16.

The German Counterattacks That Night

‘To my sorrow they were advancing again, coming on in hordes about five hundred yards away.’

Driver Henry Dalziel, A Company, Australian 15th Battalion

AT 3.00 PM on 4 July, the Germans began to heavily shell Hamel and the new Allied front line along the ridge east of the town. From the blue line trenches all the way to General Monash’s headquarters at Bertangles, Australian and American officers and men tensed in expectation of the German infantry making their counterattack. But this bombardment was not a prelude to an assault, just a fill-in as the Germans strove to muster the resources for a later major counter-blow. The barrage passed. Sporadic German shelling and machinegun fire continued through the afternoon and into the evening, but no infantry attack materialised.

The first of the German counterattacks finally came at dusk, a little before 10.00 pm, against the centre of the Australian/American line, accompanied by a fresh bombardment of the trenches and of Hamel town. German aircraft also returned to the Hamel battlefield, to bomb Pear Trench, which German commanders were convinced contained an Australian forward command post. In fact, just as Hamel had been evacuated, as part of General Monash’s plan Pear Trench had also been abandoned apart from the advanced dressing station, with the Australian and American infantry stationed in this area hunkered down in their new trenches nearby. Lieutenant-Colonel McSharry did have his 15th Battalion advanced HQ in the vicinity, but in a dugout in the trenches west of Pear Trench.

Apparently the German commanders thought the Australians and Americans would be drawn to the protection offered by the dugouts and bunkers in Hamel and Pear Trench, never crediting these troops with the capacity or grit to willingly occupy open trenches during extended bombardments. Had they known they were facing elite Australian troops they may have thought differently, but it appears that at least some Germans in this sector thought that they were only up against French troops south of the Somme, because when they surrendered they called out in fractured French to their captors. As a consequence of this flawed German thinking, there were no Australian or American casualties at either Pear Trench or Hamel from the nighttime bombing or shelling, and the enemy wasted many bombs and shells on the unoccupied positions.

The first German infantry counterassault came at the middle of the Australian line, at the blue line trenches held by the 13th and 15th Battalions and their American 132nd Infantry cohorts. The part of the line held by the 13th received particularly intense attention, as German troops charged forward en masse with their artillery continuing to drop explosive and smoke shells on the blue line. German troops advanced into a hail of welcoming lead, from Australian and American machineguns and from German machineguns now in Australian hands. ‘We reaped the benefit of having schooled our NCOs and Lewis gunners in the use of the German machinegun,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel McSharry of the 15th Battalion.²⁰⁵

By this stage, the 15th’s Two-Gun Harry Dalziel had returned to his new friend Tilly Lewis, in the post he had hollowed out for her in advance of the blue line. Before leaving the main trench, he had filled several panniers, or magazines, with Lewis Gun rounds from the ammunition box he’d brought up from the valley. The rest of the ammunition had been shared out among his comrades in the blue line trench. Ever since reloading his Lewis Gun, Harry had been waiting.

He had hoped the Germans had cleared out for good, but he was in for a fresh fight that night. ‘To my sorrow they were advancing again, coming on in hordes about five hundred yards away,’ he would recall. A few German shells were dropping around him and smoke was drifting in clouds, obscuring his view and his aim. Lying behind his gun, Harry let off carefully aimed bursts in the direction of the Germans to his left, emptying a magazine at them and taking a heavy toll.²⁰⁶

At 10.10 pm, a flare rose up into the night sky from the 13th Battalion’s trenches. This was an ‘SOS’, a signal to Australian artillery observers that the battalion was under intense pressure from German infantry, and calling in an artillery bombardment on the territory immediately in front of its line. Already, the Germans had overrun a 13th Battalion forward post, capturing five Australians and two Americans there. The Boche were pressing the other forward posts all along the line. Soon, the sounds of Australian shells bursting in No Man’s Land joined the cacophony of machineguns firing from the trenches.

Harry Dalziel had removed one empty pannier from his Lewis Gun and was reaching for a full one when, from out of the smoke in front of him, a fresh-faced boy in a coalscuttle helmet came running toward him with hands held high. Harry reckoned the youth was no more than fifteen or sixteen years of age, and he was bleeding from a wound.

‘Merci, comrade!’ cried the boy, with fear in his voice and in his eyes. ‘Merci!’

