vaire and Hamel Woods and a large defensive redoubt forward and to the right of Hamel; for obvious reasons, the Australians had dubbed this redoubt Pear-Shaped Trench, and it became known simply as Pear Trench. On the right, two 6th Brigade battalions would clear enemy posts all the way to the blue line trenches.

As the Americans surveyed the ground through field-glasses, fields of wheat that would only be harvested by war stood high out in No Man’s Land. These wheatfields, which would conveniently mask advancing troops, ran through Notamel Wood to the north and swung southwest along high ground towards Pear Trench. The remaining gently undulating terrain was mostly surfaced with clover. In the far distance, east of the town of Hamel, the hazy heights of Hamel Ridge could be seen rising up.

Those officers whose platoons were slated to go in on the left of the assault could see that the enemy were dug in about 700 metres away from them and were not particularly active. In contrast, on the right, Americans noted with surprise that the enemy were just 200 metres away, and as they watched, they spied flickers of flame as German heavy machineguns there opened up and sent lead spewing towards the Australian front line, just to annoy opposing troops and keep heads down.

The 131st’s Captain Luke, whose Company E men included Tom Pope, would be advancing towards Hamel township. Carefully studying the approaches via field-glasses, Luke spotted indications of a trench system, in front of the village. That line of trenches was accurately marked on the map he’d been given. ‘What about the enemy’s defences in Hamel itself?’ Luke asked the 43rd Battalion’s intelligence officer.

‘We anticipate that he has fairly strong garrisons in Hamel,’ the Australian replied, ‘stationed in deep dugouts.’ This would prove to be the case.

In the same way that the Americans were given a first-hand viewing and verbal briefing about the battleground, Australian battalion, company and platoon commanders were also taken to the observation posts and briefed. When field officers returned to their units, they were equipped to brief their senior NCOs once operational HQ gave permission for details to be released on the morning of 2 July. The NCOs would then pass on the details to their men.

At this point, while the officers knew that the operation was scheduled for 4 July, or Z Day as it was labelled by the operation’s planners, no one apart from the most senior officers at divisional and corps HQs knew what time Zero Hour would be. To ensure that Fritz didn’t know they were coming, and when, secrecy was paramount.

Australian Sergeant Ned Searle was no longer thinking about tanks. His thoughts were now on Yanks, and the prospect of having green Americans fighting beside him. His battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel McSharry, as short as a jockey but cheery, energetic and almost suicidally brave, went to great lengths to welcome the Americans who stumbled wearily into 15th Battalion positions on the night of 1–2 July.

Said Captain William J. Masoner, commander of the 132nd Regiment’s Company G: ‘Lieutenant-Colonel McSharry, in command of this battalion, guided us to a reserve trench a few hundred yards from his camp, and remained in our camp until all men found sleeping places and dugouts. The following morning, the four platoons were attached to the four companies of the battalion and were given instruction in the specialty weapons and were given a rehearsal for the attack.’⁷⁸

McSharry was relying on his senior NCOs, men like Ned Searle, to take the Americans under their wing, and as the Doughboys joined with the Aussies for instruction in the use of the Mills Bomb Number 5 hand grenade and the Lewis Gun Light Machinegun – which the Americans called an automatic rifle – Ned had a chance to assess the Yanks first-hand. He had never met an American before in his life. He’d never left Tasmania prior to the war, and had never travelled aboard a ship before he sailed for Egypt with the AIF in 1914, so his horizons had been limited. Yet, he had revelled in the new faces and cultures he saw on the way to his first battle on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, and had befriended Maori and Ghurka soldiers on Gallipoli.

The English Tommy had not proven Ned’s favourite fellow soldier, nor that of his late brother Ray, who had written home about the typical Tommy he’d encountered: ‘If he does not have an officer or somebody to tell him what to do, he is lost, and then loses his head.’⁷⁹ On the Western Front, like Australian troops generally, Ned mixed well with New Zealanders and Canadians. Having visited the Edinburgh family of the Scottish nurse he’d taken a fancy to, again, like all Aussies, Ned got on well with Scottish soldiers, too.

But Ned’s first words to the Americans were caustic. ‘You’re late!’ he said to the Yanks of Company G, 132nd Infantry who joined his 15th Battalion company after sun-up that morning of 2 July.⁸⁰

The Americans thought the caustic Australian sergeant was referring to the hour of their arrival at the Australian position.

‘No, four years late!’⁸¹ Ned added. Australia had been in this war for close to four years. Ned himself had been fighting for more than three. Still, after gently ribbing the Yanks on their government’s tardiness in bringing the USA into the war, Ned took the Doughboys as he found them. And he found them a pretty likeable lot, ready to learn, and keen to give the Germans hell.

