CHAPTER TWO

‘We gave them a bit of stoush’

The origin of stealth raids at Hazebrouck, 22 April to 28 May 1918

At Hazebrouck in April and May mistakes were made and lessons learned, and it was the infantry in the outposts, not their commanding officers, who proved the most adaptable. The origins of stealth raids by men of the 1st Division at Hazebrouck can be linked to a small number of determined men and their attempts to avoid the expected butcher’s bill of formal operations. Firsthand accounts are reliable on this matter because the men didn’t hesitate to express their feelings.

On 22 April the 1st Division was ordered to capture Méteren in two phases over consecutive nights: first advancing the line on the flanks of the town, then on the second night encircling, attacking and ‘mopping up’ the village. Lieutenant Leslie Newton, historian of the 12th Battalion, wrote that the old soldiers of the 3rd Brigade, who were given the job, were sceptical from the outset:

The method of the attack did not appeal to us at all, although in theory it was very excellent … provided the enemy acted ‘according to plan’ … It reminded us too forcibly of the attack on Boursies [6–10 April 1917], which was carried to a successful issue during the second phase, only after suffering heavy casualties and nerve strain … However orders issued are not to be queried, but obeyed.

The first stroke succeeded, due mostly to ‘surprise and dash’. But as the old soldiers had feared, when the second phase began the German defenders were expecting it and fought bitterly and well. The outskirts of the town were ‘bristling with machine guns’, and the encircling battalions and ‘moppers up’ were dragged into a bloody two-hour street battle with no artillery support, as the village burned fiercely. The historian of the 12th Battalion recorded that:

It was a forlorn hope from the very onset, and although officers, N.C.O.s and men alike acted in an irreproach able manner, they could not attain the impossible. As soon as a move was made, concentrated machine gun fire swept the whole front … and made movement extremely difficult … It was a fight between bombs and machine-guns, and although many Huns were accounted for before we admitted defeat, the machine-guns … proved their superiority and demanded our withdrawal.¹

The failure was not the fault of the infantry but of their commanders, who had underestimated the Germans. The operation cost the 1st Division 200 casualties. The men felt angry and betrayed; one digger described it as ‘a needless waste of valuable lives in a stupidly arranged affair’.² The battalion war diaries, histories and Bean’s Official History were equally scathing. The defeat added fuel to the almost universal mistrust of orders for minor operations and formal raids. The beginning of stealth raiding at Hazebrouck grew out of this loathing and a preference for self-reliance and employing bush skills, which one digger claimed were ‘much more to our liking’.³

After Méteren, patrolling and formal raiding to identify the German units opposite and improve the local tactical situation became routine. At first light on 1 May three patrols returned with prisoners. One had conducted a stealth raid. Lance Corporal George Godfrey’s mates went exploring the fields on the slopes of a prominent rise, Mont de Merris, and came upon a tarpaulin draped over a shell hole. They heard snoring, so gave it a tug:

Imagine the consternation of five Fritz who were supposed to be on listening post. The boys took … them prisoner … To hear the boys coming back across No Mans Land one would have thought they were a picnic party the laughing and banter that was going on. I was greatly surprised that Fritz did not put a few bursts of machine gun fire at them.⁴

Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Wilder-Neligan, 10th Battalion, was said to have delighted in the story of a stealth raid led by his Regimental Sergeant Major Ernest ‘Raggy’ Holland. Holland returned from a ‘reconnaissance’ of a farm building in No Man’s Land with ‘a scared and much bruised German’ and ‘a sack of more scared hens’.⁵ This type of initiative and daring was good for morale. So was the countryside: there was ‘buckshee’ tucker in the fields of potatoes, onions and cabbages, as well as goats, pigs, poultry and dairy herds. The area was familiar to Raggy Holland and other old soldiers because the 1st Division had been billeted there in 1916 and 1917. The estaminets in Caëstre, Flêtre, Strazeele, Moolenacker and Rouge Croix, where they had once ‘drunk the “plink plonk” (vin blanc) and … “vin rouge”’,⁶ were being ransacked by ‘salvagers’ so that grog was plentiful in and out of the line despite orders to destroy it. The absence of artillery fire also contributed to Australian cheeriness. Private Harold Mercer, 1st Battalion, reckoned the uncertainty of the location of the outposts meant ‘[w]e don’t know where [they] are; and apparently they don’t know where we are, so it is no good [either side] wasting shells’.⁷

