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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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