Our Darkest Day

by Patrick Lindsay

  Richard Vernon Stafford Wright is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, where he had taught since 1961 after returning as an honours graduate from Cambridge. He had extensive experience in mass grave investigations in Bosnia and Croatia and was regarded as a world expert in the field. Wright referred Chris to Jon Sterenberg, a British forensic archaeologist who had extensive experience in mass-grave identification and recovery in Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Iraq and East Timor. Sterenberg was then the Director of Excavations and Examinations for the International Commission on Missing Persons in Bosnia. While searching for the security team member, Chris connected with another British archaeologist, Martin Brown. Brown referred Chris to Rod Scott, who did work for the British Ministry of Defence and the army. Chris then realised how valuable the tour guide who had been helping him connect with the various experts was, so he asked Mike Kelly to be the team’s logistics manager.

  So Chris Bryett’s ROAM team now had only one missing piece – a sponsor. But in the second half of 2006 George Jones and his wife Penny took a European holiday and decided to visit the Western Front battlefields. George was captivated from the start, overwhelmed by the scale of the losses and the poignancy of the cemeteries dotted throughout the countryside. Over the following three days as they travelled, Mike Kelly told George about ROAM and the story of the missing Diggers of Fromelles. He said they had a world-class team, all of whom were prepared to work without pay. All they needed was a benefactor who could cover the team’s expenses. It would cost around $50,000. George Jones acted immediately.

  With George Jones on board, and spurred on by a 60 Minutes program that reached almost two million Australians, Chris Bryett completed ROAM’s presentation document and developed a plan of action, aimed at mobilising support for an independent non-invasive examination of the Pheasant Wood site, provided the initial investigation showed sufficient evidence of the mass graves. More than fifteen months had dragged by since Lambis and his team had made their presentation to the Panel of Investigation and they had heard nothing of substance in reply. Bryett had formed the firm view that the panel was marking time. He set about doing what old soldiers used to call ‘energising the situation’. He fired his opening shots in a series of emails to Kathy Upton-Mitchell, Deputy Director of the Office of Australian War Graves in mid-October 2006.

  Bryett began by asking whether the Office of Australian War Graves (OAWG) was involved with the recovery and identification of five World War I soldiers whose remains had recently been discovered near Ypres in Belgium. He also asked how the soldiers would be identified and whether people outside OAWG would be involved in the process. Bryett added that ROAM was concerned that, assuming it won the necessary approvals and found Australian remains at Fromelles, the French authority, the Prefect du Nord, would then exhume the bodies and hand them to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which would, in turn, notify OAWG and the Embassy in Paris. Bryett also asked what OAWG would do to identify the remains, bearing in mind that it was his understanding that under Australian Defence Forces protocol forensic testing was at the discretion of the Surgeon General. He hoped the remains would not simply be classified as ‘known unto god’.

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, Upton-Mitchell took almost a week to digest this message and reply, noting that she wanted to ‘consult and consider carefully’.

  On 8 November 2006, Bryett followed up with his main barrage. He started by saying that when the government appointed the panel, it wasn’t aware that an alternative was available, the ROAM plan for a private dig at no cost to the public purse. He challenged what he saw as the ‘gaps’ in the panel’s expertise: the lack of a mass-grave archaeologist and of a World War I trench expert. He questioned whether members, especially the eminent historians, would be able to publish their individual opinions should they differ from the majority. He queried the number of times the panel had met and suggested that an independent panel would have more credibility.

  Bryett didn’t know the impact that his team’s intervention was having behind the scenes in the bureaucracy and the government. From the outside they may have appeared to be, in army vernacular, slowly ‘lining up the ducks’, but under the waterline those ducks were paddling like crazy.

  Then, in November 2006, I was delighted to be able to report back to Lambis, Chris Bryett and Roger Lee and the Australian authorities that another potential hurdle in the journey – approval from the Pheasant Wood landowners – had been surmounted.