German shelling was heavier and more accurate behind the lines in the towns and near crossroads, where large bodies of troops gathered. The 12th Battalion was particularly unlucky. On 17 April German artillery observers on Mont de Merris caught them in their reserve camp at Borre. The battalion suffered 30 casualties in two hours, then ten more deaths and 14 wounded when a shell struck a tent while the battalion was licking its wounds after the setback at Méteren.⁸ When rumours began of orders for formal raids, one experienced soldier in the 12th Battalion went to great lengths to avoid more casualties. Captain Don McLeod asked permission to reconnoitre the front; he hoped to avoid the formal raid by capturing a prisoner, but he kept this a secret. McLeod was one of the best and certainly most experienced patrollers in the 1st Division. A Scot by birth, he had been ‘chasing the gold in Marble Bar’ in the Pilbara region of Western Australia before the war.⁹

The rough and mobile life of an infantryman did not bother McLeod. A fellow Western Australian digger remembered him in his Pilbara days:

What a fine specimen of a man he was! In those days he worked hard, but never neglected to jog a few miles, have a bath and a rub down, besides, dumbbell exercises, etc … his long suit was wrestling, at which he was a snag [a match] for anything in the Commonwealth.

The digger remembered McLeod in a bar fight in the billiard room of the ‘only hotel’ in Marble Bar. A stranger kept annoying McLeod, ‘until at last Donald gathered him up’ and in a wrestler’s hold carried the would-be challenger into the street, ‘stood him on his head and let him drop, at the same time warning him that, if he came back in the billiard room, he would hurt him’.¹⁰ McLeod landed on Gallipoli a corporal and was quickly promoted to sergeant. His energy and strength were legendary:

He could always be seen doing the work of two men, keeping his men well under control, giving orders with his broad Scotch accent, and on all occasions personally leading his men with the full conviction that they were following him to a man.

At Gallipoli McLeod led several patrols deep into Turkish territory, once bringing back three prisoners. Much of the information about the enemy works known as Pine Ridge South and Twin Trench Knoll – a dominant position over 500 yards south of the Anzac flank – was gathered by his patrols. He was promoted to second lieutenant in August 1915.

McLeod’s war should have finished at Gallipoli. At Lone Pine his right hand was blown off in a bombing fight; witnesses said he held the bloody stump of his forearm in his good hand, ‘with the thumb pressed firmly on the artery [and] quietly requested another soldier to apply first aid’. The fighting was so fierce he had to wait several hours for an opportunity to go to the rear, yet ‘never murmured or appeared downcast’.¹¹ He was sent to Britain, recuperated and by early 1917 was badgering authorities to send him back to the fighting line. In April 1917 he returned to the 12th Battalion in France.

On 10 May 1918, with the recent losses in the battalion on his mind, McLeod took just three volunteers to try and get a prisoner by stealth raid before his battalion took over the outpost line. Two were mates: Company Sergeant Major Bill Sheedy, a battalion original and orchard labourer from Spreyton, Tasmania, and Private ‘Snowy’ Carrick, a painter from Hobart, whom the men called sergeant, even though he had been reduced to the ranks for overstaying his Paris leave. The third was Private James Bush, a 33-year-old reinforcement who farmed on the York Plains in Tasmania. He was probably brought along for experience.

The night they chose for the stealth raid was pitch black. They penetrated 1200 yards into the German outpost system by following a nine-foot-high railway line embankment that crossed No Man’s Land at the southern base of Mont de Merris. They searched the crop and found a hostile post in a shell hole. But as they prepared to rush it they were fired on from several directions, including from a farm building. All were seriously wounded and became separated: Bush and Carrick bled to death in the crop; McLeod, despite wounds to his head and leg, carried the mortally wounded Sheedy back to the Australian lines.

McLeod limped to a British 4.5-inch howitzer battery stationed in the reserve lines. He marked the location of the German posts on a map and proposed a scheme to the battery’s commanding officer, Major Robert Wilson, before going to a field ambulance. The next day, Wilson ‘carefully registered two guns each’ on the two targets marked by McLeod, and told the 11th Battalion to prepare to send out a patrol. That night the howitzer battery opened rapid fire on the targets for half an hour. The 11th Battalion patrol captured three dazed men who had been blown from their posts.¹²

McLeod’s intention had been to avoid the casualties that he feared might be inflicted on his depleted battalion in a formal operation. But the fate of his stealth raid points to how difficult it was to adapt to the semi-open battlefield at night; the best men could fall foul of the ground and the darkness. Incidents like this made clear to the Australians that the Germans, although inoffensive by day, were active at night. The Germans’ response to Australian formal operations by night included wired crops and hedges designed to entangle patrols and warn sentries. German machine gunners and snipers, who always commanded respect, hid in the crop, fired from the attics of farm buildings and behind hedges, and dominated the high ground on Mont de Merris. Indirect fire over vast stretches of flat ground north and south of the Mont also caused many casualties.¹³ All these enemy tactics had to be dealt with at night when it was difficult enough for a patrol to stay together while moving through crops or skirting hedgerows and sunken roads. Several irreplaceable losses of respected experienced junior officers, NCOs and privates were caused by ambush and friendly fire because nervous men tended to fire at what they heard and identify their victims later.¹⁴ These problems drove imaginative soldiers, not their commanders, to think of innovative stealth raids as a way to get the prisoners, because as Bob Traill put it: ‘Corps is mad on identification these days.’¹⁵

