13.

The Consolidation, Morning of the Fourth of July

‘It was the best of shooting there for a while.’

Driver Harry Dalziel, A Company, Australian 15th Battalion

AT CHATEAU BERTANGLES, General Monash and his staff nervously waited through the 3.30 sunrise for news of the attack’s progress. The Australian brigades had sent forward HQ parties in the wake of the infantry advance, and, less than thirty minutes after the assault had commenced at 3.10, these parties had established brigade forward stations in the former German front line. From there, signallers trailing telephone lines and using a combination of telegraph, radio, carrier pigeons and runners fed up-to-date information on the current state of the operation back to brigade HQ. Regular updates were then telegraphed through to General Maclagan’s operational HQ, which immediately relayed them to General Monash at Corps HQ at Bertangles.

Even before these brigade forward HQs were up and running, the reports were coming in thick and fast. At 3.20, the 6th Brigade advised that the 21st Battalion, which was advancing on the right flank of the assault, was meeting light opposition as it proceeded as planned, and was sending back its first German prisoner. In the centre of the assault, 4th Brigade HQ was receiving a trickle of prisoners back at the old front line. It reported: ‘15th Battalion had stiff fight for Pear Trench and carried it inflicting heavy casualties.’ At 3.35, 4th Brigade further advised: ‘16th Battalion reports enemy front line passed and everything going well. Prisoners on their way back in large numbers.’ On the left, the 11th Brigade reported that the 42nd and 43rd Battalions were taking large numbers of prisoners, who were surrendering in droves.

By 3.45, General Monash knew that everything was going precisely to plan, and to schedule, with all three brigades across the full front of the assault achieving their primary objectives. By that time, reports were coming in of hundreds of German prisoners being taken, along with the identities of the prisoners’ units. Early indications were that the 11th Brigade on the northern flank of the advance and the 6th Brigade on the southern flank were having a relatively easy time of it, with Hamel itself already secured, while the 4th Brigade in the centre was facing fiercer resistance because of a failure of the barrage to hit the wire and emplacements at some targets, and the non-appearance of allotted tanks. The final objective, Monash’s blue line, still remained to be secured.

As Monash waited for more news of the advance and to learn what countermeasures the Germans might be launching, he had a few means of taking his mind off things. One was the Corps HQ pet, a German messenger dog captured by Australian troops in May. ‘He is a beautiful Alsatian wolf-hound and is very friendly,’ Monash wrote to a young girl back in Australia who had penned him a fan letter. ‘He has learned to understand English, and is very faithful to us, and we all pat him.’¹⁷⁶

Another Monash pastime was sketching. ‘I find this occupation keeps my nerves cool and steady,’ he told his wife. And whilst he waited for his 4 July operation to pan out, he sketched a man’s head, from memory. ‘The head is that of a typical French poilu,’ he wrote to his wife, to whom he would send the drawing. ‘In fact that of the motor driver who yesterday drove Mr. Hughes from here to the Versailles conference.’¹⁷⁷

Monash completed his sketch of the French driver at 5.00 am. By that stage, the general knew he had a crushing victory on his hands. On the right, the 6th Brigade reported mission accomplished at 4.20. Ten minutes later, at 4.30, the 4th Brigade was reporting its final objective in the centre gained. At 4.43 am the 11th Brigade advised that all objectives on the left had been seized.

The 6th Brigade, the first to achieve the final objective, had in fact been halted in its tracks when it reached the last obstacle, meeting stubborn resistance from machinegun nests on the ridge manned by Germans who were clearly prepared to fight to the last gasp. Their wish was duly met. Every battalion in the assault was equipped with two Stokes light mortars. The 6th Brigade’s light mortar teams, each armed with thirty-two mortar bombs, were brought up. Proving deadly accurate, they swiftly took out German posts holding up the advance. The 6th Brigade’s troops had then surged into the enemy trenches and gained the ridge.

