9.
The Countdown to Z Hour on the Fourth of July
‘Once a commander’s orders are issued, there is little left for him to do but watch and wait.’
Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash
AT 6.00 PM on the evening of 3 July, about the time that General Monash set off from Bussy to drive back to his corps HQ at Bertangles – still with his ultimatum to Field-Marshal Haig hanging unanswered, meaning that within an hour the entire operation might be called off – telegrams were sent by Monash’s HQ, as prearranged, to all company commanders involved in the Hamel assault.
These telegrams advised that Z Hour was set for 3.10 am next day, Z Day, and also set out the staggered times for each platoon to move forward to the ‘jumping off’ point out in No Man’s Land, in preparation for the assault’s commencement. Word of Z-Hour’s exact time was passed along the line. Men like Ned Searle, Tom Pope and Two-Gun Harry Dalziel knew their wait for action would soon be over.
Their jumping-off point, 100 metres in advance of the Australians’ front-line trenches, would be marked by white tape to be laid at 11.00 pm by company intelligence officers with the help of engineers. Already, at midnight the previous night, those intelligence officers and engineers had crawled out and marked the point with pegs which they had hammered into the chalky ground. Tonight, it would simply be a matter of crawling out again and stringing the white tape from peg to peg, creating a starting line along a front of 5.6 kilometres. They would also lay tapes all the way back to the front line, which each platoon would follow to reach its designated position on the jumping-off tape, or JOT.
As the sun set at 9.45, the tension grew in the trenches, and in the battalion, brigade, division and corps HQs. Behind the lines, the fifty-eight tanks allocated to the operation rumbled into the villages of Fouilloy and Hamelet in the twilight, and commenced to wait in long lines at the roadside. Accompanying the fifty-four battle tanks were four fully loaded carrier tanks that had originally been built with small armoured cabins and large flat trays to mount a heavy gun – the forerunner of the self-propelled artillery piece that would emerge in World War Two. When the mounted gun proved unsatisfactory in practice, the Tank Corps had turned the machine over to the carrying of supplies. The carrier tanks allocated to the Hamel assault would follow the advance and each deposit 4.5 tonnes of small arms ammunition, grenades, rolls of barbed wire, water and ration containers just behind captured enemy positions, then withdraw.
That evening, too, at the airfields at Villers-Bocage and Argenvilliers that were now temporary homes to the AFC’s Number 3 Squadron and the RAF’s Number 9 Squadron, aircrews and groundcrews made final preparations. As set down by General Monash’s plan, there would be four types of aircraft mission involved in this operation: reconnaissance, bombing/strafing, supply drop and contact – which involved intercepting enemy fighters and preventing them from attacking the aircraft flying the other missions. The Australians, operating eighteen two-seat RE8 biplane fighters in three flights, would conduct the recon, bombing/strafing and contact missions. The British, also using RE8s, would fly the supply drop missions, entailing the delivery of heavy machinegun ammunition by parachute, the first time such a thing had been attempted in the Great War.
The problem of resupply of his advancing troops had occupied General Monash’s mind for some time. The carrier tanks would solve the bulk of his problem, but not one crucial part. ‘The “consolidation” of newly captured territory,’ Monash was to say, ‘implies its organisation for defence against recapture.’119 For this reason, to defend against German counterattack, his operational plan called for Vickers heavy machineguns from the Australian 4th Machine Gun Battalion to be carried forward by their crews at the rear of the infantry advance and sited in newly taken ground, at preselected locations based on a chequerboard pattern.
In action, these machineguns went through 1000 rounds in five minutes. For resupply, each additional ammunition box containing 1000 rounds would normally have to be carried by two men more than two kilometres, over open ground and under enemy fire, with heavy casualties among these carrying parties and with much of the ammunition failing to reach its destination. ‘It was therefore decided to attempt the distribution of this class of ammunition by aeroplane,’ said Monash.120 This had never been done before, and was made possible by a parachute release mechanism invented by the Australian Flying Corps’ Major David Blake, a native of Parramatta, and implemented by the visionary commander of the AFC’s Number 3 Squadron, Captain Wackett.