The objective of capturing prisoners for intelligence remained constant but the methods of getting them were contrived by a few daring men. Some junior officers relied on remarkable individuals. Lieutenant Donavon Joynt VC, 8th Battalion, received an order from brigade to ‘catch a “live” Hun’. He was frustrated because it was ‘not so easy to carry out’:

The normal method would be a raiding party under an officer but in my position I had no spare officer or enough men to carry out such a job.

I put the matter to a stretcher-bearer, [Private David] Morgan, a man who was always ready for an adventurous job quite outside his normal work of picking up wounded men and carrying them in on a stretcher … This stretcher job alone was dangerous enough to satisfy an ordinary man, but Morgan was no ordinary man. He was a character known throughout the whole battalion – not only his Company – and like some diggers, was no good on parade or behind the Line. When an inspection by a Senior Officer was about to take place his Company Commander would see that Morgan did not appear, he was hidden away somewhere out of sight because he was always dirtily turned out, boots unpolished, tunic torn, hat turned up at the wrong angle and altogether most unsoldierly in appearance but when in the Line, was truly wonderful and worth half a dozen ordinary men for his initiative and bravery.

At around 3 am Morgan returned covered in mud, carrying maps and papers and a German automatic pistol. Joynt sent the documents to battalion headquarters and ‘shortly afterwards the Adjutant rang and said “All correct, splendid.”’¹⁶ A formal raid had been avoided because of one man’s skill.

Most battalions had a few men like Morgan and McLeod, respected for their initiative, daring and self-reliance. Men of all ranks turned to these men repeatedly as platoon strengths diminished in the final year of the war.

In the 4th Battalion Corporal John Lean was one of these men. He became a pioneer of a wave of daylight stealth raids. On 5 May Lean saw a lone German in a post by a hedge. Keeping his enemy in view and using the crop as cover he crept out and surprised him, taking him prisoner without firing a shot. On their way back, Lean noticed another post. Two men volunteered to come with him; they crept out and rushed it. The enemy yelled, so Lean used his bayonet. A shot would have given them away. He killed one and wounded another, while two others surrendered quietly.¹⁷ The German prisoners said they were defending their front in depth, with rifle pits and small trenches made in shell holes and interlocking fields of fire protecting machine guns further back. They called it ‘field watching’. The positions were held in strength at night and at daybreak most men withdrew to the main line, leaving fewer men in the more isolated posts.¹⁸

Lean’s daylight stealth raid ‘created a great keenness and … a splendid example.’¹⁹ It was a model in how to use natural cover by day and proved a nimble, inexpensive way of gathering important tactical intelligence. The intelligence had dual benefit: higher command wanted prisoners who might give information on the next German attack, while the men were interested in the location of the nearest German posts and their habits because they were directly threatened by them.

Stealth-raiding German outposts in daylight went against a commonly accepted rule of trench warfare: not to appear above ground by day. ‘We hide by day and crawl out of our holes like rats at night,’ wrote Bob Traill, ‘feed by night and work by night.’²⁰ Traill’s comment typifies the common soldier’s habits and experience. It was the same on the German side. Corps, division and brigade ordered formal raids and gas projector attacks, and battalion commanders ordered fighting patrols, all at night. Challenging this doctrine was radical.

Captain Walter Belford, 11th Battalion, described how Captain Arthur Keighley, the battalion intelligence officer, began to promote daylight stealth raids, arguing they would be ‘utterly unsuspected [and that] there would be no possibility of confusion as was the case when [formal] raids were made in the darkness’.²¹ Cyril Lillie, the officer commanding C Company, 5th Battalion, also wrote that one of his officers preferred the idea of daylight stealth raids to formal raids under box barrages, which usually resulted in losses:

[Lieutenant] Neil Maddox came to me with a plan whereby the objective could be achieved in daylight without casualties. His plan was to work your way through the wheat crops (5 feet high) between the posts and attack from the rear.²²

Keighley’s opportunity came on 8 May near a stream in the shallow valley between Méteren and Merris known as the Méteren Becque. The 11th Battalion’s intelligence platoon ‘was enjoying the contents of some bottles of wine that had been “salvaged”. The captain was offered a drink. The wine was good so he had a few.’ Conversation swung round to a debate on daylight stealth raids and Keighley, with his scout corporal, ‘Long’ Dick Wearmouth, in tow, set off into No Man’s Land to prove his point. Walter Belford recalled:

It was a lovely May afternoon and the drowsiness of the early summer lay over everything. As the two warriors approached the German lines, Captain Keighley, who was leading, suddenly recollected that he had no arms with him, so he asked Wearmouth for his Webley (the scouts were privileged to carry revolvers). The ‘squirt’ was handed over and the pair moved on, but Wearmouth was now unarmed save for a bayonet.

