December 26, 2025 • 40 mins
In this episode of The Old Front Line, we explore how individual lives and institutions reveal the human realities of the First World War.
We begin by asking why only three officers were Shot at Dawn during the war, and what this striking disparity tells us about military justice, discipline, and class within the British Army.
We then turn to the work of the Australian Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, examining how its innovative and compassionate approach - under the leadership of Vera Deakin - sought to uncover the fate of the missing and bring answers to grieving families.
Next, we consider how the experience of war shaped the men who served in the First World War, and question whether their post-war identities and challenges were truly unique, or part of a broader historical pattern.
Finally, we analyse the Battle of Manchester Hill in March 1918, assessing its significance and discussing the possible fate of Lieutenant Colonel Wilfrith Elstob VC, who commanded the defence during the German Spring Offensive.
Shot at Dawn episode: Shot At Dawn - Old Front Line.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
This episode we'll go out over the Christmas
period, a time when my minddrifts away to Flanders and
those fields along the Britishsector of the Western Front,
which experienced the Christmastruce in nineteen fourteen.
Back in the eighties andnineties, I interviewed men who
were there who took part in thatChristmas truce, and my uncle
(00:31):
Dan with the Essex Regiment, hetoo was one of those that went
out into no man's land andexperienced peace that day, just
a few weeks before he waswounded for the first time.
For me that event will never beabout football or any of the
fanciful ideas that Hollywoodand dramas have often forced
(00:55):
upon us, but the simple idea ofordinary men from two different
but similar cultures staring ateach other on a shared day that
meant something to them both.
For a moment in decembernineteen fourteen there was
peace in no man's land, but thewar was still in its infancy,
(01:17):
and honour perhaps still meantsomething then, and ahead were
long years in which warfarewould truly emerge into the
industrial age of bothproduction and death, death on
an industrial scale, which mighthave removed all honour, and
itself a microcosm of thehistory of the century that
(01:38):
would follow.
But for me the shadows of men inno man's land, swapping food and
drink, cat badges and buttons,and curious looks at each other,
warriors together, connected ina way that few back home that
Christmas will understand.
This was their shared peace onthat day more than a century
(02:00):
ago.
So now to this week's questions.
Question number one comes fromThomas on Discord.
I've heard that very fewofficers were shot at dawn
during the Great War.
How come?
Well, we've done an episode onthose soldiers who were tried by
Field General Court Martial andsubsequently executed.
(02:23):
Three hundred and six formilitary crimes, about another
forty for civilian crimes, andI'll put a link in the show
notes if you want to get anoverall view of the whole
subject of the soldiers who wereexecuted who were shot at dawn,
and that phrase comes from theheadstone of one of them.
In terms of those who wereexecuted in the Great War, 346
(02:48):
in total, three were officers, amuch smaller number.
So why was that?
Well, I think we'll go on totalk about that.
There isn't really a simpleanswer.
On one level, you could sayperhaps the army treated
officers differently, and itdid.
Perhaps it was more lenienttowards the actions of officers,
(03:10):
and there's plenty of examplesof that very thing.
But as always, the subject iscomplex, and I think it's best
to look at who those men were,who those officers were who were
executed.
The first of them is EricSkeffington Paul.
He was born in Canada in 1885.
(03:30):
The family had emigrated toSurrey before the Great War.
When that war broke out, heenlisted as an ordinary soldier
in the Honourable ArtilleryCompany, and then he was
commissioned into the WestYorkshire Regiment in May 1915.
Eventually he was posted to the11th Battalion, the West Yorks,
on the Western Front, and hefought in the Battle of the
Somme in July and October 1916,and during that latter stage of
(03:55):
the Somme Battle, when they wereover on the eastern edge of
where the fighting was takingplace, he was found absent from
his platoon and was foundwandering around behind the
trenches by military foot policewho were posted near to the
battle area.
He couldn't really give a goodenough account as to how he was
(04:16):
there, why he was there, andthey could see that something
was not right, so they didn'tjust challenge him, they
arrested him, and he was takenoff, and eventually a field
general court martial followed,at which his company commander
and the regimental medicalofficer both gave evidence in
his support, stating that he wasexperiencing some kind of battle
(04:38):
fatigue, had shell shock, andthey were expressing, I guess,
leniency in his case.
But the commander in chief, thisis towards the end of the Battle
of the Somme, there have beenhundreds of thousands of
casualties in the British andCommonwealth forces, many of
them officers.
The army marches on discipline,and senior officers felt that
(05:00):
ordinary young officers, platoonand company and battalion level
officers had to set a goodexample to their men, and Sir
Douglas A, Commander in Chief,stated Such a case is more
serious in the case of anofficer than a man, and it is
also highly important that allranks should realise the law is
the same for an officer as aprivate.
(05:22):
Now, this particular officer waswhat they would have called a
hundred years before a jollyjumper, he'd come up through the
ranks, perhaps by the waroffice, not seen necessarily as
a proper officer in invertedcommas, but the circumstances of
him leaving his post, quittingthe battlefield, leaving his men
behind, and the seriousness inthat of the wider aspects of
(05:47):
military discipline meant thathe was found guilty, and that
sentence was confirmed, and hewas executed at Popperinger on
the 10th of December 1916, abouttwo months after that incident
in the final stage of the Battleof the Somme, and he's buried at
Popperinger New MilitaryCemetery.
(06:07):
The next officer to be executedwas Edwin Dyot.
Now he was not in the army, hewas in the Navy.
Born in Cardiff in 1895, hisfather was a naval officer.
He joined the Royal NavalDivision, that infantry division
formed from naval personnel in1915.
He served with them at Mudrosand then Egypt and finally
France with the Nelson Battalionof the RND.
(06:30):
And he deserted after the attackat Bocor on the 13th of November
1916.
So about a month after theincident that Sir Eric
Skeffington Paul was involvedin.
And one account says that in thefield on the 13th of November
1916, when it was his duty tojoin his battalion, which was
engaged in operations againstthe enemy, he did not do so and
(06:53):
remained absent from hisbattalion until placed under
arrest at Engel Belmare on the15th of November.
At the subsequent Field GeneralCourt Martial, Dyatt said
absolutely nothing in hisdefence, nothing at all at the
trial, and as a result he wassentenced to death.
The court, however, recommendedmercy based on his young age,
(07:15):
but Major General Shute,commanding the Roman over
division, recommended otherwise,and the sentence was confirmed
by Hague, and Diet was executedon the 5th of January 1917, and
today is buried at Le Crotoy,close to the Bay of the Somme.
It is said that there was a hugeamount of controversy over this
(07:35):
field general court martial andabout the sentence that was
carried out.
His father kicked up a lot offuss over the matter, drew in
the Admiralty, and a decision itseemed at that stage was made
because of what was essentiallypotentially a bungled court
martial, resulting in amiscarriage of justice to this
officer.
(07:55):
It was decided thereafter thatofficers would only be shot by
firing squad for murder.
So that leads us to the thirdand final example.
Second Lieutenant JohnPatterson.
He served with the 1stBattalion, the Essex Regiment,
and he was executed on the 24thof September 1918, so quite late
(08:16):
on in the war, but in this casefor the murder of a military
policeman who was attempting toarrest him.
In civilian life, he would havebeen hung for that murder.
Patterson was born in 1890.
He'd attended civil servicecollege before the war, and he'd
worked in a trader in Africabefore 1914 as well.
In April 1915, he joined the17th Battalion of the Middlesex
(08:41):
Regiment, that was the footballbattalion, and he was shell
shocked while serving with themat Delville Wood, and then later
wounded at Red Ann Ridge inNovember 1916.
He was then commissioned fromthe ranks into the Essex
Regiment in late 1917, desertedhis unit soon after, and was
missing for over three monthsfrom March to July of 1918 until
(09:03):
he was challenged by somemilitary foot police near
Calais.
When trying to avoid arrest, hethen opened fire and shot and
killed Sergeant Collinson of themilitary foot police.
He was arrested subsequently atSt.
Omer.
There was a field general courtmartial, and he was executed for
murder, which of course was acapital crime at the time.
