Battle of Hamel

The Battle of Hamel was a small, carefully prepared attack by the Australian Corps on the German positions on the south bank of the Somme, east of Amiens. On the morning of 4 July 1918 ten battalions of Australian infantry, supported by sixty new British Mark V tanks, more than six hundred guns and aircraft of the Royal Air Force, took the village of Hamel, Vaire and Hamel Woods and the ridge beyond them. Four companies of the American 33rd Division fought alongside the Australians, and the day of the attack was chosen deliberately: it was American Independence Day. General John Monash, who planned the battle, later wrote that it was all over in 93 minutes. 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 its methods became the model for the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918.

Name and dates

In Australia and in most accounts it is simply called the “Battle of Hamel” (Battle of Hamel), while in France it is the Battle of Le Hamel, the village’s full name. The Australians and British themselves regarded it as a limited-objective operation, much smaller than the great battles of that year. The attack itself lasted from 3.10 a.m. to about 4.45 a.m., and the clearing of the woods and the village was finished by about 7 a.m. On the night of 4–5 July the Germans counter-attacked the hill east of Hamel and were driven off at about 2 a.m., which is why some accounts extend the battle to 5 July. We keep to a single day. Times are given in British time, which the army used then; because of summer time the sun stood an hour lower than the clocks showed. Figures are taken mainly from the Australian official history (Charles Bean, The A.I.F. in France: May 1918 – the Armistice, 1942).

Background

The village of Hamel lies in the Somme valley, at the foot of the plateau on which Villers-Bretonneux stands. The Germans took it on 4 April 1918, in the last days of Operation Michael (the Battle of the Avre), and after the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux on 24–25 April their line ran just in front of Hill 104, the northern shoulder of the plateau, from which Amiens could be seen. From Vaire and Hamel Woods and from the ridge behind the village, German observers and artillery looked into the Australian rear on both banks of the river and enfiladed their line on the north bank, near Morlancourt and Sailly-Laurette. In May and June the Australians pushed the Germans back there with small night raids, which they themselves called “peaceful penetration”. The German salient jutting out at Hamel, however, had to be taken by a proper attack.

General Henry Rawlinson, commander of the British Fourth Army, had urged the Australians to do this as early as April, but the corps chief of staff, General Brudenell White, objected, believing that with the dwindling flow of volunteers from Australia any costly operation might permanently “cripple” one of the five Australian divisions. The situation changed in June. On 31 May command of the Australian Corps passed to John Monash, an engineer and militia officer from Melbourne who in 1917 had commanded the 3rd Australian Division at Messines. Soon afterwards the 13th Tank Battalion, equipped with the new Mark V tanks, arrived in the Fourth Army. General Hugh Elles, commander of the Tank Corps, invited Monash to a demonstration. Unlike the tanks the Australians had known, the Mark V was driven by a single driver, could turn on the spot and reverse, and its armour protected it against armour-piercing rifle bullets. Monash and Rawlinson concluded that tanks would allow Hamel to be taken with few losses. On 18 June they discussed the plan, and on 21 June Monash submitted it in writing. On 23 June Rawlinson sent it to Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who approved it.

Plan

The first plan, drawn up by the commander of the 5th Tank Brigade, General Anthony Courage, envisaged a tank attack without an artillery barrage, on the model of the Battle of Cambrai. The Australian commanders, led by the commander of the 4th Division, General Ewen Sinclair-Maclagan, firmly objected. It was his division that in April 1917 at Bullecourt had been made by General Gough to attack the Hindenburg Line behind tanks instead of behind artillery fire. The tanks had failed, and the infantry, cut off in the German trenches, had suffered enormous losses. At a conference on 25 June it was therefore decided that the infantry would follow an ordinary creeping barrage and the tanks would help it: they were to move close behind the artillery fire, crush wire and machine-gun nests and destroy any resistance that held up the infantry. Monash ordered that during the battle the tanks would come under the orders of the infantry commanders to whom they had been allotted.

