‘It [was imperative] not to arouse the suspicions of the enemy.’
Captain Carroll Gale, Company C, US 131st Infantry
ANY SOLDIER WILL tell you that some of the longest hours of their lives can be those leading up to a planned attack. Sitting in the front-line trenches through the daylight hours of 3 July, the Australians did what they usually did before a battle: checked their weapons and ammunition, sharpened bayonets on whetstones, wrote cards and letters home, updated their diaries, wrote a little poetry, played cards, and tried to catch up on sleep – because sleep would be the last thing they would be able to do on the forthcoming night.
As this was the Americans’ first taste of an assault, pre-battle nerves made them restless. Unlike the generally calm, silent Aussies, the Yanks talked nervously and excitedly among themselves, with men often popping their heads up over the trench parapet to try to take in the fields of wheat and clover that they would be advancing over within a few short hours. Before long, this generated a command that swept along the front line, for the Americans to ‘shut their gobs’ and keep their heads down.
This was necessary, as Captain Gale of the 131st Infantry noted, ‘in order not to arouse the suspicions of the enemy as to the increase in the strength of the trench garrison’.117 It was imperative that the Germans on the other side of No Man’s Land thought that it was business as usual in the trenches facing them, and that they had no inkling that twice as many men as usual were in the Australian front line and poised for an attack on them.
Gale’s superior for this operation was the 42nd Battalion’s Major Dibdin, who was taking no chances. During the daylight hours of 3 July, Dibdin summoned all his Australian and American company and platoon leaders to the battalion’s observation post at Vaire-sous-Corbie, one at a time. Cross-referring his lieutenants to their maps and aerial photos, and the ground and landmarks in front of them, Dibdin carefully went through the operational plan and their specific objectives with them.
Captain Gale witnessed these briefings with satisfaction. Irked by the loss of his comrades of Company D as a result of General Pershing’s withdrawal order, and unhappy that he hadn’t had the chance to make a close reconnaissance of the ground his men would have to cross, he appreciated the personal briefings. ‘This made up to a large extent for the lack of actual reconnaissance of the ground,’ he would remark.118
Perhaps alerted that something was up, or perhaps purely by chance, in the afternoon German artillery began unexpectedly shelling areas just behind the 42nd Battalion’s front line. One of these shells caught two officers standing talking outside the battalion’s Corbie headquarters. Captain William MacDonnell, adjutant of the 42nd, was killed instantly by the blast. The other, Major Harry Cheney, commander of the 131st Regiment’s 1st Battalion, was severely wounded in the shoulder and was evacuated to an Australian Casualty Clearing Station.
In the hours leading up to the assault, Australian and American infantrymen were equipped by Australian quartermasters with the additional weapons and equipment they would carry into battle. Apart from standard issue ‘tin hats’ and rifles, the latter fitted with bayonets by the time the men went into the attack, in pouches each man carried 200 rounds of .303 ammunition, two grenades and rations for forty-eight hours (essentially tea and canned bully beef). Strapped to his belt, each man also carried two filled water bottles and either a small pick or a shovel. The same way Roman legionaries on the march had carried two stakes that would be contributed to the top of the defensive wall they built around their legion’s overnight camp, these twentieth-century footsoldiers each carried three empty sandbags, which, theoretically, they would fill with earth on reaching their objective, to strengthen their newly won piece of trench. Some men threaded these sandbags through their belts; others tied them around their lower legs like additional gaiters.
There were exceptions to these equipment-carrying rules. Officers were only armed with revolvers. They even went into battle wearing collar and tie. Signallers and Lewis gunners assigned to each platoon were exempt from carrying sandbags and picks and shovels, to free them up a little. The members of each of the two Lewis gun teams per platoon were given just 100 rounds of small arms ammunition, to allow them to also carry nine filled Lewis gun magazines each. Lewis gunners also carried a holstered revolver.
The 15th Battalion’s Henry ‘Harry’ Dalziel was another exception to the rule. Twenty-five-year-old Harry, who’d been born at a mining camp near Irvinebank in Far North Queensland, had quit his job as an apprentice fireman on steam locomotives running on Queensland Government Railways’ Cairns-to-Atherton line to enlist in the AIF in January 1915. Arriving in Egypt as a private with reinforcements that July, he’d joined Ned Searle and the rest of the 15th Battalion for the last stages of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. Harry had subsequently gone to France and Belgium with the 15th, and played his part in fighting the Germans to a standstill in the 1916 battles of Pozières, Mouquet Farm and Flers. Then it was the 1917 battles of Gueudecourt and Lagnicourt, before the disaster of Bullecourt with the Mark IV tanks, where, like Ned Searle, Harry had been one of the few 15th Battalion men to survive.
Harry had subsequently been wounded during the battle of Polygon Wood, after which he was evacuated to England, or ‘Blighty’ as the British called it, for treatment and to recover. He had enjoyed that break away from the war, sleeping between sheets and being pampered by pretty nurses. When Harry rejoined the 15th Battalion in January 1918, the Australians were experiencing a lull in the fighting that would be rudely terminated by the German spring offensive in March. Like a number of Gallipoli veterans who returned to their units on the Western Front after recovering from battle wounds, back in the 15th Battalion Harry was again given a noncombatant role. Attached to battalion HQ, he found himself a driver, behind the wheel of a truck and behind the lines.
When the Hamel operation was first mooted in late June, non-vital HQ staff were asked if they wanted to help fill the 15th’s depleted infantry ranks by volunteering for active duty. For better or worse, Harry put up his hand. Volunteering to go into battle was a bit of a gamble. No one in Australian Corps ranks doubted that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Australians would be killed and wounded in this operation. Harry was a bit of a gambler at heart. He considered himself lucky in many ways; when he was a kid, he and his brother Vic had stumbled on tin samples that had resulted in the founding of the Boulder Tin Mine near Emuford.
But, Harry asked himself, what was the worst that could happen now? He could be killed. Or maybe he’d end up having another long stint in hospital in England, a prospect that quite appealed to him. Later, Harry would philosophically say he accepted that one way or the other this battle could result in him being despatched – back to Blighty, or to his final resting place.
So, just days before the Battle of Hamel, Driver Harry Dalziel joined the 15th Battalion’s A Company, where he was assigned to a Lewis gun team as the gunner’s offsider. This was when Harry bent the regulations as far as the equipment he would carry into battle were concerned. Onto his belt he affixed an ornate German knife in its original scabbard. Harry never said where it had come from, but he probably bought it from another Australian who’d souvenired it from a dead German on the battlefield. Some entrepreneurial Aussies, against all regulations, made a tidy profit from collecting and selling German uniforms and equipment from and to comrades as souvenirs.
In addition to his regulation revolver, Harry armed himself with a second handgun, contrary to regulations, making him look like a gunslinger from the Wild West. ‘Two-Gun Harry’, his new comrades in A Company branded him with a nudge and a wink. But Harry would soon have the last laugh.