1917
Page 16
We love you always and forever and live in hope no matter what.
Maggie
January, 1918
Dear Mr Robinson,
I am sorry to tell you that we have received a report that your son, Lieutenant Alexander Robinson, has been reported as Missing in Action. You should know that Ace had gone to the assistance of his friend, Lieutenant Driscoll, who was on a reconnaissance mission with their Flight Leader. It was bravely done. We hold every hope that he will return.
Yours sincerely,
Major D Blake
3 Squadron,
Australian Flying Corps
Bailleul, France
HISTORICAL NOTES
You might be wondering how much of this story is real and how much is made up.
Ace and Maggie and their family, Charlie, Banjo, Len, Captain Dodd, Major Ferguson, and most of the other airmen, soldiers and farmers, are invented. But all the events in this book are based on things that really happened: the battles, the plane crashes, and the protests.
The lives of the fictional pilots in this book are drawn from the letters and diaries of real men who flew and died during this first-ever air war. The first Australian Flying Corps squadron to arrive on the Western Front was 3 Squadron, which flew two-seater RE8 planes on reconnaissance and bombing missions. Two Squadron arrived around the same time, and both were in the air supporting the new I ANZAC Corps in its first, terrible, battles in the mud of Passchendaele in October and November of 1917. Four Squadron arrived in France just before the end of the year. (One Squadron was already in action in Palestine, flying against Ottoman and German pilots.)
In late 1917, Australian Flying Corps’ 3 Squadron was based at Bailleul in France, and in the cemetery there are the graves of Henry Storrer and William Scott, two airmen killed in a crash in the dreadful weather of November. Almost as many pilots were killed in training or in crashes as in combat. By the end of the year, the squadron had lost even more men.
The Red Baron was the famous German ace Manfred Von Richtofen (actually, during the war, he was called the Red Falcon). He shot down eighty planes and was shot down himself, probably by Australian ground troops, over the Somme in early 1918.
Other real people who are mentioned include Prime Minister William ‘Billy’ Hughes, opera singer Dame Nellie Melba, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, General Sir John Monash, 3 Squadron Commander Major David Blake, and General Haig, British Commander-in-Chief in 1917.
Some of the events on the home front described by Maggie actually happened to my great-grandmother and great-aunts. Real members of the Women’s Peace Army included the remarkable Vida Goldstein (one of the first Australian women to run for Parliament), Adela Pankhurst (daughter of the famous English suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst), and Cecilia John and Ina Higgins (who really did run a Women’s Farm).
The Prime Minister, Vida Goldstein and Archbishop Mannix didn’t actually meet face-to-face in a town hall debate about conscription in 1917, although I do wish they had. But there were many violent incidents as well as peaceful protests. I have used the idea of the public meeting as a way to gather together the many warring parts of the community at that time, and combined words from Hughes’ speech on 18 September 1916 and Mannix’s speech to 6,000 people in October 1917 (both can be found in Well May We Say, edited by Sally Warhaft and published by Text in 2014). Various speeches and statements by Vida Goldstein are taken from her Manifesto, and some by Adela Pankhurst from contemporary newspaper reports.
The year 1917 was a dramatic one for the ANZAC units on the Western Front and in Palestine—and for the people at home. In April, the Australian 4th Division suffered over 3,300 casualties, and 1,170 men were taken prisoner in the battle for a village called Bullecourt. It was the largest number of Australian soldiers captured in a single engagement during the war. The next month, the Australians were ordered into Bullecourt again, and this time there were 7,500 casualties. All the time, the men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company were working underground, digging long shafts right under No Man’s Land and the German trenches, and laying mines—most famously at Hill 60. On 7 June 1917, nineteen enormous mines exploded in preparation for the Battle of Messines, and for the first time planes, artillery, tunnellers, tanks and infantry combined in a successful and coordinated plan of attack. From September to November, a series of battles in the terrible mud around Ypres claimed many thousands of casualties and made tiny spots on a map of Flanders into names that still evoke grief and awe: Polygon Wood, Menin Road, Broodseinde Ridge, Daisy Wood, Poelcapelle, and especially Passchendaele. The first Battle of Passchendaele was the worst moment in New Zealand’s military history, with 2,700 casualties in one day. Eight weeks of battle cost the Australian forces 38,000 casualties, and afterwards the two great armies were in almost the same places as they had been at the start of the year.
In Palestine, where the ANZACs faced Ottoman Empire forces, there was movement. On 31 October 1917, British and ANZAC troops attacked the fortified town of Beersheba, held by Turkish soldiers. Late in the afternoon, things were getting desperate, and in that harsh environment the battle for the water wells became urgent. Lieutenant General Harry Chauvel, commanding the Desert Mounted Corps, ordered the 4th Light Horse Brigade forward. The men of the 4th and 12th Regiments drew their bayonets to use like swords, and charged on horseback over open ground at the Turkish trenches. The water supplies were secured, and over 1,000 Turkish soldiers were taken prisoner. Six weeks later, the city of Jerusalem surrendered to General Allenby, who entered it on foot. Among his escort were Australian and New Zealand soldiers who had been fighting in the desert for months.
