12.

The Assault in the Centre

‘All ranks of the tank crews were impressed by the superb morale of the Australian troops.’

Major-General John Fuller, British Tank Corps

LANCE-CORPORAL JACK AXFORD was advancing at the forefront of the 16th Battalion, which had been tasked with dealing with Vaire Wood and Hamel Wood, before, under General Monash’s battle plan, withdrawing to the old front line to act as a reserve. Jack and members of his platoon got through the German wire without any problem, but to one side of them another platoon of the 16th was held up when it found the artillery had failed to create breaks in the wire in their path as planned. With the Australians bogged down at the wire, German machineguns zeroed in on them, cutting down a number of men including a company commander.

Seeing this, Jack Axford, who had cleared the wire, diverted sideways and dashed in the direction of the trench containing the offending machineguns. First tossing in his two little pineapple-shaped grenades in quick succession, Jac jumped in after them and bayoneted every German who stood in his way. Within seconds, little Jack Axford had killed ten Germans. Another six terrified Fritzes threw up their hands and surrendered to the lone Australian. Jack made his prisoners heave their machineguns over the trench’s parapet, out into the open.

Then, poking his head over the parapet, Jack yelled to the stalled 16th Battalion platoon, ‘Come on!’

The men of that platoon rose up and skirted to the flank to use the gap in the wire that Jack’s platoon had utilised, then ran to jump into the trench with Jack. Handing his prisoners over to the new arrivals, Jack climbed out and hurried after his own platoon, which was continuing to advance.

As the 16th Battalion pushed toward Vaire Wood and Hamel Wood, and the 13th Battalion attacked on the south side of Vaire Wood, the 15th Battalion and the attached G Company of the 132nd Infantry advanced to the north of the woods. The 15th’s A Company had been given the task of dealing with Pear Trench, supported by three tanks. Already depleted by the loss of forty-two men hit by friendly fire at the jumping-off tape, A Company was about to tackle the most difficult objective the assault force would face that day.

Not only did the trio of tanks assigned to Pear Trench fail to materialise, as the men of the 15th and the attached 132nd Infantry company reached this formidable redoubt they discovered that the defences, including the wire out front, were completely intact, having escaped the creeping barrage. Later, it would be found that all the shells aimed at Pear Trench had fallen immediately behind it. This enabled the enemy to emerge from their dugouts and man the extensive Pear Trench defences, albeit still wearing their gas masks.

As a result, all twenty-three German machineguns and several mortars in Pear Trench were undamaged, manned, and firing viciously at the attackers by the time the first wave reached the wire in front of them. Only a few sally ports offered a way through these wire entanglements, although some men succeeded in also scrambling through where the wire was thinnest. ‘We had trouble getting through the wires,’ Captain William J. Masoner of Company G would sourly complain, ‘as the barrage had not torn them down, and the tanks did not arrive in time to destroy them.’¹⁶⁰

‘The enemy fought with his machineguns bravely,’ said the 15th Battalion War Diary of the struggle at Pear Trench, ‘and our casualties were fairly heavy at this point.’ After passing through the wire, the Australians rushed the trench, ‘the enemy putting up a spirited fight with machineguns and bombs. Our men dashed in with the bayonet and soon overcame the garrison of the front line.’

The 132nd’s Captain George H. Mallon had been attached to Company G as an observer for the battle, and he saw comrades fall to these guns at Pear Trench. ‘We lost heavily in front of two machineguns before they were silenced by troops attacking from the rear,’ he said.¹⁶¹ Once defenders in the trenches out front of Pear Trench were overcome, the 15th Battalion men had passed along its rear wings and down a sunken road behind it, to tackle strongpoints there, ‘bombing and bayonetting the garrison who fought tenaciously’, said the 15th Battalion War Diary.

