The Great War: Armistice at 11 o’clock
On November 11, 1918, after almost 1600 days of continuous warfare in France and Belgium, conflict ceased on the Western Front.
At 11 o’clock in the morning on November 11, 1918, after almost 1600 days of continuous warfare in France and Belgium, conflict ceased on the Western Front. The cessation of hostilities marked the culmination of “the hundred days” of battle during which the Allies had driven the German army back, inflicting one defeat after another upon it, until finally the German military leaders called for an armistice. They accepted Allied terms virtually amounting to unconditional surrender.
Reactions to the Armistice varied along the 760km of the Western Front. At two minutes before 11, a British machine-gunner on the Fourth Army front blazed away a complete belt of ammunition continuously, then stood up, took off his helmet, bowed and walked slowly to the rear.
Some American artillery units also used the Armistice as an opportunity to fire off their last bombardment at the enemy and expend all their ammunition stocks. Others contested ground to the last minute in order to be in the most favourable strategic position in case the armistice failed. Some even moved forward, preparing for combat and oblivious to the orders to cease fire.
All fraternisation across No Man’s Land was forbidden, but in most areas the Germans withdrew before the eleventh hour.
The end of the war found six and a half million men in the Allied armies on the Western Front, more than four million of them combatants. The British Expeditionary Force contained 56 divisions and covered a front of some 100km in France and Belgium. Within these massive armies, the five divisions of the Australian Corps, then totalling fewer than 100,000 soldiers, was a minuscule, though vital, component. By the last months of the war the Australian Corps had gained a reputation as one of the elite fighting formations in the BEF. The Australian divisions had played a pivotal role as spearhead troops in many of the battles that led to the German surrender. In their final battles of the war they had helped to breach the formidable German defences of the Hindenburg Line.
But their sustained advance had taken a heavy toll. The Australian Corps suffered almost 35,000 casualties, including more than 7000 dead, in their final four months’ fighting from June 1 to October 5. Eleven of the 60 Australian infantry battalions were disbanded in 1918 due to lack of reinforcements, following the failure of the Australian government’s campaign to introduce conscription in December 1917. More disbandments would have followed if the war had continued, as many battalions were reduced to fewer than 100 men and none could muster more than a quarter of their full number. With Australian battalions going into battles only 150 strong, there was a growing feeling that unless rested, the Australian Corps could cease to exist.
The Australian infantry battalions were withdrawn from the front line by October 5 and sent to Abbeville for rest and refitting. Only support units remained fighting with the advancing armies up to November 11. Australian divisional artillery and trench mortar batteries, along with four Australian air squadrons, continued to support the advancing British Fourth Army’s attacks on the retreating German army right up to the Armistice.
Australian salvage companies, sappers and tunnellers also worked in the forward areas, repairing damaged bridges, and disarming and disposing of hundreds of delayed-action mines and booby traps left behind by the Germans during their retreat. Three men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company were killed and five wounded while constructing a tank bridge over the Sambre-Oise Canal near Le Cateau, a week before the Armistice. They were among the last Australian battle casualties of the war.
The Australian divisions began their return to the front on November 5, one month after their withdrawal. By November 11, the 1st and 4th Australian Divisions began to move back up to take over part of the British line beyond Le Cateau. But they were delayed by demolished bridges and junctions and few Australian troops were at the front when the Armistice was announced.
The enthusiasm of celebrations tended to increase with distance from the front
Official historian Charles Bean wrote that most Australian soldiers were too stunned or emotionally drained to celebrate the news. Many displayed only slight or unenthusiastic reactions. Typical was Private T.J. Cleary of the 17th Australian Battalion, who laconically wrote in his diary:
The day of days. We had two victory’s today. We won the War and defeated the 5th Field Company at Soccer. The news of the Armistice was taken very coolly ... nobody seemed to be able to realise it.
But there were also joyful responses among the Australian units in France. The enthusiasm of Australian celebrations tended to increase with distance from the front line. Gunner Charles Rea of the 17th Battery, Australian Field Artillery recorded in his diary: “The result came out about 10am and we went into Amiens and had a good time. Everyone went mad.” Captain Keith Doig, MC, a medical officer with the 60th Battalion and 8th Field Ambulance, wrote to his fiancée describing his unit’s celebrations in Rouen:
We went quite mad. We cheered and we sang and we went into Rouen. And what a sight it was. Rouen had come out en masse and the streets were nothing but a seething happy mass of all sorts of people - civilians, Tommies, Jocks, Diggers [Australians], Canadians, Indians etc. - all waving flags, singing, cheering, dancing, kissing. All restraint was thrown off and the people went wild with joy and happiness. Wine flowed freely ... and in the middle of all the crowd was an Australian band playing ‘Australia will be there’.
