Private Thomas Herbert Skehan
Rod Martin
July 1915 saw a record number of men enlist in the Australian Imperial Force. The disheartening news from Gallipoli, a spirited recruiting campaign, and the German ‘atrocity’ of sinking the ‘innocent’ liner Lusitania in April had stirred many to join the fray. Twenty-two year-old Herbert Skehan was among them. A clerk with cigarette manufacturer W.D. and H.O. Wills, Herbert just made the recently liberalized height and chest measurement requirements. He would not have done so when war broke out in August the previous year. Indeed, he may have tried to enlist at that time and been rejected. He was a very slight lad, weighing only fifty-nine kilos and standing 166 centimetres tall, and he had brown eyes and dark brown hair. What he lacked in stature, however, was obviously made up for by his keenness and sense of derring-do.
Herbert enlisted on 28 July 1915 and trained at Broadmeadows. He was actually made an acting corporal while he was there. However, when he sailed for Egypt in February the following year, he did so as a private.
Assigned to the Third Reinforcements of 29 Infantry Battalion, Herbert left Melbourne on A70 HMAT Ballarat on 18 February 1916, arriving at Suez on 22 March.
Troops, probably from 29 Battalion, waiting to board HMAT Ballarat,
18 February 1916. Private S M Memery of Essendon is in the centre.
(AWM PB0188) http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/PB0188
HMAT Ballarat leaving Port Melbourne, 18 February 1916.
(AWM PB 0182) http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/PB0182
When the men reached Egypt, they moved to the training camp at Tel el Kebir. At that time, the Australian forces were undergoing reorganisation after the evacuation from Gallipoli the previous December. The newly formed 1 Anzac Corps was in the process of departing for the Western Front in France, and 11 Anzac Corps, of which 5 Division (including 29 Battalion) was part, was readying itself for a June departure. In the meantime, the men guarded the Suez Canal from possible Turkish attack, and trained amid the sand dunes of the desert.
On 16 June, 11 Anzac Corps departed for France, arriving at Marseilles on the twenty-third. The men then entrained for the north, headed for the so-called ‘nursery’ sector near Armentières – a relatively quiet area of the front where they could acclimatize themselves to the realities of modern industrial warfare without coming under too much pressure.
They were not to enjoy the ‘honeymoon’ for long, however. On 8 July, Herbert and the others were required to march twenty-six kilometres, carrying a full kit that the battalion’s commanding officer estimated as weighing thirty-four kilos, to a new location along the front. The commander wrote in the unit diary that many of the men were ‘knocked out’ by this and could not keep up. Those who could were mainly aged between nineteen and twenty-two. The others were eventually picked up, presumably by vehicles. After more marching, the men finally reached the front line trenches at Bois Grenier on 10 July and suffered their first fatality, a lieutenant, the next day. He was attempting to retrieve a German flag from No Man’s Land. Shades of All quiet on the Western Front.
The men did not know what horrors soon awaited them. British general Sir Richard Haking (forever after known as ‘Butcher’) had devised a scheme to attack a German salient (a bulge in the front line) near the village of Fromelles. The attack was to be a feint, designed to keep the German forces in the area so they could not reinforce their comrades under attack further south in the Battle of the Somme. Haking wanted some of the Australian troops to attack the fortified salient – known as the ‘Sugar Loaf’ – across an area of No Man’s Land as wide as some 400 metres. This was twice the distance military experts believed was the maximum that men could cross effectively in the face of shells, machine gun fire, barbed wire and devastated landscape. Others who knew better, such as Brigadier-General ‘Pompey’ Elliott, tried to convince Haking of the dangers of his scheme, but to no avail. It went ahead on the night of 19 July, the men of 5 Division, including Herbert, ‘hopping the bags’, being exposed by the light emanating from star shells and, in many cases, being mowed down long before they got anywhere near the German trenches. The amazing fact was that some of them actually made it and took temporary control of parts of the trenches before having to retreat because they were not backed up.
Australia suffered 5533 casualties on that one night, its greatest single loss ever in such a short time. One of Herbert’s comrades commented later that ‘the novelty of being a soldier wore off in about five seconds, it was like a bloody butcher’s shop.’ Elliott was in tears as he greeted the survivors who staggered back to their lines the next morning.
Men, probably from 29 Battalion, France 1916-1917
(AWM H06134) http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/H06134
29 Battalion held the front line at Fromelles until the last day of the month, when it was relieved. Its losses between 19 and 31 July amounted to seventeen dead, 157 wounded and sixty-six missing. Many of those missing may have been buried by the Germans in the mass graves that were discovered at Fromelles in the last few years.
5 Division was both devastated and decimated by the attack at Fromelles and withdrew to lick its wounds, regroup and obtain reinforcements. 29 Battalion continued to spend periods of time in the front line, but it played no major offensive role for the rest of the year.
Incessant rain in the latter half of the year made conditions woeful for the troops. In September, the commanding officer noted that
Rain continued and the trenches were in an awful condition. The communications trench . . . will long be remembered, as it was knee deep in mud, and it took the front line comps. [?] 5 hours to reach the front line.
The heavy rain and German bombardments meant that rations failed to reach the men on a number of occasions, and they were sometimes forced to get their water from shell holes – which often contained dead bodies or parts thereof, dead rats and other niceties.