(09:25):
So illustrating these threecases, these are the three known
examples of officers executed inthe Great War, out of that total
of 346, two for desertion, onefor murder.
And what they tell us is whatthe military authorities felt
about executing commissionedofficers.
(09:45):
It went from Hague's view oftreating them all equally to a
bungled field general courtmartial, and the only other one
to be shot was for what was acapital crime.
And we have to ask ourselves,what message did this send to
the rest of the army?
And I think after Diet, withthat decision made to only shoot
(10:06):
officers for capital crimes,that meant that the officers
were given a free pass to behaveas they wished, no matter how
they failed on the battlefield,they would never face the same
penalty that an ordinary soldierwould do for the same military
crime.
And I remember interviewingveterans in the eighties and
(10:27):
nineties who occasionallybrought these things up and felt
that the army was soft on theseofficers when it certainly
wasn't soft on them.
Discipline, crime, the wholeview of where your position was,
not just in the military but insociety, of course, was very
different more than a centuryago.
(10:48):
And one thing I would say is Ithink the army learnt from the
experience of having an armythat was made up initially of
huge numbers of volunteers andthen eventually vast numbers of
conscripts.
It learned from that experienceand it learnt from how
discipline should be implementedand that there had to be a sense
(11:09):
of justice in it.
And I think when we look at thiswith only three officers
executed compared to all thoseordinary soldiers for similar
crimes, then you don't see muchjustice going on there.
But of course there is the wideridea that none of these men
should have been shot for thesecrimes, which eventually led to
(11:29):
them being pardoned under TonyBlair's government in the early
2000s.
So it's a complex subject,Thomas, and I hope really kind
of illustrating those threecases gives you a bit of an
insight into the kind of thoughtprocess behind how and why and
the circumstances under whichthose three officers were
(11:52):
executed and what that meant forthe wider army.
And I'm sure military, well Iknow military discipline is
something that we are going toreturn to in the podcast in the
near future.
Question number two comes fromGlenn Townsend.
From researching the exploits ofvarious family members in the
Great War, I'm aware of the workof the Australian Red Cross,
(12:13):
especially that of theAustralian Wounded and Missing
Inquiry Bureau led by VeraDeakin, the daughter of
Australia's second PrimeMinister.
I'm interested to know moreabout the work of the Red Cross
and this unit during the FirstWorld War and whether the
British Red Cross and theirother Dominion branches did
something similar to theirAustralian cousins.
(12:33):
Well the Red Cross worked fromall of these different British
and Commonwealth nations duringthe Great War, and obviously
centrally from the InternationalRed Cross based in Switzerland,
and one of the tasks that it didwas to work within military
hospitals.
For example, in terms of theAustralian contribution, they
worked in Cairo, helping totreat the Australian wounded
(12:55):
coming back from Gallipoli.
The Red Cross provided comforts,medical supplies, and members of
the voluntary aid detachment,VAD, which included a lot of
female nurses, volunteer nursesthat would go along to assist
the professional nurses who wereworking in these military
hospitals.
But even in 1915, when they weredoing that basic Red Cross
(13:19):
hospital-related work, there wasa huge problem, and that problem
was the missing.
Even at just Gallipoli, therewas a substantial number of
Australian soldiers whose fatewas unknown.
And once they moved to theWestern Front, with over
forty-five thousand dead inFrance and Flanders, and at
least half of those missing,that task was even bigger.
(13:43):
This was unprecedented.
This type of warfare where menwent into battle and literally
disappeared on the kind of scalethat you saw in the First World
War was completelyunprecedented, and it really
hampered a family's ability tohave what we would now call
closure because they justweren't sure what had happened
(14:04):
to that man, and for many ofthem it led to them having
difficulty in accepting thatthey were dead.
So a Red Cross InformationBureau was created to
investigate the fate of themissing Australian soldiers in
this case and then report to thefamilies.
And that's where who you namedin your question, Vera Deakin,
(14:26):
that's where she enters thestage, the 23-year-old daughter
of the Australian PrimeMinister, Alfred Deakin.
She arrived in Cairo in 1915 andhelped establish this first
bureau to deal with theAustralian missing McGallipoli,
and then they moved theorganisation to London, and when
they were operating on theWestern Front, they did the same
(14:48):
kind of task there, but on amuch bigger scale, when they
handled, for example, over25,000 inquiries from their
London office.
And how they worked was to firstlook at sources.
They interviewed woundedsoldiers in hospitals, went to
ask them if they were lookinginto a soldier of the 8th
(15:10):
Battalion, Australian Infantry.
They would find out if any 8thBattalion men were in hospitals
in Britain.
They would go and interview themand ask them if they knew of
this soldier or that soldier andtake some witness statements.
They would look at the recordsfrom casualty clearing stations,
field ambulances, hospitals andbureau units.
They would get reports fromchaplains and officers of the
(15:30):
units that they wereinvestigating.
And later on through theInternational Red Cross, they
were able to access capturedGerman lists, repatriated
prisoner of war lists, and thenofficial Australian Imperial
Force documentation.
And the process that theyfollowed was to receive an
inquiry from the family, open acase file, tens of thousands of
(15:52):
these were created, dispatch theinvestigators to the hospitals
and the camps and the records,cross-check conflicting
accounts, and then write adetailed, compassionate letter
to the home, to the family ofthe soldier who was missing.
And it was a good system, a goodapproach, a good process, but
they couldn't always come upwith the answers.
(16:14):
They found that there were manycases in which all of the
witnesses to a soldier's deathwere themselves dead or missing.
So often, really, they couldn'tadd much to what was already
known, which was hugely, hugelyfrustrating.
But for many families, and whenyou look at the surviving
records, you can see that theywere given information because
(16:37):
Private Brown had seen PrivateSmith go towards the German
wire, get caught by a burst ofmachine gun fire, and then his
body could not be recovered.
So that then gave a definitiveanswer to that family.
The records where you'll findthe kind of work that they did
have now been digitised.
They're available on theAustralian War Memorial website.
(16:58):
So if you're researching anAustralian soldier and he has no
known grave or he was postedmissing during the war, you are
likely to find one of theserecords and you can download
them and see the kind ofinformation they were able to
ascertain at the time.
Some of it is very limited.
Sometimes there are pages andpages of eyewitness accounts as
(17:20):
to what happened to thatindividual.
And coming back to their workduring the war, it was
recognised through the award ofthe OBE to Vera Deakin for her
dedication to this work, hercompassion, and her ability to
ensure that many Australianfamilies had answers that they
otherwise would not have had.
(17:41):
It was said of her she wascomposed and directs with a
disarming kindness, a woman whocould quiet a room by listening
before she spoke.
And I think those kind of skillswere absolutely essential in
this really quite difficultwork.
And the story of Vera Deakin andthe Australian Wounded and
Missing Inquiry Bureau is areminder really that war is
(18:05):
fought not only on thebattlefields, it's fought in
offices, in hospital wards, andthrough the relentless pursuit
of answers by those who cared toask the right kind of questions.
Long before the existence ofmodern databases, you've got to
remember all of this kind ofwork was on a card index basis
or paper records.
(18:25):
Women like Vera Deakin built asystem that gave many families
hope.
It gave them honesty, dignity,and answers, and what we would
now call a degree of closure.
And in doing so, women like herand the people that worked
alongside her left a legacy ofcompassion amid one of the
(18:47):
darkest chapters of Australia'shistory in that early part of
the 20th century.
But was this work unique?
You asked that in your question.
It wasn't.
There was a British Red Crosssystem doing the same kind of
thing.
There was an international RedCross system looking at the
missing and looking at theburial of the dead and perhaps
(19:08):
trying to identify the dead.
I remember some years ago thehistorian Peter Barton coming
onto BBC television and sayingthat he'd uncovered records in
the Red Cross archives thatshowed how the Germans had
recovered dead bodies, forexample, during the March 1918
offensive, and they hadapparently taken close-up
photographs of British deadsoldiers, hopefully sent them to
(19:32):
the Red Cross, and hopefullythese photographs could be used
in the identity of the soldiers.
But that never that bit neverhappened.
Where these records are now,what was done with them, there
were promises of them beingopened up to a wider public,
that never came.
