INTRODUCTION

‘A stealth raid is made up on the spot by a group of determined men’

The enduring images of the First World War are of trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, shellfire and mud, images intimately connected with the battles of the Somme in 1916 and Flanders in 1917.a But the German offensives of March and April 1918 swept through the old Somme and Flanders battlefields into farmland untouched by the war. In the late spring and early summer of 1918 the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) fought in a landscape of ‘marvellous beauty’, among fields of freshly sown crops and pleasantly undulating terrain and, in French Flanders, hedges and farm buildings.¹ So open was the front that neither side knew where enemy posts were, and there were no continuous lines of trenches. This was not the war that the men had become used to. The strategic situation also was unprecedented; in 1916 and 1917 Australian infantrymen were used as assault troops in offensive battles, but from April to July 1918 the British Army, including the AIF, expected the Germans would attack.

In the fields of the Somme, and at Hazebrouck, 60 miles to the north, where the Australians met the German advance, tired and weary men revelled in nature. Red poppies and brilliant blue cornflowers were in bloom; hares and rabbits were seen frequently; the great game bird of the French farmers, the pheasant, was laying its eggs in the fields; and the grating call of the corncrake was constant at night. The old Flemish and French farmers carrying shotguns over one arm, accompanied by grandsons thumbing cartridges, were gone. Many Australian country boys commented on the great shame it was that these old men and their womenfolk would not be around to harvest what looked like a bumper crop. Corporal Thomas Quinn, a farmer from Mount Bryan in South Australia, wrote:

My Dear People … The weather is still very nice & there are some nice crops about the country we are fighting in. I have seen some crops in no-mans land that I would like to try a binder in, but it would be rather unhealthy there just at present.²

The sun was warmer every day and the hours of daylight longer, increasing the growth of the crop and making the front line humid and sleepy, interrupted occasionally by gusting winds and rain.

In these conditions a few daring low-ranking Australian infantrymen, alone among all the armies on the Western Front, initiated stealth raids without orders. Sergeant John Rafferty, 11th Battalion, wrote:

a stealth raid is made up on the spot by a group of determined men … Patrols might report enemy post in front and you decide with the arms you have in the front line to take it.³

Men of skill would creep up on their enemy, keeping him in their line of sight without leaving cover. Here the personal characteristics of intelligence, ingenuity and daring were combined with professional competence: the ability to employ the full range of weapons at the disposal of the platoon, and in many instances a bushman’s skill to navigate crops, rivers, streams and gullies, to attack and then swiftly return to their posts. This was not what any infantry had done in 1916–1917, and it was unique in the British Army then and for months ahead. Precept had it that higher command ordered setpiece battles, while brigade or divisional headquarters ordered trench raids; these were often planned for weeks beforehand, and provided there was time, the men tasked with the job would be taken back to the rear and trained on ground similar to that they would have to go over. Battalion commanders, headquartered in the front line, also organised fighting patrols, typically consisting of an officer, 20 men and a Lewis gun: a light machine gun, weighing 28 pounds, with a distinctive barrel-cooling shroud and top-mounted pan magazine, which was the heaviest weapon carried by a platoon. These ‘formal operations’, such as setpiece battles and trench raids, might be supported by artillery, trench mortar, heavy machine guns and sometimes gas.⁴ Yet in the period covered in this book – from 13 April 1918, when all five Australian divisions were committed against the German offensives, to 18 September 1918, as the Australians made their penultimate advance in the Aisne – a few daring Australians attacked enemy posts without orders, often in daylight and with only the weapons in their posts, and from July 1918 onwards schooled others in the British Army in their methods. In this book I call these men stealth raiders.

At 9 am on 18 May 1918, the 18th Battalion received orders that it would be attacking the German-held village of Ville-sur-Ancre that night. It was a hot, enervating morning. Some of the Australians had slept among the equipment they were to carry into battle that night, reckoning, ‘The Hun will be asleep too.’ Ninety yards from the Australian line the Germans manned an advanced machine-gun post, partially hidden by a crop of corn in No Man’s Land. The 18th Battalion sentries knew it was occupied because sniping had been active and every so often a German would be seen throwing a ‘bully beef’ tin of excrement into the field. But no tins had been thrown for some time; the Australians were convinced the Germans were asleep. Lieutenant Alex Irvine, a station overseer from Wanaaring, in outback New South Wales, sensed a ‘golden opportunity’.⁵ He proposed to capture the post immediately, by creeping up on it through dead ground and surprising the garrison, and using the bayonet rather than bombs to avoid arousing the German front. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Murphy, agreed and decided not to ask for permission from brigade headquarters for fear of stalling the plan.

