Start of the Battle of the Ancre Heights

On 1 October 1916 at 3.15 p.m. the Canadian Corps of General Julian Byng attacked Regina Trench, the last German line on the northern slope of the Thiepval ridge on the Somme. In British nomenclature this attack opens the Battle of the Ancre Heights, in which the Reserve Army of General Hubert Gough fought for six weeks for the rest of the ridge. The first day ended in failure. The wire in front of the trench was almost untouched, and the fresh German Marine Infantry Brigade drove out with counter-attacks almost all those who had broken into the trench. To the west, meanwhile, in the ruins of the Schwaben and Stuff redoubts above the valley of the Ancre, ceaseless bombing fights went on.

A ridge only half taken

In the Battle of Thiepval Ridge, on 26–28 September, the British and Canadians had taken the ruins of Thiepval, Mouquet Farm, the Zollern Redoubt and Hessian Trench on the crest of the ridge. The Germans, however, did not give up the northern edge of the ridge. In the Schwaben Redoubt, above the steep slope running down to the Ancre, and in the Stuff Redoubt east of it, each side held a part and had been fighting for every stretch of trench for several days. Further east, on the reverse slope of the ridge, just beyond the crest, ran a trench that the Germans called the Staufen Riegel and the Canadians Regina Trench. It stretched from the Stuff Redoubt to beyond the road from Courcelette to Pys. Between it and the Canadian lines, on the very crest, lay Kenora Trench, which the Canadians had already taken once and lost. On 28 September a battalion from New Brunswick attacked Regina Trench three times without success, and Reserve Army headquarters set 1 October as the date for its capture.

More than a few hundred metres of ground depended on this trench. On 29 September the headquarters of General Douglas Haig sent the armies the plan for the next great attack, which was to begin around 12 October. The Fourth Army was to advance on Le Transloy and the heights before Bapaume, while the Reserve Army was to strike from both sides of the Ancre valley: from the Thiepval ridge northwards, towards Pys and Miraumont, and from the area of Beaumont-Hamel eastwards. The two arms were to meet at Miraumont and cut off the German troops in the valley. Regina Trench was the line from which the attack northwards was to start. Haig believed that in normal autumn weather these tasks lay within the reach of his armies.

The defenders and the preparations

Regina Trench was hard to shell. It lay beyond the crest of the hill and British artillery had difficulty hitting it, while the wire, which the Germans had reinforced with concertina coils, hardly suffered from the fire. Behind the trench a deep ravine and several sunken roads allowed the defenders to bring up reinforcements safely. At the end of September the trench was taken over from the exhausted 8th Division by the Marine Infantry Brigade, brought in from the Marine Corps on the Flanders coast, a fresh and well-trained unit roughly the strength of a division. Its 1st and 2nd Marine Infantry Regiments held the sector on both sides of the road from Courcelette to Grandcourt. Opposite the Canadian right wing stood the 4th Ersatz Division. The history of one German regiment, which still held part of the line by the road to Pys, recorded that the attack came at an unfortunate moment, just as the marines were taking over the front.

After several weeks of fighting at Courcelette the Canadians were exhausted. Byng agreed to postpone the attack until there was a reasonable chance of breaking into the trench, but insisted that the 2nd Canadian Division, which held this sector, should finish the task itself. On the morning of 1 October, at 7.50 a.m., its commander, General Richard Turner, reported to the corps that according to the previous day’s aerial photographs the bombardment of Regina and Kenora trenches was insufficient. He was told that most of the artillery preparation would take place that very morning. At noon the commander of the 8th Brigade of the 3rd Canadian Division reported that the wire in front of Regina Trench was intact, and the guns cut it right up to zero hour. The night before, both armies, Allied and German, had put their clocks back by an hour, because summer time ended at midnight.

The attack at 3.15 p.m.

The British official history describes 1 October as a fine autumn day. The Canadians, however, waited for zero hour in drizzle, and many of them were hit in their jumping-off trenches by their own shells falling short. At 3.15 p.m. they went forward at the same time as the Fourth Army, which on their right began the attack on Eaucourt l’Abbaye and Le Sars that opened the Battle of the Transloy Ridges.