Harry Dalziel’s company commander Captain Ernest Carter had ordered his Lewis gunners to fire their weapons from the hip, and in that stance Harry’s Lewis Gun partner had just wiped out one German machinegun nest in the redoubt when another that opened up from one side cut him down. Without a moment’s thought, Two-Gun Harry drew his revolvers then ran at the offending machinegun with a pistol in each hand. Hurdling the parapet and dropping into the trench, Harry blazed away, killing seven German machinegunners with his revolvers. Another German further along the trench got off a shot at him, hitting Harry in the right hand’s index finger and knocking the pistol from his grip.¹⁶²

With a howl of pain, Harry let go of the second revolver and instinctively grabbed his wounded hand. The German who’d shot him charged at him, but Harry reacted quickly, wrestling his attacker to the ground. Getting on top of the German, the Australian reached for the dagger on his belt, drew it, and struck. ‘I lunged at him with my German dagger,’ he later recalled, ‘catching him right over the heart. His dying cry upset me, and I shivered at Pear Trench.’¹⁶³

Soon, other Australians of Harry’s company and Americans of Captain Masoner’s company were surging into this section of Pear Trench around Harry, clearing it in fierce hand-to-hand combat. After years of war, the Australians had become accustomed to seeing enemy dead on the battlefield, but for the Americans, it came as a shock. Captain George Mallon looked around the carnage when he climbed into the secured Pear Trench, and shuddered. ‘A great many Germans were killed at this point,’ he would say. ‘I counted forty in a very small sector.’¹⁶⁴

After Harry Dalziel slipped his bloodied dagger back into its scabbard and reloaded and reholstered his pistols, he saw the ‘moppers up’ of the next wave of the assault arriving to collect German prisoners and machineguns around the captured redoubt. An officer, spotting Harry’s bleeding hand, ordered him to go to the rear and have it attended to. Adrenaline was pulsing through the driver’s veins by this time, and Two-Gun Harry was ready for more dices with death. But orders were orders, and, unhappily, Harry turned to obey the officer. He hadn’t gone far when he spotted stretcher-bearers who were carrying wounded down into the trench line west of Pear Trench, and he made a beeline for them.

Lieutenant Schram, Major Kennedy and their medical party had followed the assault troops all the way to Pear Trench to set up their advanced dressing station close to the fighting. They had been hoping to find a suitable German dugout, equipped with lamps, but no such dugout had been liberated by the time they arrived, and already the stretcher-bearers were coming to them with dozens of wounded from the Pear Trench assault. So, Kennedy decided to use an open trench as their ADS. At least it was comparatively sheltered from enemy fire. They had several wheeled stretchers with them – gurneys, the Americans called them – and these became the doctors’ operating tables.

‘Cases were brought in rather fast,’ Lieutenant Schram later reported, ‘but we succeeded in dressing them and getting them out in rapid time.’¹⁶⁵ As soon as wounded men were assessed and dressed, they were put in the hands of stretcher-bearers once again, to be carried or escorted back more than 1.5 kilometres over open ground to the better facilities at the nearest Regimental Aid Post at the original front line.

From that RAP, serious cases could be evacuated to a Casualty Clearing Station by motor ambulance. There, doctors assisted by military nurses would carry out procedures in fully equipped operating theatres. Once wounded men were able to travel further, they would be loaded onto hospital trains at the CCS’s own rail siding and evacuated to hospitals. Final recovery and recuperation would take place in England. To aid the CCS doctors, Lieutenant Schram had been trained to attach diagnosis tags to the tunic of each case, but Major Kennedy soon dissuaded him from that practice.

‘They come in too fast,’ said Kennedy with a shake of the head, as they worked quickly to stem bleeding and apply splints to limbs broken by bullets, blast and shrapnel. ‘To use diagnosis tags would delay them getting out.’¹⁶⁶

Before long, the numbers of walking wounded and men carried into the ADS threatened to overwhelm the doctors and their assistants. ‘We had some difficulty getting rid of our dress cases,’ Schram would report. ‘They were not evacuated fast enough. We had difficulty for a while in obtaining sufficient stretchers.’ Before long, their supply of splints also ran out, so the doctors resorted to using rifles as splints, strapping them onto shattered limbs. Schram soon found that the first-aid kits the Americans had come to the front with were too small and inadequately equipped. And unlike the Australian doctors, Schram had no painkiller to give the more seriously wounded men, and he made a mental note to acquire morphine from a hospital before he went into a combat zone again.

To speed things up, Major Kennedy after a while was able to have a relay post set up halfway back, so that increasingly weary Australian and American stretcher-bearer teams could hand their cases over to fresh stretcher-bearers for the carry back to the RAP, then themselves return to the ADS for more ‘customers’. Kennedy also sent back for more splints and bandages.