Late that morning of 2 July – X Day, as far as those involved with the Battle of Hamel were concerned – Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig arrived at General Monash’s Chateau Bertangles HQ. Haig was excited by the prospect of the Australian assault on Hamel, and asked Monash to personally go through the battle plan with him, which Monash was pleased to do.

‘As ever,’ Monash wrote home in a letter to his wife three days later, ‘Sir Douglas was affability, courtesy and consideration personified. He always expresses the greatest confidence in me.’ Haig spent more than an hour with Monash before hurrying away to attend Inter-Allied War Council meetings at Versailles. Haig’s chief artillery officer Major-General Noel Birch stayed behind and lunched with Monash, discussing the Australian’s intended use of artillery in the Hamel assault.⁸²

In the early afternoon, as Monash and Birch wrapped up their lunch at Bertangles, the Australian 11th Brigade was on the march from its bivouac at Allonville, heading towards the front line. They were accompanied by the Americans of C, E and K companies from Colonel Sanborn’s 131st Regiment. Heading for the River Somme, and with a 200-metre break between platoons, the column of thousands of soldiers passed through Querrieu in good order, then tramped along beside the dry bed of the River Hallue. At the same time, Ned Searle and the men of the 4th Brigade, and those of the 6th Brigade, had commenced to march in the same direction with their accompanying American companies.

Late that afternoon, another VIP came to pay a visit to the Amiens sector – John J. Pershing, the four-star American general who was commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Forces. The stern, unsmiling fifty-seven-year-old had the longstanding nickname among his troops of ‘Black Jack’. This went back to the days when Pershing had commanded a black ‘Buffalo Soldier’ regiment. Pershing, a West Point graduate and professional soldier, had a lot of respect for blacks from the years he had spent soldiering with them, but his president Woodrow Wilson, who pandered to bigoted Southern Democrats, did not. So, to keep his president onside, Wilson had relegated some of the AEF’s black units to labouring duties at French ports and loaned the remainder to the French Army. Pershing had even sanctioned a warning to the French people issued by his HQ to beware of black American troops because of their supposed propensity to rape and kill civilians.

Black Jack Pershing arrived at the American 33rd Division’s headquarters in the chateau at Molliens-au-Bois at 4.15 pm on 2 July. The commander of the American II Corps, General Read, was there along with his subordinate, the 33rd Division’s commander, General Bell. Read, a handsome man with a distinctive handlebar moustache that made him look a lot like the late British commander-in-chief Lord Kitchener, used maps to enthusiastically show his CIC the disposition of his American troops in the sector, Proudly, Read told Pershing that all the assigned units from the 33rd Division were in position for ‘the Fourth of July show’ with the Australians.

‘What show is that?’ asked a frowning General Pershing.

In response, Read told him about the Hamel assault that was due to take place in a little under thirty-six hours.

Pershing was far from happy, and he let Read know it, reminding him that his agreement with Field-Marshal Haig was that ‘our troops behind the British front were there for training and were not to be used except in an emergency’. There was no emergency that Pershing was aware of. ‘As the use of Americans at this time was directly contrary to the arrangement, naturally it did not meet with my approval,’ Pershing later said. ‘Better they fought together than dispersed with the troops of other armies.’⁸³

A disappointed Read glanced at a crestfallen Bell. Both had been looking forward to sending their men into action with the Australians.

In case he had not made himself clear, the inflexible Pershing spelled it out for his subordinates: ‘Our troops should not participate.’ He then ordered the withdrawal to the rear of the men of the 131st and 132nd then in position with the Australian Corps.⁸⁴

General Read acknowledged the order, and said that it would be passed onto General Rawlinson at British 4th Army HQ to be acted upon. When General Pershing left Read and Bell at 5.45 pm, he was still seething at the thought that, without his permission and against his orders, his American boys had almost been thrown piecemeal into their first battle. ‘The British made constant efforts to get them into their lines,’ he later complained. Still, to his mind, he had corrected the situation in time.⁸⁵

Following Pershing’s departure, General Read rang General Rawlinson, reluctantly telling him that American involvement in the Hamel assault had been vetoed by General Pershing. ‘He does not want partially trained troops to participate.’⁸⁶

Rawlinson rang General Monash with the news, but softened it by telling him that, ‘The matter having been reconsidered, only 1000 Americans are to be used.’⁸⁷ It is unclear whether Rawlinson had taken it upon himself to only require the withdrawal of half the American troops, or whether Read was behind this.

