Volunteers of Essendon and Flemington, 1914-1918

 

Hogg T B    Driver    2855    Tom Bell             Div Amm Column    33    Railway employee    W    Pres       

Address:    Ascot Vale, St Leonards Rd, 143, c/- Mrs Ashburn   

Next of Kin:    Hogg, Thos, son, c/- Mrs Ashburne, 143 St Leonards Rd, Ascot Vale   

Enlisted:    24 Aug 1914       

Embarked:     A9 Shropshire 20 Oct 1914   

 

Date of death: 09/04/1917

CWGC: "Son of William and Marion Hogg. Born at Creswick, Victoria".

QUEANT ROAD CEMETERY, BUISSY

 

Driver/Gunner Thomas (Tom) Bell Hogg

 

Rod Martin

 

Being one month off the age of thirty-two, railway employee Tom Hogg was well over the median age of the men who were first to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force in August 1914.  It is also somewhat mysterious that, at just under 164 centimetres tall, he was under the mandatory minimum 167.6-centimetre level set by the army – and it had plenty of qualified recruits from which to choose at this early stage of the war.  It may be that Tom had a friend in the recruiting office who was prepared to accept him despite his age and physical ‘shortcomings’.

 

Tom’s motivations for signing up are also somewhat mysterious.  He was a widower, with a young son (it may be that his wife died in childbirth, an occurrence far more prevalent in those days than now) whom he left in the care of the boy’s aunt.  He was a mature recruit in a predominantly young cohort, many of whom were looking at the war as an adventure, a chance to see the world while protecting king and empire.  Despite his age, Tom may have been motivated by these same considerations.  It may also be the case that he was seeking to escape from responsibilities that were too onerous for him to bear.

 

Whatever the reasons, Tom was accepted into the military and assigned to 21 Field Artillery Brigade as a driver in an ammunition column – mainly horse-drawn in those days.  Just how he responded to this allocation is unknown.  He may have tried to be assigned to the infantry, but perhaps was considered a little old to be involved in mass attacks across open territory.  Certain behaviour once he reached Egypt may indicate a degree of dissatisfaction with his role in the scheme of things.

 

Tom trained in Melbourne and was part of the first contingent to sail on 20 October 1914.  His ship was A9 HMAT  Shropshire.

 

 

HMAT Shropshire at Port Melbourne     (AWM P01843.001)

 

(Probably) Shropshire sailing as part of the first convoy from Albany at the beginning of  December 1914   (AWM PB1377)

 

While ostensibly en route to the Western Front in France, the AIF commanders received orders to disembark in Egypt in order to prepare for an attack upon German ally Turkey.  Accordingly, the men alighted at Port Said and travelled to a new base camp established at Mena, north-east of Cairo.   Once an allied attempt to breach the Dardanelles Straits and seize Constantinople ended in disaster, the British plan then was to attack the western coast of the Gallipoli Peninsula, take control of it and then head east overland and take Constantinople that way.  The initial attack began on 25 April 1915.  Some eighteen-pound field guns were taken along, but the steep and rocky terrain at what became known at Anzac Cove was not conducive to wide-scale deployment of heavy guns, and horses and drivers were definitely not needed.

 

As a result, Tom and his compatriots were not taken to Gallipoli.  Instead, they continued training, having been transferred to a base at the port city of Alexandria.  This is where Tom’s troubles began.  Perhaps out of frustration at the lack of action, he started to drink and misbehave.  On 4 June 1915, he was awarded ten days’ detention and fined three days’ pay for going absent without leave (AWOL) between 30 April and 4 June.  However, it is obvious that he did not learn from this because, on 15 September, he was sentenced to Field Punishment Number Two (hard labour) for drunkenness and going AWOL between the thirteenth and fifteenth days of the month.  However, did this discourage him?  It does not seem so as, in Cairo on 21 September, he was fined ten shillings for drunkenness and awarded three days confined to barracks for going AWOL for twenty minutes.