Ten battalions from three divisions were assigned to the attack, so that the losses would not fall on one: the 4th Brigade (General Charles Brand) of the 4th Division, the 11th Brigade (General James Cannan) of the 3rd Division and two battalions of the 6th Brigade (General John Paton) of the 2nd Division, all under Sinclair-Maclagan’s command. On the right flank, along the Roman road from Amiens to Saint-Quentin, the 25th Battalion of the 7th Brigade was also to attack. The 11th Brigade was to take the village of Hamel, the 4th Brigade Vaire and Hamel Woods, and the 6th Brigade was to push the line forward on the plateau near Villers-Bretonneux. The front of attack was about 5.5 km, and in the centre the infantry had to advance more than one and a half kilometres. Sixty fighting tanks of the 8th and 13th Tank Battalions and four supply tanks were available to help. For the whole corps front Monash received 326 field guns and 313 heavy guns, some of which came from outside the corps. The barrage, in which every tenth shell was a smoke shell, was to stand for four minutes 200 yards in front of the infantry, then move forward 100 yards every three minutes, halt for ten minutes halfway, and then go on more slowly, 100 yards every four minutes. Smoke screens on the flanks were to blind observers on the heights on both sides of the Somme.

For two weeks before the attack the artillery shelled the Germans every morning with gas, smoke and high-explosive shells, so that on the day of the attack, when there would be only smoke instead of gas, the Germans would put on their masks. Aircraft were to fly over the front during the night before the attack to drown the noise of the tanks. For the first time, the delivery of ammunition by aircraft on parachutes was prepared, and the supply tanks were to carry wire, water, ammunition and grenades to the captured line. For several days the infantry and the tank crews trained together in a valley near Vaux-en-Amiénois, and Monash held conferences with his commanders following an agenda which on 30 June ran to 133 items. On 2 July the troops chosen for the attack were visited by the Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes and the Minister for the Navy Joseph Cook, who were on their way to a meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council at Versailles.

The Americans

At the end of June five American divisions were training in the British zone. Rawlinson had the idea of giving some of them the experience of a well-prepared attack alongside the Australians while at the same time strengthening the depleted Australian battalions, whose companies often numbered little more than a hundred men. With the consent of Haig and of the commander of the American II Corps, General George Read, the commander of the 33rd Division (Illinois National Guard), General George Bell, sent ten companies of the 131st and 132nd Infantry Regiments on 29 and 30 June. Their platoons were attached to Australian companies. Rawlinson wrote that he had chosen the date of 4 July because the Americans were to take part in an attack with his troops for the first time.

The American commander-in-chief, General John Pershing, most probably learned of the plan only during a tour of the division on 2 July. From the start he had fought to prevent his troops from being dispersed among the Allied armies and from going into battle before the end of their training, so he forbade the Americans to take part. On the morning of 3 July six companies were withdrawn, and in the afternoon came the order to withdraw the remaining four. Monash replied to Rawlinson that it was already too late, that without the Americans the attack would have to be called off and that withdrawing them at the last moment might cause an “international incident”. Rawlinson, risking his post, allowed preparations to continue unless Haig decided otherwise. Shortly before 7 p.m. Haig ruled that the attack was to go ahead as planned, even if a few American units could not be withdrawn before zero hour. Four companies, sixteen platoons, distributed among the Australian battalions, thus took part in the battle. According to Australian accounts, a few men from the withdrawn companies borrowed Australian tunics and stayed in the line.

Course of the battle

The night before 4 July was very quiet. At 10.30 p.m. the tanks, with throttled engines, set off from Fouilloy and Hamelet for the assembly line, and after midnight the infantry lay down in the corn on the tapes marking the start line. Bombers of No. 101 Squadron RAF circled over the front all night, dropping 350 bombs, and their drone drowned out the tanks. At 3.02 a.m. the artillery began the usual morning bombardment, and the tanks moved off on the last stretch of their approach. At 3.10 the barrage came down. The infantry moved up to the line of bursts and after four minutes advanced behind it. A few guns fired short, and at the junction of the 4th and 11th Brigades the shells killed or wounded several dozen Australians and Americans at once. Smoke and dust were so thick that in the first phase the tanks in many places could not keep up with the infantry.

The heaviest fighting took place in the centre, for a German strongpoint the Australians called Pear Trench. The three tanks assigned to it got lost in the dark, and the barrage missed the wire and the trench. The 15th Battalion (from Queensland and Tasmania) took it on its own, with Lewis guns fired from the hip over the tall corn and a bayonet charge. Private Henry Dalziel, who rushed a German machine gun revolver in hand, received the Victoria Cross for it. South of him the 16th Battalion (from Western Australia) broke into Vaire and Hamel Woods. When a German machine gun on the edge of the wood killed a company commander and his sergeant, Lance Corporal Thomas Axford bombed the post, jumped into the trench, killed ten Germans and took six prisoner. He too received the Victoria Cross. The 13th Battalion went round the wood to the south and the 15th to the north, and they met beyond it on the ridge. In the north the 43rd Battalion (from South Australia) with six tanks took the village of Hamel, while the 42nd and 44th Battalions went round it on both sides. On the plateau near Villers-Bretonneux the 21st and 23rd Battalions followed the tanks almost without resistance, and the 25th Battalion on the Roman road repulsed the first German counter-attack at 4.20 a.m.

