Road to Remembrance
The Road to Remembrance was a 15-part series that explored the history of the Australians of the Western Front in France and Belgium during World War One.
The series was a partnership between Fairfax Media and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, published from November 2017 to December 2018 in 130 regional newspapers and online.
It coincided with the centenary commemorations of major battles as well as the launch of the Sir John Monash Centre in Villers-Bretonneux on Anzac Day 2018.
Michael Grealy’s stories covered the horror of trench warfare, the valour of Diggers, the role of nurses, engineers and miners, and the sacrifices from regional Australian towns.
Photographs from the Australian War Memorial were used to illustrate the series.
Australians suffer on Western Front
One hundred years ago on 10 November 2017 the bloody series of First World War battles known as the Third Battle of Ypres came to an end.
For Australian soldiers on the Western Front, these battles would become infamous for their cost in human life – for little gain.
British Field Marshal Douglas Haig planned an offensive to break through strongly-fortified German defences on ridges flanking the devastated Belgian town of Ypres. He had amassed a combined force of around a million British, Anzac and Canadian soldiers.
In the battles of Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde, Poelcapelle and Passchendaele, 38,000 Australian soldiers were killed or wounded in just eight weeks of fighting.
SHATTERED: Soldiers from the 4th Division AIF field artillery during the Battle of Passchendaele in October 1917. PHOTO: Frank Hurley (Australia, 1885-1962); AWM E01220
Carnage and horror in Europe
Australian soldiers arrived in France from Egypt in March 1916 when Allied and German armies were locked in grinding trench warfare on the Western Front.
Issued with steel helmets, box respirators for gas attacks and trench mortars, the Australians joined the front line before the Allies’ Somme offensive began on July 1, with 60,000 British casualties on the first day.
THE WAIT: Men of the 53rd Battalion AIF wait to don their equipment for the attack at Fromelles on July 19, 1916. PHOTO: AWM 03042
‘Mad Harry’ led from the front
Australia’s most decorated soldier Harry Murray joined the AIF in 1914 as a private and ended the war a lieutenant-colonel commanding a battalion of 64 machine-guns.
Born near Launceston in 1880, the dashing and courageous bushman won the Victoria Cross for leading a night charge across frozen snow and fighting off enemy counter-attacks at Stormy Trench near Guedecourt in France in January 1917.
BRAVE: Harry Murray won many awards. PHOTO: AWM PO2939.053
The conscription campaign that divided Australia
As casualty lists soared on the Western Front in the Great War, Australians twice voted to reject the introduction of conscription.
Prime Minister Billy Hughes campaigns for conscription before a crowd in Sydney's Martin Place in 1916. PHOTO: AWM A03376
Failing tanks led to heartbreak for Australia at the Battle of Bullecourt
British General Hubert Gough's plan for the Battle of Bullecourt in 1917 had Australian 4th Division soldiers advancing behind a dozen tanks across no man's land towards the Germans' heavily-fortified Hindenburg Line.
Troops billeted in a sunken road near Bullecourt on May 19, 1917 PHOTO: AWM E02021
Albert Jacka was ‘the bravest of the brave’
At the 1916 Battle of Pozieres, Albert Jacka won the Military Cross for recapturing a section of trench, freeing a group of recently-captured Australians and forcing 50 Germans to surrender.
Captain Albert Jacka of the 14th Battalion. PHOTO: AWM A02868
Fragile Traces of the Past (Behind the front line)
Leslie Russell Blake was a talented young surveyor and geologist who had been on Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition before he left Gympie for the Western Front in 1916.
During the Somme offensive Blake used his skills to great effect, earning the Military Cross for ‘conspicuous and continual gallantry’ in making a detailed survey, under heavy fire, of the Australian front line from Pozières to Mouquet Farm.
