Australians take Hamel

On 4 July 1918, American Independence Day, at 3.10 a.m., ten battalions of General John Monash’s Australian Corps, four companies of the American 33rd Division and sixty British Mark V tanks advanced behind a creeping barrage against the German positions at the village of Hamel on the south bank of the Somme, about 20 kilometres east of Amiens. By about 4.45 a.m. the whole objective line, from the Somme to the Roman road near Villers-Bretonneux, was in Allied hands. Monash later wrote that “the whole thing was over in 93 minutes” and that no battle he knew of, “not even Messines”, had gone so smoothly and so exactly to timetable. By evening some 1,500 Germans had been taken prisoner. According to the Australian official historian Charles Bean, it was the most successful Allied attack since the start of the great German offensive in March, and also the first time that American soldiers had attacked shoulder to shoulder with Australians.

The last hours before the attack

The day had in fact begun with a quarrel. On the morning of 3 July, when the Australian battalions, with the American platoons attached to them, were already in the trenches facing Hamel, an order arrived from the American commander-in-chief, General John Pershing, to withdraw six of the ten companies, because his men had not yet finished their training. The Australians had to rearrange their formations in haste, and the 11th Brigade now went into the attack with about 2,200 men instead of almost 3,000. According to the history of the Australian 16th Battalion, the Americans received the order with fury and came close to refusing to obey it. At about 4 p.m. an order came to withdraw the remaining four companies as well. Monash told the commander of the Fourth Army, General Henry Rawlinson, that it was too late, that without the Americans he would have to call off the attack, and that unless he received an explicit prohibition by 6.30 p.m., the infantry and artillery would already be on their way to their positions. Rawlinson allowed him to wait until 7 p.m. Just before that hour Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who was only then returning from Paris, decided that the attack was to go ahead as planned, even if some of the Americans could not be withdrawn.

At 6 p.m. the battalions received a telegram with zero hour: 3.10 a.m. Many of them gave their men a second hot meal around midnight, which the Americans noted with approval in their accounts. The night was unusually quiet. At 10.30 p.m. the tanks, their engines throttled down, moved off from the orchards near Fouilloy and Hamelet, and between 11.45 p.m. and 1.15 a.m. they reached their assembly line, about 800 metres behind the front. There infantry guides were waiting for them, having marked the way to the battalions with tape. Meanwhile patrols cut gaps in their own wire, and intelligence officers and engineers laid out the tapes of the jumping-off line. Between midnight and 1.45 a.m. the companies left the trenches and lay down in the grass and corn, in places waist-high. The commander of the 15th Battalion, Colonel McSharry, a veteran of many battles, remembered that the men moved to their places “like shadows”. One of the American platoons recorded: “When we lined up with bayonets fixed, we were all nervous (…), but when we got to the place we lay down and soon forgot we were going over. (…) We soon fell asleep.” Contrary to the custom of the Australian infantry, each man was given a tot of rum.

All night long bombers of No. 101 Squadron, Royal Air Force, circled over the front. Every pilot flew at least three sorties and the squadron dropped 350 bombs on Hamel and the valley behind the village. As one aircraft flew off, the next arrived, and their drone, deliberately loud, was meant to drown out the tanks. At one point a parachute flare hung for several minutes just above the tanks’ assembly line, but the Germans noticed nothing. One of the prisoners said afterwards that the night flights had aroused some suspicion, but no one imagined that they were meant to hide the noise of tanks.

Zero hour

At 3.02 a.m. the Australian artillery opened its usual morning bombardment, which it had repeated at that hour for two weeks, mixing high-explosive, smoke and gas shells. That day there was no gas in it, but the Germans, used to gas coming with every smoke shell, put on their masks, as Monash had counted on. At the same moment the sixty tanks set off at full throttle for the last 800 metres. Only at Pear Trench did a German officer hear movement in the corn and order his men to stand to, and on the southern flank, where the mortars had begun laying a smokescreen too early, the Germans sent up red alarm rockets. It was 3.10 a.m. by the watches (by the sun, without summer time, only 2.10) when, with a sudden quickening of fire, the main barrage came down.

The fire was remarkably accurate, even though the batteries had hardly been able to register their guns, so as not to give the plan away. The American Captain Carroll Gale of the 131st Infantry wrote after the war that the bursts of the 18-pounder shells formed “an almost straight line from the Somme as far south as the eye could see”. Every gun began with a smoke shell. The field-gun shells fell 200 yards in front of the infantry, the howitzer shells further on, and those of the heavy howitzers further still. The machine guns of four divisions swept the ground ahead of the attack, mainly from the flank, from the north bank of the Somme. The infantry rose and, according to Bean, lighting cigarettes, rifles slung, as if on the march, walked up to the line of bursts, which after four minutes was to make its first lift.