After the ten-minute pause, when it was already light, the tanks showed their full worth: they moved right at the edge of the barrage, made up mainly of shrapnel, fired at and crushed machine-gun nests, and the infantry called them up to every point of resistance. By about 4.45 a.m. the whole line of objectives was in Australian hands. The wood was cleared by about 6 a.m., and the village, where some 300 Germans were found in cellars and dugouts, by about 7 a.m. The four supply tanks brought up to the new line loads that would have needed about 1,200 men to carry. From 6 a.m. twelve aircraft of No. 9 Squadron RAF dropped 93 boxes of machine-gun ammunition by parachute. Of the sixty fighting tanks only three failed to reach their objectives, and their crews had only 13 killed and wounded.

The Germans were completely surprised. The attack fell on two divisions that had recently come into this sector: the 43rd Reserve Division at Hamel and the 13th Division in Vaire Wood, and the flank of the attack also struck the 108th Division. Their companies, weakened by influenza, numbered about 50 rifles each, and many prisoners had gas masks on their faces, as Monash had calculated. The staff of the German 202nd Reserve Regiment learned of the attack only before 6 a.m., when its forward battalions had already been destroyed. The reserves of the 43rd Reserve Division, under constant air attack, reached the battlefield only in the evening. At about 10 p.m., after a heavy artillery bombardment, several hundred Germans recovered part of the trenches on the hill east of Hamel, which they called the Wolfsberg. At 2 a.m. on the night of 4–5 July men of the 44th Battalion with a group of Americans drove them out with grenades, taking 56 prisoners and freeing eleven Australians captured earlier. The Germans were preparing an even larger counter-attack, but on 5 July they abandoned it.

Losses

According to Bean, the losses of the Australian and American infantry came to about 1,400 killed, wounded and missing, including 176 Americans and 142 men of the 15th Brigade, which that morning had seized German trenches near Ville-sur-Ancre, north of the Somme, as a diversion. In his memoirs Monash gave a much smaller figure, under 800 casualties, mostly lightly wounded. More than 1,600 Germans were taken prisoner (43 officers and 1,562 other ranks). The Allies captured 177 machine guns, 32 trench mortars and a new German heavy-calibre anti-tank rifle. Monash also wrote of two captured field guns. Bean estimated total German losses at well over 2,000 men, including prisoners. Some accounts, including the English Wikipedia, give 2,000 killed and wounded plus 1,600 prisoners, but this does not agree with the official history they cite.

Significance

Hamel was a small battle, but it had large consequences. The Australians gained a good position on the ridge from which the Germans had until then watched their rear and the approaches to Villers-Bretonneux, and the German divisions along the whole corps front now expected another blow. More important, however, was what the command learned. Hamel showed how to combine infantry, tanks, artillery, machine guns and aircraft in a surprise attack without a bombardment lasting several days. Haig’s headquarters issued a pamphlet to the whole army with the orders and a description of the battle, and Haig noted that Monash was “a most capable commander who thinks out every detail and leaves nothing to chance”. After Bullecourt the Australians had not trusted tanks. After Hamel they came to value them and gave them names, which they chalked on the armour. The same methods, on a much larger scale, were used on 8 August 1918 at the Battle of Amiens, which Ludendorff called “the black day of the German Army”.

News of the victory reached Versailles while the Supreme War Council was in session there. The prime ministers of Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Newfoundland sent Monash their congratulations. The French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau decided to deliver them in person, and on Sunday 7 July he came to the headquarters of the 4th Division at Bussy-lès-Daours near Corbie, where he addressed the troops in English: “When the Australians came to France, the French people expected a great deal of you. (…) We knew that you would fight a real fight, but we did not know that from the very beginning you would astonish the whole continent.”

Less pleased was Pershing, whose ban had been broken. He ordered that from then on all proposals to use American troops training with the British were to go to his headquarters. For the Americans, however, Hamel remained their first attack alongside British and Australian troops. About a dozen of them were awarded British decorations, and Corporal Thomas Pope of the 131st Regiment, who during the advance, when his company was halted by fire, single-handedly captured a German machine gun, later received the American Medal of Honor. Today on the ridge above the village, on the site of the German trenches, stands the Australian Corps Memorial, dedicated to all its battles in France in 1918.