And when you go on the Red Crosssites for prisoners of war for
(19:52):
the First World War, you willfind some details of men who
died in German hands, but thesekind of missing records are.
Are not on there, and therecords created by the British
version of this do not survive.
What happened to them?
Whether they were in Londonduring the Blitz and they got
destroyed.
I remember in Stand 2, theJournal of the Western Front
(20:13):
Association, in one of the veryearly editions, there was an
article about the scale of therecords that were lost in
bombing in the Second World War.
Every single recommendation forhonors and awards, all of the
wounded cards, for example, andI'm pretty sure these records as
well to do with the missing.
So the Australian archiveappears to be unique.
(20:36):
Presumably, there would havebeen something for New Zealand
soldiers and other Commonwealthnations.
I've not seen any examples ofthese kind of records existing
for Canadians.
If any of our Canadian listenerswho are very knowledgeable about
the records available to CEFsoldiers were able to point us
in the direction of this, I'llput some more details onto the
podcast website eventually.
(20:58):
But I think that this story ofthe tracing of Australian
missing and the gathering ofwitness statements wasn't
unique, but the fact that therecords survive is the unique
part of it and gives us aninsight into the terrible
nature, I think, of the FirstWorld War and how many tried to
overcome it.
So an absolutely brilliantquestion, Glenn, and thank you
(21:22):
for that.
Question number three comes fromAngus Cole.
Can you provide some detailsplease as to how an army of
predominantly new and rawrecruits who had never
experienced conflict on such ascale were affected by the
intensity of going into battleand how did this affect them
coming home on leave and at theend of the war with their loved
(21:42):
ones?
There were clearly many formersoldiers who were willing to
talk at length about theirexperiences, but like my
grandfather who joined with hisfour brothers in 1914, he
experienced firsthand theChristmas truce, was affected by
gas and the horrors of lostfriends and brothers in battle,
he never spoke about the GreatWar for the rest of his life.
(22:03):
Such was the effect.
On a BBC programme on the Battleof the Somme, the narrator
stated that such was theintensity of what soldiers went
through at the front that theexperience being something on a
completely different level tonormal life made them forever
altered and subsequentlydifferent in later life, which
was certainly the case for mygrandfather for the whole time I
(22:26):
knew him.
Well, Angus, I mean you raise areally important point there
about the experience of conflicton the kind of scale of numbers
and the kind of war that theFirst World War rapidly turned
into, as we've often said onthis podcast, this industrial
war that drew in industrialscale resources through heavy
(22:46):
industry, turned the battlefieldinto an area of industrial
killing, and the casualties wereon an industrial scale too.
Not just men killed, but menwounded, men affected, as you
suggested, psychologically forthe rest of their lives.
And this was something, ofcourse, that I began to tap into
when I interviewed thosehundreds of Great War veterans
(23:08):
in the late 80s and earlynineties.
And what was clear to me wasthat the war had affected them
deeply.
For some, they'd buried it andburied it and buried it to a
point where they could bury itno more, and someone came along
who was enough of a friend forthem to trust, but enough of a
(23:31):
stranger for them to tell theirtale to, and that was me.
And I must have asked the rightkind of questions for them to
come out with the kind of thingsthat they told me during many of
those discussions.
We've had a recent episode onoral history with some of the
first veterans that Iinterviewed, and how that whole
process of me talking to them,interviewing them changed over
(23:54):
time to a point where I guess Iwas having really intimate
conversations with them abouthow intense the experience of
war had been to them.
Often so intense that GeorgeButler, as I've mentioned
previously, I'm sure, wouldoften look up at me and look
into the face of someone that hesaw as a fellow Great War
(24:15):
veteran, because there I was inmy mid-twenties by then, of a
similar kind of age to thepeople that he served with, and
his mind was so far back in thatperiod that he thought he was
looking at a contemporary.
So it was clear that the war hadaffected them, but they didn't
have the language to reallyalways explain that.
(24:36):
Some of the officers that Iinterviewed perhaps did so
better than the men, but AlbertChester's, who'd served with the
17th Royal Welsh Fusiliers onthe Somme, I remember going to
see him and asked him how hewas, and he quietly looked at me
and said I fought the Battle ofthe Somme in my bed again last
night, and that was his way ofsaying that the demon that sat
(24:58):
on his shoulder, the experienceof that war was ever present,
and he couldn't shake it.
No man could go through anexperience like the First World
War and be unaffected.
Some were affected more thanothers.
For some it was part of a long,tough life, and they saw it in
the same kind of way as theyperhaps did by working in the
(25:21):
pits or in heavy industry orwhatever it was, and saw it on a
kind of equal level.
This was just another chapter inwhat they knew was always going
to be a hard life for them, andperhaps they could square it off
in that way.
For men who had grown up infairly modest but civil society
(25:41):
and had lived in good homes withgood families and were church
faring men, suddenly to bethrown into the abyss of the
First World War and experiencethose things that they that they
saw and that they went through,and the comrades that they saw
killed, not with a clean bulletthrough the chest, which they
clasped and stagger and fallover, but hideous deaths in many
(26:04):
cases that haunted them for therest of their lives.
I mean, again, no one is goingto walk away from that
completely unaffected.
But of course, when the war cameto an end, and the survivors,
who were the majority of men whohad served, not everybody died,
most men came home.
And when those men did comehome, what was the kind of
(26:25):
support network that they got todeal with these experiences?
Well, almost nothing.
There was no psychologicalcounselling after the war, there
was no counselling full stop forthese men, while some who might
have had money could have goneto see a psychiatrist to try and
talk through this, and there aresome examples of this in print,
(26:45):
and if you go to Paul Fasell'sThe Great War and Modern Memory,
you'll see quite a lot in that.
It's a curious book in manyways, but it does tackle this
subject about men seeking helpafter the war.
But most men were not in thatposition to do so.
They buried themselves in theirlives, in their civilian
(27:06):
occupation, in their family, intheir children, and pushed the
war further and further away.
And that was a commonality inalmost all of the men that I
interviewed in the eighties andnineties, that they'd push that
war into the background to apoint where they thought they'd
silenced it, but when theystopped work and their children
grew up and they were livingquiet, retired lives, the war
(27:32):
slowly crept back, and the noiseof the haunting of that war grew
stronger and stronger to a pointwhere somehow they had to do
something with it.
And some had sat down andwritten their memoirs as a way
of dealing with that, and thenothers met people like me who
gave them the opportunity totalk to verbalise their war,
(27:56):
perhaps in a way that they hadnever done.
I mean, I wasn't the only onedoing this.
Way before me was Lynn MacDonaldand Martin Middlebrook and a few
others, and at the same time asI was interviewing veterans,
Richard Van Emden was out theredoing it on a similar kind of
big scale, leading to all thosefantastic books that he's
written.
And it was good and importantthat we recorded those memories
(28:20):
at that time from Middlebrookthrough to Richard, and like
we've said, many otherhistorians doing this kind of
oral history work.
Alf Peacock up in York, who usedto be the chairman of the York
WFA, the Western FrontAssociation, and the editor of
the Gunfire magazine, which isavailable now on the Western
Front Association website.
He was doing a similar kind ofthing.
(28:41):
All of this is really important,but I think probably
unknowingly, unwittingly, even,we were acting as kind of
counsellors to some of these mento give them that opportunity to
verbalise their experiences.
And I'm sure and I know not allof it came out.
So when I look back on it, Irealised what an extraordinary
(29:02):
time it was, and what it taughtme was the ways in which men
could be affected by being inconflict, and then I saw the
whole thing all over again on aneven bigger scale when it came
to that period in which I wastravelling with and interviewing
and talking to Second World Warveterans as I took them back to
(29:22):
Normandy, to Monte Cassino, toArnhem, wherever it was, and I
saw commonalities in the waythat they phrased their
experiences, how I couldapproach them to get them to
talk about their war.
I saw a commonality with the menthat had served in the Great
(29:43):
War.
And the documentary that you'rereferring to, I think ends up
with this phrase, they don'tmake men like that these days,
where a veteran is asked if theFirst World War could happen
again, he says they don't makemen like that these days.
