France 2015 - Day 4 - Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme and The Ulster Memorial Tower

Onto the Thiepval Memorial, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.

(CWGC Image)

The Thiepval Memorial, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, bears the names of more than 72,000 officers and men of the United Kingdom and South African forces who died in the Somme sector before 20 March 1918 and have no known grave.
Over 90% of those commemorated died between July and November 1916. The memorial also serves as an Anglo-French Battle Memorial in recognition of the joint nature of the 1916 offensive and a small cemetery containing equal numbers of Commonwealth and French graves lies at the foot of the memorial.(cwgc.org)

The memorial was under renovation for the 100th anniversary in 2016, plus they were building an expansion to the visitors centre.

Jo inside the memorial. All the white stone panels are filled with names listed under the regiments in which the were serving when they died

Each the laurels signify a individual battle or engagement.

Another view of the inside. So many names.

When they find or identify someone they are buried in a known grave then the name is removed from the memorial.

No relation to me but so many Gibson's from one Regiment (the Northumberland Fusiliers) . You have to assume many of them are related. Where there were people with the same initial their service number is listed.



Cross of Sacrifice in the centre of the cemetery out the back of the memorial. On the left is the French Cemetery, on the right is the Commonwealth Cemetery

The Terrain from the memorial - not much of a hill



Poppy in a silver beat field on the outskirts of the memorial.



Out the back of the memorial there is a short road. We followed it around and came across the 18th (Eastern) Division memorial. This memorial commemorates their successful capture of Thiepval village on 26 September 1916.

Five minutes down the road is the Ulster Memorial Tower.

This is a Somme battlefield memorial to the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division. It commemorates the heavy losses suffered by 36th Division on 1st July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. There is a small museum and shop on site.

 

Trench Mortar

Other stuff in the museum

France 2015 - Day 4 - Pozières

Pozières sits about half way between Albert and Bapaume on the main read between these two towns. The village was completely destroyed in World War I during what became the Battle of Pozières.

The Battle of Pozières was a two-week struggle for the French village of Pozières and the ridge on which it stands, during the middle stages of the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Though British divisions were involved in most phases of the fighting, Pozières is primarily remembered as an Australian battle. The fighting ended with the Allied forces in possession of the plateau north and east of the village, in a position to menace the German bastion of Thiepval from the rear. (wikipedia).

The Digger on water tower just outside Pozières on the Bapaume side. The names below are those who were awarded the Victoria Cross in the battles in the area. There are five Australians, one Canadian and one Brit.

The Windmill

The Australian War Memorial owns a little piece of France – the Windmill site at Pozières. Australia’s official war historian, Charles Bean, suggested the purchase because ‘The Windmill site ... marks a ridge more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth’. Over seven weeks in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, the Australian Imperial Force suffered 23,000 casualties, more than 6700 of whom died, in the countryside around the Windmill. On 11 November 1993 soil from the Windmill site was cast over the coffin of Australia’s Unknown Soldier during his funeral at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. (www.ww1westernfront.gov.au/pozieres-windmill/)

The windmill on this high ground was used from September 1914 as a German field artillery observation post and command post.

The windmill was gradually smashed up by French and then British artillery fire. It was eventually reduced to a pile of rubble. Remains of the windmill and the German blockhouse have been left and grassed over, leaving the undulating ground as a preserved battlefield site at this place

The field looking back towards Pozières. On this field and around the windmill more Australians died than anywhere else in the war (including Gallipoli)

Just across the road is the from The Windmill is the is Tank Corps memorial. This marks the first occasion upon which tanks were used in the Battle of the Somme, and in war in general. They were supported by New Zealand Infantry.

At the Albert end of Pozières is the First Australian Division Memorial

During the last week of July 1916 shells fell in their thousands on Australian soldiers in a village they had captured from the Germans – Pozières. I had not the slightest idea where our lines or the enemy’s were, and the shells were coming at us from, it seemed, three directions, wrote Australian Lieutenant John Raws. Pozières was reduced to rubble and shattered earth, but here the men of the First Australian Division later built their memorial in France. They remembered the tenacity with which they had held their ground and the comrades who had perished in the horror of those bombardments. (From www.ww1westernfront.gov.au/pozieres-australian-memorial/)

The ruin of the Gibraltar blockhouse is next to the memorial.

