18.

The Lessons of Hamel Applied on 8 August

‘August 8th was the black day of the German Army in the history of the war.’

General Erich von Ludendorff, German commander

ON THE DAY following Bastille Day, 15 July, the German Army launched an unheralded offensive in the Marne sector in the south, against the French Army holding the line there. After the Germans surprised the French defenders and advanced for two days, reaching Chateau-Thierry just sixty kilometres from Paris, the offensive ran out of steam. The French, with American support, promptly made a crushing counterattack which delivered 15,000 German prisoners and 200 field guns on 18 July alone, and which had the Germans making a strategic withdrawal from the salient they had briefly created.

At his Bertangles HQ, General Monash correctly surmised that this was the Germans’ last hurrah, that they had expended their last mobile reserves and would not be in a position to mount another similar major offensive on the Western Front in this war. Monash, confident that Fritz had been rocked back on his heels, was determined that it was time to deliver a swift, massive and decisive blow to the belly of the German Army in the Somme sector, and that the Australians should lead it. This was what he had been repeatedly proposing to his army commander General Rawlinson since the afternoon of 4 July.

The response from Rawlinson, at first cautious, turned increasingly positive as it became clear that Monash was being perceived as the new hope for the Allies by political leaders elated by the Hamel victory. But when Rawlinson suggested that a French corps be responsible for the southern part of the offensive, Monash asked for the Canadian Corps to be instead relocated from its current positions – two of its four divisions were then in the front line in the neighbourhood of Arras, well north of the Somme, while the remainder were resting in back areas – to join the Australians in the attack and take responsibility for the southern flank. This would create the most formidable fighting double act of the war. In Monash’s view, ‘The Canadians and the Australians have never failed to achieve all their objectives strictly according to plan.’²³⁴

Canada, which had a larger population than Australia, had some 100,000 more men in uniform, but its forces still formed a small part of the overall British Army. The Canucks had, like the Aussies, developed a reputation as fearsome soldiers who were considered the elite among the British forces. The prospect of the Australians and the Canadians going into battle side-by-side was mouth-watering to Monash, who felt he could rely totally on the Canadian commander, General Currie, who’d told Monash his men would always ‘deliver the goods’. And they did. Monash also asked Rawlinson for more tanks, aircraft and artillery.

As it happened, since May, Field-Marshal Haig and France’s Marshal Foch, the Commander-in-Chief of all the Allied armies, had been discussing a major offensive launched from the British part of the line and spearheaded by the British Army’s best troops, the Australians and the Canadians. The repulse of the Germans’ Marne offensive told the field-marshals that the time was now ripe for just such a counterstroke.

On the bright summer afternoon of Sunday 21 July, British Fourth Army commander General Rawlinson hosted a top secret conference at his HQ in the village of Flexicourt on the River Somme. The meeting was attended by General Monash and three other corps commanders – Lieutenant-Generals Sir Arthur Currie of the Canadian Corps, Richard Butler of British III Corps, and Sir Charles Kavanagh of the British Cavalry Corps. Senior Tank Corps and air force officers were also in attendance.

At this meeting, in a grand white mansion in the village’s main street, Rawlinson told the gathering that a major offensive on the Hamel model proposed by Monash and launched by the British Fourth Army from the Somme sector had been approved. ‘Rawlinson unfolded the outline of the whole [Fourth] Army plan,’ Monash was to write, ‘and details were discussed at great length in the light of the views of each corps commander.’²³⁵

At the outset of the conference, Rawlinson informed Monash that earlier requests he’d made to allow the implementation of such an offensive – the transfer of the Australian 1st Division from Flanders to join the rest of the Australian Corps immediately south of the River Somme, and the reduction in the size of the Australian defensive front in the Somme sector – were being granted.

By the time the meeting broke up that evening, the basic elements of the offensive had been agreed: a joint assault by the Australians and the Canadians south of the Somme, with the Canadians on the right of the Australian Corps, British III Corps shoring up the offensive’s left flank north of the river, and a corps from France’s First Army securing the right flank, south of the Canadians. The Cavalry Corps would follow as a mobile reserve that could be thrown into the exploitation of any weak spot in German defences.