Monash had set an ambitious target when he’d required that all enemy territory in the Hamel Valley and all specific primary and final objectives be seized within ninety minutes of Zero Hour. This was in fact achieved in ninety-three minutes – a stunning achievement in any circumstance, but in this war, where Allied gains were measured in days and a few yards, not in minutes and miles, it was downright unheard of. ‘The attack was a complete surprise, and swept without check across the whole of the doomed territory,’ Monash was to report. ‘It gave us possession of the whole of the Hamel Valley, and landed us on the forward or eastern slope of the last ridge, from which the enemy had been able to overlook any of the territory held by us.’¹⁷⁸

Monash also received pleasing information from 15th Brigade HQ to the north. This was the brigade tasked with undertaking diversions. One diversion was a dummy attack, another a raid on enemy trenches, the third an advance in the Ancre Valley, opposite Dernancourt. The raid had taken the designated trenches, and the Ancre attack had also been a complete success, with all objectives gained and held, against limited opposition. The successful diversions had actually moved the front line at the Ancre several hundred metres east. From the south, too, came the news that troops of the Australian 2nd Division had advanced their front a short distance to join up with the extreme right of the newly gained blue line trenches. The indications were that the German Second Army, which held the enemy front line for more than fifteen kilometres from the Ancre to opposite Villers-Bretonneux, was reeling in disarray in the face of the Australian/American attacks.

At 5.25 am, the 4th Brigade advised: ‘All objectives reported taken and consolidation proceeding well. Tanks commence to move back.’¹⁷⁹ War correspondent Philip Gibbs, who was based at the 15th Battalion’s advanced HQ, watched the tanks return. He would write: ‘Australian soldiers who were lightly wounded came riding happily back on the tops of the tanks, of whom they are now hero-worshippers because of their splendid share in the success of the day.’¹⁸⁰ Some American wounded were evacuated in the same manner. It was a rough and precarious ride up there on top of the Mark Vs, like riding an elephant bareback, and Major Kennedy at the Pear Trench ADS made a note not to allow any wounded men with fractures to be carried on tanks.

As it turned out, the infantrymen’s fear prior to the battle that tanks would run over their wounded lying on the ground never came to anything; there was not a single instance of this happening. Back at the old front line, wounded brought in by both the tanks and by stretcher-bearers were quickly evacuated to hospitals despite a shortage of motor ambulances for the task.

Five tanks failed to return. These had all been knocked out by German shells during the assault and abandoned by their crews. General Monash, when he wrote about the battle, would put the number of knocked-out tanks at just three – a number passed on to him by subordinates. Major-General Fuller of the Tank Corps, in his account of the battle, would affirm the number was five, but even so these losses were considered negligible. What was more, the Tank Corps immediately implemented plans to recover the abandoned monsters.

Despite the successes since Zero Hour, the Battle of Hamel was far from over. Now, the Australians and Americans would have to weather the storm of the expected fierce German counter attack, which was ‘sure to come’, according to the chief of staff of the American 33rd Division, Colonel William K. Naylor.¹⁸¹ Only once counterattacks had been beaten off and the hold on the Hamel salient had been consolidated could the assault be proclaimed a complete success.

No Australian soldier would ever forget the First Battle of Bullecourt, where Ned Searle and his mates had taken their objective, despite the failure of the tanks, only to be driven out of the German trenches they had taken, when the enemy counterattacked and the British Army had failed to support them. In this case, Monash had every intention of supporting his men, and had taken detailed precautions to ensure they were prepared for whatever the other side threw at them.

From the blue line trenches on the ridge above Hamel, Australian officers with field-glasses could see numerous deserted German artillery pieces in the distance as Australian and British shells fell among them. Until ninety-three minutes earlier, those field guns had been well behind the German front line. Now, they were in No Man’s Land. Some had been damaged or destroyed by Number 3 Squadron and the Allied bombardment, while others had been abandoned by gun crews who had fled in the face of the assault. Some Australian officers sent messages back to their HQs asking permission to continue the advance as far as those guns. But overenthusiasm could result in extending the gains, and the front line, too far, making both vulnerable. Orders came back to stick to the operational plan. The attackers were to stay where they were, and consolidate their positions.

‘Dig in!’ the officers at the blue line ordered.