And I'm sure on one level thatis true, but the experience of
the Second World War for manyservice men and women was just
(30:06):
as terrible, just as horrific,just as difficult to square off
when that war was over, and theystruggled with it in the same
kind of way.
And does that make them lesserthan the veterans in the Great
War?
I mean I don't think this is akind of competition.
And men and women who haveserved in recent conflict,
(30:26):
because we've had decades ofthat in the early part of this
century, have come back withlife-changing injuries, but also
the problem of dealing with theexperience of conflict in the
same way that veterans had donea century before them.
So that wheel I think kind ofstill keeps turning.
(30:46):
I think it's a really importantpart of our understanding of the
First World War, of allconflict.
It's not to turn these men andwomen into victims, but it is to
understand how that experienceof war, that experience of
conflict, the experience ofcomradeship and the loss of
comrades, and all of the otherjigsaw pieces that the Great War
(31:08):
is made of, how that changed menand women forever, and not just
service personnel, because theloss of people on the
battlefields affected familiesback home, wives, sisters,
daughters, sons, the list goeson.
And I think it's reallyimportant to remember that.
So it's probably a kind ofsubjective answer, Angus, but I
(31:32):
hope that's highlighted I thinksome of what you were trying to
get at in your question, and I'msure yet again this is a subject
we will return to.
So our fourth and final questioncomes from Neil Coleman.
Neil says, Regarding the Battleof Manchester Hill in 1918, when
I was a student at ManchesterUniversity, I used to talk to a
(31:55):
First World War veteran way backin 1973.
He told me that in one battle,which I think was the
Manchester's at Manchester Hill,he told me that the remaining
soldiers were being overrun bymany Germans.
The few remaining men weregetting the wind up, and the
commanding officer shouted outthat he would shoot the first
man to run back to avoid a diresituation.
(32:15):
The veteran told me that one ofhis fellow soldiers shot the
officer, and they ran back tosave themselves from the
Germans.
The more I've read about this, Iwonder if this could have been
Lieutenant Colonel Elstorb, whofamously told his superiors that
they would fight to the lastround and the last man.
I wondered if you'd come acrossthis occurrence in your
research.
(32:36):
Well, it's a really interestingquestion, Neil, and one actually
that has come up a few timesrecently, and hopefully this
will answer a collection ofquestions based around this
incident.
So, first of all, what isManchester Hill?
It's a position overlooking thecity of Saint-Cantas and
Quentin, which was captured inthe spring of nineteen seventeen
(32:56):
by the 2nd Battalion of theManchester Regiment, serving in
which was the war poet WilfredOwen.
That was a regular battalion.
They took that ground and thehill was named Manchester Hill
after them.
It was then turned into a strongpoint, and when that line was
stabilised and reinforced, itwas one of a number of redoubts,
defensive positions, that wasbuilt as part of the in-depth
(33:19):
British defences in that area.
There was a whole load ofredoubts in that area, of which
the Manchester Hill redoubt wasone.
And on the 21st of March 1918,the Germans attacked in this
area in that final great Germanpush of the Great War, when at
4.40 a.m.
that morning, a massivebombardment, huge amount of
(33:40):
artillery, massive use of gas,saturated the positions here
around Saint Contown, a widerfront, not just Manchester Hill
itself, and the lines around thehill, around the redoubt, began
to collapse as the Germanspushed through.
They had the advantage ofartillery firepower, but also
the advantage of fog thatscreened a lot of their movement
(34:03):
that day.
And Lieutenant Colonel WilfrithElstob was in charge of
approximately 170 men of the16th Battalion of the Manchester
Regiment, which was theManchester Powers Battalion, and
they were the ones who defendedit that day.
Elstob was a vicar's son fromSussex.
He was educated at ChristHospital School near Horsham,
and then later at ManchesterUniversity, and after his
(34:26):
education he became a teacher inManchester.
He joined up at the verybeginning of the war, and he was
one of those that went fromprivate to lieutenant colonel,
so he served in the ranks, wasthen commissioned, and latterly
he became the commanding officerof this Manchester Powers
battalion.
Now it was clear as the fightingprogressed around them that they
(34:47):
were being cut off.
They had a fixed link back tobrigade and divisional
headquarters, an armoured cablewith telephone lines in it that
they hoped would not be brokenby the bombardment.
That kept the lines open, andElstorb gave out information to
the situation they were in.
Within the redoubt, they hadquite a lot of ammunition,
bombs, machine gun ammunition.
(35:07):
They had backup personnel fromthe trench mortars and also from
the machine gun corps assistingthem in the defence of the
position.
But the amount of ammunitionthat they had wasn't going to
last forever, and gradually thesituation got more and more
critical.
So messages came through thewire from Elstorb to
headquarters.
The enemy are on top of us, weare surrounded.
(35:30):
I hold my battalion, my leftflank is gone, my right flank is
going, situation critical, andone of his last messages was I
will not surrender.
And in the final battle, as theGermans began to swarm over the
position as the firepower of theredoubt gradually diminished,
the defensive perimeter wasshrinking, ammunition was almost
(35:53):
non existent, the machine gunspretty much all gone.
Elstorb is seen to move amongstthe men, encouraging them,
directing the fire of the menwho still had weapons that could
operate, and in the final Germanpush they overrun Elstorb's
positions and trenches, and heis killed.
Accounts vary between being shotwhile rallying his men or making
(36:15):
a last bayonet charge at theenemy as the ammunition had
completely run out.
And the redoubt the ManchesterHill falls around about midday
on the twenty first of marchnineteen eighteen.
Now Elstob is dead, he's killedin action, and he's subsequently
awarded a posthumous VictoriaCross, and for that there has to
be a number of witnesses, andwitness statements were given to
(36:38):
put forward the recommendationfor the VC, which was accepted,
and that was subsequentlygazetted in the London Gazette.
So that means quite a largenumber of men who were in the
action were spoken to tocorroborate the story of
Elstob's bravery leading to hisaward of the Victoria Cross.
So was he then killed by his ownmen based on your discussion
(37:00):
with this veteran?
I've heard this quite a fewtimes in different accounts.
Well, I mean that is a questionthat probably I and no one else
can answer.
We don't have any definitivewritten accounts that state
this.
It is a matter of kind ofwhispers and discussion, and
some later writers havespeculated about the exact
(37:22):
circumstances of Ilstaub'sdeath, but there is no
contemporary evidence to supportthe claim that he was killed by
his own men.
All reliable sources indicatethat he died fighting as the
position was overrun.
Now I think what your questionhints at is the kind of wider
idea if an officer was going toget a load of men killed under
(37:43):
all kinds of differentcircumstances, would the men
react?
I mean in the Vietnam War thiswas called fragging, where
they'd throw a grenade at auseless officer and kill him
before the actions of thatofficer got them killed.
Did that happen in the GreatWar?
It must have done.
Was this the situation atManchester Hill?
I don't think so, becauseElstorb was highly regarded by
(38:07):
his men, he had commanded themfor so long, and he never asked
men to do something that hewasn't prepared to do himself.
And putting himself in thevanguard of the fight there
meant that this is going to bealmost certain death for him,
and he knew that.
So it didn't require his own mento kill him, the Germans were
(38:28):
having a pretty good go at itthemselves.
We will never get to the bottomof this, I don't think.
But it's right to ask thesequestions and it's right to
question the accepted narrativeof something, but always, always
it has to be based on goodevidence.
Because there were, as I'vementioned in the podcast before,
when talking to veterans, therewere those kind of stamina
(38:51):
stories where little teenyfragments of fact got blown out
of all proportion by men with alot of drink in their belly, and
suddenly all kinds of storieswould come out of that.
And possibly that is the genesisof this tale of Elstob being
killed by his own men.
But for me, Elstorb will alwaysbe the hero, fighting against
(39:16):
impossible odds, but onwards,ever onwards for him to the very
last.
His body was never recovered,and you'll find him commemorated
by name on the panels of thePoziers Memorial to the Missing.
So that ends our questions forthis week.
There have been some reallysuperb questions this week, and
(39:36):
I love the kind of questionswhere we do challenge accepted
fact that's really, reallyimportant.
And keep the questions coming,send them in via the usual
routes of email and the Discordserver, and we'll be back soon
for some more questions andanswers here on the old front
line.