But for many people, 1917 felt like the worst year of the war. London itself was under attack from the air, with Zeppelins (enormous airships) and aeroplanes dropping bombs on the city. Although the United States entered the war in April, its troops only began arriving in Europe in October and soon suffered terrible casualties. At the same time, Russia was in upheaval, with a series of revolutions and civil war that undermined its support of its allies, and led to it agreeing to an armistice with Germany in December.
The world would never be the same.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research for this book was made a great deal easier by libraries all around Australia, which digitised newspapers of the period in time for the centenary of the Great War and made them available through Trove.
Staff of the State Library of Victoria had spent years scanning and exhibiting letters, diaries, unit histories, pamphlets, maps and other material from and about the war and the conscription referenda: not for me, but for everyone.
I spent many months researching the history of the war in the air, including wondrous hours watching flying displays of original aircraft at Point Cook RAAF Museum in Victoria and the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire, England. Other invaluable collections and exhibitions I visited included the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and in London; the Musée d’Armée in Paris; Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance and Museum Victoria; the Auckland War Memorial Museum and City Library; and the Australian War Memorial, National Library of Australia and National Museum of Australia in Canberra. The German Albatros shot down by members of 3 Squadron in December 1917 is on display in the Australian War Memorial.
I travelled to Flanders and visited the site of the airfield at Bailleul and its nearby war cemetery, the battlefields of Passchendaele, and the reconstructed town of Ypres with its moving museum, In Flanders Fields.
If you’d like to read more about the events that inspired this novel, here are just a few of the books I read most closely: various volumes of The Official History of Australia in the War, edited by CEW Bean, Wings by Patrick Bishop, Fire in the Sky by Michael Molkentin, The Western Front from the Air by Nicholas C Watkis, Forgotten Voices of the Great War by Max Hastings, Winged Victory by WM Yeates, Massacre at Passchendaele by Glyn Harper, The ANZACs by the great librarian and storyteller Patsy Adam-Smith, Desert Boys by Peter
Rees, and That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman by Janet Bomford. I have pages copied from A Military Atlas of the First World War by Arthur Banks stuck all over the walls of my writing room.
Some of the greatest memoirs and diaries of the 20th century were written during or following the war, and I’ve read and re-read many of them over the years, including Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, WH Downing’s To the Last Ridge, Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, and Siegfried Sassoon’s Sherston novels and Siegfried’s Journey.
The first draft of the book was written during an artist’s residency at beautiful Bundanon, and my thanks go to the Bundanon Trust for providing the time and space to write, in spite of the many distractions outside my window (a paddock full of kangaroos!) I thank my colleagues at the State Library of Victoria and La Trobe University for their patience, wisdom and encouragement.
My father and my uncle Roger shared family stories about the conscription debates, the Women’s Peace Army and the early years of the Australian air force.
Thanks especially to Clare Hallifax at Scholastic, who invited me to contribute to this series and encouraged me to write about the air war and the conscription debates; to everyone at Scholastic who has supported and produced the series Australia’s Great War, and the other writers who have contributed such wonderful books for each year.
Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my great-aunt Connie, who worked at the Women’s Farm with her little sister Madge Gardiner, who led the huge women’s peace procession in Melbourne in 1916. Madge was eight years old.—
Praise for 1917
A moving, evocative story of what it takes to be a hero, on the battle field and on the home front: courage, compassion and the will to make a difference. A fitting tribute to the Australian women and men who put their lives on the line for what they believed to be right and true, whether that be war or peace. Kelly Gardiner skillfully traverses the no man’s land between freedom and captivity; instinct and intellect; dumb luck and blind faith; devotion and duty.
Dr Clare Wright
Winner, 2014 Stella Prize, for
The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka
Associate Professor in History, La Trobe University
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First edition published by Scholastic Australia in 2017.
This electronic edition published by Scholastic Australia Pty Limited, 2017.
E-PUB/MOBI eISBN: 978 1 76027 223 4
Text © Kelly Gardiner, 2017.
Cover © Scholastic Australia, 2017.
Cover photographs: Two Bristol Fighters of the Australian Flying Corps, flying at top speed to reach their aerodrome before the gathering storm burst © Australian War Memorial (B02209); Members of the Womens’ Forage Department working a hay baler © Australian War Memorial
(H07577); Real guy © Joan Vicent Canto Roig/iStockphoto.com Internal image: pg 249, blank telegram © NorSob/Shutterstck.com
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