Between the 13th and 17th of July 1916, four separate British infantry attacks went into the ruins of a French village called Posier on the high ground of the S. Four times the infantry got close enough to see the German wire. Four times they were cut apart by machine gun fire and driven back to their own trenches, leaving their dead hanging on the entanglements.
On two of those attempts, the British actually reached the trench loop that curved around the southern and western edge of the village, a position called Posier’s trench, and were driven out both times by German counterattacks launched from the sellers and dugouts beneath the rubble. The village sat on the highest point of the ridge along the old Roman highway from Albert to Balome, controlling observation over the entire British sector of the S battlefield.
Whoever held that ground could direct artillery fire across kilometers of open country in every direction. Posier had been a first- day objective on the 1st of July when the S offensive opened with 60,000 British casualties in a single morning. Two weeks later, after thousands more, the Germans still held it.
The British commander of the Reserve Army, Lieutenant General Hubert Goff, had a reputation as a thruster, an officer who valued speed over preparation and aggression over caution. Goff looked at the wreckage of four failed assaults and decided the problem wasn’t the plan. The problem was the troops.
He needed fresh men willing to go where the British divisions wouldn’t. Field Marshal Hey himself had doubts about whether the Australians were ready for a task this important but Guff overruled the concern. Three Australian divisions had just arrived from Flanders, transferred south to join the S offensive as part of the first ANZAC corps.
They were Gallipoli veterans, but they’d never fought on the Western Front, never experienced the scale of German artillery on the S. Never attacked a fortified village supported by pre-registered guns and deep concrete dugouts. Goff didn’t care. He called in Major General Harold Walker, commander of the First Australian Division, and told him he wanted the Australians to go into the line and attack Posieras the following night. Walker refused.
He was an Englishman who’d commanded the division since Galipoly, and he knew what happened to infantry thrown at fortified positions without preparation. He told Goof he would attack only after adequate reconnaissance, proper artillery registration, and time for his officers to study the ground. Guff pushed.
Walker didn’t move. The attack was postponed until the night of the 22nd to the 23rd of July, giving the Australians 4 days to prepare. In that time, British and Australian artillery pounded the village with high explosive fosgene and tear gas day and night until the trees that once screened Posier were stripped bare, and the few remaining walls stood exposed against the skyline.
By the time the first division moved into their jumping off trenches on the evening of the 22nd, Posieras was already rubble. But the German 117th division was still dug in beneath it. The plan called for the first and third brigades to attack from the southeast, advancing in three stages at 30-minute intervals.
The first objective was the German frontline trench system. The second was the outskirts of the village itself. The third was the Albert to Bapom Road, the main highway that ran straight through the center of Posier. The infantry would creep into no man’s land before zero hour, lying flat in the dark, as close to the German wire as they dared, and rushed the trenches the moment the barrage lifted.
The approach marched from Albert through Sausage Valley toward the front gave the men their first look at industrial warfare on the Western Front. War debris and unburied dead from the earlier British attacks lay across the ground. The smell of gas hung in the air and at irregular intervals, the Earth erupted with German ranging shots aimed at the approach routes.
Some of the men were gassed by fosgene fumes during the march forward. The ninth battalion tried to improve its position by advancing up the OG lines toward the road on the 22nd, but was pushed back, a warning of how well the Germans knew the ground. The final bombardment began at dusk on the 22nd. Before the moon had risen, the flash of the guns was visible for 30 km around.
At midnight on the 23rd of July, 1916, the barrage lifted and the Australians went forward. What happened next caught the German garrison completely offguard. The first and third brigades hit the German front line within minutes. The defenders, stunned by days of bombardment and blinded by the dust of their own collapsing trenches, were overwhelmed in close quarter fighting.
Bayonets and grenades cleared the first objective before the 30-minute pause had even elapsed. The second wave went in on schedule and pushed into the wreckage of the village itself, fighting through shattered cellers and collapsed walls where German machine gun crews had set up interlocking fields of fire.
The Australians worked through them one position at a time, grenades first, then rifle and bayonet. By the time the third stage began, the leading elements had already reached the Bapome road. Within an hour of zero, the main body of the village was in Australian hands. On the western side of Posier, a separate assault seized the German trenches around the village cemetery in a swift advance that caught the defenders mid-rotation.
