General News
18 July, 2026
Veterans' Voices: The Battle of Fromelles: 110 year anniversary
The air seems to come to a standstill in the final moments before going over the top. The thunder of shellfire preceding the assault fades into the background, and breaths of anticipation wait on the final signal, not knowing what lies ahead in the next few moments. It's hard to imagine ourselves in this position, 110 years on, as one of the 7000 brave young Australians who attacked enemy trenches on the night of July 19, 1916, at the Battle of Fromelles, in what remains the single worst 24-hour period in Australian military history.
The air seems to come to a standstill in the final moments before going over the top.
The thunder of shellfire preceding the assault fades into the background, and breaths of anticipation wait on the final signal, not knowing what lies ahead in the next few moments.
It's hard to imagine ourselves in this position, 110 years on, as one of the 7000 brave young Australians who attacked enemy trenches on the night of July 19, 1916, at the Battle of Fromelles, in what remains the single worst 24-hour period in Australian military history.
The 5th Australian Division and the British 61st Division were ordered to capture the first and second lines of German trenches across a 3.7km front near Fromelles as a diversion to stop the Germans moving troops from Fromelles to the Somme front.
The newly formed 5th Australian Division combined three existing Brigades (including the 31st, 57th, 58th, 59th, and 60th Battalions formed by Victorians), and for most, the attack at Fromelles on the Western Front served as their initiation to trench warfare.
The German positions were centred around the ‘Sugar Loaf,’ a heavily fortified stronghold with machine guns in a small raised area that gave the Germans good views of no-man’s-land.
The Germans at the Sugar Loaf detected the Allied troops as they moved into position for the attack, and shelled Allied lines, causing hundreds of Australian and British casualties before they had even left their lines.
An allied artillery bombardment before the attack was supposed to damage or destroy German machine guns, but the field guns were ineffective against the well-prepared German defences.
The Allies launched their assault at 5.30 pm on July 19, 1916, with only three and a half hours of daylight remaining.
Allied soldiers were shot down in no-man's-land or pinned there by machine-gun and rifle fire.
Some Australian troops in the 18th and 14th Brigades crossed no-man's-land and captured sections of the German front.
They then advanced another 140m in search of a third line of German trenches as ordered, but found no third line existed.
The Australians began to form an unconnected series of emplacements in their new position.
The Commander of the 15th Brigade, Brigadier General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliot, was deeply distressed by his losses, writing: “We attacked in four waves, and there was not the least hesitation … One of the best of my Commanding Officers was killed, and practically all my best officers, the Anzac men who helped to build up my Brigade are dead. I presume there was some plan at the back of the attack, but it is difficult to know what it was.”
The British planned a second attempt to capture the Sugar Loaf and sought Australian help.
However, when the British cancelled their plan, the Australians were not notified and launched another attack with disastrous results.
Overnight and early in the morning, the Germans counterattacked and began recapturing their lost trenches, surrounding the forward Allied troops.
The British command ordered a retreat, and the next morning, the Australians in the enemy's lines withdrew.
By 5 am on July 20, after holding the German trenches for 11 hours, most Allied soldiers who could retreat had moved back to their lines.
The Germans reported around 1,000 casualties in the battle.
The Allied attackers suffered catastrophic losses, reporting more than 7,000 killed, wounded, or missing.
Some 5,500 of the casualties were Australians, including almost 2,000 killed in action or dying of wounds, and some 400 captured.
Among the brave young men who carried out the attack that day was farmer, Sergeant Simon Fraser, 57th Battalion, of Byaduk, Victoria.
Fraser was born in 1877 to James and Mary (nee McDonald).
In a letter dated July 31, 1916, Fraser told home of his heroics in retrieving the wounded from no man’s land.
“I must say Fritz treated us very fairly, though a few were shot at the work,” he wrote.
“Some of these wounded were game as lions and got rather roughly handled, but haste was more necessary than gentle handling, and we must have brought in over 250 men by our company alone...It was no light work getting in with a heavy weight on your back, especially if he had a broken leg or arm and no stretcher bearer was handy.
