Zero Hour Read online

  AWARDS FOR LEON DAVIDSON

  Scarecrow Army

  WINNER

  2006 CBCA Awards, Eve Pownall Award for

  Information Books

  2006 New Zealand Post Book Awards, Non-Fiction

  FINALIST

  Elsie Locke Award

  2006 Library & Information Association New Zealand

  Aotearoa Children’s Book Awards

  Red Haze

  WINNER

  Elsie Locke Award

  2007 Library & Information Association New Zealand

  Aotearoa Children’s Book Awards

  HONOUR BOOK

  2007 CBCA Awards, Eve Pownall Award for

  Information Books

  FINALIST

  2007 New Zealand Post Book Awards, Non-Fiction

  LEON DAVIDSON grew up in Christchurch on a diet of Second World War comics and movies. He lived overseas for 10 years, mainly in Melbourne, and now works as a primary school teacher in Wellington.

  ZERO

  HOUR

  THE ANZACS ON

  THE WESTERN FRONT

  LEON DAVIDSON

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Leon Davidson 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company 2010

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Text design by Susan Miller

  Typeset in Garamond by J&M Typesetting

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  Cover image: AWM E05988A: ‘Over the top’. A composite photograph,

  originally known as ‘A hop over’, constructed by Captain Frank Hurley, an Official War Photographer.

  Other images: AWM E00825 Soldiers of the 45th Battalion wearing gasmasks in a trench in the Ypres sector.: AWM E00700 A scene on the Menin road beyond Ypres.: AWM E00103 Two members of the 8th Battalion manning a trench in the Somme region. At the time German troops were located 275 metres away.

  All Alexander Turnbull Library images are from the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association Collection.

  Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright material. The author and publisher would be pleased to hear from any copyright holder who has not been acknowledged.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Davidson, Leon, 1973–

  Zero hour: the Anzacs on the Western Front/Leon Davidson.

  ISBN: 9781921656071 (pbk.)

  For secondary school age.

  Australia. Army. Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—History. World War, 1914–1918—Australia. World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Western Front.

  940.40994

  TO MY GRANDFATHER

  JACK DAVIDSON

  AND MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER

  JOHN ERRINGTON

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 The Lamps Are Going Out

  CHAPTER 2 Rather Like Heaven, 1916

  CHAPTER 3 The Somme, Pozières, 1916

  CHAPTER 4 The Somme, Flers, 1916

  CHAPTER 5 Rabbits in Holes, 1916

  CHAPTER 6 Vote No, Mum

  CHAPTER 7 Bullecourt, 1917

  CHAPTER 8 Messines, 1917

  CHAPTER 9 Third Battle of Ypres, 1917

  CHAPTER 10 The Spring Offensive, 1918

  CHAPTER 11 Black Days, 1918

  CHAPTER 12 The War to End All Wars

  Timeline

  Glossary

  Western Front commanders

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  References

  MAPS

  The Western Front, 1914-18

  Battle of the Somme, 1916

  Third Battle of Ypres, 1917

  INTRODUCTION

  DARK, COLD MORNINGS. Anzac Day. Old men marched or wheeled slowly past, with rows of medals pinned to their suits. When I was a child, they were from another world, like the stone memorial bridge in my hometown.

  At home, I had a thick book about the First World War. There were pictures of villages with brick buildings and a church. Below each was a photo of the same village, crumbled and smashed. I remember a painting of a driver holding the head of a dying horse to keep it out of the mud, and cartoons of men in long coats, bent over a brazier, with rain pelting down. There were names too—Messines, Passchen-daele, Ypres and the Somme.

  As I got older, I noticed portraits of men in uniform hanging on the walls of other people’s houses. I heard stories of uncles gassed and grandfathers shot. I learned that my own great-grandfather had fought in the Great War, but even though I’d been to Anzac Day parades, I knew nothing of what he’d lived through. So I started reading about the New Zealand Rifle Regiment he served in, and his journey through that unknown world.

  The sheer size and tragedy of the Western Front campaign are difficult to comprehend. In four years, over 3 million soldiers were killed and 11 million wounded. In the small, mediaeval village of Ypres, Belgium, 56,000 names, including those of over 6000 Australians, are carved into its walls. Every night, buglers pay their respects to the fallen by playing the Last Post. Another memorial at the Somme records over 10,000 Australians, while seven memorials around Belgium and France name more than 4000 New Zealanders, who, by the end of the war, were missing, men with no known graves, men who were blown to pieces or swallowed by mud. These are just some of the war’s missing.

  Zero Hour is about the New Zealanders and Australians on the Western Front, but, even so, it’s not the whole story. The hardest thing about writing this book was deciding what to leave out. I wanted to tell the story of the war and give a sense of what it was like for the soldiers—those men who enlisted to fight until they were killed or wounded, or until the war ended.

