Today marks the anniversary of the darkest day in Australian military history.
On the evening of 19 July 1916, troops of the 5th Australian Division, in conjunction with the British 61st Division, launched an attack on the heavily fortified German line in front of the Aubers ridge. By the end of that bloody night, nearly 1500 of the Australians were dead. It was a loss of life in 24 hours only surpassed at Bullecourt, in 1917.
All in all, the Australians suffered 5,513 casualties. Of the near 900-strong 60th battalion, only one officer and 106 men remained to muster the next day. The death toll was equivalent to Australia’s losses in the Boer War, Korea and Vietnam, combined.
The understrength British, who supplied about half as many men as the Australians, suffered 1547 casualties. The opposing Germans lost 1,600-2,000 men.
The shock of the slaughter was compounded by the fact that the Australians had only just arrived in France. While half of the Division were veterans of Gallipoli, half were raw new recruits.
Many of the Australian dead were buried in pits by the Germans days later. After the war, the remains of those left in No Man’s Land were recovered and buried at V.C. Corner, the only large exclusively Australian cemetery in France. In 2002, Australian researcher Lambis Englezos led the rediscovery of the mass burial pits, which had been undisturbed since the war. DNA testing has since led to the identification of many of the bodies.
Tomorrow, 107 years after they died, seven newly-identified diggers will be commemorated at a ceremony attended by their families.
There was Oscar Baumann, 20, a joiner from Adelaide. William Stephen, 28, a grocer from Sydney. There was Richard McGuarr, 27, straight off the family dairy farm near Lismore in northern NSW. Alexander Page, 28, a milk carter from Perth. In civilian life, James Claxton, 24, had been a teamster in Western Australia. Walter Grace, 23, was a labourer from Brisbane. And mechanic Edwin Gray, 30, hailed from Riverton in South Australia […]
All would be missing in action until their identities were restored after years of meticulous research by Australia’s Unrecovered War Casualties team.
The relatives of some of these infantrymen will attend an official ceremony at the Pheasant Wood Military Cemetery in Fromelles on Wednesday evening. And for the first time, the soldiers’ names will grace proper headstones. These will be rededicated. And these men will finally be put to rest by their families, and their country.
Fromelles, for all that it was the worst night in Australian military history, has long been relegated to a sideshow to the cataclysmic battles of the Western Front. Indeed, that was what it was intended to be: a feint, to draw off German reinforcements from the Somme — itself a battle designed to draw German strength away from the slaughter at Verdun.
Historian and journalist Les Carlyon described Fromelles as possibly “the most tragic battlefield in Australia’s history”.
“They died in a single night, many of them before the sun had properly set,” Carlyon wrote in The Great War. “Some were Gallipoli men and some had never been in battle before. Some were still wearing felt hats rather than metal helmets.”
Fromelles was a masterclass in how not to conduct a major battle on the Western Front: largely-untested troops, with poor artillery support, mustered in full view of the opposing Germans, dug into the only high ground for miles. Poor intelligence led to confusion on the battlefield. Attacking soldiers who, against the odds of withering German machine-gun fire, advanced as far the second line of German trenches — but were puzzled and disoriented when the well-constructed trenches photo-reconnaissance had led them to expect, turned out to be shallow, half-filled with mud and water. The attack descended into chaos, eventually repelled, with such tremendous losses, by the defenders.
A German assessment of 16 December, called the attack “operationally and tactically senseless”. A “tactical abortion”, in the words of senior Australian officer participating, Brigadier General H.E. “Pompey” Elliott, who is said to have wept for his “boys” as he watched the wounded streaming in.
Suzanne Chapman, a retired lawyer from Melbourne, will be at the Fromelles ceremony to honour her uncle, Edwin Gray.
“It’s a very sad story,” she said. “The family never talked about it because they didn’t know what happened to him. His mother, Ada, wrote letters asking for information but there was nothing” […]
Craig Fletcher, 62, a project engineer from Perth, and his siblings grew up hearing about their great uncles Alexander and James Page, who both died in combat during World War I […]
James Page was buried in a marked grave near Messines Ridge in Belgium close to where he died in action. It meant his mother Grace could visit his tomb in 1927 with her daughters Mabel and Grace.
But Alexander’s identity was announced only in April this year […] Suzanne Chapman said that at the ceremony she planned to place Uncle Edwin’s mother Ada’s prayer book on his gravestone.
The Australian
The one inspiring light in the darkness of Fromelles was the extraordinary heroism and dedication shown by the men of the relieving 57th Battalion, who repeatedly risked their lives over the next three days to bring in wounded from No Man’s Land, although, as Sergeant Simon Fraser of the 57th said, “I must say (the Germans) treated us very fairly … we must have brought in over 250 men by our company alone”.
Fraser is memorialised in the “Cobbers” statue. The name comes from Fraser’s recollection that, as he fetched a stretcher to rescue one wounded man, another voice sang out, “Don’t forget me cobber”. The statue now stands at V.C. Corner, with a copy near the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.