The ruin of the Gibraltar blockhouse, taken from the Germans when the Australian 1st Division attacked, took and held Pozières village between 23 and 26 July 1916. This action was one of the many battles between 1 July and 19 November of that year known collectively as The Battle of the Somme.
Gibraltar, like the Rock of Gibraltar, stuck out above the landscape, a landscape which by the end of July 1916 was a wilderness of craters. Lance Corporal Roger Morgan, 2nd Australian Infantry Battalion, described the scene: ‘a land of desolation ... villages are mere heaps of brick dust ... every yard of earth has been torn about by shells ... the whole place looks like a badly ploughed field’. This ploughing was done by thousands of British, Australian and German shells as the village and its surroundings were fought over, again and again, during July and August 1916.
Gibraltar itself was seized by men of the 2nd Australian Infantry Battalion just after daybreak on 23 July. A large white structure, some three metres tall and some 137 metres beyond the western end of Pozières, it was made of reinforced concrete and was used by the Germans as an observation post. The concrete covered the entrance to a large cellar and a stairway led down to an even deeper room. Realising this was a significant strongpoint, Captain Ernest Herrod rushed it with a small party from the front while others, led by Lieutenant Walter Waterhouse, attacked from the rear. Inside were twenty-six Germans, one of whom had his thumb on the button of a machine gun as the Australians burst in upon him. By the evening of the 23rd, the 2nd Battalion was in full possession of Gibraltar and throughout the coming days the Australians extended their hold over Pozières.
German counter-attacks failed to retake the village, so the enemy decided on a different approach. For three days their artillery poured shells on the Australian positions at Pozières. The area around Gibraltar was hard hit, as it lay close to one of the main supply routes into the village along ‘Dead Man’s Road’. That road is still there: it runs out into the far side of the main road across the small park beside the blockhouse ruins. The 2nd Battalion’s ‘War Diary’ recorded: ‘subject to very heavy shelling by the enemy’, ‘a continuous bombardment was maintained all day’, ‘bombardment continued throughout the night ... many men were buried’, ‘bombardment so intense it was impossible for A and D Companies to remain in their trenches’, ‘men were thoroughly worn out’. All told the battalion lost 510 men killed, wounded and missing during three days at Pozières, nearly 55 per cent of those who had attacked the village on 23 July ( www.ww1westernfront.gov.au)

The concrete covered the entrance to a large cellar and a stairway led down to an even deeper room

.

On the way to Thiepval we drove past Mouquet Farm, called Moo Cow Farm by the AIF.

The Battle of Mouquet Farm, also known as the Fighting for Mouquet Farm was part of the Battle of the Somme and took place as part of the Battle of Pozières (23 July – 3 September). The Fighting for Mouquet Farm began on 10 August with attacks by the I Anzac Corps and it was captured by the 3rd Canadian Division of the Canadian Corps on 16 September. The farm was lost to a German counter-attack, before being re-captured on 26 September, during an attack by the 11th (Northern) Division as part of the Battle of Thiepval Ridge (26–28 September), in which No. 16 Section of the 6th East Yorkshire (Pioneers), smoked out the last German defenders. (wikipedia)

France 2015 - Day 4 - The Lochnagar Crater and Caterpillar Valley

About 10 mins drive from Albert is the Lochnagar Crater. This was, formed by the Lochnagar mine.

The Lochnagar mine was a mine dug by the Tunnelling Companies of the Royal Engineers under a German field fortification known as Schwabenhöhe, in the front line, south of the village of La Boisselle in the Somme département of France.

The mine was named after Lochnagar Street, the British trench from which the gallery was driven. It formed part of a series of eight large and eleven small mines that were placed beneath the German lines on the British section of the Somme front.
The Lochnagar mine was sprung at 7:28 a.m. on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The crater was captured and held by British troops but the attack on either flank was defeated by German small-arms and artillery fire, except on the extreme right flank and just south of La Boisselle, north of the new crater. The crater has been preserved as a memorial, where a service is held on 1 July each year. (Wikipedia)

The Lochnagar Crater Memorial is privately owned, having been purchased by Richard Dunning on July 1st 1978. It is supported by the Friends of Lochnagar who help maintain it.

Pano of the crater



Another shot of the crater. Unfortunately it's hard to get a sense of scale of how big this hole is. It is almost 91 metres (300 ft)) in diameter and 21 metres (70ft) deep.

This simple memorial is for Private George Nugent. His remains were found on the on 31st October 1998 when a visitor noticed what he thought were human remains emerging from the chalk. The remains were exhumed on Tuesday 3rd November 1998 .

The remains consisted of a human skeleton, the skull of which was broken. Various items of army kit were found with the remains including a rifle, bullets and water bottle, as well as personal items, including a pipe mouthpiece, a silver pen holder and a folding cut throat razor.

It was the razor that held the key to identifying the remains.
Every soldier in the British Army was required to shave daily. Soldiers looked after their razors, and were extremely unlikely to loan it to another soldier. The razor found with the remains, had George's name and service number etched into the handle, so identifying the remains as those of Private George Nugent.
George Nugent was reburied, with military honours, at Ovillers Military Cemetery on 1st July 2000, 84 years after he was killed in battle.(lochnagarcrater.org/)

Memorial to all the nurses who served in WWI

We headed off to follow the route of the Battle of Pozières, fought mainly by the Australians. However we took a wrong turn and ended up at Caterpillar Valley Cemetery. We were going here but the plan was to arrive after following the route of the Battle of Pozières . Oh well :D 

Much of the text below is taken From the CWGC Site

Caterpillar Valley was the name given by the army to the long valley which rises eastwards, past "Caterpillar Wood", to the high ground at Guillemont.
The ground was captured, after very fierce fighting, in the latter part of July 1916. It was lost in the German advance of March 1918 and recovered by the 38th (Welsh) Division on 28 August 1918, when a little cemetery was made (now Plot 1 of this cemetery) containing 25 graves of the 38th Division and the 6th Dragoon Guards. 