General Monash expected that, once the Germans had overcome the shock and surprise of the Hamel assault, their commanders in the rear would pour shells onto the blue line trenches on the ridge that had been lost to the attackers. Therefore, as part of the operational plan, the Australians and Americans now occupying these trenches were ordered to make them deeper, and safer, and to also dig small posts out in front of the blue line trenches. They set about this work with vigour.

Digging in at the centre of the line on the ridge were the 15th Battalion and the 132nd’s Company G. ‘We reached our objective about 4.30 am,’ said Company G’s Captain Masoner, ‘and started to dig, our barrage falling behind the enemy’s lines for another fifteen minutes. As soon as our barrage stopped, their snipers became very active. They also brought several machineguns into action. As our men did not have sufficient cover at this time, we suffered several casualties.’ This only made the digging more energetic.¹⁸²

‘It was found on reaching the final objective,’ said the 15th Battalion’s Lieutenant-Colonel McSharry, ‘that the enemy were in strong force out in front, so, whilst the rest of the line dug in and consolidated, small parties and Lewis Gun teams pushed well out … inflicting extremely heavy casualties on the enemy.’¹⁸³

Two-Gun Harry Dalziel was one of those Lewis gunners who went out in front to create advanced posts. By this time, with several other Lewis gunners now manning captured German heavy machineguns, Harry had taken charge of one of A Company’s Lewis Guns – he nicknamed it Tilly Lewis. Alone, Harry carried Tilly twenty paces in advance of the captured German trenches, then dug himself in. Once he’d made a hole large enough to lie in, he took the three sandbags strapped around his legs, filled them with chalky soil he’d dug, then used them to create a gun platform for Tilly. Harry never did explain where the gun’s name came from. He’d probably known a Tilly Lewis back home.

Spotting movement at a German communication trench about 300 metres further east, one that had been partly collapsed by a shell or bomb, Harry took aim with his Lewis Gun. Sure enough, he saw a party of Germans emerge from that trench and run towards another that appeared equally damaged. Firing short, precise bursts, he cut the running men down in the open. ‘It was the best of shooting there for a while,’ he would later remark. The turkey shoot came to an abrupt end when he ran out of ammunition.¹⁸⁴

Cursing, Harry decided that he would have to go in search of more ammo. He had been briefed at the outset that British carrier tanks would drop boxes of Lewis Gun ammunition in the open down behind the ridge. So, Harry rose up and began a crouching run back to the trench line. As he ran, a German machinegun somewhere a long way behind him opened up. After tumbling into the trench with bullets kicking up the earth close by, Harry checked that none had hit him. With a grin to the Australian infantrymen around him in the trench, he pointed to two spent German machinegun rounds that had lodged in the puttee circling the lower part of one leg.

‘A near miss,’ he philosophically observed.

Finding his way out of the trench, Harry crawled on hands and knees until he was over the ridgeline, dodging frequent German fire that came his way. ‘A charmed life,’ he said to himself, as, coming to his feet, he tramped down the slope looking for one of the promised dumps of ammunition. Sure enough, about 250 metres below the ridge, he came across ammunition boxes scattered haphazardly about on the ground. A carrier tank had brought its 4.5 ton load of ammo to this spot.

‘Merci, monsieur,’ said Two-Gun Harry to the driver of the long-vanished tank.

As there had been no troops around to unload it, the crew had been forced to get out and do the unloading themselves. They’d wasted no time in dumping the ammo before clambering back into the protection of their cab and heading the tank back the way they’d come.

Harry grabbed the first ammunition box he came to. With this on his shoulder, he set off back up the hill. After he crested the ridge and cleared the trenches, Germans poured fire his way. ‘They were throwing everything at me from the needle to the elephant,’ he would later recall. A mortar bomb burst behind him. A 7.92 mm round hummed by his ear, passing between the ammunition box on his shoulder and his head. Stumbling forward, he fell into the shelter of an old shell crater, only to find it full of water. Soaked as well as exhausted now, he removed his belt and tied it around the ammunition box, using it to drag the box behind him as he splashed out of the watery crater, then wormed his way out onto the flat ground beyond it. ‘I crawled as I have never crawled before.’

