Sambre Canal 1918: Lock No 1

In this episode we travel to the last major battlefield of the Great War on the Western Front - the Sambre Canal. Here we follow the story of the infantry and the engineers who attacked the Canal on 4th November 1918, including the 2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment. We also see what remains of the battlefield today.

The interview with Josh Grover MM is on the IWM website here: Josh Grover MM interview.

Recommended Book: Decisive Victory by Derek Clayton.

Thread on the Great War Forum: Royal Sussex Regiment at Lock No 1.

Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

On the last great battlefield of the First World War, we discover a timeless scene along the Sombré Canal. Here at lock number one, the last big push took place on the 4th of November, 1918. I was recently on a recce for a new ledger battlefield tour, looking at the fighting on the Hindenburg Line in the final two years of the Great War. When I design a new battlefield tour, any tour, I approach it in a similar way to how we used to construct TV documentaries and how I've written some of my books. The tour isn't just a whiz round a few places. It should be a vehicle for learning and, in my view, should have a beginning, a middle bit and an end. And this is what we try to achieve with the tours that we do. So this new Hindenburg Line tour starts at Rossignol Wood on the Somme, Nightingale Wood or COPS 125, as Ernst Jünger called it, close to the 1916 battlefield. So we've got kind of a back reference there. But more than that, it's also a place where the Germans on this sector of the Somme front began to pull back and where the 16th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, the Bradford Powells, who had been involved in the assault on that summer's day, on the 1st of July 1916... in the early part of 1917 fought a costly battle here against an enemy who seemed to be pulling back but wasn't keen on yielding ground and that became a kind of an insight into that early stage of the retreat to the Hindenburg Line by German forces on this part of the Western Front and the cemetery here has the dead from that battle from the Bradford Powells of the West Yorkshire Regiment and you can see the wood you can see the ground where that action took place so it kind of sets the scene for what the retreat to the Hindenburg line was and then the subsequent battles on the Hindenburg line were all about so in following that idea of a beginning a middle bit and the end that was the beginning and the kind of middle bit is when the tour then follows the fighting in the outposts on the Hindenburg line the approaches to that set of trenches all the problems involved with sudden facing an enemy dug into new defences and you have to do the same that's what British and Commonwealth forces found themselves doing in that early part of 1917 and We then follow the story of the battles on the Hindenburg Line at different points between Arras and Cambrai and Saint-Quentin in those years of 1917-18, in the final phase of the war on the Western Front. And it ends, as we move towards that ending, it ends with the breaking of the Hindenburg Line in September 1918, the crossing of the Saint-Quentin Canal, the famous picture of the soldiers the escarpment close to the bridge at Rickerville, one of the kind of iconic images of that last phase of the Great War on the Western Front, and the breakthrough of the final line of trenches, the end of trench warfare, in places like the Beauvoir-Fonson line, near to Joncourt, just up the road, where units like the 2nd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment attacked trenches in positions like that, and broke through that final line of German defences. And amongst those in the 2nd Manchester's, who was in that action in breaking the Beauvoir-Fonson line was Lieutenant Wilfred Owen who was awarded a military cross for his bravery there. Owen, one of the great war poets of the First World War. But I wanted there to be a definitive ending and an understanding as to where all of that fighting across the Hindenburg line brought the British and Commonwealth soldiers to and what happened next once the trench systems like the Beauvoir-Fonson line were broken. What were the battles like? What where were they fought and what kind of fighting took place in those final weeks of the Great War. And I wanted the groups that will travel with us on this tour this year and in the coming years to understand that period of the war because it's kind of a neglected one. Once the trenches were over and the war became mobile again, it's almost as if we blink and the war is over on the 11th of November. But there were hard weeks ahead with tremendous casualties and a lot of very hard fighting. So in that ground beyond the Hindenburg Line, in those final weeks of the war, when it came to ending this tour, telling this story and bringing it to a conclusion, I used the fighting on the Sombre Canal on the 4th of November 1918, and that brings us to this week's episode, because just as we will use it in that tour to bring that to a conclusion, here I think it helps us explain what that final period of the war was like and it's a date that is not perhaps unfamiliar because of Wilfred Owen who we mentioned earlier he was killed in action at oars right by the canal side encouraging his men to get onto rafts and pontoons and get across the canal when he was struck probably by machine gun fire and killed instantly he's the most famous casualty of the 4th of November 1918 but he's not the only one his death his life kind of overshadows that day which is an important important day because it marks the last great battle of the first world war on the western front so it's not owen it's not oars that we're going to look at in this episode but a slightly more obscure and lesser known location i hate to use that word forgotten because it isn't forgotten but it's certainly lesser known and