Zero Hour (17 page)

The year ended, once again, in a stalemate. The German submarine campaign had not brought Britain to its knees; nor had the British driven the Germans from Belgium, although they had drawn German reserves away from the recovering French.

In Russia, troops sick of being poor, hungry and ill-treated, overthrew the tsar in a revolution and made peace with the Germans, but the peace treaty was a stark reminder of what the Allies were fighting for. In return for peace Russia gave Germany one-third of its agricultural land, half of its industry and most of its coalmines. With Russia out of the war, the Germans began moving their troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front, exactly what Field Marshal Haig and others had feared. Over the following weeks, an extra 1000 guns and 35 divisions reached the front with the aim of attacking the Allies before the Americans arrived.

KILLED IN ACTION
____________________

PRIVATE GEORGE SEABROOK
Painter. 20 September 1917

PRIVATE THEO SEABROOK
Engine fireman. 20 September 1917

MAJOR PHILIP HOWELL-PRICE
Bank clerk. 4 October 1917

SECOND LIEUTENANT JOHN BISHOP
School teacher. 12 October 1917

SECOND LIEUTENANT NORMAN WATSON
12 October 1917

LIEUTENANT WALDE FISHER
Law student and tutor. 5 April 1918

DIED OF WOUNDS
____________________

SECOND LIEUTENANT WILLIAM SEABROOK
Telephonist. 21 September 1917

SERGEANT DAVE GALAHER
Storeman. 4 October 1917

PRIVATE ROBIN HAMLEY
Schoolmaster. 6 October 1917

CHAPTER TEN
THE SPRING OFFENSIVE, 1918

BIRD—In loving memory of my dearly loved and only son, Pte.C . Bird (Charlie), 5th Batt., killed in action Mont St. Quentin, September 1, 1918.

I little thought when we said goodbye
We parted forever and you were to die.
We'll meet again, my dearest son.

INSERTED BY HIS LOVING MOTHER ,
A. MADEN .

NEWSPAPER ‘IN MEMORIAM ' NOTICE

ON 21 MARCH 1918, with thick fog hanging over the land, more than 6000 German guns opened fire across an 80-kilometre front at the Somme. For over five hours, their shells tore into the British trenches. Then German storm troops charged through the swirling mist. They carried their new light machine guns, bombs and entrenching tools, sharpened for hand-to-hand combat. After forcing gaps in the British line, they surged through them, leaving any heavily defended villages and strong points for following troops to capture. The resistance was, in places, more hardline than expected, and with no supplies the storm troops lived off food taken from British shelters—eating ham and bread and sucking raw eggs dry. They kept their water-cooled machine guns from overheating by filling the cooling system with urine.

The Spring Offensive was Germany's last attempt at a victory before the Americans arrived. Support for the war in Germany was weakening; there were strikes over food shortages, and the country was reaching the end of its manpower. Many wanted peace even if this meant handing back Belgium, but to the leaders and generals this was the same as losing the war. Instead, they attacked where the British and French Armies joined, with the aim of splitting them and driving the British back to the English Channel. Once the British were trapped and destroyed, the Germans believed the French would have little will to continue.

As the British were forced into retreat across the Somme, large gaps opened in the line, and ground that the Allies had captured in 1916 fell again—High Wood, Flers, Thiepval and Pozières. The British were in disarray, and large numbers of troops retreated in confusion as six massive German guns began shelling Paris.

GIVE A MAN A CHANCE

The New Zealand Division and the 3rd, 4th and 5th Australian Divisions moved to the Somme, travelling by rail, in motor lorries or on foot, marching huge distances each day and stopping only to eat cold meals and sleep. Although the Germans seemed unstoppable, the Diggers were excited— surely the German Army would become exhausted and too weak to defend itself.

At the same time, on 26 March, the Allied leaders met at Doullens, just north of Amiens. Field Marshal Haig had earlier requested that the French general, Pétain, send reserves to help the British, but Pétain had refused—he was convinced the Germans were going to launch a new offensive against Paris and he didn't want to deplete his troops. With divisions emerging between the Allies, Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch was put in charge of the Allied front. For the first time since the start of the war, British and French troops were under one commander. Foch's first order was that there were to be no more withdrawals.

