FOOTNOTE:
[15] See Map J.
CHAPTER VIII
EXPLOITATION
The Fourth British Army had opened the great Allied counter-offensive with a brilliant stroke. It remained to see in what fashion the Allied High Command would proceed to exploit the victory. Would the Fourth Army be called upon, with added resources, at once to thrust due east, with the object of drawing upon itself the German reserves, and dealing with them as they arrived; or would blows now be delivered on other fronts with a view to keeping those reserves dispersed?
The immediate decision, communicated to me by the Army Commander on the afternoon of August 8th, was that, while the whole situation was being considered, and troop movements were in progress to enable the necessary concentrations to be made elsewhere, the Fourth Army would continue its advance forthwith; but that, instead of driving due east, the thrust was to be made in a south-easterly direction.
The object was to aim at Roye, and either by the capture of that important railway centre, or at least by the threat of its capture, to precipitate a withdrawal by the enemy from the great salient which he had in his April and May advances pressed into the French front opposite Moreuil and Montdidier, a salient which could be kept supplied by that railway alone.
The Australian Corps front on the evening of August 8th lay roughly on a north and south line, just east of Méricourt and just west of Vauvillers. But the Canadian Corps front bent back sharply from the latter point in a south-westerly direction. The Canadians were, therefore, to advance between the railway and the Amiens—Roye road to the general line Lihons-Le Quesnoy. The rôle of the Australian Corps was to make a defensive flank to this advance, by pivotting its left on the Somme in the vicinity of Méricourt, but advancing its right along the railway, in the direction of Lihons.
It was a decision which was unpalatable to me, for it condemned me to leaving the whole of the great bend of the Somme, on which lay Bray, Péronne and Brie, in the undisturbed possession of the enemy; and in view of the reports sent in from the front and confirmed later by the Armoured Cars, it appeared to me that the resumption of a vigorous advance due east next day would give us, without fighting, possession, or at least command, of the whole of this bend; while if we allowed the enemy to take breath and recover from his shock, he would probably have time to rally the fugitives, and turn again to face us.
This same great bend of the river had been the scene of two years of sedentary warfare, in 1915 and 1916, when the French and German artillery had converted it into a barren wilderness. It was, in its eastern part, scored with trenches, and bristled with wire entanglements in every direction; it was devoid of villages, woods, or any kind of shelter—a forbidding expanse of devastation.
But between our front lines of that day and the western edge of this wilderness, there still lay a belt of some six or seven miles of practically unharmed country over which the retreat of our Fifth Army in March had carried them without much fighting. I should have welcomed an order to push on the next morning, in open warfare formation, to gain possession of the whole of this belt, and force the enemy to make any attempt to reorganize his line on the inhospitable ground which lay beyond.
The order stood, however; and instructions were issued for the First Australian Division to be drawn into the fight, and to take upon themselves the task of conforming to the advance of the Canadians along the railway. The first phase of this advance was to have been carried out at 11 a.m. on August 9th by the First Division passing through the right Brigade of the Fifth Division.
The 1st Brigade of the First Australian Division had, as already related, arrived from the North in time to participate in the fighting of the day before; but the remaining two Brigades arrived so late, and had to perform so long a march from their detraining station near Amiens to our now greatly advanced battle front, that it soon became evident that they could not arrive at the line of departure in time to synchronize with the Canadian advance.
In consequence, the Fifth Division was instructed to detail its right line Brigade to begin this duty; and in due course the 15th Brigade carried out the first part of the task and advanced our line to include the capture of Vauvillers, an operation which was successfully completed by midday.
It will be remembered that the Second and Third Divisions had been given a task for the previous day which was limited in time, though not in difficulty, and that this task had been completed, as it proved with very little stress, by 7 a.m. These Divisions had thus had a whole day in which to rest and reorganize. The Second Division was therefore placed under orders to participate in the advance of August 9th.
In due course, the First Division arrived at our fighting front, and that afternoon both the First and Second Divisions advanced in battle order, the former passing through the right Brigade of the Fifth Division, and the latter through its left Brigade. This operation carried our front line in this part of the field to the foot of the Lihons hill, and gave us complete possession of the village of Framerville. It also incidentally released the Fifth Division from further line duty.
The opposition met with during this day's operations varied considerably along the battle front, which extended in this part of the field over about 6,000 yards. The Lihons ridge was found to be strongly held, and much fire both from field guns and machine guns was encountered. It was evident that, over-night, the enemy had succeeded in organizing sufficient troops for the local defence of this important point.
Upon the front of the Second Division, however, there was little opposition and the enemy gave up Framerville almost without a struggle. Three Battalions of Tanks co-operated in the day's fighting, but several of them were disabled by direct fire from Lihons. The task assigned to the Corps for that day was, none the less, carried out in its entirety, and by nightfall contact had been made with the Second Canadian Division on the railway about a mile east of Rosières.
The situation on the left flank of the Australian Corps was, however, anything but satisfactory. The Chipilly spur was still in the hands of the enemy, all the efforts over-night on the part of the 58th Division (Third Corps) to dislodge them having failed. General Butler, the Corps Commander, in pursuance of arrangements come to some days before, was to proceed on sick leave, as he had for some time been far from well; and General Godley (my former chief of the 22nd Corps) was temporarily to take his place. I therefore persuaded the Army Commander to avail himself of this change to allow me to take in hand the situation at Chipilly, and to give me, for this purpose, a limited jurisdiction over the north bank of the Somme. This was merely getting in the thin edge of the wedge; and not many hours later, I found myself where I had so strongly desired to be from the first, namely, astride of the Somme valley.
Accordingly, the 13th Australian Brigade, after a day's rest from the anxious duty of acting as a screen for the Canadians on the eve of the main battle, were told off to deal with the Chipilly spur. Before, however, they could reach the locality, and in the late afternoon of August 9th, the 131st American Regiment (of Bell's Division), which was still under the orders of the Third Corps, very gallantly advanced in broad daylight and took possession practically of the whole spur.