while we were on that recce this journey that we made that week took me and my fellow battlefield guides to one of my old favorites a place i've visited for more than 30 years the battlefield around lock number one on the sombre canal close to the village of rege de beaulieu so what is lock number one where is the sombre canal and what was this battle here on the 4th of november 1918 The Battle of the Somme, the crossing of the Sombre Canal, the Battle of the Somme being a battle honour awarded to the regiments that took part in this action, was that last final big attack, allied attack of the Great War, because seven days later was the armistice and the end to the conflict on the Western Front. And it wasn't a small affair, far from it. In fact, more men in the British Army and the Commonwealth forces that were there went over the top on the 4th of November than on the 1st of July 1916 the first day of the Battle of the Somme but this was more than two years later nearly two and a half years later and the war had moved forward incredibly during that period the British army had developed and refined its way of fighting as had all of the other nations that fought alongside it as part of that wider British expeditionary force that had come at a price in the casualties that had been suffered in the battles such as on the Hindenburg line in 1917 1718 but by that final year of the war in those final months of the war it was a modern army fighting a modern war with modern weapons in a modern way so it had changed but of course it had fought to break the stalemate of trench warfare and when that had ended in the final breakthrough of the German trenches across the Hindenburg line in early October 1918 the army found itself on the move again it found itself mobile fighting over open ground fields and woods and copses and lanes and areas covered in hedgerows and small villages and towns with street fighting a war that we would kind of more associate with the later conflict the second great war rather than events on the western front in 1918 but this attack on the 4th of November 1918 was on a wide front from the Belgian border right down to this area of north eastern France and across following the of the Sombray Canal in some places, but not exclusively. There was a large area of woodland where many of the units that were attacking that day advanced through. That was the Forest of Mormau, where four years before, in August 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force, the BEF, the Old Contemptibles, had marched down that road during the retreat from Mons. And on the southern part of the Sombray Canal front, where it turned and kind of went eastwards, that was where the British forces joined with the French troops and the French army was attacking simultaneously as well. This was coalition warfare. The British army and the Commonwealth forces fighting alongside them did not exist in isolation, and the French were far from a spent force, which many who study the Great War seem to think sometimes that they are. After the actions of 1917, they're very heavily involved in these final offensives, and they're there alongside British troops on the 4th of November 1918. We're not going to cover their story in this, because that's a story in its own right but it was a big battle like we said more men went over the top on the 4th of November 1918 than in that opening day of the Battle of the Somme but it wasn't as catastrophic when it comes to the casualties so with 20,000 dead or thereabouts on the 1st of July 1916 on the 4th of November 1918 there was just over 2,000 battlefield deaths now that doesn't mean that the battlefield was less deadly in that attack across the Sombray Canal area it just means the war was different by that stage men's lives could be saved because of medical advances but also the army was fighting the war in a very different way of a very different countryside and a very different landscape landscape that forever factor in whatever we examine connected with the war on the western front and while this was the last great battle of the first world war fighting would of course continue beyond it right up to that last minute on the 11th of November 1918 but these were all much smaller actions compared to what happened here the Canadian Corps in particular that was on the northern part of this advance they would continue right into the streets of Mons on that final day of the First World War with George Lawrence Price a Canadian soldier being the last of four who died in the streets dragged off that street having been shot by a sniper he died in his comrades arms and when they looked up at a clock on a mantelpiece in the house where he passed away they could see it was at 10 58 two minutes before the armistice came into effect and that for a british and commonwealth point of view was the end to the fighting on the western front with that last casualty so what of the sombre canal and lock number one which we're going to look at in this episode the was sombre canal was actually built in the 1830s so some time before the great war to link northern France near the Belgian border with other canals in this area on the Aisne and also link up eventually to Paris. It's part of that kind of super highway of canals that existed in this region of France. And it was a working canal when the war broke out in 1914. But it was swept up in the German advance in those early months of the conflict. And although this region was occupied, life continued fairly normally here for the French people although many had been displaced by the fighting and others were sent eventually to force labour in Germany but the farms kept running the fields were cultivated the canal seems to have operated although there would eventually be German military traffic on it but life to the average French person here would have seemed vaguely normal although there would have been the ever presence of an occupier with German forces