1917: the most terrible year in Australia’s history
A century after the horror of the trenches and the turmoil at home, Australians are largely ignorant of the most terrible year in their country’s history.
The year 1917 was the worst of the war for Australia—it saw the greatest casualties of any year, escalating domestic rancour, the longest strike, a bedrock war-weariness and the defeat of the second conscription referendum. It is the most damaging and destructive single year in Australia’s national history.
The scale of death, tragedy and family bereavement is almost beyond comprehension. Yet what is truly shameful today is the lack of contemporary awareness, appreciation and high-profile historical focus in this centenary year on the sacrifice of this terrible year, without precedent in our history.
In 1917 almost 77,000 Australians were killed, wounded or missing on the Western Front—twice the number of casualties in France in 1916 and close to three times that of the Gallipoli campaign; the 22,000 Australian deaths in 1917 amounted to a third of all Australian losses during the war.
Historian Joan Beaumont counts the cost of these casualties in her book Broken Nation. “What made these losses so terrible was not just their scale but the fact that they occurred three years into the war and seemed to advance the Allied Powers’ cause very little,” she writes.
READ MORE: The Great War, Part Three: The Darkest Days
The names of Bullecourt, Messines, Passchendaele and Polygon Wood are sanctified in the great altar of the Australian War Memorial—an unmatched icon of commemoration—yet they remain largely unknown to a people ignorant not only of their history but of the most profound human tragedies and losses of life in that history.
How can this be for a country that pretends to virtue and honour? It is the moral chasm forever at the heart of Australian life.
For the allies, 1917 opened with false optimism and closed with deceptive gloom. On the grander historical canvas, however, 1917 has another epic meaning. It is one of those rare years that transformed the world, shattering the ideological and strategic norms. It is the moment when the 20th century came leaping into existence, as America joined the war bringing its power and democracy to bear on the old world and the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia, unleashing in their communist tyranny the most pervasive and sinister force of the century.
The dominant 20th-century struggle between US-led democratic values and Soviet-led communist organisation was seeded in this year.
Under the ultimate pressure, the war antagonists now revealed their true nature—in Germany the military titans, in the form of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, took effective control of the country, turning Germany into an ugly military state and total war economy. Food shortages in major cities were already sowing the seeds for a revolutionary backlash within two years.
In Britain and France there was renewed resolve to fight and mobilise the entire civilian economy with David Lloyd George, a “man of the people” coming to office in London. The peace movements were held in check since the military status quo – Germany occupying Belgium and northeast France – was an intolerable situation that only drove Britain and France into the quest to wage war more effectively.
The military stalemate from the previous year saw the Germans in early 1917 embark upon one of the greatest gambles of the war: unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic to destroy Britain’s supply lines, ruin industries, provoke mass unrest and force the allies into peace from weakness. This decision was high risk—it would antagonise the US and possibly lead America into the war. Indeed, Germany assumed this was likely but its statistics showed Britain could survive a full blockade for only six months, regardless of US entry. This gamble for quick victory betrayed the extent of German vulnerability against the allied powers in a war of full national industrialisation.
At this point Britain, contrary to the subsequent 20th-century narrative, was not America’s natural ally. Until the end of 1916 the dominant American sentiment had been to stay out of the war. Re-elected Democrat Party president Woodrow Wilson sought peace terms from both belligerents: the allies seeking liberation from German occupation, while the Germans lodged a series of demands so extreme that peace was never a viable option and, despite the mass casualties, both sides were determined to fight.
In a famous act of folly Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, cabled the Mexican government seeking an alliance against the US and envisaged Mexican raids across the border. British historian Michael Howard said the reaction in the US “especially in the hitherto isolationist west was cataclysmic” and “it took only a few more sinkings” before Wilson asked Congress in April 1917 to declare war.
With this declaration Wilson, an idealistic, naïve, self-righteous visionary, brought to the world the idea of American Exceptionalism. The president announced that a war, essentially about power politics and national interest, would be a crusade “for democracy” and for the universal rights of free peoples. His ambition was moral—a transformed global order inspired by US values.