In the meantime the 13th Brigade arrived, sending a Battalion across the Somme at Cerisy, and, joining the Americans, helped to clear up the whole situation. This made my left flank more secure, and enabled Maclagan to withdraw the defensive flank which he had deployed along the river from Cerisy to Morcourt. That night I took over the 131st American Regiment from the Third Corps, attached it, as a temporary measure, to the Fourth Division, and placed Maclagan in charge of the newly captured front, which extended north of the river as far as the Corbie—Bray road.
The day ended with Divisions in the line from south to north in the following order, viz.:—First, Second and Fourth, the last named having been augmented by an American Regiment, having had its own 13th Brigade restored to it, and having in exchange yielded up to the First Division the 1st Brigade of the latter.
The Fourth Division had had comparatively much the worst of it, up to this stage, of any of my Divisions, and I felt that they were due for a short rest. Accordingly, I issued orders that same night for the Third Division, which, like the Second, had been resting since the previous forenoon, to relieve the Fourth Division on that part of the front which lay between the Somme and the main St. Quentin road on the following day, but for the time being leaving the newly captured ground north of the Somme still in Maclagan's hands.
After an examination of the ground and a study of the situation, the opportunity for a further immediate local operation, certain to gain valuable tactical ground, and likely also to yield a good number of prisoners, presented itself to me. A further attraction was that it would permit of a useful advance of my left flank on the south of the Somme. This project, being of some tactical interest, demands a short explanatory reference to the terrain.
The river Somme, from Cerisy as far east as Péronne, flows in a tortuous valley which describes a succession of bends, almost uniform in size and regular in disposition. These bends face with their bases alternately north and south, and average a depth of two miles, by a width across the base of about a mile and a half. Each came to be known to us by the name of one of the villages which reposed in its folds, such as Chipilly, Etinehem, Bray, Cappy, Feuillères, and Ommiécourt; all these have become names to be remembered in the subsequent conquest of this part of the Somme valley.
The valley itself is in this region a mile broad; its sides are steep and often precipitous, and the adjoining plateaus rise some 200 feet above its bed. Through this valley winds, in ordered curves, the canal for barge traffic; it is flanked by vast stretches of backwaters and heavily grassed morasses, in which the river loses itself. The valley can be traversed only by the few bridges and the lock gates of the canal, and the causeways leading to them from either bank.
It would be difficult country for a fight on a general scale, but ideal for guerilla warfare. The whole succession of villages clinging to the sides of the valley were in the hands of the enemy, and in use by him for the housing and shelter of his troops. To attack and overcome them one by one, by fighting up the winding valley, would have been a costly business. But it suggested itself that they might all be won by a species of investment.
Taking any one of these U-shaped bends singly, by drawing a cordon across its base, the whole of any enemy forces who might be occupying the bend would be denied escape from it, except by crossing the river into the adjacent bend. But if a semi-cordon had been simultaneously drawn across the base of that next bend also, even that loophole would be closed, and moreover such troops as inhabited the second bend would find themselves surrounded also.
Immediately before my left flank lay the Méricourt bend on the south of the river and the Etinehem bend to the north of it. Both were held by the enemy, doubtless fugitives from the great battle, who had sought food, water and underground shelter in the numerous dug-outs which honeycombed the sides of the valley. The design was to capture the whole of these with little effort. It was a good plan, and only an unforeseen accident prevented its full realization.
Early on the morning of the 10th, I summoned a conference at Maclagan's Headquarters in Corbie, which was attended by the Commanders and certain Brigadiers of the Third and Fourth Divisions. It was arranged that on the north of the river, the 13th Brigade would that night get astride of the Etinehem spur on the north, while simultaneously the 10th Brigade, by making a side sweep skirting Proyart, would advance our line till its left rested on the river a mile east of Méricourt.
Columns were to move along defined routes, leaving the objectives well to the flanks, and then to encircle the enemy positions. Each column was to be accompanied by Tanks and was to move in an easterly direction and then wheel in towards the Somme. Although Tanks had never previously been used at night, as their utility was uncertain, it was thought that the effect of the noise they made would lead to the speedy collapse of the defence.
The plan succeeded to perfection on the north of the river, and the Etinehem spur and village with all its defenders fell to us almost without a blow. Four Tanks amused themselves by racing up and down the main Corbie—Bray road at top speed, and the clamour they made cleared the path for the marching infantry.
On the south, however, just after nightfall, a sudden onslaught by a flight of enemy bombing planes, threw the head of the 10th Brigade column into confusion, and its Commander was killed. Two of the Tanks were also disabled by direct hits from Artillery. This delayed the progress of the operation, and the next day broke with the task uncompleted. The 9th and 11th Brigades were, however, at once sent up to reinforce, and during the following day all three Brigades completed the operation by possessing themselves of the villages of Méricourt and Proyart and the woods adjoining the river.
This series of local operations yielded some 300 prisoners, and entirely cleared up the confused and unsatisfactory situation which had existed on my left flank, as the aftermath of the Chipilly spur failure of the first day. It also brought my line up more square to the Somme, and so somewhat shortened my already expanding front. But my left flank was at last quite secure.
I must now turn to the extreme right flank, which was, on this same day, also the scene of very severe fighting. I have related the progress of the First Division to the foot of the Lihons ridge the night before. On August 10th and 11th the advance was continued by the First and Second Divisions in sympathy with the advance of the Canadian Corps on the south of the railway. There were only a few Tanks left available to assist in this advance; and the resistance of the enemy in the neighbourhood of Lihons had stiffened considerably.
The devastated area had already been reached by us in this part of the field, and the terrain was a labyrinth of old trenches, and a sea of shell-holes; the remains of old wire entanglements spread in every direction, and the whole area had been covered by a rank growth of thistles and brambles. It furnished numerous harbours for machine-guns, and it was country over which it was difficult to preserve the semblance of an organized battle formation during an advance.
