chapter three

Fromelles

‘O dauntless heart of youth!
Against grim bastions hurled
Your name shall keep the house we build
Secure against the world.’

— Vance Palmer, ‘The Signal’

While the Australians completed their preparations for the 23 July attack, Haig most likely contemplated their chances. He must have realised that the inexperienced Australians, teamed with the talented but impetuous Gough — who had been promoted to army commander only three weeks earlier — was a volatile combination.

Haig rarely interfered with his generals’ plans. He set the broad strategy and left the finer detail for them to work through. However, on 20 July he had departed from his modus operandi — he had visited Gough’s headquarters in the small farming hamlet of Toutencourt to discuss the coming attack. He warned Gough that he had to go over all detail carefully, as the 1st Australian Division had not been engaged in France before and had possibly overlooked some of the preparations needed for this type of combat.

On 22 July, Haig visited Gough again to make sure that the Australians were given a simple task, reminding him that this was the first time they would take part in a serious, large-scale offensive against the German forces. The trouble was that there were no simple tasks on the Somme to give to the Australians.

Why was Haig so persistent in voicing his concerns about the Australians to Gough? On 20 July, he had received news that the 5th Australian Division — attached to the First British Army — had attacked near the village of Fromelles the previous evening, as Hooky’s 1st Australian Division was marching through Albert toward the firing line. First Army reports indicated that the attack was ‘only partially successful’, a euphemism that would have worried Haig.1 What did the puzzling term ‘only partially successful’ mean? What was the purpose of the 5th Division’s attack and what impact would it have upon the I Anzac Corps’ planned operations at Pozières?

In the early days of the Somme offensive, Haig had hoped that his armies would break through the German lines. His intention, upon breaching their line at one weak point, was to strike hard at other points where there were few reserves, and ultimately turn a local retreat into a withdrawal. Accordingly, on 5 July he had ordered the British armies along the Western Front to select points at which they would attempt to rupture the German line. XI Corps commander Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Haking suggested that, in his sector, a prominent German salient near Fromelles, the ‘Sugarloaf’, offered a favourable chance of capture.

Already, only two weeks into the Somme offensive, any thought of an easy breakthrough had vanished, but the attack that Haking had proposed weeks earlier was still being considered. It was planned as a feint to make the Germans think that they were being threatened so they might stop transferring troops to the Somme.

Haig was lukewarm about the idea, believing it should only continue if its architect, Haking, was absolutely assured that the artillery and ammunition in the north were sufficient to cover the attack. Haking’s superior, First British Army commander General Sir Charles Munro, also had concerns. He sought assurances from Haking that he could fulfil Haig’s requirements. Haking believed that he could.

Haking decided that the 5th Australian Division — which had recently relieved the 4th Division when it transferred to the Somme — would lead the attack, along with the British 61st Division. According to Ross McMullin’s account of the Fromelles battle in the biography Pompey Elliott, the proposition of the pending attack excited the 5th Division commander, Major-General James ‘Big Jim’ McCay. Although his division had been the last to land in France, he hoped it would be the first to make a name for itself in battle. His subordinate, Brigadier-General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott — who commanded the all-Victorian 15th Brigade, one of three Australian brigades participating in the feint — apparently didn’t share his commander’s enthusiasm, later claiming that he would have protested about having to attack such a position. ‘Not that it would have done much good,’ he wrote in a letter afterward. ‘McCay was terribly anxious that it shouldn’t be stopped and made no mention of the difficulties facing us.’2

Those ‘difficulties’ included the need to rush the registration of the heavy guns, insufficient artillery to subdue machine-gun emplacements and blockhouses, lack of communication trenches for troops to get to the front line, the requirement for troops to cover up to 400 yards of exposed and cratered ground, and the overambitious objective of capturing three lines of trenches.3 In addition, the 5th Division had been in the front-line trenches only a week and had little combat experience.

