Battle of Hamel, July 4, 1918

British soldiers depicted in Hamel in March 1918, prior to their withdraw from the town in the German 1918 Spring Offensive.

On this day in 1918 Australian and American soldiers jointly attacked and took the French village of Le Hamel in northern France.

The attack was a meticulously planned combined arms attack featuring the innovative use of the fast (for the time) British Mark V tank and air support from the RAF.  It was also a joint operation, under the command of Australian General Sir John Monash, featuring primarily Australian infantry but heavily augmented by units of the American 33d Division and supported by a creeping barrage using British and French artillery.

The attack was well planned by the experienced General Monash and provided an learning example of new combined arms tactics.  It was not without its problems, however, in that the American troops were somewhat reluctantly supplied and when supplied were directly attached to Australian units at the small unit level, something the American Army did not approve of.  The American Army had approved the use of troops of the 33d Division for a raid, not an outright assault.  Indeed, fewer troops of the U.S. 33d Division were supplied at first than initially promised and when the Australians were further supplied with U.S. troops prior to the battle some were withdrawn upon General Pershing learning that they were being assigned out to Australian formations at the company level.  The augmentation was partially needed by the Australians due to the thinning of their ranks by the Spanish Flu.

The assault technically commenced at 22:30 on July 3 when British and French artillery opened up simply to mask the noise of the deploying tanks.  A harassing artillery barrage commenced again at 03:02 which caused the defending Germans to anticipate a gas attack, for which they accordingly masked.  The RAF went immediately into action at that time and deployed fighters as light bombers, with each assigned pilot flying at least three extremely dangerous pre dawn flights.  The infantry assault commenced at 03:14 with American units showing their inexperience by advancing into the allied creeping barrage.

Allied objectives were calculated by Monash to require 90 minutes and in fact took just 93.  The Australians began to resupply the successful units with tanks and the Royal Australian Flying Corps immediately commenced areal photography in order to produce new maps.  The RAF, for its part, participated in resupply operations by dropping some supplies by parachute in a brand new technology which was, of course, necessarily limited by the nature of the aircraft of the time.

The Germans reattacked, using storm troopers, at 22:00 and were initially successful.  A flanking Australian attack, deploying grenades and clubs, reversed that and the shocked Germans retreated.

The battle was significant for a number of reasons.  For one thing, it was the first signficant use of an American division, partially, that was made up of National Guardsmen, in the case Guardsmen from Illinois, which was what formed the 33d Division.  Beyond that, it was a spectacular example of clear thinking in a meticulously planned combined arms attack using every new and old arm in the Allied arsenal successfully and also using forces from four different armies.  Beyond that, it showed that Allies had not only withstood four months of German assaults but were more than capable of going into at least limited offensive operations at this time, tactics which sucked up German storm troops, upon which their success now depended, who were shown to be capable of being beaten. Indeed, Australian troops in the action showed an offensive spirit so pronounced that they were willing to resort to the most primitive of weapons.