Ahead lay his destination, the hole in the ground with Tilly still in position where he’d left her. He tumbled into his little nest. Then, keeping his head down, he set about opening the ammunition box to rearm his Lewis Gun. When he got it open, he cursed aloud. The box contained grenades, not bullets for hungry Tilly. ‘Those German hearts would feel sore if I didn’t provide them with more ammunition,’ he said to himself, and again dragging the ammunition box after him, he turned around and crawled back to the trench line. Dropping back down into a trench with his A Company mates, he gave them the grenades to share out, then retrieved his belt, exited the trench, and crawled back over the ridge in search of a box of bullets.

Back on his feet below the ridge, Harry retraced his steps to the ammunition dump. This time, he took care to read the letters painted on the outside of the boxes he came upon, to find one whose contents were clearly rounds suitable for a Lewis Gun. Having satisfied himself that he had chosen correctly this time, he shouldered the ammunition box and made his way back up to the ridge and the 15th Battalion position.¹⁸⁵

While Dalziel was away, Lieutenant Harry Yagle, leader of one of the 132nd’s G Company platoons, saw that the Germans had succeeded in pushing up with a machinegun and siting it in a sunken road about 200 metres east of the blue line trenches. Getting together with his senior sergeant Frank A. Kojane and two Australians from the 15th Battalion, Yagle led the quartet in rushing the position. They captured the gun and the eight Germans with it, bringing the lot back to the blue line trenches.

As their prisoners were sent to the POW pen in the rear, Yagle and his companions returned their attention to digging in, as two Australian fighter aircraft flew low over the trenches of the new front line looking for German targets to strafe. ‘Our aircraft were very active in the morning,’ said Captain Masoner, commander of the 132nd’s Company G and Lieutenant Yagle’s immediate superior, ‘dropping bombs on some of the enemy positions, also bringing ammunition and wire to our lines, dropping them by means of parachute.’¹⁸⁶

The British aircraft of the RAF’s Number 9 Squadron had the most dangerous mission of the morning, loaded down with ammunition boxes and dawdling in over the battlefield to make their drops. Boldly coming in low, they accurately parachuted their ammunition for the Vickers machineguns towards the Vs laid out on the ground by the Australians of the 4th Machinegun Battalion. ‘The air-pilots were able to drop this ammunition from a height of at least 1000 feet to well within 100 yards of the appointed spot,’ General Monash was to say. ‘In this way, at least 100,000 rounds were successfully distributed during this battle.’¹⁸⁷

Australian and British aircraft had been active since before dawn, with the RAF planes flying from their base at Argenvilliers to the AFC’s airfield at Villers Bocage to load up with the ammunition boxes they were to parachute to the advancing troops in multiple missions. High above the battlefield, Australian aircraft of the AFC’s Number 3 Squadron circled continually, on the lookout for enemy fighters and ready to dive on them as soon as they went after the British RE8s. Enemy reconnaissance aircraft appeared over the battlefield at 8.00 am, but were quickly driven off by the Australian fighters.

The first air casualty came a little over an hour later, when one British plane was hit, not by enemy fire, but, according to several accounts, by friendly artillery fire aimed at German artillery positions and reserve lines beyond the ridge. Shortly after 9.00 am, troops on the ground watched as this stricken Royal Air Force RE8 plummeted nose first to the ground, still with its second load of the day in place and with partially open parachutes streaming from beneath each lower wing. The fighter fell in the middle of the recently gained territory, and stretcher-bearers soon hurried to the scene of the crash, which had shaken the aircraft apart. The RE8’s twenty-two-year-old British pilot Henry Rietie and his observer were found to be dead.

At 10.00 am, the German air force put thirty-five fighters of differing types into the air over the Hamel Valley, seriously outnumbering the Australian fighters on patrol. As diving, weaving dogfights between fighters took place in the hazy summer sky, a number of German planes evaded the Australian covering force and went onto the attack. Some German fighters came down low and bombed and strafed the Australians and Americans in their newly secured trenches. Other German aircraft went after the vulnerable, low-flying drop planes.