It was to this overworked Pear Trench ADS that Two-Gun Harry Dalziel took himself for attention. He didn’t get as far as Doctors Kennedy or Schram. Australian stretcher-bearer Private James Shearer bandaged Harry’s hand and urged him to take himself back to the RAP, but Harry wasn’t interested in leaving the battle. As soon as Shearer had patched him up, Two-Gun Harry scampered to rejoin the 15th Battalion’s A Company as they continued their advance.¹⁶⁷

While Pear Trench was still being subdued by A Company, the rest of the 15th Battalion had pushed on by it. At Vaire Trench, near Vaire Wood, D Company encountered heavy machinegun fire that sent the men of the company to ground and halted the advance. As the gun turned towards new targets, Sergeant Ned Searle knew that it was time to make his bid for a VC.

‘Come on, you blokes!’ Ned bellowed as he came to his feet with rifle at the ready.

Hoping that, behind him, the men of his platoon were also rising up to join him in rushing the gun, and running as fast as his legs would carry him, Ned dashed towards the trench housing the machinegun. The closer he came to the Germans he realised there was more than one machinegun in the post. Apart from the heavy Maxim, three light machineguns were now also in operation, chattering away. Reaching the lip of the trench, Ned threw himself to the ground. With the main gun juddering lethally just a metre or two from his head, Ned took out two hand grenades. In quick succession he pulled the pins, lobbed the grenades over the parapet, then ducked back down. From pin-pull to detonation there was a pause of seven seconds. As Ned waited, it seemed like seven agonising minutes. Finally, two dull explosions. Followed by cries of pain and alarm. The machineguns fell silent.

Up Ned rose again. Hurdling the parapet, he dropped into the middle of the smoking machinegun nest. A figure in field grey lunged at him. Ned sidestepped and plunged his bayonet into the man. As Ned withdrew his blade, another German came at him. Ned expertly despatched him with his bayonet, too. Eleven remaining German soldiers of the 55th Regiment, 13th Infantry Division, including a junior officer, all with gas masks on, threw up their hands in terror, and surrendered.

‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’ they cried, as dead comrades lay around them with their blood splattered over the chalk.

The members of Ned’s section dropped into the trench to join him, and soon scores more Australians were pouring into the trench and securing it. Whilst his men covered the surrendered Germans, who sheepishly removed their gas masks, Ned personally searched all of them. From the officer, a square-faced, narrow-shouldered lieutenant, he removed a long-barrelled Luger artillery pistol in its holster, strapping it around his waist. ‘Larrikin’ Ned also tried on the officer’s peaked cap, but the German had a big head and the cap was too large for the Australian.

Deciding that the officer was about his size and that his smart German Army tunic would look good on him in the bar of the Westbury Arms pub when he got back home, Ned then ordered the German to disrobe. The lieutenant protested that this was contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but a nudge from Ned’s bayonet told him it was required by the provisions of the Searle Convention, and he removed the tunic and handed it to the Australian sergeant.

From another German, Ned removed a flat enlisted man’s cap that fitted him perfectly. And in the tunic pocket of another quaking prisoner he found a photograph of the entire machinegun detachment, the living and the dead, posing with their machineguns as they looked, unsmiling, at the photographer. Ned would keep that memento for the rest of his days. Ned made his prisoners carry their four machineguns, and ammunition, as he and his men handed them over to the moppers-up of the next wave.

Captain Bradley trotted by, calling his congratulations to Ned for a job well done. As Ned hoped, following the battle Bradley would submit a recommendation to Colonel McSharry that Ned be decorated for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’. But for now, as soon as they’d handed over their prisoners to moppers-up, Ned and his men rejoined the push east.

Harry Dalziel caught up with his A Company mates east of Pear Trench. His wound was still leaking blood through and around his hasty bandage when he found his comrades, but, undeterred, he continued the advance as his platoon came to a deep concrete dugout. Unlike at Pear Trench, the artillery bombardment had wreaked havoc here. ‘We found Huns dead in all directions,’ Harry would later say. ‘Up in trees, under duckboards, in shell holes, everywhere.’

Standing at the top of the concrete steps leading down into the bunker, the platoon’s number one Lewis gunner fired down into it with gun on his hip. This generated desperate cries of ‘Kamerad!’ from below, and moments later unarmed Germans began streaming up the steps. ‘The poor Huns came up with their hands above their heads,’ Harry would say. ‘I felt like a warlord with my two pistols pointing at them and one dagger on my belt.’