HOME FRONT: An Australian Comforts Fund photograph of a Miss Coll knitting socks direct from a sheep’s fleece. PHOTO: AWM H02438
Sportsmen Play the Game
Today’s sport coaches risk criticism if they equate sport with sacrifice in war, yet 100 years ago recruiting campaigns actively linked the two in an effort to encourage enlistment.
In 1917 Australians were urged to join the Sportsmen’s 1000 and fight on the Western Front with the promise that they would train together, embark together and fight together.
NEW TEST: The AIF Forces cricket team in 1919 included future Test players Bert Oldfield, Jack Gregory, Herbie Collins, Nip Pellew and Johnny Taylor. PHOTO: AWM D00685
Joan of Arc Battalion
Charles Bean called them the most famous family of soldiers in Australian history.
Known as “The Fighting Leanes of Prospect” in SA, all five brothers and six sons of military age enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in the Great War.
Four were killed in action or died of wounds.
The most renowned member of the family was Brigadier General Sir Raymond ‘Bull’ Leane, commander of the 48th Battalion and later the 12th Brigade.
Portrait of the five Leane brothers: Ray Leane (centre) with brothers Ben, Ernest, Edwin, and Allan AWM P02136.001
Remembrance Trail Links War Stories
Sergeant Simon Fraser, a farmer from Byaduk in Victoria’s Grampians, was rescuing the wounded in no-man’s-land for three days and nights after the Battle of Fromelles when he heard a voice crying out.
“Don’t forget me cobber.”
This moving image is depicted in a sculpture that recognises the bravery of stretcher bearers who risked their own lives to save others after the disastrous Battle of Fromelles—the first battle involving Australians on the Western Front in July 1916.
DESTRUCTION: Australian troops passing the ruins of Ypres on the way to the front line October 25, 1917. PHOTO: AWM E04612
Truth from the front (Pompey Elliott)
First sentence of article (we may change this in our next session to ensure all of the read more buttons line up)
INSIGHT: Brigadier General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott outside a German headquarters captured in the 1918 Somme offensive. PHOTO: AWM E02855
Digger Research
Australian soldiers Ralph Eldridge and Frank Foster were awarded the Military Medal for their courage when loading artillery onto railway trucks late in 1917 near Ypres in Belgium.
While the other men “ran for cover on four occasions,” the pair at one stage hung onto ropes securing one gun, and prevented it from smashing to the ground.
The story of Eldridge and Foster is recorded in the digitised records of the 1st Australian Infantry Force Division’s recommendation file for honours and awards of January 1918.
Australian War Memorial
Monash Built to Lead
Like the volunteer Australian Corps that he later commanded, Sir John Monash was not a professional soldier when he entered the First World War aged 49.
But the Melbourne-born son of German Jewish immigrants ended the war with a record as admirable as any other Allied general based on his battle-winning leadership in France in 1918
HONOUR: King George V knights Lieutenant General John Monash at the Australian Corps headquarters in France on August 12, 1918. Photo: AWM E02964.
Germany Strikes First in 1918
Australian soldiers were to feel the impact of Russia’s withdrawal and America’s entry as the First World War entered its fifth year in 1918.
After two years of grinding trench warfare, 1918 was the year when, first the Germans, then the Allies, went on the offensive.
The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Russia and an armistice on Germany’s Eastern Front in December 1917 freed up troops to reinforce German armies in France and Belgium. The Americans were arriving, fresh and untested, on the Western Front to join the weary and under-strength Allied armies.
ATTACK: Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (centre) with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (left) and General Erich Ludendorff. PHOTO: AWM H12377
Digger Storms Trench Alone
On August 23, McCarthy was commanding 16th Battalion D Company when he realised a British battalion on his left flank was pinned down by heavy fire.
The well-built McCarthy raced across open ground to attack German machine gun posts.
UNSTOPPABLE: Lawrence Dominic McCarthy. PHOTO: AWM P02939.036
Angels from the Bush
Scratch the surface of Yackandandah’s First World War Memorial and out flow the stories of nurses from the bush who went to war.