What happened next was described by Lieutenant Joe Maxwell, VC, MC and Bar, DCM, 18th Battalion, one of Australia’s most decorated soldiers of the First World War, as the ‘finest individual act of audacity – if one could call it individual’ – that ‘I witnessed … during the war’.⁶

Irvine and 17 volunteers jogged across the dead ground in No Man’s Land, trampling the ears of corn beneath their boots. They moved in a line, spaced a few yards apart, like a rugby team sweeping into attack, each man visualising his opponent. They leapt into the post and captured 22 sleeping Germans and a machine gun. Irvine herded the prisoners, carrying their gun back to his own post. The stealth raid took ten minutes to plan and seven minutes to execute.⁷ It was so swift and silent Germans in a nearby trench had no idea their machine gun had been captured.

One thing that made stealth raids so attractive to frontline soldiers was that they defeated the enemy at no great cost. To the men of the 18th Battalion, Irvine’s stealth raid saved casualties the machine gun would have inflicted that night during the attack on Ville-sur-Ancre. It had been a bold stroke. A decision to raid without orders could land a junior officer in trouble, if things went wrong. But in this instance success had mitigated wilful disobedience of doctrine. After three years of heavy casualties and frequent failures when operations were left in the hands of staff officers and higher commanders, the survivors of 1918 saw stealth raiding as a virtue.

Yet only a few Australian soldiers were stealth raiders. Stealth raiders were the exception rather than the rule, making them all the more remarkable. Lance Corporal David Wilson, 24th Battalion, heard of a stealth raider who ‘got into trouble for his silly action … He acted without orders & this sort of thing is not allowed.’⁸ In 1918 Australian infantrymen were in action so often that there was little time or incentive for ‘buying into a fight’.⁹ As Corporal Len Jones, 3rd Battalion, put it, ‘The people in charge … just drove as hard as they could.’¹⁰ Front-line soldiers repeatedly ‘hopped the bags’ in formal operations, including battles, patrols and raids, and also endured routine and exhausting labour. Platoon commander Lieutenant Bob Traill, 1st Battalion, described the workload in the outpost system in July 1918:

working hours … are only from 10.30 [pm] to 3.15 [am] … 2 men put on a listening post … changed every hour, complete digging the trench for the platoon post; send out a patrol of 4; send 2 fatigue parties up to C.H.Q. [Company Headquarters] for food; and send 3 parties up for wiring and working materials, wire the platoon front, start digging sleeping possies and keep sentries in the trench all the while, with men to relieve them.¹¹

Platoons that were at minimum strength – at most 28 men and often as few as a dozen – in the posts closest to the enemy had to do this work. According to Lance Corporal Harrie Cave, 1st Battalion:

While you are right up in front of ‘Fritz’ it seems, when you look back towards our rear, that an un-bridgeable … gully separates you from it … Movement of any kind on terra firma is not safe within a certain distance of ‘No Man’s Land’ … we who man the trenches for the four or more days @ a stretch have to emulate the despised old ‘Bunny’ – come out of our ‘dugouts’ @ dusk & sneak in again by dawn … We down … in the bottom of the narrow trench, ‘camouflage’ ourselves with blankets … & try to enjoy the unnatural & well-earned rest, called sleep – daylight sleep. Watch has to be kept on No Man’s Land just the same because there’s no saying what’s on the ‘cards’.¹²

When not in the front line the infantry was used as a labour force, building further defences in anticipation of a German attack. From April to September 1918, the Australian infantry was always within the range of the German heavy guns and aerial bombers, and seldom relieved from the outpost, support or reserve line. Faced with this workload and the accompanying strain on the nerves, and conditioned by years of trench warfare, most men took few risks beyond what they were ordered to. Private Bert Bishop MM, 55th Battalion, held that the attitude was, ‘If you want me to go, you’ll have to detail me.’¹³ Historian Simon Robbins notes that, after the German Army’s first withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in March 1917, for British troops ‘Three years of trench warfare had left its mark’ and it was ‘a matter of comment at the time’ that ‘the stickiness of many operations was not due to the mud but what was called trenchitus of the brain’.¹⁴ Sickness rates were also high. For instance, in May and June 1918, the 5th Battalion lost more casualties through sickness than enemy action.¹⁵ Stealth raiders overcame all this hardship to launch aggressive attacks on the enemy. But as these men were still in the minority, we must ask: Who were they? Why did they do it? And how significant were their actions?