The enemy fought hard and determinedly to retain Lihons, and in some parts of the line the battle swayed to and fro. But before the morning was well advanced, we had taken possession of the whole of the Lihons Knoll, of Auger Wood, and of the villages of Lihons and Rainecourt, while the Canadians had passed through Chilly just south of the railway. All that afternoon the enemy made repeated counter-attacks, particularly directed against Lihons and Rainecourt; but they were all successfully driven off by rifle and machine-gun fire without the loss of any ground.
It was a great feat to the credit of the First Australian Division, and ranks among its best performances during the war. Some 20 field-guns and hundreds of machine-guns were captured. Such a battle, with such results, would, in 1917, have been placarded as a victory of the first magnitude. Now, with the new standards set up by the great battle of August 8th, it was reckoned merely as a local skirmish.
General Currie, operating on my right, had had a similar experience of slow, although definite, progress, against hourly stiffening opposition, and the fighting by the methods of open warfare was growing daily more costly. The enemy had recovered from his first surprise, our resources in Tanks had been greatly diminished, and much of our heavy Artillery had not yet had time to get into its forward positions. In other words, the possibility of further cheap exploitation of the success of August 8th had come to an end.
It was decided, therefore, to recommend to the Army Commander that a temporary halt should be called on the line thus reached, and that rested troops should be brought up to relieve the line Divisions. He concurred and decided that we should prepare for the delivery on August 15th of another combined "set-piece" blow, which would have the probable effect of again putting the enemy on the run, so that the moving battle could be resumed.
This plan was never actually carried into effect, for reasons which did not at once appear. But it transpired later that General Currie had made very strong private representations to the Fourth Army against the plan. He questioned the wisdom of expending the resources of the Canadian Corps upon an attempt to repeat, over such broken country, covered as it was with entanglements and other obstacles, the great success of August 8th. He urged that the Canadian Corps should be transferred back to the Arras district—which they knew so well. It was country lending itself admirably to operations requiring careful organization, which none understood better than Currie and his admirable Staff.
It was an issue in which I was not greatly concerned, for my share in the proposed operation of August 15th was to be quite subsidiary. It was to consist merely in once again advancing my right flank, in sympathy with the Canadian advance, as far as to include Chaulnes Hill and the very important railway junction at that town. In ignorance of the fact that the matter was under discussion, I prepared complete plans for the co-operation of the Australian Corps, and detailed the Fourth and Fifth Australian Divisions to carry them out. Fortunately, before any actual executive action had been initiated, orders came that the project was to be abandoned.
It soon became known that still larger questions were being discussed. The British front, which in July reached south as far only as Villers-Bretonneux, had now been extended to the latitude of Roye. The Field Marshal was urging reduction, so as to liberate Divisions for offensive operations elsewhere, and Marshal Foch agreed that, as by the elimination of the Soissons salient the French front had been shortened, this could be done. In due course confidential announcements were made that, as soon as it could be arranged, the Canadians would be withdrawn from the line, and their places taken by French troops. This would once again make my Corps the south flank Corps of the British Army, and I would junction with the French on the Lihons Hill.
The halt thus called gave me breathing time to consider a thorough reorganization of my whole Corps front. This had, by August 12th, again grown to a total length of over 16,000 yards. This increase had been the result, firstly, of my having, as narrated, taken over ground to the north of the Somme, secondly, by reason of the fact that during the advances of the last four days my right had hugged the railway, while my left had continued to rest on the Somme, two lines which were rapidly diverging from each other, and thirdly, because my front line now lay sharply oblique to my general line of advance.
Even with a fifth Division, which I now had at my disposal, a front of 16,000 yards was far too attenuated for Corps operations on the grand scale, and even for more localized operations, by one or two Divisions at a time, there was little opportunity to provide the troops with adequate intervals of rest. I therefore strongly urged upon General Rawlinson either a shortening of my front, or a further increase in my resources.
He chose the latter alternative, and on August 12th placed under my orders, provisionally, the 17th British Division (Major-General P. R. Robertson), coupled with the condition that while it might be employed as a line Division, it was not to be used for offensive operations. The reason, confidentially given, was that it was shortly to be employed in a large scale offensive in course of preparation by the Third British Army.
It was, for me, a most opportune measure of relief from a difficult situation; for the Third Australian Division was now also badly in need of a rest. Prior to the great advance, it had been longest of any of the Divisions in the line, and had subsequently had a hard time in fighting its way forward from Méricourt to Proyart. It was therefore relieved in the line on August 13th by the 17th Division and went into Corps Reserve.
On the same day I put into effect a project of organization which the necessities of the case forced upon me. North of the river stood the 13th Australian Brigade, and the 131st American Regiment, both still under the command of General Maclagan, the remainder of whose Division was resting, and this Division might be required at short notice for operations at a totally different part of the front. (I had, in fact, earmarked it for the proposed attack on August 15th to which I have referred.)
To overcome this anomalous position, I decided to constitute, for a brief period, an independent force, composed of the two units north of the river which I have named, to appoint to the command of it Brigadier-General Wisdom (of the 7th Brigade), and to supply him with a nucleus Staff, some Artillery, and supply and signal services. It became, in fact, to all intents and purposes, an additional Division with a Headquarters directly responsible to me.
This force received the name of "Liaison Force" and continued in existence for about eight days. Its functions were to keep tactical touch and liaison with the Third Corps, to protect my left flank by guarding the Etinehem spur from recapture, and to act as a kind of loose link between the two Corps, advancing its northern or its southern flanks, or both, in sympathy with any forward movement to be made by either Corps. While, during its existence as a separate force, no operations of first magnitude took place, yet the Liaison Force served me well in the very useful function of a custodian of my tactical ownership of the Somme valley, an ownership which I succeeded in retaining to the immense advantage of the operations of the Corps less than three weeks later.
