CANBERRA TIMES
"Time to find our missing men
''It was the 21st July and the sun was shining brightly and being left to myself for fully an hour I was able to look around me and to my horror I was in a place where the dead men were being stacked for I was sitting on the edge of a hole fully forty feet long, twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep and into this the killed were being thrown without any respect or fuss friends and foe being treated alike and it was pitiful to see the different expressions on their faces some with a peaceful smile while others showed they had passed away in agony''.
- From the memoirs of Private William Barry of the 29th Battalion AIF taken POW, 19-20 July, 1916 T HE SMALL French town of Fromelles was the scene of arguably the greatest Australian tragedy.
The numbers are stark - 1917 young Australians killed in 12 hours (almost four times the number of Australians killed in total in our 10 years in the Vietnam War), 3146 wounded, many dying of their wounds later, 470 prisoners of war, 163 Australians still formally missing.
Evidence is strong that the bodies of those 163 Australians were buried by the Germans in mass graves.
Opposition spokesman on veterans affairs Mark Bishop is among a growing group who believe a technical examination should be made of the likely mass grave sites around Fromelles. Such agitation has previously met with bureaucratic reluctance, but Bishop is hopeful that Defence Minster Robert Hill will authorise examinations, and has been heartened by the attitude of the Chief of Army Lieutenant-General Peter Leahy.
Bishop, who is to pursue the matter in Parliament next week, says, ''Perhaps the single greatest tragedy of Fromelles was the refusal of the Australian command to accept an offer of a truce from the Germans.
''This truce would have seen our dead, dying and wounded rescued from No-Man's Land where they perished,'' he said.
The refusal is said to have come about through the perception that a blanket ban applied to any form of truce with any part of enemy forces - even an interim one offered only for the benefit of Australians being able to reclaim their dead.
The reticence about the existence of pits at Pheasant Wood and Manalaque Farm on the outskirts of Fromelles in which Australian and English soldiers were buried by the Germans stems from the official want at the time that the battle be hushed up. It was said to be but a ''skirmish'' designed to take attention away from other theatres. The Battle of the Somme was taking place about 80km to the south. A communique issued to the Press by British GHQ about the 12-hour battle of Fromelles raised divisions between Australians and the English. It said, ''Yesterday evening, south of Armentieres, we carried out some important raids on a front of two miles in which Australian troops took part. About 140 German prisoners were captured.'' Important raids? Bishop says the battle was ''a planned slaughter.'' Exploding the official suggestion that there were not mass graves is the very detailed account of Fromelles in Robin Corfield's 2000 book, Don't Forget Me, Cobber. ''We know that [the Germans] collected many bodies and loaded them on a train, photographed them, and then took the dead to mass graves at Pheasant Wood and elsewhere over the days after the battle.'' The memoirs of Private Barry, quoted above, leave no room for doubt.
Corfield says also that the bodies of English and Australian soldiers were taken back for burial at Fournes, behind the German lines. Increasing the likelihood that the missing Australians can finally be accounted for is the retention by the German Red Cross of 160 sets of Australian soldiers' ''dog tags''.
Bishop said, ''The fact that 163 bodies remain unaccounted for, and that we now have a record of 160 from the German Red Cross could not otherwise be explained [other than by burial by the Germans in mass graves]. ''I believe this matter is now at a stage where it can be said that a strong prima facie case exists for a technical examination of the sites referred to.
''It is pleasing therefore to report that the Chief of Army, General Leahy, agreed at last Senate Estimates to examine the material I was able to provide, and to report back with a reconsideration.'' Bishop hoped a formal approach could be made to the French Government, and local authorities, for a scan of the site.
He is urging only a ground scan, which could identify the presence of bodies, and which it is understood can be done very quickly and efficiently. ''At official level in Canberra, the existence of the Pheasant Wood site has been denied by the Office of Australian War Graves, but the evidence is now building,'' he said.
He pointed to aerial photographs taken before and after the battle, saying they ''clearly show the existence of large pits at these sites''. Of the official ''element of denial'', Bishop said, ''This I suspect stems from an attitude in Canberra of reluctance to actively engage in the search for the missing from overseas deployments ...
''Put simply, they must have been buried somewhere, and as there were many hundreds of dead recovered by the Germans, large grave sites would have been the obvious means.''