France 2015 - Day 5 - Fromelles - Australian Memorial Park and VC Corner Cemetery

After a diversion, on the outskirts of Fromelles, to try and find a bunker that Adolf  Hitler may (or may not) have been in during World War I we arrived at the  Australian Memorial Park.

The Battle of Fromelles in July 1916 is significant as the first occasion on which the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF) saw action on the Western Front. 

The battle is widely regarded as a disaster for the Allies, and has been described as "the worst 24 hours in Australia's entire history." It resulted from a plan to divert German attention from the Battle of the Somme, but historians estimate that 5,500 Australians and 2,000 British troops were killed or wounded.

The Australian losses were equivalent to the combined total Australian losses in the Boer War, Korean War and Vietnam War: although later World War I actions would be more deadly for the AIF, Fromelles was the only one to achieve no success. (Wikipedia)

There are the remains of several German Blockhouses in the park. The land has grown up around some of these. They were protected with machine guns and much barbed wire.

 

  

At the Australian Memorial Park is a statue called ‘Cobbers’. It shows Sergeant Simon Fraser, 58th Battalion, carrying in a wounded man on his back. Why ‘Cobbers’? That old Australian word for mate is little heard today, but in 1916 Fraser used it in a letter describing his rescue of two men: ‘Then another man about 30 yards out sang out, “Don’t forget me, cobber”. I went in and got four volunteers with stretchers, and we got both men in safely’. So it is not the memory of the military disaster of Fromelles which is remembered here, but rather the courage and compassion of those who risked their lives to help the wounded.

Jo laying a cross on the memorial

 

About 200 metres down the road is V.C. Corner Cemetery. The trees in the distance in the image below are in the Cemetery.

V.C. Corner Cemetery is the only uniquely Australian cemetery on the Western Front. It was formed after the Armistice and contains the graves of 410 Australian soldiers who were killed during the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916 and whose bodies were found on the battlefield. As none of the bodies could be identified, it was decided not to mark the individual graves, but to record on a memorial the names of all the Australian soldiers who were killed in the engagement and whose graves are not known. Many of those originally listed on the memorial were subsequently identified and re-interred at Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Cemetery.(CWGC.org)

At VC Corner there are no headstones. Under two large concrete crosses set flat on the ground, to the left and right near the cemetery entrance, are the remains of more than 400 Australians who were killed in action or died of wounds. They died all around here. The cemetery is in the middle of the old no-man’s-land between the Australian and German trenches of 19 July 1916 (ww1westernfront.gov.au) 

The memorial wall commemorating by name 1,299 Australians who died in the Battle of Fromelles and who have no known grave.

Together, the wall and the cemetery mark the location of perhaps the greatest disaster to befall the AIF on the Western Front in World War I (ww1westernfront.gov.au)