On the right wing the 4th Brigade of the 2nd Canadian Division had only to straighten the front. Its Ontario battalions advanced about 400 metres under sporadic machine-gun fire, dug in and made contact with the British 23rd Division of the Fourth Army. That was where the successes ended. The 5th Brigade, weakened by earlier fighting, had to commit three battalions to the attack on a front more than a kilometre long. On the right wing the 22nd Battalion, made up of French-speaking Canadians from Quebec who two weeks earlier had taken Courcelette, advanced in three waves of eighty men each. After four hundred metres it ran into the German barrage and machine-gun fire, and the wire proved almost untouched. “From that moment the attack collapsed,” the battalion’s chronicle recorded. Fewer than fifty men reached Regina Trench, and after a short fight with bayonets and grenades the survivors had to withdraw. In the centre the 25th Battalion from Nova Scotia was to take “at all costs” Kenora Trench and the stretch of Regina Trench behind it. Its commander had at his disposal, as he himself wrote, two hundred men and twelve machine guns. Only thirty reached the wire in front of Regina Trench, and they lay in shell holes until dark, but the company following them took Kenora Trench and the Nova Scotians held it despite fire from the flank. On the brigade’s left wing a company of the 24th Battalion from Montreal broke into Regina Trench, but the marines, bombing their way along the trench, almost wiped it out. At the junction of Kenora and Regina trenches, however, men of the 24th Battalion built a double barricade and kept the Germans out of the newly taken Kenora Trench.

Things went worst on the left wing, where the 8th Brigade of the 3rd Canadian Division attacked obliquely across the Grandcourt road with two battalions of Canadian Mounted Rifles, which were already fighting as infantry. The alert Germans laid a barrage on the Canadian lines just before zero hour. One company of the 4th Battalion was almost entirely wiped out in no man’s land, and part of a second reached Regina Trench and died there to the last man. Of the two companies of the 5th Battalion, one was held up on the wire, from which fifteen men survived, while the other broke into the trench and built barricades in it. The bombing fight went on until two in the morning, when losses and a shortage of grenades forced the Canadians to withdraw. According to the regimental history of the marines, the situation was restored only after dawn on 2 October by a counter-attack of two battalions, at the cost of heavy losses.

In the redoubts above the Ancre

West of the Canadians the front was held by II Corps under General Claud Jacob. By the morning of 1 October the 25th Division had relieved the bled-white 11th Division in the Stuff Redoubt and, in rain and mud, was consolidating the captured trenches while waiting for better weather to take the northern face of the redoubt. In the Schwaben Redoubt the 55th Brigade of General Ivor Maxse’s 18th Division was fighting for its northern corner, over which ceaseless fighting had raged since 28 September. The divisional history states that on 1 October the 7th Battalion of the Buffs relieved an East Surrey battalion which the day before had taken and almost immediately lost the northern line of the redoubt. Two local attacks by the Buffs failed, but in the afternoon the battalion retook one of the strongpoints and held it. That was how this fighting looked over the following days: small attacks and counter-attacks with grenades, gas and flamethrowers, in trenches full of mud and dead, with no clear progress. On the northern bank of the Ancre, meanwhile, Gough began regrouping his troops for the attack eastwards, which was to begin in about ten days.

The day’s balance

On 1 October the Canadians took Kenora Trench and a piece of ground on the right wing, but not Regina Trench. The 5th Canadian Brigade, which had gone into the line on 27 September 1,717 strong, came out of it on the morning of 2 October 773 strong. Total Canadian losses for the day are not precisely known. According to the Canadian official history they were less than half those of the next great attack on Regina Trench on 8 October, in which the corps lost 1,364 men. At dawn on 2 October the Germans counter-attacked both in Regina Trench and in the Schwaben Redoubt, and the 2nd Canadian Division, which had lost more than 6,500 men since 1 September, was relieved on the night of 3–4 October.

Then the weather broke. Downpours, wind and fog halted major attacks for a week, and the ground on the ridge turned into a bog. The Canadians attacked again on 8 October and were again repulsed. The British took the Stuff Redoubt on 9 October and the rest of the Schwaben Redoubt on 14 October, while Regina Trench was fought over for another six weeks. The plan for the great October offensive, for which the ridge was to be merely a starting point, dissolved in the autumn mud.