The intoxicated pair investigated several empty posts then, walking upright in bright sunshine, moved into the grounds of the Méteren baths, which were familiar because the Australians had used them in 1916 and 1917. To their surprise, they came across a solitary, ‘somnolent German’, who was so ‘utterly astounded that he offered not the faintest resistance’:

It was a strange little party that came triumphantly back in broad daylight. The short, dapper Captain in front, then the German prisoner and lastly the tall, lanky Wearmouth trying to make his great height as inconspicuous as possible bringing up the rear. Many eyes popped as the trio passed between the posts … The good Captain was mightily pleased that he had proved his point about daylight [stealth] raids.²³

The Lean and Keighley daylight stealth raids became the talk of the division.²⁴ They underlined the stark difference between operating with full view of the ground as opposed to under the darkness of night. That night the focus on daylight stealth raids was heightened when an 11th Battalion fighting patrol blundered into an ambush near the Méteren baths, which resulted in one man being killed and several wounded.²⁵

The Germans were well dug in near the baths at night and garrisoned it with machine guns. The 3rd Brigade headquarters thought it a worthy objective for a formal raid. The date set was the night of 11–12 May. A party of raiders from A Company, 9th Battalion, trained specifically, went over the top supported by a five-minute trench mortar barrage. They captured four men and a machine gun, and dug new posts near the baths.²⁶ The next day, a section led by Corporal Carl Holm and William Allan, an experienced private, sniped at the remnants of the German garrison. They then rushed them in an impromptu stealth raid. According to Allan, they captured ten prisoners, for the ‘new chaps to rat’.²⁷ Later Holm and Allan burned down the baths and Lieutenant Herbert Knowles, scouting in the smoking wreckage, found a lost German and made him a prisoner. The stealth raiders had captured the post the hapless soldier was looking for. The prisoners were from the 12th Division, which BEF intelligence considered good troops. But it had suffered many casualties in the March and April offensives, and had been reinforced by recruits that the 9th Battalion described as being of ‘a poor type’. The prisoners were nearly all boys of 18 or 19 who had never been in the outposts before.²⁸

The Victorian 5th Battalion took over the captured posts from the 9th and continued stealth raiding. Captain Tom Maltby, the acting company commander of C Company, immediately sent out Lieutenants Neil Maddox and Harry Garlick with ten men to clear posts that the 9th Battalion stealth raids had left dangerously close. Maddox and Garlick made contact with the enemy and drove them off. Maddox was wounded but remained on duty. He brought in identification confirming the 12th Division was still in the line. The success of the stealth raid meant that the 9th and 5th Battalions advanced 300 yards by a combination of the formal raid and impromptu stealth raids. But it was also evidence that sometimes several stealth raids had to take place in quick succession in order to improve their positioning.

Within hours of capturing the posts, Maddox and Garlick were given orders to raid a German trench under a box barrage on the night of 17–18 May.²⁹ But the idea of a formal raid with a barrage was not as appealing to them. They were experienced frontline soldiers who knew the risks of advertising a raid with a bombardment.

Maddox and Garlick had been NCOs at the time of the battalions’ only previous formal raid, against Bayonet Trench in the Somme sector, on 10 February 1917. It had been a disaster. After weeks of training, four officers and 103 men went over the top and ran into three belts of unbroken wire; they scaled the first with ladders, crawled under the second, but were met by a hail of bombs at the third. Only an officer and 15 men made it into the German trench. They were counterattacked by a company of the elite 5th Guards Regiment. According to the Guards history the Australians fled, leaving 13 rifles and 250 bombs in the trench. As they withdrew, the 5th Battalion raiders were caught by an intense retaliatory bombardment in No Man’s Land. Their casualties were eight killed, 43 wounded and three missing.³⁰ The raid did little damage to the Germans. The formal raid proposed on 17 May was a much smaller affair in a different battlefield, but the experience must have left them with some reservations about raiding under a barrage. Certainly Neil Maddox expressed a determination to do things differently. He came up with an unofficial plan: a daylight stealth raid that would pre-empt the formal raid and result, he was confident, in few or no casualties.