Even so, Monash was not a happy general at having to halve the American numbers in his now integrated assault force. He was to say, ‘[I was] strongly averse [to] embarrassing the infantry plans of General Maclagan, to whom I had entrusted the conduct of the actual assault.’ To Rawlinson he put the case that this would reduce his Hamel attack force from 7500 infantry to 6500, and that he didn’t have the time or the men to train 1000 Australian replacements in the tank cooperation tactics that the existing troops slated for the assault had undergone.⁸⁸

When Rawlinson asked whether the Hamel operation could still be successfully accomplished with 6500 infantry, Monash conceded it could. But he added that if 1000 Americans were pulled out, Maclagan would have to totally reorganise the distribution of the remaining 1000 Americans to fill gaps the withdrawn platoons left in the assault line structure.

To which Rawlinson asked, ‘Is it not now too late to rearrange the distribution?’

‘No, it is not too late,’ Monash unhappily confirmed.

So, Rawlinson asked that 1000 Americans be ordered to withdraw the following morning, with the remaining American troops redistributed among the Australian units accordingly.⁸⁹

At 5.00 pm, when General Pershing was still at General Read’s HQ, the 11th Brigade column had halted beside the Somme where an Australian Corps element waited with hot food. The troops were permitted to bathe, then, after much splashing and larking about, and in high spirits, the Australians and Americans ate a meal. American officers would several times comment on the fact that Australian headquarters made a point of providing hot food for their men at important junctures of their operations.

While the troops were halted beside the Somme, Australian intelligence officers and their American shadows handed out intel material to officers and men. General Monash had become a devotee of the new art of aerial reconnaissance, taking delight in poring over aerial photographs of enemy positions with a magnifying glass. So, as part of his Hamel operational plan, every Australian and American officer and senior NCO was provided with an aerial photo of their objectives. In addition, every single man in the attack force was given a map of the battlefield, with enemy positions clearly marked and with a blue line beyond Hamel showing the old trench line that had been occupied by British troops until they had been ejected by the Germans in April.

That blue line, 1.5 kilometres east of their starting point, was as far as Monash wanted his attacking troops to go. Once the assault force reached that line on 4 July and occupied the old British trenches, the Australians and Americans would have eliminated the bubble of the Hamel salient and would be able to link up with British troops holding the existing front line to their north and French troops entrenched to their south. This provision of intel materials, involving thousands of maps and photographs which were prepared in little more than a week after the operation received the ‘Go’ from Field-Marshal Haig, was another of Monash’s pre-planned 118 elements, and was performed with precision.

In the early evening the column was reformed, and the march resumed. The roads they tramped along now were clogged with troops as the 4th Brigade and 6th Brigade columns also neared their destinations, together with motorised and horse-drawn vehicles, all moving in the same direction, towards the Germans. At one point, an Australian stretcher-bearing party passed the 11th Brigade column on foot, going the other way, carrying a badly wounded Australian soldier. For the Americans, it was a reminder that pain and death awaited them just a few hundred metres ahead.

And then they were descending into zig-zagging communications trenches. Shadowy figures passed the 11th Brigade men in the narrow confines of the trenches as they moved up. Exchanging whispered greetings with men of the 42nd and 43rd Battalions who were going forward, these were withdrawing men of two battalions of the Australian 12th and 13th Brigades who’d been holding the front line. The new arrivals, outnumbering the men coming out, filed into vacated trenches and made themselves as comfortable as they could in the front line. With only No Man’s Land separating them from the Germans, they would sit here all through the following day, and into the next, 4 July, before going into action.

All along the 5.6 kilometre front of the Hamel salient, just like the men of the 11th Brigade and their American shadows, the assault troops of the Australian 4th and 6th Brigades and their American cohorts moved into position then tried to get some sleep. At the same time, hundreds of additional field guns and howitzers were readied to be brought up to their previously prepared secret gun-pits behind the front line.

‘The men were sheltered in holes dug in the side of the [trench] ledges, covered with shelter tents,’ said Lieutenant E. K. Emerson of Company F, 132nd Infantry. At 9.00 pm, not long after Emerson’s men had settled in, and with nightfall still forty-five minutes away, six German shells dropped onto their position. Fired randomly, without any specific target in mind, these shells hit a section of trench occupied by Company F men. Four Americans were wounded, and calls of ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ soon had medical help on the scene. The wounded quartet was carried away to the nearest Casualty Clearing Station for attention by Australian doctors.⁹⁰

At 3.00 am the following morning the now daily eight-minute barrage of enemy positions in the Hamel salient by existing Australian artillery commenced, sending high explosive, gas and smoke shells raining down on German soldiers who pulled on their gas masks and scurried for the protection of underground dugouts. And then the front went silent. A little later, when the sun began to rise at 3.30, a clear, bright summer’s day dawned. It was Y Day, and the Battle of Hamel was just twenty-four hours away.

