Brothers in Arms

 

 

The Anzac legend is like a cenotaph, an empty tomb in our own history. Eighty years after the end of the Great War, so much of the story of the Anzac remains unverifiable, unresolved. This program is about how the formula was found that ended the slaughter on the western front, and how much honour is due the digger.

 

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Reporter: Chris Masters

Producer: Victoria Pitt

Research: Matt Brown

 

Reporter: Chris Masters

Producer: Victoria Pitt

Researcher: Matt Brown

Additional Research: Ann Poiret, Jackie Hudson, Claire Middleton

 

 

03:11

Dick Willcox:

Why they went -- was it their own fault, or was it just bad luck? Sometimes they died in agony, sometimes they never knew a thing about it and if you're alongside them it sinks into you, why did it happen, why did he get killed?

 

03:45

Chris Masters:

Every night for the past 80 years at the Menin Gate in Belgium people gather to honour the fallen in the Great War. This memorial records not the dead, just the missing. If each night the bugle sounds for every missing man on this one monument, it will take another 80 years for all to be honoured. And the Menin Gate memorial is only one of many along the long white scar on history and memory that is the western front.

 

04:32

Bob Riddell:

One chap, he was in front of me, took the top of his head right off, slit it right off. He just flopped down and I had to step over him and he was, you know, a good cobber, we're all cobbers.

 

05:06

Chris Masters:

The Anzac legend is like a cenotaph, an empty tomb in our own history. Eighty years after the end of the Great War, so much of the story of the Anzac remains unverifiable, unresolved. Australians have claimed our actions as much as secured victory on the western front. Our main ally, the British, whom history occasionally revises as an enemy, protest we claim too much. Another enduring impression of the war is one of loss, so much so it is easy to forget we did win. This program is about how the formula was found that ended the slaughter on the western front, and how much honour is due the digger.

 

05:59

Ted Smout:

The tommy, if his officer was killed, he would have sunk. They didn't know what to do, whereas if an Australian officer was killed, the sergeant stepped in. If he was killed, the private stepped up -- there was always someone else to take the leadership.

 

06:16

George Jameson:

We also met the Australians -- the Australians were the biggest thieves you could imagine.

 

John Laffin, Author British Bunglers & Butchers of WW1:

I found this in Britain when I'm lecturing to audiences there, that very few prepared to give the Australians the credit to which I believe they are due.

 

06:39

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

It's interesting that the Australians think that our corps won the war, you find the same thing said in Canada, exactly the same. So far as I know New Zealand are the only people who don't say that their one division actually won the war.

 

06:54

John Lee, British Commission for Military History:

My argument would be that several other Army corps, British army corps, were as good and doing as important a task without getting the same sort of press attention.

 

07:22

Chris Masters:

Eighty years beyond the Great War the British and their Australian allies are reunited. Staff from the Australian War Memorial and Britain's Imperial War Museum have joined up for a study tour of the western front. On the road through Belgium and France the mood is far from solemn. There is an effortless resumption of the good-natured banter of distant family. They have arrived in the valley of the Somme, where the mood changes, where trained eyes see beyond the soft green overgrowth to the saw-toothed savagery of the trenches.

 

08:04

John Lee, British Commission for Military History:

That is just think, I mean, just think, then they just got up and walked forward. These battalions were two years in the making and two minutes in the destroying. And that's really what it was like, you know, the first couple of minutes. This field in front of us was just covered with dead and wounded men. So you know you can read all you like about it, but just stand here and think about what it was like. It's hard.

 

08:39

Chris Masters:

They are remembering July 1, 1916, when the British lost 20,000 killed in a single day -- the greatest disaster in the history of British warfare.

 

The British attack in the Somme valley of northern France persisted for four months. Ultimately, for the 10 kilometres gained, the Allies lost 600,000 dead and wounded, the Germans 400,000. This was the story of attrition warfare all along the Western Front. The British Commander in Chief, General Sir Douglas Haig, had planned the breakthrough to end the year-long stalemate that had already cost over one million French lives.

 

09:43

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

I mean the problem was this -- that when you went over the top, when the soldier went over the top, what he had -- what his armament was, was a .303 rifle and a bayonet. What was ranged against him might be 1,000 artillery pieces and any number of machine guns. I mean in that equation, the guy with the rifle and the bayonet is never going to get anywhere.

 

10:09

George Jameson:

The Australians were marvellous troops but uncontrollable. They were going to show the world that they could wipe the Gerries off the face of the earth.

 

Bill Gilman:

I thought they were great. I think they were big men and they never worried about helmets. They always had their curved hats on.