Harry immediately felt for the boy. This was no war for children. But just as he was thinking about making him a prisoner, from behind Harry two burly Americans came rushing at the boy with their bayonets levelled.

‘Stop!’ Harry yelled. With his Lewis Gun empty, he quickly drew his pistols. Pointing the revolvers at the Yanks, he bellowed, ‘Don’t move, or I’ll blow your bloody heads off!’

The shocked Americans froze, protesting, ‘But …’

‘Take this little German back to the captain,’ Harry commanded. ‘Possibly, he may get some information from him.’

Glaring at Harry, the Americans took the German boy by the arm and hustled him back to the blue line trenches. Once they departed, Harry resumed firing at German attackers and emptied his second magazine. Determined to secure more ammunition, Harry left Tilly in her nest, crawled back to the main trenches, and from there hurried down from the ridge. In the darkness and smoke he lost his way. He found himself at Pear Trench, and the dressing station he’d visited earlier in the day.

In the dressing station, Harry saw a mature German soldier on a stretcher; his foot had been blown off. Close by, Harry spotted the two Americans to whom he’d handed over the boy. They had the boy with them, and he was having his wound attended to. On seeing Harry, one of the Americans had a conversation with the man who had lost his foot, then came over to the Australian.

‘Buddy, this German soldier wants to speak to you,’ said the American, nodding to the older German on the stretcher.

When Harry went to the German, the fellow looked up at him and said, in halting English, ‘Comrade, you have saved my son.’

In amazement, Harry looked at the man without a foot, and then at the youth whose life he had spared earlier, and realised they were father and son. The father reached up and shook Harry by the hand. Hardly able to credit the coincidence, Harry departed, and found his way to the ammunition dump. Loaded up with another box full of bullets, he set off back up to the ridge. ‘Crawling and puffing and dodging shells, and falling into shell holes, I managed to get back,’ he later said.

In the 15th Battalion trenches, with his mates firing all around them, Harry calmly filled two more magazines, then crawled back out with them to reacquaint himself with Tilly Lewis. By this stage, his feet were sore and his head ached, ‘as if there were two or three heads on my shoulders’. The German assault had stalled out in front of the blue line trenches. ‘But the sniper fire still kept popping away,’ said Harry. Several bullets hummed past his head, so he hunched down even closer to the Lewis Gun as he resumed firing. Finding that his right hand had stiffened up from his earlier wound and was almost useless, he changed the Lewis Gun’s cocking handle over to the left side.

Again he ran out of ammunition, so again he began to crawl back to the main trench with an empty magazine for more. His head was aching so terribly that he found himself rolling about in agony, but he reached the trench, filled the magazine, then crawled back to Tilly. Fitting the latest magazine, he poured lead towards the Germans, who were now retreating. His head had become a sea of pain, and he found that blood was running down the left side of his face from a wound near the temple. ‘They had hit me at last. My despatch, overseas to Blighty or my last resting place, was over.’ Two-Gun Harry passed out.²⁰⁷

Much later that night, Harry Dalziel was found, unmoving, by American engineers collecting the dead for burial. They thought that Harry was a corpse, until he opened his eyes. He was carried down to the Pear Trench ADS. It was the American doctor, Lieutenant Schram, who attended him. Schram found that a German bullet had exposed Harry’s brain on the left side of the skull. Carefully, he bandaged up the ugly wound. But Schram gave Two-Gun Harry no chance of survival as he was carried off to the RAP and evacuation to hospital.

In front of the 13th Battalion’s position, the German platoon that captured the advanced post was still in possession of it. The savage Australian barrage that was now falling behind these German troops, inclusive of poison gas blowing east, meant they were cut off and couldn’t fall back to regroup as the remaining German attackers had done in the face of fierce Australian and American resistance.

As 11.00 pm approached, a 13th Battalion squad and a Company A squad scuttled out into the darkness to retake the position. Approaching it from different directions, the Australians and Americans swarmed into the post, capturing fifty Germans and reoccupying it. Here in the centre, the counterattack had been halted, and would not be renewed. After a time, the Australian barrage ended, and German shelling slackened, only becoming occasional.

Shortly before midnight, German Second Army commander General Georg von der Marwitz launched his next counterattack, this time aimed at the left of the Australian-American line.

