The Advance to the Rhine
‘On 21 August 1918 the NZ Division—in strength equivalent to a British corps of three divisions—advanced from their trenches on the Somme and never returned to them. For the next 11 weeks the New Zealanders were constantly moving forward. Well-trained, equally skilled in open warfare, trench warfare and the set-piece battle, the NZ Division was a superb fighting machine. For the remainder of the war . . . it was used as one of the spearhead divisions of the British 3rd Army.’226
At 4.20 am on 8 August 1918, supported by over 400 tanks, 2000 guns and 800 aircraft, the British Fourth Army began the advance that would finally end the war on the Western Front. A combination of armour, surprise and the fighting skills of the spearhead Australian and Canadian divisions produced dramatic results, and by the afternoon of that day the heaviest fighting in the Battle of Amiens was over.
Between 26,000 and 27,000 German soldiers became casualties of war that day, most of them surrendering to the advancing Dominion troops. Hundreds of artillery pieces, machine guns and mortars were captured. Although stiffening German resistance slowed the advance in the days that followed, a 13-kilometre hole had been punched in the enemy lines across a 19-kilometre front. For the first time since 1914, Allied forces were free to manoeuvre in open country.
The German high command reacted with shock and near despair. Ludendorff described 8 August as ‘the black day of the German Army’, a day on which it had suffered its greatest defeat since the beginning of the war. By the time the Battle of Amiens ended on 11 August total Germans losses were 73,000 killed and wounded, and nearly 30,000 taken prisoner. The Kaiser admitted to Ludendorff that the German armies could no longer win the war.227
Russell doubted that the Allies would succeed in giving the Germans the ‘coup de grâce’ in 1918 because of manpower constraints, and his feeling that it was too soon to push the raw American troops in battle. ‘Without knowing what Foch and Haig have in their pockets,’ he wrote to Seddon, his former aide-de-camp, ‘I make a shrewd guess that there are not sufficient men available to do more than hold the Germans off with the help of a few counter-offensives, such as [has] been very successfully carried out.’228
Waiting with his division in reserve, Russell acknowledged the remarkable success of the Australian and Canadian attacks at the Battle of Amiens, though he was more than slightly envious of the reputation his fellow colonials were winning. ‘No doubt,’ he wrote to Seddon, ‘our turn will come soon.’229 He would not have to wait long. The New Zealand Division took its place in the front line of the great advance on 21 August as part of IV Corps of Byng’s Third Army. It was by now a well-trained and battle-hardened division, its four brigades making it numerically the strongest on the Western Front. The Third Army itself was the strongest of the four British armies in France, containing 13 divisions, supported by 200 tanks, nearly 1500 guns and 10 squadrons of aircraft.
In dense fog and semi-darkness on 21 August, the Third Army launched a surprise attack north of Albert in what was the second major offensive of August 1918. The New Zealand Division’s assault on the village of Puisieux at dawn caught the German defenders by surprise, netting over 200 prisoners and 30 machine guns. It was the first of many such captures the division would make in the coming months.
Russell’s response was low key; he noted in his diary: ‘General attack along our own and adjoining Corps fronts—fair success—our part a small one and [with] adjoining divisions converging we are practically squeezed out at the end of the day. Hart’s bde carried our share and did it well—about 200 prisoners, our casualties well under 100 . . . Winston Churchill called after lunch.’
On 24 August, the New Zealanders advanced again, sweeping the enemy from Loupart Wood and the villages of Grevillers and Biefvillers to reach the outskirts of Bapaume. That afternoon Russell and his IV Brigade commander, Brigadier-General Hart, rode forward to inspect their frontline positions. Everywhere squadrons of tanks, armoured cars and artillery were on the move, while fighter and spotter aircraft flew low overhead. ‘The whole scene,’ wrote Hart, ‘was very stirring and much less gruesome and awesome than the Somme, Messines, or Passchendaele.’230
The New Zealand division had now advanced 11 kilometres into German-held territory and was just 4 kilometres north of the scene of its bloody battles on the Somme in September and October 1916. Open warfare was now the norm: the roads were good, and the country was no longer pitted with shell craters. Horses and wagons could reach to within a kilometre or two of the battle line.