 

10:29

Chris Masters:

Here you see the Australians in 1916, approaching the forward trenches. They had retreated from Gallipoli with a mixed reputation. The Australian official correspondent Charles Bean added a burden to their kitbag. By promoting Anzac virtues of fighting stubbornness and individuality, he gave them a big reputation to live up to. For the most part the British were unconvinced.

 

10:59

John Lee, British Commission for Military History:

He was writing to a particular agenda, he was he had this great sense of a birth of a nation, and he was really trying to create an ideal for that young nation to look up to. And so, some of the spin he puts on some actions on the western front are very uncritical of the Australian soldier, and overly critical of the British soldier fighting next to him.

 

11:23

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

I suspect the Australians really didn't know what they were up against. Haig did. He was reluctant to commit them, and was careful not to commit them to the opening round of the attack.

 

11:45

Chris Masters:

With the smoke and sound of the Somme on the horizon, the Australians marched towards the trenches, confidence in every step. They probably were taller -- height restrictions were not yet relaxed. They were better paid and egalitarian, with a mistrust of class that meant you did not salute merely because of the demands of breeding.

 

Footage voice-over: They issue us a bar of chocolate and I said to the bloke eat it or leave it and he said no scoff it while the goings good, there’s plenty of people stupid enough to leave it and we’ll get theirs when they get knocked over .

 

12:20

When they were first thrown into battle on July 19 near the village of Fromelles, they would be mown down like the corn.

 

 

12:38

Ashley Ekins, Australian War Memorial:

Just to summarise this whole battle, it's almost a model of how not to attack on the western front.

 

Chris Masters:

The battle was over before it had begun. Blame for the poor preparation was directed at the British Commander, General Sir Richard Haking.

 

12:55

John Laffin, Author British Bunglers & Butchers of WW1:

In his time, in his own army he was known as Butcher Haking; now this was most unusual. Now I'm prepared to call certain British generals butchers in retrospect, but he was called that by his own officers.

 

13:10

Chris Masters:

While Australia had surrendered overall control to the British, we did have our own commanders, who also had a lot to learn.

 

 

12:23

Ashley Ekins, Australian War Memorial:

It's not always fair and it's become pretty well the fashion in Australian historical writing to find the British generals the scapegoats, and all too often you'll find right through the First World War, that Australian commanders were -- could be just as good at killing their own men as the British were.

 

13:44

Chris Masters:

The hastily prepared orders had decreed that in light such as this, the Australians and British would march across these flat fields towards heavily fortified German bunkers. The Germans, one of them a young Adolf Hitler, watching the preparations, were ready and waiting. British aerial photography shows the Australians caught in the open, the late afternoon light casting long shadows from those left standing.

 

14:16

Ashley Ekins, Australian War Memorial:

It's a battlefield on which you would be totally exposed, as they were for the next two or three days. Men who couldn't get back to their front line were under fire in the daytime and trying to find their way back at night.

 

14:29

Chris Masters:

Another photograph records the fate of 470 eager Australians who'd overrun the German trenches and were soon captured. While the prisoners were led away, survivors trickled back. The Australian brigade commander, tears streaming down his face, shook their hands as they passed. For our first major battle on the western front of 1916, 1,917 Australian lives were lost, most of them in the first 15 minutes. In its aftermath, it might have been apparent that failure should not be blamed on the British alone, just as success could not be achieved through bravery alone.

 

Days later, further down the line we see here more Australians moving into position at Pozieres. Again they had little more than their bravery to rely upon.

 

15:41

Peter Simkins, Imperial War Museum:

We assure you that not all the Brits were quite as stupid as that. This is one of the areas we're pretty indefensible, I think.

 

Ashley Ekins, Australian War Memorial:

In terms of casualty, this is certainly the nadir as Peter says. Charles Bean said the ground here is more densely zoned with Australian sacrifice than any other place I know.

 

Peter Simkins, Imperial War Museum:

23,000 casualties.

 

Ashley Ekins, Australian War Memorial:

In seven weeks.

 

 

16:08

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

When they were thrown in against Pozieres, the firepower they met, the hail of shells, machine guns, bullets and so on, I think was probably quite unexpected.

 

16:27

Bill Harney:

The bloke sung out charge, yeah as he did I got up and you know especially when you're falling down trenches and everything like that. And when this goes off and they say charge you don't know where to charge, so I got up and galloped one way and somebody's galloping another, and it was just like when you throw kerosene in a bunch of fowls.

 

16:44

Bill Jamieson:

And watching the fireworks and realising it was into that inferno that we were going. It was the only action in France in which I saw Australian soldiers running out from the front.