The Australians and New Zealanders were frustrated by the retreat—they felt the British had been too quick to flee. While some men accepted that the British had simply been fighting for too long, others felt that the rigid class system robbed soldiers of initiative and that they relied on officers for direction. They disliked the officers even more, believing most were promoted because of money and connections, not ability. The Anzacs' respect had to be earned, and if an officer showed courage they would follow him anywhere. But the typical British officer, they felt, flounced around with gloves, cane and eyepiece, miles behind the front-line and hopelessly out of touch with reality. A popular joke among the men was about an officer overtaking a hare while retreating from the advancing Germans, and yelling, ‘Get out of the road you brute and give a man a chance who can run.'

A TERRIBLE THING TO DO

As the Diggers got closer, the land appeared largely deserted, except for refugees carting out their possessions, and the occasional British soldier heading in the opposite direction, telling them that if they kept going they'd ‘get killed'.

On 26 March, two brigades of the 4th Australian Division arrived at the village of Hébuterne, 38 kilometres north-west of Amiens, to find it still lightly held by exhausted British troops who'd been fighting and withdrawing for five days. Some wept with relief as the Australians took over.

When the New Zealanders arrived near Beaumont-Hamel close by, the lack of British troops made it obvious they'd come to a gap in the line. Stretching eight kilometres from Beaumont-Hamel to Hébuterne, the gap had to be closed— it was in front of the vital railway junction at Amiens, and this was what the Germans were now aiming for. The New Zealanders marched out to close the gap just as the Germans, flushed with success, were advancing through it. Small fights broke out. In one trench, Private William Morris bayoneted a German soldier. ‘It was the only time I used a bayonet, I'm glad it was the last. I was nearly sick. It was a terrible thing to do.'

When the Aucklanders arrived, they were given a Mills bomb each and sent to extend the line towards the Australians at Hébuterne. At dawn, as distant villages burned, fresh German storm troops strolled forward, full of confidence, smoking and laughing, unaware that the gap had been closed. The New Zealanders waited until they were only 45 metres away, then opened fire. The Australian troops in Hébuterne were just as deadly. The Germans tried to advance four more times and, each time, the Diggers shot them down. For Morris, it was a terrible day. The Germans

sent another lot and he got wiped down the same. Terrible!…They had four deep, cleared the whole thing. Terrible! A terrible thing to happen, isn't it? Just murder.

‘YOU WILL HOLD THEM'

With the line secured, the two other brigades of the 4th Division turned their attention to Albert, 15 kilometres from Hébuterne. The town had been captured by the Germans, but instead of pushing on to Amiens and the railway junction, they had stopped to loot and drink.

The brigades marched towards Albert at night, with flares rising and falling along the front-line. Smoking was forbidden; overhead, the shapes of large Gotha bombers blocked out the stars as they searched for telltale signs of moving troops.

On the morning of 27 March, the Australians looked down a slope, past a railway embankment, at Albert and the small neighbouring village of Dernancourt. The open fields were strewn with the wreckage of three crashed aeroplanes. A riderless horse, covered in blood, galloped back past them, startling hares already bolting from shell explosions. In Albert, the golden Virgin Mary statue still glittered above the smoke from burning houses. The troops moved down to the embankment to relieve a thin, ragged line of Scottish soldiers who'd been fighting and withdrawing for six days. Lieutenant George Mitchell remembered them asking:

‘Who are you?'

We told them. ‘Forty-eighth Australians.'

‘Thank God,' they said. ‘You will hold him.'

A German attack the following morning failed. From Albert to Dernancourt, the Australians stood waist-high above the embankment and fired into the advancing troops. One man, Sergeant Stanley McDougall, used a Lewis gun taken from two dead comrades until the barrel grew so hot it burned and blistered his hand. Private Joseph Pitt, a Sydney labourer, worked furiously to construct two functioning guns out of four damaged ones. Others took bombs from prisoners or threw stones. The Germans retreated to the houses of Dernancourt. That night, rain fell as the Australians emptied German packs and found them full of biscuits, letters and packages, some from Australia, stolen from Red Cross stores. In Dernancourt, the sounds of farm animals in distress could be heard; the famished Germans were killing them for food.