  The next thing the players knew came when the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Bruce Billson, gave an interview to reporter Neil Wilson from Melbourne’s Herald-Sun newspaper and disclosed that he was negotiating with a British academic, Dr Tony Pollard of Glasgow University, who had earlier advised Lambis Englezos, to carry out an investigation of the Pheasant Wood site. Billson followed up his newspaper interview with a press release on 6 February 2007 confirming that the Australian Army was negotiating with Pollard with a view to commissioning his team to investigate

  a site near Fromelles village in northern France, to confirm if the remains of First World War Diggers are still buried there.

  Both Team Lambis and ROAM saw this as a victory. Team Lambis felt vindicated, both because it represented the first step toward their aim of investigating the Pheasant Wood site to confirm their contention that it was the site of mass graves containing missing Diggers and because it validated Lambis’ belief that the ‘system’ worked. Chris Bryett and ROAM saw it as a victory because they believed that their intervention and their provision of an alternative ‘private’ dig had acted as a catalyst, prompting the eventual decision to commission an investigation. For both teams it represented the first official acknowledgement that the missing Diggers of Fromelles had been buried by the Germans at Pheasant Wood after the battle in July 1916, as they had maintained for some years.

  The Minister’s media statement omitted the two real reasons that the Panel of Investigation changed tack from a stance of scepticism to a position of acceptance that an on-site investigation was warranted. The first came in the form of two documents from the German archives: a report by the 21BRIR (the German regiment facing the Australians at Fromelles) and an extract from the 21BRIR’s war diary. The second reason was the activities of Chris Bryett and his ROAM team.

  The two German archival documents were the ‘smoking gun’ that cast aside all doubts about whether the missing Diggers of Fromelles had been buried by the Germans at Pheasant Wood. The documents were unearthed from the German archives in Munich after inquiries by the Office of Australian War Graves, prompted by Lambis Englezos’ earlier requests. They are a stunning corroboration of the evidence put before the Panel of Investigation by Lambis and his team.

  The first of the documents is an order from Major General Julius Ritter von Braun of the 21BRIR to his men in the field, dated 21 July 1916, two days after the battle. It is headed ‘Taking of construction materials to the front and retrieval of bodies’ and assigns one noncommissioned officer and 24 men from the unit’s medical company for ‘rescuing the injured and salvaging the corpses’. The document was a turning point, an irresistible affirmation of Team Lambis’ claims. The German orders – made at the time of the action – confirm that, after the battle, the Australian and British dead in enemy territory were gathered in piles near the light railway, at Grashof and Christuskreuz (strong points behind Rouges Bancs and near Pheasant Wood respectively). They were then loaded on the light rail and taken to the mass graves prepared by the Germans behind Pheasant Wood.

  The second German document comprised a series of extracts from the 21BRIR war diaries on the day of the battle and the following days. The entry for the night of 21 July reveals that the recovery of the fallen is continuing and their number means that the ‘big cemetery at Beaucamps’ will have to be ‘significantly enlarged yet again’:

  A view of the German front line after the battle at Fromelles. In the foreground Australian dead lie
covered with blankets or coats by the Germans. This photo was taken on the morning of 20 July as the Germans reclaimed their positions. (AWM PHOTO A01560)

  For the enemy dead, mass graves are being constructed behind Fasanen-Wäldchen (Pheasant Wood).

