‘Who was that old devil who personally led his regiment to the attack?’
Major-General George Bell, Commander, US 33rd Division
GENERAL RAWLINSON HAD not released the American 131st Infantry after its participation in the Battle of Hamel. Despite General Pershing’s repeated requests that his 33rd Division and other American divisions assigned to train with the British Army be returned to his control, Field-Marshal Haig had hung onto them, and the 131st Infantry and three other American regiments of the 33rd Division had remained under the control of British III Corps, part of Rawlinson’s British Fourth Army, attached now to the British 47th Division.
On the night of August 8–9, another of the Fourth Army’s divisions from III Corps, the British 58th, attempted to take Chipilly Ridge after British troops had failed to occupy the spur during the day as part of General Monash’s 8 August offensive. They were aiming to reach the blue line to link up with the Australians south of them who had succeeded in taking their objectives. General Rawlinson had impressed on the 58th Division that it was imperative the Germans be driven off the ridge so that the left flank of General Monash’s northernmost Australian brigade was secured. But, yet again, the British troops failed, and, come daylight on 9 August, Chipilly Ridge was still in German hands.
Monash was determined to seize the ridge, and to use Australian troops to do it. But he was hampered by the fact that the area north of the Somme lay in the territory of another corps, British III Corps. Just as in Roman times a Roman provincial governor was not permitted to lead his troops into a neighbouring province, Monash was not permitted to encroach upon III Corps territory with his troops. He quickly found a way around this.
As it happened, III Corps commander Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Godley, a onetime superior of Monash’s, was to leave his post on 9 August to take command of the British Third Army. Getting on the phone, Monash was able to convince General Rawlinson to temporarily extend his own command to III Corps, to enable Monash to deal with Chipilly Ridge. Now that he also commanded north of the Somme, Monash ordered the Australian 13th Brigade to swing north, march into III Corps territory by crossing the River Somme at Cerisy, and then storm Chipilly Ridge.
That afternoon of 9 August, as the 13th Brigade was on the march, Colonel Joe Sanborn stepped into the picture. Since 6 July, the 131st Infantry and three other American regiments from the 33rd Division had been spending their days conducting training manoeuvres with III Corps. When III Corps’ two British divisions had advanced in the 8 August battle, the 131st had been left in the reserve trenches. Now, after bloodied, disillusioned British troops of the 58th Division fell back through the 131st’s position after failing to take Chipilly Ridge overnight, on the afternoon of 9 August Sanborn made a decision – the 131st would take the ridge. As it happened, back on 4–6 July, Sanborn’s men had been able to see Chipilly Ridge in the distance as they occupied the trenches they had seized on Hamel Ridge with the Australians, never imagining they would be storming the heights of Chipilly four weeks later.
Although all its companies and battalions were now back together, the 131st had been separated from its usual machinegun battalion, and was also without its full complement of Lewis Guns. Despite this, and despite a total lack of artillery bombardment or tank or aircraft support, or the cover of darkness, Colonel Sanborn ordered his men to fix bayonets and follow him. That afternoon, the 131st marched several kilometres, charged through a rain of enemy shells and attacked the Germans, first taking a wood before launching themselves at the enemy troops dug in on Chipilly Ridge who had thrown back two British attacks over the previous twenty-four hours. From trench to trench and emplacement to emplacement, and with Sanborn personally leading the assault, the Americans fought their way up and along the ridge in desperate fighting.
Corporal Jake Allex was an infantryman with the 131st’s Company H. At a critical point in the assault, all Allex’s officers had been either killed or wounded. So, Allex took charge of his platoon and led it forward until a German machinegun halted them in their tracks and the Americans were forced to ground. Allex went on alone, running towards the machinegun nest as its gunner unsuccessfully tried to cut him down. Jumping into the nest, Corporal Allex killed five Germans with his bayonet. When the bayonet broke off in his fifth victim, he swung his rifle like a baseball bat, clubbing Germans with the butt end. By the time Allex had finished and his men had joined their platoon leader, another fifteen battered Germans in the trench had surrendered to him.
The 131st had taken almost all of the ridge, with heavy loss to their own ranks, when the Australians of one of the 13th Brigade’s battalions arrived on the scene. ‘Joining the Americans,’ General Monash would later write, these Australians ‘helped to clear up the whole situation’.246 Through Joe Sanborn’s determination and elan, Chipilly Ridge was taken, Monash’s left flank was secure, and Americans and Australians once more occupied front-line trenches together. General Pershing, writing about this event several years later, said that the 131st captured the ridge ‘in splendid fashion’, but made no mention of the fact that they were joined by the Australians for the last part of the assault. He portrayed it as an exclusively American success.247
That night, Colonel Sanborn went back down to the British, reported the ridge taken, then secured food for his men, leading the detail that brought the grub back to his regiment on the ridge. Sanborn personally carried rations in a pack on his back, through a German bombardment. ‘Who wouldn’t fight like the devil for a commander like that?’ said the 131st’s Sergeant William Keane several months later.248
A grateful General Monash now removed the 131st from British III Corps and attached it to the Australian 4th Division, creating a temporary ‘Liaison Force’ made up of Sanborn’s 131st and the Australian 13th Brigade under Australian Corps command. This Liaison Force was supposedly meant to liaise with British forces on the northern rim of the Australian Somme sector, but, with no confidence in the British Army’s ability to secure his northern flank, Monash actually tasked Liaison Force with shoring up the Australian left flank until the next big Australian push east. At the same time, Monash had the command of his subordinate General Maclagan officially extended to also take in the front some kilometres north of the River Somme, inclusive of Liaison Force.
Back in the days of the Roman legions, the Roman equivalents of colonels – tribunes as they were known – routinely led their men into battle, but in modern armies colonels don’t usually lead infantry attacks from the front. That task is left to younger, more junior officers. So, when word reached General Bell’s 33rd Division HQ at Molliens-au-Bois that an old, white-haired American officer had been seen leading the assault on Chipilly Ridge, Bell asked, no doubt with a sparkle of delight in his eye, ‘Who was that old devil who personally led his regiment to the attack?’249
For this act, and on General Monash’s recommendation, Colonel Sanborn would be swiftly awarded Britain’s Distinguished Service Order – the first American recipient of the DSO during this war. The American Distinguished Service Cross would follow, as would, by war’s end, France’s Legion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre with Palm, and the Belgian Order of Leopold. ‘It was a great finish for his career,’ Dwight Harding would later comment in the Chicago Tribune.250
Sanborn would in turn recommend twenty-two members of the 131st for bravery medals for the fight that took Chipilly Ridge, medals that would be duly awarded. Sanborn would propose America’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, for Corporal Allex, for his role. As in the case of Tom Pope, approval of the Medal of Honor award would have to come from Washington DC.
Further opportunities for medals for Colonel Sanborn himself would be limited, with his superiors requiring him to remain at headquarters during future operations. When General Monash wrote about the battles of 1918, he would describe how, at Chipilly Ridge, the 131st ‘very gallantly advanced in broad daylight and took possession practically of the whole spur’.251 As for General Pershing, he would make no mention of Colonel Sanborn’s personal role in the 131st’s bold, brave storming of Chipilly Ridge, which, again, had occurred whilst the American regiment was in overall ‘British’ command. Pershing would merely comment: ‘The 131st Infantry was relieved on August 20th, having advanced over three miles and suffered heavy casualties.’252