Pozieres was the heaviest, bloodiest, rottenest stunt that ever the Australians were caught up in. The carnage is just indescribable. We were literally walking over the dead bodies of our cobbers that had been slain by this barrage.

 

17:41

John Laffin, Author British Bunglers & Butchers of WW1:

The battle was simply fought over and over again on the same lines with the same inevitable results, so that each of the other divisions involved there -- three of them -- were fed into this meat grinder, savaged, shelled mercilessly, shot to pieces, worn out.

 

18:11

Chris Masters:

Remaining soldiers from NSW and Victoria lined up at the end of the battle for this shocking roll call. In seven weeks the Australians lost more dead and wounded than for all the eight months of Gallipoli. But in the front line morale remained high. During a royal visit to the front, Australian troops cheered for king and camera. Back at home cheering seemed inappropriate when the first monument appeared at Manly in Sydney.

 

19:11

Professor Ken Inglis, Author Sacred Places:

I don't know anywhere else in the world where the memorials went up so early. The unveiling of that is a conscriptionist rally, it was on the eve of the conscription referendum.

 

19:29

Chris Masters:

The beginning of a manpower crisis saw the Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes urge the nation to vote for conscription in the referendum that was narrowly defeated.

 

Ted Drake:

We worked on the principle that one volunteer was worth six conscripted men.

 

19:46

Professor Ken Inglis, Author Sacred Places:

Women, the British-born people and primary producers tended to vote yes, and the wage earners and Catholics tended to vote no, but only by slight margins in every case. It was a very divided nation and remained so.

 

20:35

Chris Masters:

Soon the memorials were taking root in every suburban park and country town. They recorded not just the dead and missing, but all from the district who had volunteered. What history can't renegotiate, what sets these men apart more so than bush hat and swagger was their free will. The Australian Army became the only volunteer army on the western front.

 

21:06

Professor Ken Inglis, Author Sacred Places:

I think it did make a difference, yes. It made, it certainly made a difference to the rhetoric of commemoration because all those phrases like offered himself were -- had a literal truth beyond the sort of rhetorical truth that would apply to conscripts.

 

21:34

Chris Masters:

In northern France there is barely a field without its own rough and rusting monument to the war. Here you see some of the shells being fired, in a futile attempt to breach the German Hindenberg line. In March of 1917 the Germans retreated to heavily prepared fortifications. In April, despite the failure of the Allied artillery to make an impression, the infantry was sent in at Bullecourt.

 

Tanks were supposed to provide support but, slowed by the mud, the Australian and British troops found themselves out in front, unprotected.

 

22:25

Bertram Perry:

Bullecourt made the biggest impression on me because it was a terrible waste of lives -- to send troops into a battle against such overwhelming odds, both of men and firepower, with nothing whatsoever to help them but their own guts.

 

22:44

Chris Masters:

When the first battle failed, the Australians were thrown in again in May. When it was over another 10,800 casualties would be added to those memorials back home. There were also 9,000 British casualties and blame on both sides. Again, a British General, Sir Hubert Gough, was seen as most culpable.

 

23:13

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

Some Australian historians that I've read regard the first Bullecourt as Gough's cock-up and nobody would disagree with that. Second, I think Eric Andrews maintains that a lot of it's due to poor Australian staff work, particularly the failure to mask caiar, so Gough can't take all the blame for both battles.

 

23:30

John Lee, British Commission for Military History:

I'd just like to ask you to think what the 62 Division must have thought of the Australians on their ride when they were hung out to dry on the 10th April. It's the sort of incident that happens in war all the time, but it does create bad blood between people who should be good friends.

 

23:47

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

The mistakes that were made at Bullecourt, certainly some of them, can be laid at the feet of the British Command, General Gough in particular. But others were due to faulty Australian staff work -- messages not being passed on, the wrong messages being passed on, and the whole complications of battle on the western front not being fully grasped.

 

24:14

Chris Masters:

Soon arguments over Bullecourt take a back seat. In the village, at the home of a former mayor, Jean Letaille, there is a back shed to gladden the heart of this museum tour's mostly male company. The British and the Australian weapons curators have discovered a weapon of a common enemy. The French host is welcoming to all.

 

24:55

Bob Riddell:

The French people they looked after us. We never went short of nothing.

 

Dick Willcox:

This cheap wine and they got stuck into that. And we had the best white all around that ever you'd see in your life. I finished up with two black eyes.

 

 

25:13

Frank Redman:

Although France was a very religious country and rather religious people, they had what they called licensed brothels. And of course you'd go down the streets and the girls were practically naked.