and garrison command and in some degrees martial law being imposed on some of these areas too. German units were billeted in this region throughout the First World War. Many of the villages where the fighting was on the 4th of November 1918 had been places where units coming to and from the fighting at Arras or Combré or the Somme had spent rest periods there. The Germans definitely seemed to have used the canal to move war material around and why wouldn't they because it was a convenient way to move a lot of heavy gear particularly when it came to the construction of the Hindenburg Line. I suspect they were using all the material that was needed to create concrete for the bunkers. Could well have been moved down these canal systems as part of the preparation for that. And just as the British Army used the canals behind their front in northern France to evacuate the wounded on hospital barges, the Germans did a similar thing on their part of the line as well. So this was part of the medical evacuation route for Germans. German soldiers and then in the autumn of 1918 it took on another significance once trench warfare had ended because it now became a battle area and when the Germans began to look at these areas beyond the trenches how were they going to defend them they used landscape they used the geography so they looked at the ground for which they were pulling back over and they could defend woods hills and villages and river valleys. They could blow the bridges along those rivers. And once the rivers ran out, you were getting towards an area where there were canals. So it would be obvious that you would use the canals in exactly the same way. And so what you see in that final phase leading up to this battle here on the 4th of November, 1918 is an army, British army and its Commonwealth forces alongside it adapting to the circumstances on the battlefield. And one of the key things that suddenly becomes very important is engineering because if you've got rivers and obstacles and then canals to cross you need sappers you need engineers to help you do that build bridges build assault bridges build pontoons and carry pontoons and boats up to get across those water courses so the engineers although they've been heavily involved in all aspects of trench warfare on the western front we've spoken about the role of sappers on and off quite a lot and they certainly deserve their own episodes which I'm sure will come one day, here in this final phase, assault engineers, as we'd probably now call them, came to the fore, assisting the infantry getting across the obstacles that lay in their path on these kind of changing battlefields, compared to the sorts of battlefields, of course, that they'd been used to in the static war on the Western Front previously. But when it came to lock number one and this stretch of the Sombray Canal, the canal comes from north to south towards a lock, lock number one, where there was a two-storey control building overlooking the lock itself with another building alongside it. Close to that, the canal moved into a bend and beyond that bend is where the French forces were on the 4th of November 1918. It was south of the small town of which was also part of the assaults on the 4th of November 1918 and close to the village of Régé de Beaulieu to the west which is a small little village with a church and a few houses but it commanded the ground in the approach to the canal itself. British troops of the 1st Division and Infantry Division reached this area in the first few days of November of 1918 as the offensive gradually caught up with the German withdrawal and the advance towards this next feat on the landscape they were going to have to attack over, which of course was the Sombre Canal itself, and that was when the plans for the attack on the 4th of November were in their final phase. A lot of the plans being made at this stage of the war were hastily done by necessity, but the learning curve that those in charge had built benefited from came in handy really because this was an army of conscripts of young soldiers with only often fairly basic training in Britain enhanced once they came to the Western Front, once they were in the theatre of war, but most importantly commanded by veteran troops in many cases, the platoon commanders, the company commanders, the battalion commanders, and of course the brigade and divisional commanders often had gone right through it since the very beginning. And at this stage of the conflict, you could have men who were platoon commanders in the original British Expeditionary Force in 1914, who were now brigade or even divisional commanders leading men into battle on a much bigger scale. So this area around Régé de Beaulieu facing lock number one and this stretch of the Sombré Canal would be the southern flank of the British advance on the 4th of November 1918 close to those French forces and in this sector where the assault would take place the lead battalions were the 2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment and 2nd Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps supported by the 1st Battalion the Northamptonshire Regiment. Now all of these were regular army battalions they'd been in France since August of 1914 and while in each of those battalions there would have been a handful of men who had been pre-war regulars and were still serving these were very different battalions to the battalions that have gone off to war four years before because as we've said this was a conscript army most of the men in the ranks were conscripts and they were very young 18 and 19 years old which we see reflected in the cemeteries of this part of the Western Front battlefields. When we go into these cemeteries we can see how young the army had become by that final phase of the Great War. Now as soon as I mention in that list 2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment you can understand my interest being a Sussex boy researching the