I was drawn to stealth raiders on the advice of Professor Bill Gammage, author of the classic The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War. My quest to answer the questions above led to a PhD, supervised by Bill. At our first meeting, way back in 2010, Bill told me that in his opinion the topic of Australian ‘peaceful penetration’ in 1918 was perhaps the last original work that could be written on the Australian soldiers of the First World War. He warned it may be an impossible task, as the actions of these men did not derive from orders. Official sources, and the writings of generals, would only reveal holes in the historical record. To write about ‘peaceful penetration’, or stealth raiders, I would have to immerse myself in the diaries, letters and memoirs written by the men of the lowest ranks who were there in 1918.

I dug deep into the private records of soldiers held by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; the Western Australian Army Museum; and the state libraries of Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia. I also read the private records of British soldiers, who fought alongside Australian troops in 1918, held by the Imperial War Museum, London. I read every diary, letter, memoir and manuscript written by Australian soldiers of 1918 held in these institutions. My research also included reading the dozens of published diaries and memoirs of Australian soldiers, and published battalion histories, as well as the official war diaries of Australian battalions, brigades and divisional headquarters relating to the period March to September 1918. As I bore into it, names of notable stealth raiders started to emerge. I contacted their descendants. Talking and corresponding with the sons, daughters and grandchildren of stealth raiders made writing this book a deeply personal adventure. Although 100 years have passed, the memories of men in this book still resonate profoundly in families around the country.

The more I learned about stealth raiders the more their experiences challenged my own preconceptions and many orthodox historical interpretations of the AIF in 1918. For instance, the small-unit tactics described in this book have been commonly known as ‘peaceful penetration’. The official historian Charles Bean adopted the phrase in Volume VI of his official history, published in 1942, and it has been used ever since. But I found that Australian soldiers did not use the term. They had a variety of expressions to describe what they were doing: ‘kidnapping’, ‘stonkering’, ‘stoush’, ‘one-man raid’, ‘sport’, ‘the cuckoo game’, ‘minor enterprise’, ‘daylight raid’, ‘epic’ and ‘stealth raid’.

Historians have not tended to question Bean’s use of the term ‘peaceful penetration’. Perhaps this is not surprising because few historians have written about the actions of Australian soldiers in 1918, except for the battles of Villers-Bretonneux, Hamel, Amiens and Mont St Quentin. The most extensive accounts of ‘peaceful penetration’ appear in short passages in books that cover the entire range of Australian soldiers’ experiences during the war.¹⁶

My reading of hundreds of firsthand accounts by Australian soldiers convinced me to replace ‘peaceful penetration’ with a term that was used by the men. ‘Peaceful penetration’ was used by higher command; it did not emanate from the original stealth raiders, who viewed the battlefield from the posts closest to the enemy and understood that what they did was never ‘peaceful’. Stealth raids were initiated by men of the lower ranks and began in April 1918, whereas divisional and Australian Corps headquarters adopted a policy of ‘peaceful penetration’ in July. Stealth raiders inspired it, but it was not the same.

This book is structured as a chronological account to show how stealth-raiding tactics evolved and spread. Wherever Australians fought in 1918, a few daring men initiated stealth raids. To capture how distinctively Australian this type of initiative was, the chapters alternate between stealth raiders in the Australian Corps defending Amiens, in the Somme, and stealth raiders in the 1st Australian Division attached to British XV Corps defending the vital rail hub at Hazebrouck in French Flanders, which connected the British Army to the channel ports and Great Britain. Each chapter includes biographies of some of the more notable stealth raiders: colourful characters, men of great practical skill and ethos, with their senses of humour intact. In their diaries, the words of these men evoke the pathos of their situation.