 

25:46

Chris Masters:

Australians won another distinction. After the New Zealanders, they had the highest incidence of venereal disease. It was mostly contracted on leave to England, where the first stop was here, Horseferry Road. Unlike the British, the Australians, the six-bob-a-day tourists, were a long way from home.

 

26:10

Chris McCarthy, Imperial War Museum:

I don't think probably the Australians were any worse. They just had more money. They were sort of the yuppies of the day, if you like, and that showed I think. I don't really think they were more undisciplined, you know. You can't fight as an undisciplined force.

 

26:27

Ashley Ekins, Australian War Memorial:

I've certainly come across a lot of cases of everything ranging from the harmless sort of high jinks and breaking into estaminets to get the liquor, to cases of rape, assaulting French civilians, theft, burglary and so on.

 

26:46

Chris Masters:

Another distinction owned by the Australians was their immunity to capital punishment. Throughout the war the British army executed soldiers such as Private Joseph Carey at the rate of about one a week, mostly for desertion. Australia resisted persistent lobbying to allow the execution of Australian soldiers whose reputation for desertion had also grown.

 

27:12

Ashley Ekins, Australian War Memorial:

In the first half of 1917, about one-quarter of the convictions for desertion in the whole of the British army, the whole of the 60 divisions, occurred in the five divisions of the Australian army. One tenth of the force on the western front. So it seemed to be a chronic and very serious problem.

 

27:33

Chris Masters:

Field Marshall Haig, seen here reviewing Australian soldiers near Ypres in 1917, would soon find another way to kill them.

 

John Laffin, Author British Bunglers & Butchers of WW1:

Haig's idea was simple attrition which meant killing more Germans in a given period than they could kill men of his side. And he figured that in the end he must win, because he'd have more men standing-up than the Germans would. It was as simple as that.

 

28:09

Chris Masters:

Haig was consumed by a desperate mission; protecting Britain by holding the channel ports in the battlefields of Flanders. The intensity of the fighting in Flanders still haunts these fields.

 

The famous Cloth Hall in Ypres is long rebuilt. Back in 1917, when the Australians marched through, it was barely recognisable. The Germans holding the faint elevation around Passchendaele were able to observe the Allied troop movements and send down withering artillery fire. Men were blown to pieces or drowned in a developing quagmire. The lucky ones, the walking wounded, found their way to the rear.

 

29:37

Bill Harney:

When you get in a dug-out or anything like that, you try to hypnotise yourself that you're in a safe place, but you're not at all.

 

Dick Willcox:

You'd shake, the ground would shake, everything shake, I was affected by, deeply affected by shellfire.

 

30:00

Chris Masters:

The Australians were now questioning British strategies. Attack continued to be more costly than defence. And more commonly Australians were at the forefront, such as here at the accompanying battle of Polygon Wood.

 

30:14

Ashley Ekin, Australian War Memorial:

The 4th on the other hand went in very reluctantly. When they heard they were being brought in, there was jeering amongst the men -- sort of -- they still performed outstandingly, but unwilling when they heard the news.

 

John Lee, British Commission for Military History:

Things were going quite well in September -- I honestly don't understand that reaction.

What was the problem…The British  weren’t moaning.

 

(?): The fourth had been the one that had been chopped up so badly at Bullecourt.  More than the other divisions, then they had this one…they were starting to feel a bit overused- and comparatively they could have been, yeah.

 

(?):  That’s the oruigional  pillbox and it was german- youcan see it better on this side probably than you can on that side- and the shattering is corrugated iron as you can see- andit has a lot of these reinforcing rods…

 

31:11

Chris Masters:

After a four-month campaign, Australians finally took these bunkers and blockhouses. Below and behind them, the dead and wounded. One quarter of a million Allied casualties, 30,000 Australian.

 

31:30

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

I don't think there's a winner there. The British lost the reserve of divisions that might have helped stem the German attack in March of the following year. The Germans certainly lost as well, not as many, but 200,000, which is not a negligible number, so that ran their manpower reserves down as well. It was the British who were taking the risk though.

 

31:56

John Lee, British Commission for Military History:

It sounds brutal. And it's very easy to say sitting in an armchair in London that the Allies could replace those casualties -- the German's couldn't. This was attrition warfare at its most brutal and at its most effective in that sense.

 

32:15

Chris Masters:

The Australians, as game as Ned Kelly, retired from Passchendaele with a stock of experience and a little booty.

 

Ned Kelly: All the Germans as coming back and I says to a bloke I says hullo where did you get the whites and he said ‘oh I get it off the german prisoners as they come out’ he says ‘I get these, you can sell them to the people, you can make a few bob’ .  So I started as the prisoners would come back I’d go over to them and they were quite satisfied to give you anything- they were just happy to give out a little’.