Corporal Tom Pope’s first platoon with Company E, 131st Infantry had a relatively easy time of the assault that day as it participated in the 43rd Battalion’s advance, and had been the only American platoon not to lose a single man. As a result, and hearing stories of the heroic deeds of fellow Company E men such as Sergeant Erhardt and Corporal Zyburt, many in the first platoon were chafing for a chance to show their worth before the operation ended. None more so than platoon commander Lieutenant Albert Clissold.

As shells rained down and hundreds of German troops came storming through the night, Clissold and his men would have their opportunity to shine. ‘The enemy made a vigorous counterattack on a small front, approximately three hundred yards,’ Colonel Sanborn of the 131st would later write, ‘succeeding in capturing eighty yards of the front line trench with five Australians and two of our men.’²⁰⁸

A German party of platoon strength with a heavy machine gun and two light machineguns now occupied this stretch of the blue line trenches, where the seven Allied prisoners also remained. The Germans had additionally driven Americans out of a post in advance of the blue line and occupied it themselves. This cleft in the blue line could not be permitted to remain if the operation’s seizure of Hamel ridge was to be a fait accompli. Even as two companies from an Australian reserve battalion were being rushed up to the ridge to reinforce the front line here, plans for rapid offensive action were laid. Before the Germans could either consolidate this gain or withdraw with their seven prisoners, 43rd Battalion HQ issued orders for an immediate counterattack by one of its platoons and one of the American platoons, to restore the position.

It was Lieutenant Clissold’s first platoon that was chosen to hold up the American end of this attack. As Clissold consulted with his Australian counterpart, they agreed that the best plan was for each platoon to approach the now enemy-held piece of trench from a different direction. The Australians would flank left, the Americans would flank right. As the now German post east of the line stood in the way of Clissold’s line of attack, his platoon would first have to deal with that. So, Clissold called for a volunteer to lead a grenade attack on the post – someone who had shown proficiency with Mills Bombs.

Corporal Raymond H. Powell put up his hand, so Clissold gave Powell and his squad a supply of grenades and the job of retaking the post. German shells were pounding down all around them. Ignoring these, Powell and his squad slipped from their trench and crawled across the open ground to the post without being seen by the Germans inside, who had their heads down during the bombardment. Just metres from their objective, Powell began heaving one grenade after another into the post. Once they had exploded, Powell came to his feet and launched himself into the post with his rifle ready, followed by his squad members.

A minute later, Powell was signalling to Lieutenant Clissold, waving him forward. All the Germans in the post were dead, killed by the grenades. Clissold led his men out into the night. Amid the darkness, exploding shells and drifting smoke, it was difficult to tell exactly where the enemy machinegun was in the blue line trenches. Unaware that the post behind them had just been retaken by the Americans, the German machinegunners had their backs to Clissold and his men as they fired at Americans and Australians west of them. Only the flash from the Maxim’s muzzle would give away its exact location.

‘I see it!’ exclaimed Corporal Tom Pope. Rising up from the ground and waving the men of his squad to stay low, Tom set off at a sprint towards the Maxim and its unwitting crew. Jumping into the trench behind the Germans, he bayoneted the gunner and then the loader. Then, climbing to stand astride the gun, totally in the open and exposed, Tom shot every German who approached along this section of trench.

Inspired by Tom Pope, the rest of his platoon and the Australian platoon came running, jumping down into the trench and retaking it, killing some Germans and disarming others who threw up their hands. Four German officers, fifty-three of their men and three machineguns were captured within minutes. The lost portion of the blue line trench had been regained. Never again would German troops occupy these trenches along the ridge east of Hamel.²⁰⁹

A third German counterattack was launched against the 6th Brigade on the right, ‘using the many old trenches in the vicinity of our front line’, the 6th Brigade would report. The enemy ‘was only ejected and driven off using bombs’, which went close to cleaning the defenders out of grenades. As a result, the 6th Brigade recommended that in future Australian infantrymen each be equipped with four grenades instead of two.²¹⁰

This turned out to be the final German attempt to wrest victory from the Australians and Americans in the Battle of Hamel. To add insult to injury, at 3.00 am, just before dawn, the 13th Battalion sent a patrol from their trenches in the centre of the line which silently penetrated deep into German territory to the east. Surprising a German outpost, the patrol returned to the new Allied front line with twenty more Boche prisoners. Come the morning, their German commander would be scratching his head over their disappearance.