Royal Sussex Regiment as a kind of pathway to understanding the wider aspects of the Great War then this was something that I became familiar with as I delved my way through the records of the regiment and the different battalion war diaries and analysed soldiers died to see key dates and this was one that came up quite a lot because actually the 9th Royal Sussex fought in the northern part of the battlefield but yet again that's a tale for another day so this was something I was familiar with and for the 2nd Battalion the Royal Sussex Regiment this was their final chapter really of a very very long war and the main road when you look at a map they were going to attack from near rege de beaulieu across the countryside through the hedgerows and streams up towards the canal cross the canal move through another hedgerow area to a main road and that main road had been part of their route that they'd advanced down marched down during the retreat from Mons in August 1914. So for them, quite literally in this case, their war had pretty much brought them full circle. They were back where they'd been at the very beginning of the conflict. And for the Second Royal Sussex, that very long war that had brought them to this point had seen them take part in all of those battles of 1914, from the retreat to Mons, to the fighting on the Marne, and then the Aisne, the first Battle of Ypres in October and November of 1914. They lost three commanding officers in the first few months of the war. They were involved in all of the early British offensives on the Western Front in reserve for Neuf Chapelle, then in the vanguard of the assault on Albers Ridge on the 9th of May 1915, and then held the line in that sector for much of the rest of that summer, and then became a leading assault battalion in the first day of the Battle of Loos on the 25th September 1915 and continued to fight right through to the end of the battle in October of 1915. Later they would fight on the Somme around Pozières and High Wood and in 1917 moved up to the northern, very northern sector of the Western Front and were one of the British units that began to take over from French and Belgian troops near to Newport on the coast of on the sector of the Issa Canal, and they prepared, well, one of the units that was preparing for a seaborne invasion along that coast in the summer of 1917 as part of the Third Battle of Ypres. I kind of hastened to call it a D-Day, but it was an amphibious operation, no landing craft, none of the kind of specialist armour or equipment that was going to be used a generation later on the 6th of June 1944, although tanks were modified to be able to move across sand but the troops are going to be moved up in huge barges protected by a naval flotilla but the coastline was bristling with heavy guns particularly in places like Knokke Heist where there were massive German artillery fortifications there that if this landing had ever taken place I think would have resulted in catastrophic casualties for all of those who were taking part in it and it didn't happen the Germans got wind of the movement of British troops up into that sector and in July of 1917 they attacked along the Issa Canal at Newport and that's something that we've mentioned in a previous podcast episode when their attack pushed hard against the positions of the 2nd Kings Royal Rifle Corps and the Northamptonshire Regiments both of whom figure to lesser or greater degree in this story here at the Sombray Canal but for the Sussex lads that was not the end of their war they were involved in the tail end of the fight fighting at Passchendaele in 1917 and then throughout 1918 fought in pretty much every battle along the Western Front where British soldiers were holding the Germans back and were wiped out, rebuilt, wiped out, rebuilt again and again and again as were so many battalions in the British Expeditionary Force in that final year of the Great War. But having said that, when we kind of analyse the details of those who were still serving, who were here for the attack on the 4th of November 1918. It's quite a broad church. There are obviously predominantly conscripts, but when we look at the records, and they're quite good records for the 2nd Royal Sussex in the county archives, in the regimental archives that survive, we can see there's a lot of men from some of the Kitchener battalions. We can tell that by their regimental numbers. They're so low, they've got G prefixes, and in some cases SD prefixes, indicating they're original men. of the south downs battalions and there were quite a few of those serving in the second royal sussex in this attack and even some men whose numbers which have an l prefix which indicates a regular army enlistment with a fairly small four digit number often beginning seven or eight that indicates they are pre-war regular soldiers so there were still a few of those old sweats who'd gone through it all here and what a war this battalion had had and here in its final hour it had kind of seen everything from the war of movement that everyone had gone to war to fight in 1914 the first trenches on the Aisne the fighting the desperate fighting to hold the Germans back in the first battle of Ypres the whole gamut of trench warfare on the western front the arrival of tanks gas everything else and then here in this final phase they're back fighting an open war war of movement again but in a very unfamiliar landscape and that's what lay before them for this assault so this battle for the second royal sussex lads and all of those taking part in the attack on the sombre canal would prove very different to any other they'd fought because the war had changed, and then changed again, as conflict often does. And as we've said, in this battle, like some of the others in the preceding weeks, engineers would prove just as important as infantry, because to get to that canal that you've got across, the role of the engineers would be absolutely pivotal. The