 

32:45

Chris Masters: But those Germans out of it were soon replaced. By the end of 1917, with Russia now out of the fighting, Germany could deliver one million reinforcements to the Western Front. At this stage the Americans had not yet arrived and the French had begun to mutiny.

 

33:05

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

And so it was the British Army that was going to be the main force to stop these million men that the Germans were bringing back. By frittering those troops away at Passchendaele, Haig was risking a total collapse in 1918.

 

33:31

Chris Masters:

From the wreckage of 1917 the Australians emerged changed, unified. In 1918 they would, for the first time, fight together under their own command. The failures of senior command meant an increasing reliance on front-line leadership and initiative. The AIF, more trusting of its own, became smaller and closer.

 

33:59

Dick Willcox:

You become a group, you become part of the group, a group of young men. You've all got to keep in the group, you become married to the group.

 

34:12

John Laffin, Author, British Bungles and Butchers of WW1:

They realised, above all, that they could go into a battle with a good chance of coming out of it, and this hadn't happened before. They'd been fatalistic. They, in fact, the AIF almost to a man expected to be killed, or at least wounded -- what chance was there?

 

34:32

Chris Masters:

After four brutal years, one side had to find the formula to break the deadlock. The Spring of 1918 was Germany's best chance. While Australians were resting behind the lines, a major German offensive broke through, threatening Paris and the Channel Ports. The British fought to the point of exhaustion, retreating to Villers-Bretonneux only kilometres from the crucial rail junction at Amiens. A British camera was there to record French civilians joining the retreating British, loaded up with whatever they could carry.

 

35:13

Bill Collins:

An Australian sergeant came up with some men. When he went up to one woman with a hand cart loaded up and says 'what are you doing?' So she told him that 'we were leaving because the Germans were coming'. He says 'unpack', he says 'unpack', he says, 'we're coming here'. And my goodness he was correct.

 

35:35

Chris Masters:

The fighting to retake Villers-Bretonneux carried into Anzac Day 1918, by which time the village, back in French hands, was in ruins. Twelve hundred Australians, most of them young Victorians, lay dead. But the Germans were stopped.

 

35:56

Bob Riddell:

When we were in Villers-Bretonneux, we had hundreds of prisoners came across. They were hungry, they couldn't get a feed. They were starved, the war was nearly finished, you could have said it was over then.

 

John Laffin, Author, British Bungles & Butchers of WWI:

It was much greater than I think posterity and history has given to it. It was a tremendous victory.

 

Jean Pierre Thierry, Association France-Australia:

It was a very important action, it should have been the ultimate offensive before the crucial arrival of the American troops, this great offensive which precipitated the retreat of the British Army. It's true that the great offensive was stopped by Australian troops at the end of April 1918.

 

36:49

Chris Masters:

The Villers-Bretonneux action led to one of Australia's grandest boasts -- that we defeated the Germans where the British had failed, that we stopped them securing Amiens, the Channel Ports and victory. But when history is renegotiated here, the Australians' claim is restrained.

 

37:18

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

The German offensive had already run out of steam by April the 25th. By the time they got to Villers-Bretonneux the attack was petering out anyway, which is not to say the Australian counter-attack wasn't a well-mounted operation, it was. And it certainly kept the Germans further away from a vital rail junction at Amiens than would otherwise have been the case. But it wasn't a turning point in the war in that sense.

 

37:45

Peter Simkins, Imperial War Memorial:

So I think it's worth remembering that the British did play also their part in defending Villers-Bretonneux in the case of the 18th and 58th Divisions for rather longer than the individual Australian units involved, and they lost a lot of men too. So I'd like just to remind the Australians of that particular fact.

 

38:09

Chris Masters:

The battle that Australia more forcefully claims as a turning point is one that followed nearby at the village of Le Haemal. We've also credited the Australians' new commander, Lieutenant General John Monash, as the man who at last figured out how to beat the Germans. A fellow architect of the battle was the British General, Lord Rawlinson.

 

38:33

John Laffin, Author, British Bunglers & Butchers of WW1:

It was the turning point, not just a turning point, it was the most significant one of all, because here an Australian General -- and this time Lieutenant General John Monash, soon to be knighted, it was his brain child, although revisionist historians from Britain again are trying to rewrite history and give it -- the credit to Rawlinson.

 

38:57

Chris Masters:

John Monash, the son of German Jewish migrants, emerged from his schooling a dux of Melbourne's Scotch College.