Nurses who followed male relatives to the Western Front; who grieved when family members were killed; who saved the lives of men from other countries; and who were mourned when they too died.
ABOVE AND BEYOND: Sister Nellie Morrice (right) outside her tent at No. 3 Australian General Hospital in Abbeville, France, in 1917. Nellie's tour of duty began in 1914 and did not end until 1919. Photo: AWM H16063
Bearing it all for their comrades and country (Stretcher bearers)
A four-man Australian stretcher party carries a wounded soldier along a duckboard track past the mud and bomb craters near Zonnebeke on October 15, 1917.
The photograph captures the devastation near Garter Point that followed eight hours of daily shelling.
One medical officer said: “I have never seen more exhaustion or greater courage among the bearers than during these weeks in front of Ypres.”
DEVASTATION: An Australian stretcher party brings in wounded soldiers along a duckboard track near Garter Point in the Ypres sector on October 15, 1917. Photo: AWM E01127
Patients and duty above all else (Rachael Pratt)
Shrapnel tore into Rachael Pratt’s shoulder and lung when a bomb from a German aircraft hit a casualty clearing station in France on July 4, 1917.
Though seriously wounded, she continued to nurse her patients before collapsing, recalling later, '[I] felt no pain immediately but just the consciousness of having been hit by some terrific weight.'
TENACIOUS: Sister Pratt with her Military Medal. Photo: AWM P05664.001
Sir John Monash Centre
Soldiers are screaming in a blood-curdling roar as they charge the enemy’s deadly machine gun fire to recapture the French village of Villers-Bretonneux.
Others are buried alive under artillery shelling while a British Sopwith Camel engages in an aerial dogfight with a German Fokker Triplane.
REALISTIC: Soldiers charge in a film at the Sir John Monash Centre which recounts the terrifying battle at Villers-Bretonneux - a battle that forged strong national bonds. Picture: Department of Veterans’ Affairs.
Battle of Villers-Bretonneux
At dawn on April 24, 1918, German troops captured the French village of Villers-Bretonneux.
If they advanced a little further and took Hill 104, where the Australian National Memorial now stands, German artillery would overlook Amiens, 16 kilometres west, and threaten this vital Allied rail hub.
RESPITE: Meal time at 5th Australian Machine Gun Battalion on Hill 104 at Villers-Bretonneux. The position was critical for the defence of Allied rail routes to the west at Amiens. Picture: AWM E02296
Streeton and the art of war
One of Australia’s greatest landscape artists, Sir Arthur Streeton, was appointed an official war artist by the Commonwealth Government in 1918.
Best known as a painter in Melbourne’s Heidelberg school in the 1890s, Streeton was living in London when war broke out. In 1915, aged 48, he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps with fellow artist Tom Roberts.
RECORD: Lieutenant Arthur Streeton, official war artist. Picture: AWM P03451.001
Voices from across the miles
Private Harry Whiting is one of many thousands of Australian soldiers whose letters and diaries, hand-written a century ago on the Western Front, survive in the digital age.
A letter from Harry, a teacher born in Adelong, NSW into a family of 18 children, gives an insight from a soldier who stayed in France while others sailed home.
IN TOUCH: 5th Australian Machine Gun company Sergeant Peter O’Connell reads a letter from home at Vendelles on September 17, 1918. Sergeant Arthur James Stewart (l) died of influenza six weeks later. Picture: AWM E03266
Unearthing Australia’s subterranean conflict
Australia’s First World War tunnellers are best remembered for detonating a pair of cataclysmic mines beneath Hill 60 and the Caterpillar on the Messines Ridge on June 7, 1917.
As two of 19 simultaneous explosions at 3.10am under German front-lines, they left massive craters filled with dead and rubble and heralded the start of the Battle of Messines.
