If we had a Britain At War Forum – This would have appeared

From the Times

Relatives of fallen British soldiers have been banned from the centenary commemorations of a First World War battle that led to thousands of Australian casualties.
British military planning has been blamed for the heavy losses at the Battle of Fromelles. Described by one commander as a “tactical abortion”, it left 5,513 Australians dead or injured. The colonial troops had arrived on the Western Front only days earlier.

The battle on July 19, 1916, is regarded by many historians as not just the worst day in Australian military history, but the worst day in the entire history of the country.
The Australian soldiers were well trained, full of zeal and ready for anything but they did not anticipate the disaster that was about to engulf them.
Known as Diggers, the troops were mown down in their thousands in a matter of minutes. They were killed by German machinegun bullets and, the survivors claimed, by the sheer incompetence of the British high command.

As the 100th anniversary of the battle draws near, recriminations over the decision to launch the battle are still echoing. Yesterday it emerged that Australia had excluded relatives of the 1,500 British casualties from a ceremony to mark the anniversary in France this summer. The service is planned for July 19 at the Pheasant Wood military cemetery in Fromelles, near Lille, but only Australian citizens will be allowed to attend.

The ill-fated offensive, involving 20,000 British and Australian troops was supposed to divert German forces from the main battlefield on the Somme, 50 miles away. It turned into a bloody massacre with more than 7,000 Allied dead or injured in total, one of the highest casualty rates in any single battle in the war.

The Australian 15th Brigade had only recently arrived on the Western Front when it was sent into battle, despite serious misgivings by the commanding officer, Brigadier General Harold “Pompey” Elliott. He tried without success to persuade the British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, to call off the attack.

In the end, more than 2,000 of the inexperienced Australian troops died in a hail of machine gun fire from a German stronghold known as Sugarloaf.

One of the participants described how “the air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat criss-crossed lattice of death. Men were cut in two by streams of bullets [that] swept like whirling knives. It was the charge of the Light Brigade once more, but more terrible, more hopeless.”

An Australian NCO wrote: “If you had gathered the stock of a thousand butcher-shops, cut it into small pieces and strewn it about, it would give you a faint conception of the shambles those trenches were.”

Now, in what the descendants of British survivors suspect is a decision based on continuing Australian resentment, relatives of the British soldiers have been told by the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs that they are not welcome to attend the memorial, with only those with Australian passports or residency able to attend.
About 3,200 accredited spectators will be allocated grandstand-style tiered seating while other visitors will be expected to watch proceedings on screens set up in the town square.
Michael Bemrose, whose grandfather Gunner Fred Bemrose from Dorset, died after being shot in the head was among the relatives hoping to attend the ceremony.
He said: “Men from both countries fought together and died together but now the Australians want to airbrush the British out of the battle.They have made a unilateral decision to bar the British by restricting access to Australian passport holders.”

Mr Bemrose has made regular visits to the battlefield to pay his respects since the remains of 250 Allied soldiers were exhumed from a makeshift grave dug by the Germans and re-interred in 2010.

One of the men whose remains were identified was Private Harry Dibben from Buckland Newton, Dorset. His great-nephew, Richard Dibben, who lives in the same village, also hoped to go the ceremony. Mr Dibben, 61, said: “I think it is grossly unfair.”

Animosity between the two armies at the time was further exacerbated by the British general Richard Haking, who blamed the Australians for failing to press home the attack.
Haking, who had already earned a reputation for being careless with his soldiers’ lives, said the colonial troops “lacked offensive spirit”.

He added, tactlessly: “The attack, though it failed, has done both divisions a great deal of good.”

The fallout over the memorial was exacerbated further yesterday, with the military historian Andrew Robertshaw describing the Battle of Fromelles, along with the Gallipoli campaign, as the “creation myth” of the Australian state.

He said: “The battle was a disaster but it wasn’t an exclusively Australian disaster. Men from both countries died but as usual the British are blamed for everything that goes wrong.
“The Australians were regarded as good fighters but ill-disciplined and in turn they resented being colonial troops fighting British battles, though a surprisingly high proportion were not actually born in Australia.”

Peter FitzSimons, author of In the Trenches of Hell, said: “More than any other battle, Fromelles cleaved a sense of separateness of the Australian soldier from Great Britain.
“Before the war the man who would be prime minister, Andrew Fisher, famously said: ‘Australia will fight for Great Britain to the last man and the last shilling’ and most of our blokes marched away as the sons of Great Britain. They returned as Australians.”

Jennifer Stephenson, of the Australian department for veterans affairs, which is organising the commemoration, said the focus would be on the Australian casualties, adding: “This is not to diminish the role of other nations but simply a recognition of the Australian focus of the event we are organising.”

I visited Fromelles late last year and it is a stunning cemetery and visitor centre. It has become a place of pilgrimage for Aussies visiting the Western front.

I can understand why they would want to give Australian nationals priority, but excluding relatives of British victims altogether seems a bit churlish.

Moggy