In the days before the planned feint, dark rainclouds replaced the sunshine. Then the weather broke; sheets of rain lashed Fromelles, filling the trenches with mud and bogging down the troops. Haking postponed the attack, and his superior, General Munro, had the option of cancelling altogether. But Haig, now sold on the idea, wished for the operation to be carried out as soon as possible, weather permitting, and provided that Munro was satisfied that the available artillery and ammunition were ‘adequate both for the preparation and the execution of the enterprise’.4

On 19 July, at about 6.00 p.m., the 5th Division troops — laden with haversacks, picks, shovels, bags of bombs, and other equipment, each soldier’s kit weighing about 70 pounds — began their deadly journey across no-man’s-land. Many were fatalistic. The Germans had already hoisted a noticeboard that taunted them, ‘Advance Australia — if you can!’5

As the troops began to advance over the flat sweep of meadow, Germans shells fell heavily among them — unbeknown to the Australians, the German artillery observers stationed a mile back in the trees and roofs along Aubers Ridge and atop the Fromelles church tower could easily make out the commencement of the attack. ‘The enemy bombardment was hellish, and it seemed as if they knew accurately the time set [for the attack],’ recorded Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Toll, 31st Battalion.6

The whole front erupted in noise. Whining shells, shouting men, stuttering machine guns, and the deafening crash of bombs all combined to create a terrific din. ‘You could see machine guns knocking bits off the trees in front of the reserve line and sparking off the wire,’ remembered one soldier.7

Elliott noticed at about 6.15 p.m. that the sound of the Germans’ heavy artillery and musketry had died away. He assessed this as a positive sign. At 6.30 p.m. he reported that the attack had succeeded.8

His mood must have plummeted when the first detailed situation report, handwritten and with ‘urgent’ scrawled upon it, arrived just after midnight at his headquarters, a few hundred yards behind the front line. It stated that the attack had failed completely, with those reaching the enemy’s trench killed or captured: ‘Very many officers are casualties … it seems impossible to reorganise … Reports seem to be unanimous.’9 Apparently, the German fire at 6.15 p.m. ‘had only ceased because the attack had been shot to earth’.10

The inexperienced and demoralised Australians, according to one observer, retired in what appeared to be a panic, ‘like a crowd running across a field at the end of a football match’; the retreat resembled a shambles. 11

On the morning of 20 July, Charles Bean overheard that ‘the 5th had their little show last night’. He commandeered White’s car and sped north to see what had happened, arriving at 5th Division headquarters just after 1.00 p.m. to be told: ‘It’s all over, you know. We’re back in our own trenches.’12

Bean then visited, at their respective headquarters, the three Australian brigade commanders who had been involved in the attack. He wrote that the 8th Brigade commander, Brigadier-General Edwin Tivey, ‘looked quite overdone, his eyes like boiled gooseberries’, after two nights without sleep. Tivey was anxious to reassure himself that his brigade had tried hard and done as well as those brigades on Gallipoli: ‘1700 — that’s about as heavy as some of the brigades lost on the [Gallipoli] Landing, isn’t it?’ he queried Bean. When Bean visited Elliott, he described feeling almost as if he was in the presence of a man who had just lost his wife: ‘[Elliott] looked down and could hardly speak — he was clearly terribly depressed and overwrought.’ Brigadier-General Harold Pope, 14th Brigade, ‘rather disgusted’ Bean by ‘the boastful way he talked’: ‘Well — we were the only brigade that didn’t come back till we were told to,’ Pope crowed. Bean suspected that Pope had been ‘refreshing’ himself after the strain of the attack. Indeed, later that afternoon Major-General McCay found Pope in a drunken stupor, unable to comprehend an order or perform any part of his duties. He immediately called for his discharge and return to Australia.13 Pope had unravelled after one day of battle.

It is clear that Fromelles had a debilitating effect on its commanders, who faced the combined challenges of sleep deprivation and immense emotional strain in the lead-up to and during the savage battle. Their experience would be a prelude to the strains that Walker, Sinclair-MacLagan, Smyth, and Forsyth would be exposed to over the coming days at Pozières.

While Bean talked with the brigade commanders, the survivors cleaned up the mess in the trenches: they collected the dead, tended to the wounded, and rescued those stranded in no-man’s-land. The scene was appalling, recorded Lieutenant Hugh Knyvett in his biography, ‘Over There’ with the Australians: ‘If you had gathered the stock of a thousand butcher shops, cut it into small pieces and strewn it about, it would give you a faint conception of the shambles that those trenches were.’14

Captain Thomas Barbour recounted just one example of the carnage — the horrific sight of a soldier with both legs blown off crawling on his stumps across no-man’s-land. ‘He was last seen moving slowly into a sap where he no doubt perished,’ he said.15

The feint shattered the Australian 5th Division: about half of its attacking troops were killed, wounded, or captured. It suffered 5533 casualties in 27 hours. The date 19 July 1916 remains the bloodiest day in Australia’s history.