Private Alfred Binskin of the 20th Battalion described his part in joyful celebrations in the town of Vignacourt where his unit was billeted:
An Armastice signed great fun with French people, a mate and I went to the Church and climed up to the steple, and hoisted the French and Australian flags, there were over 1,000 Australians around the church at the time all the 5 Brigade, the band played the National Anthem, and god save the king.
Gunner Kenneth Downes of the Australian 105th Howitzer Battery described to his mother how his unit had been marching through Péronne on November 11 as the Armistice was announced and “all the train whistles blew, and kept blowing for about a quarter of an hour, you never heard such an awful row in all your life”. He added, “You don’t know how pleased we are at being out of the fighting at last, thank God”. Corporal Robert Addison, MM, of 46th Battery, Australian Field Artillery, recorded in his diary from Péronne, “Tonight flares and rockets are going up and whistles are shreiking all over the place”. But Gunner Alexander MacKay of the 8th Brigade Australian Field Artillery ruefully noted that as his unit was in a deserted village, they could not “even buy a bottle of soda water to celebrate the joyful news ... Cheers are floating round the camp just as well we are not near an inhabited city they would run amuk with joy”.
Some Australian troops did indeed run amok, and their behaviour in the rear areas strained the tolerance of both military and civil authorities. There were more than 60,000 Australians in hospitals, training camps and depots in the UK. Some soldiers’ actions during the Armistice celebrations in London reinforced the Australians’ reputation for rowdy hooliganism. As the rejoicing in London continued into the evening of November 12, Dominion soldiers ransacked bus signs and road dumps for timber and at around midnight built bonfires at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. The huge blaze left scars on the monument that were visible for decades.
Charles Bean wrote that most australian soldiers were too stunned or emotionally drained to celebrate the news
With the Armistice came the problems of demobilising the huge armies still in the field. This presented particular difficulties for the Australian government, whose troops were serving at great distances from Australia in the main theatres. One fortunate group had already begun their passage home a month or more before the Armistice. In September 1918 “Anzac Leave”, consisting of two months’ special furlough in Australia, was granted to the “originals”, those Australian troops who had left Australia in 1914. The first contingent of 800 men were withdrawn from their units on the eve of a major attack on the Hindenburg Line and left the Western Front battlefields on September 14. Their departure left some units seriously depleted for combat. Over the following weeks some 6000 “originals” left on home leave to Australia. For them, the war would be over before their leave expired.
Many of these returning soldiers first heard of the Armistice while on board troopships at sea. One young signaller on “Anzac leave” celebrated his 22nd birthday and the Armistice on the same day, “somewhere in the Indian Ocean”. He had enlisted in Sydney in September 1914 at the age of 17. At 18 he took part in the landing on Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. By his 19th birthday he was a veteran of the Gallipoli campaign and at 21 he fought in the decisive battles that halted the German advance at Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918. On November 11, 1918 he was sailing for home, having survived four long years of war. At the time of his death on December 10, 1997, aged 101, Signaller Ted Matthews was Australia’s last surviving “original Anzac” who took part in the landing on Gallipoli.
The remaining 200,000 Australians still overseas at the time of the Armistice became the concern of Lieutenant-General John Monash, who was appointed Director-General of Repatriation and Demobilisation. Despite the shortage of shipping for the long journey to Australia, a steady stream of embarkations was departing for Australia within a month of the Armistice.
Initial planning indicated that it would take 18 months to transport all the Australians home but, through masterful staff work, most had embarked within eight months and the task was virtually completed within a year. The repatriation process required about 200 voyages in 137 different ships. By the end of 1919 more than 177,000 soldiers, munitions workers, war workers and their families had embarked for Australia from the main theatres.
While the quotas of troops were selected and transported home, there remained the problem of occupying fighting troops now idle in the field or languishing in camps and depots. For now that the war was over, the soldiers had changed expectations. Most simply wanted to return home without delay and resume their civilian lives. Many soldiers, who had enlisted only for the duration, were in no mood to carry on at regular soldiering. Attempts to involve men in an AIF vocational education scheme were only partially successful, although several thousand men took the opportunity to learn new skills and trades for civilian employment.