engineers were not there to fight. Probably only a handful of them went into battle with weapons, They had too much engineering kit to carry to worry about wielding a short magazine in the Enfield or even a sidearm, although the officers would have been armed. Their task was to use engineering equipment, in this case, bridges and pontoons and portable drop bridges, as well as potentially boats if they were needed, get that kit across the open ground, following, going alongside the infantry, get to the obstacles that were there. And when they mapped this, they could see that there wasn't just canal but a stream in front of it that would need to be crossed that could be overgrown or even protected by the enemy and that the infantry's chance of success was based on their chance of success getting this engineering equipment in place and while We look at the designs and there's a very good book on the fighting for the 4th of November called Decisive Victory by Derek Clayton. We'll put a link to that onto the podcast website. When we look at some of the designs of these bridges, you can see that they are clearly based on previous engineering designs for battlefield bridges. But the difference is they have to be portable now and they have to be able to be dropped or put in place very easily over not just major features, but often minor ones as well, such as dreams that might block the way of an infantry assault on a position like this canal. So to help the 2nd Royal Sussex in this attack they had the 409th Field Company Royal Engineers which had been serving with the 1st Infantry Division for quite some time. They would provide the bridging support at the lock where they were going to cross and that would be really important there because the lock itself was 17 feet wide. So unless they had a few Sussex supermen serve in that battalion no one was going to easily leap across that and foot bridges drop bridges would be absolutely essential to get across there and that stream that was running parallel to the canal would also feature in any kind of outcome of this battle if that couldn't be crossed you couldn't even get to the canal so 409 field company that would be part of their task as well this unit this field company of the Royal Engineers was commanded by the 29 year old Scott Major George de Cardenal Emsil Findlay MCM Bar who had been commissioned in 1910 in the Royal Engineers but he broke his legs in the early phase of the war and he didn't go overseas until 1917 after he'd recovered but In that period, since his arrival on the Western Front, he'd fought through many battles with a military cross awarded for bravery in the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917 and a bar for the actions at a village called Wassigny in October of 1918. So he was a commander, a battlefield commander, respected within his unit and decorated for his bravery. He was a man who didn't just ask soldiers to do something, he did it himself and that bravery and aptitude had been recognised on the battlefield by his superiors. His men would have small wooden bridges that they could carry available for the stream itself and then larger drop bridges which a group of engineers would have to carry for the canal itself and they'd also supplied what we'd call today assault boats and they certainly would have been called that in a second world war for example and the bridges were specially constructed by Royal engineer workshops by the unit itself and were all part of that development of engineering on the western front that had taken place in those final weeks of the war and its reaction to the changing nature of warfare during this period similar bridges for example this wasn't the first time they've been used similar bridges have been used in the crossing in october 1918 of the cell river which has proved another big obstacle to the advance of british troops in in that phase of the battle beyond the Hindenburg Line. The battlefield that they and the infantry were about to cross in this action was pretty dense, different to some of the terrain that they'd experienced before. This was an area of a lot of kind of bockage-style hedgerows with small enclosed fields and lots of trees blocking line of sight and small buildings scattered here and there. So you would describe it as dense terrain with lots of cover cover for an advance but also cover for an enemy the germans to be bedded down in and if you suddenly advance across the ground and they see you they have the advantage of cover to open fire at you from and one of the reports noted The country on both sides of the canal was very enclosed with hedges and orchards making it impossible to distinguish any marked tactical features or pick out any landmarks which would serve as distant direction guides during the advance. A liberal supply of excellent aeroplane photographs however were found to be of the greatest assistance and these were used in time for officers and non-commissioned officers to make a thorough study of the ground which they would be required to advance over. Now again this itself kind of reflects the changing nature of the war at this point because two years before on the Somme ordinary soldiers would never have seen a trench map let alone an aerial photograph but in these final battles it had been realised by this stage of the war through bitter experience the more information that you could give soldiers the better they performed on the battlefield and aerial photographs which we've discussed in previous podcast were essential in the intelligence understanding of the battles and battlefields over which these men would fight. And they could send a flight up deliberately to get some aerial photographs from them, fly back, develop them, and then deliver those by dispatch rider to whichever headquarters had requested them. And again, when I kind of read about these air photos in these reports and how important they were, got a bit of a connection to that