From mid-morning on Wednesday 3 July, telegrams containing the American withdrawal order and carried by runners began reaching the commanders of the Australian battalions to which the American platoons had been attached. They in turn passed the telegrams on to the American company and platoon commanders in the trenches. Some American officers would not get their copies until late in the afternoon – Captain J. R. Weaver of the 132nd Infantry, who had been assigned to take command of the Australian 13th Battalion’s B Company for the battle, did not receive orders requiring him to personally not take part in the fight until 4.00 pm. ‘I would have to remain out,’ Weaver later unhappily lamented, although he stubbornly stayed put at the Australian battalion’s HQ to observe the assault.⁹¹

Other American officers who were ordered to pull their men out were seen by the Australians to be dumbfounded by the command. Worse, a number of their men were inclined to disobey and went close to mutinying. At the 16th Battalion trenches, American troops of one 132nd Regiment platoon first argued violently with their officers about the order, then went and sat down among the Australians, refusing to budge.

Which platoon from which company went this far is unknown, but for platoon commander Lieutenant Emerson and his men of F Company, their withdrawal was particularly bitter, having seen four of their comrades carted away wounded, and now the opportunity to avenge their buddies had been denied them. The rebellious troops were eventually talked around by their officers and reluctantly rejoined American ranks for the withdrawal, although some were seen to be in tears as they marched away.

Said one American officer about men under his command who were forced to withdraw, ‘They were cut to the heart.’⁹²

According to Charles Bean, two Americans pulled on borrowed Australian tunics and joined the 42nd Battalion to take part in the battle in Australian ranks, although there is no official record of this having taken place. Certainly, a number of Americans were seen to be ‘visibly distressed’ as they withdrew, Bean noted.⁹³

The first withdrawn platoon of the 132nd parted from the 14th Battalion at 10.00 am, filing back through the communication trenches then marching despondently to Allonville. The last platoon of the regiment to be pulled out, the one that had almost mutinied, departed the 16th Battalion’s trenches at 12.45 pm. The men of the 131st who had been ordered out withdrew to a similar timetable. The Aussies, for their part, thoroughly commiserated with the departing Yanks, telling them they’d soon get their chance for some action. ‘Relations between Australians and Americans were the best throughout,’ remarked Lieutenant Emerson.⁹⁴

In contrast, Captain Carroll Gale, the former Chicago police inspector commanding the 131st’s C Company, which was remaining for the battle, was livid at the withdrawal of two platoons of his regiment’s Company D from around him. ‘This caused an almost total rearrangement of the forces of the [42nd] Battalion for the attack,’ he would fume after the battle, ‘which rearrangement was made so late that many of the troops engaged could not be clearly shown the work they were to do.’ Potentially, this disruption put the lives of the remaining Americans at risk.⁹⁵

In addition to the 1000 American infantrymen who had been permitted to remain for the assault, a small number of American officers and men who had been attached to Australian battalion HQs as observers also stayed behind, as did a medical detachment. Meanwhile, everyone seemed to have forgotten the men of the 108th Engineers. This American unit, commanded by Colonel Henry A. Allen, remained where it was in the reserve area, even though, as part of General Monash’s operational plan, the engineers had been tapped to carry out support work in the territory gained in, and immediately after, the infantry’s advance. They were apparently overlooked because, technically, they were not involved in the assault itself.

That same morning, just as the disruptive orders for half the Americans to be withdrawn were being received in the front line, General Monash had to put up with an interruption that no commander would have appreciated so close to the launching of an operation that had the capacity to make or break his career. Two Australian politicians arrived at Australian Corps headquarters, accompanied by a pair of Australian war correspondents.

The war correspondents were Gordon Gilmour and Keith Murdoch, the latter the father of future media magnate Rupert Murdoch, and who, as Sir Keith, would be a leading Australian newspaper proprietor in years to come. The politicians were Billy Hughes, Nationalist Party of Australia leader and Prime Minister, and Navy Minister Sir Joseph Cook, a former prime minister. This pair had just travelled from Australia to France via the United States, and had sent a request to address as many AIF men at the front as possible in a day. Monash and Hughes were not huge fans of one another, but each respected the other’s position, and Monash made arrangements to escort the pair around Australian units to address them. On Monash’s orders two hundred men at a time would be assembled in woods near their posts to see and hear the politicians.

Back home, Prime Minister Hughes had divided the nation. The Australian Government had the power to conscript men into the army, but only for service within Australia. In 1916 and 1917, British-born PM Hughes had twice put a proposition to the Australian people via referenda that conscription be extended to allow him to send conscripts overseas for service at the front and so further assist the ‘Mother Country’ in her European war. Those referenda had violently split opinion, caused riots, and failed. The men already at the front also had a say in these referenda, and in each case they had voted overwhelmingly against extending conscription. The troops only wanted men serving beside them in the trenches who had chosen to be there, not those who were sent there by the government and didn’t necessarily have a commitment to the fight.

