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Back in Australia, news on the great losses at Fromelles didn’t become
obvious to Australians until the coverage by newspapers in 1920.
The losses of men and in particular, officers, was a serious blow to the
levels of competence and the leadership of the the Units involved in the
debacle at Fromelles.
His passion for the welfare of his troops may have weighed heavily on
Elliott as he committed suicide in 1931.
Haking seemed to be able to divert responsibility for the plan’s failure to
the Australians inexperience, and the Battle of Pozieres which occurred
four days later with its heavy losses diverted attention away from
Fromelles.
VC CORNER CEMETERY FROMELLES
VC Corner contains the names of 1299 soldiers who were missing after
the battle. It is the only all-Australian cemetery in Europe. They have no
headstones as none of the soldiers can be identified. The dead included
twenty four pairs of brothers - a fact that resulted because soldiers were
allocated in groups of reinforcements to the same battalion when they
enlisted. This meant that in any battle where heavy losses occurred could
also mean that any family could lose more than one son.
With a continuation of the Somme Offensive the Australian 1
st
Division
was able to capture the small village of Pozieres in fierce fighting but
again suffered a large number of casualties, amounting to five thousand.
While it was a victory at Pozieres the Australians suffered badly and the
victory was probably only due simply to the distance between the
combatants being much shorter at Pozieres than Fromelles. The wider
front at Fromelles made the machine gun more lethal from the German
controlled salients.
Charles Bean, a journalist from Australia, said Pozieres “is more deeply
sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth”. Bean had
won a ballot to be the one journalist recognized by the Australian
government to report on Australia’s involvement in the First World War.
Charles Bean had been at Gallipoli and his experiences of the war
inspired him to begin the Australian War Memorial to honour Australia’s
war time losses and at the same time allow average Australians to see the
futility of war. Peter Fitzsimon’s book
Fromelles and Pozieres: In the
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