CHAPTER ONE

‘A sort of Company Competition’

Formal fighting patrols versus stealth raiding on the Somme, 26 March to 17 May 1918

At the beginning of 1918 the outstanding problem facing the AIF was maintaining sufficient strength in the field. In 1916 the AIF lost 42,270 men in battle casualties and 45,657 in non-battle casualties, including sickness and injury. The situation worsened in 1917. A serious defeat for the AIF at Bullecourt was followed by campaigns at Messines and Third Ypres: battle casualties in 1917 climbed to 76,836, eclipsed by non-battle losses of 89,084.¹ The appalling scale of casualties had a knock-on effect. By the beginning of 1918, recruitment in Australia had fallen to less than 2000 volunteers a month and two referendums to introduce conscription had failed. It fell to the Australian depots in Britain, convalescent camps treating the wounded, and non-combatant units to keep pace with the demand for reinforcements. They failed: the AIF in 1918 was growing weaker by the month. Eleven AIF battalions were disbanded between April and September 1918 for want of reinforcements.

Yet at the beginning of 1918 morale and confidence in the AIF were high. When news of the opening of the German offensive reached the Australians, the Gallipoli veteran Sergeant Archie Barwick wrote:

So the Great Hun offensive has been launched at last … I’ll bet they will get cut to pieces … there is never any trouble … to make the first advance for they have all their guns registered on the trenches & the front line is always lightly held, wait till they get up against the line of resistance & have to haul their guns over shell torn ground & get them into position for the next push then the fun starts, we know all about that from personal experience & as for [sic] [as] man to man [combat] goes every Australian knows who is the superior fighter, that has been tested too often & the Fritzies know it in their own hearts too … good luck to him & his storm troops this should be the beginning of the end & France will be a good place to be out of during the next 6 or 8 months for there will be plenty of stouch [sic].²

The Australian Corps fought as part of the British Fourth Army defending Amiens. The corps front reached from half a mile south of Villers-Bretonneux to ten miles north of the Somme River. From May, four Australian divisions fought together under an Australian command, with three divisions in the line – one north of the Somme River, two south – and the fourth in support. The 1st Australian Division was detached to the British Second Army defending Hazebrouck in French Flanders.

The Australian divisions entered the line just as the German offensive was losing its momentum. It was much as Archie Barwick had predicted, although the result was too close a call for comfort. On 11 April the British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, issued his now celebrated appeal:

To all ranks of the British Force in France … There is no other course open to us but to fight it out! Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our Homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.³

Such was the mood when the Australians took the line. As they marched towards the sound of the guns, they witnessed droves of French and Flemish peasants evacuating once peaceful villages. They looked with pity and sometimes disdain on tired and disorganised elements of the British Army. Sergeant Albert ‘Eddie’ Edwards, marching to the front near Hazebrouck, saw:

the skyline … illuminated with the flames of the still burning farmhouses and the occasional flash of guns. It was a weird feeling to be out in the blue with very little knowledge of the positions of our own or enemy troops … Our footsteps echoed hollowly as we tramped through the deserted streets … Everything spoke of hurried departures as some new rumour of the enemy’s approach spread panic into a wild stampede for personal safety.⁴

The German offensives captured all the battlefields where Australian soldiers had fought in 1916–1917. To many Australian survivors of these battles, the ground was sacrosanct, and for new men, a storied testing ground. Lieutenant Colonel George Murphy, 18th Battalion, exhorted his men, ‘The foot of the Hun is on the graves of our fallen comrades and I know my men too well to fear that they will rest contented.’⁵ In the defensive battles at Hébuterne, Villers-Bretonneux, Monument Wood, Dernancourt, Sailly-le-Sec and Hazebrouck the Australian infantry engaged in cathartic killing. In the wedge of high ground between the Ancre and Somme rivers, Private Horace Lock, 43rd Battalion, described how the German infantry came in massed waves in broad daylight, and ‘made fine targets for our machine gunners’, who ‘simply poured hundreds of bullets at the enemy’.⁶ At Strazeele, near Hazebrouck, Corporal Percival ‘Topsy’ Turvey, 3rd Battalion, watched German infantry advance in a wave six men deep: ‘It was like firing into a haystack – one could not miss.’⁷ At Villers-Bretonneux, Private Allen Clements, 54th Battalion, noted:

Fritz lively. Had a great day yesterday killing Huns. They came over in thick waves. The first was shot to pieces and not a man got away. The second got to our wire and then broke, the third got halfway over and then bolted back. Threw down my rifle was sick of killing men could not miss.⁸

Where the German advances stopped, Australian and German infantrymen dug outposts in the fields. Each AIF battalion entered the line with instructions to identify the German units opposite and if possible capture a ‘live Bosche’, who might offer information on the likely direction of the next German offensive.⁹ A typical AIF divisional frontage consisted of a reserve-fire trench well within range of German artillery, a support line with wire in front and an outpost system patrolled by liaison, reconnaissance and fighting patrols. Throughout the summer the Allies expected the Germans would resume the attack. It was known that the German high command had 31 divisions waiting in reserve for such an offensive. Lance Corporal William Miller, 50th Battalion, wrote:

It doesn’t do to think too much of what may happen if ever Fritz came against us – but of course he does not know the line is practically held on reputation. Two men in a post then a gap of 50 yds, there another post a few men holding it, then another gap of 50–100 yards, another post of a few men and so on; and that’s the front line holding Amiens. The supports are just as weak – we are at present holding a battalion front with 300 men instead of the 1200 we should have. But the line holds – it even advances.¹⁰

Miller was an inexperienced youngster, recently arrived from Broken Hill. The old soldiers recognised that the Germans were more inactive than those they had fought in 1916 and 1917. Second Lieutenant Edgar Rule, 14th Battalion, wrote, at times the ‘Huns’ seemed ‘very peaceable’.¹¹ His was the type of comment only a veteran was entitled to make; the outpost system was a dangerous and active war zone. But it did speak to a wider strategic problem facing the German high command, although the Australian infantryman could not have been aware of it at the time. The German Army had suffered such significant losses in the spring offensives that it simply did not have the resources or the time to construct a formidable or cohesive front line. The reinforced concrete pillboxes that the Australians encountered at Messines and Third Ypres in 1917 were absent, and the lack of manpower also meant that very little effort was put into building trenches or constructing the massed barbed wire that channelled attackers into killing zones for machine gunners. The Germans could not hold their front in strength and amass reserves for another offensive. The result was that the British Army, including the Australians, faced a relatively disorganised system of outposts shielding a haphazard ‘main’ line behind it, while the German high command siphoned divisions for further offensives against the French in the south.

