The Battle of Bellicourt Tunnel: Tommies, Diggers and Doughboys on the Hindenburg Line, 1918 by Dale Blair

Author:Dale Blair [Blair, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hindenburg Line, Battles, World War I
ISBN: 9781848325876
Amazon: 1848325878
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2011-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

The combined force of the 44th and 59th Battalions had pushed on to join the rest of the 44th in the Hindenburg Line. For a short while the 44th Battalion was able to use the communication trench of Top Lane to screen its advance. However when the 41st Battalion with two machine guns from the 9th Machine Gun Company had attempted to force their way up Top Lane, which connected the outpost line with the main German defence system, they were unable to counter the anti-tank and machine-gun fort that dominated the approach.27 Captain C. Longmore, author of the 44th Battalion history and company commander at the time, believed the Germans had fought with ‘more dash and vim [here] … than he’d ever produced before’.28 The 41st Battalion’s inability to push past this point meant that, effectively, the Germans held the intervening ground between the 41st and 44th Battalions. These seemingly small Australian gains were nevertheless ultimately significant as they provided a hinge on which the neighbouring 5th Division could pivot.

As perplexing as the situation was during the morning for the troops in the field it was equally vexing for the headquarter staffs trying to unravel the conflicting reports filtering through to them. Monash, whose rising stress was visible before the attack had even commenced, now found his normally considered – even if often abrupt – responses in danger of giving way to a fulminating rage. A British officer privy to Monash’s response to the American setback at the time recalled:

At Divisional HQ I heard the candid opinion of Sir John Monash … on their [the Americans’] prowess. It was not the polite though thinly veiled opinion which appeared in the Sunday Times at 28 December 1919. Never have I heard such an elegant flow of language, either in the army, or out of it. He called them all the names under the sun ’ nothing was too bad for them.29

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