because in one of these mythical brighton junk shops one time i remember lifting up a box of stuff and tucked in there was a whole pile of aerial photographs and one of them was an aerial photograph and a bleak so looking down at an angle at the bend in the sombre canal where the first division including the second royal sussex made their attack on the 4th of november and when i peered at the photograph i could see the lock number one control building the lock house very clearly on this photograph and I'll put a copy of that image onto the podcast website so you can see it it's an official photograph and it's in the archives of the Imperial War Museum but I've got an original copy of it pasted onto a bit of paper that a veteran for whatever reason has kept perhaps he was in the engineers perhaps he was in the Sussex who knows so with the infantry in place close to the village of Rish there were no trenches here. So these men were kind of dug in. The trench warfare was over. They weren't occupying former enemy positions, German positions. They were digging in as and when required. So the entrenching tool becomes a very important bit of kit in this phase of the war. And also the Mark I infantry shovel, which you see a lot of soldiers have tucked down the back of their equipment, useful for digging in as and when required. And the engineers linked up with them. They too became ready for the attack. and were assembled by 4 o'clock in the morning on the 4th of November 1918 with their engineering kit with the infantry ready to go in battle order and the momentum of the battle begins by 0530 they'd reached the streams west of the canal and they found that obstacle not just to be a difficult obstacle to get across but they found it clogged with fallen trees perhaps deliberately undergrowth in there as well and also German barbed wire so the Germans had seen the importance of this obstacle and had wired it up just to make it even more difficult to cross so the engineers had to get out wire cutters and do this by hand and cut their way through that as well as get their bridges assembled heavy fire began to drop on these positions while they were doing this work and one account stated so intense was the enemy's fire that even the stoutest troops hesitated and it seemed impossible for any man to get to the lock and yet live. One area of the stream was found to be crossable but only by using two of the small bridges together or one of the larger bridges designed for the lock. So they kind of underestimated just how difficult it would be to bridge even this stream. So two of the smaller bridges were put together to kind of form an inverted V shape and in one case one of the heavier bridges was used as well. So that got them in, that got the infant and the engineers supporting them across this stream and Lieutenant Colonel Johnson commanding 2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment and Major Finlay who commanded the engineers the 409 Field Company they were very much in the thick of this thing they weren't sitting back and watching their men go forward they were in there taking command at the very sharp end of this battle calming the men down taking charge giving orders the bridges were put in place the sappers and the infantry streamed over and Lewis gunners of which there was a greater number in infantry platoons by this stage of the war were given covering fire from their automatic weapons to enable that advance to move forward because the Germans were in the lockhouse, the control building firing down at almost point blank range as the men who crossed over that stream that was now literally in the shadow of the bank of the canal and men were dropping left and right there was close quarter fighting that took place in and around the lock house itself as Germans came out to meet and greet that assault to try and push it back and once drop bridges had been placed over the lock some men mounted the actual lock gates themselves climbed over that way and then got into the building cleared that wiped out the German defenders and then pushed on towards their objectives beyond the canal towards that main road at this point German resistance had pretty much collapsed and the battle for the lock was over. It was short, it was sharp and in many cases it was deadly but it was decisive. The canal had been crossed, the lock had been captured, the enemy had been silenced and pushed back and the objectives beyond these positions had been taken. To the south, on the right of the Sussex Lads, 2nd Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps had come forward and found their bridges destroyed by enemy fire. So they had made the decision to use boats to cross the canal. But the boats took some construction. They weren't kind of flat-packed and ready to go. They took a lot of effort and a lot of time to actually build and get ready. And while the battle was unfolding on their left, the commanders of the KRRC guys felt that this was taking far too long not a single boat had been completed so the officer in charge told his men to dump the boats forget them and head straight for the Sussex lads at the lock cross on their bridges get over the canal and then stream out beyond and that's exactly what they did so those two battalions 2nd Royal Sussex 2nd Kings Royal Rifle Corps essentially crossed over together by 0630 the lock was in British hands the And then, first Australian Tunnelling Company came up with the task of building a tank bridge here, which was eventually used by one tank just a few hours later. Now, the first Australian Tunnelling Company had been in action right across the Western Front, doing just as it says on the tin. They'd been carrying out tunnelling mining operations beneath the battlefield. That was over in a mobile war, so they were doing all kinds of engineering tasks. They were detached from the main Australian Corps which had fought its last battle at Montbriand on the 5th of October 1918 