These were the conditions that allowed for the open or semi-open warfare that would suit stealth raiders’ skills and ethos. The change in the battlefield heightened Australian morale and aggressiveness. It promised an end. The men stuck to their job in the knowledge that the war had reached a critical stage. Their commander-in-chief had warned them their Empire’s back was to the wall. The Australians told each other that if they could hang on a few months the tide might turn. In April 1918, Second Lieutenant John Bourke, 8th Battalion, captured the spirit:

Dear Dad

The long winter is over and with it – gone for ever I hope the very trying strain of the trenches. How we did hate with a most detestable hate that long infernal gutter system that marked our far flung battle line. Such names too – Sydney Rd, Burke St, Piccadilly Circus, Rotten Row all provocative of sarcasm and mirth & always greasy & muddy & uncomfortable enough to exhaust Australia’s vocabulary. Rats, men & mice all lived together here – the mice feeding on men’s rations, & the rats going deep after our buried comrades … their plump bodies could be heard splashing through the shell holes in search of their prey.

That such a nightmare of horrors & pain may not be ours for another year is the earnest wish of all & present appearances seem to point to a finish … we have every reason to think that trench warfare is ended. Open, or semi-open warfare has begun & although the enemy has had initial success, we hope to turn the tables before the year ends. The Australians are ‘all in’ & before long I’ll send an account of the part we played & are still playing.¹²

Many historians have written about the battles that followed, at Villers-Bretonneux, Hamel and Amiens, and many Australians have heard of these victories. But stealth raiders remain virtually unknown.

The Michael offensive, launched on 21 March, had forced a gap of ten miles between the Ancre and Somme rivers on the right flank of the British Third Army. BEF high command urged divisional commanders to instruct the line battalions to identify the enemy units opposite them every 24 hours, and capture a prisoner who might give useful information on the next attack. At 5 pm on 28 March General Monash, commanding the 3rd Australian Division, ordered his two available brigades to advance by platoons in fighting patrols and make contact with the enemy.¹³ The fighting patrol leaders had only a vague knowledge of their objectives and no knowledge of enemy strength or dispositions.

‘We were to make contact and drive in his outposts,’ wrote Lieutenant Les Boyce of the 41st Battalion. ‘I remember gathering at Company headquarters. A misty drizzle had set in and it was dark … We received our orders … drank [looted] champagne out of tin mugs and set off.’ Boyce wrote, ‘In the dark and wet with no real knowledge where the enemy was it was a bit confusing.’ As he moved forward with his fighting patrol, he was not in contact with the brigade to his left. He described what happened next:

I was … making my way cautiously up the road when someone called out ‘Who’s there?’ which, just as I answered, sank into my consciousness as ‘Vass is dar?’ Accompanied by a burst of machine gun fire … contact was made.

Boyce and his men took cover and prepared to advance according to the drill they had learned. Lewis gunners on the right flank maintained fire; rifle grenadiers pitched grenades while two squads of infantrymen took turns to move forward.

I heard the thud of bullets in bodies. A bullet got me in the left thigh. It hit like a complete black out, I thought I had been killed but no, I stretched out but could not stand. Some of my chaps came and put on a field dressing and started to carry me out when another bullet got me from behind, right thigh this time … and that was the end of my war.¹⁴

Boyce was one of 300 casualties inflicted on the 11th Brigade that night. All of the brigade’s fighting patrols were forced back to the starting line.¹⁵ The advance was a disaster, the result of an ill-conceived plan from Monash, made worse by its haste. The orders caused confusion between the two line brigade’s commands, which failed to agree on the method or timing of their advances, or their objective: Were the fighting patrols to bite and hold ground? Or were they to capture prisoners to ascertain the strength and intent of the enemy? Those tasked with the work were uncertain from the outset. To make matters worse they had no knowledge of the battlefield or of the Germans’ strength. Monash’s orders typified the kind of formal operation the Australian infantry had grown to detest, because it wasted lives in vain hopes that lacked clear objectives, and did not provide adequate firepower to protect the infantry (particularly its flanks) once the enemy signalled its intentions with strong counterattacks.

The men in the front line learned from these harsh lessons more quickly than their commanders, and a few initiated stealth raiding. In the ensuing month a few men began to modify the orders they received, particularly ‘if commanders did not hang around to see them carried out’.¹⁶ A small minority adapted them radically. They were the first stealth raiders, who sometimes captured the prisoners or secured the identifications from the German outpost system that their divisional headquarters sought.

The setback on 28 March marked the 3rd Division’s first experience on the Somme. It had little time to recover. The German Army attacked repeatedly between 29 March and 4 April, with Amiens as their objective. On 9 April the focus of the attacks shifted 60 miles to the north to French Flanders. With practically the entire British Army front under pressure Field Marshal Haig ordered his army to strengthen its defences.¹⁷ This included gathering intelligence. ‘Vigorous patrolling’ was ordered across the BEF front.¹⁸

The job of patrolling fell to the companies manning the outpost and support lines. In general, the Australian battalions used three types of organised, or formal, patrols: ‘liaison patrols’ maintained lateral communication with friendly forces, ‘reconnaissance patrols’ established enemy dispositions and strength, and ‘fighting patrols’ killed or captured the enemy. These tactics were based on lessons learned in 1916 and 1917 and in particular the winter in Flanders, where Bean wrote that No Man’s Land at night had ‘swarmed’ with small Australian patrols.¹⁹

Battalions typically received orders channelled through brigade headquarters to conduct formal raids and fighting patrols, all to take place at night. For example, on 15 April, the 16th Battalion was ‘ordered by brigade through division to secure an enemy for identification’.²⁰ The chain of command worked in much the same way as it had done in 1917 but the method of acquiring the prisoners was innovative. On 16 April, Sergeant Chris Sandilands wrote:

Some fun on this morning. CSM England, Cpl Smith, Sgt Mackie went exploring along an old trench and came across a Fritz machine gun which they promptly lifted and brought back to our lines, then they took three others including an officer and went back and captured the crew who were asleep in their dugouts. One Fritz being killed and three wounded, none of our fellows being touched.²¹

This action occurred near the pulverised villages of Gommecourt and Hébuterne, where No Man’s Land was crisscrossed by derelict trenches from the battles of the Somme in 1916. The old trenches and long grass gave excellent cover to the three experienced NCOs as they searched for an isolated post. When they found the post they decided to take it with the weapons they had in the front line. England, Mackie and Smith showed initiative and self-reliance because their patrol occurred before a formal raid could be organised. It was one of the first stealth raids undertaken by Australians in 1918.

