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Premier’s Visy Industries History Teacher Gallipoli Scholarship “Lions Led by Wombats?” Comparing and contrasting the nature of Australian military leadership at Gallipoli in 1915 to that on the Western Front in 1918. Did they learn their lessons? Philip Sheldrick Robert Townson High School Sponsored by The Focus This study tour was undertaken in order to assess changes in the nature of Australian military leadership at Gallipoli in 1915 to that on the Western Front in 1918, a topic that is at present neglected, but should be the subject of great debate in both NSW School Certificate History and Higher School Certificate Modern History. Douglas Haig was 'brilliant to the top of his Army boots' said David Lloyd George and his view sums up the attitude of many people towards Haig and other British generals of World War One. They were, supposedly, 'donkeys' moustachioed incompetents who sent the 'lions' of the Infantry to their deaths in futile battles. Many popular books, films and television programs echo this belief. The casualty list and the bloody stalemate of the Western Front seem to add credence to this version of events. But other interpretations of the work of British officers have emerged in recent years. Australian troops, while known for their skill and spirit on the battlefields, also gained the reputation for not always being deferential to their superiors whether Australian or another nationality. Much of their dissatisfaction was probably due to the harsh living conditions they endured on the front lines, while higher ranks often had more comfortable surroundings. Many, like their British counterparts, lost faith in the high-command that led thousands to their deaths: I am fed up... With our dopes of Officers they are the biggest curs ... Some of them they get decorations by getting men killed for nothing ... little wonder the men go mad at times. Letter, Private Ronald Simpson, 29 July 1918. So this study tour was an attempt to reassess the work of senior Australian officers in the light of the re-interpretation of the actions of British officers that is presently taking place in the United Kingdom. My tour gave me the opportunity to compare and contrast the approach of the Australian Officer Corps at Gallipoli in 1915 with their approach, when given a degree of autonomy, during the decisive battles of 1918. I have a great interest in this military history debate for both personal and academic reasons. I was particularly impressed, academically, at the groundbreaking work being done on First World War leadership when I attended The Chief of Army's Military History Conference 1918 Defining Victory. I also had an even stronger personal interest in the debate about leadership as my grandfather was a participant in these final campaigns and was gassed at the battle of Mont St Quentin in 1918. The Study Tour I spent much of my study leave physically walking the open countryside of northern France and Gallipoli, the battlefields and the monuments. The rest of the time was spent in the archives of Canberra, Singapore, Berlin and London – especially the Imperial War Museum in London. In France, to my dismay, I found that I was investigating a war long forgotten by the local population. Even though northern France was devestated by the Great War, those living there now have let it go. The monuments are still there, beautifully cared for, and so are English, Australian, New Zealand, American and Canadian tourists, but the local population just doesn’t seem interested beyond the tourist income generated. On enquiring at the Lille Tourist Office about any information or maps to nearby World War One sites I was greeted with a well meaning laugh that said – why would anyone bother? Very sad, because ironically the tourist office was located in the town’s massive First World War Memorial. On the Western Front, enormous battles damaged or destroyed cities, towns and valuable agricultural and industrial land, which were all rebuilt and restored after the war. The battlefields, cemeteries and memorials coexist with the urban or rural landscape and lifestyle. A cemetery can be metres from a motorway, or just down the road from a busy brick factory. There were times when I wasn’t quite brave enough to seek the enemy strongpoint marked on my map because it was in the middle of a still very much in use farm. But at Gallipoli there were no such distractions. I saw some other visitors at Anzac, but, because it wasn’t yet Anzac Day, our small group had it all to ourselves. Other than Anzac Day, the CWGC gardeners outnumber everyone else. Compared to the Western Front battlefields, the compact size and precipitous nature of Anzac also came as a shock. There aren't many signposts, but the one on the road near Gaba Tepe directed us north along the coast to Anzac Cove and the Suvla plains beyond, and then inland along Pine Ridge to Lone Pine, Quinn's Post, The Nek and Chunuk Bair. We didn’t have much trouble finding most of the places we had heard about. But we didn’t really understand Anzac until we got off the road. We followed the footsteps of the first Australians ashore on 25 