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.
---------
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