A similar action, which also made a formal operation unnecessary, took place on the night of 2–3 April, whereby the 3rd Division held the outpost line, close to where Les Boyce had been wounded. In a gully running from the high ground of Morlancourt Ridge to the north bank of the Somme River, Private Stanley Smith, 43rd Battalion, located an enemy post and went out supported by the rifle fire of two other soldiers. Smith met an enemy patrol and immediately rushed towards them and fired his rifle, wounding one man and taking him prisoner.²² Smith was a sniper who had volunteered to stay behind when the 41st Battalion took over from his battalion. He had been living alone in the fields on emergency rations for days, and visiting the 41st Battalion outposts infrequently. His stealth raid prevented the need for a formal fighting patrol or operation.

Smith’s unusual stealth raid was followed by a spate of formal fighting patrols that used 1917 tactics: typically half a platoon went out in a diamond formation consisting of scouts and an assault party at the point of the diamond, flanked by a Lewis gunner and reliable men, followed by ‘tailers’ in support. Allied artillery or trench mortars would fire a box barrage on a designated German position, with the intention of trapping the German garrison by landing shells on all four sides of their post. Then the fighting patrol, having made its way through No Man’s Land, would attack.

On the night of 13 April Lieutenant Walter Green, 43rd Battalion, led a typical patrol of 20 men including a Lewis gunner. Green picked out a German listening post, crept 600 yards through a ‘friendly’ bombardment and seized a solitary German. Green’s patrol suffered four casualties – all wounded by their own bombardment. The prisoner was from the 18th Division, a first-class division that had taken part in the opening of the Michael offensive. He was tired and emaciated, having been in the line since 21 March. The soldier was interviewed in the outpost line and told his captors that he was one of a series of listeners, or ‘flare kings’, who occupied posts in advance of strong points. It was his job to fire flares to warn of the approach of ‘British’ patrols.²³

The following night, Second Lieutenant Francis Burtenshaw, 41st Battalion, led a similar formal raid with box barrage against a German machine-gun post. The post was silhouetted against the skyline by a tree and several weathered crosses in a small British cemetery, a remnant of the first battle of the Somme in 1916.²⁴ As scouts led the raiders towards the target, one of the German machine gunners saw them and, thinking they were a friendly relief, walked out to meet them. He was shot by Private Ernest Dixon, a headquarters scout. Corporal Charles Ralph rushed the post and killed a second man. Burtenshaw captured a sergeant and two other ranks, all of whom belonged, like the prisoner of Green’s patrol, to the 18th Division.

The following night, 15–16 April, Lieutenant Robert Tredenick and a party of volunteers of A Company, 41st Battalion, rushed a post north-east of the cemetery after their fighting patrol was fired on.²⁵ They killed two Germans and suffered four slight wounds.²⁶ The next night another 41st Battalion formal fighting patrol went into action. This time the leader, Lieutenant Colin Butler, radically modified the tactics the battalion had been using, hoping to catch the German outpost system off guard after three consecutive nights of fighting patrols penetrating their outposts.

Butler had found a line of German wire running across the Bray–Corbie road at night, while on one of his frequent solo reconnaissance patrols. The following day he had organised a shoot by a 4.5-inch howitzer battery, with six guns, each firing one round per minute, designed to keep the enemy’s heads down while not arousing suspicion of a raid.²⁷ That night he and 22 men, including a Lewis gunner, crept along the Bray–Corbie road to the German wire. At 2.15 am Butler and a scout, Private Noel Murray, began to cut the wire as the howitzer battery opened up. Butler cut while Murray held the wires tightly, taking up the tension so that the recoil of the metal would not give them away. They waited 20 minutes then returned to the patrol and led them through the gap. Private James Whannell, the Lewis gunner, moved to cover the patrol’s right flank. Butler, Murray and the scout Dixon crawled towards the German outpost system north of the road, unaware of the precise location of hostile posts. At the third attempt, the sounds of coughing and the smell of tobacco led Butler and the two scouts to a garrisoned post.

The three Australians were challenged when, 15 yards from the post, Butler yelled, ‘At them!’ He leapt into the post with Murray and Dixon. Nine Germans were killed ‘hand-to-hand’. Murray was credited with two and Dixon claimed to have killed or wounded three, but Butler reckoned Dixon had killed at least six. Two prisoners were pulled out ‘by the scruff of their necks’ as rifle and machine-gun fire cracked about them. Germans in other posts counterattacked.²⁸ Whannell opened fire with his Lewis gun, ‘and prevented the enemy from cutting off the patrol’.²⁹ The prisoners were from the 50th Reserve Division, a different one to those identified in the three formal fighting patrols of the previous nights. The change indicated that a relief might have occurred on the German front.

A report on Butler’s innovative fighting patrol was circulated to the other Australian divisions.³⁰ It was an excellent example of the communications and control a junior officer had at his disposal in a well-organised brigade to bring artillery and platoon weapons to bear on a target of opportunity, quickly and efficiently. The raid also required men of skill who could operate at night in unknown rural conditions beyond the German wire.

Colin Butler was born in 1892 at Kilcoy Station, two days’ horse ride north-west of Brisbane. In his own opinion he ‘came into the world inauspiciously, in fact I was a damn nuisance, one of those little “Straws” that occur to elderly parents who have already raised nine children’. As a boy his happiest days were spent at Kilcoy Creek, building dams and canals, shrimping and the ‘hundred and one things one could do’. He learned how to handle a rifle and hunted possums, bandicoots and ducks with his older brothers, sometimes his sister, ‘and always a dog to keep me company’. Butler remembered his youth as ‘a life of sheer joy … for to adapt Banjo Paterson’s “Clancy” – “The bush boy’s life has pleasures that town boys never know” – and so on to the end’.³¹

When the war broke out, Butler was ‘among the sheep’, working as an overseer at Beaconsfield Station in Ilfracombe, central western Queensland, and was married to Alice. His ambition was to become a sheep station owner:

I had no wish to go to war, but gradually I began to realise that, if I was to accomplish my ambition, I had to join those who were fighting for their freedom to remain as part of the Empire and not bow down to the German jackboot.

