Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

# 3471  SKUSE James William                                    15th Battalion
 
Jim Skuse was born in Bristol, England to parents Henry and Margaret Skuse. It is unclear when the family emigrated to Australia but by the outbreak of the war, the Skuse family were living and farming in the Goombungee area.
 
Jim presented himself to the recruiting office in Adelaide Street in Brisbane on 16th January 1915. He stated he was 36 years old and worked as a labourer. Jim reported to Enoggera where he was placed in a depot battalion before being assigned to the 11th reinforcements of the 15th Battalion. Jim remained in Brisbane for the next nine months before departing on the “Seang Bee” on 21st October for overseas. He allocated 4/- of his 5/- a day pay to his mother in Goombungee. The reinforcements landed at Suez and went into camp at Tel el Kabir on the Suez Canal. While in the reinforcement camp, Jim may have caught up with his brother, George, who had enlisted ten days after Jim and was a member of the 4th Light Horse.
 
The arrival of the reinforcements in Egypt coincided with the evacuation of the Anzac Force from the Gallipoli campaign in December 1915. The 15th Battalion was one of the battalions of the 4th Brigade which had gone into camp on the Suez Canal upon their return from Gallipoli. The AIF then began to undergo an expansion, doubling the number of divisions from two to four. To achieve this, some of the original 1stDivision battalions were split to form the core of two battalions. In the case of the 15th Battalion, this resulted in half the strength being allocated to a new battalion, the 47th. Reinforcements from the camps then made up the numbers that would bring the battalion up to the nominal strength of about 1,000 men. Jim Skuse was taken on by the 15th Battalion at Tel el Kabir on 6th March 1916 and then began training with his new battalion.
 
In the first week in June 1916, the newly formed 15th Battalion, along with the three other battalions of the 4th Brigade embarked at Alexandria for a six day voyage to Marseilles on the French Mediterranean coast. From there, the troops travelled by train north to a sector of the western front close to the border with Belgium where they could become accustomed to the routines of fighting. While in billets around Bailleul, the brigade commander, Colonel John Monash left for England to take up a position of a divisional commander. This meant there was a deal of movement among senior brigade and battalion staff which disrupted training.
 
On 1st July, the British Field Commander in France, Douglas Haig, launched the Battle of the Somme. The British army, made up of new regiments from volunteers from the mills and factories marched into the teeth of a German artillery and machine gun barrage that produced 60,000 British casualties on the first day; 20,000 of whom were killed. None of the objectives planned for the battle were realized but Haig was determined to push on. By the second week of July, Haig had committed most of his reserves and the front had barely moved forward. Three AIF Divisions, the 1st, 2nd and 4th were ordered south from the Bailleul area to be available to press up against the German defenders.
 
The village of Pozieres half way between Albert and Bapaume, sat on the highest point of that part of the Somme battlefield and the Australians were given the task of capturing it. Pozieres village was taken by the 1st Division on 26th July. The second division’s objective was to take a blockhouse which had been built on the site of a ruined windmill above the village of Pozieres. The windmill was behind two lines of trenches, and provided a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. The attack on the windmill began just after midnight on the 29th July. The attack was a failure, with one battalion suffering 343 casualties (from a strength of a little less than 1000 men). The men of the 2nd Division were sent back into the line five days later and managed to take the blockhouse and associated trench system, but at great cost. To consolidate the gains and to meet the expected German counterattack, the 15th Battalion in conjunction with other 4thDivision units was put into the defensive line on the 7th August.
 
Survivors of Pozieres describe the artillery barrage rained down on the them sheltering in the trenches as the heaviest they encountered during the entire war. Many men simply disappeared, churned up among high explosive shells and clods of earth and blown to pieces. When the 15th Battalion was relieved five days later, a roll call revealed that the battalion had suffered 45 men killed, 325 wounded and 45 missing. One of the missing was Jim Skuse.
 
In total, the AIF suffered 23,000 casualties at Pozieres and the authorities who had the task of informing friends and family of the dead and wounded were simply overwhelmed. It was not until May 1917 that the 15th Battalion held a court of inquiry into the fate of those 45 missing. All were declared Killed in Action on 7th August 1918. What stunned the Australian community was the fact that the missing had disappeared without a trace.
 
In 1938, some 20 years after the end of the First World War, the Australian Government constructed the Australian National Memorial at Villers Bretonneux. The memorial was dedicated by the newly crowned King George VI. The memorial records the names of over 10,000 Australian soldiers who lost their lives in France and have no known grave; James Skuse among them. On the site of the Pozieres windmill today is a commemorative stone which reads:
“The ruin of the Pozieres windmill which lies here was the centre of the struggle on this part of the Somme Battlefield in July and August 1916. It was captured by Australian troops who fell more thickly on this ridge than on any other battlefields of the war.”