 

This bridge over the nearby Yarra is continuing practical proof of his skill as an engineer. From this background developed his meticulous approach to planning. Eighty years ago he plotted over these very maps. His officers ended up spending more time at the pre-battle briefing than the battle itself.

 

39:30

Keith Officer:

He was a great planner, I think he was probably the greatest planners of all the British army at that time.

 

39:39

Chris Masters:

Some of the planning took place here at the Chateau St Gratien where, according to a letter from Monash, the Compte de Thieulloye had made him very comfortable.

 

Hubert de Thieulloye & Mimi Vallengin:

Headquarters here of General John Monash was here. My Grandfather always said that. The battle was commanded from here, by phone.

 

Mimi Valengin:

You are coming from so far away, so I think the population appreciate a lot.

 

Hubert De Thieulloye:

Yes of course.

 

40:16

Chris Masters:

The St Gratien Chateau is still in the same family who billeted the Australian general staff. The Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes, seen here on the same front steps, visited the Chateau two days before the battle of Haemal. It was a perilous time for Australia. The failure of the second conscription referendum increased the difficulties of replacing a depleted AIF. It was never more important for our small nation to find a way to win without the exhausting losses.

 

40:51

Professor Ken Inglis, Author, Sacred Places:

By 1918 every second family had been bereaved, and every family must have been living with the possibility of bereavement.

 

41:08

Chris Masters:

The battle was set for July 4, in honour of American soldiers brought in to be blooded with the Australians. Sixty British tanks arrived behind the lines and the Australians taught to make friends with these monsters, distrusted ever since Bullecourt. On the night, the tanks would be sent forward to coordinate perfectly with advancing infantry. In a pioneer form of smart warfare, Monash integrated aircraft into the formation to mask the sound of the tanks and re-supply the troops.

 

41:47

Keith Officer:

I understand the orders of the Australian corps for the battle of the 8th August became a textbook for the British army, and we used the staff college as such for a number of years afterwards.

 

42:03

Chris Masters:

The start time was scheduled so that the battle would be over before first light. Most important on this and preceding nights, a massive overkill of artillery, about two thirds of which being the British big guns. The objective was the ridge beyond the village of Le Haemal. On this rare occasion it was taken at a lesser cost to the attackers. The battle had been scheduled to last 90 minutes.

 

Ninety-three minutes after the fighting began, the rising sun revealed the Australians beyond their objective. On a distant ridge, the official correspondent Charles Bean records -- among the tanks could be seen infantry standing in those unmistakable easy attitudes that marked the digger in every fight. At last, command had found the fitness to keep pace with the digger.

 

43:14

Peter Burness, Australian War Memorial:

It's a case of coordination or orchestration, he called it, like arranging an orchestra, and in many ways that's what he was doing, he was doing what should have always been done.

 

Chris Masters:

The British acknowledge Monash as one of the great leaders of the war. But the formula for success, as demonstrated at Le Haemal, like the victory, they argue, was not his alone.

 

43:35

John Lee, British Commission for Military History:

Any other sort of British corps fighting the same battle would have fought it in the same way. This is how offensive operations are conducted at that stage of the war, in 1918.

 

Peter Burness, Australian War Memorial:

It's easy to overestimate how important it was, but at the same time it shouldn't be underplayed. It was one of a string of events which could be said to be the turning point of the war.

 

43:59

Chris Masters:

In the months following Le Haemal, Allied forces pushed the Germans back behind their old trenches into open country. Five Australian divisions, 10 per cent of the British Army claimed an advance of 37 miles. They claimed the conquest of 39 German divisions, the liberation of 116 towns and villages and the capture of one-quarter of the guns and prisoners taken by the entire British army. In Britain, the claims, not too far from the truth, were dismissed as Australian boasting. What was undoubtedly true was by being used constantly in the spearhead of these assaults, Australian casualties again began to climb.

 

44:51

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

The infantry still had to occupy ground, they had to get up out of their trenches and move forward which took incredible courage. But, the fact was unless you'd eliminated the machine guns and the artillery, the infantry couldn't operate -- they couldn't live on the battlefield.

 

45:09

Peter Simkins, Imperial War Memorial:

If you establish yourself as a good assault formation you will tend, unfortunately for yourself, to be placed in the front line fairly often because you're regarded as trustworthy, you have dash, you're likely to pull the attack off. Therefore, if you're breaking into a big German defensive system, you want the best troops you've got in the front line. Now, I could point to British divisions which equally tended to be put into the front line for the major assaults.

 

45:50

Chris Masters:

British casualties had also climbed. By the end of the war they would incur 12 times the losses of the Australians. It wasn't long before success began to wear thin.