The descriptions of the environment where stealth raids occurred are based on firsthand accounts and my exploration of the old battlefields of the Somme and French Flanders. I visited the sites named in this book with my father, Ken, and my then fiancée, now wife, Anna, in the European spring and summer of 2012. Armed with trench maps, diaries, notepad and camera, I found that these rural landscapes remain recognisable, or at least it was easy to conceptualise how they were a century ago. Many of the farmhouses and roads marked on trench maps used in 1918 are extant. Crops still grow in the same fields enclosed by the same hedges. Even on the outskirts of Villers-Bretonneux, where the light industrial area has crept down the old Roman road to Warfusée, the remnants of an orchard where stealth raiders slipped into the German 108th Division’s main line of defences still stand amid the car yards. Anyone with an eye for terrain and a trench map can appreciate how vital dead ground, ridgelines and natural cover were in this war of isolated posts and vast spaces of country – latent with the potential to be explored and conquered between April and September 1918.

Stealth Raiders: A Few Daring Men in 1918 presents history as seen from the outpost in 1918, told by the men in crops and rural landscapes close to the enemy. Their thrilling exploits are brought to life in their own words in order to challenge some long-established positions from the firm ground of primary evidence.

Chapters 1 to 4 describe how stealth raiders took advantage of the unsettled nature of the outpost system. Some men explicitly sought ways to avoid costly trench raids. By 1918 the men ‘hated’ formal raids and minor operations because they ‘brought always intense local shelling and often painful losses’. Bean held that, in April 1918,

each front-line battalion knew that, if its nightly patrols in No Man’s Land could seize … small posts or patrols, or even single men from any of them, the need for a full-dress [formal] raid generally disappeared’.¹⁷

In Backs to the Wall: A Larrikin on the Western Front, the stealth raider Lieutenant George Mitchell called this the ‘modification’ of orders.¹⁸

As spring turned to summer, changing seasonal conditions spurred a few men to go beyond modification to innovation. The growth of crop in the outpost system, and the German tendency to withdraw as soon as they heard a patrol or were warned of a trench raid by a bombardment, made the tactics used in 1917, and arguments such as Bean’s in favour of nightly patrols, difficult to continue. Australian battalions increasingly found that even the most experienced and trained patrollers and trench raiders could fall foul of the ground and the darkness. Several respected junior officers and men were lost to ambush or indirect machine-gun and friendly fire. The men found these losses the more regrettable because, with reinforcements next to none, experienced men were practically irreplaceable. Nevertheless, higher command – brigade headquarters and above – continued to order nightly fighting patrols and raids.

One of the radical arguments of this book is that the stealth raiders embarked on their raids often without direct orders and almost always as a means of offering an alternative to the rigid plans of higher commanders. Still wedded to the idea of formal raids, preceded by artillery action and involving large numbers of troops, which invariably caused heavy casualties, the commanders took little notice of the objections of their troops. The stealth raiders argued that if the objective could be gained by better and less expensive use of troops, then they would act outside of formal orders. Stealth raiders developed successful small-unit tactics, which had eluded the commanders for so long.

Jeffrey Grey, one of Australia’s most distinguished military historians, called peaceful penetration ‘small-unit tactics at its very best’. But Grey went on to diminish the importance of stealth raids by claiming that such tactics ‘do not win wars, or battles’.¹⁹ Stealth Raiders shows that Grey’s view is simply a misreading of history and a misreading of the role of stealth raids in the Australian Imperial Force in 1918.

Grey was particularly wrong in regards to battles, as becomes clear from the events described in chapter 5 onwards. On 8 July 1918, Second Lieutenant Russell Colman, the youngest officer in the 27th Battalion, initiated a series of stealth raids that captured all of the objectives General John Monash intended to capture in a second Battle of Hamel. The stealth raids made a formal battle unnecessary, saving casualties the AIF could ill afford. In the same week, in French Flanders, a few men of the 1st and 4th Battalions captured half the opposing German division’s front line before either their own headquarters or the German commanders were aware of it, for the loss of three men. Bean interviewed several of the stealth raiders and thought:

On that day there must have been 20 performances at the very least every one of which would have gained a V.C. if it had been a separate action or an enterprise carried out by some less enterprising troops.²⁰

On 30 July 1918 the 1st Division captured the fortified village of Merris in a unique formal battle, which combined an all-arms barrage with stealth-raiding tactics. A few Australian stealth raiders of the 10th Battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Wilder-Neligan, captured more Germans than there were Australian infantrymen in the attack. The importance of stealth raiders in this victory has not been previously recognised or acknowledged. These actions are described in detail in chapter 6.