To Harry’s amazement, in a bid to buy their lives the Germans offered their Australian captors their gold and silver watches as they were roughly searched for weapons. Dalziel didn’t take any of the watches on offer, but some other Australians would. ‘We sent them off with their beautiful watches to the “moppers-up”,’ said Harry. ‘This was a grand experience for me and I relished every minute of it,’ he confessed. But Two-Gun Harry’s battle was not yet over. Not by a long shot.¹⁶⁸

Twenty-one-year-old Corporal Albert C. Painsipp of the 132nd’s Company A had just gone through a gap in the German wire in advance of the trees of Vaire Wood when a machinegun in a wheatfield opened up on him. An armour-piercing bullet slammed into the American’s thigh, spinning him around and knocking him down. Hauling himself back to his feet, Painsipp staggered towards the trench containing the machinegun. The gunner, thinking he’d killed Painsipp, had traversed his weapon to fire at other targets. Now, seeing him coming afresh, the gunner desperately swung the gun back to cut him down.

Dropping his rifle and lunging for the barrel of the gun with both hands to save himself, Painsipp tried to upset the grim grey Maxim, but it was too heavy and the gun’s two-man crew frantically resisted his efforts. Letting go of the hot barrel, Painsipp dropped back down below the parapet. Here, the machinegun couldn’t incline far enough to get him. But he knew he would die here if he didn’t act fast. The Americans had little experience of Mills Bombs, and few made effective use of them during the Battle of Hamel. In contrast, Corporal Painsipp knew that the Mills Bomb in the pouch on his chest was his only chance. Dragging out the grenade, Painsipp yanked the pin and tossed it into the trench. The detonation silenced the gun.

Retrieving his rifle and picking himself up, Painsipp dropped into the trench with his bayonet at the ready. He found the grenade had killed four occupants of the post. A fifth German was running off along the trench’s duck-boarded floor, away from him. As the corporal limped after the escaping German, the enemy soldier disappeared down steps into a dugout. Without hesitation, Painsipp went down the steps after him, with rifle levelled. It was pitch dark down here, and out of the darkness Painsipp’s quarry leapt at him. But Painsipp was handy with the bayonet; he rammed the blade into his assailant, killing him.

Finding the dugout empty apart from the now-dead man, Painsipp turned and climbed back up into the daylight. Just as he was emerging, another German came at him with a bayonet. But he only caught Painsipp in the arm. It was a fatal error, for the German. Painsipp countered, plunging his own bayonet into his attacker’s chest. The man slid to the trench floor. Still, Painsipp’s ordeal wasn’t over. Yet another German rushed at him with bayonet levelled. Knocking the German’s blade aside so that it only scratched him, Painsipp countered with a lethal blow of his own. As this latest assailant sagged, dead, to the ground, Painsipp withdrew his bloodied bayonet. By rights, the American should have been dead four times over.

From behind him, Painsipp heard the judder of a machinegun firing. Yet another German had taken over the gun that Painsipp had silenced with the grenade, and, unaware of the American’s presence, was kneeling behind it, firing at the advancing Australians and Americans outside the trench. Lifting his rifle and taking aim, Painsipp pulled the trigger, plugging this latest gunner. The German fell away, dead, and again the machinegun went silent.

Now that he had cleared the nest and removed the last threat, Painsipp’s strength deserted him, and he sagged to the trench’s floor. Sitting with his back against the chalk wall, surrounded by dead Germans and with a trio of wounds, Painsipp was bleeding heavily and knew he could go no further. Looking around, he saw a piece of white cloth lying within reach; perhaps one of the Germans had been preparing to surrender. Tying the rag to the end of his rifle, he held up the weapon and slowly, painfully, waved it back and forth to attract the attention of stretcher-bearers.

A number of 132nd Infantry men overcame their timidity with the bayonet after they saw one of their popular Company G comrades, Private Henry F. Engelhardt, a twenty-seven-year-old draftee and former foundryman from Alton, Illinois, killed at the end of a German bayonet in the trenches.

Elsewhere, Americans saw a German pretending to be wounded raising his hands in surrender and beckoning an American stretcher-bearer, only for the German to skewer the stretcher-bearer with a bayonet when he came up to help him. ‘He was treacherously murdered!’ was the story that swept through American ranks. Now, anger and a lust for revenge drove American bayonets into German breasts, and any thoughts of mercy were forgotten.¹⁶⁹

A baby-faced but earnest corporal of the 132nd’s G Company had pushed through Vaire Wood, firing at fleeting targets as he went, and was advancing against the heavily-defended German trench line beyond Hamel town. The corporal had led twenty-four Americans into combat, and, the night before they came into the line, all had formally vowed to inflict as much damage on the Germans as possible this day, then, like boys in the schoolyard, spitting on their palms and shaking hands in confirmation of their oath.