Maddox came from a wealthy Launceston family and had been educated at Brackley Grammar School in Melbourne. He joined the staff of Gibbs Bright & Co in Melbourne, but the work of a clerk did not fit his adventurous spirit. He travelled to outback Queensland, where he took a job as a jackaroo on a cattle station. Maddox ‘was very green [at first] but in a little over 12 months he was considered one of the best buck-jump riders on the station’.³¹ The life of a stockman appealed to him. It took determination and skill to learn how to track cattle in the bush, to know where the cattle would go to feed and to find water in vast country unbounded by fences.³²

Maddox left the outback at the end of the dry season of 1915 and joined the Light Horse, calling himself a ‘bushman’. The term is important: he shied away from ‘jackaroo’ in favour of the more egalitarian title. Many bush workers saw the jackaroo as a bush aristocrat, typically the son of a wealthy businessman or landed farmer from the settled districts, sent to the bush as a rite of passage. The stereotype matched Maddox’s upbringing. But his use of the bushman title eschewed the privileges of the station homestead for the rugged camp of the bush workers. Viewed from a pastoral homestead, the bushman was a step down the social ladder from the jackaroo, though one camp closer to the homestead than the Aboriginal stockmen and their families. The bushman, according to legend, treated all he came upon as his equal. Maddox’s disposition and charismatic leadership would prove important in a company that consisted of many men from working-class inner-Melbourne suburbs such as South Melbourne, St Kilda, Collingwood and Richmond, where the effects of the depression of the 1890s had left their mark on ‘the faces in the street’³³ and the homes with dirt floors. Maddox’s one-time platoon sergeant John Edey reckoned that many of the enlisted men in the company were ‘familiars of Jack Wren, I am quite certain they would have been far happier had I issued them all with broken beer bottles and let them loose on Fritz’.³⁴

A fortuitous meeting with an old school friend led to Maddox joining the 5th Battalion. He served in the ranks, was promoted to second lieutenant and was court-martialled and cleared with a caution for a reckless act while skylarking behind the front line. His grandson Ian Sharman heard a story that may have explained Maddox’s court martial: he once entered an estaminet in France with a defused grenade, which he placed on the bar. The terrified publican and his customers fled, and Maddox and a mate helped themselves to a few bottles.³⁵ He was later wounded during the Battle of the Menin Road in September 1917. Edey saw him leading men against German pillboxes during that battle:

[W]ith his right arm bandaged, waving his revolver in his left hand in the good old charge manner and leading a good proportion of the company. He was heading for Black Watch Corner and we were between him and his objective, so with discretion we kept our heads down.³⁶

Maddox returned to the battalion soon afterwards and was promoted to lieutenant. As a platoon officer he was at his best when scouting and roving, as he had done in the Australian bush. The rural setting of the outpost line near Hazebrouck was perfectly matched to his skills, and it did not take him long to distinguish himself. During the attacks on Méteren in April, he acted as liaison officer to the 12th Battalion. He crossed the Méteren Becque several times under heavy machine-gun fire, dodging through a maze of narrow tracks in the crop, allowing Lewis gunners and rifle grenadiers to attack posts he had located. He knew this front like few others and it paid off in the form of the first organised daylight stealth raid on the Hazebrouck front.

At 5.30 am on 17 May, with the formal raid planned for the coming night hanging over them, Maddox and four NCOs left their posts and crawled into the crop, bent on finding a post to stealth-raid.³⁷ From a hide-out they watched a German post 200 yards away; they counted 15 men with a machine gun. The post backed onto a hedge with a small gap in it. They agreed they could capture it ‘without very much trouble’.³⁸ Back at their post they proposed a plan. Six men joined them. A barrage of rifle grenades and Lewis gunfire would distract the Germans while Maddox and the stealth raiders crawled out. Maddox would carry a flare pistol and when they were ready to rush the post he would fire it. This would be the signal for the barrage to cease. The stealth raiders would surround the post, except for the gap in the hedge: a Lewis gunner would switch his fire onto the gap, where the Germans were expected to flee from. The Lewis gun’s fire can be likened to the crack of a stock whip; those not killed would, like spooked cattle, wheel back into the post, where the stealth raiders would bail them up. Any resisters would be shot.