  Although they had been out-manoeuvred and had lost the first round – the initial investigation of the site – Chris Bryett and his ROAM team had played a pivotal role in the panel’s change of heart. Documents obtained under a Freedom of Information order clearly show that ROAM’s activities had acted as an important catalyst in persuading the panel and the army to advise the Minister to call for a physical examination of the site. And a briefing note from Roger Lee to the Chief of the Army on 14 February 2007 left little doubt as to Team Lambis’ impact:

  The Friends [of the 15th Brigade] conducted their campaign through the media and eventually placed army in the position where it could not avoid considering the case. (emphasis added)

  The Expert Panel had made five ‘General Recommendations’ and three ‘Findings’. The first two recommendations noted that ‘all issues’ relating to the remains of Australian service personnel overseas, including their recovery and ‘all scientific and forensic processes’, were the responsibility of the Australian government. The third called for the reaffirmation of the general principle that the ‘government does not search for, nor will it support private individuals searching for, the unrecovered remains of our war dead’. The fourth noted that the post-war recovery of remains of war dead was not ‘infallible’ and called on the government to establish a formal structure to examine allegations of unrecovered war remains. The fifth recommendation called on the Minister to refer such allegations to a panel of experts to decide whether the allegation was compelling enough to justify official examination.

  The panel had made three specific findings on the evidence before it on Pheasant Wood. On the one hand, it agreed (with some members dissenting) that the evidence supported the contention that Diggers were buried after the Battle of Fromelles in a mass grave behind Pheasant Wood. On the other hand it held that the evidence as to whether these remains had been recovered and re-interred at other cemeteries was

  minimal and vague and did not support the contention that the remains had not been recovered.

  Finally, it found, again with some of its members dissenting,

  that as the evidence relating to the question of whether remains had been recovered was so inadequate, further research should be undertaken, including a non-invasive survey of the site to establish whether sufficient data could be obtained to warrant a physical examination of the site.

  The Panel recommended that, as Dr Tony Pollard and his group at the University of Glasgow had the experience necessary to provide the specific answers the Panel was seeking, had a proven track record in these matters and included a French archaeologist on his team who was familiar with French law and processes, he should be approached to undertake this next research step.

  ROAM took the view that the government had erred in snubbing the available Australian mass-grave ‘know-how’ in favour of Tony Pollard’s British team. They conceded that Pollard had excellent archaeological skills, particularly in British battlefield conflict. Their point was that the Pheasant Wood site potentially contained the remains of 170 Australians and 327 British soldiers – the largest non-genocide mass grave yet discovered in Western Europe. The Australian experience centred on mass-grave archaeology in digging and geophysics. ROAM questioned whether the British team could match this mass-grave experience. In addition, they pointed out, the British team would cost $150,000; the Australian team’s work would be at no cost to the taxpayer.

  Dr Tony Pollard and his team of six from Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division (GUARD) arrived at Fromelles on 16 May 2007. For the next twelve days they cast their expert eyes and sophisticated state-of-the-art equipment over the suspected Pheasant Wood mass gravesite. They came armed with Team Lambis’ ‘hand-up brief’ to the original Australian Army Panel of Investigation, which they confirmed with their own archival enquiries in Australia, Britain, France and Germany, both before and after their site testing.

  The team’s specific objectives included: a full topographic survey of the site at one-metre intervals (to reveal changes in the topography relating to the presence of the pits); a geophysical survey, using resistivity meter and gradiometer (to identify underground archaeological features like the pits and the wartime railway); a ground-penetrating radar survey (to provide additional information like the depth of the underground features); a metal detector survey (to recover artefacts and give evidence of the site’s wartime history); and an extensive archival documentary search (to seek any evidence of post-war recovery and reburial of the remains).

  The results of the metal detector survey conducted by the GUARD Team during their investigation of the Pheasant Wood site. (TONY POLLARD PHOTO)

  The metal detector survey took the most time but it also provided the most dramatic results. The time and effort were more than repaid by the discovery of two small objects: two copper-alloy medallions. The first medallion was a 3.8 × 2.4 centimetre heart-shaped pendant bearing the letters ‘ANZAC’ embossed across its top, above the Australian coat of arms. Under the crest it had ‘Oct 15’ and beneath that ‘1915’. The second was 2.9 × 2.3 centimetres and in the shape of an inverted horseshoe. It featured the letters ‘AIF’ and inside the horseshoe letters reading ‘Shire of Alberton’ and the date ‘1914’. This medallion still retained traces of its original red, white and blue enamel.