The corporal was unscathed and had avoided any life and death scenarios up to this point, when two Germans came running towards him from a German post with their hands held high and yelling ‘Kamerad!’ Not knowing what this meant, the corporal raised his rifle to shoot.

‘Don’t touch them!’ called one of his officers from nearby.

The corporal turned the German pair over to troops coming along behind, and kept advancing, all the time with his finger on his rifle’s trigger. From out of nowhere, a bullet fired by an unseen rifleman hit him. The youngster stumbled on a few more steps, then, as the realisation hit him that he’d been wounded, he dropped to his knees. To finish off the corporal, a German charged him with rifle and bayonet. Instinctively, the American raised his rifle and fired. The German dropped, sprawling on his face in front of the corporal, and didn’t move again.

Moments later, a second German, bareheaded and yelling, came at the American with a bayonet lowered. The baby-faced corporal pulled his trigger again, only to find he was out of ammunition. In the flash of a second, as the German bore down on him, the youth came to a realisation. ‘I knew I had to get up and fight,’ he would later say. Rising back to his feet, the corporal brought up his rifle. As he had been trained, he turned the German’s blade aside with his own. In the same fluid motion, he brought the butt of his rifle around, and, as the German’s momentum carried him past, the corporal cracked the back of the man’s skull and the Boche went down, and stayed down. Somehow, the corporal had survived.¹⁷⁰

‘We kept on advancing,’ said the corporal’s commander, Captain Masoner. Over this trench line and up the slope towards the trenches on the ridge that represented their final objective they continued.¹⁷¹ When the attacking forces that were now pushing on beyond Vaire and Hamel Woods reached that trench line up on the ridge, they found them heavily defended by waiting Germans. More machineguns spat fire in their direction.

But now tanks appeared and growled relentlessly up the slope, passing the climbing troops to lead the attack at several places along the line. The Germans here were in for a tough time. ‘It was necessary for the tanks to go forward mopping up some trenches and strong points,’ said Colonel Abel Davis, the 132nd Infantry’s CO, ‘and proved of great value in neutralising the enemy strong points.’¹⁷²

Wherever and whenever the tanks turned up, the attackers put them to good use. After tackling the German trenches in front of Vaire and Hamel Woods, Ned Searle and his comrades of the 15th Battalion’s D Company were on the extreme right of their battalion’s advance to the ridge. Three British tanks helped the 15th here. One was soon knocked out by German fire. According to Lieutenant-Colonel McSharry, the 15th’s CO, another tank was ‘not very keen’, but the third was ‘gallantly handled, and saved us a great number of casualties at the final objective’.

At that final objective, the central portion of the blue line trenches on the ridge, ‘the enemy made a short stand’, McSharry said, ‘until our men rushed the position and cleaned it up with the assistance of a tank, taking three heavy machineguns and twenty-seven light machineguns’. With the help of that tank, D Company was the first 15th Battalion company to secure its final objective.¹⁷³

‘Our tanks served us very well,’ said Captain Masoner, ‘going close to the enemy line and destroying their machinegun emplacements using armour-piercing shells. One of our lieutenants and several of our men discovered a machinegun position and with the aid of a tank took six prisoners and destroyed the machinegun.’ To attract the attention of the tank’s commander, the American lieutenant had rung the bell on the tank’s rear, just as he had been earlier briefed to do.¹⁷⁴

The Tank Corps would come out of this battle, the first exhibition under combat conditions of the Mark V’s awesome capabilities against infantry in fixed positions, full of admiration for the Aussie infantry they fought alongside at Hamel. Said the Tank Corps’ Major-General Fuller: ‘All ranks of the tank crews operating were impressed by the superb morale of the Australian troops, who never considered that the presence of the tanks exonerated them from fighting, and who took instant advantage of any opportunity created by the tanks.’¹⁷⁵

Right along the 5.6-kilometre front of the assault, the final objective, General Monash’s blue line on the bare expanse of Hamel ridge, was being reached, and taken, in fierce, no-holds-barred fighting.