MOST of us know much more about Gallipoli than we do about the Western Front and the Somme battlefields, and we tend to look on the ill-fated Anzac campaign as our country's finest hour.
Few Australians know enough about the part played by the Diggers on the Somme battlefields to compare it seriously with what the Anzacs did at Gallipoli. Yet nearly 10 times the number of soldiers fought at the Somme than did at Gallipoli and they fought more than five times as long, in equally shocking conditions.
The Anzacs fought the Turkish army solidly for more than seven months at Gallipoli and Australia had nearly 40,000 troops engaged there. The number of Australians killed and wounded - about 8000 - shocked the nation. Each year on Anzac Day we remind ourselves of these things, and yet too few are aware that on the Western Front in Europe, from 1916 until the end of the war in November 1918, 500,000 Diggers fought in the trenches of the Somme battlefields, sometimes for weeks at a time, up to their knees in mud.
This was a long and hideous battle made even worse because leadership of the Allied armies was riddled with inflated egos, personal jealousies, professional incompetence and a criminal disregard for the lives of the rank and file.
Largely as a result of this disgraceful situation, the bodies of nearly 40,000 Australians lie in the immaculate war cemeteries of France and Belgium. A further 11,000 have no known grave.
More than three times this number were wounded - many of them on more than one occasion. In the years that followed the war, tens of thousands more died from their wounds and the aftermath of being gassed.
As we prepare to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the great 1918 Allied victories on the Somme that put an end to the war and its senseless killing, it is appropriate to put things in perspective.
The Gallipoli landing was the first time an Australian expeditionary force had fought in Europe, where that part of Turkey is, in an intensely hostile environment and against insurmountable odds. The fortitude and bravery of our troops was of the highest order and forms the basis of the Anzac legend.
But a cloud still hangs over the Gallipoli campaign. The Australian assault was a disaster, for three reasons: first, the whole concept was strategically unsound; second, naval support for the operation was pathetically inadequate; and third, the expedition was incompetently planned and directed by the British higher command.
The Anzac evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula took place during the third week of December 1915 and as the Aussies trudged down the tracks of the escarpment to the waiting ships and boats, they did so with the overwhelming feeling of having walked away from thousands of their mates whose bodies lay in the shallow graves they had dug for them.
They made their way back to Egypt where the heat, the sand and the flies did little to help them recover from the exhausting and debilitating campaign. Yet they were back in training within a few weeks and between March and June 1916 they moved to France.
Soon John Monash, who from the time the Australian Imperial Force was formed had been commanding the 4th Infantry Brigade, was promoted to the rank of major-general and given command of the 3rd Division that had arrived in England. (He was again promoted, to the rank of lieutenant-general, in 1918.) Camped on Salisbury Plain, Monash moulded this division into an effective fighting formation and it was here that the depth of military knowledge and the brilliance of Monash as a commander and a teacher became evident.
One by one the senior British generals visited his division and watched it not only on the parade ground but also in the field carrying out divisional manoeuvres. Without exception the generals went away astounded that a colonial citizen-soldier could achieve such remarkable success.
It was suggested to king George V that he inspect this fine Australian division before it crossed the Channel to France. Having spent the day with Monash and after witnessing his troops in the field, the king took the salute as the 27,000 Australians marched past. In departing for the palace, the sincerity of his congratulations was demonstrated when, in thanking the general for showing him exactly how troops should be turned out - and trained - he told Monash how cold the winter in France could be and that he would see to it that each man had a leather underjacket.
During Monash's first year as a divisional commander, another battle was being fought well behind the Australian trenches. From the time of their arrival in France in the middle of 1916, the Australian and New Zealand divisions and brigades, although they were officially called the First and Second ANZACs, were deployed piecemeal as a part of many different corps and armies, sometimes British and sometimes French.
The Australian generals told the higher command and the Australian government that their divisions were becoming fragmented and less effective, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. However, as the months passed and the casualty lists grew longer, prime minister Billy Hughes and his cabinet started putting pressure on the British government to direct that the Australians should fight together under one command.
It was thus that the First Australian Army Corps was formed, with the top-class British general William Birdwood, who knew the Australians well, appointed corps commander.
During this time Monash had been fighting his own battle for survival. Despite his brilliance as a soldier, he had one characteristic that his contemporaries found unattractive: whereas his brain, his organisational genius and his leadership skills were way ahead of his peers, he expected each of his great successes to be recognised, and when this recognition was not forthcoming, he complained. His enemies used this to campaign against him. Some, such as Hughes's agent in London, Keith Murdoch, resented his success; others criticised his German heritage; and at least one, the unabashedly anti-Semitic war historian Charles Bean, denigrated him for both these reasons and because he was a Jew.
But almost every top-ranking British general from Douglas Haig down regarded Monash as an outstanding officer, and the biographer of British prime minister David Lloyd George wrote that, had the war continued into 1919, it was the PM's intention to rid himself of Haig and appoint Monash in his place.
At the beginning of 1918, in the depths of the unusually cold and wet winter, with impassable roads and the fields of Flanders and Picardy like quagmires, activity on the Western Front was limited. The Australian divisional commanders used this time to rest, regroup, replenish and train their troops.
They were well aware that, with the new Bolshevik government having pulled Russia out of the war, the million-strong German army on the Eastern Front was already moving west to bolster the enemy's front-line manpower and firepower. It was the German intention to launch a major offensive that would capture Paris and win the war.
This onslaught started in mid-March and, as expected, having advanced through Belgium, the Germans brushed aside the British resistance and continued towards Amiens, the only city between them and Paris. All that stopped them was the extraordinarily resolute defence offered by the 3rd Australian Division (under Monash) at Dernancourt. This was followed on April 25 with a spectacular Australian victory at Villers-Bretonneux.
The Australian government was proud to have its own corps and wanted it to be commanded by an Australian, and Monash was the first choice. Murdoch and Bean wanted general Brudenell White, a clever staff officer who had never had a senior command in battle, to be appointed and they were prepared to stop at nothing to get their way.
After the Villers-Bretonneux victory, Monash was appointed commander of the First Australian Army Corps. But even after his appointment had been gazetted, Murdoch and Bean continued their vendetta.
Their problem was that in the months that followed, Monash's series of outstanding successes at the Somme made him a national hero and the two conspirators were left with red faces and severely tarnished reputations.
Under his dynamic leadership the Australian advance gathered momentum. On July 4, at the town of Le Hamel, Monash created history by planning and executing (in record time and with sensational success) the first battle plan in which infantry, armour and the air force were integrated. Without even a day's delay he started the detailed planning of his next move. He and his staff worked night and day for five weeks preparing for what would be known as the Battle of Amiens, possibly the most decisive battle of the war.
On Anzac Day next year, when we remember those "who grow not old as we who are left grow old" and when we recall the bravery of our first Anzacs, we will be failing in our duty as Australians if we do not equally honour the memory of the 500,000 Diggers who fought at the Somme, and remember with pride their phenomenal achievements, especially between March and October 1918.
In those months the First Australian Army Corps comprised less than 10 per cent of the British imperial forces, yet it captured almost a quarter of all prisoners taken, a quarter of the enemy guns and 20 per cent of the ground wrested from the Germans. The corps' sensational victories over this period were - and still are - regarded as the most decisive feats of arms that brought to a victorious conclusion the so-called war to end all wars.
Rex Lipman, who served as a commando officer during World WarII, is a war historian and author.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22379931-31477,00.html