Some guns, however, were firing short. At the junction of the 4th and 11th Brigades the first shells fell on a section of Americans and a section of Lieutenant Canaway’s platoon of the 43rd Battalion, killing or wounding almost all of them. On the left flank of the 15th Battalion their own shells killed a dozen or so men and wounded about thirty. The same guns fired short until the end, but the Australian infantry learned to avoid them. Canaway led the rest of his platoon so close to the main barrage that the stray shells burst behind them.

Pear Trench

At 3.14 a.m., when the barrage moved forward, it was still almost completely dark. Smoke from the shells and dust from the dry earth formed such a thick screen that even experienced soldiers could not see the line of bursts and moved by compass, while the tanks had trouble keeping direction. The fiercest fighting took place in the centre, at a German strongpoint which the Australians, because of its shape, called Pear Trench. The barrage jumped over the wire and the trench, and the three tanks allotted to it got lost in the darkness. Captain Carter’s company of the 15th Battalion (Queensland and Tasmania) ran into coils of barbed wire under machine-gun fire, and Carter fell with both legs broken.

According to the plan, in such a situation the infantry was to lie down and call up a tank. There was no tank, so the Australians managed in their own way. Every platoon had two Lewis guns, and the gunners, standing and firing from the hip over the tall corn, silenced the German posts. As the company rushed two machine guns, a third opened up from the left. Private Henry Dalziel, the second gunner of a Lewis gun team, a driver from the transport section who had volunteered for the attack, went for it with a revolver, shot two Germans and captured the post. Wounded in the hand, with a finger shot off, he did not leave the field. Twice he crossed open ground to fetch ammunition dropped from aircraft, until he was badly wounded in the head. He survived and received the Victoria Cross. A little further north, on the flank of the 43rd Battalion, when a German machine gun killed Lieutenant Brook, the Australian gunner Shaw fired from the hip at the crew, and the American Corporal Henry Zyburt of Chicago dashed into the post and bayoneted three Germans. Canaway’s platoon jumped the trench and took four machine guns still in their covers.

In the strongpoint itself the fighting was fierce and confused. Some of the Germans raised their hands while others behind them kept throwing grenades. The Queenslanders, enraged by their losses, then killed the defenders without mercy. The American Captain Mallon counted forty dead Germans on a very small stretch. After clearing Pear Trench the 15th Battalion caught up with the barrage, and at the line of the ten-minute pause its tanks at last arrived.

Vaire Wood and Hamel Wood

South of Pear Trench the 16th Battalion from Western Australia advanced on Vaire and Hamel Woods, one of the three main obstacles. It attacked with half the strength originally planned, because both American companies allotted to it, 500 men in all, had been withdrawn the previous evening. At the wire in front of a redoubt called Kidney Trench a German machine gun mortally wounded the company commander, Captain Woods, and his sergeant, and wiped out a Lewis gun team. Lance Corporal Thomas Axford, a labourer from Coolgardie, ran forward, bombed the post, jumped into the trench, killed ten Germans and took six prisoner. Then he threw the machine gun out onto the parapet and called the platoon on to the attack. He too received the Victoria Cross. Many of the Germans in this sector, as the commanders of the 14th and 16th Battalions noted, were wearing gas masks, which made the fighting much easier. Many of the prisoners were very young.

In the wood the tanks could advance only along the main ride, so the 16th Battalion pushed through the undergrowth on its own, firing from the hip as it went and driving the fleeing Germans into their own artillery fire. In the north-eastern corner of Hamel Wood a German company headquarters held out to the end, manning the trenches with stretcher-bearers, runners and a reserve platoon, until a phosphorus shell set its dugout on fire. The battalion took some 400 prisoners in the woods and had finished clearing them before 6 a.m. The 13th Battalion from New South Wales was to go round the wood to the south and reach the ridge beyond it. Before the battle its men had been told to treat the wood like a rugby scrum and to run round it themselves like a half-back. Captain Marper, who led this outflanking move, captured one machine-gun nest, but behind it came upon a carefully camouflaged trench that had not appeared on the aerial photographs. It was already light. Marper ran to an approaching tank bearing the 13th Battalion’s colours on its armour and pointed out the target. He was shot in the chest and arm, but the tank crushed one post and the crew of the other surrendered.