DIGGING DEEP: Australian soldiers in 1918 at the entrance to the Catacombs, a tunnel system under Hill 63 near Messines that could house 2000 men. Picture: AWM E04486
Rusty Ruthven inspired others
Collingwood-born Bill ‘Rusty’ Ruthven was at the forefront when Australian 2nd Division troops successfully attacked German strongpoints near the Somme village of Ville-sur-Ancre on 19 May 1918.
After the 22nd Battalion’s D Company suffered many casualties, including its commanding officer, Sergeant Ruthven assumed control in leading part of the assault, single-handedly attacking enemy posts, capturing a machine gun and 38 German soldiers.
LEADER: Second Lieutenant Ruthven VC. Picture AWM D00019
Portraits of Courage (Photographers Wilkins and Hurley)
George Wilkins and Frank Hurley, late arrivals to the Western Front in August 1917, took some of the most enduring and dramatic photographs of the First World War.
Both were renowned polar adventurers, photographers and early cinematographers – Hurley spending five years with Mawson and Shackleton’s expeditions in the Antarctic and Wilkins three years in the Arctic.
CONFRONTING: Photographers Frank Hurley and George Wilkins saw these dead and wounded Australians in a railway cutting near Broodseinde Ridge on October 12, 1917. Picture: AWM E03864
Hamel victory was a Monash masterpiece
The Battle of Hamel on July 4, 1918, is famous for a series of firsts, but it almost didn’t go ahead.
It was the first significant operation of the Australian Corps since Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash became commander in May 1918.
It was the first British offensive since the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917 and one that successfully integrated infantry, armoured tanks, aircraft and artillery in a limited-objective battle plan.
UNITED FRONT: Australian and American troops in a trench after the Battle of Hamel with the village, then freed of Germans, behind them. The entire coordinated offensive took just 93 minutes. Picture: AWM E02844
Dalziel’s bravery turned the tide
Private Harry Dalziel, an Atherton Tableland railway fireman before the First World War, was the 1000th soldier awarded the Victoria Cross.
When tanks failed to arrive to support 15th Battalion soldiers advancing on Pear Trench during the Battle of Hamel, German machine-gun fire caused many Australian casualties.
INSPIRED: Private Henry Dalziel VC of the 15th Bn AIF. Picture: AWM A05444
A loss without equal
Tens of thousands of Australian mothers grieved for precious children lost on the Western Front in the First World War.
For some the pain was multiplied. Voluntary enlistment, large families, and the deadly toll on the Western Front meant the tragedy of losing two, three or even four sons was not uncommon.
Brothers and 17th Battalion soldiers, Theo, William and George Seabrook, died in the same battle, their first, in Belgium in 1917. Picture: AWM H05568
Soldiers mastered the art of stealth warfare
In the months before the major Allied offensive known as the Battle of Amiens on August 8, 1918, Australian soldiers had considerable success with small-scale stealth raids on German outposts on the Somme.
Australian infantrymen would attack enemy posts, often on their own initiative and often in daylight, to kill or capture enemy troops and seize machine-guns.
VITAL: Lieutenant Rupert Downes, an orchardist from Camden, addresses his platoon before the advance onto Harbonnieres during the Battle of Amiens. Picture: AWM E02790.
Australians on the Western Front: Assault on the German morale
Australian 1st Division intelligence summaries in July 1918 reported that stealth raids and daylight aggression near Merris in northern France were shaking German morale.
A captured document revealed the German commander in Flanders, the Crown Prince of Bavaria, “is considerably perturbed at the impunity” with which the raids were “nibbling” at German defences.
WATCHFUL: Australian correspondent Charles Bean. Picture: AWM E00246
New peak of heroism
One hundred years ago, Australian soldiers, exhausted and under strength in number, were about to enter one of their toughest and most pivotal battles on the Western Front.
In a month of continuous fighting, the Australian Corps, with the British and Canadians, had routed German troops out of a succession of French villages and defences straddling the Somme Valley east of Amiens.
