Captain Ernst Albert Linsingen Hahn
1ST REGIMENT, SOUTH AFRICAN INFANTRY
INSTEAD OF SEIZING THE INITIATIVE after the success of the attack on the Bazentin Ridge, the British offensive on the Somme began to drift. One place would come to define the tireless attempts to press the enemy further back from his second-line positions at the bottom end of the British front. Consisting of about 156 acres of sturdy trees and dense thickets of hazel, Delville Wood was split by grass thoroughfares that had now been named familiarly Buchanan Street, Campbell Street and Haymarket by the troops in the area. The village of Longueval, another of those reinforced by the enemy, ran right up to the edge of it and made the two combined objectives an incredibly difficult prospect, populated by machine-gun nests and even German artillery pieces that had been wheeled inside.
If Mametz Wood was to be synonymous with Wales, then Delville, or ‘the Devil’s Wood’ as it became known, would haunt South Africa. For the dominion troops who had made the long journey from the southern tip of their continent, the opening months of the war had been spent on closer fronts, such as German South West Africa, or concerned with internal friction, but in the summer of 1915 the Union Government decided to furnish a force to fight in Europe. Raised largely from those of British extraction, the numbers of the white population and the inevitable need to replenish those killed meant that recruitment was limited to a brigade. Four battalions of infantry were duly produced. Loosely speaking, the 1st came from the Cape, the 2nd from Natal and the Orange Free State, the 3rd Transvaal and Rhodesia and the 4th was the South African Scottish.
Ernst Hahn, seated centre of the front row, with his family in Paarl, 1912. (Courtesy of @rememberussa)
Twenty-eight years old and the son of a church minister, Ernst Hahn was a bank clerk from Paarl, about 40 miles from Cape Town, the third oldest European settlement in South Africa. With strong German ancestry, Ernst’s grandfather had been instrumental in the founding of the Lutheran congregation in their town. Born near Riga, Carl Hahn had moved to Germany before travelling to South Africa to spread his religion in the 1840s. Ernst’s father had served as the leader of the congregation since 1883. Paarl retained very Germanic sensibilities, although Ernst’s father was liberal in his outlook. Though he tried hard to remain faithful to the local population’s roots in keeping the town’s German school open, he also drew criticism for teaching confirmation classes in English for children not fluent in the Kaiser’s tongue. The war caused severe divisions in the community and tensions obviously ran even higher when some of their minister’s five sons began joining the Allied cause early in the war; Ernst’s father was eventually compelled to take a pay cut.
In the meantime, his boys left for war. The South African contingent began embarking in August 1915 and by the beginning of November everyone was on English soil and in training. After a somewhat unconventional introduction to fighting in North Africa, Ernst and the rest of the South Africans embarked again at Alexandria in mid-April and sailed for Marseilles. Once on the Western Front they became part of the 9th Scottish Division, men of Kitchener’s first 100,000, and in June they moved towards the Somme.
The fighting of 14th July took a portion of Longueval and up to where the village met Delville Wood. The Scottish Division battled fiercely to take the hardest of objectives allotted by Rawlinson that day. Given the necessity of conquering both village and wood at the same time though, plainly not enough weight was being thrown at such a difficult obstacle. That evening, Rawlinson ordered his army across the board to continue the offensive the following day. They were to exploit anything gained so far and take care of any outstanding objectives, which included Longueval and Delville Wood. By the morning of the 15th, though, the Germans had reinforcements on the way and were poised, expecting further attacks.
The South African Brigade was ordered to take Delville Wood ‘at all costs’ and for the most part moved up before dawn on the 15th. The southern half of the wood was seized in fewer than two hours ‘although progress was very difficult among the shell holes and the tangle formed [by] the trunks and branches’. Having arrived back from being loaned to another brigade, most of Ernst’s battalion was thrown in too, past snipers, a mass of ruins, wire entanglements, garden fences, half-fallen trees ‘together with every description of debris and shattered building material’. A fresh advance on the wood took more ground, but the enemy ensconced in the north-west corner held out. At the end of 15th July the task of seizing Longueval and Delville Wood was incomplete and the South African battalions had suffered serious losses. As the sun went down, the activity of the enemy guns increased and the sky was lit up by liquid fire. All night long, Ernst and his men were trying desperately to dig in.
There was no possibility of any rest for the sleep-deprived men fighting for Delville Wood. By dawn orders had been received to continue trying to conquer this stubborn objective. They would go again at 10am. The 16th July was overcast, but muggy. Attempting to direct any kind of accurate artillery barrage on a spot that was so hopelessly full of confused troops was impossible for either side’s gunners to attempt without causing significant casualties to their own, and so a preparation would be made by mortars instead.
The attack went forward as planned. After a heavy mortar bombardment of Longueval, the 11th Royal Scots advanced parallel to the Western edge of Delville Wood while the South African troops went the opposite way, entering the western part of the wood at Princes Street, which ran eastward through the remains of the trees. Both advances failed under heavy machine-gun fire and the troops were largely annihilated.
Elsewhere in the wood, Ernst and his men had been sent to defend another tenuous spot and were clinging on for dear life. During the course of the day the South Africans’ commanding officer arrived to take stock of the situation and came to the conclusion that the German position was so strong that the wood could only be taken after proper artillery preparation. The man commanding Ernst’s battalion was beside himself. He asked for his exhausted men, who had now been fighting for days, to be relieved. But their brigadier could only repeat his divisional instructions ‘that at all costs the wood must be held’. Relief would not be forthcoming.
Shaking off sleep to stand in their shallow trenches, the South Africans wavered in the heat. No further progress was possible at all on 16th July and, although the British mortars continued to fire on the German positions at intervals throughout the day, they could not silence the enemy’s machine guns. The sun set again on Delville Wood and the 9th Scottish Division, South Africans included, remained inside.
The six days and five nights that the South African contingent were to spend inside the Devil’s Wood exacted a miserable toll on their ranks. Some 121 officers and a little over 3,000 volunteers had marched into ‘a corner of death on which the enemy fire was concentrated at all hours from three sides’. It was still untaken when they departed a few days later, a haggard remnant of a brigade. The men who had sailed all the way from the southern tip of Africa to fight for the Allies ultimately assembled to be counted and could muster no more than 750 men. When they paraded before their commander he was distraught. He ‘took the salute with uncovered head and eyes not free from tears’.
Ernst Hahn fell on 16th July. His younger brother Benno also died during the war when he was killed in an accident training to fly at Upavon. Despite social pressures at home, their father was in no way ashamed of his sons’ choice to fight for Britain. He later named the family home Delville. The name remains deeply associated with South Africa. Captain Hahn’s body, if recovered, was never identified and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier & Face 4c.