Hamel village

In the north the village of Hamel was taken by the 43rd Battalion from South Australia, while halves of the 44th Battalion from Western Australia went round it on both sides. Some thirty tanks were waiting to be called up in this sector. Here too the first minutes passed without them. In front of the western edge of the village, lit up by a burning house, the Germans were firing from behind a heap of beets. Captain Cope sent Lieutenant Symons with an American platoon on an outflanking move along the road, after which Australians and Americans rushed the post from all sides, killed fifteen Germans and took about forty prisoner. When Symons was wounded, the American platoon was led to the end by the Australian Private Anderson, the only experienced soldier in the unit apart from Symons. In Notamel Wood, north of the village, where the German line was strongly held, a sergeant walked up to a tank, pulled the bell handle at the back of the vehicle and, when the door opened, pointed out a machine gun to the crew. According to one account the tank “went straight on and wiped it out”. On the extreme left flank, by the Somme marshes, the 42nd Battalion advanced according to plan, and at the second lift of the barrage the tanks caught up with the infantry.

After the ten-minute pause the 43rd Battalion entered the village with the tanks. In the cellars and dugouts about 300 Germans were found, some of whom learned of the attack only then. Lance Corporal Schulz, detailed to search for documents, had earlier spotted on aerial photographs the trace of a buried cable. He followed it with two German-speaking Americans to a dugout in the northern part of the village and there accepted the surrender of a German battalion commander with his entire staff. Three tanks were knocked out in and at the edge of the village, two hit by shells and one overturned. At about 7 a.m. Captain Cope fired three green rockets, the signal “Hamel cleared”. Captain Moran, a 44-year-old officer who had recently arrived from Australia, climbed onto the rafters of a house at the eastern end of the village and there, for a bet, planted a small French flag.

On the plateau

On the right flank, on the plateau north-east of Villers-Bretonneux, two battalions of the 6th Brigade from Victoria advanced behind an excellent barrage. The tanks caught up with the infantry at the first German trench and enfiladed it, and the smokescreens blinded the Germans so that their posts saw the Australians only when they were right in front of them. The commanders of the 23rd Battalion reported that it was “the best barrage we have ever followed”. It was hardest at the very edge, by the Roman road, where the 25th Battalion from Queensland attacked without tanks. Of the two platoons storming a German post south of the road, only nine men reached the objective unwounded. At 4.20 a.m. the Germans counter-attacked them from two sides, and only a platoon sent from the neighbouring company turned the bombing fight. Then the Germans began to surrender in little groups of two and three, and once ten, from as far as 350 yards away. The battalion lost 93 men but took 92 prisoners. On this flank the objective was reached before the barrage arrived at the pause line.

Tanks, aircraft and the new line

In the second phase, after dawn, the tanks showed in full what they could do. They moved at the very edge of the barrage, which now consisted mainly of shrapnel, harmless to their armour, raked machine-gun nests with case shot, and crushed whole lines of dugouts and rifle pits along the banks and gullies under their weight. An observer on the heights on the north bank of the Somme noted at 4.45 a.m.: “Tanks everywhere beyond Hamel. Beyond Vaire Wood.” One tank was seen moving backwards and forwards “like a housewife’s iron”, flattening a German dugout. At the same time aircraft of No. 3 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps, flew over the line, signalling to the infantry to light flares. Flares burned along the whole line of objectives, and the airmen dropped maps showing their positions at the headquarters of the 4th Division. At about 5.30 a.m. most of the tanks turned back. Of the sixty, only three failed to reach their objectives, and by 11 a.m. almost all had returned to their rallying points several kilometres to the rear. Their crews had only thirteen killed and wounded.

On the captured line the infantry dug in. Where there were German trenches, they occupied them. Four supply tanks brought barbed wire, pickets, corrugated iron, water, grenades and ammunition to the appointed points. When the commander of the 13th Battalion, Colonel Marks, reached the site of the battalion dump beyond Vaire Wood early in the morning, he found it piled with boxes. “That’s from our tank, sir,” a soldier told him. By calculation, the loads of the four tanks replaced carrying parties of about 1,200 men, and some commanders considered this the most important lesson of the battle. From 6 a.m. twelve aircraft of No. 9 Squadron RAF from the airfield at Poulainville, flying at a height of about 300 metres, dropped boxes of machine-gun ammunition on brown parachutes wherever the gun teams had laid out large white “V” letters on the corn. Each aircraft made an average of four flights. They dropped 93 boxes, or 111,600 rounds. Two boxes caught in the trees of Accroche Wood on the German side, and most fell further from the target than planned, but the infantry judged that the method had a future. One aircraft crashed, according to some accounts after a parachute became entangled in a wing, according to others after being hit by a shell; the pilot and observer were killed. Later another was shot down.

At about 9.30 a.m. most of the British aircraft flew off and for an hour or two the Germans controlled the sky. More than thirty of their machines at a time dived over the new positions, dropping bombs and strafing the infantry, while observers directed artillery fire onto Hamel. The village was heavily shelled from 9 a.m., but until then the German artillery, engaged by British and French batteries and unsure where the Australians were, had been almost harmless. The wounded reached the rear so quickly, some of them on the returning tanks, that the loading post ran short of ambulances, and the 4th Division’s medical command brought up horse-drawn wagons and even the engineers’ pontoon wagons. Among the soldiers the saying went round: “There’s a catch in it somewhere, it was too easy.” In the trenches the mood was carefree. A lieutenant of the 14th Battalion heard his men, digging under fire, arguing whether Fitzroy’s football team would beat Carlton on Saturday.