One of the persistent tensions in this book is the ignorance, reticence and obstruction of generals and a certain type of officer versus the self-reliance of the stealth raider, and the self-aggrandisement of commanders and those with the power to influence the historical record for short-term or long-term gain. In the last battles of the war Bean wrote:

All of us knew of instances – I personally found them to occur more often than not – in which the commander’s report on an action contained important inaccuracies. Commanding officers, for example, constantly – and naturally – believed and reported that some movement made by their troops was the result of an order issued by them, when it had actually been initiated and carried out by a company commander or one of his men on the spot before the order from above arrived – if ever it did.²¹

Such was the case with the capture of Chipilly Spur, tactically important high ground overlooking the Somme River. Monash claimed that Chipilly Spur was captured on his orders by an Australian brigade and the American 131st Regiment, after a British division had failed to take it.²² But the spur was actually captured by six Australians – two NCOs (non-commissioned officers) and four privates – led by one of the NCOs, Company Quartermaster Sergeant Jack Hayes, using stealth raid tactics. On 9 August the British battle to capture Chipilly Spur had been raging for 30 hours, when the six Australians decided to cross the Somme River. They captured the village of Chipilly and the Chipilly Spur – the right-flank objective of a British division, some 15,000 men – during the most decisive battle of the war. This event was the supreme stealth raid. Chapter 7 gives the fullest account yet written on the capture of Chipilly Spur. The story tells us a great deal about the sophistication and ingenuity of the diggers and their achievements in the last battles of the war.

Captain Alf Carne MC, an original of the 6th Battalion, who fought in the front line throughout the war and witnessed several stealth raids, believed that they brought the best of the infantry to ‘such a pitch of fighting efficiency as worthily to play a part in the great series of battles’ that opened when the Allied counteroffensive began at Amiens on 8 August.²³ Many frontline soldiers voiced similar arguments in their own notes and diaries, but their viewpoint has been neglected in recent times. Today, the prevailing view among historians attributes the AIF success after the 8 August counteroffensive to General Monash and the tactical training of the infantry.

Historian Robert Stevenson argues that the improved tactical performance of the 1st Australian Division in 1918 can be directly attributed to changes in its training regime in 1917. This seems broadly true of all the Australian divisions; the training in 1917 gave the infantry a new emphasis on platoons and platoon weapons. The ideal platoon consisted of 40 men arranged into smaller sections of bombers, Lewis gunners, riflemen and rifle-bombers. But in 1918 Australian platoons were never at full strength. A smaller number of men had to carry the burden of the work of storming and capturing enemy strongpoints. Lessons learned in the fighting against German pillboxes in Flanders in 1917 were reiterated in training and undoubtedly increased the cohesion and effect of the fire and movement tactics of the platoon, as did an increase in the number of Lewis guns to 24 per battalion.

But training alone cannot account for stealth raids; in the AIF there was no training for it. In 1917 the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) promulgated a new doctrine that guided the British Army and the Australian Corps staff for the rest of the war. The foundational documents were Instructions for the Training of Divisions for Offensive Action (SS135) and Instructions for the Training of Platoons for Offensive Action, 1917 (SS143).²⁴ Neither mentioned stealth raids. Stealth raiders made use of the platoon weapons and adapted their tactics in entirely new ways. Training certainly played a part, as did the experience of patrolling in No Man’s Land, albeit in vastly different conditions, in 1916 and 1917, but they should not be overstated. Stevenson is closer to the mark when he acknowledges that ‘peaceful penetration’ or stealth raids allowed Australian infantry platoons to fine-tune their tactical skills, within the context of frontline experience.²⁵

Historian Peter Pedersen argued that ‘peaceful penetration’ was made possible because the Australians faced ‘inferior trench divisions’.²⁶ Yet stealth raiders vanquished the worst and the best of the German Army, including first-class divisions that spear-headed the Michael offensive, and the elite 4th Division and 27th Württemberg Division, among the best in the German Army.