TOO CLOSE TO STOP

Despite the initial British retreat, the withdrawal was over. The Allies now held a continuous line although it was weak in places. Even though the Diggers believed the British had fled too easily, they had slowed the German advance.

The German supply lines were over-extended and the troops exhausted, but General Ludendorff had come too close to Amiens to stop. Over the next five days, the Germans attempted to split General Gough's weakened British 5th Army from the French at Villers-Bretonneux, another town close to Amiens. During this time, an Australian battalion helped hold the line after British troops left their positions, while the New Zealanders launched a successful attack near Hébuterne that saw the Germans driven back for the first time since 21 March.

But on 4 April the 35th Battalion of the Australian 9th Brigade was forced into retreat through Villers-Bretonneux after British troops on either side panicked and fell back. The last Australians in the area, the 36th Battalion, were told to advance until stopped, then to ‘hold on at all costs'. Before marching out, Lieutenant Colonel John Milne, the battalion commander, looked at his men and said, ‘Goodbye, boys, it's neck or nothing.' When the five waves of advancing German troops spotted the fast-moving Australians, they took cover in nearby woods and opened fire. The Australians also took cover, and a soldier in the uniform of a British officer arrived at one post and ordered the men to withdraw. The lance corporal in charge of the post asked for papers, but when the officer had none and couldn't prove his identity, the lance corporal shot him, believing he was a German. Whether he was or not was never established.

Soldiers of the 36th Battalion fell thickly, but the survivors rushed on in small groups, one party giving covering fire as another raced forward. Soon the Germans began to break, and when the British cavalry rode forward with swords and lances drawn, some of the retiring 35th Battalion joined them to form a solid line in front of Villers-Bretonneux. The town, for now, was held.

The next day, three German divisions attacked the Australians holding the railway embankment near Albert. They surged through a gap in the line at the railway bridge— heavy shelling had killed all the men—and moved up the slope, hauling up their artillery to fire directly into any post that resisted. The Australian artillery reply was weak—only two guns had ammunition left—so the Diggers left their wounded and retreated to a trench at the top of the slope. The wounded were taken prisoner. Some were well cared for, others weren't. When one German officer asked a group who they were, Private Frank Curtis replied, ‘Australians.' The officer shot him in the stomach.

But the Germans failed to break through. They had captured the railway embankment but had run out of troops and energy. As German soldiers paid their respects by erecting rough wooden crosses for two Australian dead with the epitaph ‘Here lies a brave English warrior,' Ludendorff paused the Somme offensive and turned his attention to Flanders.

BACKS TO THE WALL

Ludendorff 's second attack—Operation Georgette—was launched in Flanders, where many Allied troops had just arrived to recover from the Somme. This attack was as brutal, and the consequences as devastating. Armentières, Messines, Bullecourt and Passchendaele—every metre of territory the British, New Zealanders and Australians had fought and died for in 1917, and more, fell. Soon Hazebrouck, a major railway centre that supplied half the Flanders area with food and ammunition, was within a day's march of the Germans. As the 1st Australian Division moved to Hazebrouck, Field Marshal Haig appealed to his troops:

Every position must be held to the last man…With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.

Arriving at Hazebrouck station on 12 April, the Australians marched forward with a pannikin of hot cocoa and dug a second line of trenches six miles in front of Hazebrouck. The following day, the Germans continued to advance and, with British troops retreating past them, the Australians found that their trenches had become the front-line.

On the morning of 14 April, the advancing German waves made easy targets. One soldier said it was ‘like firing at a whole haystack—one could not miss.' But on 16 April, two New Zealand companies of the 2nd Entrenching Battalion had a different experience in a village next to the Australians. The men—mostly new to France and expecting to dig trenches, not fight—found themselves surrounded by Germans. After the British retreated, one company fought its way back, but in the other over 100 men surrendered—the largest number of New Zealanders to be taken prisoner at one time.