At the 1st AIF Officer’s School at Duntroon, Butler was failed for ‘not sufficient leadership’.³² He joined the 41st Battalion in France on 29 November 1916 as a sergeant. Initiation into frontline work came in the Armentières sector, where he was commissioned in the field in January 1917, wounded twice at Messines – on 2 June and 2 July – and again at Broodseinde Ridge on 4 October while leading a bayonet charge to recapture a position. He rejoined the battalion in February 1918 to, in his words, ‘Fight Another Day’.³³ He was recommended for the Military Cross for ‘excellent leadership’ during the German offensive on 30 March when he ‘controlled the fire of his platoon’ against repeated massed-wave infantry attacks.³⁴ His commanding officer, Colonel Alex Heron, after a ‘long and constant association’, wrote that had it not been for his wounds at Broodseinde Ridge, Butler ‘would have had an MC [Military Cross] long ago’.³⁵ He was, in the eyes of the ordinary digger, a front-line soldier. He had been involved with distinction in nearly every major and minor engagement the 41st Battalion had taken part in. The battalion’s newcomers in the first months of 1918 held such men in wonder. The young man who had been deemed to have ‘not sufficient leadership’ was, in the eyes of his commanding officer, one of the ‘very best platoon commanders: keen, conscientious and a brave and fearless leader at all times’.³⁶

Heron wrote that Butler’s innovative and determined raid on 18 April spurred ‘a sort of Company Competition’.³⁷ Lieutenant Ewen Price, commanding D Company, described what happened next as a ‘stonkering’ followed by a ‘kidnapping’.³⁸ On the night of 18–19 April a formal fighting patrol under Lieutenant Harry Wiles, including Dixon and Murray, crept through the gully south of the Bray–Corbie road to a field near the cemetery. Wiles had orders to attack a post but after three hours he decided to attack a patrol instead, despite being outnumbered ‘four to one’.³⁹ He opened fire on a patrol coming from the direction of Sailly-Laurette, to the south. One of his men was heard to yell, ‘We’ve got one.’ Wiles ordered a withdrawal as he thought a prisoner had been captured, but the yell referred to a German shot dead. By the time Wiles realised there was no prisoner the German machine-gun fire was fierce and his men were determined to withdraw to a friendly post. At that point, what had started as a formal fighting patrol became a stealth raid. Wiles decided to go back and try to retrieve information from the Germans killed in the ambush. The irrepressible scout Dixon volunteered to go with him. In a ‘masterly’ show of skill the two crawled through low crop and dead ground, under intense fire, and ‘brought back a complete identification’: shoulder straps, maps and papers from the dead.⁴⁰ Here again was the self-reliance that would come to be the distinctive mark of a few Australian stealth raiders in 1918.

The identification ‘caused a slight commotion’ at divisional headquarters, because the 41st Battalion had by now captured men of two different divisions in four consecutive nights. The 3rd Division headquarters were concerned it might signal the German high command was strengthening the front in preparation for an offensive. The next day, 20 April, Colonel Heron received a message from division stating that a ‘live Bosche was urgently required’. There was no time for a fully planned formal raid with artillery support, as would typically have been deployed in 1916 and 1917. The method of capturing a ‘live’ German had to be devised on the spot, by a group of determined men, using platoon weapons, because there was simply no time to arrange supporting firepower with headquarters in the form of artillery, mortars, gas or Vickers guns. It was under this sort of pressure that stealth raids evolved. Wiles volunteered and asked for his friend Francis Burtenshaw to go with him. Heron agreed and ‘as far as possible a scheme was devised’.⁴¹

The night was ‘unusually bright’. For two hours Wiles, Burtenshaw and a small group of men chosen because they were confident and competent crawled about the farmland, woods and gullies looking for an isolated post to raid. The moonlight made them fearful of being seen. Tired, they returned to a post for a ‘spell’. By 2.30 am visibility had deteriorated enough to warrant another attempt. They started up a sunken road running into the German outpost system. A command rang out in German from a bush above the road.⁴² One of Wiles’ scouts who could speak German replied, ‘Deutschen’, but the clumsy trick did not work. A German standing patrol answered with bombs and rifle fire. Wiles and his party attacked, killing two. Some of the Germans fled. Wiles, whose revolver was now empty, chased an armed German for 30 yards up the sunken road and into a field. Wiles tackled the man within a stone’s throw of a German post; it was practically a kidnapping. The prisoner told his captors that he belonged to 18th Division and that only its two northern regiments had been relieved. He had heard nothing of a renewed offensive. In fact, he said his battalion was exhausted.⁴³

The next day the 41st Battalion was relieved. In five fighting patrols in six nights, each one more innovative and unprecedented than the last, the 41st Battalion had captured six prisoners and killed 21 Germans for the loss of two men badly wounded, and four minor wounds.⁴⁴ The minimal casualties justified the innovation of the men involved and increased their confidence.

On 25 April the battalion returned to the outpost line and noticed a change of attitude in the enemy. The Germans treated any artillery falling near their outposts as advertisement of a raid. They responded with machine-gun barrages from deep positions across a broad front and withdrew their outpost garrisons. The adjustment in tactics indicated that the Germans, despite their fatigue, remained well led and organised. On 26 April the 41st Battalion suffered its only fatal casualties in this form of warfare when a B Company man was killed and another died of his wounds.⁴⁵ The casualties forced the battalion to adapt again. On the night of 27 April, Lieutenant Samuel Robinson, A Company, killed one man and took one prisoner in a formal raid on a machine-gun post on a ridge north of the road.⁴⁶ Robinson had taken his patrol deep into the German outpost system in the hope of cutting off retreating garrisons; his raiders suffered three casualties.⁴⁷

After the gains of these fighting patrols, Heron remarked:

The morale of all ranks is in a very good state, everyone has had a trying time but on all sides the desire to get an opportunity of meeting the Bosch and inflicting casualties on him is great. Our recent successes in encounters with him have had a very stimulating effect and we are sure that when it comes to hand-to-hand fighting, we are immensely superior.⁴⁸

On 1 May Heron wrote to his wounded officer Les Boyce, and informed him that the German machine-gun post that had wounded him on 28 March had been captured. Heron also mentioned that the battalion had ‘made quite a name for itself’, while the other three battalions in the brigade had managed to capture only one prisoner between them.⁴⁹