“You had to lie down and get him on your back then rise and duck for your life with the chance of getting a bullet in you before you were safe.”
Over three days, Fraser and a few other men made these missions to no man’s land.
“One foggy morning in particular I remember, we could hear someone, over towards the German entanglements, calling for a stretcher bearer; it was an appeal no man could stand against, so some of us rushed out and had a hunt,” Fraser wrote.
“We found a fine haul of wounded and brought them in, but it was not where I heard this fellow calling so I had another shot for it and came across a splendid specimen of humanity trying to wiggle into a trench with a big wound in his thigh: he was about 14 stone weight (90 kilograms) and I could not lift him on my back, but I managed to get him into an old trench and told him to lie quiet while I got a stretcher.
“Then another man about 30 yards (27 metres) out, sang out ‘Don’t forget me, Cobber’.
“I went in and got four volunteers with stretchers and we got both men in safely.”
Fraser was killed at the Second Battle of Bullecourt on May 12, 1917, aged 40.
His body was never found.
Fraser was not decorated for his courage, but his heroism has been recognised in a sculpture named ‘Cobbers,’ immortalising his display of courage and mateship in bronze in the Australian Memorial Park at Fromelles.
Another incredible example of courage and bravery is that of James Hislop Easson, 31st Battalion.
Easson was born in London, England, and enlisted in the AIF on July 12, 1915.
He was shot in the back during the Battle of Fromelles on July 19.
Concerning the engagement in which he was wounded, he wrote: ‘I was most fortunate to get out of it as I did experience the pleasure of lying in a shell hole in no man’s land for two days.
I was unable to move at all when first hit, and only hunger and a keen desire to live induced me to crawl on all fours and eventually reach our lines.
Old Fritz did his best to complete the job, but the nearest little bit of lead lodged in my tunic pocket, quite a good shot but not good enough.’
He was admitted to the hospital, where he eventually recovered from his wounds, and returned to Australia in March 1917 after being discharged from the army in January.
Easson settled in Horsham with his wife, Christina, and was employed as a Clerk in the Army Base Records Office until his passing in 1952.
James Hislop Easson had two children and is the grandfather of Horsham RSL Historian, Sally Bertram.
Horsham RSL committee member Bill Armstrong underlined the importance of commemorating the Battle of Fromelles, noting, “It’s part of tradition.”
“The significance (of Fromelles) was the amount of different Australian units that had come together to that specific event,” Mr Armstrong said.
“(It’s legacy) means everything; part of the traditions of the military, part of our history, part of our life.”
To conceptualise the casualties recorded at the Battle of Fromelles, Armstrong compared it to Australia’s Defence Force numbers today.
“If you look at the defence forces today, if I said they had 80,000 (members), you’re losing effectively just in that first five minutes of battle about 7% of the Australian Defence Force.
“That's the Australian Defence Force now, not as in one of the Brigades or Units.”
The Australian soldiers killed at Fromelles are primarily interred in two main cemeteries in France.
The V.C. Corner Cemetery was established after the Armistice and contains the bodies of 410 Australian soldiers who were found on the battlefield, and is one of only two all-Australian cemeteries on the Western Front.
There are no individual headstones used to mark the graves, as the bodies could not be identified; instead, a memorial commemorates 1,171 names of Australian soldiers who were killed in the engagement and whose graves are not known.
For nearly a hundred years, the resting place of missing Australian and British soldiers remained a mystery until a mass grave site was discovered in Pheasant Wood, northern France, in 2009.
The bodies of 250 soldiers were located buried behind German lines, and in 2010, after rigorous identification processes, the new Pheasant Wood Military Cemetery at Fromelles was dedicated to the unearthed remains, and the bodies of 96 soldiers were reburied in their own plots.
The identification and exhumation process of the bodies discovered in the mass grave at Pheasant Wood is ongoing to this day, and as of 2026, 110 years later, 181 of the 250 remains discovered have since been identified and reburied.