The strong point known as Gibralar, a concrete blockhouse that had anchored the German line for weeks, fell to the first division’s infantry before dawn. It was at the old German lines, the OG trenches running along the crest of the ridge 500 m east of the village that the fighting turned brutal. Lieutenant Arthur Blackburn of the 10th Battalion led four consecutive bombing parties into the OG1 trench, clearing 350 m of fortified position in a grinding yardby-yard advance.
Each party went forward with grenades and came back fewer. Blackburn kept going until the trench was held. He earned the Victoria Cross for it. Private John Leak of the 9inth Battalion earned his the same way, throwing himself at a German bombing post that was holding up the entire advance and clearing it alone under fire.
The German garrison fought with the stubbornness that would define every encounter on this ridge. Positions changed hands in the space of minutes. Bomb fights in the OG trenches lasted hours with both sides throwing grenades across barricades built from sandbags and the bodies of the fallen. A German battalion launched a counterattack at dawn on the 23rd, coming straight at the Australian positions from the east.
Australian machine gunners cut it apart. The battalion broke and fell back, leaving its casualties in the open ground between the trenches. By midday on the 23rd, the first Australian division held Posier village and portions of the OG lines. The position that four British attacks had failed to take over 5 days had fallen to the Australians in a single night.
But taking Posier was the easy part. Holding it was where the bill came due. The German command understood exactly what the loss of Posieras meant. The ridge controlled observation over the entire s battlefield and the OG lines were the spine of their second defensive system. Losing both would unravel their position north to thiefall.
So they did what the German artillery did better than any army on earth in 1916. They concentrated every gun within range on the village and began to destroy it and everyone in it one salvo at a time. The bombardment began on the 24th of July and built steadily for 3 days. German gunners walked their fire systematically across every trench, every supply route, every communication sap the Australians had dug or inherited.
The approach road into Posier, already known as Dead Man’s Road, became a killing ground where carrying parties bringing up ammunition and water ran through continuous shellfire. Men were buried alive in their trenches by near misses, dug out by their mates, and buried again within the hour. The second battalion’s war diary recorded that bombardment was so intense it was impossible for two of its companies to remain in their trenches.
The shellfire didn’t pause for darkness. It didn’t pause at all. On the 26th of July, the bombardment reached its peak. By 5 in the afternoon, the Australians believed a German infantry assault was imminent and called for a counter barrage. The guns of the first ANZAC corps, the second British corps, and two neighboring corps all opened fire simultaneously.
The Germans, interpreting the Allied barrage as preparation for an Australian attack, increased their own fire in response. The result was an artillery duel of a scale that surpassed anything previously experienced on the Western Front. Shells landed so densely that the craters overlapped, turning the ground into a featureless moonscape where no landmark, no trench line, and no reference point survived intact.
The shelling didn’t subside until midnight. The First Australian Division held every meter of ground they’d taken. They didn’t give back a single trench. But by the 27th of July, after 4 days of continuous bombardment, the division was finished as a fighting force. 5,285 men had been killed, wounded, or shell shocked since the attack began.
The second battalion alone lost 510 men in 3 days. 55% of the troops who’d gone over the top on the 23rd. Most of those casualties came from shell fire, and a large proportion were men whose bodies were intact, but whose minds had been broken by the concussion. Shell shock cases flooded the aid posts.
Officers reported men wandering the trenches unable to speak, unable to respond to orders, unable to do anything except stare. Charles Bean, the official correspondent, visited the front line on the 31st of July and was shaken by what he found. He described blackened men torn and whole, lying everywhere, dead for days.
The ground around Jialter was cratered so densely that the terrain had been turned into what one Lance corporal called a badly plowed field where villages were heaps of brick dust and every yard of earth had been ripped apart by shells. The first division was pulled out on the 27th and the second Australian division moved in to take their place.
The second division’s job was to push beyond the village and take the heights, the crest of Posier Ridge, including the ruins of a 17th century windmill that sat on the highest point of the entire Som battlefield. The Germans called it diveind mua. The Australians called it hill 160. Its concrete foundations had been turned into a fortified observation post.
And whoever held it could direct artillery fire across the full depth of the British sector. Taking the windmill meant taking the OG lines in their entirety across open ground that the Germans had pre-registered with every gun they had. The second division’s commander, Major General James Lea, launched his first attack at a quarter midnight on the 29th of July.
German artillery had hammered the Australian assembly positions throughout the evening, and British guns had failed to cut all the wire protecting the OG lines. The Germans knew the attack was coming. Machine gun fire caught the assault waves in the open, and the attack collapsed along most of the front with 3,500 casualties.
