Tag Archive for: World War I

The magnetic lure of strategic geography

Australia has committed a surveillance aircraft and a ship to assist in a US-led operation to ensure oil supply through the strategic Strait of Hormuz. The Persian Gulf is a critical waterway for the transport of crude oil from the Middle East to refineries in South, Southeast and North Asia.

Few Australians are aware that following the discovery of oil in Persia, now known as Iran, in 1909, the British Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later called British Petroleum, or BP for short, was established to pump oil from the oilfields to a place called Abadan Island at the head of the Gulf. An oil refinery and port were built to export oil for use by the British, in particular, the Royal Navy, which was converting its battleships from coal-fired to oil-fired. The oil supply was of such importance to Britain that the British War Office tasked the Indian government, then part of the British Empire, to make plans to secure the oilfields should war come.

War did come in 1914, and a division of the Indian army was dispatched to Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq, to ensure the supply of oil. Three months into the campaign, it became obvious that aerial reconnaissance was needed to monitor the advances of both the Turkish army and hostile Arab tribes in the region. The Indian armed forces had few aircraft and fewer aircrew, having sent their available fliers to Egypt and Britain to protect the Suez Canal and to fight on the Western Front in France and Belgium.

In February 1915, the Australian government was asked if it could provide aeroplanes and pilots to assist in defending Mesopotamia and ensuring the security of the oilfields. Australia at that stage had just five aircraft, three of which were ‘flyable’, and six pilots (soon to be seven). Because of those numbers, the government offered to provide four pilots, but no aircraft. The offer was accepted and four Australian pilots and some 40 mechanics were sent to Basra in what is now southern Iraq.

It went well to start with. The Australian pilots, flying outdated planes provided from India and Egypt, performed wonders of aerial reconnaissance and surveillance that fundamentally lifted the decision-making superiority of the commanding generals. However, as summer progressed and the temperatures approached the mid-40s, the quality of the aircraft and the conditions took their toll. Within three months two pilots were dead. A young Australian doctor and pilot, George Merz, and a New Zealander, William Burn, lost their lives after engine failure caused them to crash-land in the desert and they were murdered by local tribesmen. By December, the tiny force was reduced to one plane and one pilot; the others had crashed, been shot down or been captured and taken prisoner of war.

The story is worth remembering, if not only to honour the first Australian airman to die in war, but to ponder the reality that Australian forces will be asked to participate in security operations in the Middle East for as long as we are dependent on an oil economy and as long as we rely on a major world power to assure our national security.

There are multiple ironies at play in this story. While we may try to disengage from the Middle East, we are constantly drawn back because of the strategic significance of the geography and the significance of the oil industry. Australian forces saw service in the Middle East in World War I, World War II, Operation Desert Storm and now continuously since 2003, with the advent of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The major security partner has changed over the past century from Britain to America, but little seems to have changed in the geopolitical reality of our dependence on oil from the Middle East. The region remains as strategically important to Australia now as it was then, whether we like it or not. Geographically, there are places on the planet that will continue to be nexuses of trade and conflict. The Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula and the Red Sea are among those places.

In 1915, the deployment of Australian air forces was not in the minds or priorities of the Australian government of the day, but the request was supported. In 2019, a little over a hundred years later, we find ourselves hoping to disengage from two decades in the Middle East—but again, in response to a request for military support in the Middle East from our major ally, we are deploying air forces.

The question for strategists, then, is whether, rather than consider defence policy from the perspective of a national and near-region defence posture, we should be looking at where the flashpoints of strategic geography are that will draw Australian forces with an inexorable gravity.

Surely, the real truth of geopolitics and strategic geography is that we are forced to consider our national security in the context of a global environment in a global economy.

A century on: remembering the Australians who fought in the Russian Civil War

On 29 August 1919, Sergeant Samuel Pearse, an Australian veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, was killed in action fighting against Red Army forces in northwest Russia. He fell during a British Army attack on a series of Bolshevik blockhouses near the remote railway village of Yemtsa, about 150 kilometres south of Archangelsk.

His unit, pinned down by machine-gun fire, was unable to push forward until Pearse cut his way through barbed-wire entanglements, lobbed grenades into the Bolshevik strongpoint and killed the inhabitants. Moments later he was cut down by a burst of enemy fire, and he later died of his wounds. He was posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross for his actions. He was 22 years old.

Pearse died in an obscure action in a confusing conflict: the Russian Civil War. It is a war seen by many as an afterthought to the Great War of 1914–18, but the Russian Civil War led to the death of an estimated 10 million people and gave bloody birth to the Soviet state. Unlike the relatively static war fought on the Western Front in France and Belgium, the war in Russia consisted of several competing armies, shifting allegiances and dynamic fronts.

Vladimir Lenin’s Red Army eventually emerged victorious over anti-Bolshevik White forces, anarchist Black armies, a Blue army composed of former Czechoslovak ex-prisoners of war, and Green bands of marauding peasants. Historian Richard Pipes once commented that attempting to draw a map tracing the movement of the various armies leaves one with something resembling a Jackson Pollock painting.

Pearse was killed fighting as part of the anti-Bolshevik foreign intervention in the war. Over 200,000 foreign troops served in the conflict across the length and breadth of Russia, from Vitebsk in modern-day Belarus to Vladivostok on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Australians served on naval reconnaissance missions on the Black Sea, and in command and training roles across the Caucasus and Siberia. By far the largest Australian involvement was in north Russia, near the key ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.

The first group of Australians to take part in the war were nine experienced soldiers drawn from Australian Imperial Force Headquarters in London in 1918 as part of the top-secret mission code-named Elope Force. This intervention force, along with its accompanying mission, Syren Force, was charged with protecting tonnes of war materiel and coal sent to Russia to support the tsarist fight in the First World War. With the instability that accompanied the 1917 Russian Revolution, British authorities feared the supplies would fall into German hands. Once Germany signed the Armistice in November 1918, that fear shifted to the threat posed by the Bolsheviks.