 

46:07

Dick Willcox:

If the wars had lasted a little bit longer, I don't think I could have stayed there. I had an idea of trying to get away, of trying to make it to England, to South Africa, somewhere like that. I was starting to crack. I couldn't stand much more of it.

 

46:32

Chris Masters:

Australian desertions and mutinies rattled senior command. Australians won another distinction. They became the Allies most imprisoned soldiers. When Field Marshall Haig spoke with visiting journalists in September, with victory in sight, he continued to give priority to the case for extending the death penalty.

 

46:55

Ashley Ekins, Australian War Memorial:

I think some of them just found they couldn't stand the strain any longer and the continual rotation back into the line, with the dread of battle, that no matter how enthusiastic the Australians were as fighters, that dread of battle must have grown on every man as he went forward.

 

47:13

Chris Masters:

In the last months of the war, a British naval blockade, the entry of the Americans, and the advancing technical superiority of the Allies made German defeat inevitable. On October 5, one month after Haig's plea to extend the death penalty, one month before war's end, Australians were again willingly risking their lives.

 

47:39

Dick Willcox:

The last time in the line, it was September 1918, we heard this thing coming down. Well, it landed between me and my mate. We all bobbed down and I grabbed him by the neck and said 'come on Mack, jump up', and half his neck was gone off.

 

47:59

Charlie Mance:

And it'd be terrible to see one of the old blokes get cracked, you know, an' 'Oh Jesus' we said, 'fancy him getting that far and that, dead as a maggot'.

 

Tour: A historian of the battalian recorded the dread felt by the men before the battle as they learned they were to make this final attack, as I say they expected to be relieved.  But their spirits were revived and its recorded in Battalian history that before the battle, nine of the officers joined in a suing-song on a captured dug-out.

 

28:28

Chris Masters:

The tour here is also coming to an end. One of the last stops for the British and Australian historians is, appropriately, one of the last battlefields, one of the last graveyards, Montbrehaine.

 

48:43

Tour:  The historian |Charles describes this battle in the official History of the war but it concludes is ‘difficult to believe that it was wisely undertaken. It seems rather devised to make some use of these troops before withdrawing them according to the prime ministers demand’. So here was Monash pushing his man to the limit.

 

Peter Burness, Australian War Memorial:

It's only a small cemetery and it's quite a long way from sort of the main battlefields, quite difficult to get to, but it has quite a special poignancy, I think, because they had one more day to go and they were going home. And particularly as amongst them are some Gallipoli veterans, men who'd been fighting from 1915, had been -- hadn't seen home perhaps since 1914 or 15, and they weren't expecting to go into this battle but they were expecting to be relieved the night before. Instead, they were put into one final action and of course, they died.

 

49:40

Chris Masters:

Among the headstones they wonder. While it had been important to find soldiers to do the nasty front line work and climb into the enemy trenches, the historians later estimated less than one per cent of casualties were inflicted by bayonet. While near to two-thirds of casualties from the Great War were caused by artillery.

 

The new lesson of 20th century warfare was that technology would prove more decisive than human bravery. In the last months of the war the British had assembled over 6,000 big guns in France. Throughout the war they fired their lethal cargo around 160 million times. Each shell at least the cost of an average weekly wage.

 

50:33

Charlie Mance:

British artillery were well trained and everything and the 18-pounders especially did a good job.

 

50:42

Bob Riddell:

They used to back us up, artillery -- without them we'd have never won.

 

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

In 1918 the people who were winning battles were 10 miles behind the front, they were hunched over trigonometrical tables. Weather reports and all the scientific apparatus that you needed to make sure that when you fired a gun, its shell landed where you wanted it to land, that is right on the enemy batteries or on their machine gunners.

 

51:12

Chris McCarthy, Imperial War Museum:

You can see where our empire went. You know, it's mostly laying in the fields of France now and it's still rusting away.

 

51:26

Chris Masters:

At Hyde Park Corner in London stands the Royal artillery monument. While Charles Bean and others made much of the distinctiveness of the Australian soldier, near the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne stands the same British soldier, unacknowledged and easily mistaken as Australian.

 

51:45

Professor Ken Inglis, Author Sacred Places:

They certainly believed that the Empire was their country in a way that it's no longer possible to believe, and very difficult for young people now to recognise that the British Empire was thought of as a country, as a nation.

 

52:13

Chris Masters:

All across Australia, memorials once seen then forgotten are noticed once more. At Ballarat a living memorial -- 23 kilometres of trees commemorating the 4,000 soldiers who enlisted, the 500 who died. At Gatton in Queensland a mother still weeps for the sons of the land.

