"The British Say It Cannot Be Done" — How Monash's Australians Ended The War In 47 Days

On the twenty-ninth of September nineteen eighteen, Australian infantry crossed the St Quentin Canal in canvas boats under direct machine gun fire. The canal walls dropped eighteen metres to the water. The crossing had been declared not feasible by British command. The Australians crossed anyway, cleared the far bank, and pushed four kilometres east before the German counter-attacks could form. Forty-seven days later, Germany signed the armistice. This is the story of the Hundred Days Offensive and the Australian Corps under John Monash — a civilian engineer the British army had spent two years trying to keep out of command. On the eighth of August nineteen eighteen, his corps advanced thirteen kilometres in a single day, the deepest penetration on the Western Front since the war of movement ended in nineteen fourteen. British command ordered him to stop twice. He kept going. When the Hindenburg Line — four years of German engineering, concrete, and wire — needed breaking, Monash built the plan, was told it couldn't be done, and broke it anyway. The German high command told the Kaiser the war was over two days after the canal fell. Twenty-three thousand Australian casualties. One hundred and sixty-six thousand German prisoners taken across the offensive. Five divisions doing the work the full Allied line couldn't finish alone. Subscribe if you want the history they didn't put in the textbooks. #AustralianHistory #AustralianMilitary #HundredDaysOffensive #JohnMonash #HindenburgLine #StQuentinCanal #WWI #WorldWarOne #AustralianCorps #WesternFront #MilitaryHistory #GreatWar #AustralianDiggers #AmiensBattle #MilitaryDocumentary #WarHistory #AIF #FranceWWI #AustralianCommanderWWI #FirstWorldWar