End of the Battle of Bullecourt

At two in the morning of 17 May 1917 British soldiers entered the last patch of the ruins of Bullecourt, over which one of the fiercest struggles in the trenches of the Hindenburg Line had been fought for two weeks. For most of the battle the British had already held almost the whole village, but at its western edge, on the highest-lying piece of rubble, marked on the maps as the Red Patch, the Germans held out stubbornly. From this spot machine guns swept every attack. After several failed attacks by the 7th Division the village was taken over by the fresh 58th (2/1st London) Division, made up of territorial battalions from London. For most of them it was their first battle.

The commander of the 2/5th Londons, that is the London Rifle Brigade, Lieutenant-Colonel P. D. Stewart, was at first to lead his men into the village and attack the Red Patch from the east, as his predecessors had tried to do without success. After a personal reconnaissance he concluded that the situation in the ruins was so unclear, and the firing from all sides so heavy, that this would be a mistake. He noticed, however, that from the south the Red Patch was not covered by wire, and obtained permission for a frontal attack from the railway embankment. After a hurricane bombardment lasting only two minutes, the Londoners rushed the position and quickly took it, capturing 23 prisoners and five machine guns. Immediately afterwards a company of the neighbouring 2/8th Londons (the Post Office Rifles, recruited among postal workers) passed through the rubble and cleared the rest of the village, taking another 13 prisoners. The day before, another company of the 58th Division had taken a stretch of the Hindenburg Line’s support trench as far as the eastern road to Hendecourt.

The German communiqué stated that Bullecourt had been evacuated according to orders. According to the British official history, however, prisoners testified that the Londoners had surprised them while they were preparing to evacuate, blowing up cellars and dugouts. Two days earlier the Germans had suffered a defeat in their largest counter-attack. Before dawn on 15 May, after an all-night bombardment including gas shells, storm troops and the Lehr Regiment of the 3rd Guard Division struck along the whole length of the breach. The Australians of the 14th Brigade and the Londoners of the 173rd Brigade drove them back with heavy losses. Only in Bullecourt did the Germans regain part of the ruins west of the road to Longatte. The Lehr Regiment, which had earlier been taken out of the line for special training, suffered a complete failure.

The capture of Bullecourt was officially regarded as the end of the battle, although minor clashes went on for a few more days, and later the British attacked the Hindenburg Line in the area several times. Field Marshal Douglas Haig had already decided to move the offensive to Flanders. He kept up the fighting at Bullecourt so long after the end of the Third Battle of the Scarpe partly so that the Germans would not realise that the Battle of Arras had come to an end, but above all because without the capture of the village the Australians in the trenches of the Hindenburg Line east of it would have been under constant threat. The result was modest. Since 3 May a breach a little over a kilometre wide had been won, but no one reached Riencourt and Hendecourt, which had been set as the objectives of the first day. According to the official history I ANZAC Corps lost 7,482 men and V Corps about 6,800, together more than 14,000, an average of a thousand a day. The two German divisions that defended the village lost, according to their regimental histories, more than 4,500 men, not counting the lightly wounded, and regiments of four other divisions also went into action. The battlefield was covered with unburied bodies. One witness wrote that never, not even later at Ypres, had he seen a place where the living and the dead lay so close together for so long.

The Australians came out of both battles of Bullecourt embittered. After the defeat of 11 April they had lost confidence in tanks and in General Hubert Gough, whom many of them blamed for haste and disregard of losses, and on 3 May they attacked without armoured support. In May the commander of the 5th Division, General Talbot Hobbs, protested against throwing it into the fighting after a very short rest, and the commander of I ANZAC Corps, General William Birdwood, who was also commander of all the Australian forces, had an order cancelled that the exhausted 1st Australian Division should relieve a British division on the neighbouring sector. Gough pressed for the Australians to be withdrawn to rest as soon as possible, and on the night of 12 to 13 May their sector in the western part of the breach was already taken over by the British. The critical assessment of Gough’s command was fixed by the Australian official historian Charles Bean. According to many historians, distrust of tanks was overcome only by the Battle of Hamel in July 1918. Today in Bullecourt there is an Australian memorial park with a statue of an Australian soldier.