As Wackett had demonstrated to the general shortly after Monash took charge of the Australian Corps, most of Number 3 Squadron’s aircraft were equipped with bomb racks beneath each lower wing. When a cockpit lever was pulled, bombs were released. On the same principle, said Wackett, a 1000-round ammunition box had been fitted under each wing and could be released by pulling the lever.
However, the box would not reach the ground undamaged unless suspended from a parachute that slowed its descent and softened its landing. Whilst the parachute had been invented by this stage in history, aircrew were not permitted to use it – senior British officers felt that a pilot would be more likely to bring a damaged aircraft back to base if he didn’t have the option of bailing out. So, using Major Blake’s mechanism, Wackett had experimented with parachute drops of full boxes of machinegun rounds, determining the right size of parachute and the ideal height from which to allow the box to float to earth intact and find its target – a thousand feet.
Once the RAF’s Number 9 Squadron was allocated to the Hamel operation it was given the ammunition drop role, with Wackett personally training British aircrew in the supply drop technique and devising the targeting method to be used. The Australian Vickers machinegun crews were given a large white canvas ‘V’ to lay out near where they set up their guns on Z Day. Wackett demanded that dropping aircraft land the ammo no further than one hundred yards from the white ‘V,’ and, in training, the RAF pilots were soon able to land their loads well within the one hundred yard zone. It would be a matter of repeating this accuracy on the morning of 4 July, but with the added dangers of enemy ground fire and attacking enemy fighters.
As darkness fell at the airfields, the aircraft were prepared with fuel, bombs and ammunition, parachute-equipped ammunition boxes were piled up in readiness, and pilots once more studied maps showing their area of operation.
At 6.00 that evening, accompanied by American medical orderlies, First Lieutenant Frank E. Schram of the US Medical Corps, who was attached to the 132nd Infantry, reported to Major B. C. Kennedy, the 15th Battalion’s medical officer, at his Regimental Aid Post behind the front line. At 10.30, Kennedy, his doctors and orderlies, along with Schram and his party of five American orderlies and two squads of unarmed stretcher-bearers, moved up to join Lieutenant-Colonel McSharry and his staff at 15th Battalion headquarters. In the same way that pairs of NCOs had been allocated as runners to each platoon commander in the assault force – one Australian and one American runner to each Australian and American platoon – the stretcher-bearers were made up of Australians and Americans who would work together on the battlefield.
‘We had twelve stretcher-bearers for each company,’ said Schram, ‘also one man in charge of each stretcher-bearing detail, which made three stretcher-bearing squads. Four Americans were assigned to each bearing section, and these were mixed or distributed with experienced Australians, so that each stretcher squad had at least one American and experienced Australians.’121
Because there was no medical facility in the front line, Lieutenant Schram and Major Kennedy had previously agreed with Colonel McSharry that the combined medical party would do a ‘hop-over’ with the assault troops when they advanced. That is, they would follow the attackers all the way to one of the 15th Battalion’s primary objectives, Pear Trench. In the same way, McSharry was planning to follow along behind the four waves of assault troops to set up an advanced battalion HQ at Pear Trench. Once the Germans occupying that redoubt had been eliminated, the medical officers would set up an RAP there, substantially reducing the distance stretcher-bearers would have to travel to get the wounded into the doctors’ hands. The medics would go over the top at the same time as the men of the assault force, and face the same dangers as they went into the attack – except their role would be to save lives, not take them.
At 11.00 pm, Australian and American intelligence officers and selected British troops from the Royal Engineers’ Special Company began crawling out into No Man’s Land, this time taking along white tape and wirecutters. The tape was to create the operation’s jumping-off line, the wirecutters to cut large gaps in the Allied barbed entanglements that ran through No Man’s Land in advance of their trenches. This wire had originally been put there to prevent the Germans from reaching the Allied front line.
There were occasional small gaps in the wire called ‘sally ports’. These narrow gateways existed to permit the Australians to sally forth on their frequent raids across No Man’s Land. For the upcoming assault, much larger gaps were required, and creation of those gaps now occupied the men with the wirecutters, who snipped slowly and quietly so that the Germans in their front-line trenches weren’t alerted. Of course, thick German barbed wire also extended in front of their own trenches, but General Monash’s preliminary artillery barrage was designed to eliminate that barrier by carving it up with high explosive shells.