Wilson came as a prophet to sweep into the dustbin of history the sordid world of European rivalries and balance-of-power politics. The critics who say WWI had no purpose have forgotten about Wilson, who vested it with an ideological purpose that would resonate for a century.
The irony, meanwhile, is that events on the Eastern Front were swinging to Germany’s immense advantage. War pressures reduced each combatant to its essence—and Russia, a sprawling but over-rated power, now collapsed. Food shortages, unrest in the army and spiralling inflation created a revolutionary situation.
In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending the 300-year Romanov dynasty with a weak provisional government coming to power, still pledged to the war effort.
Verifying the truth that in a revolutionary situation the extremists eventually prevail, the Bolshevik faction staged a coup d’état on November 7 under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. The German command had assisted Lenin to return secretly to Russia in a sealed railway car.
Lenin’s cause was the dictatorship of the proletariat; his enemy was liberal democracy. He promised bread, land and peace. He immediately withdrew Russia from the war, allowing the Germans to reinforce the Western Front.
In July 1918 the deposed Tsar was executed by the Bolsheviks along with his entire family and children, some shot and others stabbed to death. Lenin’s victory was a permanent threat to the allies at another level: he stood for global class solidarity, repudiating the war and the nationalism and national-interest imperatives that drove the conflict. In every allied country the chilling call for a workers’ revolution had to be managed and contained.
In his history of the war Winston Churchill called the three events—the German resort to unlimited submarine warfare, the intervention of the US and the Russian Revolution—as constituting “the second great climax of the war”. Churchill said the sequence was decisive. If the allies had been left to face the collapse of Russia without the intervention of America then “it seems certain that France could not have survived the year and the war would have ended in a peace by negotiation or, in other words, a German victory”. In short, had Germany refrained from its submarine warfare decision at the time, there would have been no US intervention and the entire course of the war would have been transformed against the allies.
The Australian home front of early 1917 had witnessed far-reaching events—the restructuring of politics that would dominate not just the rest of the war period but the decade of the 1920s. The key figure was Billy Hughes, the fiery and passionate Australian patriot and Empire loyalist, standing only 168cm, who now performed the most adroit and brazen reinvention of a prime ministership in the nation’s history.
Within a few months Hughes transitioned from being a Labor to a Nationalist or non-Labor prime minister in a show of defiance, manipulation and persuasion rarely matched before or since.
Having lost the referendum for conscription in October 1916 and facing a ‘no confidence’ motion, Hughes had walked out of the Labor caucus room, taking with him the best of the Federation generation that had shaped the pre-war ALP and leaving behind him a state of confusion and blue tobacco smoke.
Labor embraced the split with a French vindictiveness and expelled all MPs who had supported conscription. The breach was irrevocable.
Determined to keep power, Hughes at once selected a new ministry from his minority band of followers, called their party the National Labor Party, assumed he would have the support of the Opposition—the Liberals under the leadership of Joseph Cook—and went off to advise the governor-general, who commissioned the minority Hughes government. Hughes was walking a political tightrope and such an arrangement, obviously, could not last long.
At first Hughes dreamt of forming a new Labor Party but this was never a realistic proposition, since he had no organisational base. When parliament resumed in late 2016 Hughes faced two oppositions, the Labor Party and the Liberals who would offer him “discriminating support” for a time. Hughes said his priority objective was the war strategy. Meanwhile efforts were mounted in Melbourne by a range of figures who had backed the conscription referendum to bring the parties of Hughes and Cook together.
At first Hughes resisted, but the logic was irresistible. At the second meeting to discuss the idea he promptly announced “we all seem to be agreed” and packed his cumbersome hearing aid into its box and walked out of the room. A long series of negotiations marked the early months of 1917 with an impatient Hughes soon declaring: “Funk is fatal. Action is necessary and at once.” The prime ministership was in play as two parties who had fought each other for years negotiated a merger.