April, climbing Ari Burnu and Plugge's Plateau, and walked as far up Shrapnel Gully as our bushcraft and stamina permitted. We saw the remains of trenches on Russell's Top and Walker's Ridge, and struggling through the scrub to Pope's Hill had a panoramic view of the Allied front line from The Nek down to the 400 Plateau, and Bolton's Ridge and Gaba Tepe beyond. On the way up to Chunuk Bair we passed Baby 700 and Battleship Hill, and the walk from Chunuk Bair down Rhododendron and Cheshire Ridges to The Farm revealed the nightmare of wooded slopes that challenged attackers and defenders in August 1915. Except for the farmers and a few holiday cottages, Suvla was an isolated and lonely place. We didn’t see any, but our guide warned of packs of dogs roaming here, and I suddenly remembered just how far from home I really was. Kiretch Tepe was a difficult climb, and Lala Baba an interesting drive along sandy tracks with a few creek crossings, really better suited to four wheel drives. Most other parts of Suvla were easy to get around. But between Anzac and Suvla, Taylor's Gap, the Aghyl Dere, Australia Valley, Damakjelik Bair and Hill 60 it was not easy going. Monash's 4th Brigade traversed this wild country by night, but even by day we were tripped and tangled and snagged by head-high scrub. Helles was different again. This was rolling country, mainly farmland now, with some houses and a few shops, and cars and schoolchildren and tractors and olive trees. It was dry, but reminded me a little of the Somme around Pozières or le Hamel. It's easy to see how V and W Beaches turned out to be such deathtraps, and Achi Baba's head and shoulders overlook just about everything at the end of the peninsula. But even the sunbleached severity of the French cemetery at Morto Bay couldn’t disguise the essential homeliness and serenity of Helles. We visited the two museums. The Gaba Tepe museum was formal, while the one in Alcitepe was a community one, staffed by volunteers. Both had many of the touching relics that are regularly uncovered in the fields. When we left the road just about anywhere at Gallipoli, sooner or later we found human remains. We were told that the forestry workers, in their cycle of planting pine seedlings then chopping them down when they grow, never remove the bones, but instead sweep them into little bundles. Somewhere, even today, someone probably still mourns the life that these little mounds of bones that we regularly stumbled upon during our many walks. A Brief Summary of the Research There were four grades of general officers in the First AIF, these being from least to most senior: Brigadier General, Major General, Lieutenant General and General. As with all other officer ranks, they could be temporary or substantive, except for brigadier general, which was always temporary. Temporary rank was generally granted while an officer was serving in a particular capacity. When the job lapsed, the officer returned to his substantive rank. This prevented an accumulation of officers at high grades without posts for them. The rank of Brigadier General was unusual in that it was only held as a temporary appointment in the AIF. Seniority was on the basis of the rank and date upon which one had been promoted within the AIF. Where an officer had not been promoted within the AIF, regular army officers carried their seniority according to their appointment date within the AMF. Brevets were a kind of long term higher duties, granting higher rank without pay or allowances, meaning that they could wear the badges of the rank. Sometimes the government just used them as an excuse to avoid paying its officers at the full rate. But nonetheless they were highly sought after by regular officers, who felt that they gave them the inside track for substantive promotion to the rank. There were some British and New Zealand officers on secondment in Australia before the war who were granted AMF rank and seniority, but not always the same rank and seniority as that of the army from which they came. Some of these officers joined the AIF in Australia. The five that became general officers were: S. M. Anderson, C. S. Davies, D. J. Glasfurd and E. G. Sinclair MacLagan of the British army and W. L. H. Burgess of the New Zealand Staff Corps. Only one British officer joined the AIF overseas: Lieutenant General W. R. Birdwood. There were 68 AIF generals in total: 1 full general, 4 lieutenant generals, 12 major generals and 51 brigadier generals The usual role of a lieutenant general was command of a corps. This was a huge formation; the Australian Corps in France was normally fielding around 200 000 men in 1918. Corps became more important as the war went on. In 1914, corps were just a grouping of divisions, and their only permanent units were a headquarters and a signal company. By 1918, so-called corps troops (those troops allocated to the corps but not one of its divisions) numbered over 50 000. Corps were the major tactical and operational formation, but had no input into strategic matters. Under British doctrine, corps was responsible for the administration of the area in which it operated and during the war the responsibilities of a corps