Only on the extreme left did the Australians managed to seize a section of trench. Everywhere else, the men fell back to their start lines. What happened next was pure Australian stubbornness. Lego asked permission to attack again rather than be withdrawn after failure. Any other division on the SO would have been pulled out of the line and replaced. Lego wanted another crack.
His request was granted, but the second attack would require something the first hadn’t had preparation. For the next 6 days, the second division dug communication trenches, assembly trenches, approach saps, all of it under constant German shell fire at night in ground so churned by explosions that men couldn’t tell where the old trenches ended and the new craters began.
Lieutenant John Ross of the 23rd Battalion commanded one of those digging parties on the night of the 31st of July. German flares lit up no man’s land at irregular intervals, and every time the light caught the diggers in the open, the artillery followed within seconds. Ros described it as a tornado of bursting shells, rivpping up the earth and burying them.
He was knocked down repeatedly and buried twice alongside the bodies of men already passed. He pushed his men to keep digging until dawn, refusing to withdraw, even when ordered to do so by another officer because the trench wasn’t finished. On the way out, he carried the only wounded man his party could find, a soldier who was delirious and had to be tied to his own pack with a putty to keep his shattered leg from dragging.
Ross spent another two hours under shellfire searching for more wounded. He wrote afterward that several of his friends were raving mad and that he’d met three officers in no man’s land, all of them wandering and incoherent. Ros was killed at Muk Farm 3 weeks later. He has no known grave.
On the 4th of August, the second division attacked again. This time they formed up just before dusk undetected while a 4-day artillery bombardment had systematically dismantled the German wire and flattened the OG line parapets. The attack was preceded by the construction of a network of communication trenches and assembly positions dug under fire over the previous six nights.
Work that was classified as a battle operation because the digging parties took casualties at rates normally associated with infantry assaults. When the infantry went forward in the evening light, they swept the Germans off the ridge with a speed and ferocity that left the defenders no time to organize resistance.
The OG lines fell. The ruins of the windmill fell. Hill 160, the highest point on the SO, was in Australian hands by nightfall on the 4th of August, 1916. The second division had done what its first attempt couldn’t, but the cost was beyond anything an Australian formation had paid before.
No Australian division before or since suffered heavier casualties in a single tour of the front line. In 12 days on the Posier’s Ridge, the Second Australian Division suffered 6,848 casualties. Five of its battalions each lost between 600 and 700 men. The 27th Battalion, a South Australian unit, captured the windmill itself and held it under direct fire until they were relieved in place by the 48th Battalion.
When the 48th moved into the forward positions to take over, they found no one left alive. Every man in the 27th forward posts had been killed by shellfire in the hours after the attack. The fourth Australian division relieved the second on the 6th of August. The Germans launched a counterattack the following morning, overrunning some of the forward posts in the dim light of dawn.
It was during this fighting that Lieutenant Albert Ja, already a national figure as the first Australian to earn the Victoria Cross at Gallipoli, led a counterattack that threw the Germans back. Jacka fought at close range and was badly wounded. He earned a military cross for it, though many in the division believed it should have been a second Victoria cross.
The counterattack on the 7th of August was the last concentrated German effort to retake the Posier’s ridge. After it failed, the German command accepted the loss and shifted to holding the next line of defense further north. But G wasn’t finished with the Australians. The ridge extended northwest from the windmill toward the German strong point at Muk Farm.
The diggers called it Moo Cow Farm, a fortified complex of sellers and tunnels sitting on high ground between Posier and the village of Tipval. Goff wanted the farm taken to drive a wedge behind the German salient to Thipval and collapse their flank. The fourth division was ordered to advance along the ridge and take it.
For 10 days, the fourth division fought its way north through a landscape that had been shelled into a featureless waste. Landmarks had been obliterated. Trench maps were useless because the trenches themselves no longer existed in recognizable form. Positions changed hands repeatedly and soldiers struggled to determine where their own front line was.
The German artillery turned the narrow front into a corridor of fire, catching the Australians in crossfire from guns positioned on both flanks of the ridge. The fourth division suffered 4,649 casualties before it was pulled out on the 16th of August. And then the whole thing started again. Each of the three Australian divisions had been through Posier once and each had been gutted.
The men expected to be sent to a quiet sector to recover. They were wrong. After a short rest, each division was reinforced to 2/3 strength and sent back in. The first division returned on the 16th of August. The second followed on the 22nd. The fourth came back on the 27th. Each tour produced another wave of casualties in the same ground against the same enemy under the same shell fire.