By August 13th, therefore, my responsibilities included the control of seven separate Divisions as well as all the Corps Troops, and Army Troops attached. The next week was occupied in local operations by the front line Divisions to straighten our front, and to dispose of a number of strong points, small woods, and village ruins which, so long as they were in enemy hands, were a source of annoyance to us. The attitude of the enemy was alert but not aggressive, and an important point was that he showed every desire to stand his ground, and to contest our further advance. There was as yet no indication of any comprehensive withdrawal out of the great river bend. Each day brought its useful toll of prisoners, all of whom, however, corroborated the view that the enemy meant to hold on, and that the troops opposing us were more than a mere rearguard intended to delay our advance.
The period from August 13th to 20th was also occupied in carrying out a number of inter-divisional reliefs—events of merely technical interest to the student of military history, but imposing an immense amount of detailed work upon the Staff of the Corps and upon the Commanders and Staffs of the Divisions concerned. It was my own special responsibility, and one which I could not delegate, to decide the date of the relief of each Division and by which other Division it should be relieved. Such decisions involved a close inquiry into, and a just and humane appreciation of the condition of the troops, almost from hour to hour every day, a duty in the discharge of which I was able to rely upon the loyal help of the Divisional Commanders and Brigadiers.
The time that had elapsed since last they had rested, the marching they had since done, the fighting they had undertaken and its nature, the mental and physical stress which they had undergone, and the probable nature and date of their future employment were all factors which had to be weighed carefully, and set against the advantages or disadvantages of cutting short the period of rest of the troops who were available to relieve them. It was a function which had to be exercised, at all times, with the greatest circumspection, and the strictest justice; for troops are very ready to acquire the impression that they are being called upon to do more than their fair share.
MAP C.
An actual inter-divisional relief usually occupied two nights and the intervening day. Incoming units, both fighting and technical, had to be shown all over the sector, to be taught the dispositions and the exact situation in front of us; maps, orders and photographs had to be explained and handed over; stores and dumps had to be inventoried and receipts passed; while on the other hand the outgoing troops expected to find their billets, offices, stables, wagon lines, bathing-places and entertainment rooms in the rear area all allocated and ready for their occupation.
Each such mutual relief meant the movement of upwards of 20,000 men, and separate roads had to be allotted for their use. Frequently in so large a Corps as this, two such inter-divisional reliefs would synchronize or overlap, and the danger of congestion and the Staff work necessary to avoid it would be thereby more than doubled. And all this work would have to go on smoothly even if the Corps front were in the throes of an actual battle at the time.
Although much of the routine of such reliefs, which had become almost a ritual during the preceding years of trench warfare, was now scrapped, it is a matter of pride to the Australian Corps and its Divisions, that all such relief operations, even amid all the stress of these busy fighting months of August and September, were, until the end, carried out with precision, freedom from irritating hitches, and a minimum of stress on the troops.
The decisions which had to be given regarding the times and alternations of these Divisional reliefs became from now on really of basic importance, and affected the main framework of the whole of my future plans. It was no longer merely a question of earmarking certain Divisions for a specified single operation; but of planning, many days ahead, the rotation in which the Divisions were to be employed in a continuous series of operations. I regarded it as a fundamental principle to employ whenever possible absolutely fresh and rested troops for an operation of any magnitude or importance. To carry such a principle into effect involved the necessity of making the best surmise that was possible as to the course of events a week or even two weeks ahead.
As I shall endeavour to make clear in the course of the following pages, the really outstanding and exceptional features of the work of the Corps in its last sixty days were the sustained vigour of its fighting, and the unbroken continuity of its collective effort. Those results would clearly depend more on the manner in which the resources in troops were manipulated than upon any other factor. Each Division had to be kept employed until the last ounce of effort, consistent with speedy recovery, had been yielded, and each Division had to rest a sufficient time to enable it fully to recover its spirit and tone, and yet had to be ready by the time it was wanted.
The fulfilment of such conditions involved, as a little reflection will show, a great deal more than a mere mechanical rotation of employment; for the problem was, always to have available an adequate supply of sufficiently rested troops for a prospective demand which, although varying always in accordance with the changing situation, had nevertheless to be predicted or conjectured.
August 21st found our front line much about the same as that of August 13th, although generally more advanced and straightened out. The Corps frontage was still over 16,000 yards, and upon the completion of the series of reliefs to which I have alluded the dispositions of the Corps were as follows: The Fourth Australian Division from Lihons to just south of Herleville, the 32nd British Division opposite Herleville, the Fifth Australian Division in front of Proyart, and the Third Australian Division on the north of the river. The First and Second Divisions were in Corps Reserve, the former having by then had a good rest from its Lihons fighting. The Liaison Force had been broken up; and the 32nd British Division (Major-General T. S. Lambert) had joined my command in substitution for the 17th Division, which had been withdrawn to join the Third Army.
Such was the situation of the Australian Corps, when on August 21st the short period of comparative inactivity came to a close, and it was destined soon to go forward to further decisive events. On the previous day the French opened a great attack in the south, which yielded 10,000 prisoners on the first day, and on the day in question the Third British Army delivered north of Albert the attack which had been expected for some days. Thus the enemy would have his hands full in endeavouring to parry those fresh blows; and the time seemed appropriate for another stroke on the front of the Fourth Army.
CHAPTER IX
CHUIGNES
Allusion has been made to the great bend which occurs in the course of the River Somme. It is indeed a geographical circumstance which must be borne in mind, if the phraseology current at this epoch in the war is to be clearly comprehended.
The river flows in an almost due northerly direction from the neighbourhood of Roye as far as Péronne, and then bends quite sharply, at that locality, in a western direction, past Bray, Corbie and Amiens, towards the sea, beyond Abbeville. In the story of the fighting of the period from March to August we have been concerned only with that portion of the river valley which ran parallel to our line of advance; but interest will henceforth focus itself largely upon that other reach of the Somme which runs on a north and south line, upstream, from the town of Péronne.