(40:00):
You've been listening to anepisode of the Old Frontline
with me, military historian PaulReed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcor.
You can follow the podcast atOldFrontline Pod.
Check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
find lots of podcast extras andphotographs and links to books
that are mentioned in thepodcast.
(40:21):
And if you feel like supportingus, you can go to our Patreon
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buymea coffee atbuymeacoffee.comslash
oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsite.
Thanks for listening, and we'llsee you again soon.
This episode we'll go out over the Christmas
period, a time when my minddrifts away to Flanders and
those fields along the Britishsector of the Western Front,
which experienced the Christmastruce in nineteen fourteen.
Back in the eighties andnineties, I interviewed men who
were there who took part in thatChristmas truce, and my uncle
(00:31):
Dan with the Essex Regiment, hetoo was one of those that went
out into no man's land andexperienced peace that day, just
a few weeks before he waswounded for the first time.
For me that event will never beabout football or any of the
fanciful ideas that Hollywoodand dramas have often forced
(00:55):
upon us, but the simple idea ofordinary men from two different
but similar cultures staring ateach other on a shared day that
meant something to them both.
For a moment in decembernineteen fourteen there was
peace in no man's land, but thewar was still in its infancy,
(01:17):
and honour perhaps still meantsomething then, and ahead were
long years in which warfarewould truly emerge into the
industrial age of bothproduction and death, death on
an industrial scale, which mighthave removed all honour, and
itself a microcosm of thehistory of the century that
(01:38):
would follow.
But for me the shadows of men inno man's land, swapping food and
drink, cat badges and buttons,and curious looks at each other,
warriors together, connected ina way that few back home that
Christmas will understand.
This was their shared peace onthat day more than a century
(02:00):
ago.
So now to this week's questions.
Question number one comes fromThomas on Discord.
I've heard that very fewofficers were shot at dawn
during the Great War.
How come?
Well, we've done an episode onthose soldiers who were tried by
Field General Court Martial andsubsequently executed.
(02:23):
Three hundred and six formilitary crimes, about another
forty for civilian crimes, andI'll put a link in the show
notes if you want to get anoverall view of the whole
subject of the soldiers who wereexecuted who were shot at dawn,
and that phrase comes from theheadstone of one of them.
In terms of those who wereexecuted in the Great War, 346
(02:48):
in total, three were officers, amuch smaller number.
So why was that?
Well, I think we'll go on totalk about that.
There isn't really a simpleanswer.
On one level, you could sayperhaps the army treated
officers differently, and itdid.
Perhaps it was more lenienttowards the actions of officers,
(03:10):
and there's plenty of examplesof that very thing.
But as always, the subject iscomplex, and I think it's best
to look at who those men were,who those officers were who were
executed.
The first of them is EricSkeffington Paul.
He was born in Canada in 1885.
(03:30):
The family had emigrated toSurrey before the Great War.
When that war broke out, heenlisted as an ordinary soldier
in the Honourable ArtilleryCompany, and then he was
commissioned into the WestYorkshire Regiment in May 1915.
Eventually he was posted to the11th Battalion, the West Yorks,
on the Western Front, and hefought in the Battle of the
Somme in July and October 1916,and during that latter stage of
(03:55):
the Somme Battle, when they wereover on the eastern edge of
where the fighting was takingplace, he was found absent from
his platoon and was foundwandering around behind the
trenches by military foot policewho were posted near to the
battle area.
He couldn't really give a goodenough account as to how he was
(04:16):
there, why he was there, andthey could see that something
was not right, so they didn'tjust challenge him, they
arrested him, and he was takenoff, and eventually a field
general court martial followed,at which his company commander
and the regimental medicalofficer both gave evidence in
his support, stating that he wasexperiencing some kind of battle
(04:38):
fatigue, had shell shock, andthey were expressing, I guess,
leniency in his case.
But the commander in chief, thisis towards the end of the Battle
of the Somme, there have beenhundreds of thousands of
casualties in the British andCommonwealth forces, many of
them officers.
The army marches on discipline,and senior officers felt that
(05:00):
ordinary young officers, platoonand company and battalion level
officers had to set a goodexample to their men, and Sir
Douglas A, Commander in Chief,stated Such a case is more
serious in the case of anofficer than a man, and it is
also highly important that allranks should realise the law is
the same for an officer as aprivate.
(05:22):
Now, this particular officer waswhat they would have called a
hundred years before a jollyjumper, he'd come up through the
ranks, perhaps by the waroffice, not seen necessarily as
a proper officer in invertedcommas, but the circumstances of
him leaving his post, quittingthe battlefield, leaving his men
behind, and the seriousness inthat of the wider aspects of
(05:47):
military discipline meant thathe was found guilty, and that
sentence was confirmed, and hewas executed at Popperinger on
the 10th of December 1916, abouttwo months after that incident
in the final stage of the Battleof the Somme, and he's buried at
Popperinger New MilitaryCemetery.
(06:07):
The next officer to be executedwas Edwin Dyot.
Now he was not in the army, hewas in the Navy.
Born in Cardiff in 1895, hisfather was a naval officer.
He joined the Royal NavalDivision, that infantry division
formed from naval personnel in1915.
He served with them at Mudrosand then Egypt and finally
France with the Nelson Battalionof the RND.
(06:30):
And he deserted after the attackat Bocor on the 13th of November
1916.
So about a month after theincident that Sir Eric
Skeffington Paul was involvedin.
And one account says that in thefield on the 13th of November
1916, when it was his duty tojoin his battalion, which was
engaged in operations againstthe enemy, he did not do so and
(06:53):
remained absent from hisbattalion until placed under
arrest at Engel Belmare on the15th of November.
At the subsequent Field GeneralCourt Martial, Dyatt said
absolutely nothing in hisdefence, nothing at all at the
trial, and as a result he wassentenced to death.
The court, however, recommendedmercy based on his young age,
(07:15):
but Major General Shute,commanding the Roman over
division, recommended otherwise,and the sentence was confirmed
by Hague, and Diet was executedon the 5th of January 1917, and
today is buried at Le Crotoy,close to the Bay of the Somme.
It is said that there was a hugeamount of controversy over this
(07:35):
field general court martial andabout the sentence that was
carried out.
His father kicked up a lot offuss over the matter, drew in
the Admiralty, and a decision itseemed at that stage was made
because of what was essentiallypotentially a bungled court
martial, resulting in amiscarriage of justice to this
officer.
(07:55):
It was decided thereafter thatofficers would only be shot by
firing squad for murder.
So that leads us to the thirdand final example.
Second Lieutenant JohnPatterson.
He served with the 1stBattalion, the Essex Regiment,
and he was executed on the 24thof September 1918, so quite late
(08:16):
on in the war, but in this casefor the murder of a military
policeman who was attempting toarrest him.
In civilian life, he would havebeen hung for that murder.
Patterson was born in 1890.
He'd attended civil servicecollege before the war, and he'd
worked in a trader in Africabefore 1914 as well.
In April 1915, he joined the17th Battalion of the Middlesex
(08:41):
Regiment, that was the footballbattalion, and he was shell
shocked while serving with themat Delville Wood, and then later
wounded at Red Ann Ridge inNovember 1916.
He was then commissioned fromthe ranks into the Essex
Regiment in late 1917, desertedhis unit soon after, and was
missing for over three monthsfrom March to July of 1918 until
(09:03):
he was challenged by somemilitary foot police near
Calais.
When trying to avoid arrest, hethen opened fire and shot and
killed Sergeant Collinson of themilitary foot police.
He was arrested subsequently atSt.
Omer.
There was a field general courtmartial, and he was executed for
murder, which of course was acapital crime at the time.
(09:25):
So illustrating these threecases, these are the three known
examples of officers executed inthe Great War, out of that total
of 346, two for desertion, onefor murder.
And what they tell us is whatthe military authorities felt
about executing commissionedofficers.
(09:45):
It went from Hague's view oftreating them all equally to a
bungled field general courtmartial, and the only other one
to be shot was for what was acapital crime.
And we have to ask ourselves,what message did this send to
the rest of the army?
