North Stafforshire regiment and the breaching of the Hindenburg Line: Sept 29th 1918

I wrote this a few years ago and I wrote it to recognise and act of bravery and valour which was not recognised in the local media. I tried to interest the Sentinel, but they did not print either this or a letter I had written around September 29th 2008.

Why is it important? Well because the events of the late summer and early autumn of 1918 probably represents one of the great achivements of the British Army in which people from North Staffs played a considerable part. Especially so as the Regiment had been adjudged to have failed two years earlier in the Somme campaign. As I say they will be people in Stoke unaware of the major feat of arms in which there great great grandfather was involved.

This area often gets castigated and run down but I thought that this was worthy of a wider acknowledgement and the debt of gratitude that we owe them.

"When we think of the First World War we think of the slaughter of the trenches. We think of the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers who died wastefully in mud and the barbed wire of the Western Front. We think of the incompetence and stupidity of the Generals- a view reinforced in the phrase “Lions led by Donkeys”. This year is the 90th anniversary of the end of the war and perhaps it is time to give an interpretation as it is of a battle fought by the men of North Staffordshire on the 29th September 1918 which helped to bring an end to the war. This battle was not the typical one of bloody stalemate, but to use the words of the regimental war diary, an advance carried out with dash and enterprise using lessons learnt in the 4 years of war.

The storming of the great German defensive barrier- the Hindenburg Line- by men of North and South Staffordshire Regiments goes down as one of the greatest feats of arms carried out by the British Army, described by one military historian as equally to the Battle of Waterloo or Agincourt . The Staffordshire men who won the day did it by crossing a formidable obstacle the canal at San Quentin on a foggy early autumn morning. A journalist for the national newspaper the Observer who was present captures the moment

"The Midlanders- boot makers,miners,laceworkers, potters who had never pretended in their lives to heroism or poetry, or the traditions of a crack regiment went at the canal at San Quentin with mats, rafts, lifebelts, wading, swimming, floating, they crossed the water and stormed over the astonished enemy and clean through the Hindenburg defences. Their days work was the immortal epic of the ordinary man".

But first a recap: The British Army by 1918 had endured much in the previous years of the war. On the first day of the poorly planned Battle of the Somme on the 1st July 1916 there were over 60,000 casualties- the greatest loss ever endured by the Army to be followed by the terrible fight of Passchendale the following year. 1917 also saw the collapse of Russia and the entry into the war of the United States .

The Germans under the command of Field Marshall Luddendorf threw the might of the German Army against the British line on the 21st March 1918 in an attempt to win the war before the Americans arrived in force. The British bent under the weight of the attack but did not break. The following months saw the British along with their colonial and French allies regain the advantage assisted by increasing numbers from the United States
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The Germans were on the retreat but were confident that the Hindenburg Line, a system of concrete and wire fortifications ten miles deep in places, was impregnable. The British commanders knew that it would take many months of hard fighting and huge loss of life to breach these formidable defences. The division chosen to make this impossible attack was the 46th (North Midland) Division comprising of regiments from Leicestershire, Derbyshire and the North and South Staffordshire . Preparations for the assault were taken with great care and preparation as it required a crossing of the deep and wide waterway They practicised for the assault for days carrying 80lb worth of equipment to help them to force a crossing of the canal.
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The assault took place at 5.50am on Sunday 29th September in dense fog which greatly helped the attackers. The assault on the canal was the most dramatic led by the 1/6th North Stafford ’s. They formed up in two lines and fixed bayonets to attack on a 3,500 yard front. Officers used compass bearings to make their way to the bridge and a dash occurred to stop the Germans firing charges to blow the bridge up
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An advanced group of 9 soldiers led by Captain Charlton realized the urgency of the situation attacked a forward machine gun position, killing the crew with bayonets and rushed forward. An NCO shot 4 Germans who tried to blow the bridge and an officer cut the leads of the charges throwing them into the canal.

The whole company stormed forward mopping up the trenches and enemy posts on the banks of the steep canal. By 8.30 am, exactly as laid down by time table, the Stafford ’s had surpassed all their objectives.

The 46th Division captured 4,200 prisoners; it had also captured seventy guns, and made possible the deepest penetration on the whole front some 6,000 yards and with less than 600 casualties.

1000 prisoner were taken when Sergeant Wallace of the North Staffords turned a German artillery piece around and fired at the entrance of a tunnel. The whole event was a phenomenal result.

