Tuesday - May 05, 2009
Long Lost Soldiers Buried Three Times
Fromelles France, 10 miles west of Lille. July 19, 1916, late afternoon.
Since early morning the guns had raged. Thousands and thousands of shells, falling on the German troops occupying the “sugar loaf”, a salient in the northern part of the Western Front. Huddled in the mud in rough trenches, an entire army of Australian troops, fresh off the ships that had brought them halfway around the world, sat waiting. A few hundred yards away a similar horde of young British soldiers did the same. Surely after 11 solid hours of bombardment there couldn’t be much left of the enemy. This should be a walk in the park. No worries mate. Right? After all, this is just a diversionary raid, to make the Jerrys think that the big push down at Somme is a full scale attack along the whole line. Besides, we’re only supposed to go half a kilometer forward. Easy!
The guns fell silent. Up and down the trench lines the whistles blew. This was the signal. This was the moment. Over the top!
And so over they went. The very first Australian troops to fight in the war. Straight out of boot camp. Straight off the ships. Straight into the Maxim guns.
And there they died, in seconds. Row after row after row after row after row. The shelling had not been effective, serving merely to alert the Germans that an attack was imminent and giving them all day to get prepared. And prepared they were. Twice the Allied forces attacked, but were unable to hold the ground they captured. The fighting raged on into the night, but in the darkness the Germans sprung their counterattack. By dawn they had pushed spikes of troops into the Aussie lines, and filled those narrow gaps with more machine guns. And somewhere in that spike of men, soldiers from the 6th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, was this young corporal. Named Adolf. But that’s another story for another day. The Allies began their retreat, through a murderous crossfire. Few made it back alive, fewer even made it unwounded.
In the end, more than 5500 AIF troops had fallen, along with about 1550 British. German casualties were very light, with only perhaps 140 troops taken prisoner. And the lines in the mud remained unmoved. In that single 24 hour skirmish Australia lost more soldiers than it did in the entire Boer War, Korean War, and Vietnam War combined. In just a day. In all of Australian history, this was and still is the single largest wartime tragedy they have ever suffered.
Once the battle was over, the Germans did the honorable thing and buried the dead. But there were so many bodies they had to build a narrow gauge railway to haul them away. And they had to dig deep in the soggy clay - 17 feet down - to find some stable soil for the task. But it was done. And the war went on. And the graves were soon forgotten.
Eventually the war was over. Generations came and went, farming the land, growing peace over this little corner of hell. Few survived the battle, few remembered the event. But some did. Enough to raise a memorial nearby. But the burial site was lost.
While most of the world has forgotten, World War I is still a sensitive issue with Australia. As a good colony, they answered the call, and in a huge way. Their losses were enormous, and I gather they still feel the sting of the realization that their men were just thrown into the meat grinder in battle after battle. By war’s end 165,000 Australian troops had disappeared, unidentified casualties whose whereabouts were known only to God. That’s more than half of their 271,000 losses. Australia sent nearly 417,000 off to this war, more than 38% of their entire eligible male population. And they suffered a 65% casualty rate, higher than any other nation involved. They’ve a right to be sensitive.
In 2004 some of the lost mass graves were found by Lambis Englezos, an Australian historian. In 2007 Glasgow University did a sonographic survey which revealed the size of the burials, and turned up a few Australian artifacts. In 2008 arrangements were made for a reinternment, and some excavation was done that proved the scope of the burial. And now today the digging begins in earnest. There is hope that some of the soldiers can be identified through either DNA or uniform patches, but it’s a slim hope. Even the children of these men are almost all dead by now, and the Germans were pretty diligent at removing personal effects and sending them back via Geneva. But these men, lost in combat, lost in time, found again, buried and dug up three times now, will have a remembered and visible resting place at last. And the Land Down Under will have a bit of closure, finally.
The mystery surrounding the identity of 400 Australian and British World War I soldiers found in a mass grave in France could finally start unraveling as work begins on recovering their remains.
A team of 30 archaeologists is due to start a massive excavation of the grave site in northern France today so the soldiers’ skeletal remains can be reburied will full honours in a new military cemetery next year.
The project has raised hopes that dozens of Australian and British families will finally know what happened to their soldier ancestors who disappeared during the notorious Battle of Fromelles in July 1916.
Australian forces suffered 5533 casualties during the 24-hour battle - the country’s heaviest military casualty rate ever recorded - while Britain recorded 1547 soldiers killed, wounded or missing.
Some BBC news video can be viewed here, with links to 2 other clips.
Australian, British and French dignitaries gathered in the village of Fromelles for a ceremony marking the launch of the project, which is expected to conclude in just over a year.
“Today marks the beginning of the journey to afford many of those killed at Fromelles with a fitting and dignified final place of rest,” said Admiral Sir Ian Garnett, Vice Chairman of Australia’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is charged with overseeing the excavation.
...
Australia has since commissioned the construction of the nation’s first war cemetery in more than 50 years near the site and dispatched a team of archeologists to exhume and attempt to identify the remains.“This site is part of our national story,” said Warren Snowdon, Australian Minister for Defence Science and Personnel. “It filled a gap in our history.”
...
“It was over 90 years ago, but the wounds still run deep,” he said.The discovery of the Fromelles site coincides with a burgeoning popular interest in Australian history, Snowdon, the Australian minister, added.
“In Australia, it’s got a lot of public support and drive,” he said of the Fromelles excavation. “It really is part of our national history, of who we are.”
Posted by Drew458
on 05/05/2009 at 10:07 AM
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