The next objective was Bapaume itself, in a struggle that would involve the division in one of the hardest-fought battles of its three years on the Western Front. The town occupied a commanding position and had already resisted heavy bombardment and several frontal attacks. Russell planned to avoid a direct assault on the town by enveloping it from the flanks and forcing the Germans to abandon it without a fight. Success did not come easily. It took further heavy bombardment and much hard fighting before the Germans finally pulled out of Bapaume to new defensive positions in the east. The final cost of victory was over 3000 New Zealand casualties, including 800 killed.
‘The Boche is being well harried,’ Russell wrote to his sister the day the Germans evacuated Bapaume. ‘The gain of ground is distinctly valuable: it puts Amiens, Paris, the Channel ports out of the question for the Boche this summer—so that we are now in a position to wait for the development of American strength. This being so I hope we shall be working quietly with a minimum of expenditure of life and a maximum of ammunition. The latter can be replaced, the former not so.’
There was to be no respite in the coming days for the New Zealanders, or for any other frontline division of Haig’s armies. On 30 August, they overcame stubborn German resistance to take the villages of Bancourt and Frémicourt. ‘His [the enemy’s] machine gunners are stout fellows, who fight until we are on top of them,’ noted the NZEF’s official correspondent. ‘The German High Command is ruthlessly sacrificing them in order to save the artillery.’231
At Russell’s direction, the New Zealanders advanced as they had done at Bapaume, bypassing villages and German strongpoints and leaving them to be mopped up by the units that followed. ‘Villages are only obstacles,’ he noted in his diary, ‘not ends in themselves.’ Russell kept in close touch with his troops by moving forward each day to advanced brigade headquarters. In this way, he gave his commanders both the freedom to plan their own battles and the support they needed to keep going.232
The New Zealand Division was now marching and fighting across open country almost untouched by war. Behind them now was ‘the lacerated, too familiar landscape of churned-up shellholes, hideous walls of wire, miry battered ditches, stricken villages and blasted woods’.233 Forests, valleys, ridges and spurs; rivers and canals; railway embankments and cuttings were surmounted one by one as the New Zealanders stayed at the cutting edge of the Third Army. Hart’s diary noted: ‘Our division still in the lead towards Berlin; there is usually an eastern bulge in the line when we go in.’234
On 31 August, the Australians captured Mont Saint-Quentin in one of the most brilliant actions of the war, and took the town of Péronne. On 2 September, Canadian and British forces broke through the Drocourt-Quéant Line southeast of Arras. In 12 days of stubborn fighting the Third and Fourth armies had driven 35 German divisions back across the old Somme battlefield, taking some 34,000 prisoners and 270 guns. The New Zealand Division took 1650 of these, and was now over 30 kilometres east of Hébuterne where it had first joined the offensive on 21 August.
On 9 September, Haig reported to Lord Milner at the War Office that in the preceding four weeks his forces had captured 77,000 German troops and 600 guns. Never in British military history had there been such a victory, he told Milner. Discipline in the German Army was clearly declining, and German troops were now unlikely to stand up to Allied attacks even in the strongest positions.235
The New Zealand Division had so far seen little evidence of that. They were now across the Canal du Nord, and on 12 September were ordered to capture Trescault Spur, just 5 kilometres from the great defensive wall of the Hindenburg Line. The Germans were determined to hold this ridge at all costs and had garrisoned it with some of their best troops, including a Jäger division.
In the dimly lit vault of a village cemetery, Russell and his staff directed the battle as attack was followed by counter-attack and the line swayed back and forward until midnight. Russell’s diary mentioned nothing of the severity of the fighting, noting only that the division had met stiff resistance from a Jäger division ‘of good repute’. While the New Zealanders had inflicted heavy losses on the Jägers and taken a large number of prisoners, the British 38th Division on the right, Russell complained, ‘did nothing, which hampered matters’.
