off on a tour of French Flanders. On 25 June 1940, Hitler, accompanied by his List Regiment comrades, Max Amann and Ernst Schmidt, spent the night near Fromelles quietly celebrating the time the Armistice would officially come into effect, at 1.35 am.
Hitler and his comrades-in-arms toured the old Fromelles battlefield, visited the building in which he was billeted in Fournes-en-Weppes, his regiment’s cemetery at Fournes and the blockhouse where he took refuge during the battle. On 20 April 1942 Hitler arranged for a stone plaque to be solemnly affixed to the wall on his former billet. The plaque was smashed after the liberation in 1945 but was later recovered and reconstructed. Today it is on display at the Fromelles Museum, above the town hall. The Hitler blockhouse still stands near the Fromelles football oval behind Rouges Bancs. Another blockhouse on the Aubers Road is often referred to as Hitler’s bunker, but the photos taken on his 1940 visit clearly show him at the former bunker.
6
IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH
We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go.
P AUL A. R UBENS , ‘Y OUR K ING AND C OUNTRY W ANT Y OU ’, 1914
As so often happens in war, the Australians were soon swept up in events far removed from them and over which they had no control.
The bitter reality was the war was a learn-as-you-go experience for both sides, but especially the Allies. First the Germans, with their massive artillery pieces, and then the Allies, realised this Great War was a completely different animal from previous conflicts. At the cutting edge, infantrymen still charged against their opposite numbers. But the real killing was done by mighty unseen guns that spewed death and destruction from 10 or 20 kilometres behind the front lines and by the nests of machine guns that sprayed no-man’s land with lethal effect. Against these twin agents of death, the resolution of the humble infantryman counted for little.
In short, manpower had given way to firepower. But it took many commanders a long time and countless casualties before they adapted to the new ways of war. They were still in the process of this transition when the Australians arrived.
While the High Command plotted the next major offensives, the Australians were about to settle into their new homes in the rich marshy soil of French Flanders. Because the water table was so high there the trenches were technically breastworks (shallow trenches were dug down a metre or so to the water level with parapets facing the enemy and parados on the trench wall behind them, all built up by sandbags of soil piled two metres or more above ground level). With experience the troops learned to build the parados higher than the parapet to prevent being silhouetted. The walls of these breastworks were five or six metres thick and could withstand all but the heaviest artillery shells. They usually had wooden floors called duckboards (timber walkways) to keep the troops out of the slush. The front-line trenches and the support lines, 200 to 300 metres further back, were linked by communication trenches that ran back away from the front lines every couple of hundred metres. These communication trenches had walls on both sides to conceal and protect troops moving up to and back from the front lines. The communication trenches had street names: VC Avenue, Bond Street, Brompton Road and Pinney’s Avenue.
Originally, the Somme Offensive had been mooted for Flanders. Later, the Allied High Command decided on a major offensive against the German line along a 24-kilometre front just south of the Somme River in Picardy in northern France, where the French and the British Armies’ lines joined. This action was to take place about 80 kilometres south of the Australians’ position at Fromelles.
Because of the losses sustained by the British Expeditionary Force since the start of the war, its original six divisions of regular army troops had effectively ceased to exist. They were
Hitler and his comrades-in-arms toured the old Fromelles battlefield, visited the building in which he was billeted in Fournes-en-Weppes, his regiment’s cemetery at Fournes and the blockhouse where he took refuge during the battle. On 20 April 1942 Hitler arranged for a stone plaque to be solemnly affixed to the wall on his former billet. The plaque was smashed after the liberation in 1945 but was later recovered and reconstructed. Today it is on display at the Fromelles Museum, above the town hall. The Hitler blockhouse still stands near the Fromelles football oval behind Rouges Bancs. Another blockhouse on the Aubers Road is often referred to as Hitler’s bunker, but the photos taken on his 1940 visit clearly show him at the former bunker.
6
IN THE PRESENCE OF DEATH
We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go.
P AUL A. R UBENS , ‘Y OUR K ING AND C OUNTRY W ANT Y OU ’, 1914
As so often happens in war, the Australians were soon swept up in events far removed from them and over which they had no control.
The bitter reality was the war was a learn-as-you-go experience for both sides, but especially the Allies. First the Germans, with their massive artillery pieces, and then the Allies, realised this Great War was a completely different animal from previous conflicts. At the cutting edge, infantrymen still charged against their opposite numbers. But the real killing was done by mighty unseen guns that spewed death and destruction from 10 or 20 kilometres behind the front lines and by the nests of machine guns that sprayed no-man’s land with lethal effect. Against these twin agents of death, the resolution of the humble infantryman counted for little.
In short, manpower had given way to firepower. But it took many commanders a long time and countless casualties before they adapted to the new ways of war. They were still in the process of this transition when the Australians arrived.
While the High Command plotted the next major offensives, the Australians were about to settle into their new homes in the rich marshy soil of French Flanders. Because the water table was so high there the trenches were technically breastworks (shallow trenches were dug down a metre or so to the water level with parapets facing the enemy and parados on the trench wall behind them, all built up by sandbags of soil piled two metres or more above ground level). With experience the troops learned to build the parados higher than the parapet to prevent being silhouetted. The walls of these breastworks were five or six metres thick and could withstand all but the heaviest artillery shells. They usually had wooden floors called duckboards (timber walkways) to keep the troops out of the slush. The front-line trenches and the support lines, 200 to 300 metres further back, were linked by communication trenches that ran back away from the front lines every couple of hundred metres. These communication trenches had walls on both sides to conceal and protect troops moving up to and back from the front lines. The communication trenches had street names: VC Avenue, Bond Street, Brompton Road and Pinney’s Avenue.
Originally, the Somme Offensive had been mooted for Flanders. Later, the Allied High Command decided on a major offensive against the German line along a 24-kilometre front just south of the Somme River in Picardy in northern France, where the French and the British Armies’ lines joined. This action was to take place about 80 kilometres south of the Australians’ position at Fromelles.
Because of the losses sustained by the British Expeditionary Force since the start of the war, its original six divisions of regular army troops had effectively ceased to exist. They were
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