And I think after Diet, withthat decision made to only shoot
(10:06):
officers for capital crimes,that meant that the officers
were given a free pass to behaveas they wished, no matter how
they failed on the battlefield,they would never face the same
penalty that an ordinary soldierwould do for the same military
crime.
And I remember interviewingveterans in the eighties and
(10:27):
nineties who occasionallybrought these things up and felt
that the army was soft on theseofficers when it certainly
wasn't soft on them.
Discipline, crime, the wholeview of where your position was,
not just in the military but insociety, of course, was very
different more than a centuryago.
(10:48):
And one thing I would say is Ithink the army learnt from the
experience of having an armythat was made up initially of
huge numbers of volunteers andthen eventually vast numbers of
conscripts.
It learned from that experienceand it learnt from how
discipline should be implementedand that there had to be a sense
(11:09):
of justice in it.
And I think when we look at thiswith only three officers
executed compared to all thoseordinary soldiers for similar
crimes, then you don't see muchjustice going on there.
But of course there is the wideridea that none of these men
should have been shot for thesecrimes, which eventually led to
(11:29):
them being pardoned under TonyBlair's government in the early
2000s.
So it's a complex subject,Thomas, and I hope really kind
of illustrating those threecases gives you a bit of an
insight into the kind of thoughtprocess behind how and why and
the circumstances under whichthose three officers were
(11:52):
executed and what that meant forthe wider army.
And I'm sure military, well Iknow military discipline is
something that we are going toreturn to in the podcast in the
near future.
Question number two comes fromGlenn Townsend.
From researching the exploits ofvarious family members in the
Great War, I'm aware of the workof the Australian Red Cross,
(12:13):
especially that of theAustralian Wounded and Missing
Inquiry Bureau led by VeraDeakin, the daughter of
Australia's second PrimeMinister.
I'm interested to know moreabout the work of the Red Cross
and this unit during the FirstWorld War and whether the
British Red Cross and theirother Dominion branches did
something similar to theirAustralian cousins.
(12:33):
Well the Red Cross worked fromall of these different British
and Commonwealth nations duringthe Great War, and obviously
centrally from the InternationalRed Cross based in Switzerland,
and one of the tasks that it didwas to work within military
hospitals.
For example, in terms of theAustralian contribution, they
worked in Cairo, helping totreat the Australian wounded
(12:55):
coming back from Gallipoli.
The Red Cross provided comforts,medical supplies, and members of
the voluntary aid detachment,VAD, which included a lot of
female nurses, volunteer nursesthat would go along to assist
the professional nurses who wereworking in these military
hospitals.
But even in 1915, when they weredoing that basic Red Cross
(13:19):
hospital-related work, there wasa huge problem, and that problem
was the missing.
Even at just Gallipoli, therewas a substantial number of
Australian soldiers whose fatewas unknown.
And once they moved to theWestern Front, with over
forty-five thousand dead inFrance and Flanders, and at
least half of those missing,that task was even bigger.
(13:43):
This was unprecedented.
This type of warfare where menwent into battle and literally
disappeared on the kind of scalethat you saw in the First World
War was completelyunprecedented, and it really
hampered a family's ability tohave what we would now call
closure because they justweren't sure what had happened
(14:04):
to that man, and for many ofthem it led to them having
difficulty in accepting thatthey were dead.
So a Red Cross InformationBureau was created to
investigate the fate of themissing Australian soldiers in
this case and then report to thefamilies.
And that's where who you namedin your question, Vera Deakin,
(14:26):
that's where she enters thestage, the 23-year-old daughter
of the Australian PrimeMinister, Alfred Deakin.
She arrived in Cairo in 1915 andhelped establish this first
bureau to deal with theAustralian missing McGallipoli,
and then they moved theorganisation to London, and when
they were operating on theWestern Front, they did the same
(14:48):
kind of task there, but on amuch bigger scale, when they
handled, for example, over25,000 inquiries from their
London office.
And how they worked was to firstlook at sources.
They interviewed woundedsoldiers in hospitals, went to
ask them if they were lookinginto a soldier of the 8th
(15:10):
Battalion, Australian Infantry.
They would find out if any 8thBattalion men were in hospitals
in Britain.
They would go and interview themand ask them if they knew of
this soldier or that soldier andtake some witness statements.
They would look at the recordsfrom casualty clearing stations,
field ambulances, hospitals andbureau units.
They would get reports fromchaplains and officers of the
(15:30):
units that they wereinvestigating.
And later on through theInternational Red Cross, they
were able to access capturedGerman lists, repatriated
prisoner of war lists, and thenofficial Australian Imperial
Force documentation.
And the process that theyfollowed was to receive an
inquiry from the family, open acase file, tens of thousands of
(15:52):
these were created, dispatch theinvestigators to the hospitals
and the camps and the records,cross-check conflicting
accounts, and then write adetailed, compassionate letter
to the home, to the family ofthe soldier who was missing.
And it was a good system, a goodapproach, a good process, but
they couldn't always come upwith the answers.
(16:14):
They found that there were manycases in which all of the
witnesses to a soldier's deathwere themselves dead or missing.
So often, really, they couldn'tadd much to what was already
known, which was hugely, hugelyfrustrating.
But for many families, and whenyou look at the surviving
records, you can see that theywere given information because
(16:37):
Private Brown had seen PrivateSmith go towards the German
wire, get caught by a burst ofmachine gun fire, and then his
body could not be recovered.
So that then gave a definitiveanswer to that family.
The records where you'll findthe kind of work that they did
have now been digitised.
They're available on theAustralian War Memorial website.
(16:58):
So if you're researching anAustralian soldier and he has no
known grave or he was postedmissing during the war, you are
likely to find one of theserecords and you can download
them and see the kind ofinformation they were able to
ascertain at the time.
Some of it is very limited.
Sometimes there are pages andpages of eyewitness accounts as
(17:20):
to what happened to thatindividual.
And coming back to their workduring the war, it was
recognised through the award ofthe OBE to Vera Deakin for her
dedication to this work, hercompassion, and her ability to
ensure that many Australianfamilies had answers that they
otherwise would not have had.
(17:41):
It was said of her she wascomposed and directs with a
disarming kindness, a woman whocould quiet a room by listening
before she spoke.
And I think those kind of skillswere absolutely essential in
this really quite difficultwork.
And the story of Vera Deakin andthe Australian Wounded and
Missing Inquiry Bureau is areminder really that war is
(18:05):
fought not only on thebattlefields, it's fought in
offices, in hospital wards, andthrough the relentless pursuit
of answers by those who cared toask the right kind of questions.
Long before the existence ofmodern databases, you've got to
remember all of this kind ofwork was on a card index basis
or paper records.
(18:25):
Women like Vera Deakin built asystem that gave many families
hope.
It gave them honesty, dignity,and answers, and what we would
now call a degree of closure.
And in doing so, women like herand the people that worked
alongside her left a legacy ofcompassion amid one of the
(18:47):
darkest chapters of Australia'shistory in that early part of
the 20th century.
But was this work unique?
You asked that in your question.
It wasn't.
There was a British Red Crosssystem doing the same kind of
thing.
There was an international RedCross system looking at the
missing and looking at theburial of the dead and perhaps
(19:08):
trying to identify the dead.
I remember some years ago thehistorian Peter Barton coming
onto BBC television and sayingthat he'd uncovered records in
the Red Cross archives thatshowed how the Germans had
recovered dead bodies, forexample, during the March 1918
offensive, and they hadapparently taken close-up
photographs of British deadsoldiers, hopefully sent them to
(19:32):
the Red Cross, and hopefullythese photographs could be used
in the identity of the soldiers.
But that never that bit neverhappened.
Where these records are now,what was done with them, there
were promises of them beingopened up to a wider public,
that never came.
And when you go on the Red Crosssites for prisoners of war for
(19:52):
the First World War, you willfind some details of men who
died in German hands, but thesekind of missing records are.
Are not on there, and therecords created by the British
version of this do not survive.
What happened to them?
Whether they were in Londonduring the Blitz and they got
destroyed.
I remember in Stand 2, theJournal of the Western Front
(20:13):
Association, in one of the veryearly editions, there was an
article about the scale of therecords that were lost in
bombing in the Second World War.