 

52:50

Professor Ken Inglis, Author Sacred Places:

Again and again with pathetic regularity, you find about 20 per cent of the names are of the dead, and that there were 20 per cent -- 60,000 out of about 300,000 -- who saw action died.

 

53:09

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

It's fashionable to say that the attrition on both sides was so terrible that neither side won. I don't think that's true. Prussian militarism was not a pretty state -- it was authoritarian, illiberal, anti-Semitic -- and it was well worth the democracies getting together in order to stop that, in order to keep Western Europe free for liberal democracy. So I think the great winners in this war were the liberal democracies of the west.

 

53:42

Chris Masters:

On the question of who found the winning formula, there is, as this tour winds to a close, some conciliation.

 

 

53:51

John Lee, British Commission for Military History:

I've always said that Australia made a very, very important contribution to the war. But it was the forces of the British Empire, if you like, and France -- even the Americans, of course, arrived and gave us a hand towards the end. It was very much, the way I make it, it was a common war, a common effort.

 

54:12

Peter Simkins, Imperial War Museum:

What actually mattered was the combination of the Dominion and British Divisions. That's what won the campaign, not the differences.

 

Associate Professor Robin Prior, Australian Defence Force Academy:

In 1918, for probably the only time in our history, we engaged the main army of the main enemy and defeated them. But certainly as part of a larger unit, the British army, we played a very prominent role in that. And the defence of liberal democracy by a new democracy, which Australia was in 1914, is something of note, something worthy of remembrance.

 

54:54

Chris Masters:

Three million French casualties, 1.5 million dead, means here remembrance is a fact of life. But these French people are visiting the Australian memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. Australian casualties, small in comparison, were devastating for our small nation. Among the Allied forces the Australian casualty rate was the highest. One of the reasons around here they say, never forget Australia.

 

Jean Pierre Thierry:

Australia cannot be forgotten here since there are landmarks which recall Australia, and there is also Anzac Day celebrated regularly each year. There are also the Australian visitors who have been coming in greater numbers for several years now. Australia is very present here.

 

56:11

Chris Masters:

Remembrance for Australia is more than a matter of mathematics. It is deep in our family histories. Wal and Lois Campbell are on a common mission. Wal has found his father's World War I diary, and in retracing his footsteps has stumbled into the hospitality of Bullecourt.

 

Lois And Wal:

Q: Why did you choose to do that?

A: He didn't know his father very long. His father died when he was 12.

Q: And I suppose going to where he fought is also very moving, isn't it, to see how many Australian lives were lost?

A: Just anyone who has Australian background, I think would be very moved.

 

 

15:13

Claude Durande:

We must thank the people of Australia and all the veterans, those still alive, and all the people and all the men who come to die so far from their home.

 

57:30

Chris Masters:

Across at Fromelles, French schoolkids have cycled 10 kilometres over the flat countryside to another small museum. As in Australia, the French report an increasing attention to remembrance. At Ypres in Belgium, the Great War has become an experiential tourist attraction at the new In Flanders Fields museum at the old Cloth Hall.

 

58:23

Here there is very little evidence of Australian participation. While on the hill above Le Haemal, where Charles Bean saw our soldiers standing so unassuming in victory, a new monument of our own construction brags long and loud.

 

58:52

There remains some awkwardness about the place we give ourselves in history. But any fair account of the Anzac will show that while age might have wearied them, the years do not condemn. Stripped of its boasts and hyperbole, the Anzac story is made stronger. Of the 330,000 Great War volunteers, only 66 are left. Here Augie Band receives France's highest honour.

 

1:00:08

Bob Riddell, 57th Battalion First AIF:

Anybody who came out of France is extra lucky, lucky that they're alive.

 

Charlie Mance, 22nd Battalion First AIF:

Well what I mean to say, why am I here today? I mean to say, I was pretty lucky.

 

1:00:23

Chris Masters:

Their families say only in the last years have they begun to open up about the Great War, while their mates, their cobbers, continue to speak to us.

 

1:00:36

Dick Willcox:

I often think of the different cemeteries and the different mates and different localities where this happened and that happened. We all used to say the same thing, if another war comes, we'll make the bloody ammunition.

 

 

01:02:04

 

END

 

Veterans:

* Dick Willcox

* Bob Riddell

* Ted Smout

* George Jameson

* Bill Gilman

* Bill Jamieson

* Frank Brent

* Ted Drake

* Bertram Perry

* Frank Redman

* Charlie Mance

* Bill Collins

* Keith Officer