In the end the Liberals reluctantly recognised that Hughes, unrivalled as a war leader, must remain in the top slot. Hughes had to concede six out of 11 cabinet places to the Liberals. The new Nationalist government was sworn on February 17, 1917. It was the third Hughes ministry under a different party banner: Labor, then National Labor and finally Nationalist.
The chief motivating force for the re-alignment was the “win-the-war” commitment within the political system and public. The Labor Party had the option of joining this broad coalition, but declined. While Hughes would cross any road for self-interest, his passion as war leader was unshakeable—he was determined to maximise Australia’s effort on behalf of the British race and empire.
But in April/May the AIF took huge casualties of more than 10,000 in the two battles of Bullecourt on the Western Front that stained Australian-British military links, shattered any delusions about an early end to the fighting and put the AIF onto a trajectory that would lead to a second conscription referendum at year’s end.
British commander Douglas Haig launched an assault on the German defences in April 1917 that involved the 4th Australian division in an ambitious operation seizing a section of the Hindenburg Line near Bullecourt. The execution was a chapter of mishaps with British lieutenant-general Sir Hubert Gough insisting on an attack with last-minute operational changes against the advice of the commanders of the Australian forces, generals William Birdwood and Brudenell White. A reluctant Birdwood authorised the attack having being told Haig wanted it.
With the inadequate effort from promised tank support the infantry was exposed—it was caught in thick wire with Private Wilfred Gallwey saying men “dropped in the middle of the wire and hung there like scarecrows wounded and helpless only to be riddled”. Corporal George Mitchell said: “Men were dropping like flies. No one yelled. The human voice was too insignificant a thing there.” The Australians reached the German trenches but had to retreat.
In less than 24 hours the 4th Division lost 3500 men and 1164 Australians were taken prisoner—the largest number in any action of the war. The men blamed the British. Britain’s official war historian heavily criticised Gough, as did the official Australian historian, Charles Bean. But Joan Beaumont said Birdwood and White had failed to stand up to Gough.
The French now began to buckle. A division refused to cross the line. Within days dissension, mutiny and unrest had infected half the French army. In 44 divisions soldiers rioted, shouted revolutionary slogans and vented hostility towards their leaders. It was a moment of crisis. If the French army had disintegrated the British might have faced the choice of strategic retreat across the channel with Germany taking Belgium and France. The crisis was contained with the appointment of Marshal Philippe Pétain as chief of staff, although more than 600 mutineers were sentenced to death.
With the French needing support, the British tried again to take Bullecourt, this time with the 2nd Australian Division in a prominent role. In fighting that one German general called more bitter than on the Somme, the 1st division replaced the 2nd and both were then replaced by the 5th. The Australians and British took Bullecourt, reduced to rubble, with Haig sending a message saying “it will rank high among the great deeds of the war.” In the past generation Bullecourt has become a focus of Anzac commemoration. It features a museum and an Anzac Day ceremony is conducted each year.
The plans of Hughes and defence minister George Pearce to create a sixth Australian division were now abandoned, since reinforcing the existing five divisions would be an immense task given slow recruitment rates. Hughes, meanwhile, was preoccupied with his latest domestic challenge—the general election of May 5.
In his opening speech Hughes said: “We stand for the Empire because in no other way can we stand for Australia.” He ran on the “win-the-war” platform, but the Hughes view of the nation had grown paranoid. In a secret cable through Keith Murdoch to Lloyd George he offered a view of the country alarming in its own right and alarming about the mind of its leader:
“Election promises to be the most bitter on record. The struggle is between outside labor executives composed of at least 75 per cent Irish who now control industrial and political labor organisations and the rest of the community who are unorganised. Syndicalism and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) are, of course, rampant in executives but real strength behind them is the Church … Australian recruiting is practically at a standstill. Irish National Executive here has carried resolutions to effect that until Home Rule granted no Irish Catholics shall join forces … If other side win as they may (possibly?) do, effect on Empire disastrous.”