Despite this background, the men assembled for the ministerial visit of 3 July gave Hughes and Cook a warm welcome when they drove to their positions. The novelty of seeing the short, idiosyncratic PM in the flesh, so close to the battlefront and so close to their next battle, made the men of the Australian Corps an interested audience. Hughes was a curiously hokey personality. There was a lot of the actor in him, as was evident when he made his political speeches. In fact, back in his youth, he had appeared on the Sydney stage as an extra in several plays, including one of Sarah Bernhardt’s French dramas during the international super-star’s 1891 Sydney season.⁹⁶

After lunch, a small convoy of motor vehicles sped away from the Bertangles HQ, as General Monash escorted Hughes and Cook on flying visits to the 11th, 4th and 6th Brigade units that were preparing to take part in the Hamel assault in the early hours of the following day. With the troops arrayed in front of them in full battle gear, both Hughes and Cook addressed the men, heaping praise on them for the blood they had shed and bravery they had shown, and were about to shed and show. While Cook spoke, Hughes stretched out on his back on the grass and looked at the sky and at the bemused men around him.

The visit was undoubtedly good for morale, but was a distraction General Monash and his commanders could have done without. Politicians on the battlefront were always an irritation, if not an annoyance, to military commanders, but, for Monash, on the day before a crucial operation it was an unnecessary extra burden. He was to tell his wife, ‘It proved a most highly inconvenient day.’⁹⁷

That afternoon, while on his way back from the Versailles conference, Field-Marshal Haig dropped in to see General Pershing in Paris. Pershing was irritable, telling Haig that he had only learned the previous evening, while meeting with General Read of his II Corps, that American troops of the 33rd Division had been slated to go into action with the Australians on 4 July. This, Pershing complained, was in direct contravention of his order that American troops only train with British armies and not be used in battle by British commanders at this stage of the American build-up in France, other than in an emergency.

The Hamel matter had troubled Pershing so much that he had, only shortly before Haig’s arrival, put in a telephone call to General Read. In Pershing’s own words, ‘Further and positive instructions were given that our troops should not participate.’⁹⁸ Pershing seems to have instructed Read, as part of these ‘further and positive instructions’, to go over General Rawlinson’s head and relay Pershing’s order to General Sir Herbert Lawrence, Chief of the British General Staff and Haig’s deputy, at British GHQ, for this is what Read did.

Haig played dumb when Pershing now raised the Hamel matter with him, pretending to know little about it. According to Pershing, Haig responded, ‘I entirely agree with your point of view, Pershing.’ Haig was to note in his diary that he added, ‘Do you wish me to intervene?’⁹⁹

‘No, no,’ Pershing came back. He said he’d called General Read on the matter only a short time before, to reiterate his instruction of the previous day and make it perfectly clear that no American troops take part in the Hamel operation. ‘Read has it in hand with your man Lawrence,’ he told Haig.¹⁰⁰

Read had indeed rung General Lawrence at British GHQ following the terse call from Pershing, as a result of which Lawrence agreed that the Americans would be entirely ‘left out’ of the Hamel operation. Lawrence advised that he would pass on the instruction to Rawlinson.¹⁰¹

Following Haig’s departure from the meeting with Pershing there seems to have been a further call from Pershing’s HQ to General Lawrence, to say that Pershing had just met with Marshal Haig, as Pershing referred to him, and that Haig had said he entirely agreed with Pershing’s point of view in the Hamel matter. This information was relayed by Lawrence to Rawlinson at his Fourth Army HQ at Flixecourt. Accordingly, as far as all were concerned, the order to withdraw the last 1000 Americans from the Hamel operation had been endorsed by the British Commander-in-Chief. As far as Pershing was concerned, the matter was now at an end, and he forgot all about it.

As 4.00 pm approached, General Monash arrived at Australian 3rd Division HQ at Glisy as part of his usual daily round of visits to his brigade and divisional headquarters, having detached himself from Prime Minister Hughes and Minister Cook. That pair had gone on to pay a visit to the airfield of the AFC’s Number 3 Squadron – Hughes even sat in the cockpit of an RE8 fighter that would take part in next day’s battle, as squadron commander Captain Lawrence Wackett from Townsville explained the controls to him.

Monash hadn’t been at the Glisy HQ long when a telephone call came in for him from General Rawlinson.

