WHO WERE THESE MEN?
BRITAIN AT WAR
men that Australia lost at Fromelles in less than twenty-four hours remains the most concentrated series of losses its army has suffered in any war or battle.
A number of those killed – both British and Australian – were taken by the Germans and placed in large burial pits. It was from these mass graves that the bodies of 250 men were recovered over recent months. All that now remained was to try and identify these soldiers.
PREVIOUS PAGE MAIN PICTURE: The Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s new Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery with construction work almost completed. The two graves nearest the camera mark the last resting places of two identified soldiers. On the left, Grave E11 in Plot I, is the headstone of 20-year-old Private Raymond Bishop, 55th Battalion Australian Infantry, whilst next to him, in Grave E10, lies Second Lieutenant Albert Pratt, 29th Battalion Australian Infantry. Pratt, who was 22-years-old when he was killed, was a native of Auckland, New Zealand. (Courtesy of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission)
PREVIOUS PAGE INSET PICTURE: Men of the 53rd Battalion Australian Infantry waiting to attack at Fromelles. Only three of these men survived, and they were all wounded. (Courtesy of the Australian War Memorial)
ABOVE:
The cemetery pictured as preparations for the service of dedication, held on Monday 19 July 2010, neared completion. During the service an un-named soldier was buried. He was the last of the 250 Australian and British soldiers found at the Pheasant Wood site to be laid to rest. (Courtesy of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission)
RIGHT:
Private Raymond Bishop, 55th Battalion Australian Infantry, whose grave can be seen in the main picture on the previous page. (Courtesy of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission)
BELOW:
A panorama of the site of Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery taken in early 2009 before construction work began in May that year. (Courtesy of the Brian Harris/ Commonwealth War Graves Commission)
better off. It hailed from the central English shires – Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire – and, although it had been in France for longer than the 5th Australian Division, this was only by a matter of weeks.
The Allied attack on the “The Sugarloaf”, in effect a subsidiary action to the much larger battle taking place further south on the Somme, was repelled by the Germans with very heavy losses. The British battalions had a front-line strength of only 550, whereas the Australian battalions were around half as strong again. As a result the British went forward with one man for every metre of German front being attacked, whilst the Australians had three men compressed into the same space. This difference may go some way to explaining why Australian casualties in the battle were more than three times those of the British.
Fromelles was the first battle fought by the AIF on the Western Front. The 5,300
One of the Australians whose body may have been recovered in 2009 and was buried, unidentified, in the new cemetery at Fromelles is Douglas Caswell. Caswell, who came from New South Wales, was identified as possibly being one of the Fromelles casualties following an article in the Newcastle Morning Herald in 2008. In this Caswell’s niece revealed that she was in possession of the identity tags of one Private Douglas Caswell, 30th Battalion AIF. The tags had been returned to his parents via the Red Cross in 1917.
This was spotted by Caswell’s great-niece Bronwyn Owens. Bronwyn’s aunt, Beth McLennan, had been asked to help find a blood relative of Private Caswell to provide a DNA sample as it was known from military records that he had been killed in the Battle of Fromelles. The combination of his dog tags as proof that the Germans buried him and the contemporary evidence that placed him close to the front line in the battle, meant that it was likely that he was a member of the so-called “191” of Australians who might have been found at Fromelles in 2009.
Even the remote possibility that her great uncle might be identified catapulted Bronwyn and her family into a new and extraordinary scene being played out over half a world away.
The setting then shifted to Upton-upon- Severn in Worcestershire. Bronwyn discovered that her grandfather Edwin Caswell, a coal agent from Worcestershire, had emigrated to Australia with his son, Douglas, in 1912. Sophie Caswell and her daughter Nellie, Bronwyn’s grandmother, arrived the following year. *
30
AUGUST 2010
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