The Lost Soldiers

[BushyFromOz]

Here here boltaction, bueatifully said.

[Peter Laidler]

That abject drivel that you have to listen to all day DRP........... Does that include my e-mails too!

One thing that I often think about is those sat in the trenches, waiting for a bit of action and the platoon sergeant comes along and gives every 10th man a set of wire cutters. Man says to Sergeant....... '...what do you want mne to do with these Sergeany
Sgt to man. '....fit them to the rifle and you go ahead of the blokes...., who'll be pretty close behind...., and when you see barbed wire, you stop and use the clipper thinggies to snip the wire so that the rest of the blokes can follow you. Then when you get to the next bit of barbed wire, you do the same until we get to the enemy trench.......
Rifleman. ''........sounds fine Sergeant but pray tell me, will there be anyone shooting back...........
Sergeant. '........................will there be anyone shooting back........................................

Funny old world isn't it..................... well, not so damned funny if you've got the wire snippers

[Roger Payne]

DPL,
TVMFYs. Hmm.......I s'pose I did write that posting after a particularly irritating day. One tends to forget the multitude of decent people one deals with & just remember the idiots. Speaking of decent people that brings me back to your posting. The very fact that those PBI KNEW they were going to get cut to ribbons (especially our pal with the wire cutters!), yet they still went.....
I think that's what encapsulates what I admire so much about the men of that generation......the devotion & sense of mateship.

ATB

[Bruce_in_Oz]

I have been catching up on Fromelles a bit lately.

My wife and her mum went to the ceremony at which the last identified Australian was interred last year. One of the distant relatives was killed at Fromelles and had been interred in a plot in the cemetery there post WW1. Luckily, I was not at work at the time the ceremony was broadcast live on TV here in Oz . Very moving.

Fromelles was another triumph of optimism over experience. The Germans had refined defensive warfare to a much higher degree than the Brits at that stage: think concrete strong points, deeply buried phone lines, well thought-out defence in depth and notably, advanced machine gun tactics. Not only that, but the Germans held the ONLY high ground in the province, and thus dominated the billiard-table flat countryside around it.

Some years back, if you were doing training to be a Warrant Officer in the Australian Army, you would have been set an exercise about siting machine guns on a contour map that showed "red" and "blue" positions.

The "solution" was the one that the Germans used in 1916 to site 12 Maxims on a piece of real estate that took over a year to capture. Mutual defence, interlocking arcs and precisely defined enfilade fire controlled by commanders with a good view of the battlefield shredded many attacks. Many times MGs were sited in strong points FORWARD of the nominal lines and could thus fire at the REAR of troops who survived the enfilade fire. Because each MG position was a registered target for at least two other guns, assaulting a pillbox was akin to suicide. Unlike in the movies, machine guns are at their most effective when firing ACROSS your neighbour's front line, not hosing away directly forward.

Artillery was still in its infancy, accuracy-wise, and the rapid build-up of demand led to the great British shell shortage, closely followed by the great British shell failure ( at least one-third "duds"). This "dud" problem was further exacerbated by the reluctance of fuses to detonate upon impact with the soft, deep and already churned up soils of France. The other artillery problem was the obsession with shrapnel. It was great for slaughtering troops in the open, but utterly useless against those entrenched with basic overhead protection.

Fromelles, like much of the "Great War", was a product of the times, and the thinking of the times. Technology often leapt ahead of the ability of the commanders on the ground to understand and integrate the lessons in battle plans. Communications were also crap, so many times the right information was never passed in time.

Then there were the appalling lapses in communications security as committed by the British and Australian commanders before the battle at Fromelles. Principal among these was the discussion of battle plans over the field telephone network.

Technical note: The British used a phone system that employed a single wire strung on posts and the earth as a return line. The Germans used an insulated twisted pair which could be strung on poles or buried, or even spooled out on the ground without degrading the signal. The problem with the "single wire" method is that it actually radiates like a radio antenna. The Germans quickly worked out that this radiated signal could be picked up by a relatively simple receiver and the traffic exploited as required. A twisted pair, however, radiates very little coherent signal because the electromagnetic fields surrounding the two wires are 180 degrees out of phase and thus cancel each other out.

[Mk VII]

The Fullerphone was developed to counter this, and was increasingly used later in the war. What they needed, of course, was a secure R/T real-time comms system like BRUIN or PTARMIGAN which didn't arrive for another sixty years.

[Peter Laidler]

On the barbed wire scenario, I often think that it wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to have devised a mortar launched grappling hook. Many could be fired simultaneously and drawn back using something simple like a ratioed hand or machine operated capstan wheel.......... Hey ho..., whole frontages of the wire could all be drawn back and neutralised in one hit. A bit late now I fear.