The Australians of Elope Force spent the winter of 1918–19 training anti-Bolshevik White forces and building defences near Arkhangelsk and along the Dvina River as far south as the camp at Osinova. Not long after the arrival of Elope Force, however, the British leadership recognised that the men could have little bearing on the outcome of the war, and decided that the force should be withdrawn. The British cabinet soon approved the withdrawal, and established the North Russia Relief Force to ensure that it was well protected.

Australian authorities did not wish to contribute units to the new expedition, so any Australians who wanted to serve were required to seek discharge from the AIF in order to enlist in the British Army. Australians troops were, however, allowed to retain their uniforms (including their distinctive slouch hats) and serve in the same units. All Australians who served in the North Russia Relief Force served in the 45th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, and the 201st Machine Gun Battalion, Machine Gun Corps.

When the call went out for volunteers, hundreds of Australians showed interest, and around 140 took part in the expedition. There’s little evidence that any signed up for political or ideological reasons; rather, it appears they had arrived in Europe too late to take part in the fighting on the Western Front, or were bored waiting for repatriation from England, and wanted to keep their wartime adventure going.

The Australian volunteers arrived in Arkhangelsk in early June 1919 and moved down the Dvina River to the camp at Osinova, where Elope Force had based its operations the previous year. The initial plan was to train White Russian forces so that they would constitute a strong presence after the withdrawal of foreign forces, and to harass the enemy ensure that it could not form an effective fighting force in the region.

They worked in tough conditions in harsh terrain, often with hostile and untrustworthy peasant guides, and faced attacks and ambushes from bands of Bolshevik troops. More than 550 British troops and nearly 100 Americans were killed serving with the mission. Australian Gallipoli veteran Captain Allan Brown was killed near Onega when the group he was training defected to the Bolsheviks and turned their weapons against him.

The major actions for Australians in North Russia occurred in August 1919. Early that month British and Dominion troops made a concerted attack along the Dvina River to destabilise the enemy and give White forces a morale boost before their withdrawal. On 10 August, a company consisting mainly of Australians had seized targets and was fighting a rearguard action when an officer and three other ranks fell into the Sheika River while crossing over a narrow plank. Corporal Arthur Sullivan jumped into the water and saved the men.

Sullivan was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions, described in his citation as a ‘splendid example of heroism as all ranks were on the point of exhaustion and the enemy less than 100 yards distant’. Nineteen days later the fighting had shifted to a strategically important railway line further west. It was during this phase of the action that Sergeant Pearse was killed. Sullivan and Pearse received the only Victoria Crosses awarded to troops for actions during the campaign.

In the weeks after the offensives of August 1919, foreign troops withdrew to Arkhangelsk, and were completely withdrawn by 29 September. The last relief force troops were withdrawn from Murmansk by 12 October.

Australian service in North Russia is often seen as a confusing episode tacked on to the end of the Great War. Australians never fought on the main fronts or in the decisive battles of the Russian Civil War. Given the scale and brutality of the conflict, it’s easy to view Australia’s role as little more than an insignificant annoyance for the leaders of the Russian Revolution.

One veteran described it as ‘another of the many pathetic side shows of the Great War’. However, his criticism seems directed more towards the politicians who sent the men to fight rather than the men themselves: ‘[The] most tragic thing of all was the number of splendid men who lost their lives in the venture, men who, after having passed through the dangers of France, Gallipoli, and other theatres of the war, deserved a better fate.’

In all, the men fought hard and acquitted themselves well in harsh conditions far from home. We should remember their role in a conflict that decisively shaped the history of the 20th century.

The lost lessons of World War I

It has been 100 years since World War I ended and the centenary was commemorated this month with great pomp in Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom. Germany sent high-level authorities to France to mark the occasion, reaffirming the reconciliation between the two countries. But the fact that Franco-German reconciliation did not occur until Europe had suffered another devastating war demonstrates how fragile peace can be, especially when political leaders are as shortsighted as they often are.

The Cambridge historian Christopher Clark aptly titled his 2012 book on the origins of WWI The sleepwalkers. Through a combination of wilful blindness, utter complacency and intense stubbornness, Europe’s leaders subjected their countries to a conflict that shattered an entire generation.

By the time WWI erupted, it should have been clear that industrialisation and the transportation revolution had transformed warfare. The Crimean War of 1853–1856 had over a million casualties; the American Civil War of 1861–1865 resulted in more than 600,000 deaths.

Despite these experiences, Europe’s leaders clung to the 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that ‘war is the continuation of politics through other means’. So politics continued in the form of war, resulting in 20 million military and civilian casualties.

Yet not even that was enough to wake up the sleepwalkers. In the years following the Armistice, Europe’s leaders failed to transcend the divisions that WWI had laid bare, with the tensions between the French and Germans being particularly destabilising.

This failure was reflected in the Armistice itself, which imposed excessively harsh requirements on Germany, including billions of dollars in reparations payments, due at a time when the country faced a deep economic crisis. Meanwhile, international oversight was too weak. The League of Nations remained largely silent in the face of dangerous developments, such as Adolf Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland. The US Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations in 1919—and thus of the principles of internationalism and multilateralism that President Woodrow Wilson had promoted—certainly didn’t help matters.

More fundamentally, World War II erupted because nationalism was allowed to continue to fester. French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, for one, remained deeply nationalistic and, in particular, vehemently anti-German. But while behaving like Clemenceau might win the war (especially if a power like the United States shows up to offer crucial help), it cannot win the peace; hard nationalism naturally leads to conflict.

Yet, today, a major world leader, US president Donald Trump, is behaving very much like Clemenceau. This holds serious implications not just for the US, but also for Europe. To be sure, French president Emmanuel Macron embraces the ‘Wilsonian principles’ that Trump rejects. But, as the interwar period starkly showed, if core rules and principles are not accepted by all, the institutions they underpin cannot be sustained.

WWII accomplished what even WWI could not: it ended the era of European global dominance. While Europe has grown and prospered since 1945, it has not regained the global leadership status its major countries once possessed. This leaves today’s European Union at the mercy of a US that has rejected multilateralism and embraced nationalism.

Of course, plenty of the risks Europe faces lie within its own borders. In France, for example, many are brushing off the warnings issued by Macron—or, more concretely, by their history books—as they push back against their president’s efforts to take up the mantle of multilateralism.