FORTRESS: A 54th Battalion machine gun position established during the attack on Péronne. The photograph was taken after the capture of the town. Picture: AWM E03183
Building bridges on a road to allied victory
The Australian Corps’ success at Mont Saint-Quentin and Péronne would have been impossible without the skill of engineers and pioneers constructing and repairing crossings over the Somme River.
Lieutenant General Sir John Monash wrote in 1919 that numerous crossings had been systematically destroyed by the German Army in August 1918 as it was driven back along the Somme valley.
GRAND DESIGNS: Australian engineers rebuild a crossing over the Somme swamps near Cléry on September 2, 1918, to keep communications open and transport moving after the capture of Péronne. Picture: AWM E03143
Grateful town is paying tribute
Throughout 2018, the French town of Péronne is celebrating the Year of Australia.
Under banners urging N’oublions jamais l’Australie (Do not forget Australia), a program of activities pays tribute to the town’s liberation by Australian soldiers 100 years ago.
CHAMPION: Olympian Cecil Healy died in battle. Picture: AWM P04366.007
A lifeline for families
Vera Deakin, youngest daughter of Australia’s second Prime Minister, ran the bureau that gave families information about wounded and missing soldiers on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918.
Captain Harold Wanliss DSO, an orchardist from Lorne in Victoria, was so highly regarded that Charles Bean wrote contemporaries believed he was “possibly destined, if he lived, to lead Australia.”
Their lives became linked after Wanliss, 25, was killed in the Battle of Polygon Wood on September 26, 1917, and Deakin searched for the truth about his death and place of burial.
RELENTLESS: Vera Deakin managed the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, keeping Australian families informed. Picture: AWM P02119.001
Accounts reveal the spirit of the battlefield
A new study of letters and diaries of 1000 First World War soldiers has challenged long-held wisdom about the secular nature of the Australian Imperial Force.
Author Daniel Reynaud says the writings of more than a third of the soldiers studied show evidence of spirituality.
He says: “I chose a definition of spirituality as anything to do with matters of the human spirit seeking higher purpose – removing it from the narrow confines of religion with all its controversies and doctrinal implications.”
HIGHER POWER: 20th Battalion chaplain Captain Robert Crawford, from Toowong, Queensland, conducting a burial service near Péronne on August 31, 1918. Picture: AWM E03092
Surgeon gave our soldiers hope
Private William Kearsey was one of 5000 First World War soldiers whose severe facial wounds were repaired through the skill of pioneering New Zealand-born Dr Harold Gillies.
An Inverell coach-builder before he enlisted, Kearsey was initially left for dead after a shell exploded in his face during the Third Battle of Ypres in October 1917.
RESTORED: AIF soldier William Kearsey in the 1920s. Picture: AWM E03092
Our nation’s promise
On October 5, 1918, Australian soldiers fought their final infantry battle on the Western Front at Montbrehain in France.
At a cost of 5500 men killed and wounded over 17 days, the Australians played a major role in breaking through the German Army’s formidable Hindenberg Line.
By late October, all five Divisions of the Australian Corps were exhausted and resting after six gruelling months of non-stop fighting.
There was one group of Australians, however, whose task was getting bigger by the day. It was the Australian War Records Section (AWRS), a unit charged with collecting battalion records and battle relics for planned post-war museums.
The Australian War Records Section (AWRS) ‘trophy’ store at Peronne in 1918. Around 25,000 objects were shipped to Australia. Picture: AWM E03684
Australian citizens in the trenches
About 1000 Indigenous soldiers volunteered for the First World War despite Australia’s Defence Act excluding Aboriginal men from military service.
Although a May 1917 regulation enabled men with one white parent to enlist, most of the Indigenous soldiers had already signed up before 1917. Many fought at Gallipoli in 1915 and then the Western Front.
Historian Philippa Scarlett said the majority of those who volunteered were accepted, demonstrating “the pragmatism of recruiters.”