The first division second tour caused 2,600 men in a week. The second division’s second attempt on Muk farm saw them actually capture the position on the 26th of August only to be driven out by a counterattack from the German guard reserve corps. The sixth brigade lost nearly 900 men in that single action. Nine separate attacks were launched against Muk Farm between the 8th of August and the 3rd of September.
The farm had been a homestead and dairy complex before the war, but the Germans had identified its position on the ridge as tactically decisive and built a network of interconnecting rooms, bunkers, and tunnels beneath the ruins. The stone sellers survived the heaviest bombardment, and the tunnel system allowed fresh troops to emerge behind positions the Australians thought they’d cleared.
The Australians reached the farm buildings on multiple occasions, fighting through the rubble to the sellers beneath, but the Germans reinforced from below. Every time the surface was taken, the farm held. During one of the forward post actions near the windmill, Sergeant David Twining of the 48th Battalion held a position with nine men against repeated German counterattacks and continuous shelling.
One by one, his men were killed or wounded around him. Twining sent a walking wounded man back to battalion headquarters with a message reporting he was the only unwounded man left, that he had the Lewis gun and asking whether they still wanted him to hold the position. He and what remained of his men were eventually pulled out.
By the time the first ANZAC corps was finally taken off the Posier front on the 5th of September, all three divisions were burned through. The Canadians took over and the Australians were sent north to Epres. The final count was 23,000 Australian casualties in 6 weeks of fighting on a strip of ground barely 2 km long.
6,800 of those men were killed or died of their wounds. The rest were wounded, missing, or evacuated with shell shock so severe they couldn’t function. That number, 23,000, exceeded the total Australian casualties from the entire 8-month Gallipoli campaign. The battle that Australians had crossed the world to remember, the battle that had forged the national identity at a beach called Anzac Cove, had been surpassed in 6 weeks on a ridge in Pickerty that most Australians back home had never heard of.
The official historian, Charles Bean, walked the battlefield several months later and described a land of shell craters where every yard of earth had been torn apart. He wrote that the Posierre’s ridge was more densely swn with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth. Bean considered Posier, not Gallipoli, to be the defining moment of the Australian Imperial Force.
He believed the men who survived the ridge emerged as the hardest and most experienced infantry on the Western Front. But he also recognized the price. In 1932, Bean persuaded the Australian War Memorial to purchase the ruins of the windmill site. When Australia finally interred its unknown soldier in 1993, the soil scattered on the coffin was dug from the ground at Posier.
The political fallout hit before the mud had dried. General William Birdwood, the British officer who’ commanded the ANZACs at Gallipoli and become genuinely popular with the troops lost much of that goodwill at Posier. Birdwood had failed to push back against Goff’s demands for repeated attacks. And the soldiers knew it.
They called his speeches praising their courage and telling them he knew they wanted to get back and fight more Germans exactly what they were, birdies bull. When the 1916 conscription referendum reached the Australian troops in France that October, many voted against it. Their reasoning was straightforward. They’d seen what Posier did to volunteers and they didn’t want to see conscripts fed into the same machine.
The men who came out of Posier didn’t talk about it the way the Gallipoli veterans talked about Anzac Cove. There were no songs about the ridge, no mythology of golden beaches and impossible cliffs. Posier was industrial slaughter on ground that had been pounded until it looked like the surface of another planet. The men who survived carried shell shock for years and some for the rest of their lives.
The official records note the numbers. 23,000 casualties, five Victoria crosses, three divisions wrecked twice over. Bean’s records note what the numbers don’t. Men found wandering the trenches, unable to remember their own names. Officers broken by the sound of shellfire months after they’d left the front.
Soldiers who flinched at loud noises for decades and never told anyone why. Mouet farm finally fell on the 26th of September 1916, 3 weeks after the Australians left, when a broader British offensive bypassed it and left the garrison isolated. The ridge the Australians had paid 23,000 men to take gave the allies observation over the S battlefield for the remainder of the offensive.
The psalm ground on until November, producing over a million casualties across all armies for a total Allied advance of 12 km. Posier was one small piece of that advance. A strip of ridge barely 2 km long where 19 attacks had been launched in 42 days. The Australians had taken it because three British divisions couldn’t. And the price for that success was a generation of men from New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia who went into the line as soldiers and came out as casualties or didn’t come out at all.