At the time the 41st Battalion’s dynamic mix of formal fighting patrols and stealth raids was thought to be unprecedented in the British Army, in their frequency in one tour, in material and men captured and in how few casualties were incurred.⁵⁰ Yet when it came to formal operations, the battalion did not have a glorious record to fall back on. Indeed, the formal trench-raiding and fighting patrol experiences of 1917 had proved a cautionary tale to the 41st Battalion. At least seven officers and 173 other ranks had been trained in raiding by March 1917.⁵¹ Before April 1918 they had attempted five formal raids. All failed. Private and official records give only a partial picture of the men who participated in these events, but Wiles, Butler, Croft, Dixon and several other headquarters scouts and intelligence staff were involved at one time or another.⁵²

Dixon had been one of eight men wounded (with two killed) on 11 February 1917 in a raid at Armentières when three officers and 43 other ranks went over the top and found the German wire had not been cut by the preliminary bombardment.⁵³ Wiles commanded an assault group in a large formal raid in the Mushroom Salient two weeks later. Eight men were wounded and two killed. The raiders had gone over after the artillery had bombarded the German line for four consecutive nights, only to find the wire still uncut, and they made a hasty withdrawal. The Germans responded with a counterbombardment that killed three men in the frontline trenches and wounded eight.⁵⁴ These events formed exactly the type of scenario that Bean claimed the men of 1918 feared and hated in formal raids.⁵⁵

The 41st Battalion history, written in 1919 by men who had been frontline soldiers, recalled that during the battalion’s first formal fighting patrol in January 1917 the men ‘greatly under-estimated the enemy’s vigilance’, and ‘simply walked across [No Man’s Land] in a stooping posture, so that Fritz, immediately he detected their movements, waited and allowed them to come quite close up before opening fire’.⁵⁶ At Ploegsteert on 16 April 1917 an officer was killed and two other ranks wounded, again before their fighting patrol had crossed No Man’s Land.⁵⁷ In the same sector, Butler led a fighting patrol in cooperation with a gas projector attack. He cut the German wire by hand, perhaps because he had learned not to trust an artillery barrage to do it. But the patrol was heard, and the men had flares and grenades thrown at them.⁵⁸ Before April 1918, no raid or fighting patrol by the 41st Battalion had reached an enemy trench or killed or captured a German. The men recognised the need to adapt.

As distinct from these formal operations the battalion prided itself on its scouting and reconnaissance of No Man’s Land. Central to this tactic was dominating No Man’s Land right up to the enemy wire. Heron took command in July 1917 and continued a policy of being ‘master of “No Man’s Land”’.⁵⁹ At Le Bizet in February 1918 he wrote, ‘The quietness of the front offered excellent opportunities … for getting all new hands into No Man’s Land to accustom them to moving about in the dark.’⁶⁰

This experience prepared the battalion for the formal fighting patrols in April, and gave scope for the innovation that anticipated future stealth raids.

By April 1918 the patrollers of the battalion were experienced in No Man’s Land. Faced with intense demands for identification and prisoners, they showed a readiness and confidence to crawl for distances of 1000 yards and to wait for hours at a time to get in position to rush German posts or patrols from the flanks. They used disciplined formations, mostly the diamond, with a central assault party, covered by flanking parties and reserves, known as ‘tailers’. However, usually only a handful of men raided a post, probably because the experienced men insisted that fewer men made less noise and created less of a target. The majority of a fighting patrol’s strength waited in No Man’s Land as supports and reserves, to fight as required.

In the raids of 1917, artillery had been used in the form of preparatory and destructive barrages to cut the German wire, smash the trenches and demoralise or kill the garrisons. Brigade orders dictated how and when the artillery would fire. In the 41st Battalion’s experience, these barrages had failed and served only to invite retaliation. In April 1918 the men preferred to cut through the wire themselves and use artillery to bluff and outmanoeuvre their enemy and assist a patrol’s movement, as the successful patrols of Butler, on 18 April, and Robinson, on 27 April, had done. Artillery was less about firepower and more about ruse.

The innovative fighting patrols of the 41st Battalion influenced the small-unit fighting skill of the division. Certainly Colin Butler’s raid was disseminated as an example to other units. On 3 May the 37th Battalion, in posts on the river flats near Ville-sur-Ancre, received a memo from divisional headquarters requesting urgent identification of the German unit facing them. The battalion was left to devise the plan. A fighting patrol was organised that owed much to the tactics outlined in the circular detailing Butler’s action on 18 April. A barrage was arranged to resemble the harassing fire of the previous four nights in the hope that the enemy would be ‘unsuspicious of any change’.⁶¹ It lasted five minutes before the Germans caught on that something was up. By then the fighting patrol had crossed the dead ground. The Germans opened machine-gun fire as the patrol rushed the post in two parties. The presence of a Lewis gunner was critical, as it had been for Butler:

One of the enemy on the left of the post fired steadily at close range but the Lewis gun … beat him down. The remainder of the post threw bombs and fired their rifles at the attacking party – two of whom were wounded. The post was rushed and the two occupants were captured although they offered stubborn resistance. One was wounded … but the other had to be urged to go with the patrol by being prodded with the bayonet.⁶²

However, there were a few men in some Australian battalions who needed no coaching or circulars to instigate stealth raids. On the night of 18 April Lieutenant Stan Stebbins and eight Tasmanians of the 40th Battalion patrolled 1000 yards in front of the 10th Brigade lines south of the Ancre River, with orders to locate an enemy post and raid it the following night. Stebbins found a post on the outskirts of Ville-sur-Ancre. Captain Frank Green, the battalion’s historian, wrote that Stebbins, ‘Realising that they would have to go out and do the work the next night … decided to obtain the identification then and there.’⁶³ As he and two men moved to outflank the post, a nine-man German patrol intercepted them and called on Stebbins to surrender. The three Australians attacked: Stebbins and Sergeant Alfred Richards shot two Germans, and Private John Brilliant killed one with the bayonet and chased the others, who ran ‘squealing’. The three stealth raiders carried one of the dead back to their lines to establish identification, avoiding the need for the formal raid the next night.⁶⁴ This was the virtue of stealth raiders: a few daring men had willingly done a dangerous job that had been set aside for a whole platoon or company.