COURAGE: Private Miller Mack of the 50th Australian Infantry Battalion was one of 21 Ngarrindjeri men who enlisted. Picture: AWM P10608.010
Going above and well beyond
Two Aboriginal soldiers from NSW, Corporal Albert Knight and Private William Irwin, were awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery at the end of the First World War.
Albert Knight, one of three brothers from Bourke, led an attack at Bony on September 30, 1918, moving 300 metres across open country in broad daylight to plot entrenched enemy machine-guns.
TRADITION: Private Walter Saunders. Picture: AWM P00889.012
Guns Finally Fall Silent November
In the early hours of November 4, 1918, Corporal Albert Davey was lying under drizzling rain in a shallow trench in northern France, convinced that he was soon to die.
Davey, a miner from Ballarat, was in a group of Australians waiting to construct a bridge for British tanks to cross the Sambre-Oise Canal.
He had pressured his commanding officer Captain Oliver Woodward the previous day to take care of his belongings and send them to his wife Margaret if he was killed in the battle ahead.
ANTICIPATION: Miss Myra Harvey (centre) waits in at the Anzac Buffet in Sydney’s Hyde Park to welcome home the soldier she would soon marry. Picture: AWM H11576
Words of War Echoing Across the Decades
From soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and John McCrae to latter-day songwriter Eric Bogle, inspiration came from the unrelenting horrors and sacrifice of the Western Front.
Lieutenant Owen, 25, had one prolific year of writing poetry that expressed revulsion of war before he was killed in action at Sambre-Oise Canal exactly one week before Armistice.
POIGNANT: Soldier-poet Wilfred Owen returned to the front after suffering shell shock and was killed on November 4, 1918. Picture: Argus Collection, Fairfax Photographic
Follow in our soldiers’ wake
While resting behind the lines on the Somme, Australian soldiers posed for photographs taken by Louis and Antoinette Thuillier in Vignacourt and toured the underground city of Naours.
Travellers to the Western Front can now follow in the soldiers’ footsteps by visiting a newly-opened museum at the Thuillier farmhouse, walking in the nearby tunnels under Naours and seeing the personal inscriptions left by more than 2000 soldiers on the walls.
SNAPPED: AIF 2nd Division soldiers, Vignacourt, 1918. Picture: AWM P10550.140
The Legacy of Conflict
Sapper Arthur Dunbar, a Gawler-born blacksmith, was like a lot of soldiers on the Western Front, just a bit older than most when his family welcomed him home in June 1919.
He’d enlisted at 30, served in France for three years, was wounded, gassed and hospitalised, had an anxious young woman seeking information about his condition, and received a bravery medal for an operation that left half his mine-detection party as casualties.
HOME FIRES: Sapper Arthur Findon Dunbar is welcomed home by his family at 45 Chief Street, Brompton, South Australia in July 1919. Picture: AWM P05328.001
Supporting the nation at war and in peace
Australian households helped finance the First World War by subscribing 250 million pounds to seven War Loan Bond and three Peace Bond issues.
Managed by the fledgling Commonwealth Bank, the bonds gave returns of 4.5 to 6 per cent over terms ranging from five to 10 years.
STAR POWER: The legendary Captain Albert Jacka VC, from Victoria was the face of recruitment campaigns and later, the 1919 Peace Bonds. Picture: AWM ARTV00784
Sport a balm for soldiers’ souls
Major Sydney Middleton, a pre-War Olympian in rowing and rugby, became organising secretary of the AIF Sports Control Board in January 1919.
Plucked from leading the 19th Battalion, Middleton was told to “get busy and keep a couple of hundred thousand home-hungry soldiers contented.”
According to Lieutenant G.H. Goddard, author of Soldiers and Sportsmen, sport replaced drill as an extensive program was played at inter-battalion, inter-brigade and inter-Corps level, and at the Paris Inter-Allied Games in June 1919
GLORY: Australia’s winning King’s Cup team, July 1919. Picture: AWM D00725