The stealth raiders got underway without hesitation. Two platoon posts bombarded the Germans with rifle grenades and Lewis gunfire while Maddox got his men to within 30 yards of the German garrison and fired the flare. They rushed in. The Germans fled and the Lewis gunner switched to the gap, but the gun jammed and a few escaped. Five wheeled back into the post and were ‘fixed up’, in Maddox’s words, ‘in good old style’:

One grappled with [Corporal Sydney] Williams and I shot him in the stomach, but unfortunately a stray bomb blew him to pieces and all we could get from him was a shoulder strap marked 62. We secured several other identifications, but before we could finish our hunt we were attacked by about 30 to 40 men from [a] post on our right and we gave them a bit of stoush … seeing that things were getting too hot, I returned with party to post and found that [Lance Corporal Tom] Haydon was missing. So we hopped out again to get him and were met with severe M.G. [machine-gun] and rifle fire, but succeeded in bringing him in safely, without casualties. He was severely wounded and we got him straight away to [a] dressing station, his own comrades who had been on the raid insisted on carrying him down.³⁹

The stealth raiders got identification and killed five Germans. Maddox had organised an impromptu stealth raid from an isolated platoon post that was innovative and radical: he organised his platoon so that it willingly tried to pre-empt orders for a formal raid under a box barrage that night. He did it without informing his battalion commander. But when the stealth raiders presented the identification to battalion headquarters they were informed that only a live prisoner could say whether the Germans were planning a major offensive. Maddox and his friend Harry Garlick’s platoons were ordered to go over the top in the planned formal raid anyway. Perhaps a stronger battalion CO would have queried the orders in the light of the identification produced by the stealth raid, but the tactic was so unprecedented as to be met by a mixture of ignorance and ambivalence.

That night the formal raid found the German trench empty, and suffered five casualties.⁴⁰ As far as the men involved were concerned, the result was hardly worth the strain. It reinforced their view that the Germans would withdraw from their post when the attackers announced their intentions with a box barrage. The friendly barrage also exposed the raiders to retaliatory machine-gun and artillery fire. The formal raid was a sharp contrast to Maddox’s daylight stealth raid.

The next day, 18 May, Private Arthur Hall, a battalion original who had been on Maddox and Garlick’s first stealth raid of the tour, saw three Germans get out of a trench, take off their coats and lie down to sleep behind a hedge. Hall crept out, shot one and after a brief chase captured a young soldier of the 12th Division.⁴¹ Hall had previously been a sergeant but he had been court-martialled and reduced to the ranks for going absent without leave for six weeks in late 1917.⁴² The style of warfare at Hazebrouck brought the best out of him as a soldier. In the space of a month he was awarded the Military Medal and two bars, two of which were for these stealth raids.⁴³

The advantage of daylight stealth raids to the men in the posts closest to the enemy was highlighted again that night when a formal fighting patrol was outflanked by 70 Germans and forced to pull back. Confused in the darkness they became separated in the crop and a popular soldier and battalion barber, Private ‘Pug’ Randall, was killed when his mates mistook him for a German. Randall’s shooting was not recorded in the battalion or brigade war diaries. Only witness statements in Randall’s Red Cross file reveal what happened, testifying how the event left a bad taste in the mouth of those in the battalion and a sense of unnecessary and avoidable loss.⁴⁴

The next afternoon, 19 May, a sentry in a post near the Méteren Becque saw some Germans. When they were close enough, Private Francis Maher rushed them, shooting one and bayoneting the other before tearing the shoulder straps from both. He returned along the Méteren Becque, covered by his section and Lewis gunner.⁴⁵ Maher’s action ended an extraordinarily successful four days tour in the outposts, the first period of any battalion in the war in which successive daylight stealth raids without orders had gained so many identifications with so few casualties.

General Harold Walker, the general officer commanding the 1st Division, met the tactic with surprise and vacillation. He sent his congratulations to the battalion commander (who had no influence on the stealth raids) and mentioned the daylight stealth raids in his divisional circular.⁴⁶ But his subsequent orders were dogmatic: when the 1st Brigade took over the line, Walker ordered them to ‘maintain the excellent standards’ of the other brigades and ‘give the Hun no peace’. Each battalion was ordered to ‘formulate plans for one minor operation against suitable objectives’ and submit them for approval.⁴⁷ There was nothing innovative in this directive, as battalion commanders were still expected to get prisoners by night, using the familiar tactical doctrine. For frontline soldiers this meant reconnaissance patrols followed by formal raids and fighting patrols, at night.

After this spate of stealth raids, there was a sharp decline in the patrolling that had been so dominant. Worn out and facing an apparently indifferent enemy, some battalions had fallen into the ‘habit of leaving a thing when it is “near enough”’.⁴⁸ The 1st Brigade had marched to the front from the support and reserve lines in villages where civilian comforts and alcohol were plentiful. When they relieved the 2nd Brigade signs of exhaustion, in the form of binge drinking, sloppiness and indiscipline, spilled into the outposts. Len Jones described seeing a drunken digger in top hat, frock coat, canary-yellow waistcoat and a pair of corsets, with an umbrella up, pushing a wheelbarrow full of beer bottles into the front line. Other men sniped (poorly, according to Jones) a pig in front of their position and crawled out at night to bring it in.⁴⁹