The pivotal campaign question was whether the national anti-conscription vote of 1916 would carry over into an anti-Hughes vote at the election. Hughes took a calculated position on conscription: his government accepted the people’s verdict if, however, “national safety demands it, the question will again be referred to the people.”
Hughes said Labor was unfit to lead in the war and had been captured by a “narrow-minded disloyal section.” The leading Catholic figure, Bishop Daniel Mannix, campaigned against the government saying a vote for Hughes was a vote for conscription. Hughes insisted conscription was not an election issue. Eventually he said the government was not seeking any pretext and would only put the question to the people once again “if the tide of battle which flows strongly for the allies turns against them”.
His biographer, L F Fitzhardinge, said the energy Hughes put into the campaign was “phenomenal even for him” and suggested it was almost as if “he was trying to recover some of the atmosphere of those far-off days in the early nineties when he was organising the little towns of the central west of New South Wales for the Labor Party.”
His victory was stunning. In the House of Representatives Hughes commanded 53 seats to Labor’s 22. In the Senate all 18 vacancies were won by Nationalist candidates. The vote proved while the public had opposed conscription—just—it backed the war strongly. Yet for Hughes there was a shadow across this victory. Fitzhardinge said: “Cut off from his political, social and even geographic roots, expelled by the party and the union which had been such a large part of his life, distrusted by his new supporters, he never, for all the public triumphs, regained the authority and confidence of his early days.”
That said, Hughes was the singular outstanding figure to run the war effort. That was widely recognised even by many of his critics. This status testified to the weakness of the non-Labor side of politics that reluctantly bowed before Hughes as its wartime leader. The day before the new parliamentary session opened the two governing parties formally merged to form the Nationalist Party.
In July Hughes wrote to Murdoch saying the “great party” recently brought into being was “showing no signs of disintegration.” In fact, the Nationalists would govern Australia for the next 12 years. Hughes, having governed as a Labor leader, now governed as leader of the conservatives, an event made possible only because of the war.
With France weakened, the balance of allied power had shifted to Britain and Haig’s plan for the second half of 1917 was for Britain to remain on the offensive with a fresh campaign based on Flanders in Belgium. Known as Third Ypres, it ended in November 1917 among mud and bog-laden ground—where some soldiers drowned in mud—with the final taking of the town of Passchendaele, then reduced to a ruin. The Germans were keen to pay a high price to maintain their occupation of Belgium.
An early engagement featuring the Australians was an attack on the Messines ridge. This also featured the British and then Australian tunnelling operation at Hill 60—the subject of a 2010 film—that produced a thunderous explosion supposedly killing some 10,000 Germans. Haig’s Third Ypres offensive was launched on July 31and was plagued by continuous rainfall. All five Australian divisions participated in the terrible struggle.
The 1st and 2nd Australian divisions were involved from September 20, achieving for high casualties what general Pompey Elliott called a “glorious advance”. The 4th and 5th divisions were brought forward for the successful attack at Polygon Wood, now a magnificent location and site of the 5th division memorial. Yet each success only drove Haig to unrealistic hopes. In early October the Australians were prominent in the attack at Broodseinde ridge, another success for huge losses.
‘Australian interests are suffering badly and Australia is not getting anything like the recognition it deserves’
~ John Monash ~
Beaumont said had Haig “stopped in early October 1917 Third Ypres might have been remembered as one of his greatest achievements”. But Haig pressed ahead and the British War Cabinet allowed him. The attack on Passchendaele ridge came when the ground was reduced to bog and lakes. Many troops said the mud was worse than the enemy. When his initial attacks failed, Haig ordered more and more attacks. The conditions were impossible, the casualties immense, the progress incremental, until the Canadians finally took the town.
As John Monash, then commander of the Australian 3rd Division, wrote to his wife: “Our men are being put into the hottest fighting and are being sacrificed in hare-brained schemes like Bullecourt and Passchendaele and there is no one in War Cabinet to lift a voice in protest. Australian interests are suffering badly and Australia is not getting anything like the recognition it deserves.”