‘Monash, look, I’m sorry,’ said Rawlinson, ‘but it has now been decided that no American troops are to be used tomorrow.’¹⁰²

Monash was thunderstruck. He would later say that he was never told why the decision had been taken ‘in the upper realms of high control’ to withdraw all the Americans. He said he could only guess it had been a matter of General Pershing’s policy, or ‘an underestimate of the fitness of these troops for offensive fighting’. If it was the latter, his own officers had assured him these Yanks looked fit and ready for the fight.¹⁰³

Monash’s immediate inclination was to resist this latest withdrawal instruction. It had been bad enough sending back half the Americans that morning. A further withdrawal, one that didn’t attract German attention and bring a rain of German artillery shells on the Americans and on Australian troops assembled for the attack, could only be safely undertaken after dusk. Even then, the withdrawing Americans would clog roads over which reserve troops and supplies would be pouring up in preparation for occupying the front-line trenches once they were emptied by the advance of the assault force.

So, Monash asked Rawlinson for a face-to-face meeting. He knew from experience that he had a better chance of winning over his superior when they met in the flesh. Rawlinson possessed a ‘charming and sympathetic personality’, in Monash’s estimation. Meaning, Monash might be able to change the Englishman’s mind.¹⁰⁴

‘I’m far from my own station,’ was Monash’s excuse for an initial delay. ‘Can I request that you be good enough to come at once to the forward area and meet me at the headquarters of Maclagan at Bussy-lès-Daours. Maclagan being the commander immediately affected by this proposed change of plan.’¹⁰⁵

Those words ‘proposed change of plan’ must have forewarned Rawlinson that he had a fight on his hands as far as Monash was concerned, but he nonetheless agreed to the meeting at Bussy. He and his Chief of Staff General Montgomery drove at once to Maclagan’s 4th Division HQ, and the pair met there with Monash at 5.00 pm. From Monash’s point of view, this meeting proved to be both tense and ‘of grave import’. On the drive to Bussy, he had stiffened up his determination to retain the last thousand Americans. ‘I resolved to take a firm stand and press my views as strongly as I dared,’ he later said. Now, he let his superior have it.¹⁰⁶

‘At this very moment,’ Monash began once he and Rawlinson came together, ‘the whole of the infantry destined for the assault at dawn tomorrow morning, including those very Americans, is already on its way to its battle stations. The artillery is in the act of dissolving its defensive organisation with a view to moving forward into its battle emplacements as soon as dusk falls. I well know that even if orders could still with certainty reach the battalions concerned, the withdrawal of those Americans will result in untold confusion and in dangerous gaps in our line of battle.’

‘I entirely agree with you, Monash,’ Rawlinson responded, ‘but I feel myself bound by the terms of a clear order from the Commander-in-Chief.’

‘General, it is already too late to carry out the order,’ Monash retorted. ‘The battle will have to go on with the Americans participating, or not at all. Unless I am expressly ordered to abandon the battle, I intend going on as originally planned.’ This was bold indeed, coming from a subordinate. More than that, it was a big and confident call.

Rawlinson countered that, if, after refusing to withdraw the last Americans, Monash went ahead with the operation and it proved a costly success, or a failure, it would cause ‘an international incident’. For the outcry in America would be enormous.

Monash pictured a very different sort of international incident. ‘If all the Americans are withdrawn, no Australian would fight beside an American again!’ he declared. He was exaggerating, but this showed how emotional he had become, and how he had nailed his colours to the mast in this affair. In effect, he was challenging Rawlinson, and Haig, to back him in his first offensive operation in charge of the Australians, or to sack him.

Rawlinson didn’t know what to do, feeling caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Monash, on seeing this, gave him an out. ‘General, I feel perfectly sure that the Commander-in-Chief, when giving such an order, could not have had present in his mind the probability that compliance with it meant the abandonment of the battle. And that, under the circumstances, it is competent for the senior commander on the spot to act in the light of the situation as known to him, even to the extent of disobeying an order.’

Rawlinson, that senior commander on the spot, was ‘very much upset’, in Monash’s words, and retorted, ‘Do you want me to run the risk of being sent back to England? Do you mean it is worth that?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Monash resolutely replied. ‘Unless I receive a cancellation order before 6.30 pm,’ he went on, ‘it will in any case be too late to stop the battle, the preliminary phases of which are just on the point of beginning.’

Rawlinson thought long and hard, then said, ‘I shall take it that your view is correct, provided the Commander-in-Chief is not accessible for reference.’¹⁰⁷

On Rawlinson’s instruction, a call was put through to British GHQ at Montreuil-sur-Mer, to make contact with Field-Marshal Haig and let him decide the matter. Haig wasn’t yet at GHQ, and no one there seemed to know precisely where he was or when he would arrive back from his trip to Versailles. Increasingly desperate, Rawlinson put in a call to Montreuil every ten minutes, as Monash sweated on the future of his battle, and of his military career. Each call elicited precisely zero information about Haig’s whereabouts.