Stealth raiders contributed to the demand for prisoners and the domination of No Man’s Land that the Australian Corps had come to expect. The men were pleased because the casualties sustained in these types of enterprises were much fewer than they anticipated in conventional operations. On the night of 4 May, patrols of the 9th Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Charles Rosenthal, advanced between 400 and 1000 yards across a front of 1500 yards and dug new posts across the front that the 41st Battalion had dominated.⁶⁵ His decision to advance meant the support line took up better positions, which increased the depth of the defence and gave the outposts respite because the German artillery was unsure of their location. The advance was bloodless because innovative fighting patrols and the original stealth raiders, mostly from the 41st Battalion, had cleared all the hostile German posts in the area over the previous few weeks.

These advancements allowed General William Birdwood, commanding the Australian Corps, to initiate a scheme to capture Morlancourt Ridge in a series of formal operations. Its subsequent success was brought to the attention of Field Marshal Haig. On 8–9 May, Haig commented in his diary:

During the last three days they [the 3rd Division] advanced their front about a mile … The ground gained was twice as much as they had taken at Messines last June, and they had done it with very small losses.⁶⁶

Rosenthal’s advance and Birdwood’s formal operations on Morlancourt Ridge were anticipated by the work of the first stealth raiders. It was a better use of the infantry of the 3rd Division than Monash’s ambitious yet blind foray into unknown territory against a vast enemy force, which had cost 300 men, on 28 March. Monash was apt to make poor decisions about the conditions at the front because he did not visit it. On the other hand, stealth raiders were self-reliant and confident in the vast rural battlefield they were exploring, with its gullies, copses and sunken roads. Such men increasingly became disillusioned by orders that were out of step with the conditions on the ground, or which denied them some measure of independent judgement. Monash’s orders on 28 March were an example of the type of command the men had come to resent. Monash’s finest achievements were based on thorough and detailed planning; however, throughout 1918, his ambitions were such that he sometimes claimed stealth raider’s successes as his own.

Meanwhile, south of the Somme River, during the First Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, Corporal Doug Sayers and Privates John Stokes, Walter DeForest, William Cox and Archibald Barry, 58th Battalion, rushed a German patrol in the flats between the villages of Hamel and Bouzencourt in daylight. Sayers had been instructed to protect an advanced machine-gun post and his actions were in part based on those orders. The patrol killed an officer and five men, captured two wounded prisoners and collected maps and a diary from the dead officer.⁶⁷ Elsewhere fighting patrols and small raids, which battalion or brigade headquarters had intended to involve a whole platoon plus Lewis guns supported by a box barrage, were sometimes pulled off swiftly by experienced patrols with ‘as few men as possible’. Lieutenant George Mitchell, 48th Battalion, learned not to rely on a barrage or weight of numbers: ‘A lot of men mean a lot of noise, and are a lot of target. Only take trusted men, with good night eyes, who can move quietly.’⁶⁸

On the night of 13 April Lieutenant John Stinson, 53rd Battalion, ‘a tall leather-faced bushman’,⁶⁹ while leading a formal fighting patrol of 20 men and a Lewis gun, with orders to raid a post, broke away from his men and seized a lone German moving between posts in No Man’s Land. The prisoner was dragged back to the Australian line without ‘attracting attention’, as might have happened had Stinson raided a post.⁷⁰ Lieutenant Albert Hill MC, 31st Battalion, a former itinerant shearer and champion boxer of the 5th Division, shot a German in the face in a field near Bouzencourt, after several nights of stalking the German outpost system. The wounded German ran; Hill chased and tackled him. The prisoner surrendered with the stricken plea ‘Very good, Sir’.⁷¹ The incident was similar to the ‘kidnapping’ by Harry Wiles of the 41st Battalion. Hill’s initiative and self-reliance typified the virtue of stealth raids, as he had captured a prisoner without drawing fire.

Hill was resourceful and preferred to work alone or in a small team of trusted men. On 21 March, on a reconnaissance patrol in No Man’s Land, Hill and two other men armed with revolvers and bombs had attacked a German raiding party and scattered it, undoubtedly saving their mates in the trenches. This was reported in the Empire press under the headline, ‘Sixty routed by three: Australians fight with bombs and revolvers’.⁷²

Soldiers like the bushmen Stinson and Hill in the 5th Division and Butler, Dixon and Stebbins in the 3rd reflected the old hands’ belief that as for man to man, ‘every Australian knows who is the superior fighter, that has been tested too often & the Fritzies know it in their own hearts too’.⁷³ Their stealth raids were reported and circulated in divisional intelligence reports, which officers were encouraged to read to the men. The raids added to Australian confidence and spirit. The men knew they were powerless against gas, shells and machine-gun fire but they revelled in the superiority a few daring men demonstrated in stealthy hand-to-hand fighting in No Man’s Land. The condition of the prisoners gave them further reason to be confident. From the front line the Australian infantry observed that German morale seemed to have taken a knock because of the innovative Australian patrol tactics and stealth raids. Lieutenant Tom Britton, 34th Battalion – a station hand from Greta, New South Wales – thought that the captured officers he saw were ‘mostly game fellows but the men always beg most abjectly for mercy’.⁷⁴ The commanding officer of the 15th Brigade, Brigadier Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, wrote:

The intelligence reports of these patrol encounters are joyful reading. I feel like going out myself for a rough and tumble, for the sport seems as harmless for us as chasing and rounding up barn door fowls.⁷⁵

At Villers-Bretonneux on the night of 19–20 April, Private Sydney Lewis, 56th Battalion, a signaller who was drunk and absent without leave from his battalion, captured a German from a post deep in the outpost system. Driver John Turnbull, 5th Division Ammunition Column, met Lewis, still absent without leave, and his prisoner the next day outside Amiens:

This chap [Lewis] had too much rum and lost his B[attalio]n. He wandered across No man’s land, half stupid and found himself in a Hun trench, which sobered him up. He came across a dugout full of Huns. He did, as he said, a bit of bayonet exercise in front of the dugout, calling on Fritz to come out. 27 Huns came out & faced [him] … He picked one man out & ordered the rest into the dugout … He made his way rapidly back through our outposts passing the Tommy reliefs. He said he would have brought the lot over only he was scared of the Tommies who would open up on that number of Huns coming over at night & might skittle [him] … He passed here with the Hun carrying his equipment & rifle for him. Last night he camped in Amiens getting his prisoner very drunk on wine. He reckons he must get his prisoner up before his Colonel. He has to account for his absence somehow.⁷⁶