This latter stretch of the river lies squarely athwart the direction in which the Corps had been advancing, and the obstacle to that advance which the river would presently constitute was continued in a northerly direction from Péronne by an unfinished work of a great canalization scheme to be called the "Canal du Nord." This canal was already wide and deep, and formed a tactical obstacle of some significance, for the excavations incidental to this project had been almost completed before the war.
The "line of the Somme," as it was understood in the tactical discussions of the period now to be dealt with, meant, in short, the line formed by that part of the river which lay upstream (i.e., to the south of Péronne), and the continuation northwards of that line by the Canal du Nord. Both features being military obstacles, they and the highlands to the east of them together afforded an eminently suitable continuous line on which the enemy might, if he were permitted to do so, establish himself in a defensive attitude in order to bar our eastward progress.
The autumn was upon us; not more than another eight or nine weeks of campaigning weather could be relied upon. A quite definite possibility existed that the enemy might be able to put forth so powerful an effort to contest our further advance, inch by inch, that he would gain sufficient time to prepare the line of the Somme for a stout defence, and hold us up until the arrival of winter compelled a suspension of large operations.
There were at that time, indeed, some who contended that as we had apparently succeeded in putting an end to the German offensive we should rest content with the year's work; that our soundest strategy would be to permit the enemy to take up such a line of defence; and then quietly to wait over the winter until 1919 for the full development of the American effort, now only in its inception.
So far, the enemy had given no indication of any readiness to undertake a precipitate withdrawal from the great bend west of the Somme. On the contrary, his resistance had stiffened to such an extent that little further progress was to be hoped for from the methods of open warfare which I had employed since August 8th.
If, however, another powerful blow could be delivered, to be followed by energetic exploitation, it was quite possible that the enemy might be hustled across the Somme, that this might be achieved at such a rate that I could gain a firm footing on the east bank, and that thereby the value to him of the line of the Somme, as a winter defence, might be destroyed.
This was the very project on which I now embarked. The First Division was in Corps Reserve, had rested and was fresh. The 32nd Division had only just come into the line. By handing over a substantial sector to the French, my frontage south of the Somme was about to be shortened to 7,000 yards, a very suitable front for a deliberate attack by two Divisions.
I held a conference at Fouilloy, near Corbie, in the afternoon of August 21st to announce the plan, and to settle all details with the Commanders and services concerned. The Infantry assault was to be entrusted to Glasgow and Lambert, attacking side by side; but the former had allotted to him much the larger share of the battle front, at the northern end, the corollary rôle of the 32nd Division being to seize Herleville and carry our line just to the east of it.
The date of the attack was fixed for August 23rd, and the Second and Fifth Divisions were warned to be in readiness to come into the line a day or two after the battle, in order to commence immediately the process of keeping the enemy on the run, and hustling him clean out of the river bend and across the line of the Somme.
The conference of that day was of special interest, in that I had to deal with two Divisions which had not participated in any of those Corps Conferences, previously held, which had initiated a fully organized Corps operation. The Commanders and Staffs were strangers to each other and, some of them, to me and my Staff. Nearly all of them were yet unfamiliar with the special methods of the Corps. The conference was therefore a lengthy one, for many problems of tactical mechanism, which had been settled in connection with the preceding battles of Hamel and August 8th, had to be reopened and elucidated.
These regular battle conferences were in the Australian Corps an innovation from the time the command of it devolved upon me. They proved a powerful instrument for the moulding of a uniformity of tactical thought and method throughout the command. They brought together men who met face to face but seldom, and they permitted of an exhaustive and educative interchange of views. They led to a development of "team-work" of a very high order of efficiency.
The work of preparing for, and the actual conduct of, these conferences was always a very arduous business; but they more than repaid me for the effort they entailed. They served two paramount purposes. They enabled me to apply the requisite driving force to all subordinates collectively, instead of individually, and thereby created a responsive spirit which was competitive. In addition, each Commander or Service had the advantage not only of receiving instructions regarding his own action, but also of hearing in full detail the instructions conveyed to his colleagues. He knew, not merely what his colleagues had to do, but also knew that they had been told what to do; and he had an opportunity of considering the effect of their action on his own.
The senior representative of the Heavy Artillery, Tank and Air Services invariably attended, and listened to all the points discussed with the Divisions, and the Divisional Commanders heard all matters arranged with these services. In this way, each arm acquired in the most direct manner a steadily expanding knowledge of the technology of all the other arms.
My reason for emphasizing these matters in the present context is that, on this particular occasion, an attempt was to be made to carry out a major Corps operation at little more than thirty-six hours' notice; and the Division which was to have assigned to it the principal rôle was still in Corps Reserve and a day's march from the battle front.
That, in spite of these handicaps, the battle proved brilliantly successful is a testimony to the valuable part which these Corps conferences played in securing rapid and efficiently co-ordinated action; a result which would, I am confident, have been unattainable under the stated conditions by the mere issue of formal written orders.
Although only two out of the seven Divisions of the Corps were to participate in this operation, it was my intention to employ, for the full assistance of the Infantry, the whole resources of the Corps in Artillery, Tanks and Aircraft. That was a principle which I always regarded as fundamental, and one from which I never permitted any exception to be made, although the pressure upon me to rest a substantial portion of these ancillary services was always very great.
The general plan for the battle ran briefly as follows. The 32nd Division would attack with one Infantry Brigade, under a barrage, on a frontage of 1,000 yards; the capture of the village of Herleville, which was still strongly held, being its principal objective.
The 1st Australian Division would attack on a frontage of 4,500 yards, with two Brigades in line, and one Brigade in reserve. The attack would be carried out in three phases.
The first phase was a normal assault, under an Artillery barrage, and with the assistance of Tanks, to a predetermined line, which would carry us beyond the Chuignes Valley; the second phase was in the nature of exploitation by the two line Brigades, but was expressly limited to a maximum distance of 1,000 yards beyond the main first objective.
The third phase was to be contingent upon the complete success of the preceding phases, and would consist of an advance by the Reserve Brigade for a further exploitation of success, by the seizure of the whole of the Cappy bend of the river, including the towering hill close to the Somme Canal known as Froissy Beacon.