But while you're there Sergeant, I don't think I'll take you up on your kindly offer of the snipper thinggy. I'll just go and put the kettle on so you can all have a nice cup of tea when you get back

[Roger Payne]

That's an interesting commentary Bruce in Oz, & I agree entirely with you. Haking, who was in charge at Fromelles was not renowned as one of the most meticulous planners & this did not help. I think the area that caused the most problems was The Sugar Loaf, forming an elbow in the German lines.

Oddly, I was lucky enough to be at the first ceremony at the new cemetery at Fromelles in January last year, when the body of the first soldier was interred. There were a number of dignitaries present & a buffet in The Mairie afterwards, but nowhere near as much pomp as for the July ceremony. The televising of it all was accompanied by a very interesting documentary, which, unfortunately I have yet to secure a copy of....

As an aside but related to this, some forumers may be familiar with the series Finding The Fallen (also screened as The Trench Detectives). The first series of five episodes is commercially available on dvd. The second series of 8 episodes is not, but it can be bought directly from Yap Films in Leeds (Google it if interested). I have just acquired the whole series & it's a great 'watch!'

ATB

[Thunderbox]

Fromelles, like much of the "Great War", was a product of the times, and the thinking of the times. Technology often leapt ahead of the ability of the commanders on the ground to understand and integrate the lessons in battle plans. Communications were also crap, so many times the right information was never passed in time.

To be fair, its almost impossible for a modern commentator - even one from a military background - to comprehend the sheer difficulty of conducting combat operations in the era that fell between those of personal command (e.g. a commander viewing and directing a battle from a hilltop) and of electronic battlefield communications (e.g. radios). I and some fellow officers once ran a wargame of part of the Somme offensive. Apart from the incredible amount of staff work needed to come up with a basic plan (arty, infantry, signals, logistics, etc) in an era of pencils and paper, the lack of effective radio communications meant it was essentially impossible to react to new intelligence and change the plan within about 48 hrs - the time taken to complete a planning cycle and send/receive information along the chain from Corps level down to front line (e.g. assault battalion or arty battery). Once you were at about H-24hrs, the attack plan was essentially fixed in stone. If new enemy positions are reported, or it is discovered by aerospotter that the wire is still intact, there is nothing you can do about it except hope the troops will cope. Once the attack had started at H-Hr, it got even worse: because your own forces move away from their telephone lines, and have to rely on runner or carrier pigeon (!), as commander you have to wait 4-6 hrs (per turn of the war game) to receive combat reports and try to send corrective orders. Your opponents (ze Germans) in static positions, by contrast, generally have live telephone communications, and can achieve a meaningful orders cycle of under an hour - eg especially critical things like arty adjustment. In our wargame, our outcomes were little different from those of the real thing - even though we had the benefit of 80 years of hindsight.

We also tend to overlook the astonishing professional advancement and achievements of the time - the fact that the British & Empire forces transformed from a tiny colonial garrison force of less than 200k initially committed, to a citizen army of over 5 million (of which c.2 million+ in service at any one time), and from amateur 19th century tactics to modern professional combined arms operations (air-armour-infantry-artillery-logistics), and all of it in just four years - and all of it whilst in lethal contact with a powerful enemy. Popular history loves to condemn "staff officers" ("Lions led by, etc.."), but fails to understand that these officers were usually plucked from front-line combat units in order to fill the thousands of staff assignments needed for the new armies. A modern divisional SO1 or SO2 might have twenty years' professional training; a WW1 GSO2 might have had less than a year in uniform...

[Mk VII]

I sometimes compare it to the task McClellen, Hooker, Burnside and the others faced turning armed mobs into an efficient army on a tiny base of professional officers left from before the war.

[Bruce_in_Oz]

Peter, you just jogged my memory with that comment.

I think I have a picture showing just such a device (small canon with a grappling hook projectile) in one of the volumes of "The Illustrated War News" in my library. I will dig it out and scan it, then try to post it. I am not too sure the one shown in the book would have had the range to reach enemy wire.

As I recall such devices were also used to recover bodies forward of the trenches. It was a rough old time. I guess the other problem would have been that if you launched a barrage of hooks into the enemy wire, the machinery to "wind in" the lines would have been a tempting target by itself. The old "measures and countermeasures" thing.

The other interesting device was the "Pipe Pusher". This was essentially a mechanised Bangalore Torpedo. The idea was to drive multiple lengths of explosive-filled pipe UNDER the surface (remember the soft farm soil) and then detonate it just before or even during an assault. The blast would form a narrow trench, 3 to 5 feet deep along which your advancing troops could move towards the enemy line. It actually worked, but there was a catch.

The problem was that the machinery for pushing the pipes was quite conspicuous and tended to draw a lot of mortar and artillery fire once spotted.

At Fromelles, the British trench system had "Sally Ports" These were ostensibly "concealed" exits on the forward face of the trench line from which troops could "sally" forth without going over the trench parapet. The problem with these was that once spotted, they became registered targets for the German MGs and artillery. One of the British battalions involved at Fromelles got severely mauled while trying to exit such ports.

Lots of trials, lots of errors, too many dead men.