Australians take Péronne

On 1 September 1918 the Australian Corps of General John Monash captured Péronne, the small town on the Somme which the Germans had taken in March, during the spring offensive. The day before, the Australian 5th Brigade had attacked the hill of Mont Saint-Quentin, which dominates the town from the north, but a German counter-attack had pushed it off the summit. During the night Monash moved further brigades across the river and on 1 September struck simultaneously at the hill and at the town itself. A British chronology of the war records under this date that Péronne was retaken by “British troops”. In reality it was the work of the Australians of the British Fourth Army.

The attack began at 6 a.m., in drizzle and mist. The orders had been issued only around midnight and the troops barely reached their start positions in time, and the artillery, as on the previous day, had no time to prepare a barrage and fired only at selected targets. The 14th Brigade of the 5th Australian Division drove the Germans out of the village and wood of Sainte-Radegonde and before 7 a.m. reached the wide, water-filled moat surrounding the old ramparts of Péronne. The main bridge was blown up right under the noses of the Australians chasing the Germans, and a machine gun on the castle walls killed several men at a footbridge further south. It turned out, however, that the moat could be crossed on planks and the rubble of the destroyed bridge. The 54th Battalion got across and by 8.40 a.m. was already in the centre of the town. Most of the defenders were sitting in cellars. Soon the Australians held almost all of Péronne except the north-eastern suburb, which the Germans defended until the following day. On the left the 53rd Battalion cleared Anvil Wood, and its men silenced German posts with a captured field gun turned round on them.

Meanwhile the 6th Brigade of the 2nd Australian Division advanced on Mont Saint-Quentin. Since it was not known exactly where the leading units of the previous day were, the artillery fired only beyond the road from Péronne to Bouchavesnes, and the battalions had to cover about a kilometre without support, dashing from shell hole to shell hole. The village was now defended by fresh regiments of the German 38th Division, and to the north of it regiments of the 2nd Guard Division still held on. Between 1 and 1.30 p.m. every available mortar and howitzer smothered the ruins of the village, after which the 21st and 23rd Battalions went in to the assault, passed through the village and the wood beyond it and dug in on their eastern edge. Further to the left the 3rd Australian Division was halted by fire in front of Allaines, taking about 400 prisoners.

The fighting for Mont Saint-Quentin and Péronne brought the Australians eight Victoria Crosses, six of them for 1 September. They went to Private William Currey of the 53rd Battalion, who captured a field gun and then a German strongpoint, Corporals Arthur Hall and Alexander Buckley of the 54th Battalion, Sergeant Albert Lowerson of the 21st Battalion, Lieutenant Edgar Towner of the 2nd Machine Gun Battalion and Private Robert Mactier of the 23rd Battalion. Buckley and Mactier were killed and received the Victoria Cross posthumously. According to Charles Bean’s Australian official history, in three days of fighting, from 31 August to 2 September, the Australians took about 2,600 prisoners at a cost of a little over 3,000 men. Monash wrote that the commander of the Fourth Army, General Henry Rawlinson, more than once called this operation the finest single feat of arms of the war.

The capture of the hill and the town destroyed German hopes of holding the Somme line through the winter. The river and its marshy flood plain were meant to shield the Germans from the west, but the Australians went round them from the north. In March 1917 the British had entered Péronne without a fight, after the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line. This time they had to take it by storm. The next day, when the Canadians further north attacked the Drocourt–Quéant line, the Germans decided to fall back towards the Hindenburg Line.