The risk today is that generations that have not known war will reproduce the chain of events that lead to it. This risk is exemplified by the recent ‘yellow vest’ protests in France against an environmental tax on fuel. The protests were also intended to be a broader rebuke of Macron, whom many blame for their declining spending power.

The protesters probably think that they are acting in the spirit of the 1789 French Revolution, a spirit that the French periodically revive in their country’s politics. But they are actually re-enacting the 1930s, with its right-wing protest movements and militias.

This is not to say that French citizens—and, in particular, young people—have nothing to complain about. Unemployment has remained too high for too long, and while France has largely escaped the spike in income inequality seen in other countries, such as the US, systemic inequalities are pervasive.

But the fact is that the emotional rejection of any person or institution even remotely associated with established ‘elites’—including mainstream political parties and trade unions—lends itself to exploitation by populist demagogues. And history could not be clearer about the risks generated when such demagogues secure power.

The world has changed profoundly over the last century. Our economies are more deeply intertwined than ever before, and the sheer scale of destruction that could be wrought by today’s weaponry may invite some semblance of restraint.

But, as Trump’s erratic presidency—including his challenges to longstanding alliances and reckless nuclear posturing—starkly demonstrates, the structures we have created to preserve peace are far from foolproof. With populations across the West embracing nationalistic and populist ideas, we are again dancing on the rim of a volcano.

‘Has anybody here seen Kelly?’ The lost, and the loss, of World War I

The numbers are stark and brutal. Out of a population of five million, more than 60,000 Australians were killed in the First World War and at least 137,000 more were wounded.

But the statistics don’t fully convey the extent of the loss to the culture and humanity of the nation.

The years before World War I saw a blossoming of artistic endeavour with the emergence of the likes of Picasso and Matisse.

With them on that wave rode a remarkable, multi-skilled, but now largely forgotten, young Australian musician, composer and athlete, Frederick Septimus Kelly.

Like many other brilliant young men, Kelly fell victim to the war to end all wars. He was killed on the Western Front on 13 November 1916.

He had composed some of his best music by candlelight in deep dugouts, sometimes as artillery pounded around him.

Alongside his musical skill, Kelly had stunning ability as a rower, winning a gold medal as stroke of the British eights at the 1908 Olympics. As a single sculler, he won the 1905 Henley Diamond Sculls in record time that stood for 33 years.

Musician and historical researcher Christopher Latham says Kelly was undoubtedly Australia’s greatest cultural loss of that war, but few Australians have any idea of the scale of what’s gone.

‘He was the greatest amateur rower of the period, a brilliant pianist and a composer of pure genius’, Latham says. ‘It seems incredible he’s not better known.’

Kelly was born in Sydney and sent by his family to Eton. He studied in Germany for five years and took up a scholarship to Oxford.

When war broke out he volunteered to fight with the British forces and joined the Hood Battalion, a naval contingent which was sent to fight on land at Gallipoli and then in France. Lieutenant Commander Kelly is believed to have been one of the last three officers to leave Gallipoli and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role in the evacuation.

Kelly was a close friend of Rupert Brooke, and began writing an elegy to him as the poet lay dying. Soon after that, the brilliant young Australian composer was killed while leading an attack on a German position.

Because Kelly served with a British unit, his name doesn’t feature on the wall of the Australian War Memorial, though it is recorded at the memorial among the Australians who died fighting with allied forces.

Latham directed the international Flowers of War project, which set out the cultural cost of World War I. He produced Three treasures—the rediscovered music of three lost World War I composers featuring the work of Kelly, a Frenchman and a German.

‘These are the pieces people wrote facing death’, Latham says. ‘I can’t do anything for the other 60,000 Australians who died in World War I, but I can bring Kelly back.

‘This is another cost of war beyond the economic, the material and the treasure. You lose culture. When you lose these people you lose all the pieces they would have written, you lose their students.’

The potential for regeneration was also lost, Latham says. ‘Every generation which comes through shakes up the status quo.

‘No one had realised just how awful a heavily-industrialised war of attrition would be.

‘European culture was probably at its absolute zenith in 1913 and then so much of it was lost.

‘The art was so vibrant that you have to think, what if it had kept going and there hadn’t been the war?’

Another remarkably talented young Australian to die was John Clifford Peel, a reconnaissance pilot with the Australian Flying Corps. In 1917, Cliff Peel wrote to the Reverend Dr John Flynn suggesting that he could use aircraft to carry his ministry through outback Australia. Written just 14 years after the Wright Brothers made the first powered flight under control, that letter provided the inspiration for Flynn’s creation of what was to become the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

On 19 September 1918, just seven weeks before the war ended, Lieutenant Peel and his observer vanished after being sent to photograph a section of the German Hindenberg Line. It emerged later that they’d probably been shot down by a German fighter.

Among the Diggers who went through much of the fighting, and very nearly survived the war, was Thomas ‘Rich’ Baker, an 18-year-old South Australian bank clerk who enlisted in 1915 and found himself serving as a gunner on the Western Front.

His letters home and a set of logbooks he owned when he later moved to the Australian Flying Corps describe his extraordinary wartime experiences.

If you look past the elegance of the handwriting, the paper faded with age and the quaintly formal language, some of the letters contain the same sense of excitement found in emails from any teenager of today backpacking through Europe. The pictures sent home to ‘Dearest Ma’ were taken with a Kodak rather than a mobile phone, but all the youthful exuberance is there.

Held in the National Archives, the letters cover in lighthearted fashion Baker’s acceptance that he would not, after all, be home for Christmas with the family in 1916, and an episode in which he was buried up to his waist in mud as he repaired a phone cable under heavy German shellfire. He took that as a bit of a lark, but his commanding officer had Baker awarded the Military Medal for his bravery. He won a second MM for putting out a fire that was in danger of setting off a pile of ammunition.

Most of the Australian troops who’d played a key role in smashing through the Germans’ main defence, the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line, were spared the final slaughter. There were about 100,000 of them, all volunteers, on the Western Front; most were under the command of Lieutenant General Sir John Monash. They had been fighting hard and, just before the end of the war, he pulled them out of the line for a rest.

Two groups of Australians who were not rested were a contingent of miners who had been tunnelling under the German lines and who were under British commanders, and the airmen of the Australian Flying Corps.

Historian Peter Burness has described the deaths of sappers Charles Barrett and Arthur Johnson and Corporal Albert Davey of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company as they prepared to place a bridge over a heavily defended canal.

The unit commander, Captain Oliver Holmes Woodward, described later how Davey, a 34-year-old Ballarat miner, came to him before the attack and asked him to take care of his personal belongings and send them to his wife if anything happened to him.

‘Davey must have seen that the war might soon be over and felt that going into one more heavy battle was chancing his hand too far’, says Burness.

Davey was killed by a German shell as the attack began. Barrett and Johnson also died. They were the last Australian soldiers killed in action in the ‘war to end all wars’, though many more died later of wounds.

But above the battlefield, two squadrons of the Australian Flying Corps were fighting a German air force that was well equipped and far from defeated.

The same battle also robbed the world of British poet laureate Wilfred Owen.

The young gunner, Thomas Baker, had often looked skyward from the trenches and yearned to join the flyers far above the mud; finally he got his wish and was sent to train as a pilot.

In one of his letters home he describes a trip to the theatre with ‘the Misses Longbottom’ and the tea that followed ‘in a bonza little joint called “The Thistle” opposite the Piccadilly tube station in Haymarket—if you ever go there don’t forget to try the shortbread’.

There’s the complaint to his mother that ‘I have rather an unsightly crop of pimples’, and then the description of an air battle in which he destroys a German aircraft and kills its crew.

In a letter dated 11 August 1918, he describes how ‘I downed my first Hun. I have since shot another to pieces.’ He and two other pilots went looking for a ‘stoush’. They dropped through cloud to find two German aircraft nearby and gave chase.

‘A pal of mine shot his down in flames and as the other tried to turn and get away I poked my nose straight at him and let fly from about 40 feet and shot his left bottom plane [wing] off. He then folded up and crashed in pieces.’

‘So long’, Baker finishes, ‘I hope to add a few more Huns to my score soon.’

Later, he tells his mother that he’ll be flying one of the latest fighter aircraft and adds: ‘I’m just itching to try out on a Fritz.’ On 1 October, he writes: ‘That makes five! Had a ripping time this morning on an early flip before brekker.’ He spotted a German two-seater aircraft on the enemy side of the lines and goes on in a letter to describe in Uncle Remus fashion how ‘Brer Rick got his fifth Hun.’

He pretended he hadn’t seen the enemy aircraft, stalked it, killed the crewman in the rear cockpit and kept shooting until the plane crashed. In October, Baker was promoted to temporary captain and flight commander.

The 4th of November 1918, just a week before the finish, was one of the Australian Flying Corps’ worst days.

The Australians were skilled pilots and had the latest British aircraft, the Sopwith Snipe, a development of the famous Sopwith Camel. The Germans, too, were very experienced, flying their state-of-the-art aircraft, the Fokker DVII.

The Australian squadron was escorting British bombers when the Fokkers attacked. The Australians climbed to intercept them and were quickly involved in a swirling dogfight. It was over in minutes. When the squadron reassembled, three aircraft were missing and all three pilots—Captain Thomas Baker, Lieutenant Parker Whitley Symons and Lieutenant Arthur John Palliser—had been killed.

Palliser and Baker were ‘aces’, Baker with 12 ‘victories’ and Palliser with seven, including one balloon.

Baker, the youngest, had turned 21 on 25 April, Anzac Day.

There’s a sad and faded footnote to that battle in the archives.

After the war, Palliser’s mother, Mary, wrote to official war historian C.E.W. Bean to give him details of her son that he had requested. She wrote across a corner of the letter: ‘My husband has never recovered from the shock of our son’s death. He is now a confirmed invalid.’

In 2004, author Joseph Persico wrote Eleventh month, eleventh day, eleventh hour, in which he revealed that, in the final hours of the last day of World War I, pointless last-minute attacks were ordered along the front line.

This was not just the lunacy of junior officers with a sense of unfinished business. In some cases it came from the top. US Major General Joseph Kuhn sent a message to his commanders: ‘Hostilities will cease on the whole front at 11 hours today, French time. Until that hour the operations previously ordered will be pressed with vigour.’

Disbelieving soldiers who had been celebrating news of the armistice and thought they had survived the war were ordered to go over the top one last time; gunners were ordered to fire their remaining artillery shells into enemy positions to avoid the inconvenience of returning them to stores.

Nearly 3,000 men died in those final few hours in what Persico describes as the perfect metaphor for the four years of senseless slaughter that preceded them.

How Anzac was fought, soldier by soldier

The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, volume I, The story of ANZAC from the outbreak of war to the end of the first phase of the Gallipoli campaign, May 4, 1915, was published in 1921—a remarkable feat given that its author, C.E.W. Bean, was still overseas in 1919. Since then, more than a thousand books have been written on the campaign.

It might seem that there’s little more to be said. The problem is that the landing at Beach Z by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps is shrouded in myth, mystery and confusion. Bean gave us a valuable foundation, but, with a few significant exceptions, the story of the battle is often simply repeated or embellished with the new author’s prose, rather than investigated. An accomplished Gallipoli historian once said to me: ‘I have read the Official History, and I don’t understand what happened at the landing, do you?’

It’s long been argued that the Allied attack turned too quickly into defence, thereby handing the initiative to the enemy. In The Landing in the Dawn, I set out to examine how and why that happened with an approach not available to Bean: I limited the focus to a single battalion over one day. That enabled a much deeper and more detailed study than previous efforts.

The 11th Battalion was raised in Western Australia, but contained many men from the United Kingdom, Victoria and elsewhere. On 25 April 1915, they landed with the covering force, the first wave of the ANZAC landing. Their job was to fight their way ashore, if necessary; push the Ottoman troops away from the landing beaches; and establish a ‘covering position’ to shield the landing of the remainder of the force. As the 11th Battalion’s members fought as far north as Fisherman’s Hut and south as 400 Plateau, inland on Third Ridge and on the high ground of Battleship Hill, this study places much of the battlefield under a microscope.