The Germans had not collapsed and Belgium had not been liberated. The British had lost 250,000 men. In eight weeks the Australians had suffered 38,000 casualties, far more than at Pozières or Gallipoli. Military historian Peter Pedersen quoted the great British war historian, John Keegan, on Haig: “On the Somme he had sent the flower of British youth to death or mutilation; at Passchendaele he had slipped the survivors into the slough of despond.” Haig said the Australians were disciplined troops “because when they are ordered to attack, they always do so”. Beaumont said it seemed “the situation for the Allies was less favourable at the end of Third Ypres” than at the start of 1917. At home tensions reached a boiling point.
In August 1917 the eastern states had seen an outbreak of industrial warfare, the worst since Federation. The origin of the strike was inconsequential. But it lasted 82 days and involved 97,000 workers, paralysing transport and industry in NSW. War weariness and high prices were catalysts and Hughes became convinced it was a sinister conspiracy of disloyal extremists. He raged against the Catholic Church, the IWW and Mannix. Punitive powers were invoked as the nation became more polarised and the unions were crushed. In this climate and against the casualties of Passchendaele, like a Shakespearean tragedy, Hughes was driven to put conscription back to the people.
The omens were grim. Recruitment was weak, casualties were extremely high. By October it was clear the voluntary system could not raise the numbers needed to maintain the Australian divisions. There were still 140,000 fit single men and 280,000 married men who had not volunteered. All other allied nations had conscription. Hughes had dreaded this moment; he had hoped for an allied victory or a recruitment revival. Neither had eventuated. And Hughes was under pressure from his new party—the pro-conscription Nationalist power base.
The campaign was more personal and malevolent than in the previous year. Rationality played little role; ideology and claims of treachery prevailed. Historian Patrick O’Farrell said Mannix’s loyalties were in this order: “Catholicism, Ireland, Australia, the Empire and Britain.” The archbishop fed the Catholic sense of injustice. Dying in 1963, he outlived Hughes by 11 years. Hughes campaigned with a gun in his pocket. The target of an egg-throwing event and melee in Queensland, Hughes went for retaliation and created the Commonwealth Police Force. A sympathetic governor-general, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, complained of the Hughes temper, saying: “He shoulders the whole campaign, sought little advice, was too aggressive.” The campaign ended in ignominious hysteria.
The December 20, 1917 vote saw the ‘No’ margin increase slightly on the previous year: 1,181,747 to 1,015,159 who voted ‘Yes’. NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia rejected conscription. The AIF voted for conscription but the margin was tight: 103,789 to 93,910 votes. Australia would remain a volunteer war power. The anti-conscription mythology would enter the national culture.
For Hughes, the defeat was emotional, psychological and personal. It was also something more—a threat to his leadership. Hughes had created a huge political problem for himself, declaring in the campaign: “I tell you plainly that the government must have this power, it cannot govern the country without it and will not attempt to do so.” The cry now went up from Labor and sections of the Nationalists: Hughes must resign, he must honour his pledge.
The party sank into prolonged turmoil, tempted to execute a leader not from its own political loins. A complex drama was played out. The result was not unexpected: Hughes survived, yet again. The governor-general wrote that “in courage, genius and energy he stands alone”. Hughes would lead the nation throughout the war and into the peace.
So Australia’s most tragic year of war, death and turmoil came to its unsatisfactory conclusion. The story was too much sacrifice for too little gain—but that overlooks the then unknown triumph that 1918 would bring. The second Anzac Day in 1917 had been a conspicuous and spontaneous event of national commemoration. The nation’s sense of itself was taking form.
The perspective a century later, however, remains unsatisfactory: for most Australians this story of 1917 is lost, either forgotten or never taught.
It is the product of a nation unaware of the scale, location or purpose of the greatest sacrifice in its history, unaware of itself, testifying to an incomplete nation.
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