At 3:02 am on 4 July 1918, more than 600 guns opened fire simultaneously along a front east of Villers-Bretonneux. At 3:10 am, the infantry and 60 tanks of the Australian Corps advanced behind a creeping barrage toward the village of Le Hamel. Ninety-three minutes later, every objective had been taken. Lieutenant General Sir John Monash had predicted the battle would last 90 minutes. He was off by three.
Military historians call the Battle of Hamel a masterpiece, possibly the most precisely planned operation of the entire war. Monash, a civil engineer and concert pianist by profession, treated it like an engineering problem. His final planning conference on 30 June lasted four and a half hours, covered 133 agenda items, and had 250 officers in attendance. No subsequent changes were permitted.
But it was the innovations that made Hamel revolutionary. Aircraft bombed the village beforehand to mask the noise of approaching tanks. Supply tanks delivered ammunition, water, and hot meals to front-line troops during the battle, a first. Ammunition was parachute-dropped from aircraft to advancing infantry. Tanks and infantry trained together beforehand, with battalion insignia painted on paired tanks so crews knew their partners by sight.
About 1,000 American soldiers from the 33rd Division fought alongside the Australians, among the first Americans in combat on the Western Front. Monash deliberately chose 4 July, American Independence Day, as the date. The night before, General Pershing ordered the Americans withdrawn because he opposed US troops fighting under foreign command. Six companies were pulled back. But some Americans refused to leave. At least two soldiers from the 42nd Battalion switched into Australian uniforms and stayed. Field Marshal Haig intervened to let the remaining Americans fight.
Corporal Thomas Pope of the 131st Infantry became the first American awarded the Medal of Honor in the war, for rushing a German machine-gun nest at Hamel.
Total Allied casualties were approximately 1,400. German losses exceeded 2,000 killed and wounded, with another 1,500 taken prisoner. It was one of the rare occasions in the war where an attack cost less than the defence, proof that Monash’s methods worked.
The tactics developed at Hamel were applied directly to the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918, what Ludendorff called the “black day of the German Army,” which launched the Hundred Days Offensive that ended the war.
On 12 August, King George V personally knighted Monash at Australian Corps headquarters. It was reportedly the first battlefield knighting by a British monarch in 175 years. The son of Prussian-Jewish immigrants had become the finest Allied general on the Western Front.
Fairways & Frontlines visits the Australian Corps Memorial Park at Le Hamel, just 6km from Villers-Bretonneux.