and again we've got a previous podcast episode on that but these were some of the last Australian soldiers at the tip of the spear right in the front line in this final great battle on the western front and they set about building the bridge that would be needed to support the weight of a tank that could cross at this advantageous position on the canal the lock itself but the position despite its capture and despite the enemy being pushed back the Germans knew where the British soldiers were now and British and Australian soldiers came under artillery fire while they were working on the bridges and some got hit got injured got killed going about their work the Australians alone suffered three men killed here and eight wounded while building their tank bridge in fact total casualties in the assault here at lock number one were 409 So we're talking hundreds of casualties here not thousands but nevertheless for battalions that were reduced in strength with only a small proportion of their battalion actually in the forward part of the battlefield attacking this was not insignificant casualties in capturing a position like this plus of course the 11 Australian casualties from the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company and a further 21 Royal Engineer casualties from 1st Division Engineer units who were also attached for this attack So you can see unusually in a battle like this, a significant number of the casualties are from engineering units, which shows how the scope of the battlefield had changed by this period of the war. So the capture of lock number one was not without cost, not on the scale of the Somme, as we've said, or Passchendaele, but not in considerable losses given this short, sharp engagement. And a whole host of awards and decorations were given out out for bravery to both the infantry and the engineers who took part in this attack including Victoria Crosses to Major Finlay of the 409 Field Company and Lieutenant Colonel Johnson of the Royal Sussex Regiment. Both of them survived the war and went on to live long lives. But what was the significance of this action and this wider battle on the 4th of November 1918, the Battle of the Somme? Well, this marked a final phase of the war. The men who took part couldn't have really known it at the time, but within a week the war would be over with the signing of the armistice. The final preparations of German parliamentarians to cross the Allied lines to seek an armistice were about to take place, but to the men on the ground and even the commanders at the top the war did not look over even Haig was thinking that the Germans would continue with the fight and the war could easily move on into 1919 and considering the casualties that his expeditionary force had suffered on the western front in those battles of the autumn of 1918 and the manpower problem that he had to replace those losses then his concern was that the war would move towards an American war where American troops from the American Expeditionary Force would form a much greater proportion of those at the sharp end and that any victory could easily become an American victory and all the things that Britain and its empire and its allies had suffered in the preceding years could easily be lost, the significance of it could easily be lost because of that but that was not to be. The German army, the German nation, the German people were on their knees by this stage with submarine blockades causing starvation in many German towns and cities, and the army itself finding it increasingly difficult to bring up replacements and call up younger and younger soldiers to serve in frontline infantry regiments, running out of fuel, running out of weapons, running out of ammunition, running out of everything, and the end of the war for them was now when rather than if. But for Britain, it marked one last major push in that war, a war that had seen battle after battle after battle and this was the last of those great battles somewhat forgotten more than a century later despite the fact that it was extensively written about in the official histories that were published in the post-war period it never resulted in an actual book on the subject until Derek Clayton's most recent Decisive Victory which we mentioned earlier and which there is a link to that on the podcast website But it's an important battle and one that's easy to follow on the ground. The terrain really has not changed much since 1918. And you can find the traces of it on the buildings, many of them original. And you can see the dead from the battles along the Sombre Canal and the Forest of Montmartre and up towards the Belgian border in many, many battlefield cemeteries that are part of that landscape of the final phase of the Great War on the Western front but it's not just the wider significance it's a spot that is special to me not just because of the Sussex connection but because one of the veterans that I knew and interviewed Josh Grover MM was there he was one of the Lewis gunners in that attack I met Josh back in the 1980s when he was a prominent member of the Western Front Association I used to bump into him a lot on the battlefields wherever he travelled he wore his original steel helmet with the badge of the Royal Sussex Regiment on it. He'd been transferred into the Royal Sussex by the time of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and had fought through all those different battles that we discussed earlier but awarded the military medal for his bravery and become part of the Lewis gun section of his company and in this attack he went forward with the Lewis gun was about to deploy it but didn't actually fire it on that action and when he got over the canal went to use the weapon on the other side and found that the Germans had struck the Lewis gun with a round so it wouldn't function. The weapon had absorbed the enemy's bullet and essentially had saved his life. He came back to the Sombrae Canal