One of the first steps in reconstructing the history was to determine which officers belonged to which companies and platoons and, if possible, to do the same with the enlisted men. Bizarrely, such a roll for 25 April doesn’t exist, or at least hasn’t been found. This might appear an administrative task of little historical merit, but it became one of the keys that unlocked the history of the battle.

An example of the way this information can change the way we view the battle is examination of the early decisions by commanders and the early movements and dispositions of troops. The Official History tells us that soon after the landing, ‘the two companies of the 11th under Captain Barnes and Major Denton’ were directed to establish themselves on Second Ridge. That was not their planned objective.

Later, as more troops arrived, many were also directed there to occupy ground, but that wasn’t their objective either. The reason for the deviations was concern about an anticipated counterattack from inland on the right. Those decisions in effect converted an offensive battle into a defensive one. The different arguments about how the battle developed are based on varying interpretations of the evidence.

Some arguments are based on troop dispositions. If B and D Companies were sent to Second Ridge, that means up to 500 rifles in eight platoons were available to defend the ridge. Overlaying the reconstructed battalion structure—the roll of who belongs to which companies and platoons—repaints this picture.

B Company’s commander, Captain Charles Barnes, did proceed to Second Ridge. His second-in-command (2ic), Captain Eric Tulloch, famously made his way to Battleship Hill. Second Lieutenant S.H. Jackson, 5 Platoon, found himself fighting near Tulloch. Lieutenant F.P.D. Strickland, 6 Platoon, was ordered to attack Fisherman’s Hut, on the beach on the left flank. Lieutenant A.H. Darnell, 7 Platoon, commanded the battalion scouts and was detached from his platoon, and Lieutenant J. Newman, 8 Platoon, initially fought forward of Second Ridge, and later with the 10th Battalion. In other words, Barnes had not a single officer or intact platoon with him.

D Company’s commander, Major J.S. Denton, proceeded to his designated position, as did his 2ic, Captain A.E.J. Croly. Like Strickland, Lieutenant C.A.P. Gostelow, 13 Platoon, was attacking Fisherman’s Hut, Second Lieutenant H.H. Walker, 14 Platoon, was lying wounded on the beach, and Lieutenant M.L. Reid, 15 Platoon, and Second Lieutenant C.F. Buttle, 16 Platoon, had been dispatched to the high ground and fought with Tulloch. Denton consequently also had not a single intact platoon with him. Ascribing men to platoons, when possible, reveals more. Corporal Tom Louch was a member of 16 Platoon, and was fighting in Wire Gully, on the inland side of Second Ridge, with others of his platoon. Part of Buttle’s platoon was on Battleship Hill—the high ground on the left—and another part was at the southern end of Second Ridge, about a mile away.

Similarly, determining where men were on the battlefield, and when, by cross-referencing as many sources as possible, establishes new frames of reference and chronologies.

When it’s reconstructed from this level and in this type of detail, the battle can be viewed quite differently from previous accounts. There’s a great difference between dispatching a company of six officers, four platoons and over 200 men to a point, and sending a captain with an unknown number of men in unknown formations.

The latter drastically reduces a commander’s ability and confidence to thrust for strategic points, or defend others. One cannot be confident of holding against a counterattack when, instead of dispatching two companies under known and trusted leaders, the ground is held by a mixed collection of men of an unknown number—none of them under command of his platoon officer.

By contrast, the fact that the men fought as hard as they did and endured all that the day could throw at them, despite the breakdown of military structure, explains in part why the men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps created such a reputation in those first days on the Gallipoli peninsula.

Angus Campbell: an army is made of its people

In his last week as chief of the Australian Army, Angus Campbell delivered a speech hosted by ASPI at the Australian War Memorial in which he described General John Monash’s planning for the Battle of Hamel as a textbook study of how to plan an attack.

Campbell, then a lieutenant general, today becomes a full general and chief of the Australian Defence Force. In his Hamel oration marking the centenary of the 1918 Western Front battle, he described how the Australian success at Hamel was due to the leadership Monash exercised through meticulous planning, attention to detail, professionalism, thorough training and preparation, and a clear focus on the objective.

‘Every component part of the attacking force knew their role and performed it to the best of their ability’, Campbell said.

On the anniversary, much has been made of the fact that American troops fought for the first time under an Australian general, beginning a close relationship that continues to the present. And that tanks were successfully used in close coordination with artillery and aircraft, dramatically reducing the infantry’s casualties.

But Campbell’s strong message was that Hamel reinforced the truism that an army is made of its people.

‘Hamel is ultimately a great story of our people and their service, as individuals and as an extraordinary team, melded by an extraordinary leader’, he said.

‘Monash as corps commander was the “right man at the right time”. His intellect, drive and, dare I say it, ambition, combined with decades of professional development and four years’ wartime command experience, delivered a smart victory.’

Yet Monash alone could achieve nothing. He was reliant upon the other 150,000 troops in the Australian Corps to achieve the goal. ‘It’s about Australians accepting responsibility: quietly and humbly going about their duty but determined to excel in that duty.’

Campbell went on to tell the stories of otherwise ‘ordinary’ Australians who did extraordinary things in incredibly difficult circumstances.

The 13th Battalion was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Marks DSO, MC, MID, sometimes referred to as ‘the Boy Colonel’, who’d been promoted to command the battalion in November 1917. Marks was 22 and already a veteran combat leader of Australian infantry from the Gallipoli campaign, including the landing, and many battles on the Western Front.

The 15th Battalion’s Henry Dalziel was awarded the 1,000th Victoria Cross for his valour during the assault on German trenches. As the second member of a Lewis gun team, Private Dalziel silenced the heavy fire from a machine-gun post. When his unit was held up by another machine-gun post, he dashed forward with his revolver and killed or captured the crew and secured the gun, allowing the advance to continue.

