Private Frank Desmond Archer

Rod Martin

We may never know what motivated Frank Archer to sign up in June 1916.  That he did not enlist before that date is understandable.  The twenty-six year-old blacksmith had a wife and two children to support and care for, and the initial rush to enlist after war broke out in 1914 suggested that there were plenty of eager and single young men to fill the ranks.  By 1916, however, things had changed.  News of the disasters at Gallipoli had led to a significant reduction in the numbers enlisting, and a commitment by the Hughes Labor government to provide an extra 50 000 troops on top of those who had already enlisted led to a substantial propaganda campaign across the country.  It may have finally persuaded Frank that he had to go and do his bit.  There again, he may have been motivated by another kind of incentive, such as the receipt of a white feather.  Some women, angered by their belief that apparently fit men should enlist, sent these symbols of cowardice to those still wearing ‘civvies’, or even confronted them with them.  Some were indiscriminate, and victimized men who had been rejected by the military for some reason or another.  A few repatriated veterans, suffering from such problems as shell shock, were also singled out for such treatment.

Whatever the reason, Frank enlisted and was sent to Broadmeadows for training.  He was assigned to 14 Battalion which, by late 1916, was known as ‘Jacka’s Mob’, a title it gave itself after Lance-Corporal Albert Jacka won the first Australian VC of the war at Gallipoli.  He completed his training at Broadmeadows and embarked on A71 HMAT Nestor at Port Melbourne on 2 October as a member of 21 Reinforcements. He sailed via the Cape of Good Hope, suffered a bout of influenza that put him in the ship’s hospital for seven days, and landed in Plymouth, southern England, on 16 November.  He completed further training at Codford, and embarked for Etaples, France, on 28 December. 

While in England, Frank showed what a supportive family man he was by writing eleven letters to his wife, as well as sending some ‘pretty’ post cards to various members of the family.  Still extant letters from Dora Archer to her brother Archie Pike on the Western Front indicate that Frank was constantly sending letters and gifts to his family up until the time he died.  He sent at least one ‘pretty’ post card to Dora from France.  It may have been one of the very popular embroidered lace ones like the example below:

(Source:  Rod Martin)

Frank’s stay at Etaples (a training camp) was short.  14 Battalion’s reinforcements were needed for participation in the Australians’ first major battle of 1917.  The Australian troops had been ‘blooded’ – quite literally – on the killing fields of Fromelles, Pozières and elsewhere on the Somme during the previous year, suffering great numbers of casualties. The start of 1917 still found them located in the area of the Somme Valley, fighting sporadic actions with their German opponents.  They had weathered the wettest and coldest European winter for forty years, but had received a fillip in February and March when the Germans staged a strategic retreat to the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line and solidly entrenched themselves.  The Allies were able to easily occupy the ground left by the Germans.  The retreat, however, did not change the military situation.  The Germans still occupied large portions of France and Belgium.

As winter turned to spring, British command planned a couple of offensives aimed at the Hindenburg Line, one at Arras and the other at Bullecourt.  Led by British Fifth Army commander Sir Hubert Gough, the Allied forces planned to use a combined tank/infantry attack to achieve surprise at Bullecourt.  Instead of the usual preliminary barrage to ‘soften’ the Germans up, twelve of the recently introduced ‘tank’ weapons would strike across no man’s land, destroying the barbed wire barricades.  Infantry would then rush through the gaps created and storm the German trenches.

An early British tank, Flers 1917. Australian War Memorial Collection.

http://cas.awm.gov.au/item/H09244

That was the plan, anyway.  The battle was delayed for a day because only three of the tanks had arrived on time.  Others had either broken down, had ‘accidents’ or been delayed by muddy conditions, shell-damaged roads or an inconveniently timed blizzard. The ones that did arrive made a hideous noise in doing so, removing any chance the Allies may have had of surprising the Germans with them.  Despite the fact that no further tanks arrived at the jumping off point, the impetuous Gough insisted on the attack going ahead the next morning.  He was anxious to please his boss Sir Douglas Haig, who wanted a quick action to coincide with the offensive at Arras.

So the men, including those from 14 Battalion, went over the top at 4.30 am on 11 April.  The tanks were soon out of the action and the fact that some of the troops made it to the first German trenches was an achievement in itself.  However, those men were stranded because they were not given artillery support once they got there.  The British believed that they would quickly progress to the next line of trenches, and the commanders didn’t want to take the risk of bombarding their own forces.  The men in the German trenches had no choice but to either retreat or be captured.

South-east of Bullecourt, May 1917.  The tank on the horizon broke down during

the first assault on 11 April.  All three were out of action by 10 am.  (AWM E01408)

Australian War Memorial Collection.  http://cas.awm.gov.au/item/E01408

As with so many other Allied offensives in the war, what became known as the First Battle of Bullecourt cost a large number of casualties.  Seventy-nine Australian officers and 2260 other ranks were killed or injured, and 1300 taken into captivity.  Les Carlyon describes the whole affair as a ‘bloody fiasco’.

Some time during the initial attack, Frank went missing.  A Red Cross report from a stretcher bearer named Foster, who claimed to have known Frank and sailed with him on the Nestor, indicates that he saw him lying dead in an area that was later overrun by the Germans.  We do not know the full story because his body was never found.  In November 1917, a court of inquiry determined that he was dead, and his name and details were recorded on the Villers Bretonneux Memorial after the war.

The grief suffered by Frank’s wife, Dora, and her children must have been immense.  It came on top of a triple tragedy the previous year when first Dora’s grandmother died, then her sister died in July at the age of seventeen, and then her father was killed in a freak accident at the Newport railway workshops in December.  He was fifty-one.  In addition, her brother Archie Pike was also fighting on the Western Front and in constant danger (petitions to the war department through local identities and organizations finally led to him being recalled to Australia for family reasons in 1917).

But the Archer family’s suffering was still not complete. In late 1917, the International Red Cross in Berlin received information from the Germans to the effect that Frank was in captivity.  They stated his regimental number and the name ‘Francis Archer’.  This information was passed on to Dora.  In May the following year, however, the Red Cross sent a further message stating that the report was incorrect, and that a Francis Archer, captured on the same day that Frank died, had been mistaken for Frank.  Frank was confirmed as having been killed in action.  He died in April.  Just how his number could be attached to the name of another man from another battalion reported as captured several months after the battle is a bit of a mystery.  If Frank was lying in a spot overrun by the Germans, it is possible that they quickly buried him behind the lines, took his identity disc and then got it mixed up with their records of those captured.  Stranger things must have happened in the chaos of battle.  In addition, the fact that both of the men went missing on the same day and were listed as having been born in Tasmania may have led to someone on the German side or at the Red Cross making a false conclusion.  And ‘Frank’ is usually an abbreviation of ‘Francis’, isn’t it?

So the hopes of Dora Archer and her children were dashed.  The family struggled on, assisted by government pensions, and later in 1918 Dora married a man several years her junior.  They were to stay together until her death. 

Sources

Australian War Memorial

Carlyon, Les: The Great War, Sydney, Macmillan, 2006

Frost, Lenore

National Archives of Australia

Pike Family correspondence, 7 February 1916-15 May 1917: transcribed by Lenore Frost

Travers, Richard: Diggers in France: Australian soldiers on the Western Front, Sydney, ABC Books, 2008