In the first two nights that the 1st Brigade garrisoned the outpost line, only three reconnaissance patrols were active across the entire brigade sector and no Australian patrols were in No Man’s Land after 2.30 am. No formal raids or fighting patrols took place. Brigadier William Lesslie, the brigade commander, was furious when he found out that formal patrol activity had dropped off to this extent. He accused the line battalions of not giving their orders the ‘proper attention’ and issued specific orders for fighting patrols and raids, doubling the number of minor operations ordered by General Walker, at two formal operations per tour. The rebuff was clear: ‘Domination of No Man’s Land, the ascertaining of necessary information, and harassing the enemy will not be effected unless Battalions in the line act on the lines above directed.’⁵⁰

The orders led to a number of casualties in exchange for no identification or ground gained. On 21 May, Lieutenant Stan Viccars, an experienced officer and former pastoral station overseer, was killed while reconnoitring for a formal raid. The next night a formal raid under a box barrage found the German trenches empty, the garrison having retired at the first sign of a barrage. On 22 May three reconnaissance patrols of one officer and ten other ranks were sent out after midnight. One of these patrols was attacked and forced to withdraw, while two men were wounded.⁵¹

However, the number of daylight stealth raids actually increased. A few daring men trusted their judgement and skill in No Man’s Land over the formal operations they were being ordered to undertake at night. It was a pattern of behaviour and an ethos that increasingly differentiated the Australians from other troops.

On 21 May the 3rd Battalion received orders to conduct a formal raid during a gas projector attack. The raiders were ordered not to wear gasmasks because they hindered vision. Instead they were instructed to avoid low-lying ground such as shell holes. The choice between crouching in No Man’s Land strafed by German machine-gun bullets and choking on gas in a shell hole was not appealing. Before the formal raid went ahead, Sergeant Jack Bruggy, one of the battalion’s originals, crept from his post at 6 am. He crawled 500 yards through a corn crop and opened fire on a German post with his revolver. He shot the garrison and brought back a handful of identity tags:⁵² oval-shaped discs, worn around the neck, which featured a soldier’s name, date of birth, hometown and regimental details.

Bruggy had enlisted in 1914. He suffered a gunshot wound to his left knee at Gallipoli that was serious enough to see him discharged. He returned to Harden, New South Wales, where he had a wife and children. He re-enlisted and served on the Western Front, assuming his original regimental number, 308. An account of his stealth raid, told by Company Sergeant Major Pat Kinchington, implies that Bruggy might have known his company were due to do the gas projector raid, but decided to take action himself. Kinchington told Bean:

Bruggy [was] a big country man, 6’2” or so & square, fairly well informed & a favourite of [Captain] McDermid. This morning Bruggy had had his rum – [and probably] other men’s rum as well … he came into … [McDermid’s] HQ at the Paradise Estaminet & threw down five [identity] discs on the table. His revolver was caked up with mud. He said practically nothing.⁵³

McDermid asked Kinchington if he thought the discs were genuine. Kinchington noticed they were from different regiments and were weathered, implying that they had been ‘souvenired’ earlier. He challenged Bruggy to prove his stealth raid by taking him to the German post, if he were ‘game enough’.⁵⁴ Within a few minutes the two were crawling through the crop. Bruggy led Kinchington to the post. Kinchington saw four bodies lying prostate, and blood trails. He started to cut the identifying shoulder straps from one. The apparently lifeless corpse came to life and struck him hard on the arm. He shot the man and, with Bruggy, crawled back to company headquarters.⁵⁵ Kinchington acknowledged that Bruggy’s stealth raid was legitimate.

When General Walker heard about Bruggy’s raid, he was so astonished at his initiative that he ordered a reconnaissance plane to photograph the tracks the big countryman had made in the corn.⁵⁶ The image and reports of the stealth raid were sent throughout the division, serving as both an encouragement and a warning of what could be done in the crop by men with initiative and skill. The phrase ‘one-man raid’ was invented.⁵⁷

In contrast to Bruggy’s stealth raid, a formal raid by the 1st Battalion on 27 May was ‘doomed to failure’. In the dark and in high crops a number of raiders ‘strayed from the leaders’. Scout Sergeant Albert ‘Eddie’ Edwards reckoned the noise the men made in the crops ‘was loud enough to arouse the whole of the western front’. The enemy commenced throwing bombs and turned a machine gun on the raiders. Edwards gave the order to charge:

The German outpost fired one farewell volley … and then made off in all directions, over the back of the trench, along either side, in fact everywhere except forward. I chased one fat chap until I had emptied every chamber of my revolver at him. Finally giving up the chase … [another] member of the party to reach the objective was calling out something about the ‘cowardly buggars’.⁵⁸