Pompey Elliott’s response and Lewis’s drunken stealth raid both point to the exhaustion and malaise infecting German units that had been in the line since 21 March and were beginning to be reinforced by teenagers with no battle experience. But they also belie the difficulties of closing with a nervous enemy, in a fluid front line that changed with successive waves of German attacks. As Bean pointed out, in parts of the Australian Corps front any form of activity above ground ‘was impossible’ because the space between the opposing lines was ‘too narrow and bare to allow manoeuvring even by night’.⁷⁷ The outposts were swept by machine-gun fire. Low-lying areas were toxic with gas, and No Man’s Land interminably lit up by flares. Shellfire was a persistent fear, much of it ‘friendly fire’. The German attacks had been so sudden and penetrating that neither the British nor the relieving Australian troops had time to dig posts capable of withstanding shellfire. A tired Allen Clements described moving up to the front near Villers-Bretonneux:

Came into the front line last night after our short spell. Was hardly able to walk, but managed to get along cold and wet … Big barrage opened up as we were coming in and there was iron floating everywhere. One shell from our own guns fell within a few yards of me, must have been defective. Trenches in this sector in rotten condition and not deep enough.⁷⁸

On 8 May, Private John Smith ‘felt like having a yarn’ with his dad and wrote home:

We have held this front line for over a month now without relief – & this is, I believe, a record for the British Army. The Fritz artillery is not very severe but still there is a strain all the time. We have to keep out of sight all day & work all night. The work consists of patrols etc & we have gained the upper hand of No man’s land. The night is only 6 hours now compared with 15 hours in winter. ⁷⁹

The signs of fatigue were apparent, but the work went on. It was the norm for the ‘work’ of formal fighting patrols and raids to be conducted at night; however, this added to the nervous and physical exhaustion, and the risk of casualties, because the outpost system at night was at its most active. Formal fighting patrols and raids that returned empty-handed would also have the emotional drain of knowing another would be ordered. In May, Allen Clements took part in several formal fighting patrols in the understrength 54th Battalion, experiencing the full horrors and frustrations of No Man’s Land. In one patrol a German garrison saw them coming. It sent up flares and turned six machine guns onto Clements’ party: ‘bullet hit rifle … got fastened up in our wire … fell into shell holes, clothes torn to pieces and nothing to show for it’.⁸⁰

Four nights later, as Clements prepared to go over the top in a formal raid supported by a ‘friendly’ trench mortar barrage, he could hear the German wounded screaming in their posts. ‘It was heartrending,’ he wrote. ‘Hope I will never get like that.’ When Clements’ raiding party attacked they found the bombardment had acted as signal to the German garrison: ‘Fritz scooted as hard as he could go.’⁸¹ The barrage was such an effective warning of an impending raid that the Germans had time to evacuate their wounded. The raiders got no prisoners but their own nerves were rattled as the Germans responded with artillery, machine guns and gas. During April and May these types of incidents occurred almost every night somewhere or other along the Australian Corps front. And with them exhaustion was inevitable.

The Germans tended to stand and fight in their posts when they had the tactical advantage of high ground or cover. One particularly dangerous area was the south-west corner of Vaire Wood, north-east of Villers-Bretonneux. The Australian line ‘ran in a series of strong posts roughly following the crest of a rise’. It faced a shallow valley ‘beyond which rose steeply a bank about fifteen feet high, and then a series of terraces’ where a small plantation hid Germans in advanced posts. German machine gunners and snipers dominated the terrace and plantation, protected by patrols that used a tactic of lying and waiting in the low crop, spread out in the shape of what one Australian called ‘Zulu horns’, with the intent of trapping or outflanking Australian patrols.⁸²

On the night of 5 May, Second Lieutenant Dalton Neville, 55th Battalion, along with 15 men, used the din of a heavy rainstorm to cover their movement onto the terraces, where they searched on their bellies for signs of a German machine-gun post. Theirs was not a time-bound formal fighting patrol or raid reliant on coordination with artillery or trench mortars, but an impromptu stealth raid by self-reliant men designed to make the most of the cover the noise of the rain afforded.

Dalton Neville was from the small town of Singleton on the Hunter River in New South Wales. As a boy he had helped drovers pilot their stock across the river and rode his bicycle between isolated rural townships. He worked briefly as a clerk in the local Commonwealth Bank, being one of the first young men to take up the employment opportunity afforded by the nationalisation agenda of the Fisher Labor government. Neville enlisted, under-age, in July 1915. His first night on active service was at Fromelles in July 1916, where, he recalled:

At the age of 20 as a Corporal I was shoved out on No Mans Land with one other man to act as a listening post … From that night on … until I was seriously wounded in July 1918 I was out in No Mans Land nearly every night. I had the flair, or it was cultivated in me, or because I was with the battalion and knew the ropes.

In 1917 Neville was decorated with the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) and Mentioned in Dispatches (MID) for gallantry and initiative as a leader of formal patrols and raids. An entry in Neville’s pay book indicates that he also held the French Croix de Guerre. He was commissioned after good work during the Third Battle of Ypres. Years later he told his son, Dalton Junior, that on hearing of his younger brother Tom’s death at Menin Road he became mightily enraged and set about stealth raiding as a way to extract a personal toll.⁸³ Even if this desire for revenge was Neville’s main motivation, it did not affect his skills in using the ground, or the judgement required to decide when a silent raid under a rainstorm was a better option than a noisy bloodbath.

On the night of 5 May, Neville led the stealth raiders across No Man’s Land while rain pelted the crop. They found a German machine-gun post on the terrace. Four wet German machine gunners crouched by their gun. Neville whispered a quiet order and rushed the post. Three of the Germans surrendered, but a corporal resisted. Neville, armed with a revolver, closed in on him. He recounted:

He was a huge, powerful man … I had to shoot him. The outpost was only about 35 yards from the main German trenches, and the man made a rush to get back to his own lines. I shot him again, this time through the back, and he dropped on his hands and knees and started crawling forward, and I had to shoot him twice again in the back before he stopped.

Neville and another man searched the dead corporal for information. They were so intent on this work that they did not see the German reinforcements approaching through the crop until they were practically on top of them:

We looked up to see a German officer and a private within five yards of us. They saw us at the same instant, but we had our revolvers up quicker, and … shot them both dead. Before we could get away the effect of the shooting had its result. We were surrounded and had to fight our way back … but all of us managed to get back without a scratch.