Corporal Robert Addison of the 46th Battery, Australian Field Artillery, wrote in his diary a week after the Armistice, “we have done nothing but feed the horses and play football ... This morning however, they had all the gunners on rifle drill, but we had the evening off”. He added, almost in passing, “We had a strike today over food”. In early December, Captain Daniel S. Aarons, MC and Bar, of the 16th Battalion, also recorded a strike in the 16th and 15th Battalions, who refused to parade or make route marches “on account of our shortage of rations. [He noted] …. men are getting too little to do .… A lot of trouble is in store for us—due to Red Rag socialists”. His remarks reflected a popular concern that there could be agents of Bolshevik subversion among the returning soldiers.
One month after the Armistice, Lieutenant Keith Probert of the 5th Pioneer Battalion was despondent as he recorded that his days now began with “Brekker in bed”, and consisted of little more than playing cards and the occasional sports afternoon: “Gee this life is monotonous. Wish we could visit some decent places and take some interest in things. As it is we have nothing to do and so get lazy.” The longer this inactivity persisted, especially through the winter of 1918-1919, the more disaffected Australian soldiers became.
Even the prospect of moving to Germany as an occupation force failed to appeal to most Australian soldiers. Driver John Turnbull of the Divisional Ammunition Column wrote, “The Troops are not too keen on being kept on as Occupation Troops. It may be an Honor, as the Heads try to impress on us, but it is Australia we are looking for”. Gunner Charles Rea, 17th Battery Australian Field Artillery, wrote home three weeks after the Armistice:
We seem lost without the war. When it was on we always had something to occupy our minds, but now it is different . . . we seem to be living another life . . . We are still in Amiens and having a good time but we seem to be discontented. I think that we must all be homesick, for nothing seems to satisfy us.
Many veterans remained unsettled by the experience of war service long after coming home. A former bushman, Signaller Bill Harney, who had seen more than his share of the horrors of war while serving with the 9th Battalion in France, went straight back to his civilian life on being demobilised and never claimed his service medals. “I rode 800 miles ... to forget about it all,” he later recalled. “I’d never crack on that I’d been to the wars. I was somehow or another ashamed of the war.”
Other returned soldiers harboured a nostalgia for the intensity and comradeship of their days in the AIF. In 1919, an Australian “returned” soldier, Harry Smith, wrote from Lower Burdekin, North Queensland, to his former comrade Private George Isbister of the 41st: “I like to get your letters George, it seems good to go back on the old soldier talk and all our experiences. At times the place here seems dead, and I would give anything to be arousing the boys again, but no boxing on for me … When I think of those days George, I often think we were happy, and didn’t know it.”
The social effects of the war were profound and enduring in Australia. From a total population of fewere than five million people, nearly 417,000 men, almost half the eligible male population, enlisted and more than 330,000 of them embarked for service overseas. Almost two-thirds of those who served abroad became casualties, the AIF having the highest proportion of battle casualties of all the forces of the British Empire. About 60,000, or one in five of those who served abroad, died on active service. Of the 270,000 who returned, about 156,000 had suffered some sort of wound.
Together with the loss of those who died and the devastation to the living, the war left a legacy of sorrow. Thousands of families were left with only the memories of men who should have returned from the war as husbands, fathers and sons. Many grieving women never remarried. War-damaged veterans were a visible reminder of the war throughout the inter-war years. By 1920, two years after the Armistice, more than 90,000 veterans—about one third of Australia’s over 270,000 “returned men”—were receiving disability pensions; by 1926, almost 23,000 were in hospital and by 1939 this number had grown to almost 50,000.
In time, the Great War receded in Australian popular memory. The only conspicuous evidence of its impact remained in the war memorials that were raised in every city and in country towns all over the nation. Personal grief and civic pride mingled in this impulse to commemorate Australia’s soldiers in stone and bronze.
The memorials provided a symbolic reminder of the official justification and meaning for the war; and many small town memorials also offered families and communities a focus for their grief as “substitute graves”, and a means of keeping alive the memories of their loved ones who remained buried on the other side of the world. But the memory of the Armistice of November 1918 slowly faded in Australia.
The significance of that event in Australia’s past was symbolically revived on November 11, 1993. On that day, 75 years after the Armistice of 1918, an unknown Australian soldier exhumed from the soil of the Western Front was ceremonially entombed with full military honours in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Ashley Ekins is head of the Military History Section at the Australian War Memorial.