As 6.00 pm approached, Rawlinson succeeded in making contact with the Chief of the General Staff, General Lawrence. Rawlinson told Lawrence that four American companies remained with the Australian Corps for the Hamel assault and could not be withdrawn in time before the operation commenced. If Field-Marshal Haig still wanted all the Americans out, said Rawlinson, the assault would have to be called off. But, to take effect, that order must be received by 6.30.

Lawrence advised that Haig had left Paris, 230 kilometres due south of Montreuil, by road some time before, and his two vehicles were expected to arrive at GHQ within half an hour. When Lawrence mentioned the time that Haig had departed Paris, Rawlinson estimated that the CIC could not possibly reach Montreuil until after 7.00 pm, so told Lawrence that if he did not hear from the Field-Marshal by 7.00, the Hamel operation would go ahead as things stood. Realising that Rawlinson was in a bind, Lawrence promised he would have Haig call him as soon as he arrived.

Monash would not have been pleased that his deadline had been stretched by half an hour. With the atmosphere between Rawlinson and himself still tense, the pair parted, climbed into their Rolls-Royces, and set off for their respective headquarters.

At the same time, General Lawrence at British GHQ rang General Read at his II Corps HQ. ‘Your four remaining companies have become fully committed to the operation,’ Lawrence informed the American. ‘General Rawlinson can make no change without instructions from the Commander-in-Chief, Field-Marshal Haig. And he cannot be reached.’¹⁰⁸

Read accepted this advice without argument. He seems to have been as eager as his subordinates General Bell and Colonels Sanborn and Davis for their men to taste action with the Australians on the Fourth of July, to make a name for themselves and for American force of arms on America’s national day. Read did not relay this latest piece of information to General Pershing. Instead, Read would go to his bed that night no doubt hoping and expecting that his boys did him proud in the early hours of next morning, but dreading Pershing’s subsequent reaction.

Arriving back at Chateau Bertangles, Monash rejoined the waiting Australian Prime Minister and Navy Minister. In a private moment, Monash informed Hughes he was aware that a campaign had been waged behind the scenes to remove him from Australian Corps command, and said, quite bluntly, if push came to shove, he would not go quietly. Hughes proceeded to deliver a speech to the HQ staff in praise of Monash, who kept checking his watch as the PM waffled.

By this stage, Monash was banking on Haig failing to arrive back at Montreuil in time, meaning the Hamel battle would go ahead with the Americans involved as he had demanded. But, as he later said, ‘To me, it had taken the form of a very serious crisis.’ His prime minister would be of no use to him in this, carrying no weight with the generals. This was a military stoush, but one that Monash was perfectly capable of fighting alone. He was determined to carry his point, for it wasn’t just this Hamel operation that was at stake. As far as he was concerned, the success of this battle would have ‘far-reaching consequences’ that would affect the future tactics and outcome of this war.¹⁰⁹

Hughes had let slip to journalists Murdoch and Gilmour that Monash was launching a surprise attack the following morning, and now Monash told the politicians and journalists about the 6.30 deadline he had set for calling the whole thing off, a deadline that General Rawlinson had extended to 7.00 pm. ‘Monash told us with a smile,’ one of the war correspondents would later reveal, ‘that General Haig was in a motor car between Paris and GHQ and was unlikely to be back by 7.00, so that it would apparently be alright.’¹¹⁰

The clock kept ticking, and still no word came from Field-Marshal Haig. But just when Monash thought he was in the clear, the phone rang from Fourth Army HQ. ‘Just before 7.00,’ Haig’s biographer Duff Cooper was to say, ‘the decision came.’

As it happened, Haig had arrived back at Montreuil before 7.00. Lawrence was waiting for his weary CIC, and quickly brought him up to speed on the Hamel dilemma, and the deadline imposed by Monash and Rawlinson. ‘Six American companies have been withdrawn,’ Lawrence explained, ‘but about four companies cannot be withdrawn in time. Should the operations be stopped in order to do so?’

Haig didn’t hesitate to answer. ‘No!’ he said firmly. ‘The first essential is to improve the situation east of Amiens as soon as possible. The attack must therefore be launched as prepared, even if a few American detachments cannot be got out before Zero Hour.’¹¹¹

Lawrence immediately rang the waiting, sweating Rawlinson at Flixecourt with the decision, and Rawlinson promptly, and delightedly, rang Monash to convey it.

‘The Chief directed the withdrawal of the Americans in deference to the wishes of General Pershing,’ Rawlinson explained to Monash. ‘But, as matters stand, he now wishes everything to go on as originally planned.’