 

It would seem that Tom finally got the message after this third punishment, for no other misdemeanour is noted on his record.  Instead, along with the troops returning from Gallipoli, he trained at the new Australian base at Tel el Kebir in preparation for the move to the Western Front.  As part of this, he was reassigned and reclassified as a gunner and was taken on the strength of 23 Battery, which became a part of 21 Field Artillery (Howitzer) Brigade in April, after arriving in France.  Now he would be a member of a group responsible for four eighteen-pound field guns, supporting 1 Australian Division.

 

                                                                                       (www.historylearningsite.co.uk)

 

The eighteen-pounder was an efficient field gun during the First World War.  However, it did not have the penetrating power necessary to blast such reinforced positions as German concrete blockhouses. As a result, some field artillery brigades also had 4.5-inch howitzers, guns that fired shells in a high trajectory, leading to those shells falling almost vertically on their targets.  Along with it four eighteen-pounder guns, 23 Battery was equipped with one section of four howitzers.

 

On 24 March 1916, 21 FAB began moving towards the port of Alexandria in preparation for the move to France. The men sailed on the twenty-fifth and arrived, via Malta, at Marseilles on 1 April.  They then marched around eight miles, arriving at a rest camp at La Valentine.  By the thirteenth of the month, the unit was based at Borre, near Hazebrouck, just south of the Belgian border.  1 Anzac Corps, of which 1 Division was part, had been sent to the so-called ‘nursery’ sector near Armentières, a relatively quiet part of the Western Front, a place where new arrivals could acclimatise while not being in too much danger.  The men spent most of April training at Borre before moving to the town of Fleurbaix (opposite the German-held village of Fromelles) on the twenty-sixth of the month.  On the thirtieth, they received their first supply of steel helmets, replacing the felt caps that were worn at Gallipoli.  They were ordered to wear them at all times when there was the slightest danger from enemy firing. 

 

The first action of the brigade occurred in early May, when two batteries, including 23 Battery, were involved in firing at the enemy lines.  On the fifteenth of the month, the howitzers were removed from the unit and it became, from then on, 21 Field Artillery Brigade.  Batteries were renamed, and Tom’s unit was officially designated as 23 Battery.  It moved out of the firing line on the same day and was replaced by 22 Battery. 

 

On the night of 30-31 May, 23 Battery moved into the line to replace 24 Battery.  At the same time, the brigade suffered its first listed casualties. Three men from 22 Battery were wounded by shellfire and, the next day another, also from 22 Battery, was killed in the same way.  While gun emplacements were, of necessity, located behind the front lines, the men firing them were under regular attack, either from enemy guns or from aerial bombardment.  Tom was not in a very safe position.

 

An eighteen-pound gun in action  (AWM E03045)

 

21 FAB remained at Fleurbaix in June.  As part of the training, batteries were rotated in and out of the front line for short periods of time.  On 19 June, Tom was sent to hospital, suffering from bronchitis, and he was not able to return to his unit until 4 July.   If he did go back to Fleurbaix, he would have been surprised.  Overnight, 21 FAB began moving north, over the Belgian border, to Ploegsteert, south of the town of Ypres.  Taking over from the Royal Field Artillery, 21 FAB’s guns were in place and in action by the fifth.  23 Battery’s guns were first fired at 4.30 pm on 6 July, aiming at the Germans’ barbed wire. Later that night they were firing at the enemy front line and support trenches.  The unit commander noted in the war diary that the trenches were ‘considerably damaged’.  Tom may still have been making his way north when these first actions occurred.  He may have arrived by the eighth of the month when the batteries were relieved by the Royal Field Artillery.  On the night of 8/9 July, the men moved into billets at nearby St. Jans Cappel.  Their stay there was to be short, however.  On 12 July, they entrained, once more heading back into France and, via a somewhat circuitous route, finally billeted at Havernas, north of Amiens, a town on the Somme River.