As the intelligence officers and engineers went forward to do their preparatory work, in the 15th Battalion’s trench line Ned Searle looked around the unfamiliar faces of the men of his section, and those of the Americans of the 132nd’s G Company sharing the trench with them, and wondered how they would perform when the time came. It’s likely he also wondered how many men he would have to kill before 4 July was over to earn him his VC.
Ned would never forget the first man he had ever knowingly killed, in the early hours of 7 August 1915. Ned had been at the forefront of the 15th Battalion’s advance up the Gallipoli Peninsula’s Hill 971 with fixed bayonets, in a surprise attack. ‘I got first blood out of our company,’ he had written home after the event, more in shock than in celebration. To preserve the element of surprise, the Australians had been ordered to remove the cutoffs from their rifles, so they couldn’t fire. The Turks were to be despatched silently, by bayonet. As Ned pushed up the hill, he’d found a Turkish soldier popping up from a hole in the ground, an unseen enemy forward outpost directly in front of him.
Apparently, the Turk had been merely intending to stretch his legs. Seeing an Australian soldier bearing down on him, the astonished Turk brought up his Gewehr 98 rifle to fire. Ned, with his own Lee-Enfield still on his shoulder, grabbed the enemy weapon and started wrestling the Turk for it. Ned’s mate Private Andy Belstead had then arrived on the scene and jabbed the struggling Turk with his bayonet. The wounded foe, letting go of his rifle, turned and ran. With a curse, and pulling his own bayonet-equipped rifle from his shoulder, Ned had set off after the fleeing man, who had to be stopped before he gave the alarm. ‘And my bayonet was sharp,’ Ned would say.122
Ned, a good runner, soon overtook the wounded Turk. When he did, he plunged his bayonet into the fleeing man’s back, between the shoulder blades, felling him and killing him instantly, and silently. Ned had bayoneted more of the enemy since that day, especially in a trench called OG2 in 1917’s Battle of Bullecourt. That trench had been occupied by a thousand Germans; within minutes, the Australian charge had left most of them dead or prisoners. During 3 July, Ned had sharpened his bayonet in expectation of having plenty more custom for it before long.
One of the men crawling out into No Man’s Land from the 16th Battalion’s lines to help lay the JOT was twenty-four-year-old, five-foot-seven tall, nine-stone (57 kilograms) Lance-Corporal Thomas ‘Jack’ Axford. Neither physically imposing nor loud-mouthed, Jack was not the sort of man who stood out in a crowd. Described as ‘unexcitable’ and ‘softly spoken’, he was the last person anyone would expect to do anything spectacular, even if he had occasionally shaped up in the ring as an amateur boxer in Kalgoorlie before the war, and more recently in khaki on 4th Division sports days.123
Born in South Australia to a Tasmanian father and a South Australian mother, Jack was a Catholic of Irish extraction who’d grown up at Coolgardie in Western Australia. Before the war, Axford, a teetotaller, had, ironically, worked as a labourer at the Boulder City Brewery. Enlisting in Kalgoorlie in July 1915, he’d arrived in Egypt after the Allied withdrawal from Gallipoli and had subsequently gone on to the Western Front with the 16th Battalion. Hospitalised in England in 1916 after the Battle of Mouquet Farm in France for ‘shell shock’, he had returned to his unit and been wounded in the knee at Gapaard Farm in Belgium in 1917. Since enlisting, Jack had been mentioned in despatches six times, and in May 1918 he was awarded the Military Medal for playing a gallant part in halting the 1918 German spring offensive. Quiet, inoffensive Lance-Corporal Axford was about to take part in his next battle, and win his next medal.