Did the ground on which the Australians fought make stealth raids possible? Were other troops held back by unfavourable terrain and conditions like trench warfare in sectors in Flanders and Arras as opposed to the Somme? In Flanders, British and Australian troops occupied outposts in the same rural environment – yet it was the Australians who gained a reputation for stealth raids. The British divisions serving next to them acknowledged it. Firsthand accounts indicate that ground was important, but initiative, both individual and collective, more so. Lieutenant Cyril Lawrence wrote proudly of stealth raiders in action near Strazeele on 11 July 1918, ‘[t]he Tommies next door just sat and watched. They had no orders to go out – our boys had no orders not to go out, just the difference.’²⁷ Writing in 1918, Alf Carne held that the stealth raiders exhibited qualities the Australian admired more than any others in a ‘digger’: ‘ingenuity, resourcefulness and personal initiative’.²⁸

When it came to stealth raiding, the men, like Carne, and their commanders, British and Australian, and Bean – the diggers’ most intimate observer and sympathiser – held that these qualities were more marked in the Australian bushman, or country man. Yet it has become a fashion to discredit the view that these qualities were inherent in the very way of life of some Australians before the war. A host of books has been published to this end, including Graham Wilson’s Bully Beef & Balderdash: Some Myths of the AIF Examined and Debunked and Jean Bou’s Light Horse: A History of Australia’s Mounted Arm.²⁹ Historians critical of the bushman explanation tend to see the infantryman as a product of the machine-line efficiency of discipline and training. Stealth Raiders challenges this orthodoxy, which dismisses the importance of bush skills and values in the first AIF. To disavow the importance of bush skills among that generation, and to ignore the hold of the bush ethos on Australian mateship in 1918, fails two important tests of the historian; the attitude is anachronistic, and it ignores primary evidence.

British and Australian commanders dating back to the Boer War recognised that the bush skills and casual attitude of some Australian soldiers were a product of the rural environment in which they had grown up. In 1901, a British officer, E. P. H. Bingham, gave an instructive lecture to British officers that was later published as ‘The Australian Soldier’. Bingham affirmed the value of the Australian bushmen during the open warfare on the South African veldt.

The statistics of all the 204 stealth raiders mentioned in this book – including biographical detail on the place of residence and occupation prior to the war – show that the majority of stealth raiders did come from rural, or bush, backgrounds. Bush skills certainly gave stealth raiders an edge in the warmer conditions and relatively open terrain of the Somme and near Hazebrouck in French Flanders, and the bush ethos, however supposedly mythical, contributed to the motivation behind stealth raids.

The lower ranks championed personal freedoms over entitlement, and linked a heightened sense of independence and initiative with a distinctly Australian ‘bush ethos’. In the fighting ranks, the mythical values and virtues of the Australian bushman – laconic humour, comradeship, suspicion of authority and a high premium on initiative and resourcefulness – had been popularised through the works of Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy, Banjo Paterson and contributors to the Bulletin. This set of values was key to the self-image of the Australian worker and soldier. But while most were happy to adopt the ethos because it was a point of difference from rigid British Army discipline, and their own Australian commanders, why did only a few daring men act on it by initiating stealth raids?

Many firsthand accounts point to the civil society that produced men with these traits. Stealth raids were a way to avert formal raids, rescue mates, avenge mates, collect souvenirs and war trophies, or show skill and initiative and speed up the end of the war. Stealth raiders considered all these virtues to be linked to civilian qualities: freedom, initiative, independence and solidarity in the lower ranks. Stealth raiders and their admirers frequently compared their initiative with the supposed ‘stickiness’, or lack of initiative, of others, including mates, sections, platoons, companies, battalions and, particularly, English troops. Australian disparagement of the formal discipline of the British Army recurs throughout the accounts of stealth raids; the Australian perceived British Army discipline to be a chain around the neck of the ‘Tommy’, leading to their pity and contempt for English troops. The stealth raider acted on a distinctly Australian bush ethos. While others waited in the posts for orders, ‘like them old Roman soldiers, that you read about, that stood to their posts when the lava went over their head’,³⁰ the stealth raiders stayed daring, resourceful and deadly effective.

Stealth Raiders: A Few Daring Men in 1918 is an original and radical reappraisal of the Australian infantryman at the peak of his powers. It challenges the historical neglect they have received since Bean laid down his pen in 1942.