The problem was one that dogged Russell’s men throughout the ‘100 Days’ offensive—the failure of flanking British divisions to get forward in several major attacks, forcing the advancing New Zealanders into a vulnerable salient. A further limitation on the success of his division, Russell noted, was the general refusal of British divisions to attack, as the New Zealanders almost invariably did, in the dark. The official correspondent wrote on 15 October: ‘Our men have made night fighting their specialty, which has resulted not only in the surprising of the enemy and the capture of villages, but has saved many casualties.’236
On 16 September, Russell wrote to Allen: ‘The men really have done extraordinarily well during the last month, which has given scope for their innate qualities such as they have not had before.’ His brigadiers and their subordinate commanders had shown plenty of drive and initiative, and the division was ‘anything but a one-man show . . . There is no one but, if he were lost tomorrow, could be suitably replaced at a moment’s notice. In this lies a great deal of our strength.’237
But with no guaranteed end to the war in sight, and still in indifferent health, Russell suggested again that the time had come for him to be replaced as commander of the New Zealand Division. He told Allen: ‘I have now held the position for three years, during which time I have been remarkably well served by all the commanders and my Staff. The men have always played their part faithfully and honestly. I cannot say too much for their fighting qualities. Consequently it is not astonishing that the Division has earned a pretty good reputation, though I say it myself. At the same time I have noticed in almost every line of life that a change is sometimes good.’238
In mid-September, at a time when the division was taken out of the front line and put into reserve for two weeks. The men were entertained with platoon, company and inter-battalion football games, sprints and relay races. NCOs and other ranks were grilled on their experiences of the previous month’s fighting, and a series of tactical exercises was arranged to put the lessons learnt into practice. Russell noted in his diary on 24 September: ‘Inspected 2/Auckland and 1/Wellington . . . Men wonderfully fit and cheery—the turnout far ahead of what one would have got 2 years ago.’
On 29 September, the division was put back into the line with orders to capture La Vacquerie village, the Welsh and Bonavis ridges, and to secure bridgeheads across the St Quentin Canal and the Escault River. In a brilliantly executed night attack, Russell’s brigades advanced nearly 6 kilometres across the mass of wire, trenches and strongpoints that was the Hindenburg Line, taking over 1400 prisoners, 44 artillery pieces and hundreds of machine guns. Welsh Ridge and La Vacquerie fell easily, and Bonavis Ridge after much hard fighting. Against stubborn German resistance, the division forced a crossing of the St Quentin Canal to capture the village of Crevecoeur, holding it against heavy shelling and repeated counter-attacks. Over 1000 prisoners were taken. Russell’s diary noted drily: ‘Attack (with British 62nd and 3rd Divisions) was tolerably successful on our part but sticky on left—consequently we gained but little ground and lost fairly heavily—it’s useless to depend on British divisions—they may succeed or they may not.’
By 5 October, the whole of the heavily fortified Hindenburg system was in British hands. The ‘wall of bronze in the west’ that Germany’s Imperial Foreign Minister, Admiral Paul von Hintze, had assured the German Reichstag would never be broken was now irretrievably shattered. ‘The Hindenburg Line is gone forever,’ intoned the NZEF’s official correspondent. ‘A great fire is burning in Cambrai . . . The whole horizon is grey with smoke. Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s destroying angels are busy with their firebrands—aware of the disaster which has overtaken them.’239
The Germans were destroying everything that might be of use to their pursuers. Abandoned towns and villages were set on fire, and roads, bridges and railway tracks were destroyed. Dugouts, houses, roads and wells were infested with booby-traps. The New Zealanders forced German prisoners to go first into such places and either remove the booby-traps or be blown up instead of their captors.
In the Battle of Cambrai on 8 October, the New Zealanders broke through the northern part of the Masnières Line to capture the villages of Esnes and Lesdain, followed by Beauvois, Fontaine and Viesly. On 10 October, the division took the village of Briastre, liberating 172 civilians who had been trapped in their cellars by the fighting. It then forced a passage across the River Selle and fought its way up to the heights of Bellevue. Russell wrote to his family: ‘The inhabitants of the villages we are now in receive us very cheerfully. For them, as they say, La Guerre est finie—now that they are out of the House of Bondage.’