After helping lay the jumping-off tape and cut the barbed wire, Jack remained out in No Man’s Land as a one-man patrol outside the 16th Battalion’s section of the front line, keeping his ears pricked for enemy activity in the vicinity. The Germans were never as active as the Australians in regularly sending patrols to raid enemy lines; they didn’t seem to have the stomach for it. But that didn’t preclude the Germans attempting a raid on this particular night, or, perhaps alerted by unusual movement in the Australian lines, sending a patrol over to investigate. The last thing the Australians wanted was for a German party to discover the gaps they had cut in their own wire. That would tip Fritz off to the fact the Aussies were about to mount a fullscale attack. If necessary, to keep that secret safe, Jack Axford would kill any Germans who came his way in the darkness – silently, with the bayonet.
As the tape-layers and wire-snippers carefully went out to do their business in No Man’s Land, a hot meal and hot tea were delivered to all the men in the trenches who would take part in the attack – a combined supper and breakfast. As they all knew, for some it would be their last meal, ever, and a number of Australians supplemented their food with a surreptitious tot of rum, to settle their nerves. Z Hour was just four hours and ten minutes away.
At Chateau Bertangles, all had gone quiet. Conversations had ended. Telephones had ceased to jangle, telegraph keys stood frozen. Once the operation began, they would all start to ring and tap again, with reports coming in every few minutes. For now, a tense silence prevailed. All the orders had been issued, all the preparations made. Some Corps HQ staff had put their heads down to get some sleep before the operation began. Others were too keyed up to sleep. Following dinner, Monash himself had lain down to get some rest, instructing his staff to wake him well before Z Hour.
‘When once a commander’s orders are issued, there is little left for him to do but watch and wait,’ Monash wrote home to his wife.124 Apart from the 136-point battle plan he had ordered General Maclagan to carry out, Monash had also given the battle’s operational commander a very precise timeline for implementation of each element of the plan. ‘Every individual unit must make its entry precisely at the proper moment, and play its phrase in the general harmony,’ he said.125 Plus, Monash had given Maclagan a time limit for the execution of the plan. He wanted all objectives secured within ninety minutes of the operation’s commencement. It was a big ask. Never before in this war had so much Western Front ground been taken in so little time. Monash, confident his Australians and their American colleagues could pull it off, quickly slipped off to sleep.
Colonel Sanborn of the 131st Infantry was also grabbing some shuteye, in his case at his regimental HQ at Pierregot. During the day, he had led the remaining troops of both the 131st and 132nd on a ‘terrain exercise’ behind British trenches at Vaiden, trying to mimic the attack their countrymen would make the following morning, but in this case against a nonexistent enemy.
Sanborn’s thoughts were on his boys now in the trenches with the Aussies as they counted down the hours to their first attack of the war. ‘Fussy’ Joe worried that his men would be going into action without the support of their usual comrades-in-arms of the 124th Machinegun Battalion, whose men General Read had held back at his HQ at Molliens-au-Bois. Sanborn also worried that his platoons would be going in with just a handful of the new Lewis gun automatic rifles, and even then their crews would have had barely a couple of days’ training in their use. The colonel could only hope and pray that his boys gave a good account of themselves on their national day, and didn’t let him or the United States down.126
The watches of Australian, British and American officers involved in the Hamel operation were synchronised twice leading up to Z Hour. The first time was at 9.00 pm on 3 July, the second at 2.10 am on 4 July, sixty minutes prior to Z Hour. As those watches ticked past midnight and American Independence Day arrived, Australians and Americans of the first wave of the assault force clambered from their trenches and slowly crawled out into No Man’s Land for 100 metres, halting once they reached the jumping-off tape.
This move forward came as a relief to waiting Americans. Lieutenant-Colonel McSharry of the 15th Battalion would later report that the Yanks attached to his unit had occupied the front-line trenches ‘with the same nervous expectancy exhibited by a thoroughbred before starting in on a race’. McSharry’s own men remained outwardly calm, cool and collected. ‘I was impressed,’ he said, ‘with the silent and orderly way in which our boys formed up on the taped line.’127
Over close to three hours, the troops went forward in stages. Once the first wave was in position, men of the next wave moved up, then the men of the third and fourth waves behind them. Out in No Man’s Land, once Jack Axford knew his mates were at the JOT, he slithered back to join his 16th Battalion platoon for the assault. The last troops would be in position by 2.50. Behind their now-severed barbed wire, they lay, and waited.