  In New Zealand and Australia, we tend to focus on the 1915 eight-month Gallipoli campaign—our ‘baptism of fire’—at the expense of our much longer and bloodier involvement on the Western Front. We shouldn’t. For 32 months on the Western Front the Australians and New Zealanders endured the heaviest bombardments in history. They were gassed, drowned in mud, fought beside tanks and stormed village strongholds. It was here that the fighting forces of Australia and New Zealand came of age, here that they gained the reputation of ‘shock troops’, here that they grew to believe they were as good as the British troops if not better than them. It was here too that men raised on stories of Mother England and the Empire, realised that their own countries were better places to live.

  ‘I personally feel’, said Private Sidney Stanfield, at the age of 87, ‘that by lionising Gallipoli…they do overlook the severity of the fighting and the extent of the suffering on the Western Front…Seven months on Gallipoli versus three years on the Western Front. There’s quite a difference, isn’t there?’

  Zero hour was the name given to the moment of each attack. As their officers’ watches ticked towards it, each soldier faced his fate on the other side of the sandbags. Some met their death, others went on to brave another zero hour, and another.

  For me, zero hour also says something about the extraordinary time these men lived and died in. The old wo
rld of steam engines and horse-drawn wagons was being replaced by new technology which enabled war on a scale that had never been imagined before; war fought with tanks and aeroplanes, rapid-firing guns and chemical weapons. As these men fought to defend their known world, the world itself was changing around them.

  THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND DIVISIONS OF I ANZAC CORPS AND II ANZAC CORPS:

  1st Australian Division (1st Division)

  2nd Australian Division (2nd Division)

  3rd Australian Division (3rd Division)

  4th Australian Division (4th Division)

  5th Australian Division (5th Division)

  New Zealand Division

  Artillery in action in Belgium.

  Alexander Turnbull Library G- 13029-1/2

  BRITISH AND COMMONWEALTH ARMIES

  SECTION: 8–10 men, commanded by a sergeant or corporal.

  PLATOON: four sections, 30–60 men, commanded by a lieutenant.

  COMPANY: four platoons, around 200 men, commanded by a captain or major.

  BATTALION: four companies, around 1000 men—including cooks, wagon drivers, medical personnel, stretcher-bearers, and a trench mortar battery—commanded by a lieutenant colonel.

  INFANTRY BRIGADE: four battalions, between 2500 and 5000 troops, commanded by a brigadier general.

  DIVISION: three infantry brigades, three artillery brigades, four engineer companies, mortar batteries, a machine-gun battalion and pioneer battalion—10,000 to 20,000 troops, commanded by a major general.

  CORPS: two or more divisions, commanded by a lieutenant general.

  ARMY: two or more corps, commanded by a general.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT

  ‘A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God.’

  INSCRIPTION ON THE HEADSTONES

  OF UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIERS

  AT ZERO HOUR, 5.25 a.m., the artillery opened fire. The creeping barrage of exploding shells was meant to give the men cover and maim the Germans but it was thin and ragged and spewed up mud and steam, rather than shrapnel and dust. Some shells fell short and exploded among the Australians and New Zealanders and the swampy river and mud slowed them down. But the Diggers still advanced.

  The Germans waited, their guns silent. They knew the attack was coming—a Scottish deserter had told them—so the commanders had put their elite Jaeger troops with extra machine guns into the line. Each machine gun could shoot 500 bullets a minute, and as the Diggers came into sight, the Germans fired. Wounded men slumped into the swamp or water-swollen shell holes and drowned. Private Leonard Hurse had begged to take part after being selected to stay behind. As he ploughed through the mud he turned to Lance Corporal Ernest Williams, bellowing, ‘I wouldn’t have missed this for a thousand.’ He was shot through the head. The following wave filled the gaping holes in the line, passing the wounded and dead. The cratered slope was too slippery to charge, so they slithered forward from shell hole to shell hole, their clothes weighed down by mud.

  As more men got close to the dense, uncut belts of wire, they unclogged their guns and rifles and looked for ways through. One group charged into a gap across a sunken road that led to Passchendaele, but it was a trap, and they were gunned down.

  It was 12 October 1917, over three years since the Great War had started, and the Australians and New Zealanders were now considered crack troops. They’d been put into the centre of the attack to capture Bellevue Spur and Passchen-daele, near Ypres, Belgium, and were charged with securing the most vital objectives in an offensive that the British commanders believed could bring the war’s end closer. But men kept dying in their thousands, and the war, which many had expected to last six months, just kept going.

  1914

  The Great War, or the ‘war to end all wars’, was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by a Serbian on 28 June 1914. At first, no one expected a single death to lead to a world war, but tensions in Europe had been building for decades. Old empires wanted to maintain their power while new countries wanted a share of the world’s resources.

  On one side the Allies were lined up: Britain, France and Russia. On the other side were Germany and Austria– Hungary.

