Our Darkest Day Read online

  Rue Petillon Cemetery, the final resting place of Chaplain Spencer Maxted, who helped 150 or more wounded after Fromelles, and of the champion Carlton footballer, George Challis. (PATRICK LINDSAY PHOTO)

  Published in 2011 by Hardie Grant Books

  Hardie Grant Books (Australia)

  Ground Floor, Building 1

  658 Church Street

  Richmond, Victoria 3121

  www.hardiegrant.com.au

  Hardie Grant Books (UK)

  Dudley House, North Suite

  34–35 Southampton Street

  London WC2E 7HF

  www.hardiegrant.co.uk

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Copyright © Patrick Lindsay 2008

  (Abridged edition © Patrick Lindsay 2011)

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Lindsay, Patrick.

  EISBN 9 781 742 736 648

  Cover and text design by Nada Backovic Design

  Cover photography Patrick Lindsay

  Typesetting by Bookhouse, Sydney

  To

  Lisa, Nathan, Kate and Sarah, as always

  For

  The missing men of Fromelles and their families …

  may they, at last, find eternal peace

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue: A Magnificent Obsession

  Introduction: Brave Blood

  1 The Brewing Storm

  2 At the Crossroads of History

  3 The Anzacs’ Journey

  4 To the ‘Nursery’

  5 An Austrian Lance-Corporal

  6 In the Presence of Death

  7 Loose Thinking

  8 Hopping the Bags

  9 Lost in the Fog of War

  10 Don’t Forget Me, Cobber!

  11 Counting the Cost

  12 The Cover-Up

  13 We Are the Dead

  Epilogue: Harry Willis’ Story

  Appendix I The Order of Battle, Fromelles

  Appendix II The Missing Diggers of Fromelles

  Appendix III 5th Division AIF Deaths, Fromelles

  Appendix IV Casualties of World War I

  Appendix V Brothers who Died at the Battle of Fromelles

  Appendix VI Major-General von Braun Order No. 5220

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Prologue

  A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION

  Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical;

  don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow

  your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  They say you don’t choose your obsession, it chooses you. Lambis Englezos’ obsession not only chose him, it crept up on him and then it subsumed him.

  It started innocently enough. He was reading Peter Charlton’s Pozières 1916, about a famous victory by the Australians, when he came across a reference to an earlier battle at Fromelles – a tiny village in north-eastern France where in July that year Australians were thrown into one of those crazed World War I assaults of man against machine guns with predictable cataclysmic results.

  As he read the terrible details, Lambis could not believe that in his extensive Great War reading he had never heard of this mysterious battle where Australia suffered the greatest loss of life in one day in its history – almost 2000 men dead – with another 3500 in casualties. He found himself driven by a nagging desire to find out more about the battle and the men who fought in it. Over time, interest grew into passion and passion into what even Lambis now admits is obsession.

  At first glance, it seems a strange obsession for a fifty-something Greek-born art and crafts high-school teacher from Melbourne. But more than half a century of Australian life has imbued Lambis with a deep emotional link to his adopted country and its Anzac heritage and Lambis is now about as Greek as a meat pie.

  At primary school at Melbourne’s Albert Park, Lambis was fascinated by Anzac Day and he gravitated to the old Diggers who lived near him. They became his quasi-grandfathers and he spent hours sitting with them as they had a quiet beer on the wharf, chatting to the fishermen coming back with their catches. His interest in the Great War stayed with him as he grew up, left school and graduated as an art teacher, and in 1992 he helped to establish The Friends of the 15th Brigade, an association of families and friends dedicated to keeping alive the story of the men of one of Victoria’s finest Great War units, the 15th Brigade of the 5th Division of the First AIF, which fought at Gallipoli and later in France, starting with its disastrous introduction to the Western Front at the Battle of Fromelles.

  Through the 15th Brigade Association, Lambis met some of the survivors of the Battle of Fromelles. He met Tom Brain, the last of the 60th Battalion to survive the battle and the war, and Bill Boyce of the 58th Battalion. Lambis developed a special friendship with both men and gained a deep insight into them and their mates and the sacrifices they gladly made for their country. The words of another veteran who became his friend, Fred Kelly of the 53rd Battalion – who fought at Fromelles with the 14th Machine Company – have always stayed with him:

  Whoever planned the battle of Fromelles was stupid. It was the greatest piece of stupidity since the Charge of the Light Brigade. We were in full view, the Germans chopped the 53rd to pieces … Haking was a ratbag. It was the worst piece of strategy. It was murder. We had no chance.

  When Lambis travelled to Fromelles for the 80th Anniversary of the battle, in 1996, he was struck by how clearly defined the battlefield was and how little had changed since the conflict. He found it easy to visualise the front lines of both sides, which remained static for virtually the whole war, and he looked with amazement at the billiardtable flatness of no-man’s land, the killing ground between the two front lines.