 

A trench at Ploegsteert.  The trees in the background line the main Plogsteert-Messines road.  (AWM P09534.016)

 

Beginning on 1 July, the Allies had launched an attack on the German lines near the Somme.  This battle was to become the largest of the war, carried out primarily to divert German attention from the conflict at Verdun, further to the south, and thus relieve the beleaguered French forces there.  The Germans had deliberately attacked the historic fortress at Verdun, believing rightly that the French would fight to the death to defend it, mainly for reasons of honour.  The battle was a veritable slaughter, large numbers of casualties being suffered by both sides.  The British high command proposed an attack on the Somme because, at that place, British and French soldiers could stand side by side as comrades in arms.  There was, however, no clear strategic objective for this attack and, while around nine square miles of territory had been gained by the following November, its loss did not put the Germans at a great disadvantage, and its human and material costs were astronomical.

 

21 FAB participated in this battle.  On 19 July 1916, it moved into the firing line near the town of Albert and relieved a Royal Field Artillery brigade.  From then until the end of the month, its guns supported Australian troops attacking the ruined village of Pozières and the strategic ridge behind it.  Casualties amongst the gunners were very light during this time,  only a few men being wounded.  Casualties amongst the infantry, however, were horrific.      1 Division sustained 5 285 casualties by the time it withdrew from the line on 25 July and     2 Division, replacing it, lost 6 846 by the time it finally seized the ridge on 4 August.

 

21 FAB continued to support the troops in the first week of August.  As the conflict intensified, however, it suffered more casualties.  Between 1 and 5 August, three men were killed and another three wounded.  Another seven men were admitted to hospital with various afflictions.  The unit was finally relieved on the seventh, moving off to a rest area at St. Leger, arriving there on the ninth.  By 16 August the brigade was back in the front line, relieving 22 FAB at Vadencourt, near Albert.  The unit cooperated in an attack on the eighteenth, and then provided artillery support for the troops as they moved forward.  On 23 August, the gunners moved out of the line again and headed for Ouderdom, south-west of Ypres in Belgium.  Their casualties in the second half of the month were very light, only one man dying from the effects of a gas shell.

 

On 1 September, 23 Battery, including Tom, took over from 68 Battery of the Royal Field Artillery on the front line.  Again, casualties were light, only three men being wounded during the last two weeks.  There were no other casualties until late in September, when two men were killed and one wounded. The unit stayed there in action until 15 October, when it withdrew from the line and headed south, over the border to Guémy in northern France.  It then moved further south, to the area of the Somme again, and went into action near Albert on 26 October.  From 4 November to the tenth, one man was killed and four wounded.  The Battle of the Somme was in its last, stalemated stages as winter – to be the coldest in forty years - was coming on.  The unit commander noted in the war diary that the weather on the tenth was generally unsettled and showery.  Casualties increased in the following week, with five men killed and another five wounded.  The Germans were still putting up quite a fight!

 

As the men moved into the last month of the year, they were experiencing increasingly foggy conditions. As a result, it was difficult for both sides to accurately target their firing.  Because of this, the month was relatively quiet, no casualties being suffered.  On 22 December, 21 FAB was relieved and moved to Havernas, north of Amiens, where the men spent Christmas and New Year in reserve.  The unit commander signed off for the year by noting that there was a serious shortage of men to handle the guns.  Some of this was as a result of an increase in rates of sickness and hospitalisation as that winter began to really bite.  The other, more serious reason was the reduced number of volunteers coming from Australia.  In an attempt to combat this problem the Hughes government, first in October that year and then again in 1917, conducted plebiscites on the issue of conscription.  Both attempts to gain support failed, and there were shortages among the ranks until the end of the war in November 1918.

 

         Filling a water cart from a pipe stand, the Somme, January 1917  (AWM E00174)

 

On 20 January 1917, an order to reorganise the 1 Division artillery was sent out from army headquarters.  The reorganisation was a consolidation of forces and an attempt to overcome a shortfall in headquarters staff.  As a result, 21 FAB ceased to exist and the men and guns were distributed among other brigades.  Tom and some other men were assigned to 4 Battery of 2 FAB.  21 FAB had already moved to Buire, located on the River Ancre, a tributary of the Somme. From there, once they were reassigned, the new members of 2 FAB moved to an area  known as Brickfields, not far from the town of Albert. That is where they found their new brigade.  The new, consolidated batteries now had six eighteen-pound guns each.