Monash was more than a little relieved. ‘The crisis passed as suddenly as it had appeared,’ he would later say. ‘Great issues had hung for an hour or so upon the chance of my being able to carry my point.’¹¹² Carry his point he had. Now Monash was free to get on with winning the war. With a confident smile, he farewelled Prime Minister Hughes and Minister Cook as they set off for Versailles to take part in the Inter-Allied War Council meetings. The politicians in turn wished the general every success with the 4 July operation, and asked to be updated with the battle’s outcome the following day.

When the politicians took their leave, war correspondents Murdoch and Gilmour stayed behind to report on the Hamel assault. The pair dined with Monash and official Australian Government photographer Captain George Hubert Wilkins – known as Hubert, and later as Sir George after he was knighted. Unusually for a photographer, Wilkins had just weeks before been awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. Within months he would be awarded a second MC, for leading to safety American troops who had lost their officer on the battlefield. South Australian-born Wilkins would settle in the United States after the war and become a noted polar explorer. Following Wilkins’ death in Massachusetts in 1958, the crew of a US Navy nuclear submarine would spread his ashes at the North Pole.

Monash was extraordinarily gracious to include Keith Murdoch in his inner circle that evening. He knew that Murdoch and another influential Australian war correspondent, Charles Bean, had lobbied Hughes and the British government to have him removed from command of the Australian Corps. Officially, the journalists had pitched their argument against Monash around his military suitability, as a former militia officer, not a permanent soldier, putting their support behind professional soldier General Brudenell White for the role of corps commander, and pushing for Monash to be promoted upstairs to the purely administrative post of head of the AIF. The journalistic pair had even gone as far as approaching British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to argue against Monash’s retention.

Although Monash never articulated it himself, there was, and remains, a strong suspicion that Bean and Murdoch were motivated by anti-semitism. Monash knew that the pair was lobbying against him. Writing to wife Vic on 25 June, he had told her, ‘An intrigue going on is taking all sorts of subtle forms.’ He didn’t name Murdoch or Bean, but he knew very well they were the instigators of this intrigue. ‘These proceedings are being undertaken in London,’ he had told his wife, ‘in order to put pressure on Mr Hughes.’ Monash had felt he would win this political battle, not least because ‘both Rawlinson and the Chief will see me through’.¹¹³ As indeed they did. With Generals White and Birdwood also refusing to be a part of this intrigue, Field-Marshal Haig’s recommendation that Monash be retained as corps commander had been endorsed by both the Australian and British governments.

Well aware of what Murdoch and Bean had been doing behind his back, Monash could have been churlish on the night of 3 July and excluded Murdoch from his company, giving journalistic competitor Gilmour the opportunity to secure a scoop on the eve of the important battle. But Monash was as wily as he was wise. He well knew the power of the press, and had appreciated for some time that his reputation as a general depended on the reports of the war correspondents. So, overlooking his personal opinion of them, he courted Murdoch, Bean and Gilmour.

Charles Bean, who would become Australia’s greatest World War One historian, when he would, to his credit, lavish praise on Monash’s generalship, was to say that it was Monash’s practice to deliver ‘wonderfully lucid explanations of his battle plans’ to the war correspondents. These were explanations which they ‘deeply appreciated’, said Bean. Now, following dinner and as the clock ticked down toward Zero Hour the next morning, Monash gave Gilmour, Murdoch and Wilkins an insight into his plan for the Battle of Hamel.¹¹⁴

Monash explained his ‘musical composition’ for the battle, summing it up neatly: ‘The whole program is controlled by an exact timetable, to which every infantryman, every heavy or light gun, every mortar and machinegun, every tank and aeroplane must respond with punctuality. Otherwise there will be discord which will impair the success of the operation, and increase the cost of it.’¹¹⁵

Monash also told the war correspondents, ‘If the tanks fail to get to the strongpoints, the infantry cannot try. They are to let the tanks flatten out any serious opposition which they locate. They have been told, in such cases, to lie down and let the tanks go ahead.’¹¹⁶ This was the infantry-tank cooperation technique that the Australians had been schooled in at Vaux. It of course depended on tanks actually turning up, and the past negative Australian experience of the metal monsters meant that many men such as Ned Searle would go into this battle fully intending to ignore this order and deal with German strongpoints themselves.

Meanwhile, just as General Read had failed to alert his commander-in-chief that Americans would still be going into offensive action with the Australians within hours, the British didn’t bother to inform General Pershing that Field-Marshal Haig had gone back on their understanding that all Americans would be withdrawn from the battle. Clearly, Haig was prepared to weather the storm of Pershing’s indignant protestations and accusations following the battle, rather than see it cancelled as Monash had threatened.

So it was that General Pershing was blindsided by both the British and his own corps commander. He would be in for a rude shock come the morning.