The tip of his trigger finger was shot away and he was ordered to the rear. Instead, he continued to serve his Lewis gun in the final storming of Pear Trench. After again being ordered back to the aid post, he began taking ammunition up the front line, until he was shot in the head and severely wounded.

Nearby, Lance Corporal Thomas (Jack) Axford saw that an adjoining platoon’s advance was delayed by barbed wire and machine-gun fire.

With his company commander out of action, Axford charged and threw bombs among the enemy gun crews. He then jumped into the trench and charging with his bayonet, killed 10 of the enemy and took six prisoners. He threw the machine guns over the parapet and the delayed platoon was able to advance. Axford rejoined his own platoon and fought with it during the remainder of the operations.

He, too, was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions.

Campbell said Monash, Marks, Dalziel and Axford personified the Australian Imperial Force’s character, and its rapid professionalisation and growth in capability, over four years of combat operations.

He also noted that the first US Army Medal of Honor in World War I was awarded to Corporal Thomas Pope of the US 131st Infantry Regiment (Illinois National Guard), for his actions during the Hamel battle.

Campbell said Monash continued his distinguished career in the service of the nation after the war and his statue at the memorial, unveiled and dedicated at the War Memorial this week, was the latest of many deserved acknowledgements of his contribution to Australia.

Dalziel recovered from his severe head injury in England, returning home to Queensland in January 1919. Travelling home by train he received a hero’s welcome at every station on the way to Atherton. He became a farmer, a factory worker, and a soldier in the Citizen’s Military Forces. Later he developed an interest in songwriting. Dalziel died of a stroke in 1965 in the Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane, aged 72.

Axford came home to Australia in December 1918 on furlough and was discharged in February 1919. He recommenced work as a labourer and later became a clerk. In November 1926 he married Lily Foster, a shop assistant, in Perth. They lived at Mount Hawthorn and had five children.

On 25 June 1941, Axford was mobilised in the militia, rising to sergeant. He was discharged on 14 April 1947. In his leisure time he regularly attended the races. He was returning from a reunion of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association when he died, on an aircraft between Dubai and Hong Kong, in October 1983.

Marks returned to Australia in February 1919. He was accepted as a law student at the University of Sydney but deferred for a year to study Latin and took a managerial job with a paper-bag manufacturer. His biographer describes how Marks visited Palm Beach on 25 January 1920. He was not a strong swimmer, but, seeing a stranger in trouble in the heavy surf, he went into the water and drowned in an unsuccessful rescue attempt. His body was never recovered. He was just 24.

Lieutenant Colonel Harry Murray VC, who had served and fought with Marks in the 13th Battalion, said at the time, ‘We loved Douglas Marks for his high indomitable spirit, his dash and daring … no truer comrade ever lived.’

Campbell observed this week: ‘A democratic nation’s army is as good as the support of its citizens, its government and its coalition partners. In this respect Australia was, and is, the lucky country.

‘Lest we forget.’

Remembering Villers-Bretonneux: April 1918

In the spring of 1929 a group of British army officers made a study tour of the 1918 Somme battlefields from Villers-Bretonneux, astride the main road westward to Amiens, and then out to the east to the old Hindenburg Line and the Sambre-Oise canal. This was the direction of the British Army’s rapid advance until the Armistice in November 1918 brought the war to an end.

For many of those young officers, the Great War had been their baptism of fire. Much of the terrain had barely changed in the intervening decade. Of the six battles covered in their training manual, three focused on actions where Australian troops were heavily engaged. The operations at the village of Villers-Bretonneux on 24–25 April, and at Mont St Quentin on 31 August, in which the AIF played the leading role, were singled out for special attention.

When the German army launched its great offensive on 21 March 1918, the five Australian divisions on the Western Front were in Flanders, 100 kilometres north of the main assault. In the following days, as the British Army retreated and tried desperately to stem the tide, the Australians were rushed down to bolster the Somme front—the scene of bitter fighting for the AIF in 1916.

With General Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army in disarray, the AIF’s 3rd and 4th Divisions had seen days of heavy fighting by early April, helping thwart the German lunge westward towards Amiens. They played a key role in stabilising a new front line between Albert and the Somme River near Sailly-le-Sec. It was around this time, at the village of Heilly, that Charles Bean, the official Australian military historian, records a 3rd Division infantryman laconically telling a French villager: ‘Fini retreat madame—beaucoup Australiens ici.’

By late April, around 100,000 Australian troops had been hurriedly dispatched from Flanders to counter the main German advance. They held key points in the line almost as far south as Villers-Bretonneux, which was then held by the much-depleted British 8th Division.

But on the morning of 24 April, four divisions of the German Second Army made yet another determined push towards the high ground of Villers-Bretonneux, already the scene of heavy combat early that month. The waves of assault troops were supported by tanks, the first direct combat action between German and British armoured units in World War I. By midday Villers-Bretonneux had fallen.

The location of the town, the last real impediment to a direct advance on Amiens, 25 kilometres to the west, dictated an immediate counterattack that night, spearheaded by the Australian 13th and 15th Brigades. The 15th Brigade, commanded by one of the AIF’s most famous brigadiers, Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, would attack from the north, with the 13th Brigade, commanded by William Glasgow, on the southern flank along the old front line. The British 8th Division was in support. The assault, on a 4,000‑yard front, began with an artillery barrage at 10 pm.

The 15th Brigade’s advance to the higher ground on the northwest of Villers-Bretonneux was headed by the 59th and 60th Battalions. Around midnight according to the official historian of the AIF’s Fifth Division, all hell broke loose:

A wild and terrible yell from hundreds of throats split the midnight air, and the whole line broke into a rapid run and surged irresistibly forwards, bayonets gleaming thirstily in the moonlight. A storm of enemy machine gun and rifle fire was poured into the oncoming ranks but checked them not at all. A hundred enemy flares lit up the terrible scene in vivid light, in which the Germans read too well their fate … It was the third anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, and the payment of odd debts due to the Turk was to be made today to his esteemed ally and brother, the German.

The counterattack succeeded at the cost of nearly 1,500 casualties for the two Australian brigades, with the 13th having the toughest fight with just over 1,000 men killed and wounded. More than 900 Germans were taken prisoner. Villers-Bretonneux had been recaptured less than 24 hours after being overrun by the Germans and Amiens was no longer in danger.