The carnage at Fromelles particularly shocked Bean, White, and Elliott. Naturally, they thought someone must be to blame. They asked uncomfortable questions immediately after the battle, and well into the 1920s and 1930s. Bean wanted to know why ‘second rate territorials’ (the 61st British Division) had been used in the attack, and why a ‘fine division’ (the 5th Australian Division), which had only been in the trenches for a week, had been sacrificed.16 White, who hated what he called ‘these little unprepared shows’, could not understand why a feint had been required at all.17 Elliott, who claimed in a letter to Bean in 1926 that he was always of the opinion that ‘success was impossible’ because of the distance his troops had had to cover to reach the German trenches, was the most scathing. He asked why Haking hadn’t supported the attack with more artillery and why Haig hadn’t checked Haking’s plans more thoroughly, or cancelled the attack.18 In 1930, an embittered Elliott delivered a lecture that largely blamed the British commanders for the debacle. Elliott committed suicide a year after delivering his caustic talk; he was quite possibly another victim of Fromelles.

Newspaper articles and books written by survivors after the war continued to raise uncomfortable questions and apportion blame for the disaster. In 1920, The Argus featured an article on Fromelles under the headline ‘What Really Happened’ and concluded, somewhat confusingly, that the botched attack was ‘a glorious failure’.19 Ninety-five years after the battle, the discovery of the unidentified remains of Australian and British soldiers in an unmarked mass grave just outside the village resurrected these uncomfortable questions.20 Emotions still remain high, with one historian recently likening Haking’s planning to a ‘dog’s breakfast’.21

The prospects for the Australians attacking at Fromelles — as they were for the British attacking along the Somme and the Germans attacking at Verdun — were always bleak. Even if preparations had been perfect (and they never were) and all the trenches captured and held (which they never seemed to be), artillery would not have been able to support them indefinitely, and the Germans would have undoubtedly counterattacked. But the costly gamble had to be taken as part of a broader strategy aimed at achieving a breakthrough on the Somme: if the Germans had hesitated for one moment in sending troops south, it might have provided the critical window of opportunity that Haig so desperately sought to break through their defences. It might just have made the Australians’ job at Pozières a touch easier.

The lesson of Fromelles was a brutal one, and it would have dire implications for the I Anzac Corps marching toward Pozières: war on the Western Front was completely different from anything the Australians had ever experienced. A feint like Fromelles only constituted a minor part of the overall Somme battle plan; it could take up to 40 or 50 attacks like Fromelles, all ending in carnage, to pierce the German line — if it could be pierced at all.

Battles like those on the Somme no longer had defined start or end points. They were rarely decisive and were more about attrition than breakthrough. Battle plans were always clouded by uncertainty and indecision; there were no sure paths to victory. And it seemed, irrespective of whether it was a major offensive, feint, or minor raid, and whether it was a success, draw, or failure, that the outcome was always the same: mass carnage.

The Australians had hoped that the Great War would be an opportunity to prove the nation a valuable member of the British Empire. They had anticipated short, set-piece battles and quick victories. Fromelles demonstrated that this was an illusion. In reality, the Somme was a human-mincing machine on a scale 20 times larger than Fromelles. British divisions were marching into it with metronomic regularity, to be ravaged and spat out days later with casualty rates similar to those of Australia’s 5th Division.

Later that day, Bean returned to the Somme and met with an anxious White, who was grappling with some significant operational problems. ‘Tomorrow is a more important attack,’ he reminded Bean. White explained that critical issues still remained unresolved: there appeared to be ‘no definite written arrangement’ for the complex artillery plan supporting the 1st Division’s advance, even though he had ‘begged’ the Reserve Army for it, and the objectives for the night attack still remained uncertain, although he had implored Hooky to take more than just the ‘first miserable trench’ in his midnight attack.22 Would the Australians succeed and add fresh laurels to their name, or would they fail, their bodies becoming intermingled with those of British soldiers that hung from the German wire entanglements in front of Pozières? Perhaps White — late that night, while sitting at his desk, smoking his pipe — reflected on the Fromelles carnage, and pondered, in light of the problems he now confronted, whether it would be repeated at Pozières, with him there to witness it.