On the other side

The attack fell on two German divisions that had recently come into this sector: the 43rd Reserve Division, whose 202nd Reserve Infantry Regiment held Hamel, and the 13th Division, which had only just relieved its predecessors in the Vaire woods and whose artillery was still moving. Their companies, weakened by influenza, numbered about 50 rifles each, the trenches were shallow and the wire weak. Prisoners told the tank crews that when the bombardment began they took it for the preparation for a raid and sheltered in their dugouts, and before the shelling stopped Australians were already standing in the trenches, calling on them to come out. None of the front-line prisoners questioned had seen a tank before being captured. The headquarters of the 202nd Reserve Infantry Regiment learned of the attack only before 6 a.m., when both its forward battalions were already gone. From the forward battalion of the 15th Infantry Regiment one officer and twenty men returned, together with the battalion staff, whose commander, Rittmeister von Preuschen, left the best German account of the battle: at 3 a.m. drumfire, a quarter of an hour later firing up ahead, then tanks on the Roman road and at 5 a.m. infantry right in front of the headquarters.

The command of the 43rd Reserve Division at once sent the reserve battalion from Méricourt and a battalion from the north bank of the Somme to counter-attack, but British aircraft attacked even single soldiers on the roads with bombs and machine guns, and the units reached the vicinity of the battlefield only shortly before noon. At about 10 p.m., after a heavy artillery bombardment, several hundred Germans struck along a communication trench leading to the hill east of Hamel which they called the Wolfsberg, and recaptured about 200 metres of the 44th Battalion’s trench. The night was restless: the Germans shelled the new positions with mustard gas and phosgene, which was a severe trial for the American platoons, who did not even know the smell of gas. Four mortars of the 11th Light Trench Mortar Battery under Sergeant Distant, well supplied by a supply tank, kept up fire throughout on the trench along which the German reinforcements were moving. At 2 a.m. on 5 July the bombing parties of Lieutenant Gaze and Lieutenant Cornish, reinforced by men of the 43rd Battalion and the section of the American Corporal Powell, attacked from the south and drove the Germans out of the trench traverse by traverse. Private Lynch, “irresistible throughout the fight”, was killed in a crowd of Germans just before they fled. Six officers and fifty men were taken prisoner, together with ten machine guns, and eleven Australians captured earlier were freed from a German dugout. In this fight the American Corporal Thomas Pope distinguished himself by capturing a machine gun single-handed. He later received the British Distinguished Conduct Medal and the American Medal of Honor.

The Americans

For the four American companies of the 131st and 132nd Infantry Regiments, from the Illinois National Guard, this was their baptism of fire. Most of them had never before heard machine-gun fire. Their first impression of war, as Lieutenant Rinkliff and Sergeant Gottwald wrote, came from stretcher-bearers carrying a wounded Australian the night before. In the battle they were so eager not to fall a step behind the Australians that they ran into their own artillery fire, and according to Australian accounts most of their casualties came from this. In the 43rd Battalion Major Lott had to turn them back, and then, when they halted uncertainly, ask whether they were going on. “We watched the line next to us. When they went, we went,” said one of the Americans. The Australian Corporal Roach of the 13th Battalion was killed running into the fire of his own artillery to turn back an American platoon. The Australian commanders spoke of the Americans with appreciation. Colonel McSharry wrote that they “behaved magnificently, but were too anxious to get up to the barrage, a common fault of new troops”, and one of the company commanders ended his report with the words: “The United States soldiers have been admitted as Diggers.” The Americans lost 176 men.

The day’s balance

On a front of about 5.5 kilometres the Australians advanced in places more than a kilometre and a half and took the whole ridge behind Hamel, from which the Germans had overlooked their rear since April. According to the Australian official history, infantry losses amounted to about 1,400 men, including 176 Americans and 142 men of the 15th Brigade, which that same morning had seized German trenches near Ville-sur-Ancre, north of the Somme, as a diversion. Monash gave fewer than 800 casualties in his memoirs. Including the night counter-attack, more than 1,600 Germans were taken prisoner, and 177 machine guns and 32 mortars were captured. Pershing learned the next day, to his displeasure, that four of his companies had fought after all. On Sunday 7 July the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau came to the headquarters of the 4th Division to thank the Australians in person, and the way the attack at Hamel had been prepared and carried out served a month later as the model for the attack at Amiens.