After the Armistice, this cemetery was hugely increased when the graves of more than 5,500 officers and men were brought in from other small cemeteries, and the battlefields of the Somme. The great majority of these soldiers died in the autumn of 1916 and almost all the rest in August or September 1918.

Caterpillar Valley Cemetery now contains 5,569 Commonwealth burials and commemorations of the First World War. 3,796 of the burials are unidentified but there are special memorials to 32 casualties known or believed to be buried among them, and to three buried in McCormick's Post Cemetery whose graves were destroyed by shell fire.

Some views of the Cemetery

On the 6th November 2004, the remains of an unidentified New Zealand soldier were removed from this cemetery and entrusted to New Zealand at a ceremony held at the Longueval Memorial, France. The remains had been exhumed by staff of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission from Plot 14, Row A, Grave 27 and were later laid to rest within the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, at the National War Memorial, Wellington, New Zealand.

On the east side of the cemetery is the Caterpillar Valley (New Zealand) Memorial, commemorating more than 1,200 officers and men of the New Zealand Division who died in the Battles of the Somme in 1916, and whose graves are not known.

This is one of seven memorials in France and Belgium to those New Zealand soldiers who died on the Western Front and whose graves are not known. The memorials are all in cemeteries chosen as appropriate to the fighting in which the men died.

Both cemetery and memorial were designed by Sir Herbert Baker.

From the Cross of Sacrifice looking towards the memorial.

The New Zealand Memorial

Some of the panels on the memorial.

From the memorial looking back towards the Cross of Sacrifice

 Another view looking towards the Memorial

ANZAC's 

Just down the road is the Delville Wood South African memorial. Unfortunately we didn't get to this one as we wanted to head back towards Pozières.

And as we left Caterpillar Valley we spotted other cemetery in the middle of the field in the distance. This one is called Thistle Dump Cemetery, High Wood. Everywhere in this area there are places like this, seemingly in the middle of nowhere but each with a story.

High Wood was fiercely fought over during the Battle of the Somme until cleared by 47th (London) Division on 15 September 1916. It was lost during the German advance of April 1918, but retaken the following August.
Thistle Dump Cemetery was begun in August 1916 and used as a front line cemetery until February 1917. It was later increased after the Armistice by the concentration of 56 graves from the Somme battlefields.
There are now 196 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in the cemetery. 59 of the burials are unidentified but there are special memorials to four casualties known to be buried among them. The cemetery also contains seven German war graves. (CWGC.org)

We didn't go here either.. not enough time....

France 2015 - Day 3 - Villers-Bretonneux to Albert

The day was getting late so we decided to miss the Australian Memorial at Hamel and head to Albert for a rest. After seeing Hamel on the TV show ANZAC battlefields I was questioned by Jodie as to why we hadn't gone there. Kinda wish we had.

Anyway we were driving along a country road and spotted this plaque. This was the site of the first tank vs tank combat.

I went for a short walk along the edge of the field opposite and found a large piece of rusty metal, which I assume was shrapnel.

After that we headed toward Albert. Stopping off at the 3rd Australia Division Memorial.

The leading battalions of the division came to this land of deep, river valleys and broad sweeping uplands on the morning of 27 March 1918 marching up towards this spot from the village of Heilly in the valley of the Ancre just to the north. Their task was to occupy an old French defence line between the river Ancre in the north and the Somme in the south, roughly between the villages of Mericourt–L’Abbé and Sailly–le–Sec, and slightly to the east of these settlements:

As the Australians arrived, bullets from long distance reached them. The Germans, who were in the sixth day of a rapid advance that had begun on 21 March 1918, were firing at them from afar.

Called ‘Operation Michael’, this massive German attack had quickly breached the British lines near St Quentin to the east. Their plan was to push rapidly westwards, capture the city of Amiens and then cut off the British armies in the north from their French allies in the south. The Germans had initially swept all before them and the British began to retreat across the famous 1916 battlegrounds of the Somme.

To relieve the weary British, fresh divisions, including the Third Division, were rushed from the north to stem the German advance west of Albert.

(from http://www.ww1westernfront.gov.au/le-hamel/sailly-le-sec.php)

The road to Sailly-le-Sec. opposite the 3rd Australian Division memorial. As you can see, not really on a hill

Unfortunately I hadn't done by research on this area. Just down the road is the site where the Red baron was downed...... Doh !

We finally arrived at our Hotel about 3 kms out of Albert. Nothing flash but a generic Ibis. Time for a local ale. This time I tried a red beer (tasted a lot like raspberry soft drink). Nice enough but I didn't have another.
 

It was kinda the colour of Jo's hair -  tasted nicer though