Every single recommendation forhonors and awards, all of the
wounded cards, for example, andI'm pretty sure these records as
well to do with the missing.
So the Australian archiveappears to be unique.
(20:36):
Presumably, there would havebeen something for New Zealand
soldiers and other Commonwealthnations.
I've not seen any examples ofthese kind of records existing
for Canadians.
If any of our Canadian listenerswho are very knowledgeable about
the records available to CEFsoldiers were able to point us
in the direction of this, I'llput some more details onto the
podcast website eventually.
(20:58):
But I think that this story ofthe tracing of Australian
missing and the gathering ofwitness statements wasn't
unique, but the fact that therecords survive is the unique
part of it and gives us aninsight into the terrible
nature, I think, of the FirstWorld War and how many tried to
overcome it.
So an absolutely brilliantquestion, Glenn, and thank you
(21:22):
for that.
Question number three comes fromAngus Cole.
Can you provide some detailsplease as to how an army of
predominantly new and rawrecruits who had never
experienced conflict on such ascale were affected by the
intensity of going into battleand how did this affect them
coming home on leave and at theend of the war with their loved
(21:42):
ones?
There were clearly many formersoldiers who were willing to
talk at length about theirexperiences, but like my
grandfather who joined with hisfour brothers in 1914, he
experienced firsthand theChristmas truce, was affected by
gas and the horrors of lostfriends and brothers in battle,
he never spoke about the GreatWar for the rest of his life.
(22:03):
Such was the effect.
On a BBC programme on the Battleof the Somme, the narrator
stated that such was theintensity of what soldiers went
through at the front that theexperience being something on a
completely different level tonormal life made them forever
altered and subsequentlydifferent in later life, which
was certainly the case for mygrandfather for the whole time I
(22:26):
knew him.
Well, Angus, I mean you raise areally important point there
about the experience of conflicton the kind of scale of numbers
and the kind of war that theFirst World War rapidly turned
into, as we've often said onthis podcast, this industrial
war that drew in industrialscale resources through heavy
(22:46):
industry, turned the battlefieldinto an area of industrial
killing, and the casualties wereon an industrial scale too.
Not just men killed, but menwounded, men affected, as you
suggested, psychologically forthe rest of their lives.
And this was something, ofcourse, that I began to tap into
when I interviewed thosehundreds of Great War veterans
(23:08):
in the late 80s and earlynineties.
And what was clear to me wasthat the war had affected them
deeply.
For some, they'd buried it andburied it and buried it to a
point where they could bury itno more, and someone came along
who was enough of a friend forthem to trust, but enough of a
(23:31):
stranger for them to tell theirtale to, and that was me.
And I must have asked the rightkind of questions for them to
come out with the kind of thingsthat they told me during many of
those discussions.
We've had a recent episode onoral history with some of the
first veterans that Iinterviewed, and how that whole
process of me talking to them,interviewing them changed over
(23:54):
time to a point where I guess Iwas having really intimate
conversations with them abouthow intense the experience of
war had been to them.
Often so intense that GeorgeButler, as I've mentioned
previously, I'm sure, wouldoften look up at me and look
into the face of someone that hesaw as a fellow Great War
(24:15):
veteran, because there I was inmy mid-twenties by then, of a
similar kind of age to thepeople that he served with, and
his mind was so far back in thatperiod that he thought he was
looking at a contemporary.
So it was clear that the war hadaffected them, but they didn't
have the language to reallyalways explain that.
(24:36):
Some of the officers that Iinterviewed perhaps did so
better than the men, but AlbertChester's, who'd served with the
17th Royal Welsh Fusiliers onthe Somme, I remember going to
see him and asked him how hewas, and he quietly looked at me
and said I fought the Battle ofthe Somme in my bed again last
night, and that was his way ofsaying that the demon that sat
(24:58):
on his shoulder, the experienceof that war was ever present,
and he couldn't shake it.
No man could go through anexperience like the First World
War and be unaffected.
Some were affected more thanothers.
For some it was part of a long,tough life, and they saw it in
the same kind of way as theyperhaps did by working in the
(25:21):
pits or in heavy industry orwhatever it was, and saw it on a
kind of equal level.
This was just another chapter inwhat they knew was always going
to be a hard life for them, andperhaps they could square it off
in that way.
For men who had grown up infairly modest but civil society
(25:41):
and had lived in good homes withgood families and were church
faring men, suddenly to bethrown into the abyss of the
First World War and experiencethose things that they that they
saw and that they went through,and the comrades that they saw
killed, not with a clean bulletthrough the chest, which they
clasped and stagger and fallover, but hideous deaths in many
(26:04):
cases that haunted them for therest of their lives.
I mean, again, no one is goingto walk away from that
completely unaffected.
But of course, when the war cameto an end, and the survivors,
who were the majority of men whohad served, not everybody died,
most men came home.
And when those men did comehome, what was the kind of
(26:25):
support network that they got todeal with these experiences?
Well, almost nothing.
There was no psychologicalcounselling after the war, there
was no counselling full stop forthese men, while some who might
have had money could have goneto see a psychiatrist to try and
talk through this, and there aresome examples of this in print,
(26:45):
and if you go to Paul Fasell'sThe Great War and Modern Memory,
you'll see quite a lot in that.
It's a curious book in manyways, but it does tackle this
subject about men seeking helpafter the war.
But most men were not in thatposition to do so.
They buried themselves in theirlives, in their civilian
(27:06):
occupation, in their family, intheir children, and pushed the
war further and further away.
And that was a commonality inalmost all of the men that I
interviewed in the eighties andnineties, that they'd push that
war into the background to apoint where they thought they'd
silenced it, but when theystopped work and their children
grew up and they were livingquiet, retired lives, the war
(27:32):
slowly crept back, and the noiseof the haunting of that war grew
stronger and stronger to a pointwhere somehow they had to do
something with it.
And some had sat down andwritten their memoirs as a way
of dealing with that, and thenothers met people like me who
gave them the opportunity totalk to verbalise their war,
(27:56):
perhaps in a way that they hadnever done.
I mean, I wasn't the only onedoing this.
Way before me was Lynn MacDonaldand Martin Middlebrook and a few
others, and at the same time asI was interviewing veterans,
Richard Van Emden was out theredoing it on a similar kind of
big scale, leading to all thosefantastic books that he's
written.
And it was good and importantthat we recorded those memories
(28:20):
at that time from Middlebrookthrough to Richard, and like
we've said, many otherhistorians doing this kind of
oral history work.
Alf Peacock up in York, who usedto be the chairman of the York
WFA, the Western FrontAssociation, and the editor of
the Gunfire magazine, which isavailable now on the Western
Front Association website.
He was doing a similar kind ofthing.
(28:41):
All of this is really important,but I think probably
unknowingly, unwittingly, even,we were acting as kind of
counsellors to some of these mento give them that opportunity to
verbalise their experiences.
And I'm sure and I know not allof it came out.
So when I look back on it, Irealised what an extraordinary
(29:02):
time it was, and what it taughtme was the ways in which men
could be affected by being inconflict, and then I saw the
whole thing all over again on aneven bigger scale when it came
to that period in which I wastravelling with and interviewing
and talking to Second World Warveterans as I took them back to
(29:22):
Normandy, to Monte Cassino, toArnhem, wherever it was, and I
saw commonalities in the waythat they phrased their
experiences, how I couldapproach them to get them to
talk about their war.
I saw a commonality with the menthat had served in the Great
(29:43):
War.
And the documentary that you'rereferring to, I think ends up
with this phrase, they don'tmake men like that these days,
where a veteran is asked if theFirst World War could happen
again, he says they don't makemen like that these days.
And I'm sure on one level thatis true, but the experience of
the Second World War for manyservice men and women was just
(30:06):
as terrible, just as horrific,just as difficult to square off
when that war was over, and theystruggled with it in the same
kind of way.
And does that make them lesserthan the veterans in the Great
War?
I mean I don't think this is akind of competition.
And men and women who haveserved in recent conflict,
(30:26):
because we've had decades ofthat in the early part of this
century, have come back withlife-changing injuries, but also
the problem of dealing with theexperience of conflict in the
same way that veterans had donea century before them.