  Lambis was astonished to find that almost 90 years after the conflict the ground was still thick with war relics – shell casings, shrapnel, ordnance and personal artefacts like buttons, buckles, spectacles, even false teeth – not to mention the hundreds of massive concrete bunkers that rise from the Flanders clay like carbuncles.

  During a subsequent visit in 2002, while he was at VC Corner Cemetery at Fromelles – the only all-Australian Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in France – Lambis was struck by the number of names of men missing from the battle that were carved on the stone wall at the rear of the cemetery. This ghostly group of missing Diggers played on his mind over the following days as he walked the entire length of the battlefield, guided by his friend, local historian and Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) officer, Martial Delebarre.

  Lambis knew many of the unknown had been buried at VC Corner, he figured there were others who would have been gathered after the war and interred in other cemeteries. This led him to conjecture about how many there were who remained unfound and, as he walked, he would imagine where they might be – in no-man’s land, in the filled-in communication trenches across it, along the banks of the River Laies, dumped in shell craters and filled in, hidden in long-lost graves in the fields. A growing feeling welled up inside him. These missing Diggers were waiting for him to find them.

  Lambis Englezos at Fromelles in 2007, doing the numbers in front of the wall commemorating the missing at VC Corner Cemetery. Lambis’ quest to find the missing Diggers of Fromelles began with a simple calculation of the number of men missing after
the battle compared with the number of unknown dead registered at the cemeteries in the region. (WARD SELBY PHOTO)

  After he returned home, Lambis Englezos focused his imagination on the fate of the missing Diggers of Fromelles. He studied all the available books, cross-checked the facts and did the basic maths.

  Lambis wrote, emailed and phoned others with knowledge of Fromelles and a similar interest. His messages travelled all around the world and soon he found himself linked into a vibrant network of people in Australia, Britain and France who shared his passion. He gathered a small close-knit team of like-minded amateur sleuths around him, all dedicated to solving the mystery of the missing Diggers of Fromelles: John Fielding, deputy headmaster of Normanhurst High School in north-western Sydney, a keen military historian and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve; Ward Selby, another military history buff and an executive at BHP-Billiton; and Robin Corfield, author and the definitive expert on the Battle of Fromelles. They pooled their thoughts and attacked the problem.

  One of Lambis’ early clues came from reading Robin Corfield’s book Don’t Forget Me, Cobber!. Corfield quoted from the memoirs of Private Bill Barry of the 29th Battalion. Barry was captured behind the German lines. He had been caught in an artillery barrage shortly after dropping supplies to the beleaguered men of the 8th Brigade on the left flank near Delangré Farm. Barry recalled being knocked senseless by the bombing and then waking up wounded as a prisoner. Some time later he lapsed into unconsciousness again and when he awoke he was unattended, so he moved out of the bunker in which he’d been held. To his horror, and as recorded earlier, he discovered he was

  in the place where all the dead men were. I was sitting on the edge of a hole about forty feet long, twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep and into this hole the dead were being thrown without any fuss or respect.

  Lambis had his first genuine breakthrough: first-hand evidence that the Germans had buried Australians and British dead from the battle in some kind of mass grave. It was a great start, but where was this grave and how many of the missing were buried there? Lambis had a good idea of how the dead were recovered and taken to the rear of the German lines. He had long ago seen the photograph of the German troops standing beside a small field railway engine, or perhaps more accurately a rough tram, hooked up to a flat-topped, timber-planked tramcar piled with the dead bodies of Australian troops. He knew that the Germans had used this light railway to move supplies behind their lines. It was known to the Germans as the Turkenbahn. It began as the French local rail line in peacetime, Ligne Michon, which originated at Don-Sainghin to the south of Fournes, then ran to Fournes, where the Germans built a rough station near their regimental cemetery. The wartime line then continued through Fromelles and down the hill out of the village towards the front lines, cutting through the south-western corner of a small wood below the church, then heading behind Rouges Bancs to the German front line trench system.

  Early in the piece, Lambis had been struck when he read that General Haking and his staff had used aerial photographs of the Fromelles area when they planned the attack. It occurred to him that with so many dead to bury after the battle, any large area of gravesites dug by the Germans should appear on some of the aerials that were taken after the battle by the Royal Flying Corps (the forerunner of the Royal Air Force) and these may be evident if he compared before and after aerials. So he wrote off to the Imperial War Museum in London seeking copies of any photographs of the area behind the German lines taken, either shortly before 19 July or in the days and weeks after.

  When he received the first photos from London, Lambis was stunned. A comparison between an aerial taken on 17 June 1916 (a month before the battle), another taken a week after the battle on 29 July, and a third on 1 August threw up an immediate area of interest. The area was at the southern end of the distinctively shaped wood just below Fromelles village. The pre-battle aerial showed no sign of any major excavations but the aerials taken after the battle clearly showed that a large patch of the ground had been disturbed. Closer examination showed the disturbance was a series of large open pits. They were in a rectangular plot of land, about 30 metres wide and 150 metres long, sitting on the southern end of the wood.

  Lambis sought more aerials from the Imperial War Museum, and when he received one dated 20 December 1916 he could easily see eight large pits dug in two lines along the southern border of the tree-line below the wood. This shot showed that five of the pits had been filled in. A final aerial which arrived some time later and was taken on 16 September 1918, two months before the Armistice, showed that the five filled pits had blended into the surrounding paddock but that the remaining three pits were still open and empty.

  The findings buoyed Lambis enormously. Re-reading Corfield’s treasure-trove of research gave him another clue. It had been there all along, hidden in a story about two great mates, Private Walter Vaile and Lieutenant Jack Bowden, who had both died in the battle. Bowden’s body had never been found and was one of those classified as missing in action. His family made persistent enquiries about his fate. Initially they brought confusion. Because Bowden was listed as a private, although he had been recently commissioned, his family was told that he apparently ‘died of wounds while a prisoner of war’. They had no record of where he had died or where he was buried. But by 1918, Corfield reported, the story had changed and the family was advised:

  Battle of Fromelles, 19–20 July 1916

  ‘Tote Englēnder nach dem Kampf vom 19.

  Juli 1916 bei Fromelles’ Source: www.westfront.net The Pheasant Wood burial pit.

  Officially reported as killed in action 19 July 1916. There is no question of his ever having been taken prisoner of war, this belief must have risen from the circumstances of his personal effects being picked up by the Germans in the field. There is a possibility that his body was buried by the enemy though we have never received any information to this effect.

  After the war the Red Cross in Berlin confirmed that it did have a record of Bowden and so Corfield then added:

  the confusion, if there was confusion, resulted from the Germans believing him to be among those they buried in one of five large British Collective Graves outside Fasanenwäldchen, Pheasants Wood or in a collective grave at Fournes. (emphasis added)

  Lambis checked German trench maps from the time and found that Fasanen Wäldchen was included in them. It was the name of the wood where he had discovered the excavations in the British aerials! Another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place: Lambis now had the name of the wood in his aerial, Pheasant Wood (or, as the Germans knew it, Fasanen Wäldchen). Indeed, when he started to go through the records and other accounts, he found that Pheasant Wood appeared without fanfare a number of times. The pits in the aerials were surely the mass graves.

  Lambis was certain that this was a major validation of his theory and he started making enquiries in the official channels, sending all his findings to the Australian Army and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. All he met were roadblocks: dead ends and prevarication.

  All I got was ‘piss off, go away, they’re all accounted for’ responses and replies. It was very frustrating and eventually I realised I needed to give the thing a push to get it taken seriously so I went to the press, even though I’m usually reluctant to do that. I spoke to Neil Wilson of the Herald-Sun and ultimately to Jonathan King, who broke the story on the day before the anniversary of 2003.

  Typical of the responses Lambis received to his enquiries in these early stages was this reply, dated 3 December 2004, to an email he sent to the Director of the Office of War Graves, Air Vice-Marshal Gary Beck, in which Lambis had listed all the names of those he believed to be the Missing:

  Lambis,

  Every one of these names is listed as buried at VC Corner Australian Cemetery Fromelles.

  Commission information on VC Corner includes: ‘It contains the graves of over 400 Australian soldiers who died in the attack at Fromelles and whose bodies were found on
the battlefield, but not a single body could be identified.’

  We are checking CWGC [Commonwealth War Graves Commission] records to see if any more information about the state of the bodies is available. However, given that not a single one could be identified suggests they had already been interfered with, eg, hastily buried by Germans and tags removed and reported to Red Cross.

  If this is so, then that should lay to rest your belief they still remain at Pheasant Wood. Lambis, you will have to let this one go, or find some evidence for your belief.

  If we learn anything new, I will be in touch. Would you please distribute this message to your friends and maybe one of them can convince you as I don’t seem to be able to.

  Jonathan King’s article contained some inaccuracies but it clearly put the mystery of the missing on the public agenda and prompted questions from the media, the veterans’ community and the Federal opposition. Eventually responding to the groundswell of interest, Gary Beck confirmed (in a brief provided to Defence Minister Senator Hill to allow him to answer a question from Senator Mark Bishop in a Senate Estimates Committee) that 163 Diggers had been gathered by the Germans and buried.

  Lambis was gobsmacked! He was elated that at last he had official confirmation that the ‘missing’ actually existed. They had obviously been there all the time. No-one had asked about them.

  The Office of War Graves had done the simple maths:

  1299 names with no known graves on the VC Corner Wall

  (less) 5 bodies found in the 1920s (after cemeteries established)

  (less) 1131 bodies buried at VC Corner and other cemeteries

  (equals) 163 ‘The Missing’

  Not long after this, Jeroen Huygelier, a Belgian archivist and one of Lambis’ growing international support network, referred Lambis to the records of the International Red Cross. Lambis attacked them like a dog at a bone. And his timing was spot on. The Australian War Memorial had only digitised the records two years earlier and they were now available online via the AWM’s excellent website.