sent up. My Medical Officer is far too busy at station and is completely exhausted. Will you manage his relief together with ours as soon as possible. So far the brigade have held on but I feel the strain is becoming too much so trust some special effort may be made …
On 20 July, the 9th Division, of which the South Africans formed part, was relieved by soldiers of the 3rd Division following another desperate note from Thackeray to Brigadier General Henry Timson Lukin, the commanding officer of the South African Brigade. Private Harry Cooper (3rd Battalion, C Company) had been detailed to take the written order to brigade headquarters. By now Delville Wood was looking like a ploughed-up field: “Off I went like a rabbit,” recalled Cooper, “through the village … dead everywhere looking at you with sightless eyes and the smell made me feel bad. I found my way. I faced the general, gave him the compliments of Colonel Thackeray and gave him the note. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and asked me to tell him something about his men in the wood. All the time he was exclaiming: ‘My men, my poor men’.”
The note he had taken to General Lukin read: “Urgent. My men are on their last legs. I cannot keep some of them awake. They drop with their rifles in their hands and sleep in spite of heavy shelling. We are expecting an attack. Even that cannot keep some of them from dropping down. Food and water has not reached us for two days. Please relieve these men today without fail, as I fear they have come to the end of their endurance.”
When the South African units were relieved, at 16h15 on 20 July, only 143 men walked out of Delville Wood unscathed. The South Africans had hung on in the face of the German attacks, but at a tremendous cost. Major Frank Heal (1st Battalion HQ) wrote in a letter home that “it has been an awful time, but by heaven we’re proud of them all. South Africa will never know what those men did for her; no one who was not there can ever realise it; no imagination under the sun can ever grasp that awful hell.” Major Heal was later promoted to lieutenant colonel, and was killed at Marrieres Wood in March 1918.
The South Africans suffered over 2 000 casualties at Delville Wood. Of these, 662 men had been killed and 104 more were to die of their wounds. Thackeray led just 140 men and two remaining officers, Lieutenant Edward Phillips and Second Lieutenant Garnet Green, out of “Devil’s Wood”, both of whom, like him, had been wounded. The South African Brigade had entered the wood with 121 officers and 3 032 other ranks. On 21 July, the survivors paraded before General Lukin, a tough veteran of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. He looked at his shattered brigade, bared his head and the tears trickled down his cheeks. “You see,” he said afterwards, “I know the fathers and mothers of those lads. I feel responsible for them to their parents.”
Enemy artillery fire, which had reached rates exceeding 400 shells per minute, coupled with incessant rain, had reduced the landscape to mud, water, shell holes and broken tree stumps. The remains of 538 South Africans lie in unmarked graves in the wood and are commemorated along with 72 089 others on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing.
Delville Wood eluded capture until 27 August, but not until it had been a killing field for both the Allies and Germans. It was only secured from German counterattacks and shelling by 3 September. The 9th (Scottish) Division (part of XIII Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Walter Congreve VC) suffered casualties of 314 officers and 7 203 other ranks in the first three weeks of July. On the other side, the German defending unit numbered just 10 officers and 250 other ranks out of 2 700 all ranks.
The South African Infantry Brigade continued to serve on the Western Front, suffering more than 4 000 fatal casualties and winning two Victoria Crosses: Private WF Faulds at Delville Wood, and Lance Corporal WH Hewitt at Ypres. Four South Africans earned recommendations for the VC at Delville Wood: Colonel Thackeray, Lieutenant Walter Hill, Sergeant John Naisby and Private William Frederick Faulds. All apart from Faulds were turned down, Thackeray receiving the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), Hill a “Mentioned in Dispatches”, and Naisby the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM). The citation for Faulds reads:
For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty. A bombing party under Lieutenant Craig attempted to rush over 40 yards of ground which lay between the British and enemy trenches. Coming under very heavy rifle- and machine-gun fire, the officer and the majority of the party were killed or wounded. Unable to move, Lt Craig lay midway between the two lines of trench, the ground being quite open. In full daylight Private Faulds, accompanied by two other men, climbed over the parapet, ran out, picked up the officer and carried him back, one man being severely wounded in so doing. Two days later Private Faulds again showed most conspicuous bravery in going out alone to bring in a wounded man, and carried him nearly half a mile to a dressing station, subsequently rejoining his platoon. The artillery fire was at the time so intense that stretcher bearers and others considered that any attempt to bring in the wounded man meant certain death. This risk Private Faulds faced unflinchingly, and his bravery was crowned with success.
The VC was gazetted on 9 September 1916. Faulds, who was promoted to lieutenant in May 1917, was taken prisoner in the battle for Marrieres Wood in March 1918. After the war, he returned to Kimberley but later moved to Bulawayo. He served in Abyssinia in the Second World War with the rank of captain, and died in Salisbury, Rhodesia, in August 1950. Private Bill Hewitt, who fought at Delville Wood, was wounded later at Warlencourt and at Ypres where, on 20 September 1917, he earned the VC. He returned to South African to farm in Natal and Kenya, and served as a major in the Second World War.
Only one tree in Delville Wood survived the battle. Ian Uys writes that “when a metal detector is placed against its gnarled and twisted trunk, it indicates that the tree is riddled with shrapnel, shell splinter and bullets.”
Private Frank Marillier (2nd Battalion, C Company) was one of the last four men to leave the wood, and made notes at the time:
Heavy hand to hand fighting still continues. SA boys, though only a handful left, still hold enemy back. Royal Welsh Fusiliers retire … Col Thackeray splendid. Orders them to return and hold the line or he would shoot [those who retired]. We have been without rations and water for two and a half days and no sleep for six days and nights … after getting a good way back from the battle, we number off and find only 52 of 2nd Regiment have come out whole and all other SA regiments about the same. Colonel Thackeray thanks us and tells how very valuable our services have been in a few words … Oh! It’s been a terrible week and it is to be marvelled at that anyone at all came out safe and sound. Thanks to God for my safe return …
Colonel Edward Thackeray’s report to General Lukin summed up the South African achievement: “I am glad to report that the troops under my command carried out your instructions to hold Delville Wood at all costs and that not a single detachment of this regiment retired from their position, either on the perimeter of the Wood or from the support trenches.” Amazingly, Thackeray was hit several times by shrapnel and spent bullets but emerged from Delville Wood unhurt. He went on to become a general officer and the head of Witwatersrand Command. He retired in 1926 and died in Johannesburg in 1956, aged 86. Colonel Tanner recovered from his wounds, was also awarded a DSO, and returned to command the 1st Brigade. He retired in 1942 as a major general and died in 1943, aged 67.
Was the great sacrifice by the South African volunteers worth the price, and did it make a difference? Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s massive History of the First World War, first published in 1930, devotes just five lines to Delville Wood. He describes it as “the bloodiest battle-hell of 1916”. The 1st South African Infantry Brigade, outnumbered and attacked from three sides, lost three-quarters of its strength, but obeyed the order to hold the wood. There has been no convincing suggestion that, if they had failed, the Allied strategic position would have been undermined – or that it was improved through their success. The South African losses were small in relation to those suffered by Britain and France. The British, for instance, sustained 60 000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone. But for a new country, with an army that had not existed half a dozen years before, Delville Wood was a devastating blow.
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