By 21 October, the New Zealand Division had advanced 65 kilometres from its start line on the Somme and taken over 6000 prisoners, 49 artillery pieces and nearly 1000 machine guns. A young officer wrote: ‘One way and another we had hard fighting enough and it was mostly successful—always advancing and always mopping up lots of prisoners and guns . . . The attack of the Division was something like a series of waves breaking on the shore, one battalion after another pushing on.’240
On 23 October, the division made its longest advance of the counter-offensive—7 kilometres in a single day—to secure three bridgeheads across the Ecaillon River and capture the village of Beaudignies. Russell noted in his diary: ‘NZ Divn attacks at 8.20: Everything went smoothly. Little resistance and few prisoners—the 3rd Divn did well on our left—the 37 Divn on the right were sticky, getting a bad start. By night we had reached the Ecaillon and secured 3 bridgeheads . . . an exceptionally good performance on the part of Btn Cmdrs Stitt and Hargest.’ In the village of Solesmes, divisional officers bunked down in a beautiful old house which had once hosted the Kaiser on a visit to the Western Front.
The retreating German forces were now in a desperate state. Since 15 July, 250,000 German troops had been captured by the Allied armies, along with 4000 guns, and their supplies of fuel and ammunition were low. Everywhere lay the evidence of defeat—broken-down trucks and railway wagons, machine guns, trench mortars and abandoned stacks of military stores. Prince Rupprecht warned German Chancellor Prince Max: ‘Whatever happens, we must obtain peace before the enemy breaks into Germany; if he does, woe on us!’241
The final blow on the Western Front was delivered by the British Third and Fourth armies in the 10-day Battle of the Sambre. The Fourth Army took over 4000 prisoners and 80 guns. The Third Army was even more successful, its biggest success being the capture of the ancient medieval town of Le Quesnoy by the New Zealanders on 4 November.
Founded in the eleventh century, the old walled town had been captured by French Kings Louis X1 in 1447 and Henry II in 1552, the Spaniards in 1568, and the Austrians in 1793. Its cannon had fired on the English army in the Crecy campaign of 1336; and the Duke of Marlborough had ended his last campaign there in 1711. Russell and his New Zealanders were its latest besiegers in one of the last actions of the war.
Initially, Le Quesnoy looked to be a tough nut to crack. It was protected by 16-metre-high ramparts and surrounded by a wide, deep moat. On and around these ramparts the Germans had sited field guns and dozens of machine guns. Taking the town by frontal assault would mean bombarding it in advance, causing heavy damage to historic buildings and much loss of life among its civilian population. As at Bapaume, Russell planned to avoid this by encircling Le Quesnoy while his other brigades pressed on through the Forest of Mormal towards the River Sambre.
The attack opened at 5.30 on the morning of 4 November. The town was steadily enveloped and German positions on the ramparts were deluged with smoke and drums of burning oil. Prisoners were sent into the town with a message demanding a German surrender, and a similar note was dropped by aircraft. Before any reply could be received, men of the 3rd (Rifle) Brigade scaled the ramparts by ladder, just as medieval soldiers might have done 600 years before. Under cover of Lewis gun and mortar fire, they took its 1000-strong garrison by surprise, and once New Zealand troops were in the town, the Germans readily surrendered. In the main square, the German commander handed over his revolver and 400 of his men to a young New Zealand captain.
The joy of the French population at their liberation was unbounded. The French tricolour flew at every window, and the townspeople flocking out of their shelters under the ramparts went ‘joyfully hysterical’. Russell and one of his brigade commanders rode into the town, before going on to check the progress of their troops still fighting in the Forest of Mormal. A few days later, French President Henri Poincaré inspected a New Zealand guard of honour drawn up in the square and thanked them for what they had done for France.