quite a few times in the latter part of his life, and he wrote quite a lot of poetry that was published in the early editions of Stand 2, the journal of the Western Front Association, and one part of one of his poems remembering this action here at lock number one reads, Now we're across, the strong point captured, the crisis over, resistance ceases, the reaper she is it true this eerie silence are we still alive the day is drawing to its close and all objectives carried we rest and clean the lewis gun but had we known we wouldn't have troubled for a bullet meant for one of us was embedded in the barrel we have survived the war is over and we a tale can tell how death the reaper reaped his harvest at the crossing of the Sombre Canal. Josh Grover was also interviewed by the oral historians at the Imperial War Museum and those recordings are now online and I'll put a link to his interviews in the show notes so you can go and listen to those. There's a huge amount of recordings on there now which you can listen to and it's just incredible to have those voices of veterans and for me to hear Josh Grover's voice once more after all these years. But what of lock number one today? It's always good to tell the story of a lesser-known battle and battlefield of the Great War, but we like to visit those battlefields as well. And what can we find when we travel to lock number one in that wider area today? Well, very little, as I mentioned earlier, has changed. And you can follow a path from the village of Régé de Beaulieu. There's a track, a walkway now, that you can follow through the countryside, that kind of dense bocage style hedgerows up to the stream which has now got a modern bridge across it you don't need any sappers to build one for you and that brings you up onto the canal bank and in front of you is the canal and the lock and the control house the lock house itself of lock number one the original building that was there in 1918 And it's almost as if history has stood still. It's got a modern lock, it's got modern equipment here, but nevertheless, this is a place with a lot of atmosphere and you can really picture what the battle was like here more than a century ago on the 4th of November 1918. And I'll put some photographs of what it looks like today, again, onto the podcast website. But whenever I visit, I try to end at the Régé de Beaulieu communal cemetery back in the village where the Sussex and the Sappers and the Kings Royal Rifle Corps lads made their attack from, because here the dead from this action were brought back to this place for burial, burial by their comrades. When I look at the Sussex names in this cemetery, I find South Downs men who joined up at the very beginning of the war and fought at Richborg in that day that Sussex died. I also find some original 2nd Battalion men who'd been out since August 1914 and survived the whole war only to die in their final battle and amongst them the grave of their solitary officer who was killed in that attack, Lieutenant Ernest Stanley Loder of the 2nd Royal Sussex. He was a Londoner who had previously served in the ranks of the Royal Horse Guards on the Western Front in 1917 and was then commissioned in the Royal Sussex Regiment in April 1918 and killed leading his platoon into action. He was typical of platoon commanders of that period of the war having come up through the ranks. And he's another connection for me because I picked up a photograph of him in a London junk shop many, many years ago. There was a part of London that had a lot of junk shops in and one of them was run by a former professional photographer and was full of images. There were boxes and boxes and boxes of images and you could kind of rummage through them and he'd have boxes of portraits, boxes of group photographs and more specialist images. I bought quite a lot of aerial photographs in there over the years And he kind of rated images and almost priced images based on how good they were. So if it was a particularly good image, you always knew you were going to pay a little bit more for it. I mean, they were nothing compared to the kind of prices that these things go for today. But I was able to secure, rescue, whatever we're going to call it, quite a few little treasures, including an original photograph, portrait photograph of Ernest Stanley Loder, who was killed here and buried in this cemetery and died on the 4th of November, 1919. And I'd love having battlefields like this where I have so many of these connections to it. Also laid side by side are the three men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company who died up at the lot while building their tank bridge. These are the final Australian battle casualties on the Western Front on the ground almost a month after the last Australian Corps action at Montbrier. They are themselves, really, a beacon to Australian sacrifice in France and Flanders. That long war on the Western Front for Australia, which cost them more than 45,000 dead. And these three lads buried side by side in this communal cemetery on the most eastern flank of those final battlefields on the fields of France. These are the last diggers to die attacking the enemy. And as we pause in this cemetery, sit perhaps on the cemetery wall and look across the landscape towards the canal, perhaps as the sun is setting over the church of Roger de Beaulieu, it seems a timeless scene, a timeless view in so many ways. Little has changed here since 1918. And here we connect with the past, down less familiar paths, but yet layered, with so many stories and new insights into that final phase of the fighting. And this is what it gives us, our journeys here. There is so often a surprise or two to find as we follow our learning pathway along that eternal old front line. www.oldfrontline.co.uk patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash old front line links to all of these are on our website thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon