Our Darkest Day Page 2

  These records were a revelation to Lambis. The Red Cross investigated and responded to enquiries about the fate of missing Australian personnel. In a Herculean performance, the organisation managed to investigate most of those posted as wounded and missing on official army lists and to reply in writing to relatives and friends of those missing. Usually, each soldier’s file included a searcher’s report, eyewitness accounts from friends or comrades of the place and circumstances of the death or wounding of the individual and, where possible, his place of burial, together with letters from friends or relatives and responses by the Red Cross.

  A copy of the British Army trench map of 1916, with the approximate Allied and German front lines drawn in. Pheasant Wood is shown in map square N17, the Sugar Loaf at the bottom of square N8 and Fromelles village in N22. Each numbered square is 500 yards square. (SOURCE CHRIS BRYETT)

  Lambis now returned to Robin Corfield’s Don’t Forget Me, Cobber! as a base-line reference, and painstakingly went through the honour roll of all those who died at the Battle of Fromelles and cross-referenced each name against the Red Cross records. The turning point came when he viewed Jack Bowden’s file. Lambis’ heart missed a beat as he read a translation of a letter dated 21 January 1918 from the Red Cross in Berlin to the organisation’s headquarters in Geneva responding to a query from Bowden’s family seeking his final resting place. One paragraph jumped out at Lambis:

  After the battle near Fromelles on the 19.7.16 the identity discs were removed from all the fallen men and sent in. The name of Bowden is not reported in the list of graves. It may be assumed that possibly Lieutenant Bowden was buried in one of the five large British collective graves before the Fasanen Wäldchen (Pheasants Wood) near Fromelles, or in the collective grave (No.1 M.4.3) in the Military Cemetery at Fournes [emphasis added].

  Another piece in the jigsaw puzzle – and a corner piece too! Lambis realised that he was effectively piecing together the German death list from the Battle of Fromelles – all the Australian dead who had been collected by the Germans after the battle, placed on their light railway carriages and taken to the pits they had dug at Pheasant Wood. There, with the efficiency and meticulousness for which their army is renowned, the Germans had sorted the dead by nationality, taken their identification tags and then listed their details before burying the remains in the mass graves.

  Working long into the night over the next months, Lambis patiently cross-checked the honour roll names with those on the German death list and eventually came up with 161 names of soldiers who were recorded as having been gathered by the Germans and buried.

  Lambis was even more upbeat some months later when he called John Fielding. He told him it was ‘action stations’ because he’d just received word from Roger Lee, Head of the Australian Army History Unit, that he’d been instructed to establish a Panel of Investigation to examine Lambis’ claims. Lambis told John that they had to be ready to present their case to the panel at the Defence Department’s Campbell Offices Headquarters in a month’s time. The team – Lambis, John and Ward Selby – then focussed all their energies on preparing their presentation. They would only have one chance to persuade the panel they had a genuine case that demanded their action.

  As he honed his presentation, Lambis took some satisfaction from the fact that his quest had gathered such momentum and the pressure had paid off. The Panel of Investigation would examine the evidence and decide whether it was strong enough to warrant a proper examination of the Pheasant Wood site. The panel would comprise Roger Lee (as Chairman); Dr John Williams, nominated as an independent expert; Professor Bill Gammage, author and historian from the Australian National University; Associate Professor Iain Spence from the University of New England; Professor Jeffrey Grey from the Australian Defence Force Academy; Dr Bruce Scates from the University of New South Wales; Dr Peter Stanley, Garth Pratten and Craig Tibbitts from the Australian War Memorial; Air Vice-Marshal Gary Beck and Kathy Upton-Mitchell from the Office of War Graves; Keith Knight from the Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation; and Bill Houston, Brian Manns and Emma Robertson from the Army History Unit.

  It was a high-powered assembly and a testament to the case that Lambis and his team had painstakingly built and substantiated.

  In his subsequent presentation at conference room CP4-2-66 in the Department of Defence’s massive bunker-like Campbell Offices in Canberra on Friday 10 June 2005, Lambis said he was not seeking a full-scale excavation or reburial of the remains at this stage but, rather, in the first instance, he was seeking preliminary field studies including a professional archaeological geo-radar survey and, possibly the digging of test pits. The aim would be to establish the exact location and extent of the site with a view to considering the possibility of large-scale excavation or reburials after the results of the preliminary field work.

  The panel members deliberated, and reached their conclusion on Pheasant Wood:

  It was agreed that while not conclusive, sufficient evidence does exist to warrant further investigation of records pertaining to the Pheasant’s [sic] Wood site. Field studies are not recommended unless more compelling documentary evidence is located to support the contention that the site was used as a mass grave by the Germans in July 1916. Should more compelling evidence be discovered, the Panel agreed to reconvene, consider the new evidence and prepare an appropriate recommendation to the Minister for further action.

  The panel went on to recommend that they contract a researcher (John Williams, Sydney author and academic and a member of the panel) to investigate the military records of the Bavarian Division opposing the attackers at Fromelles to find out how the dead were collected and interred after the battle. It also agreed that the Australian Army should approach their British counterparts and examine the area’s intelligence assessments to find out what activity occurred there during the two years after the battle in 1916. Finally, the panel asked the army to try to locate the maps and reports of the Graves Registration Unit for the area after the war to find out whether they revealed any remains recovered from the site after the war.

  Rather than leave things entirely in the hands of the army and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Lambis and his team set about covering the ground themselves. Once they had extended their coverage and again worked their way through the war graves records, they were surprised to find an additional nine names of soldiers missing from the Battle of Fromelles. They were listed on the memorial wall at another famous Australian battle site, Villers-Bretonneux, about 80 kilometres to the south in the Somme. The nine Diggers listed there all also appeared in the Red Cross files showing they were gathered, not at Villers-Bretonneux, but at Fromelles on 19 July 1916 and buried by the Germans. This brought the total missing, buried by the Germans, to 170.

  This remarkable aerial shot by the Royal Flying Corps shows virtually the entire Australian battlefield at Fromelles as it was on 19 July 1916. Taken from an oblique angle, it captures almost all the key elements of the battle from a position roughly in line with the Sugar Loaf salient (bottom right). From the bottom of the frame, it shows the Australian, then German front lines, with no-man’s land between them, and looks south-east across the German-held territory as far as the Aubers ridgeline. The Fromelles township is in the centre about a third of the way down the photo, with Pheasant Wood just to the left in front of the town. (AWM PHOTO E05990)

  One of these new names was Lieutenant Robert David Burns of the 14th Machine Gun Company. When Lambis opened Burns’ Red Cross record, it yielded another clue. Burns had been one of the last to try to withdraw from behind the German lines. He broke up his machine gun so the enemy couldn’t use it and tried to fight his way back to the Australian lines but was killed, probably in no-man’s land. He was the heir to the vast Burns Philp fortune – one of the biggest trading companies in the Pacific – and his Sydney-based father had called on his company’s London executives to try to find his son’s grave.

  A reference in Burns’ file led Lambi
s to an official internal inquiry held in 1920 by the Australian War Graves Service. The findings are now held in the National Archives. The inquiry was established to investigate claims that civilians had been present at the exhumation of loved ones’ remains, something that was prohibited by the British regulations at the time. The investigation was prompted because a Burns Philp executive, named as Mr C.A. Smith, apparently had been present at the Fournes Military Cemetery, near Fromelles, when a grave believed to contain Australian dead from the Battle of Fromelles was exhumed in 1919. Major G.L. Philips, Officer Commanding Australian Graves Services, swore an affidavit that caught Lambis’ eye from its opening paragraph:

  The records in Australia House [in London] show that a letter dated the 12th day of March 1919, was received from the Officer in Charge of Records, Administrative Headquarters, AIF, London, addressed to the Corps Burial Officer of the Australian Graves Registration Section France and relative to Lieutenant R.D. Burns, 14th Machine Gun Corps, killed in action on 20/7/16. This letter referred to an inquiry which had been received asking for the place of burial of this officer, further that records show that Lieutenant Burns was killed during the action at Fromelles on 20/7/16. It was also stated that a communication was received from Germany giving the information that there were five large collective British graves before Pheasant Wood [emphasis added] and also a German Military Cemetery at Fournes. It was asked that a search be made and Australian Headquarters, London, be advised of the result. A digest of these facts was forwarded to Major Allen, then inspector of the AIF Graves Section in France, and instructions were given that a search be made.

  So, once again, Lambis had confirmation that the Germans buried Australian dead in mass graves at Pheasant Wood. In another affidavit in the file, by Major A. Allen, Inspector of Australian Graves Services, Northern Section (responsible for the Fromelles area), Lambis found:

  Before any question of the exhumation of Lieutenant Burns’ body arose I made an exhaustive search all around Fromelles, Pheasant Wood and a portion of Fournes [emphasis added].

  To Lambis, the importance of this inquiry was that it revealed that Major Allen, the representative of the Australian War Graves Service, did in fact search the Pheasant Wood area seeking evidence of buried Australians and that he found no trace of the graves. Lambis now believed his team had established that the Germans had buried the missing Australians at Pheasant Wood in 1916 but that, as late as 1920, the War Graves teams had not located the mass graves there. It followed therefore that they could not have re-interred the remains at Pheasant Wood at one of the official cemeteries.

  Lambis also sought expert advice from Dr Tony Pollard from the Centre of Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow about the way the earth on the Pheasant Wood site would have behaved in the years since the pits were filled in. Lambis noted that the pits appear to have subsided to their present state of slight depressions. Pollard reported that it was quite common for earth mounds, as high a metre, to subside in the first two or three years after burial because of the partial decay of the bodies in them. This, Lambis believed, would explain why the graves were no longer obvious, nor even recognisable as such, when the people of Fromelles returned to the village two and a half years after the Germans filled them in.

  In late 2005 a new player emerged on the scene. Sydney lawyer and amateur military historian, Chris Bryett, had just capped a lifelong fascination with Australia’s military history with an emotional tour of the Western Front battlefields of World War I. Bryett had watched Lambis’ work with fascination from afar but came home determined to help him get some resolution. He offered to help in any way he could. Lambis sent him the presentation document to the Army Panel of Investigation.

  The first thing that struck Chris Bryett was the number of the missing. The lawyer emerged and he quizzed Lambis on how he had substantiated the final number. The original figures came from a spreadsheet that Senator Hill had handed over to the Senate Estimates Committee. It had originated from the Office of War Graves, which had apparently got it from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Chris was concerned at the method Lambis had used and went back to first principles:

  I started to verify those numbers by visiting the State Library in Sydney, copying a register at a time and then sitting on the bus and reading the register and ticking them off. I checked each cemetery register as to who was in what cemetery and compared it with the spreadsheet that Senator Hill had given to the Senate Estimates Committee.

  Chris knew that Lambis had gone through the 1299 listed in the Honour Roll of the Fromelles dead and missing in Corfield’s book and checked them off against the Red Cross records. Where they had mention of a German death list, he included them in and all else went out. However, Chris came at the numbers from a different angle. The spreadsheet listed the numbers of Australians from the Battle of Fromelles buried in eight regional cemeteries. He then went through those one by one and cross-matched them by battalions from the 5th Division and the dates of their deaths. If they died on the 19th or 20th he included them. Then he eliminated those recorded as being buried somewhere and came down to the number of those with no record of being buried. He spoke to Lambis.

  We got to a point where I said yeah I’ve done it and I’m reasonably comfortable with the number. He said how many do you reckon there is? And I said 170 … And he said that’s amazing. I asked why and he said well we’ve just done this exercise with the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Records and we’ve come to 170.

  So, in essence, Lambis and Chris had corroborated the missing by counting them in two ways: Lambis counted those the Germans claimed to have buried; Chris added up all bodies actually recorded as being buried at all the regional cemeteries and then subtracted that from the total known to have been killed or missing after the battle. They were elated.

  Then, in November 2005, John Williams visited Pheasant Wood to conduct his inquiries for the Panel of Investigation. According to Williams, the only source that suggested the presence of the mass graves was the unit history of the 21BRIR which appeared in 1923. He quoted the official British historian, Sir James Edmonds, as telling Bean:

  It won’t do to rely on regimental and divisional histories: they are nearly all written by ‘hacks’ … who wanted to earn their fees as quickly as possible, without research or investigation.

  Williams told the panel that he visited a French historian named Baileul-Catignies in Sainghin-en-Weppes in the company of Martial Delebarre. He concluded:

  M. Baileul believes, as I now tend to believe, that the constructions by Pheasant Wood were military and defensive in nature – possibly a heavy minenwerfer [trench mortar] emplacement carried out in accordance with Falkenhayn’s orders – and which may or may not have been completed by 19 July 1916.

  Williams backed up this view with a suggestion that when writing the 21RIR unit history, the author may have confused the German word for grave ‘das Grab’ with the similar word for trench ‘der Graben’. He went on to suggest that if there were remains in the pits at Pheasant Wood they were likely to be those of Portuguese soldiers killed in the area in early 1918.

  Williams then downplayed the overall importance of the Australians’ contribution to the war in the area by claiming the Australian dead would represent little more than 5 per cent of the 20,000 ‘Germans, Britons, Frenchmen, Indians, Anzacs, Canadians and Portuguese killed during the war in fighting around Fromelles’, adding: ‘Only a fraction of those men have known graves’.

  When Lambis gave Chris Bryett a copy of John Williams’ elevenpage report it was like a red rag to a bull.

  To say I was disappointed was a massive understatement. He got the names of battalions and sources wrong, basic facts that should never have been wrong. His supposition that the pits had been dug before the battle was without any foundation.

  While Chris was near his boiling point, Lambis remained staunch in his belief that the proper process must be followed and that it would eventually prove h
is theories correct.

  Fromelles, just after the cessation of hostilities (above) and today (below). The village was home to around 1000 people in 200 houses at the outbreak of the war. It was linked to Lille by railway and electricity had reached it just before the war. The church dated from the late fourteenth century. By war’s end the village had been reduced to little more than a pile of rubble, surrounded by hundreds of concrete blockhouses and kilometres of trenches. Today Fromelles is again a thriving village with around 1000 inhabitants. (TOP: AWM PHOTO E03723; BOTTOM: PATRICK LINDSAY PHOTO)

  Around Anzac Day of 2006, I formed the opinion that the Panel wasn’t ever going to come back with a conclusion that was useful to Lambis. And that the only way we would ever get the Panel to do anything useful or positive or helpful, so far as we would assess it, would be if we got a private dig running.

  Chris started getting serious about putting a team together during May through to July. He created an association he called ROAM (Recovering Overseas Australia’s Missing Inc.). Progress was relatively slow until he started contacting the world archaeological community in July of 2006. He found an expert website where you can seek comment or help on projects. His email explaining the situation at Pheasant Wood brought a dozen responses.

  Two of them said, if you don’t pick me, Richard Wright is your boy. I’d never heard of him, didn’t know him from a bar of soap. I saw he was a professor and I thought, professor, that’s going to be a bit hard. But he also responded so I made contact … and mass graves are his bag.