The meeting agreed that a minimum of ten days should be allowed from the moment approval to proceed was received from Field-Marshal Haig before the offensive was launched, allowing time for the four Canadian divisions and the additional Australian division to be transported by train to the Somme and rested for a few days, and for all the ammunition and supplies to be brought in.

Monash and his fellow corps commanders hurried back to their respective headquarters to engage their staff in preparing detailed but highly secret recommendations for submission to Field-Marshal Haig.

Monash had gone into the Flexicourt conference with two concerns – a lack of confidence in the French, and a lack of belief in the cavalry. The day of the gallant cavalry charge was over. Monash had been impressed by the use of the mounted arm in past wars to quickly manoeuvre behind enemy lines and cut off communications and supply lines. But in the era of trench warfare, wire entanglements and tanks, Monash felt the horse soldier had become an anachronism and that cavalry would only be a burden, not a benefit, to the upcoming offensive. In the event, General Rawlinson would allocate a British cavalry battalion to the Australian Corps for the operation, and it would indeed prove a burden to Monash.

Then there was his worry about the French Army’s role in his operation. ‘My hesitation to accept the French as colleagues in such a battle was based not altogether on theoretical or sentimental grounds,’ Monash was to say. Since the Hamel battle, the Australian 2nd Division, which currently occupied the southernmost portion of the Australian front line, had been daily extending its grip on German-held territory east of Villers-Bretonneux, sometimes by hundreds of metres, via the aggressive ‘peaceful penetration’ that Monash had ordered on 4 July. But, said, Monash, ‘No persuasion on my part, or on that of my flank division [the 2nd], could induce the adjacent French division to extend any cooperation in these advances or to adopt any measures to flatten out the re-entrant which, growing deeper every day, threatened to expose my right flank.’²³⁶

Monash and his men had a lot of time for the French soldier, and, up to this point, the 2nd Division and French 31st Corps troops who were their immediate neighbours to the south had, in Monash’s words, enjoyed ‘hearty fraternisation’ and ‘the evolution of a strange common vernacular’. But, said Monash, while the French could be irresistible in attack and dogged in defence, ‘whether they will attack or defend depends greatly on their temperament of the moment’.²³⁷

The temperament of soldiers, and the psychological factors that affect that temperament, had long interested Monash. He knew that men responded to encouragement from the top. A realist, but an optimist, he was a ‘glass half full’, not a ‘glass half empty’ man. From the moment he had been given a battlefield command, he had always quite deliberately displayed a positive attitude, no matter what the circumstances facing him. When things went wrong, Monash would encourage men, not admonish them. One of his former aides, Englishman Lieutenant-Colonel F. M. Farmar, said of Monash, and his ability to bring out the best in his men: ‘The poorest instrument will respond unexpectedly well with a master-touch.’²³⁸

Not all divisions, corps and armies were blessed with leaders with Monash’s qualities. Indeed, there were no Napoleon Bonapartes in the modern French Army, no leaders for whom the common soldier would give his all. And Monash knew that, faced with weak leadership, entire armies can lose the will to win. This had been the lesson of recorded history, as far back as 49 BC, when an army in North Africa led by one of Julius Caesar’s inept deputies during the civil war that eventually brought Caesar to power unexpectedly found itself cut off. The outnumbered Caesarian troops made their wills and prepared for defeat, which of course proved to be their fate.

Without strong leadership, and without the Australian capacity to quickly adapt to changed circumstances, Monash questioned whether the independent-minded French could be relied on to adhere to the sort of strict timetable for each element of the assault that his planned operation, like the Hamel battle, would call for. ‘I felt quite unprepared to count upon it,’ Monash would confess. However, with the stout Canadians, many of whom were French speaking, advancing on the Australians’ right, and a French corps south of them providing a defensive flank, Monash’s concern about the French exposing the Australian underbelly during the offensive was allayed. The Canadians, he knew, would not let him down.²³⁹

Monash’s staff worked quickly preparing detailed plans for the August offensive, basing them on the Hamel model. Once again, the plan called for a carefully integrated assault involving an infantry advance, a creeping artillery barrage, tank support, and aircraft for reconnaissance, bombing/ strafing and ammunition drops, but on a much larger scale than at Hamel.