  On 28 July, Austria began bombarding the Serbian capital. The Austrians had the backing of Germany, which saw an opportunity to break the growing military power of Russia and France. Russia, which had its own links to Serbia, declared war on Austria. As France called up its army, Germany declared war on both Russia and France and launched the Schlieffen Plan: to knock the French out of the war before Russia had fully mobilised its massive army.

  THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN

  Despite having over 1.5 million soldiers on the French borders, the Germans knew that the heavily defended French forts would be too formidable to pass. Instead, 320,000 German troops would march into neutral Belgium, overrun the 84,000-strong Belgian Army, then sweep down into France and circle in behind Paris. The manoeuvre was meant to take six weeks. Paris was to be captured, trapping the French troops between the city and the border. With France’s surrender, General Helmuth von Moltke would be able to shift his troops to face the Russians.

  The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, knew the invasion of Belgium would bring Britain into the war, but he and his generals had little respect for the 80,000-strong British force. He referred to them as a ‘contemptible little army’ and expected to roll over them as easily as the Belgians.

  The Germans invaded Belgium on 4 August. Britain declared war on Germany that night. The Great War had started.

  GOD SAVE THE KING

  On the other side of the world, people in Australia and New Zealand closely followed the events in Europe. The two countries were part of the vast British Empire, and saw Britain, their major trading partner, as the ‘mother country’. Even those not born there were raised on stories about British conflicts—the Battle of Waterloo and the Crimean War—and sang ‘God Save the King’. If Britain was defeated, they not only faced being alone in the Pacific, they also risked becoming German colonies.

  When New Zealand and Australian politicians immediately offered ‘the last man and last shilling’ to defend Britain, people in both countries took to the streets, waving the Union Flag and singing patriotic songs.

  Most people welcomed the war, and as soon as the recruiting offices opened men queued to volunteer. Initially only men aged between 19 and 38 were accepted, so some simply lied about their age while others got permission from their parents. Eighteen-year-old Sergeant Henry ‘Harry’ Kahan was accepted after his mum wrote a note saying it was okay. Older men shaved their faces to look younger and some who were rejected tried their luck again in a different city. One man travelled from Adelaide to Hobart to Sydney before being accepted.

  In cities, men gave up their jobs as teachers, policemen or office clerks, while in the country, bush-clearers and farmhands travelled to the nearest recruitment station. One New Zealander sold a horse he’d stolen to pay his way to the nearest station. Some farmers simply locked their gates, not knowing when they’d return.

  The men, who were mainly single, volunteered for many reasons—to see the world, for the adventure, to defeat the ‘barbaric’ Germans, to escape unhappiness, to see the ‘mother country’, or to fight for the English King, the British Empire, and their own country. Others needed a job, and the army was paying five shillings a day for the New Zealanders and six for the Australians. Some men just went because their mates were going.

  At military camps the men—20,000 Australians and 8000 New Zealanders—put their full effort into training. No one wanted to be left behind and miss out on what was going to be a short war. With the new artillery and rapid-firing guns, many people believed it would be over by Christmas, six months away. Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary didn’t share that view. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ he wrote. ‘We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

  The Australian and New Ze
aland forces were offered to the British Army to use however and wherever its commanders saw fit, although both countries were responsible for the men’s food, transport, clothing, wages and even ammunition. Despite their pay being below the minimum wage, the Australians were the highest paid soldiers in the war. They became known as ‘six bob a day tourists’. British troops would come to hate going into towns that the Australians and New Zealanders had been in; their one-shilling pay wasn’t enough to cover what the locals expected.

  ‘THE CONTEMPTIBLES’

  The small Belgian Army momentarily slowed the German advance at its borders but was forced into retreat. When Belgian civilians took up arms to defend their homeland, the Germans dragged young and old from their houses and killed them without trial—by the end of the war over 5000 civilians had been executed. In one mediaeval town, they burned down buildings dating from 1425. As masses of refugees fled the advancing army, stories were printed in newspapers around the world about atrocities committed by ‘barbaric monsters’ against the ‘poor people’ of Belgium.

  The Belgian resistance gave the British time to get their 80,000 troops, under the command of Field Marshal Sir John French, across the English Channel. On 23 August, in Mons, Belgium, the British held off 160,000 German troops for six hours. When news reached them that the defeated French forces on their right were pulling back and that the Belgian Army on their left had retreated, they were forced into a fighting withdrawal.

  After a two-week, 190-kilometre retreat to the River Marne, the Allied forces finally halted the Germans within 70 kilometres of Paris, thwarting the Schlieffen Plan. The Russians also mobilised faster than expected, and the Germans sent five divisions east to fight them. Knowing they no longer had the troop numbers or energy to encircle Paris—the men had been moving nonstop for a month— the Germans changed their plan and, instead, attacked the exposed left flank of the British and French forces.

  DIGGING TO LIVE