In the Staffordshire Regimental archive near Lichfield there are a number of mementos of that day. I found the most poignant was a letter in a beautiful copper plate hand written by Sergeant William Adams of Charles St , Cobridge to his wife. The letter which was written over a few days in October 1918 gives a remarkable insight into the activities of the regiment. I would say from the use of the “laddie or lassie” to describe his two children Adams was a Scot or a Geordie. He started his letter with a pleading that he didn’t want his wife to send him anymore peppermint and wanted to pass on his congratulations to Mrs Adkins who has just had a son. He reports what happened to the unit of the North Staffords to which he was attached. On the 28th September the battalion was subject to a strong counter attack by the Germans but the following day they were ready to storm the canal

“We were curious objects for most fellows had a life belt on in addition to his equipment. This was to assist in crossing the canal if anything upset the other means of crossing… there was awful pandemonium as the artillery barrage hit and the fog came on.

He got lost and joined with a trench mortar party where he saw Brunt’s son from Sneyd Street in the leading company who stormed the bridge. They took a large batch of prisoners including a young good looking German about 20 who showed him a photograph of his fiancée and was glad to be out of the war. He gave Adams a meerschaum pipe which unfortunately the Cobridge man accidentally broke.

He talked about crossing the canal and the press coverage the incident received.

“Marvellous piece of work, if the bridge had blown up I don’t know what we would have done. We were very fortunate. To give the idea of the size of the canal take the cutting at Milton near the station, well the sides were as steep and about twice as high. We are taking thousands of troops and lots of troops passed through us and shifted to the German’s right away”

On the Wednesday after the battle Adams and his comrades lined up on the canal and had their photo taken by the Daily Mirror. It is probably one of the most iconic photographs of the First World War perhaps of the 20th century; many of the men from Staffordshire are photographed still wearing the lifebelts that they wore on the day of memorable achievement. They look triumphant and they have every reason to be so.

Adams ended by narrating how he helped a Lieutenant named Hoff from the Machine Gun Corps who was wounded in the shoulder and Adams was applying pressure with a pad. He signs off giving kisses to his wife and “the lambs”.
Back home in Stoke, the Sentinel carried the news of the heroic exploit and in the weeks that followed bought news of victory and advance on a daily basis. But for many families in the area the days bought news of death and loss of the men killed during the last days of September and the first days of October in the attack on the Hindenburg defences. It must have been heart-rending to receive the news that a husband, son or an uncle in the North Staffs and other units of the armed forces had been killed as the prospect of peace increased by the day.

The Sentinel mournfully carried the news of those North Staffords killed in action. Among them Sgt McLynn of Waterloo Rd, Cobridge, Private Carr of Boothenwood Street, Stoke, Corporal George Hales of Nelson St, Fenton, Private James Baddeley of Rose Cottage, Bycars, Burslem. Private Herbert Stevenson of 170 Leek New Rd , Cobridge a former miner from the Sneyd Pit, he had enlisted in 1914 at Hanley Park , his death was reported on the 28th October.

In early November a week before the guns stopped 38 year old Private William Tudor of Sandyford a father of 3 was listed among the dead of the 29th September and, perhaps, most sadly Private Tom Poyser aged 18 of the Post Office, Onecote in the Staffs Moorlands. He had joined illegally at the age of 15 and had escaped from a German Prisoner of War camp to rejoin his regiment.

My grandmothers first husband Harry Cartwright of Milton killed in October 1918 having been through the war from the start. A family story was that he believed that he would not return home because on his last leave he claimed to see the ghost of his mother.

As for William Adams he survived the war and in the Staffordshire Regimental archive there was a Christmas card from him to his wife in Cobridge.

Why is it important to record this event 90 years ago? This was, as the Observer reported, an event of heroic proportions carried out by ordinary men from this part of the country, an incident that had a major bearing on the outcome of the war and the history of Europe subsequently through the century. North Staffordshire has had its detractors, but I believe that we should pay tribute to these unassuming men, the descendents of which still live in the area and are probably unaware of the great deed of valour carried out by their ancestors. For although no one realised it at the time, that morning Germany had lost the war and under accumulated strain the German Field Marshall Luddendorf’s nerve cracked and overtures toward peace began.

The tragedy of this event is that it was the soldiers that won the war and the short sighted actions of politicians who subsequently lost the peace.