The only major change Monash made to the Hamel model was to take on board a recommendation of Australian officers involved in that battle – this time, the blue line establishing the final objective would be drawn at the enemy gun line, ensuring that large numbers of enemy artillery pieces would be captured, limiting the ability of the Germans to shell the newly taken territory whilst it was being consolidated. The offensive’s first ‘green line’ objective was also a considerably longer distance from the jumping-off tape than had been the case in the Hamel operation – nine kilometres away.

Within two days, Monash had completed his planning. ‘Towards the end of the third week in July,’ he would write, ‘I propounded certain proposals to Sir Douglas Haig in the nature of a counter-offensive on a very large scale.’²⁴⁰ Haig liked Monash’s ideas, but asked for time to discuss it with the French, who would have to agree to participate in the south of the offensive by withdrawing some of their troops to make way for the Canadians and by protecting the Canadians’ southern flank during the advance with a corps of its own.

While Monash waited for Haig to get back to him, he decided to take a little overdue leave, which General Rawlinson approved after Monash guaranteed that he would cut short his holiday and rush back to his HQ should the field-marshal give permission for the offensive to proceed in the meantime. So, on 23 July, Monash set off for London, accompanied by a single aide, his nephew Captain Paul Simonson. Travelling via Boulogne and Folkestone, the pair arrived in London late that night.

Over the next five days, Monash would have spent time with his London mistress, Lizette ‘Liz’ Bentwich, who had been a family friend prior to the war, before a telephone call from the British War Office late on a Sunday evening terminated his break – Haig and Foch were in agreement that the Somme offensive was to proceed as per Monash’s proposal, launching on 8 August. Monash was not a fan of flying, so an initial proposal from General Rawlinson that he be flown back to France had not met with the Australian general’s approval. Instead, a British destroyer had been laid on at Dover to whisk him across the Channel. Back at Bertangles, Monash threw himself into final planning for the offensive. ‘I am now in the middle of preparations for a very large battle,’ he wrote home to Vic on 2 August. ‘It will be a very big show indeed.’²⁴¹

The Battle of Amiens, as it became known, began at 4.20 am on Thursday 8 August. In the middle of the assault line, along a seven kilometre front, two Australian divisions swept forward behind a creeping barrage, with a third division coming immediately behind ready to leapfrog the leading pair once they’d gained their primary objectives, to drive on to the final blue-line objective. Each Australian company in the attack was supported by a British tank, whilst, overhead, Australian and British aircraft provided air cover. On the Australians’ right, three Canadian divisions also went forward, and on the Aussies’ left, two divisions of the British Fourth Army’s III Corps. In all, 100,000 men went into the attack between Albert and Moreuil that morning, over a total front eighteen kilometres long from north to south.

The assault was designed to catch the German Second Army completely by surprise, and, to ensure this, tight security had surrounded preparations and troops movements, even down to refraining from referring to any aspect of the operation in telephone conversations. This was in case the Boche had succeeded in tapping into the kilometres of Allied military telephone lines. In addition, Australian troops were only informed at the last moment that the Canadians were going into battle beside them. Up till then, they were told that the Canadians were merely coming to relieve them.

To mask from the Germans the fact that the Canadians were going into the front line in the Amiens sector, once the French troops occupying that part of the line had been quietly withdrawn to make way for them, Australian troops occupied this part of the front line until the Canadians arrived. But then a spanner had been thrown in the works, by the Germans. As chance would have it, the enemy had mounted a rare patrol across No Man’s Land on the night of 4 August. Capturing an Australian sergeant and five men from the 4th Brigade at an isolated forward post, the German patrol had taken them back to their lines for interrogation.

Once General Monash became aware of this, those around him naturally became concerned that the Australians, under questioning, might be forced to reveal that preparations for a major offensive from this sector were nearing their culmination. Nonetheless, Monash was confident that the Aussie prisoners would reveal no more than their names and unit to the Germans, and he opted not to alter any aspect of the assault plan, including its launch date. Within days, German records of the six Australians’ interrogation would be captured, and would reveal that the Aussies had indeed done just as their general had expected, stoutly resisting their questioners’ best efforts, giving nothing away.

Another small hiccup had come on the afternoon of 7 August when a random German shell set one of eighteen loaded carrier tanks alight as they all sat just north of Villers-Bretonneux waiting to participate in the operation the next day. The billowing black smoke from the fire had attracted German attention, and within minutes their gunners zeroed in on the site. Loads of ammunition and fuel on the other tanks ignited, and before long fifteen carrier tanks, and their loads, had been consumed by a massive bonfire. The Germans no doubt congratulated themselves on some good shooting, but never suspected they had hit anything more than a stationary arms dump. The impending assault of 8 August remained a secret.

For this operation, Monash had set another ambitious target: the attacking divisions were to advance a minimum of nine kilometres into German-held territory, with a maximum advance of eighteen kilometres the aim. All planning for consolidation of the gains was based around these targets. The Australians’ primary objectives, marked by a green line on the operation’s maps, were gained before 7.00 am. At 8.20 am the next phase of the advance began, with red line and then blue-line objectives progressively reached thirty minutes ahead of schedule. General Hobbs’ 5th Division captured its final objective as soon as 12.15 pm.

By 8.00 pm, Monash knew that the Australians had overrun the German Second Army’s positions to a depth of eighteen kilometres, taking 8000 prisoners, 173 field guns, thousands of machineguns, hundreds of vehicles, even a complete German railway train mounting a 12-inch gun that had been shelling Amiens. Five German colonels commanding regiments were captured, and near Framerville the entire HQ staff of the German 51st Corps was seized in the late afternoon. This was the equivalent of General Monash’s HQ at Bertangles being captured by the Germans.

Among the German corps HQ paraphernalia including papers, equipment and motor vehicles captured intact was a box containing one hundred freshly minted German iron crosses, ready for issue to German troops as bravery awards. As a result, a number of grinning Australian soldiers came back from the battle with iron crosses pinned all over their uniforms.

Australian casualties for the Battle of Amiens were 1200. On the Australians’ right, the Canadians had achieved similar successes and similar ‘slight’ losses, reaching their blue-line objectives almost as quickly as the Australians. General Rawlinson wrote, ‘The Canadians have done splendidly and the Aussies even better – I am full of admiration for these corps.’²⁴²

The Australian and Canadian gains of 8 August involved the deepest penetration of German territory by ‘British Army’ troops to date in the war. ‘The tactical value of the victory was enormous,’ Monash would later observe, but on 8 August he did not know what an absolutely crushing blow it had been to the enemy, from the German rank and file up to the most senior levels.²⁴³

German commander General Erich von Ludendorff would write in his memoirs after the war, ‘August 8th was the black day of the German Army in the history of the war. This was the worst experience I had to go through.’ At first confounded by the speed, depth and scope of Monash’s attack, Ludendorff soon became convinced that 8 August signalled the end for Germany, a view that his emperor Kaiser Wilhelm later confided to him he shared.²⁴⁴

Despite the overwhelming success of the Australians and Canadians that day, Monash found he had a problem. On his left flank, the British Army had let him down. Again. The British Fourth Army divisions assigned to the left flank of the advance north of the Somme, the 47th and 58th, had failed to reach their final blue-line objectives. Importantly, the British divisions’ failure had left the Chipilly Ridge, on a spur north of the river around which the Somme bent through marshland, in enemy hands. As a result, German artillery stationed on this elevated ground was able to pound the exposed flank of the Australian 4th Brigade, and on 8 August knocked out six of the nine tanks operating with the 4th. Monash didn’t blame the British infantryman for this failure, but was scathing in his criticism of what he perceived to be ‘faulty’ British staff officer coordination and ‘faulty local leadership’ of British officers on the ground, which he was convinced had caused the failure at Chipilly Ridge.²⁴⁵

The solution to Monash’s Chipilly problem was about to be provided by a new friend of the Australians – Colonel Joe Sanborn’s 131st Infantry Regiment.