The battle marked the end of the British Army’s defeats on the Somme front. Only three months later the great Allied offensive that began on 8 August with Australian and Canadian troops in the vanguard would begin just to the east of Villers-Bretonneux.

The Germans’ last big push to win the war petered out on the rolling hills astride the Somme river valley. From its beginning on 21 March to the end of April, German casualties were estimated at 50,000 dead and 250,000 wounded. British Army casualties (including the Dominion troops) in the same period were around 28,000 dead with 240,000 wounded.

In a letter home written a week after the battle, John Monash, soon to take command of a newly created Australian Corps consisting of all five AIF divisions, summed up:

In my opinion this counter-attack at night is the finest thing yet done in the war by Australians or any other troops … The British public is at last beginning to sit up and take notice, and from an attitude of cold and rather critical patronage towards Australians, and vague allusion to their ‘slack discipline’.

A century later a popular myth continues to flourish that the Australians in France in 1918 single-handedly turned the tide of the German advance on the Somme front, changing the course of the war. Summing up in his official history 80 years ago, Charles Bean offered this assessment:

It has frequently been claimed that the Australian divisions stopped the advancing Germans in their previously victorious progress towards Amiens and also towards Hazebrouck … if this claim means that the Germans continued to advance until they came up against Australian troops hurriedly brought to the rescue, and that these were the troops that first held up the enemy on the line on which the offensive ended, it is not literally true of any important sector of the Somme front.

This isn’t to question the genuine achievement and fighting prowess of the AIF in 1918. In his long dispatch on the great German offensive written in July 1918, Douglas Haig observed that the night operation at Villers-Bretonneux by the Australians, undertaken at short notice, was ‘an enterprise of great daring’, and a ‘well-conceived and brilliantly executed operation’.

The 13th Australian Brigade, in particular, showed great skill and resolution in their attack, making their way through belts of wire running diagonally to their line of advance, across very difficult country which they had no opportunity to reconnoitre beforehand.

Fighting alongside the Australians at the battle of Villers-Bretonneux was a young British army captain, Hubert Essame, who would also serve in World War II under Bernard Montgomery, ending up as a major-general. In his book on the 1918 Western Front battles, Essame singled out the Australians for special praise. ‘In an inferno of bursting shells and machinegun fire, these superb troops recaptured the town in one of the most sanguinary actions of the war.’

Essame, who was wounded in the Anzac-eve battle for Villers-Bretonneux, gave this evaluation of the men of the AIF: ‘All who fought in it gave the palm for the best infantry of the war on either side to the Australians.’

From the bookshelf: Lenin on the Train

The great Russian writer, Vladimir Nabokov, probably described VI Lenin best, when he observed that the Bolshevik leader’s ideology was like a pail of milk of human kindness, with a dead rat at the bottom.

The nature of Lenin’s narrow, obsessive and ultimately murderous character lies close to the heart of Catherine Merridale’s outstanding new book, Lenin on the Train, which retraces the revolutionary’s journey from exile in Zurich to St Petersburg in April, 1917. The fabled ‘sealed train’ supplied by the Kaiser’s Germany, provided the means by which the Bolshevik party made the journey. But behind Berlin’s support for the exiles returning to their Czarist homeland lay a greater strategic gamble.

1917 was the decisive year of the Great War. The February introduction by the Germans of unrestricted submarine warfare made a manifest contribution to American entry into the war. But it was the notorious Zimmermann telegram, sent by the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmerman, to his Ambassador in Mexico City, that had enraged the Wilson Administration in Washington.

As Barbara Tuchman brilliantly described, the telegram was intercepted by British intelligence in Room 40 of the Admiralty, decoded and given to the Americans. Imperial Germany was encouraging Mexico to enter the war and invade the US, reclaiming lost territories. Zimmerman, who foolishly confirmed the authenticity of the telegram when it became public, was pursuing a strategy designed to provoke hostilities in the home territories of enemies and potential adversaries.

By 1917, the British blockade was crippling Germany and her allies among the Central Powers, especially in foodstuffs. Endless slaughter on the Western Front had produced an effective stalemate. On the Eastern Front, however, the tottering Czarist Empire was showing the signs of terminal decay. Massive military incompetence coupled with corruption and gross inefficiencies in those ministries charged with wartime supply and basic economic policy, produced strikes, riots and mutiny in the army, reflecting widespread political opposition and disillusionment.

In February 1917, a Revolution broke out. The Czar was deposed. While a Provisional Government under Prince Lvov was nominally in office, the Soviets, consisting of workers and soldiers, in which the Bolsheviks were a force but not necessarily the exclusive power, actually held the key to the future of the emerging Russia.

Lenin, however, was in frustrating exile, reading of events but powerless to shape them. Enter the Germans. In a manner similar to efforts to foment unrest in the British Empire, especially in Ireland and India, the Germans agreed to transport Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades across Germany to Scandinavia from where they could make the final leg of the journey into the Russian homeland through Finland to St Petersburg.

Merridale decided to retrace Lenin’s journey from Zurich via Stockholm, to the border crossing at Tornio. She has succeeded in writing a compelling narrative; brilliantly illustrated; removing inaccuracies in other accounts while giving a clear picture of the driven Lenin, who thought only of violent world revolution. His companions, including his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, Karl Radek, and Grigory Zinoviev, among lesser comrades, travelled in confined conditions which required compromise. Hence, there was even a roster for smoking in the toilet.

One historical challenge which Merridale faced when writing Lenin on the Train was to explain that she was interested in VI Lenin and not John Lennon. Despite the grotesque, embalmed figure in the Mausoleum on Red Square, Lenin’s name now means little in popular culture.

Not so in 1917, where the Allies sought to deny Lenin’s dangerous party entry to Russia. There is a suggestion that one man, the Justice Minister, Alexander Kerensky, could have denied the Bolsheviks’ passage at the border. When Kerensky had been asked by telegram from Tornio: ’The Minister of Justice had replied (with the pomposity that was his ultimate undoing) that democratic Russia did not refuse entry to its citizens. With that, there was no option but to let the subversives go home.’