So that wheel I think kind ofstill keeps turning.
(30:46):
I think it's a really importantpart of our understanding of the
First World War, of allconflict.
It's not to turn these men andwomen into victims, but it is to
understand how that experienceof war, that experience of
conflict, the experience ofcomradeship and the loss of
comrades, and all of the otherjigsaw pieces that the Great War
(31:08):
is made of, how that changed menand women forever, and not just
service personnel, because theloss of people on the
battlefields affected familiesback home, wives, sisters,
daughters, sons, the list goeson.
And I think it's reallyimportant to remember that.
So it's probably a kind ofsubjective answer, Angus, but I
(31:32):
hope that's highlighted I thinksome of what you were trying to
get at in your question, and I'msure yet again this is a subject
we will return to.
So our fourth and final questioncomes from Neil Coleman.
Neil says, Regarding the Battleof Manchester Hill in 1918, when
I was a student at ManchesterUniversity, I used to talk to a
(31:55):
First World War veteran way backin 1973.
He told me that in one battle,which I think was the
Manchester's at Manchester Hill,he told me that the remaining
soldiers were being overrun bymany Germans.
The few remaining men weregetting the wind up, and the
commanding officer shouted outthat he would shoot the first
man to run back to avoid a diresituation.
(32:15):
The veteran told me that one ofhis fellow soldiers shot the
officer, and they ran back tosave themselves from the
Germans.
The more I've read about this, Iwonder if this could have been
Lieutenant Colonel Elstorb, whofamously told his superiors that
they would fight to the lastround and the last man.
I wondered if you'd come acrossthis occurrence in your
research.
(32:36):
Well, it's a really interestingquestion, Neil, and one actually
that has come up a few timesrecently, and hopefully this
will answer a collection ofquestions based around this
incident.
So, first of all, what isManchester Hill?
It's a position overlooking thecity of Saint-Cantas and
Quentin, which was captured inthe spring of nineteen seventeen
(32:56):
by the 2nd Battalion of theManchester Regiment, serving in
which was the war poet WilfredOwen.
That was a regular battalion.
They took that ground and thehill was named Manchester Hill
after them.
It was then turned into a strongpoint, and when that line was
stabilised and reinforced, itwas one of a number of redoubts,
defensive positions, that wasbuilt as part of the in-depth
(33:19):
British defences in that area.
There was a whole load ofredoubts in that area, of which
the Manchester Hill redoubt wasone.
And on the 21st of March 1918,the Germans attacked in this
area in that final great Germanpush of the Great War, when at
4.40 a.m.
that morning, a massivebombardment, huge amount of
(33:40):
artillery, massive use of gas,saturated the positions here
around Saint Contown, a widerfront, not just Manchester Hill
itself, and the lines around thehill, around the redoubt, began
to collapse as the Germanspushed through.
They had the advantage ofartillery firepower, but also
the advantage of fog thatscreened a lot of their movement
(34:03):
that day.
And Lieutenant Colonel WilfrithElstob was in charge of
approximately 170 men of the16th Battalion of the Manchester
Regiment, which was theManchester Powers Battalion, and
they were the ones who defendedit that day.
Elstob was a vicar's son fromSussex.
He was educated at ChristHospital School near Horsham,
and then later at ManchesterUniversity, and after his
(34:26):
education he became a teacher inManchester.
He joined up at the verybeginning of the war, and he was
one of those that went fromprivate to lieutenant colonel,
so he served in the ranks, wasthen commissioned, and latterly
he became the commanding officerof this Manchester Powers
battalion.
Now it was clear as the fightingprogressed around them that they
(34:47):
were being cut off.
They had a fixed link back tobrigade and divisional
headquarters, an armoured cablewith telephone lines in it that
they hoped would not be brokenby the bombardment.
That kept the lines open, andElstorb gave out information to
the situation they were in.
Within the redoubt, they hadquite a lot of ammunition,
bombs, machine gun ammunition.
(35:07):
They had backup personnel fromthe trench mortars and also from
the machine gun corps assistingthem in the defence of the
position.
But the amount of ammunitionthat they had wasn't going to
last forever, and gradually thesituation got more and more
critical.
So messages came through thewire from Elstorb to
headquarters.
The enemy are on top of us, weare surrounded.
(35:30):
I hold my battalion, my leftflank is gone, my right flank is
going, situation critical, andone of his last messages was I
will not surrender.
And in the final battle, as theGermans began to swarm over the
position as the firepower of theredoubt gradually diminished,
the defensive perimeter wasshrinking, ammunition was almost
(35:53):
non existent, the machine gunspretty much all gone.
Elstorb is seen to move amongstthe men, encouraging them,
directing the fire of the menwho still had weapons that could
operate, and in the final Germanpush they overrun Elstorb's
positions and trenches, and heis killed.
Accounts vary between being shotwhile rallying his men or making
(36:15):
a last bayonet charge at theenemy as the ammunition had
completely run out.
And the redoubt the ManchesterHill falls around about midday
on the twenty first of marchnineteen eighteen.
Now Elstob is dead, he's killedin action, and he's subsequently
awarded a posthumous VictoriaCross, and for that there has to
be a number of witnesses, andwitness statements were given to
(36:38):
put forward the recommendationfor the VC, which was accepted,
and that was subsequentlygazetted in the London Gazette.
So that means quite a largenumber of men who were in the
action were spoken to tocorroborate the story of
Elstob's bravery leading to hisaward of the Victoria Cross.
So was he then killed by his ownmen based on your discussion
(37:00):
with this veteran?
I've heard this quite a fewtimes in different accounts.
Well, I mean that is a questionthat probably I and no one else
can answer.
We don't have any definitivewritten accounts that state
this.
It is a matter of kind ofwhispers and discussion, and
some later writers havespeculated about the exact
(37:22):
circumstances of Ilstaub'sdeath, but there is no
contemporary evidence to supportthe claim that he was killed by
his own men.
All reliable sources indicatethat he died fighting as the
position was overrun.
Now I think what your questionhints at is the kind of wider
idea if an officer was going toget a load of men killed under
(37:43):
all kinds of differentcircumstances, would the men
react?
I mean in the Vietnam War thiswas called fragging, where
they'd throw a grenade at auseless officer and kill him
before the actions of thatofficer got them killed.
Did that happen in the GreatWar?
It must have done.
Was this the situation atManchester Hill?
I don't think so, becauseElstorb was highly regarded by
(38:07):
his men, he had commanded themfor so long, and he never asked
men to do something that hewasn't prepared to do himself.
And putting himself in thevanguard of the fight there
meant that this is going to bealmost certain death for him,
and he knew that.
So it didn't require his own mento kill him, the Germans were
(38:28):
having a pretty good go at itthemselves.
We will never get to the bottomof this, I don't think.
But it's right to ask thesequestions and it's right to
question the accepted narrativeof something, but always, always
it has to be based on goodevidence.
Because there were, as I'vementioned in the podcast before,
when talking to veterans, therewere those kind of stamina
(38:51):
stories where little teenyfragments of fact got blown out
of all proportion by men with alot of drink in their belly, and
suddenly all kinds of storieswould come out of that.
And possibly that is the genesisof this tale of Elstob being
killed by his own men.
But for me, Elstorb will alwaysbe the hero, fighting against
(39:16):
impossible odds, but onwards,ever onwards for him to the very
last.
His body was never recovered,and you'll find him commemorated
by name on the panels of thePoziers Memorial to the Missing.
So that ends our questions forthis week.
There have been some reallysuperb questions this week, and
(39:36):
I love the kind of questionswhere we do challenge accepted
fact that's really, reallyimportant.
And keep the questions coming,send them in via the usual
routes of email and the Discordserver, and we'll be back soon
for some more questions andanswers here on the old front
line.
(40:00):
You've been listening to anepisode of the Old Frontline
with me, military historian PaulReed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcor.
You can follow the podcast atOldFrontline Pod.
Check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
find lots of podcast extras andphotographs and links to books
that are mentioned in thepodcast.
(40:21):
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Thanks for listening, and we'llsee you again soon.
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