Zero Hour (4 page)

[For] about six seconds after the explosion, you don't know if anything is wrong or not. It sort of numbs you. The hot stifling gases mixed with dust and black smoke choke you. You can't see for falling earth and clay and your ears ring like fury.

Hour after hour, the shells shrieked down and the men tensed as they waited for them to hit. They started differentiating between them by the noise they made or other telltale signs—the ‘rum-jar' mortar left a trail of sparks as it turned end over end through the air. Guessing where they were likely to land, the men dove for cover in other bays. But when the shells came over thick and fast, they could do nothing but claw into the ground.

They gave the shells nicknames like Jack Johnson, Coal Box, Silent Susan and Whizz-Bang. Close-firing mortars that could be launched from the trenches were also nicknamed— Rum Jar, Toffee Apple, Flying Pig and Plum Pudding. Most shells were named for their shape or sound, but the Jack Johnson was named after the 1908 world heavyweight boxing champion.

The artillery had quickly become the decisive weapon of the war, used to smother trenches before attacks or to bombard no-man's-land if troops in the front-line fired SOS signal rockets to indicate that enemy troops were crossing. The rockets burst in different colours and sequences to inform commanders further back about what was happening at the front. Certain rockets signalled that a sector was being attacked, while different colours signalled the end of an action or indicated new positions. In the lead-up to major battles, and during them, each side's artillery tried to silence the other, which would give its own infantry a marked advantage.

DEADLY NIGHTS

On 5 May, two weeks after the morse code message, German shells plunged into the Australian trenches. The roar of the hurricane bombardment was deafening. In the light of the shell bursts, several groups of Germans, with daggers, revolvers and bombs, were spotted bursting into the Australian trenches. They shot anyone who showed resistance, bombed dugouts and killed men by cracking their heads with knobkerries
—
wooden shafts with metal studs at the ends. Twenty-five minutes later, they were gone, taking 11 prisoners and leaving 95 dead or wounded. Soon after, the Australians began preparing their own raids.

With preparations for the Somme offensive intensifying, General Haig—the British commander—had ordered an increase in raids to prevent the Germans from thinning their trenches and moving spare troops to the area. Raiders trained at night using replicas of the German trenches created from information gathered by spotter aeroplanes. On their allotted night, they blackened their faces and hands, painted their bayonets, and swapped rifles for revolvers and knobkerries. With a curtain of explosives protecting them and illuminating the trenches in flashes, the raiders—some wearing steel body armour—stormed through the German trenches, bombed dugouts and captured prisoners. Any German who didn't cooperate was killed, but the men also shot some who'd surrendered—they had orders to take only a certain number of prisoners. Then, on a signal, the raiding parties withdrew. They were in and out like a whirlwind, sometimes in as little as eight minutes.

Not all raids succeeded. The Germans bombed one New Zealand group spotted sneaking through a gap in the wire. In another raid, a wounded Australian soldier was left behind. The Germans put up a sign saying he was being cared for ‘and is hopful'. Earlier, the Germans had used a placard to inform the New Zealanders that the German Navy had defeated the British in the Battle of Jutland. The Australians shelled the placard, while the New Zealanders replied with their own sign, stating how many German ships had been sunk.

THE SOMME

The German positions at the Somme were formidable. Trenches had been dug into the chalk, and the shell-ruined villages and forests had been fortified with deep wire entanglements and concrete strong points, strategically placed to give each German machine-gun position covering fire. The first and second German trench systems ran along ridges overlooking the British, while the third system, several kilometres back, was still being constructed.

The Somme had been chosen because it was where the British and French lines joined. Initially the French were to take the lead role, but, with the Battle of Verdun drawing away many of their divisions, the British took over. Despite having fewer divisions and the attacking line being reduced to 33 kilometres, Haig expected his troops to break the first German trench system within three hours, and the second by the third day. Then the cavalry would gallop through the break and circle in behind the German lines. If this failed, the commanders simply wanted more Germans killed than their own men. At the very least they hoped to take pressure off the French at Verdun.