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s excellent The Romanovs (1613-1918) makes its readers wonder how the Russian Empire survived until 1917, given its ignorance and decadence. Reform after the 1905 Revolution should have planted deeper seeds for democratic institutions and civil society. Instead, VI Lenin eventually triumphed. Momentarily the Germans succeeded, knocking Russia out of the war, the consequences of which are still lamented by the current Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Putin is a pointed critic of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which saw Russia depart allied ranks and be dismembered territorially.

But the brutal treaty led inexorably to the punitive Treaty of Versailles and the next generation of Russian troops would end their war in Berlin, not Petrograd. Merridale has told a tale worth hearing, not only from Zurich to the Finland Station but beyond: from revelations about the Bolsheviks’ dependence on German aid, organised by Radek, through to the fate of Lenin’s companions under Stalin.

And while Lenin’s musty presence still shadows museums commemorating his 1917 pilgrimage, Merridale has captured his personality better than any writer since Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote Lenin in Zurich. The verdict: Nabokov was absolutely right.

 

War at sea 1914-15: An accelerating revolution (Part 1)

HMS Queen Elizabeth

It’s an irony of history that we no longer comprehend much of the way in which ships were worked and fought in 1914-1918. Indeed, the interest in the Nelsonic era and the combination of extensive research, historically informed fiction and replicas, as well as continuing square rigged sail training has meant that our knowledge of what was happening onboard the Victory and her sisters in 1805 is greater than for the Iron Duke and the Grand Fleet in 1914. The deficiency becomes even more apparent comparing naval history with that of land forces, particularly on the Western Front. A body of work has profoundly changed our view of the land war, dispelled the myth of ‘lions led by donkeys’, and above all, conveyed the complexity and the learning curves involved. For the war at sea, understanding is much less complete.

We tend to consider the ‘Fisher Era’ as a continuum from Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s accession as First Sea Lord in 1904; in reality, the pace of development not only accelerated but became truly multi-dimensional only after about 1910. Pressures were thus intensifying in the years immediately before 1914. Those involved were struggling to learn a new language of naval operations with an incomplete dictionary and very little grammar.

Exercises at sea didn’t help as much as they should. Too many were set piece, closer to a chess match than the uncertainties of operating with incomplete information. They were conducted for limited periods with little consideration to the vagaries of visibility or surprise. The annual Grand Manoeuvres, effectively the only semi-‘free play’ simulations, shared these limitations. If an umpire assessed that you got within range of a more heavily armed opponent, you were judged out of action. Such an approach militated against risk taking and against a sophisticated approach to manoeuvring and the use of fire power.

Had there been more realistic exercises, which included more live firings, navies might have better understood what was really going to happen at sea, yet people were not complacent or entirely misguided. The pace of change was so fast that learning how to use it all was a problem arguably impossible to solve in the time available before August 1914.

We also need to appreciate just how financially restricted the Royal Navy—and the Imperial Germany Navy—were. Money had to be found by the British for new 15 inch gun battleships and oil firing. At-sea training, amongst other things, took a heavy hit—one has only to note the intensity of Admiralty demands for improved fuel economy to understand this. The Germans were even more constrained. Almost all tactical exercises were conducted at scaled down speeds. This allowed the correct relative movement, but was in no way preparation for the challenges of combat. At more than £50 for a heavy shell, a thousand pounds for a practice torpedo and nearly as much for a practice mine—both the latter could all too easily be lost—it shouldn’t be surprising that the true capabilities of the new weapons and thus the techniques needed to deal with them should go partly unexamined.

So much was new. The first truly long-range submarine (a British boat, not a German one) didn’t enter service until 1908 and it took its success in the 1910 manoeuvres to prove its potential. The Germans were no further ahead—indeed, in August 1914, U-Boats were not equipped to navigate for extended periods out of sight of land. They had been intended largely for coastal defence and the sortie conducted by boats of the First Flotilla into the northern North Sea in August 1914 was the furthest they had yet sailed. Two didn’t return.

Destroyers only began to get radio in 1908. The first submarine wireless set wasn’t fitted experimentally in a British unit until 1910. Systematic installation began in 1912, but the following year the C-in-C Home Fleet commented that submarines were yet to have soundproof cabinets installed and that operators found it difficult to hear signals when the diesels were running. When submarine wireless was fitted, its effective range was often no more than 30 miles, which was all the original 1911 staff requirement had proposed.

The rapid extension of radio installations worsened the existing shortage of trained personnel, which was acute. Furthermore, most of the smaller ships didn’t have enough operators to keep a continuous watch, which meant that they could only be contacted at specific times. British destroyers had only one operator in 1914, despite this having been identified as a serious deficiency as early as 1912. They didn’t receive an additional telegraphist until well into 1915—it took the war for the additional manpower (and the associated expense) to be approved.

Aviation was no more advanced on either side. The Royal Navy had conducted only one sustained tactical exercise from an ‘aircraft carrier’ before August 1914. Over the 14 days during which the converted cruiser Hermes took part in the 1913 manoeuvres with two seaplanes embarked, bad weather prevented flying for three days, while fog curtailed sorties on two days. One machine had a wing ripped off during a gale on 23 July, while three sorties resulted in damage to the aircraft. Overall, there were only five successful flights, even if the use of airborne radio was demonstrated (although compasses which worked in the air had yet to be invented). Ironically, after an engine failure had resulted in Seaplane No.81 being forced down during the final sortie, she and her crew were rescued by a passing German merchant ship!

For the German Navy, the performance (with suitable weather) of the first zeppelin in the September 1913 manoeuvres was extremely encouraging, but L1 crashed in a thunderstorm a few weeks after with 14 dead. In October 1913, L2 burnt up in the air, killing all its crew. Although the Germans had hired a commercial unit to allow training to continue, the naval zeppelin force in August 1914 was a single airship, L3.  The most basic techniques of scouting, reporting and navigation over the sea were still being learnt, as were the effects of weather.

Navies in 1914 were, in short, a ‘work in progress’.