At 3.30 am on 5 July, the sun began to rise, heralding a clear, pleasant summer day in Picardy. All through that day, the Australian and American troops held their newly gained front-line trenches in the face of sporadic German artillery and machinegun fire. But the enemy seemed to have accepted that the Hamel salient had been lost, for no more troops were seen to be massing for counterattack. As a comparative quiet fell along the front line, preparations were made to implement the final elements of General Monash’s operational plan: the withdrawal, replacement and resting of the troops who’d made the assault. This was scheduled to take place in stages along the new front line under cover of darkness that night of 5 July.

At Chateau Bertangles, 5 July dragged by as General Monash waited for nightfall and the news that his men had been relieved and the front line was secure. To help fill the time, he wrote again to his wife in Melbourne, telling her about Field-Marshal Haig’s visit of 2 July, and of Prime Minister Hughes’ 3 July interruption. Having sent Vic a telegram the previous day informing her that his latest offensive had been a success, he now also told her a little more about the Hamel victory.

‘As cabled,’ he wrote, ‘[it] was a brilliant success. No fighting operation that the corps has ever undertaken has been more brilliantly, cleanly and perfectly carried through, without the slightest hitch.’ Knowing that it would take some weeks for the letter to reach his wife, he added, ‘You will have learned all about it from the papers long before now. I send you herewith the original telegram of congratulations received from the Prime Minister, the Commander-in-Chief, and the Army Commander.’²¹¹

As the sun set, the men in the blue line trenches gathered up their bits and pieces as they prepared to make way for their replacements. It turned out that the Germans had other ideas. Having lost their foothold in the ridge trenches, that night of 5–6 July the Germans began what Colonel Joe Sanborn described as ‘a savage strafe’, pounding the new Australian-American front line with artillery fire.²¹² The Australian battalions and their accompanying American companies scheduled to be pulled back that night were forced to hug their trenches, with the bombardment proving so fierce it wasn’t safe to move a centimetre. The swap was postponed.

The wind having changed, blowing now from the east, the German gunners added poison gas shells to the smoke and high explosive shells they were sending over. This was the Americans’ first experience of being on the receiving end of a gas attack. They had trained for it. Colonel Sanborn said of that training, ‘The soldiers began to realise that their gas masks were their best friends. One private expressed the sentiment of all his comrades by stencilling on his mask the words, “I need thee every hour”; another, “In thee I trust.”’²¹³

Despite this, some men of Sanborn’s regiment were unprepared for the real thing when it came. On the left of the new front line, thinking it was merely smoke that was drifting into their trenches, thirty-four men from the 131st Infantry failed to get their gas masks on in time. Their eyes burning, their lungs on fire, they were blinded and struggling for breath.

Stretcher-bearers wearing gas masks could only get to the gas-affected men once the enemy barrage lifted. Carried back to the ADS and then the RAP, the thirty-four would be evacuated via a Casualty Clearing Station to a hospital at Glorieux, and then to England. They would play no further part in the war. One of these gassed men was Corporal Tom Pope; his combat career had lasted less than forty-eight hours. Finally, after midnight on 6 July, the German bombardment lifted, and in the early morning hours the delayed Australian/ American withdrawal and replacement process began by stages.

That night of 5–6 July, too, the Tank Corps sent carrier tanks out to drag the five knocked-out Mark Vs back to British workshops behind the lines. All five were recovered. They would subsequently be repaired, and be back in action within weeks. Meanwhile, the Tank Corps was cock-a-hoop about the battle and its outcome. Despite the failure of some of the 5th Tank Brigade’s machines to reach their objectives and the lack of enthusiasm displayed by one or two tank crews, overall, and particularly in its work with the Australian 4th Division, the Tank Corps had shown for the first time in history that tanks and determined infantry working together against trenches and fixed emplacements comprised a frighteningly effective weapon of war. Knowing that the future face of warfare had been defined by this operation, the Tank Corps’ Major-General Fuller would subsequently speak of ‘the dramatic coup-de-main accomplished on July 4 by the 4th Australian Division and 5th Tank Brigade in the Battle of Hamel’.²¹⁴

With the enemy fought to a standstill and Australian and American assault troops and disabled tanks coming out of the line, the Battle of Hamel was officially over. Its repercussions were about to begin.