The pilot of one British plane was badly wounded by a German attacker, but he managed to nurse his aircraft back to Villers Bocage and land. Another RAF fighter, on its second run of the morning and piloted by Lieutenant S. F. Harris, was shot down just south of Hamel by German pilot Leutnant Martin Dehmesch of the German air force’s Jasta 58. Troops rushing to the scene of the mangled wreck found Harris dead. But his observer, Lieutenant D. E. Bell, an American serving with the RAF, was still alive, although seriously injured. Bell was carried to the nearest dressing station, the one at Pear Trench. There, Bell was tended by fellow American Lieutenant Schram. Despite Schram’s best efforts, the American airman couldn’t be saved.

For a full thirty minutes the Germans held supremacy of the air over the battlefield, as numerous enemy planes got by their outnumbered opponents and combined with German artillery to make things difficult for the men on the ground. ‘At every opportunity,’ said Captain Masoner, ‘the German planes, flying very low, would fire into our trenches.’ Bombing from the air was then a very imprecise art, and as long as the Americans and Australians kept their heads down in the trenches they were safe from everything bar a direct hit. Inevitably, some German pilots got lucky with their bombs, ‘one of which was dropped into our trench and killed four men’, Captain Masoner would note.¹⁸⁸

To counter this, the AFC put every available Number 3 Squadron aircraft into the air, and by 10.30 the squadron had driven off the Germans. In the final melee, Australian pilots shot down two German planes, without loss to their own squadron. The vigilant Australian fighters would control the air here for the remainder of 4 July and all the next day, ensuring that the German air force no longer had any influence on the outcome of the ongoing battle.

During the morning, as digging in and the laying of wire continued on the ridge, German snipers taking careful potshots continued to harass the Australians and Americans. Out in front of the 13th Battalion’s blue line trenches, which were to the left of the 15th Battalion’s position, one brave American stretcher-bearer with the 132nd Infantry, who was striving to reach a wounded man in No Man’s Land while carrying a white flag, was shot down and killed by a sniper. To put a stop to this, Private Harry Shelly of the 132nd and an Australian from the 13th Battalion teamed up. Crawling out of their advanced post, the pair made their way unseen to the enemy sniping post, where they captured all eight occupants without a fight. They made their prisoners crawl back to the blue line trenches with them.

On the right of the line, the 21st Battalion found an easier answer to snipers. Their Stokes mortar teams proved so accurate, they were able to drop mortar bombs right onto sniper positions, silencing one after another.

That morning, too, official Australian photographer Captain Hubert Wilkins had permission from General Monash to go forward and take photographs in the newly occupied territory in the valley behind the blue line trenches. Among his shots, he photographed Australian and American dead lying together on flat ground at the foot of Hamel Ridge, German dead at Pear Trench and at the quarry, and Australian stretcher-bearers carrying wounded past the wreck of one of the two British aircraft shot down that morning.

Wilkins also captured on film a group of smiling Australian and American infantrymen of the 42nd Battalion and the 131st’s Company C, including a Lewis Gun team, who were cheerfully sharing a hole scratched in the flat, chalky terrain outside Hamel and awaiting the anticipated German counter attack. These Aussies and Yanks formed part of the second line of defence, with the task of stopping the enemy if their counterattack overwhelmed the Australians and Americans dug in along the ridge further east.

Throughout the regained Hamel salient that morning, the troops of the assault force sat through the nail-biting wait for the German Army to throw everything at them in an attempt to dislodge the invaders. As Americans laid bets on when the counterattack would come, the experienced Australians would have told them that, if it were them, they would wait for dark before they counterattacked. They all knew that, behind the lines, Fritz was hurriedly moving thousands of men and hundreds of artillery pieces up from reserve positions kilometres away to try to dislodge them.

Similarly, during the day, while preparing to mount his counterattacks, the enemy attempted to recover damaged and abandoned German artillery pieces that were sitting out in No Man’s Land, sending horse teams to haul them off. The attempt was in full view of the Australians on the ridge, who called in artillery fire to discourage Fritz from recovering their guns. ‘When he sent up horses to try to drag them away,’ said Philip Gibbs, ‘they were scattered by our fire and failed in the attempt.’¹⁸⁹

This would not prevent the inevitable storm. Everyone, on both sides, was aware that a German Army counterstrike was not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’.