Until Z Hour, talking and smoking were banned. If the Germans worked out they were out here in the open, their artillery and machineguns would zero in on them and cut them to pieces. This ‘caused some anxiety’ among the green American troops, Captain Gale of the 131st would say.128 As it happened, an Australian 4th Brigade man lying at the jumping-off tape would be unlucky to be hit by a bullet from a German machinegun that fired randomly his way. Without fuss, or noise, he was dragged back for medical attention.
Among the 15th Battalion men at the tape, Sergeant Ned Searle wasn’t anxious. When he was sober, Ned was the calmest, coolest of characters. Eighteen months earlier, beneath Hill 60 in Flanders, he’d been assigned to guard duty in an underground tunnel. Australians were tunnelling to plant a huge land mine beneath German lines. At the same time, the Germans were known to be tunnelling the other way, and Ned had instructions to remain silent and keep his ears pricked for the sounds of German digging. For the task, he’d even been provided with a metal listening trumpet to put against the tunnel wall.
Several hours into his shift, Ned, sitting on a crate and bored silly, had rolled himself a cigarette. Suddenly, a pick had come through the wall above his head. Still with the unlit cigarette in his mouth, Ned had slowly come to his feet. As he watched, the pick created a hole the size of a man’s head. And through that hole Ned saw the face of a German soldier. In one hand, the German held a pick; in the other, a candle. In mutually debilitating shock, Ned and the German stared at each other. Then the Fritz made a move. Reaching through the hole in the tunnel wall with his candle, he lit Ned’s cigarette. And then both men had run for their lives to alert their superiors.
Now, not for the first time, and with the men of his section around him, Ned lay waiting for the word to go into the attack and kill more Germans. He hoped one of them wasn’t the man with the candle. Looking out into the night, he studied the landscape in front of him. Ahead lay his own barbed wire. Beyond that, the open ground rose a little toward Hamel town. Beyond that, Ned knew, over a little ridge, there was a depression, with the old trench system on the ridge on the far side of it. Up, down, then up again he would have to tramp across the Hamel Valley to reach that old trench system, the objective established by General Monash’s blue line on the folded map in Ned’s tunic pocket. Despite his calm, right now Ned could have done with a cigarette. And a beer.
As the Australians and Americans waited, the air temperature quickly dropped. The nearer 3.00 am came, an increasingly thick white fog rolled in from the Somme and began to hug the hollows on the battlefield. Fog was unusual for this time of year, but that didn’t overly worry the Australian commanders. While it would mean the officers in charge of keeping the advancing units on track to their objectives via compasses would have their work cut out in the growing pea-souper, the fog would provide the attackers with even more cover and shroud their presence until they were right on top of German defenders.
General Monash was to himself paint an evocative portrait of the minutes leading up to a battle’s launch. ‘Company and platoon commanders, their whistles ready to hand, are nervously glancing at their luminous watches, waiting for minute after minute to go by, and giving a last look over their commands, ensuring that their runners are by their sides, their observers alert, and that the officers detailed to control direction have their compasses set and ready. Carrying parties shoulder their burdens, and adjust the straps. Pioneers grasp their picks and shovels. Engineers take up their stores of explosives and primers and fuses. Machine and Lewis gunners whisper for the last time to the carriers of their magazines and belt boxes to be sure and follow up. The Stokes Mortar carrier slings his heavy load, and his [loaders] fumble to see that their haversacks of cartridges are handy.’129
Monash also knew that behind the line, things were just as tense: ‘Scores of telegraph operators sit by their instruments with their message forms and registers ready to hand, bracing themselves for the rush of signal traffic which will set in a few minutes later. Dozens of staff officers spread their maps in readiness, to record with coloured pencils the stream of expected information. In hundreds of pits, the guns are already run up, loaded and laid on their opening lines of fire. The sergeant is checking the range for the last time. The layer stands silently with the lanyard in his hand.’130
From behind the lines, the artillery would launch the battle, and it would be the artillery officers who gave the first command. ‘The section officer, watch on wrist, counts the last seconds,’ Monash wrote.
‘“A minute to go …!”
‘“Thirty seconds …!”
‘“Ten seconds …!”
‘“Fire!”’131