#KW/272 Leading Seaman Fred Hattersley
NELSON BATTALION, ROYAL NAVAL VOLUNTEER RESERVE
TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD FRED HATTERSLEY WAS WAITING to attack with the Nelson Battalion. Born between Sheffield and Huddersfield, before going to war Fred was a trammer at the Old Silkstone Colliery at Dodworth, near Barnsley. His father and two brothers were miners there and even his younger brother, Ernest, was working at the colliery by the age of 13 as a screen boy. Fred had originally enlisted in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in September 1914 with another brother, Charles, eight years his senior. Six days later both transferred to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and were originally in the Benbow Battalion until reshuffling took place at Crystal Palace after the Antwerp debacle. Both brothers then found themselves in the Nelson by the end of the year. Charles was presently stationed at a depot in Blandford, Dorset, so at 5:30pm on 12th November Fred moved out without his brother towards his battalion’s assembly positions.
Come zero hour the following morning, south of the Ancre, Gough’s men would be pushing out from the area around Schwaben Redoubt towards Grandcourt in the distance. The main attack would be north of the river and would include the Royal Naval Division, attacking the original German defences that had been assaulted in vain on 1st July. Since then there had been months of active trench warfare in the area and plenty of time for the Germans to bolster their defences. The likes of Fred Hattersley and his naval comrades would be attacking parallel to the river. The Hood and Hawke battalions would advance first and take the first objective. The Drake and Nelson would then follow to leapfrog over them to head for the next, which was labelled as a green line on their maps. Then the initial attackers would jump over them to go forward again, and so forth.
The anticipation, mingled with fear as 5:45am approached, was almost unbearable:
No one can look back on the anxiety of that night without emotion. It was not only the culmination of weeks of agonising preparation, it was a gambler’s throw.
This was the last big push of the Somme campaign. Planning was intricate, deliberate. The Nelson Battalion, numbering less than 500 men, had gone over its orders again and again. Officers had held conferences and explained every detail so that every single one of their men knew exactly what was expected of him. But war doesn’t go to plan.
To begin with, as zero hour approached, the battlefield was shrouded in wet fog. Fred could not see further than 30 yards. Assembled on a forward slope, along taped lines, the signal to attack came when the ferocity of the British artillery bombardment suddenly increased. The men of the Hawke Battalion ahead vanished like spectres into the fog. The Nelson were supposed to wait until their counterparts had advanced 150 yards and then follow, but they now had no way of knowing when that was. After a rough interval they began to advance. Fred may have had some inkling as to how far the Hawke had progressed when the sound of German machine guns came from within the mist. The enemy barrage was negligible but as the leading battalion had got within sight of their objective, the Germans had opened a storm of rapid fire from in between their front two lines. At that point the last of Fred’s unit were crossing the British front line into no-man’s-land.
In front of them the Hawke Battalion was being ripped to shreds, nearly 400 of the officers and men becoming casualties early in the attack and many of them in falling on a German strong point in their path. Behind them the Nelson came under the same murderous fire. Blinded by thick fog and now smoke, Fred could hear the fierce British artillery barrage and the rattle of the machine guns. Somehow he and his comrades managed to get through the confused fight going on ahead, but they had lost pace with the protective artillery barrage creeping forward in front of them. The first two waves managed, after hand-to-hand fighting at the point of a bayonet, to get on. This savage fighting, ‘virtually without any assistance from the artillery’, had decimated their weakened companies. The rear Nelson waves met even more resistance, subjected to heavy enfilading machine-gun fire and accumulating crippling casualties. They lost cohesion among themselves and direction, and, except for small detached parties, ceased to exist as a fighting force.
Fred Hattersley’s battalion had been annihilated in the first two lines of German trenches before they could get anywhere near their later objectives. The combination of the mist, the lack of officers who got forward and a not wholly effective artillery barrage had doomed the men of the Royal Naval Division to failure. And things continued to get worse for the Nelson Battalion. Its commanders crossed the original front line about forty-five minutes after zero hour, attempting to come up and make sense of the rabble that now clustered about the battlefield after the breakdown of the attack. The Germans opened fire at close range and decimated the surviving men, killing the Nelson’s commander and his adjutant.
Those who survived cleared out any dugouts they could find with little opposition and the battalion advance continued to their second objective, where it ground to a halt. The Royal Naval Division had got forward, but its position was tenuous to say the least and it was low in numbers. Neither had it come anywhere near fulfilling all of the tasks put in front of it for the day. By 9:15am the attack was postponed.
Information began to filter in to Gough’s headquarters. The general was reasonably pleased with the outcome of the day’s fighting. In the eyes of those orchestrating the attack, it seemed reasonable enough to attempt to finish off what had been started, on a front of more than 3,000 yards. Gough wanted Redan Ridge, Grandcourt and Beaucourt before his men settled down for winter. Orders were promptly issued to renew the offensive on 14th November.
Less than half of the Nelson men would be present to take part. Almost 300 of them and their officers had been slaughtered on the north banks of the Ancre, including 23-year-old Fred Hattersley. His body, if recovered, was never identified and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier & Face 1a.