In mid-November, while the battalion was in reserve, Herbert caught influenza and was evacuated to a hospital at Etaples, near Boulogne. He then went to a convalescent camp at Cayeux before returning to his unit on 20 December. By that time the battalion was in reserve again, and preparing to move to billets at Dernacourt, where it stayed for Christmas and the new year.
The winter of 1916-1917 was estimated to be the worst for at least forty years: bitterly cold, with plenty of snow, ice and slush.
Icy conditions on the Somme, January 1917
(AWM E00171) http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/E00171
In January alone, 29 Battalion evacuated 130 men to hospital with various forms of sickness. Influenza, pneumonia, frostbite and trench foot (contracted by standing in cold mud for hours or days on end) would have been common ailments. On 22 February, Herbert succumbed as well, being sent to hospital with frostbite. It must have been quite severe as he did not return to the battalion until the last day of March.
By that time, the Germans had begun a strategic retreat to their heavily fortified Hindenburg Line. This was done to reduce the length of their line and thus the number of troops needed to man it. The attrition of the war was starting to really bite. The Allies naturally moved forward to take over the land left vacant by the enemy. However, the Germans were not going to make it easy for the Allies. They left booby traps, they bombarded the advancing soldiers, and they sometimes counter-attacked. This happened at Beaumetz on 23 March, and 29 Battalion had to take the brunt of the assault and fight it off, which it did successfully – at the cost of 202 casualties for the month.
29 Battalion’s only involvement in a major battle in 1917 was the attack on Polygon Wood, in the Ypres sector of Belgium, on 26 September. After the final, inconclusive battles on the Somme in November 1916, and the takeover of land in early 1917, the British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, decided to switch his attention back to Belgian Flanders - the scene of two disastrous battles in 1914 and 1915. Haig’s ostensible reasons for this were, according to war correspondent Philip Gibbs, ‘to turn the German flank from the Ypres salient [bulge in the front line], occupy the Belgian coast and capture the enemy’s submarine pens [at Ostend and Zeebrugge]’. The battle began promisingly with the mining of German positions and the capture of Messines Ridge on 7 June. However, the full attack was delayed until 31 July. By that time, the Germans had reinforced their positions, anticipating a follow up to Messines. When rain began to pour on 31 July, the combination of it and constant shelling turned the naturally marshy land around Ypres into glutinous mud, bogging everything down. The Third Battle of Ypres quickly turned into another bloody war of attrition. Haig’s ambitious plans were soon forgotten in a murderous scramble for a sea of mud.
In late September, however, there were a few high points. On the twentieth, the Australians fought the Battle of Menin Road, just outside Ypres. Under the leadership of General John Monash, they had had adopted a strategy called ‘bite and hold’ – the use of an effective creeping barrage followed by a sudden attack on a small area of German-occupied line, and it was becoming very successful. In a very short period of time, they drove the Germans back to Polygon Wood – but at the cost of 5 000 casualties. 29 Battalion, having moved to Belgium in August, was now one of the units scheduled to attack at Polygon Wood. The plan for 26 September was to capture the remainder of Westhoek Ridge, including the whole of Polygon Wood, the so-called Butte (a mound about ten metres high that once was part of a target range), and a section of the German ‘Flandern 1’ defensive line. This would facilitate a later attack towards the village of Broodseinde. After a carefully planned preliminary barrage, the men were to attack and penetrate about 1 100 metres on a front 1 500 – 2 000 metres wide.
The Butte in Polygon Wood. Note the graves of Australian soldiers.
(AWM J06406) http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/J06406
Official war historian C.E.W. Bean tells us that, having been rested for four months, 5 Division was to undertake the more difficult task of taking the main ridge.After suffering a gas attack in the early hours of the morning, 5 Division, including 29 Battalion, attacked at 5.50 am. What the men saw before them as the sun rose were the remnants of a once leafy wood that had contained an army training ground, a rifle range and a racecourse surrounded by fir saplings. The area now, as described by Lieutenant Sinclair Hunt of 55 Battalion, was “a forest of charred and splintered stumps standing about three or four feet high” amidst thick undergrowth, craters and pillboxes. The Butte rose into the sky at the far end. The men moved forward and quickly took their first objective. By 1.00 pm, they had taken their final one. Later in the afternoon, they repulsed a German counter-attack.
Herbert did not make it to the Butte. Red Cross reports indicate that he was killed instantly by a shell soon after moving into attack on 26 September. The reports also indicate that he was a machine gunner, so he may have been slowed down by the equipment he was carrying and been more of a target as a result.
Herbert was buried by his comrades in a shell hole near where he fell, but was later moved to a temporary cemetery at the remains of the racecourse.
5 Division suffered 5 471 casualties at Polygon Wood between 26 and 28 September. After the war, a memorial to the ones who died was erected on top of the Butte.
The memorial in the 1920s . (Department of Veterans’ Affairs)
Also after the war, Herbert’s body was disinterred, transported to Ypres and buried in the Duhallow ADS (advanced dressing station) Cemetery.
(Commonwealth War Graves Commission)
Sources
Australian War Memorial
Bean, C. E. W.: The official history of Australia in the war of 1914-1918: Sydney, Angus and Robertson,
12 volumes, 1941
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australia
en.wikipedia.org
Gibbs, Philip: From Bapaume to Passchendaele, London, William Heinemann, 1918
National Archives Australia
Pedersen, Peter: The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front, Melbourne, Penguin Books, 2007
Travers, Richard: Diggers in France: Australian soldiers on the Western Front, Sydney, ABC Books, 2008
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