  Dr Tony Pollard delivered GUARD’s report on the findings of its investigation at Pheasant Wood to Roger Lee in mid-July 2007. The report was considered by the Army History Unit’s Expert Panel on 25 July and the next day, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Bruce Billson, issued a press release confirming his support of further examination of Pheasant Wood in the light of the GUARD Report’s findings. He said the report revealed

  subsurface anomalies in the soil that coincide with war time aerial photos and confirm the presence of a series of pits. Other evidence, including water pooling discovered in the pits, led Dr Pollard to conclude that ‘it was beyond doubt’ that the site was used as a burial ground.

  While the circumstantial evidence from GUARD’s metal detector survey strongly suggested that Henry Willis and his comrades were buried by the Germans in the mass graves at Pheasant Wood, GUARD believed that what made it even more compelling was the array of results from the other tests they carried out. GUARD reported to the Australian Army that, although the results were ‘compelling’,

  The two medallions found by the GUARD Team during their investigation of the Pheasant Wood site. (TONY POLLARD PHOTO)

  we still lack absolute proof that remains buried here in 1916 and/or later, were NOT recovered after the war.

  Both Lambis and Chris Bryett knew that their quest had long hours and many roads still to travel. They had proven their argument. They had prompted the authorities to act. But they knew that only the shovel would finally decide whether the missing Diggers and Tommies who fell at Fromelles were still in their mass graves at Pheasant Wood.

  On 6 February 2008, the Australian Minister for Defence Science and Personnel in the newly elected Rudd Labor Government, Warren Snowdon, made the announcement that Team Lambis had been waiting for: he confirmed that he had authorised a limited excavation of the Pheasant Wood site to be undertaken by GUARD, starting in April.

  Pollard had already decided that his team would not be able to uncover each pit completely and dig down into it to discover whether it held human remains. He chose instead to hand-dig a series of sondages (test pits), positioned differently in each pit to give the maximum chance of an accurate overall cross-section. Each sondage was the width of the original burial pit (a little less than two and a half metres) by a metre and a half. The idea was then to dig down through the pit to the bottom or until they discovered human remains.

  Each sondage took a
round four hours to dig.

  I can still feel the relief when, at the bottom of the sondage through Pit 5, we exposed human bone. We found it about one metre twenty from the top of the pit, which is over 1.75 metres or so from the top of the present ground surface.

  In Canberra, the Minister for Defence Science and Personnel, Warren Snowdon, made the announcement that excavation of a small trial trench over one of the pits had uncovered human remains at around 5 pm local time on Tuesday 27 May. He added:

  Human remains have been uncovered during the limited excavation of a suspected World War I burial site which is being investigated by the Australian Army in France.

  At this stage there is no indication of the number or condition of any remains which may be found at the site and the archaeology team still have a large task ahead to attempt to resolve these questions. While it is believed that the bodies are likely to be Australian and British soldiers, the nationalities have so far not been confirmed.

  At the end of day three of the dig, Warren Snowdon had confirmed that, in addition to the initial discovery of remains in Pit 5, the dig had also uncovered remains in Pits 1 and 2. He concluded that, despite these discoveries, the team could not confirm the presence of Diggers among the remains as none of the discoveries was distinctly Australian.

  He was even more buoyed when the next big step forward came at the start of the final week of the dig. The GUARD team found a heavily corroded but unmistakable Australian Army ‘Rising Sun’ collar badge – confirmation, at long last, of the presence of Diggers amongst the remains. In the words of Mike O’Brien, the find immediately transformed the site into ‘a place of national significance’. Later the same day, the team uncovered another ‘Rising Sun’ badge. Both were discovered in the chest cavities of skeletons, leading to suggestions that the soldiers may have placed the badges in their breast pockets prior to the battle.