All arrangements for the forthcoming battle having thus been completed, the First Division duly relieved the Fifth Division on the night of August 21st, and hastened forward its preparations for the attack, which had been fixed for 4.45 a.m. on August 23rd.
In the meantime, the first attack which any British Army other than the Fourth had made since August 8th was at last launched on August 21st along the whole front of the Third British Army, northwards from Albert.
It has come to be an article of faith that the whole of the successive stages of the great closing offensive of the war had been the subject of most careful timing, and of minute organization on the part of the Allied High Command, and of our own G.H.Q. Much eulogistic writing has been devoted to an attempted analysis of the comprehensive and far-reaching plans which resulted in the delivery of blow upon blow, in a prescribed order of time and for the achievement of definite strategical or tactical ends.
The Canal and Tunnel at Bellicourt—looking north.
The Hindenburg Line—a characteristic belt of sunken wire.
All who played any part in these great events well know that it was nothing of the kind; that nothing in the nature of a detailed time-table to control so vast a field of effort was possible. All Commanders, and the most exalted of them in a higher degree even than those wielding lesser forces, became opportunists, and bent their energies, not to the realization of a great general plan for a succession of timed attacks, but upon the problem of hitting whenever and wherever an opportunity offered, and the means were ready to hand.
In these matters it was the force of circumstances which controlled the sequence of events, and nothing else. An elaborate time-table controlled by definite dates and sequences for the successive engagement of a series of Armies would have been quite impossible of realization. Even a Corps Commander had difficulty in forecasting within a day or two when he would be ready to launch an attack on any given part of the front. For an Army Commander it was a matter of a week or even two.
All attempted time-tables were controlled by our Artillery requirements; both the assembling of the necessary guns—often drawn from distant fronts—and the accumulating of the requisite "head" of ammunition to see a battle through, were processes whose duration could only be very roughly forecasted.
The dumping, in the gun pits and in ammunition stores, of the necessary 500 or 600 rounds per gun meant days of labour in collection and distribution on the part of the railways and motor lorries. The breakdown of a few motor lorries at a critical time, or the dropping of a single bomb upon an important railway junction, were disturbing factors quite sufficient to have arrested the flow of ammunition, and to have postponed, indefinitely, any programme based upon its prompt delivery.
It will be obvious, therefore, that no reliance could be placed, days or weeks beforehand, upon a given attack taking place on a given day; therefore no plans could be made which depended upon such attacks taking place in a predetermined sequence.
Shortly put, therefore, the decisions of the High Command were confined to questions such as where an attack should be made, in what direction, and by what forces. The date was always a matter of uncertainty, and the only control that could be exercised was by postponement, and never by acceleration.
For the greater part of the offensive period it was therefore necessarily left to the Commanders of the Armies to conform to a general policy of attack, the time and method being left to their own decision or recommendation. And they, in turn, relied upon their Corps Commanders to seize the initiative in the pursuit of such a policy. Naturally, the Army at all times made every effort to secure co-ordinated action by its several Corps; but it rarely happened that more than one Corps at a time carried through the main effort—the other Corps performing subsidiary rôles. The great battle of September 29th to October 1st, which completed the final rupture of the Hindenburg line, was, however, a signal exception to this rule.
The attack by the Third British Army on August 21st is a case which illustrates the delays inseparable from battle preparations. The project of such an attack had already been mooted on August 11th, when General Byng (Third Army) paid me a visit to discuss my battle plan of August 8th, and I gathered on that occasion that he hoped to begin within four or five days. The event showed that the operation actually took ten days to materialize. No criticism is suggested. The conditions of transport of troops and munitions doubtless made its earlier realization quite impossible.
The attack coming when it did, however, considerably eased the situation of the Fourth Army, upon whose front Ludendorff had flung all his available reserves, drawn from all parts of the German front, in his endeavours to bring the Australians and Canadians to a halt.
He was now suddenly confronted with the prospect of another "break through" in a different part of his line, and the German people had been taught by their press correspondents to believe that a "break through" was the one thing most to be resisted by the German Supreme Command, and the one thing impossible of achievement by us.
There can be no doubt, therefore, that the success of the Third Army on August 21st, although not comparable in its results with the battle of August 8th, did materially assist the prospects of my own success in the operations upon which I was then embarking.
The immediate effect of it was already felt the very next day. For the Third Corps, which was still the left flank Corps of the Fourth Army, and which had made very little progress since August 8th, was enabled to advance its line a little past Albert and Meaulte.
The Third Australian Division, which, it will be remembered, had taken over the front and the rôle of the now disbanded Liaison Force, participated, by arrangement, in this attack and, swinging up its left, brought my front line, north of the river, square to the Somme Valley, and just to the forward slopes of the high plateau overlooking Bray and La Neuville. The Third Pioneer Battalion at once got to work on restoring the broken crossings over the Somme, to the south of Bray, and put out a series of advanced posts upon the left bank of the river, which gave us practical control of the great island on which stands La Neuville.
Meanwhile, on the left flank of the 9th Brigade, which had carried out the Third Divisional attack, there was serious trouble. The enemy counter-attacked in the late afternoon. The 9th Brigade stood firm; but the 47th Division (of the Third Corps) yielded ground, leaving the flank of the 9th Brigade in the air. A chalk pit, which we had seized, formed a welcome redoubt which enabled the 33rd Battalion to hang on for sufficiently long to permit of the 34th Battalion coming up to form a defensive flank, facing north.
In this way the gallant 9th Brigade (Goddard) was able to retain the whole of its gains of that day; but the risk of an immediate further advance was too great while the situation to the north remained obscure and unsatisfactory. The capture of the village of Bray, which was still strongly held by the enemy, had, therefore, to be postponed, although it had been part of my plan to capture it that same day as a measure of precaution, seeing that I calculated upon being able the next day to advance my line south of the Somme to a point well to the east of Bray.