For no tactical gain, two Australians were killed and five wounded.⁵⁹ Edwards found his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Bertie Stacy, waiting in the outpost line: ‘He seemed to be rather disappointed with our failure, although he realised that the party had done everything possible in the circumstances.’⁶⁰

A few days later, Edwards was ordered back into No Man’s Land, to reconnoitre for another formal night raid. This time, however, he embarked on his own version of a one-man daylight stealth raid and went way beyond the expectations of his commanding officer. In ‘a field of growing wheat about four-feet high, with numerous tracks running hither and thither’, he found a German strongpoint. Edwards saw a ‘tall fair-headed chap … busily cleaning a rifle’ while talking. Edwards pulled the pin on the only Mills bomb he carried, threw it at the German garrison, ‘and without waiting to see the result’ doubled back on his tracks, ‘followed by a hail of machine-gun bullets’. A few hours later he saw two more German posts on the opposite side of a field, about 200 yards away. He watched these posts for several hours from a hiding place at the edge of a crop. A German crept from a farmhouse and visited a series of posts. Edwards decided he had ‘seen enough’:

I took careful aim at him, but in the failing light I am afraid I missed him, for with a startled glance around he jumped for the nearest cover. After some minutes he emerged 50 or 60 yards further along, and I think I made a better shot this time. As I came back through our trenches the outposts wanted to know what war had been going on in No Man’s Land.

Edwards was, in his own words, ‘independent’ as a soldier.⁶¹ He was highly regarded in the 1st Battalion for his ‘very keen sense of direction’, which he attributed to summer holidays spent roaming the coast and hinterland of southern New South Wales as a boy. The army – that is, his battalion commander, probably on the advice of junior officers – noted his talent and built on it. Just a few weeks before the Hazebrouck campaign began on 11 April, Edwards went from a corporal in charge of a section, awarded a Military Medal for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’ at Third Ypres, to battalion scout sergeant.⁶² He described his ‘rambles’ in the outpost system as ‘great fun’.⁶³ He was confident and competent; beholden to no one but himself, he would spend hours alone and seemingly content as he hunted German posts and strongpoints in No Man’s Land. Dalton Neville and the bushmen Neil Maddox, Jack Bruggy, John Lean and Arthur Hall, along with other stealth raiders, seem to have had similar careers in that they were recognised as good soldiers before 1918 but proved exceptionally adaptable in the unprecedented battlefields that had opened up following the German offensives.

The outpost war at Hazebrouck was a stark contrast to the drudgery of military life and trench warfare that had become the infantryman’s lot, whereby, according to the bushman Private Bill Harney, ‘all initiative was gone’. In the trenches of 1916–1917:

The old days of the cattle stations where a man rounded up the cattle and used his own initiative – that’s all gone. You’re just a big cog in the machine and you’re just moving ahead, the whole heap of us, you’re part of a big mob.⁶⁴

But at Hazebrouck the Australians were unfettered by the routine of trench warfare and the close supervision that had moulded them into a mob. Lieutenant Harry Chedgey wrote that the ‘style of warfare suits us better and the men are keen and in excellent health … We fight in open fields, among hedges and farmhouses, and dig trenches all over the country and have got right away from fixed trench warfare.’⁶⁵ Stealth raiders were usually experienced frontline soldiers. Some were ‘hard doers’: city larrikins, like Snowy Carrick, Arthur Hall and David Morgan, who had been reprimanded by the army for a variety of ‘offences’ and in some cases court-martialled. However, the majority of the first stealth raiders were country-born or former pastoral and outback workers. After three years of trench warfare, might these men have found themselves marginally freer of the toil and the shackles that had imprisoned them in the trenches? They were now in their element.

The frontline soldiers were sick of dying or being mutilated by plans drafted by corps, division or brigade staff and left unquestioned by their own battalion commanders. The stealth raiders’ actions spoke to this feeling. They were some of the best men when it came to initiative and self-reliance; they were efficient killers; they wanted to be in at the kill; and they were confident to choose when. They did not want their battalion to be whittled away by relatively pointless minor operations.

Battalion commanders, brigadiers and the divisional commander, General Walker, were largely ambivalent towards the tactical innovation of these few men and made no doctrinal change. In fact, the orders for formal operations by night increased. The worst types of formal operations happened repeatedly in April and May, such as the disaster at Méteren on 22 April. However, setpiece battles were sometimes necessary. At the end of May, the men of the 1st Division were informed that they would be attacking Mont de Merris. Almost as soon as word got out, stealth raiders were in the fields and among the hedgerows seeking hostile machine-gun posts and snipers in anticipation of the formal attack. To the south, near the Somme River, a few men in the Australian Corps also started stealth raiding in daylight, when conditions suited them and often with the hope that their action would pre-empt formal operations.