headquarters grew considerably but its logistical "tail" remained smaller than its fighting "teeth" -- something by no means true of an army, the next formation up. In addition to the commander, the corps headquarters also had posts for five brigadier generals, for a chief of staff (BGGS), engineers, administration, artillery (GOCRA) and heavy artillery (BGHA).A major general normally commanded a division. A Great War division was a sizeable formation of 20 000 men but they rarely operated alone. Instead they formed part of a corps. As the war went on, the task of a division commander became more complex but also easier to perform, as staffs, techniques and tactics were developed, and corps increasing took over more of the load. Division Headquarters was a complex organisation. When the AIF was formed in 1914, infantry and light horse brigade commanders and the divisional artillery commander were graded as colonels. They were re-graded as brigadier generals on 1 July 1915 in order to bring them into line with their British counterparts, with seniority backdated to the date of their assumption of brigade command. This affected (with seniority date) Colonels J. W. McCay (15 August 1914), J. J. T. Hobbs (15 August 1914), E. G. Sinclair-MacLagan (15 August 1914), H. N. MacLaurin (15 August 1914), J. Monash (15 September 1914), G. de L. Ryrie (19 September 1914), F. G. Hughes (17 October 1914) and H. G. Chauvel (10 December 1914). MacLaurin had already been killed on 27 April 1915, and was promoted posthumously. In essence, much of the warfare that these officers were engaged in at Gallipoli and on the Western Front was essentially a form of siege warfare. The British and Australian commanders sought a means of breaking through the static defences of the Turk and German trenches, hoping that a decisive breach would result in a return to open warfare. The Gallipoli attack and the early set-piece battles of the Western Front were doomed attempts to achieve this decisive breakthrough. It was not until August 1918 that the British and Australian officers reached a state of understanding of the nature of trench warfare and had created a technical proficiency in successfully assaulting a trenchline. The solution to this problem was the section rush. One section of a platoon could pour fire on the German defenders to suppress the level of defensive fire while other sections moved forward. These sections would then take a position and continue firing while other sections moved forward leap-frogging other section. The critical factor in this tactic was the use of the Lewis Gun, a portable light machine gun that could maintain a high rate of suppressive fire in support of rifle fire. Grenades fired from rifles were also useful in assaulting trenches. Once sections got within close range, the use of hand-thrown Mills bombs, followed up by bayonet charges, often enabled a trench line to be taken. Later the Germans developed defences in considerable depth, with the use of “pillboxes”, concrete structures containing machine guns. Suppressing fire from a section's rifle fire and light machine guns could enable men from another section to creep close to neutralise pillboxes with grenades through the firing slit or back entrance. This deceptively simple approach had many implications. Firstly, it had to be practised, not only at a platoon level with its four sections, but also at company and battalion level. This tactic placed a premium on the leadership at the platoon commander and noncommissioned officer level, as these men were the ones who would actually direct the section rush during a battle. Thus the leadership and training necessary for these men, and the trust that a battlefield commander had to have in his junior leadership, would need time to evolve. Historians such as Garry Sheffield, Robin Prior and Robin Neillands have been examining the popular conception of “chateau generals”. These historians argue that commanders such as Field Marshals Sir Julian Byng and Sir Herbert Plumer made strenuous efforts to analyse the emerging nature of trench warfare and find ways to overcome it. Working with Divisional Commanders such as Australia’s John Monash and the Canadian Arthur Currie, these commanders sought ways to break the deadlock through increasingly sophisticated fire artillery plans supporting more innovative infantry techniques and, where possible, employing emerging military technology such as tanks and aircraft. As historian Chris Pugsley has expressed it, “Victory in battle depended on maintaining the balance between the artillery and its ability to ‘direct massive artillery' onto the enemy's position, suppressing enemy artillery fire while providing artillery cover to enable infantry to advance, and the ability of trained infantry who because of their ‘strength, condition, training, morale or state of discipline' had the skills to fight their way forward from bunker to bunker.” The essential problem was that although these tactics could achieve a break-in to the enemy line, they could not achieve a break through. To do so would have required the immediate availability of forces (or a technology) to accomplish such a breakthrough. This