Experience in No Man’s Land had made Neville fit and tough but there was also evidence of bushcraft in this stealth raid. His tactics were likened to Indian (Native American) warfare on the American frontier in an article published in the Sunday Times in 1922, headlined ‘World’s Super-raider, diggers adopt Indian warfare, Sydney man’s extraordinary exploits’.⁸⁴ Neville’s skill was that he used the noise of the rain to achieve the covering effect of a bombardment. The German garrison could not hear his approach, and their sentries were crouching down avoiding the rain rather than keeping watch. Neville’s actions provide an example of how stealth raiders thought and reacted to the environment; they were lateral thinkers, not bound by doctrine. But this stealth raid had been a close-run thing.

It did not take the Germans long to reoccupy the post and to send patrols into the plantation. Sniping and machine-gun fire from the terraces continued to harass the Australian outpost line, suggesting well-organised fresh troops with competent NCOs and junior officers. The prisoners Neville captured were from the 77th Reserve Division. Their identification confirmed that the Australian Corps was facing fresh enemy divisions north and south of the Somme River. The first-class, albeit exhausted, divisions had been replaced by less experienced and less known divisions including the 77th Reserve and 108th, which had recently transferred to the Amiens sector from the Eastern Front. This transfer coincided with a weather change, as the cold and unsettled days of April gave way to a ‘humid, enervating heat’.⁸⁵ No Man’s Land and the surrounding countryside fast became ‘one mass of beautiful scarlet poppies growing ever abundantly amid the neglected fields of wheat’. Men complained that the ‘high crop in No mans land, made patrolling awkward … as they couldn’t help making a noise … in it’.⁸⁶ Lieutenant Ernest Hodge, 50th Battalion, wrote from the front line near Bouzencourt, south of the Somme River, that it was ‘a very hard job finding your way about in this country which is covered in wheat crops or high grass’.⁸⁷ There was no training or battlefield experience from 1916 and 1917 to help the men to cope with the new conditions, which were unfamiliar to all except men from rural (and bush) backgrounds.

On 17 May Private Edmund Street – 20-year-old station hand who described himself as a ‘freelancer’ in the front line, because he was usually a runner delivering messages for his company commander – joined Neville and 13 men while they organised another stealth raid. Street wrote that from an outpost they watched an enemy ‘machine gun spitting fire as it traversed our line’. They made a plan, and at 1 am they crept out intent on wiping out the German garrison on the terrace. The stealth raiders faced the familiar perils of No Man’s Land: flares, indirect and direct machine-gun fire and the fresh challenge of high, dense crop in a semi-open battlefield.

They had gone several hundred yards ‘when a sudden crack was heard’: a flare fired from the German outpost system, which soared above the crop in ‘a brilliant white flame’. Street described how the stealth raiders depended on skills learned in the Australian bush:

We kept a tight hold of ourselves and flattened into the wheat. The flare fell among us sizzling and roaring. Fortunately, it touched none of us and was soon burnt out. We crept forward until we were within striking distance of the flare king. One of the chaps, who was a roo hunter in pre-war days, crept forward alone and pounced onto the unsuspecting flare king. Our man hit hard with his fist and, as there was a Mills bomb in it, the impact sent the firer of flares to sleep. On we crept, the machine gun spitting bullets over our heads into our outposts.

Street could hear the German garrison talking: ‘At last the gunner left his post and walked along the trench.’ The German was unaware of the menace that watched him from the edge of the crop. Neville gave a ‘low spoken order’ and the stealth raiders ‘made a silent rush at the post’. Street, firing a revolver, was among the first into the trench. As far as he was concerned the ‘stunt was over in a few seconds’.⁸⁸ But citations for gallantry suggest a short, bitter fight ensued. Private Peter McClusky, a former light horseman and Gallipoli veteran, frequently disciplined for drunkenness, absenteeism, insubordination and fist fighting, beat down a German bayonet with the butt end of his rifle just as the German ‘was about to strike’, then clubbed him to death.⁸⁹ McClusky was also ‘freelancing’; he was usually a horse driver in the battalion’s transport section.

The ‘roo hunter’ Street referred to was Private Peter Monck, a farmer from Pambula on the New South Wales south coast. Monck killed the machine gunner then captured the stunned flare king he had knocked out in the crop.⁹⁰ Two other men were also captured. Finally, Neville, ‘in an exercise of great skill and leadership, piloted’ his men and the prisoners back to the 55th Battalion’s outposts.⁹¹ When trench maps were issued in this sector after 17 May the terraced ground was marked ‘Neville’s’.⁹² Getting one’s name on a trench map indicated how the reputation of stealth raiders and stealth raiding grew and spread.

It had taken weeks of reconnoitring and ultimately the bush skills of a bunch of ‘freelancers’, most of them ‘fine big country men’, according to Street, to wipe out the German posts on the terrace.⁹³ Stealth raids were mostly silent: a few revolver shots did not attract attention when fired in the crop, nor did some brutal work with rifle butts and bayonets. No noise meant retaliation was less likely because the local German commanders did not know a post had been captured. The Australian infantry garrisoning the outposts, support and reserve line, within range of the German trench mortars and artillery, appreciated the lack of retaliation. Often the stealth raiders’ own battalions and brigade commanders did not know a stealth raid had taken place until the stealth raiders arrived at headquarters with their prisoners.

Stealth raids had several advantages over the conventional formal raiding and fighting patrol tactics. The objective of capturing prisoners, which traditionally meant big, highly organised and time-bound formal operations with attendant risks, could instead be achieved by small numbers of men without heavy casualties. The tactic gave higher commanders with an intelligent and critical eye, like Rosenthal, 9th Brigade, and Birdwood, in charge of the Australian Corps, unforeseen opportunities to improve the Australian Corps line by increasing the depth of the defence between the front and Amiens, to shift posts to higher ground and to improve fields of fire and tactical continuity in the outpost system. All of these changes benefitted the men. As the 41st Battalion intelligence staff noted, ‘Better work of this nature, with fewer casualties attendant, has certainly never been done.’⁹⁴ Stealth raiders also demoralised the enemy, and the war-weariness of the prisoners they captured reinforced Australian confidence.

During the same period, 60 miles to the north at Hazebrouck in French Flanders, Australian stealth raiders also began to influence the small-unit tactics used by the lower ranks of the 1st Division. Men and commanders heard rumours of a new tactic among the men, along with new terms like ‘daylight raid’ and ‘one-man raid’. Stealth raiders acting with no orders captured and killed the enemy quietly when he least expected it, losing few men. They would steer the AIF on an uncharted path, beyond traditional doctrine and modification of orders, to something unique and distinctive.