 

By then end of the day on 28 March, the men marched to the town of Laviéville, west of Albert.  The next day, the guns of 4 Battery were sent to the mobile workshop at Albert for overhaul.  One must presume that, in the meantime, the men of the battery were reassigned temporarily to assist in the other batteries during the time in reserve.  Beginning the previous January, the Germans on the Somme staged a strategic retreat.  Suffering losses in their ranks from almost continuous combat since February the previous year, and having to man a number of dangerously exposed salients in their line, the German commanders decided to consolidate their forces behind their heavily defended Siegfried Line (perhaps more commonly known as the Hindenburg Line, after the chief German military commander).  As the Germans retreated, the Allies moved forward cautiously, on the lookout for booby-traps and enemy snipers.  German guns still bombarded the territory and the Allies needed to use their guns to support the advance of their troops.  On 6 April, 2 FAB moved forward and, by the eighth, had sighted its guns on the Hindenburg Line.  The next day, thirty-one eighteen-pounders went into action, firing 1,410 rounds of shrapnel at the Germans.  Of course, the Germans fired back and the war diary records that, on the tenth, they succeeded in destroying 400 rounds of shrapnel and 116 high explosive howitzer shells.  They also damaged two eighteen-pound guns on 11 April.

 

On the thirteenth, the unit commander recorded that, between 7 and 13 April, twelve men had been killed in action and nineteen wounded.  Tom was one of the men killed, on the ninth.  As there are no Red Cross reports of his death, we can only assume that he was killed by enemy shellfire.  A Red Cross report does tell us, however, that he was one of seven from 4 Battery killed that day, and it would appear that they were all buried at Lagnicourt where they fell, two wooden crosses, each with several names, being erected over the grave.  The bodies were removed later and reburied in the Queant Road British Cemetery, near Buissy, north-west of the town of Cambrai.  That area had been recaptured from the Germans in September 1918.

 

As noted at the beginning of this story, Tom had a young son, whom he left in the care of his sister, Marion Osborne.  Upon Tom’s death, young Thomas was granted a stipend of twenty shillings (two pounds) per fortnight from 23 June.  As the years went on, this was increased to twenty-five shillings in 1922 and thirty shillings in 1926.  Marion Osborne was granted a pension of fourteen shillings per fortnight from 29 October 1917.

 

Tom’s military record indicates that his medals, commemorative scroll and memorial plaque (‘Dead Man’s Penny’) were granted to his son in 1921 and 1923.  By those dates, the boy was old enough to sign for them himself.

 

(en.wikipedia.org)

 

 

Sources

 

Australian War Memorial

En.wikipedia.org

National Archives of Australia

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk

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

 

AUSTRALIANS ABROAD. Mrs A. Osborne, of 42 Eglinton street, Moonee Ponds, has been informed that her brother, Gunner T. B. Hogg, was killed in action in France on April 9. He enlisted on August 24, 1914, and left Australia with the first contingent. He went through the  Gallipoli campaign, and had only returned from his first furlough in England few weeks before he was killed. The Argus 2 May 1917 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article1614698

 

Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiries Bureau Correspondence   2855 Gunner Tom Bell Hogg, 2nd Field Artillery Brigade Killed in Action 9-4-17 No 1068 J H Grainger was wounded at Lagnicourt by shell fire, and died, being buried at the Bty position at Lagnicourt.  A Cross is erected with his name on.  I saw him hit, present a the burial, and have seen the grave, with a Cross.  There are two Crosses with several names on.  Those I can remember are:- Sgt Keaney                    Gnr Hogg Bombr Woolstoncraft   Gnr Pamment Sgt Cavell                      Gnr Proctor All of 4th Bty Informant, Doull, Gnr R M 1593 2nd Bde, 4th Bty WESTHAM http://static.awm.gov.au/images/collection/pdf/RCDIG1049560--1-.pdf

 

 

War Service Commemorated

Essendon Gazette Roll of Honour killed

Regimental Register

 

In Memoriam

No notices in The Argus to 1920