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

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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)