The British massed the largest number of guns used in one offensive to date—over 1400—and opened fire on 25 June. On one day alone over 200,000 shells were fired. For seven days, the British bombarded the German lines. The explosions were so loud they could be heard in London, but many of the shells were duds and too many were filled with shrapnel balls, designed to explode in the air and kill troops. They did not damage the dugouts the Germans were sheltering in. Nor did they destroy the barbed wire as the commanders believed they would.

At 7.30 a.m. on 1 July, British officers blew their whistles and bugles, and the soldiers climbed out of their trenches and formed long, evenly spaced lines, then marched forward. Just before they charged, the four platoons of Captain Wilfred Percy Nevill's company each kicked a football to see who could get it furthest across no-man's-land, in places 640 metres wide.

The German troops hauled up their machine guns and mowed the enemy down; many British soldiers were hit as they left their trenches. The long front and the lack of reliable communication caused confusion. British troops reached several villages and some sections of the first German line. But the majority had been stopped. By the end of the day, there were 60,000 British casualties—20,000 had died, most within the first hour.

TOO LITTLE GAINED

Over the next two weeks, as the next phase was planned, the British launched 46 localised and uncoordinated attacks in which they gained 52 square kilometres of ground, but they still hadn't broken through the first line. Then, on 14 July, after an intense artillery bombardment, 22,000 British soldiers took the Germans by surprise, sweeping through their first line and capturing 10 kilometres of their second line before they recovered. The day was a huge success; the troops had broken the lines, although fighting continued among the dense trees of Delville and High woods.

The Somme offensive forced the Germans to end their assault against Verdun—where over 140,000 Germans and 180,000 French had been killed or wounded—and it was now the hot spot of the war. To prevent the British breaking through, the Germans began directing fresh troops to the Somme from quieter areas, like Armentières. Wanting to stop the Germans further thinning their trenches, Haig ordered that the raids continue.

Several weeks earlier, Lieutenant General Godley had arrived from Egypt with the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions of II Anzac Corps. Now there were over 100,000 Australian and New Zealand troops at the Western Front. After a reshuffle of divisions, I Anzac Corps consisted of the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions, while II Anzac Corps had the New Zealand Division and the 5th Division. The I Anzac Corps was moved down to Messines, 10 kilometres away, while the New Zealanders undertook the raids at Armentières. But the raids were failing, and a more threatening action was needed to hold the German troops in the area.

Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking, a British divisional commander stationed beside the 5th Australian Division, wanted to capture the part of the German front-line known as the Sugarloaf salient, near the occupied village of Fromelles on Aubers Ridge, 12 kilometres south of Armen-tières. The Sugarloaf, which was choked with machine guns and concrete bunkers, bulged into the British line in low-lying farmland overgrown with grass and weeds. Haking had already been involved in two attacks against Aubers Ridge, in May 1915 and June 1916. Both had failed against the strong German defences. But Haig agreed to Haking's plan, and Godley lent Haking the newly arrived 5th Division.

A POINTLESS TRICK

Haking's plan was that the 5th Division, with the weakened 61st British Division on their right, would advance in waves to capture the German front-line and the support trenches beyond it. Shortly before the attack, one of Haig's staff suggested it be cancelled: there wasn't enough ammunition for the artillery, and the flat 360-metre expanse of no-man's-land—the length of three rugby fields—was too wide to cross successfully. Haking insisted the attack go ahead. The troops, he said, were ‘worked up' to do it, and any change ‘would have a bad effect' on them. The commander of the 5th Division, Major General Sir James McCay, kept quiet. He was happy enough that his division, the last to arrive in France, would be the first to take part in a serious action, despite half the men not having seen the front-line, let alone fought in a battle.

In the German breastworks, with their concrete machine-gun shelters, and from Fromelles village one and a half kilometres back, German observers had watched the British and Australian preparations. They put up a sign saying ‘Advance Australia. If you can!'