The great attack by the First Division supported by the 32nd Division, which has come to be known as the battle of Chuignes, was launched at dawn on August 23rd, and was an unqualified success.
The main valley of the Somme in this region is flanked by a number of tributary valleys, which run generally in a north and south direction, extending back from the river four or five miles. They are broad, with heavily-wooded sides, and harbour a number of villages, such as Proyart, Chuignolles, Herleville and Chuignes, which cluster on their slopes.
One such valley, larger and longer than any of those which, in our previous advances, we had yet crossed, lay before our front line of that morning, and square across our path. It ran from Herleville, northwards, past Chuignes, to join the Somme in the Bray bend. It was the most easterly of all the tributary valleys to which I have referred, and it was also the last piece of habitable country before the devastated area of 1916 was reached, just a mile to the east of it.
The valley afforded excellent cover for the enemy's guns, and the expectation was that some of them would be overrun by our attack. It was also ideal country for machine-gun defence, for the numerous woods, hedges and copses afforded excellent cover, and had in all probability been amply fortified with barbed wire. It was a formidable proposition to attack such a position on such a frontage with only two Brigades.
The 2nd Brigade (Heane) attacked on the right, the 1st Brigade (Mackay) on the left, and the first phase was completed to time-table, with the green objective line, located on the east side of the long valley, in our possession. The only temporary hitch in the advance along the whole front was at Robert Wood, where the enemy held out, and had to be completely enveloped from both flanks before surrendering.
Then came the second phase, and no difficulty was experienced in advancing our line 1,000 yards east of the green line, nor in establishing there a firm line of outposts for the night.
The third phase presented a great deal more difficulty than I had anticipated. It was to have been undertaken by the 3rd Brigade (Bennett) pushing without delay through the 1st Brigade, and advancing in open warfare formation north-easterly towards Cappy, for the seizure of Hill 90, overlooking that village and on the south-west of it, and terminating at its northern extremity in the high bluff of Froissy Beacon.
There was, however, some unexplained delay in the initiation of this advance, and it was not until about 2 o'clock that the 3rd Brigade moved forward to the assault of the long slope of the Chuignes Valley, which still lay before them in this part of the field. The enemy, under the impression that our attack had spent itself, had occupied the plateau in great strength, and at first little progress could be made.
Mobile Artillery was, however, promptly pushed up, and this proved of great assistance to the infantry. Garenne Wood, on the top of the plateau, into which large numbers of the enemy had withdrawn, proved a difficult obstacle, and incapable of capture by frontal attack. It, too, was conquered by enveloping tactics, and with its fall the resistance of the enemy rapidly subsided, and the 3rd Brigade had the satisfaction of hunting the fugitives clean off the plateau into the Cappy Valley.
The whole of this phase of the battle was an especially fine piece of work on the part of the Regimental Officers. It was open warfare of the most complete character, and the victory was won by excellent battle control on the part of the Battalion Commanders, by splendid co-operation between the four Battalions of the Brigade, and by intelligent and gallant leadership on the part of the Company and Platoon Commanders.
Beset as I had been by many anxieties during the early afternoon as to how the Third Brigade would fare in the difficult task which had been given it, rendered more difficult by the delay of which I have spoken, I had the satisfaction that night of contemplating a victory far greater than I had calculated upon.
For the 32nd Division had successfully captured Herleville, and the First Division had seized the whole country for a depth of 1½ miles up to a line extending from Herleville to the western edge of Cappy. The whole Chuignes Valley was ours. By its capture the enemy had been despoiled of all habitable areas, and had been relegated to a waste of broken and ruined country between us and the line of the Somme.
We took that day 21 guns and over 3,100 prisoners from ten different regiments. The slaughter of the enemy in the tangled valleys was considerable, for our Infantry are always vigorous bayonet fighters. They received much assistance from the Tanks in disposing of the numerous machine gun detachments which held their ground to the last.
It was a smashing blow, and far exceeded in its results any previous record in my experience, having regard to the number of troops engaged. Its immediate result, the same night, was the capture of Bray by the Third Division, north of the river, thus completing the work of that Division which the failure of the 47th Division on their left the day before had compelled them to leave unfinished. The 40th Battalion took 200 prisoners, with trifling loss to themselves.
A more remote result, which made itself apparent in the next few days, was that it compelled the enemy to abandon all hope of retaining a hold of any country west of the line of the Somme; it impelled him at last to an evacuation of the great bend of the river, a process which he began in a very few days.
Such was the battle of Chuignes. Much of the success of this brilliant engagement was due to the personality of the Divisional Commander, Major-General Glasgow. He had commenced his career in the war as a Major of Light Horse, and had participated in the earliest stages of the fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Speedily gaining promotion during that campaign, his outstanding merits as a leader gained him an appointment to the command of the 13th Brigade, when the latter was formed in Egypt in the spring of 1916. For two years he led that Brigade through all its arduous experiences on the Somme, at Messines and in the third battle of Ypres.
This fine record was but the prelude to the history-making performances of the 13th Brigade in 1918 at Dernancourt and Villers-Bretonneux, and Glasgow seemed easily the most promising, among all the Brigadiers of that time, as a prospective Divisional Commander: a judgment which fully justified itself.
Of strong though not heavy build and of energetic demeanour, Glasgow succeeded not so much by exceptional mental gifts, or by tactical skill of any very high order, as by his personal driving force and determination, which impressed themselves upon all his subordinates. He always got where he wanted to get—was consistently loyal to the Australian ideal, and intensely proud of the Australian soldier.
The number of prisoners captured on this day, and the total numbers of the enemy encountered in the course of an advance which was relatively small, pointed to a disposition of troops which was unusual on the part of the enemy.
According to the principles so strongly emphasized by Ludendorff, in instructions which he had issued, and copies of which duly fell into my hands, there was to be, in his scheme of defensive tactics, a "fore-field" relatively lightly held by outposts and machine guns. The main line of resistance was to be well in rear, and there the main concentration of troops was to be effected.