That day, 4 November, was probably the division’s most successful day of the war. It had taken Le Quesnoy, Rompaneau, Villerau, Potelle, Le Carnoy, Jolimetz and Herbignies. By 5 November it had reached the eastern outskirts of the Forest of Mormal for a total advance of 26 kilometres. Over 2400 prisoners, 84 field guns and nearly 300 machine guns had been captured.
Behind the lines, German resistance was now nearing its end. The German Navy had evacuated the ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend, and on 19 October Admiral Scheer had ordered all German submarines to return to their bases. On 30 October, sailors of the German High Seas Fleet had mutinied and refused to take their ships to sea for a final and decisive battle with the British Grand Fleet. The German army was by now in a critical state.
The end to hostilities was declared at 11 am on 11 November 1918. World War I historian and novelist John Buchan described what followed: ‘There came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges to the sea.’242 Hart’s diary on the day lacked Buchan’s literary flair, but probably reflected the feelings of most: ‘So it is all over at last. Thank God for that. There was no jubilation. Each one asked himself and each other: “Now how soon can I get home?” ’243
The terms of the armistice accepted by Germany were harsh but predictable: immediate evacuation of Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine, and repatriation of all inhabitants of these areas who had been deported, imprisoned or held hostage. The German Army was required to surrender 5000 heavy guns and artillery pieces, 25,000 machine guns, 3000 trench mortars and 1700 aircraft. Sixteen battleships and battlecruisers, 8 light cruisers, 50 destroyers and all submarines were to be handed over to the Allies. All German troops in the east, including those in Russia, were to withdraw behind Germany’s 1914 frontiers. Allied troops would occupy all of Western Germany up to the left bank of the Rhine, including three bridgeheads across the Rhine at Mainz, Koblenz and Cologne.
The Germans had been driven to defeat on the Western Front by the growing military superiority of the Allied armies and the enormous loss of men and weaponry. Bolshevik propaganda had also taken its toll, but a greater factor was the war weariness of the German troops and their awareness of the miseries being endured at home as a result of the British naval blockade. Despite their tenacious and skilful rearguard actions, the loss of morale and fighting spirit in the German armies was eventually irreversible.
The seeds of defeat, however, were probably sown much earlier. Travers argues that the decisive events of 1918 were not so much the last months of the war but the 115 days of the Kaiserschlacht, between 21 March and 15 July. This period, in which Russell’s New Zealanders played an important part, cost the German army nearly a million men in casualties and prisoners, effectively destroying it as a combat force.244
For his part, Russell was pleased with what his division had achieved in the final months of the war. Between 21 August and 6 November 1918, it had taken 8765 prisoners, 145 guns, and 1263 machine guns, as well as large quantities of other war material. In the epic battles of Bapaume, Havrincourt-Epehy, Cambrai, the Second Battle of Le Cateau, the Selle and Sambre, the division had fought with skill and determination and shown an aptitude for open warfare that Russell always felt it possessed. Adapting rapidly to the switch from static trench warfare to a war of movement, the New Zealanders spearheaded the advance of Byng’s Third Army for the 11 weeks from 21 August to the Armistice. Russell was now in command of a citizen army ‘indistinguishable from a Regular formation, skilled and professional at every level. Despite strong defences and determined resistance, it was something the Germans could no longer match and defeat.’245
Allen regretted that Russell had lost the opportunity to command a British Army corps, although he was pleased that he was able to finish the war still in command of the New Zealand Division. He wrote to Russell: ‘You have earned a great name here and, so far as I understand, at the front as well.’246 Allen understood well. By now Russell had established a reputation as a first-ranked divisional general, and this had been acknowledged at the top levels of the British Army.
But Russell’s soldiering was not over yet. The day after the Armistice there was some trouble in the ranks over the news that the division was to go to Germany on garrison duty instead of being immediately demobilised and sent home. Russell’s diary of 13 November noted a disturbance in the form of a meeting called by ‘an agitator of the name of King, who I understand, has achieved notoriety in NZ. Spoke to the men, and took no notice—think no danger but must watch out for Bolshevism.’ The British high command had been preoccupied with the threat of Bolshevism since hearing of outbreaks in Germany in the last months of the war. Godley, in fact, had told Allen that the army of occupation might be used to put down Bolshevism in Germany.