Late in the morning of 19 July, as the Australians passed British graves from 1915 on their way to the front-line, over 320 guns opened fire on the German trenches. Some of the troops still wore their slouch hats because there weren't enough helmets to go around. It was a hot day. The Australians cheered as the shells tore ragged gaps in the German breastworks and heaved them into the air.

But the German troops, including 28-year-old Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler, hunkered down in their concrete dugouts, listening to the replying bark of their artillery. For hours their shells destroyed the Australian trenches. Men hugged the parapets to avoid shrapnel, standing on the dead, as stretcher-bearers laboured to remove the wounded. One soldier, driven mad by the constant shelling, kept calling for his mum to close the gate. An officer cried like a child; other men just babbled.

MORE HOPELESS

With another 15 minutes of the Allied bombardment left, the Australians moved out into no-man's-land. The 8th Brigade was on the far left, the 14th Brigade was in the middle and the 15th Brigade was on the right, directly opposite the Sugarloaf and with the furthest to go. The 61st British Division was attacking next to the 15th. Despite dust and smoke smothering the land and making it difficult to see, the 15th Brigade commander, Brigadier General Harold ‘Pompey' Elliot, was confident the artillery had done its job. He told his men, ‘You won't find a German in the trenches when you get there.' When zero hour arrived, at 6 p.m., the 15th Brigade charged through an overgrown orchard and across a shallow river. The Germans at the Sugarloaf hauled out their machine guns and waited in the low summer sun until they had a clear view, then started firing. Their bullets ripped into trees and sparked off the wire. The attacking troops dove into shell holes or the river. When men of the following waves ‘looked over the top, they saw no-man's-land leaping up everywhere in showers of dust and sand'. They also saw men hit with so many bullets that their bodies were cut in two. Still, at five-minute intervals, the waves of men charged. For Sergeant Walter Downing, it was like the charge of the Light Horse at Gallipoli, ‘but more terrible, more hopeless'.

No-man's-land on the left of the Sugarloaf was narrower, and the 8th and 14th Brigades swept across it and into the enemy trench before the Germans had time to react. After bayoneting and shooting anyone in their path, the Australians moved on to capture the support trenches, but all they could find were open grassy fields crossed with hedges and a watery ditch filled with corpses 180 metres beyond the German front-line. The ditch had at one point been the Germans' support line but it was now flooded and abandoned. At 6.30 p.m., unaware that the 15th Brigade and the British to their right had been shot to pieces and that the Sugarloaf wasn't captured, one of the battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Toll, scrawled a note saying his men were digging in. He attached it to a messenger pigeon, the safest and most reliable means of communication available. The bird took 17 minutes to fly the several kilometres back to headquarters. By the time the message was read and fresh orders given, events at the front were changing.

A BUTCHER'S SHOP

Toll returned to the unoccupied German front-line with most of his men, leaving some of his troops from the 8th and 14th Brigades to make the 45-centimetre-deep, 900-metre-long watery ‘support line' ditch defendable. The men scraped the clay mud off their entrenching tools into the two empty sandbags they each carried, hopelessly trying to build a wall. Ammunition and sandbags were running low, but the carrying parties bringing up supplies were being shot down. Meanwhile, engineers raced to dig communications saps between the Allied line and the captured German frontline. The shallow river in no-man's-land was bloated with ‘wounded and dying men—like a butcher's shop—men groaning and crying and shrieking'. When the carriers did reach the front, many stayed to fight rather than returning for more supplies.

With messages arriving that the men were digging in, the Australian commanders believed there was still every chance of success, even though the 15th Brigade and the British hadn't reached the Sugarloaf. A new attack to begin at 9 p.m. was planned to capture it, but at the last moment Haking ordered the British troops to wait until the morning. The Australian staff were told, but the message wasn't passed on to Elliot until half of his reserve battalion had already advanced into the dwindling light. Out in no-man's-land, soldiers from the earlier waves rose from craters to join the charge, but machine-gunners on the Sugarloaf shot them down.