Why had this dictum been so widely disregarded on this occasion? It was a question worthy of close inquiry, and two German Battalion Commanders who were captured by us on that day supplied the answer.
Reference has already been made to the message which I issued to the Corps on the eve of the great opening battle; and to the fact that a copy of this message had fallen into the hands of the enemy, probably by the capture of an officer in the close fighting which took place at Lihons on August 9th and 10th.
In due course the substance of this message was published in the German wireless news, and in the German press of the time, but cleverly mistranslated to convey a colouring desirable for the German public.
It so happened that not long before the opening of our offensive I had, at the request of the authorities, sent to Australia a recruiting cable, which appealed to the Australian public for a maintenance of supplies of fighting men.[16] That the full text of this cable also became speedily known to the enemy is a testimony to the far-flung alertness of their Intelligence Service. It, also, was published in their press.
Basing their editorial comments on this material, the Berliner Tageblatt of August 17th, 1918, a copy of which I captured, and another journal whose name was not ascertainable, because in the copy captured the title had been torn off, both indulged in arguments, which were long, and intended to be convincing, to prove to the German people that I had promised my troops a "break-through;" that I had failed, and that, admittedly, the "proud" Australian Corps had been shattered, had come to the end of its resources and was no longer to be taken into calculation as an instrument of attack by the "English."
It was perfectly legitimate, if clumsy, propaganda. But it was a curious example of a propaganda which recoiled upon the heads of its propounders. The Battalion Commanders, who, like all German officers whom we captured, were always voluble in excuses for their defeat, pleaded that they had been deceived by the utterances of their own journals into believing that the Australian offensive effort had come to an end, once and for all, and that no further attack by this Corps was possible.
Map D
It was this belief which, they said, had prompted their respective Divisions (for each of them represented a separate one) to disregard Ludendorff's prescription; their Divisional Generals had felt justified in availing themselves of the very excellent living quarters which existed in the Chuignes Valley, near the German front line of August 22nd, to quarter all their support and reserve Battalions.
It was there that we found them—increasing the population of the front zone far beyond that which we had been accustomed to find. Was there ever a more diverting example of a propaganda which recoiled upon those who uttered it? Intended to deceive the German public, it ended in deceiving the German front line troops, to their own lamentable undoing.
Among the captures of the battle of Chuignes, which, as usual, comprised a large and varied assortment of warlike stores, including another great dump of engineering materials near Froissy Beacon, and two complete railway trains, was the monster naval gun of 15-inch bore, which had been so systematically bombarding the city of Amiens, and had wrought such havoc among its buildings and monuments.
It was first reached by the 3rd Australian Battalion (1st Brigade) during a bayonet charge which cleared Arcy Wood, in the shelter of which the giant gun had been erected. An imposing amount of labour had been expended upon its installation, and the most cursory examination of the effort involved was sufficient to make it evident that the enemy entertained no expectation of ever being hurled back from the region which it dominated.
The gun with its carriage, platform and concrete foundations weighed over 500 tons. It was a naval gun, obviously of the type in use on the German Dreadnoughts, and never intended by its original designers for use on land. It had a range of over twenty-four miles, fired a projectile weighing nearly a ton, and the barrel was seventy feet long.
It had been installed with the elaborate completeness of German methods. A double railway track, several miles long, had been built to the site, for the transport of the gun and its parts. It was electrically trained and elevated. Its ammunition was handled and loaded by mechanical means. The adjacent hill-side had been tunnelled to receive the operating machinery, and the supplies of shells, cartridges and fuses.
The gun and its mounting, when captured, were found to have been completely disabled. A heavy charge of explosive had burst the chamber of the gun, and had torn off the projecting muzzle end, which lay with its nose helplessly buried in the mud. The giant carriage had been burst asunder, and over acres all around was strewn the debris of the explosion.
For some time, some of my gunner experts favoured the theory that the gun had burst accidentally, but the view which ultimately prevailed was that the demolition had been intentional. Many months afterwards, the full story of the gun and its performances was elicited from a prisoner who had belonged to the No. 4 (German) Heavy Artillery Regiment, and it was circumstantial enough to be credible.
The story is worthy of repetition, not only because no authentic account of this wonderful trophy has yet been published, but also because the history of this gun curiously illuminates the enemy's plans, intentions and expectations between the dates of his onslaught in March and his recoil in August.
The substance of the story is as follows: The gun came from Krupp's. Work on the position was started early in April, 1918—only a few days after the site had fallen into the enemy's hands. It was completed and ready for action on the morning of June 2nd. Its maximum firing capacity was twenty-eight rounds per day. It fired continuously until June 28th. By this time the original gun was worn out, having fired over 350 rounds at Amiens. A new piece was ordered from Krupp's. It arrived on August 7th, and was ready to fire by 7 p.m. It fired its first round on August 8th at 2 a.m. and kept on firing till August 9th, firing thirty-five rounds in all. At 7 a.m. on August 9th, all hands were ordered to remove everything that was portable and of value. Demolition charges were laid and fired about 9 a.m. on August 9th. The crew returned to Krupp's.
It is to be inferred from this narrative that the enemy's defeat at Hamel on July 4th did not deter him from his enterprise of replacing the original worn gun, but that after August 8th, he quite definitely accepted the certainty that he would be allowed no time to remove the gun intact, and so he destroyed it in order that we might not be able to use it against him.
This is the largest single trophy of war won by any Commander during the war, and it was a matter of great regret to me that the cost of its transportation to Australia was prohibitive. The gun, as it stands, was, therefore, fenced in, and it has been formally presented to the City of Amiens as a souvenir of the Australian Army Corps.
So long as any Australian soldiers remained in France, this spot was a Mecca to which thousands of pilgrims wandered; and soon there was, over the whole of the immense structure, not one square inch upon which the "diggers" had not inscribed their names and sentiments. There, in the shade of Arcy Wood, the great ruin rests, a memorial alike of the sufferings of Amiens and of the great Australian victory of Chuignes.