Unrest in the ranks following the Armistice was not exclusively a New Zealand Division problem. Similar incidents were occurring with British, Australian and Canadian troops, and for much the same reasons—restless men fed up with war and military discipline, and wanting to get back to their families and the civilian life they once knew.
On 28 November, Russell’s division began its 250-kilometre march to the German frontier through northern France and across Belgium. On the roads it encountered streams of German prisoners and civilians moving back, but in every town the New Zealanders entered—Bavai, Mauberge, Liège, Namur, Huy, Charleroi and Verviers—the welcome was the same. At Verviers, near the German border, the townspeople ‘went mad as we marched in. Otago was in the lead on this march and girls hung garlands of flowers around my horse’s neck as we went along and rushed the ranks to kiss any man they liked the look of . . . we stuck their flowers in our hatbands and the muzzles of our rifles.’247
After three days in Verviers, the division marched by night over the German frontier and entrained for the city of Cologne. On 20 December, the first battalion of New Zealand infantry crossed the Hohenzollern Bridge over the Rhine, followed closely by the artillery. ‘There, under the great bronze statue of the ex-Kaiser himself, passed the long column of Diggers, guns and wagons, all pretty rough after their continuous trekking, but mighty serviceable looking in spite of, or rather because of, that fact.’248
With the hostilities now over, the challenge was how to keep the men ‘amused, interested, and occupied’ while on garrison duty in Germany. In August, Russell had written to Defence Minister Allen asking for information on the employment prospects in New Zealand for returned soldiers—where the shortage of labour was being felt, what lines of business were likely to be attractive, what the future of fruit growing and other industries was likely to be, in what areas public money was likely to be spent—‘anything in fact which will give the men an idea of what they can look forward to on their return to NZ’.
By December 1918, 50 scholarships to British universities were in place and 50,000 pounds of government money had been earmarked for Russell’s educational and vocational schemes. As Reg Gambrill put it: ‘He [Russell] knew how men’s minds could atrophy under the deadening influence of war but he did his utmost to arrest this easy, fatalistic drift.’249
The demobilisation of the division began at the end of December 1918, based on length of service. Inglis spoke for many, as the New Zealand troops packed their kit for their return to England and then by troopship for home: ‘Notwithstanding the imperative call of home, it was sad pleasure to break with the old life and part from those with whom we had experienced what W.H. Nevinson has called “the highest of all human joys”, perilous companionship in a cause they counted good.’250
Russell was unable to remain with his men to the end. On doctor’s orders he handed command of the division over to Brigadier-General Napier Johnston, and on 1 February left again for the south of France to recuperate from a bout of bronchial pneumonia. His farewell message to his division acknowledged its exceptional fighting record. In its three years in the line, he wrote, the division had gained every objective given it. The only exception was Passchendaele, which had ‘added yet fresh laurels for tenacity and resolution in the face of insuperable difficulties’. He urged the men, on their return to New Zealand, to lay aside class and sectional interests for the common good.251
All was not well, however, on the family front. By this time the Spanish flu epidemic was at its height; its final toll in New Zealand alone was 8000 people, and 20 million worldwide. A cablegram from Gertrude on 8 December told Russell that his immediate family was safe, but that two of her brothers, Edric and Cyril, had died of the flu. It was not the end of tragedy for the Russell family. Guy’s younger brother Claude and his wife and only son died of tuberculosis just as the war in Europe ended, and his sister Evelyn of pneumonia. They were followed by Dick Riddiford, a former member of Russell’s staff and the man he regarded as his closest friend in France. ‘It is the loss of a brother,’ Russell confided to his diary.
By now, Russell himself was also at risk. In early 1919, he collapsed in a train between Paris and Calais after spending two weeks caring for his sick sister Gwen, and his daughter Jan, who was recovering from the Spanish flu. Ill and exhausted by the strain of four years of unbroken command, Guy Russell was now badly in need of rest.