was not possible because the break-ins were often on a limited scale, and the problem of battlefield communication meant that commanders could not be certain of success in committing cavalry for the pursuit of a retreating enemy. Tanks were too slow and unreliable. The reality was that any breakthroughs were limited to the pace of infantry and the ability of artillery to support them. Aerial reconnaissance was helpful, but the delay in passing messages to a commander meant that any opportunity for a breakthrough might be lost. The potential for a breakthrough remained, but it was not until late 1918 that the British were able to devise a multifaceted weapons system to finally create a breakthrough. Breaking through trench lines on the Western Front was by necessity a battle of tacticallevel, small-scale manoeuvre, but because it was not one of the sweeping breakthroughs this manoeuvre has not been recognised for what it was. Whether this was clearly understood at the time is a moot point. It is possible that Haig and his senior generals did understand this, but that British politicians did not. In his book, The Great War Generals on the Western Front, Robin Neillands argues that British senior commanders understood that a significant advantage generally lay with the defenders, and that any effort to defeat the Germans was always going to be costly in terms of men's lives. However, he argues quite convincingly that they did as much as could be expected of any general in the circumstances of the time to come up with ideas to achieve local victories. A decisive breakthrough was never a realistic possibility, despite Haig's optimism. Rawlinson's doctrine of “bite and hold” – effectively seize a small amount of territory, hold it against the inevitable German counter-attacks and then seize some more territory – was the only practical approach. The Australian Divisions were to become effective exponents of Rawlinson's “bite and hold” strategy. The German defeat in March-April 1918 had put them onto the defensive again, but the huge losses of the offensive could not easily be remedied. War weariness and the erosive impact of the Allied blockade of Germany had led to much domestic hardship. This increased agitation from groups within Germany for an end to the war. All this impacted on the ability of the Germans to resist the increasingly confident Allies, bolstered by the arrival of American troops flooding into France. After their defeat the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg line, a formidable series of trench lines. In August, the Allies launched a series of attacks in what would become known as the "Hundred Days". This term refers to the period when the Allies forced the Germans onto the defensive, systematically forcing them back from one position to another, maintaining relentless pressure by continually shifting the point of attack from one part of the German trench line to another. The Germans could neither anticipate the exact position of the Allied attacks nor prevent them from seizing a trench line once they did attack. The static siege warfare of the previous four years had finally been broken, replaced by a more open form or warfare that eventually forced the Germans to capitulate. What had evolved within the Australian Divisions in particular, and in the British Army in general, is what is known today as a weapons system. This is a planned systematic coordination of different weapons of the military in order to achieve a military objective. By 1918 Monash's had developed a weapons system, whereby the assault on an objective was systematically planned, involving a coordinated approach between the artillery (whose role might vary between an initial bombardment by heavy artillery to continuous support by the lighter field artillery in assisting advancing infantry), the infantry (employing a variety of infantry skills based around the “fire and manoeuvre” tactics), and air power, both for observation of enemy moves and attack. The timing of attacks by the different armies created uncertainty among the Germans about how best to employ what reserves were left. The result was a fluid series of attacks that not only systematically advanced but also kept the Germans off-balance in attempting to anticipate the Allies' next move. The key to this new weapons system was planning, logistics and skilled staff work by Australian officers who along with their British, New Zealand and Canadian counterparts had learned and evolved their tactics since the Gallipoli disaster of 1915. The Germans had no answer to this weapons system. As the advances were made, they were exploited by the Allies changing the focus of attack to another part of the Hindenburg Line. In this way, momentum was maintained until the Germans were forced to seek an armistice. The era of trench warfare was finished. Bibliography 1. Macleod, J., Reconsidering Gallipoli, (Manchester University Press, Manchster, 2004). 2. Neillands, R., The Great War Generals at the Western Front 1914-1918, (Robinson, London, 1999). 3. Pugsley, C., The ANZAC Experience – New Zealand, Australia & Empire in the First World War, (Reed Military, Auckland, 2004).