Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

49 Battalion

Rank - Private

5 May 1916 disembarked Marseilles

7 May 1916 embarked Alexandria

14 June 1916 Disembarked Marseilles

28 July Taken on strength field

3 September 1916 Wounded in the back

6 September 1916 Admitted to hospital in Camiers contused back

Medals: British War Medal, Victory Medal

Son of William and Margaret Anderson, of Dinmore, Queensland. Native of Darling Downs, Queensland

According to information from the Woodford Historical Society, William is commemorated via a collection plate at Saint Matthias Anglican Church, Woodford.

Woodford Roll of Honour
 
# 5027  ANDERSON William Herbert                                     9th / 49th Battalion
 
William Anderson was born at Goombungee on 9th November 1890 to parents William and Margaret Anderson. William attended school at Goombungee and then Toowoomba. He may have worked in farming when he left school before becoming a worker in butter factories. His name appears on the Woodford Honour Roll indicating that he may have had some connection with the Woodford/ D’Aguilar area. By the time that William enlisted, he was living with his parents at Dinmore near Ipswich where he was employed in a butter factory there.
 
William enlisted in Brisbane on 20th September 1915. He advised the recruiters that he was 24 years old; a butter maker of Dinmore. William named his father, who may have been the head teacher at Dinmore State School, as his next of kin. At Enoggera, William was assigned as a reinforcement for the 9th Battalion which was at that time fighting the Turks on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
 
William, as part of the 16th reinforcements for the 9th Battalion embarked for overseas on 31st March 1916 and landed at Port Said in Egypt on 5th May. Later that month, William was transferred from the 9th Battalion to the 49th Battalion. On 7th June, William was part of a group of reinforcements who boarded a ship at Alexandria headed for the French port of Marseilles, and from there proceeded to an infantry depot at Etaples. William was taken on strength by the 49th Battalion on 28th July where he was placed in “C” company.
 
The 49th Battalion was part of the 13th brigade of the 4th Division AIF. The division had spent most of July in the Vignacourt area to the north of Amiens while the British Forces engaged in the opening of the Battle of the Somme. In the beginning of August, with the Somme campaign not achieving noticeable gains, the 4thDivision was moved up to the support lines at Tara Hill and then began to be sent up to the front at Pozieres. The 49th spent a number of weeks in the support trenches before being relieved for a short rest. By the first week of September, the fighting at Pozieres had moved a short distance along the ridge above the ruins of Pozieres village to a collection of ruined farm buildings; Mouquet Farm.
 
Mouquet Farm was a difficult proposition for advancing infantry which had to move up through an ever-narrowing shallow gully, enfiladed by machine gun fire. The ground had been so churned up by constant artillery fire that trenches dug soon collapsed. On 3rd September, the 49th began an assault on Mouquet Farm which resulted in 406 men killed, wounded or missing; almost half of the battalion strength. One of those wounded was William Anderson, who received a badly contused back from shell fire.
 
William was evacuated from the battlefield and made his way via casualty clearing stations to a hospital at Camiers on the French coast. On 8th September, William was loaded on to the Hospital Ship “Antwerpen” and taken to the War Hospital at Clacton-on-Sea where he would receive treatment for several months. He was discharged on 14th January 1917 to the AIF Depot at Perham Downs where he may have received training in the use and deployment of the Lewis light machine gun which was being issued to infantry battalions in increasing numbers. William finally rejoined his unit on 30th March 1917 where the battalion was holding the line at Noreuil. When relieved, the 49th battalion began a program of intensive training to prepare them for their next action. During this time, William was promoted to lance corporal and then corporal.
 
With the abandonment of the Somme campaign, the British Commander’s attention moved north into Belgium and the Ypres salient. Lessons learnt on the Somme in 1916 were incorporated into the planning for what became known as the Third Battle of Ypres (or more commonly to those involved; Passchendaele). A series of small contained battles were planned in a “bite and hold” strategy to push out from Ypres along the Menin Road to the Broodseinde Ridge and Passchendaele; but before this phase could begin, the enemy would have to be dislodged from the Messines Ridge.
 
The Germans had been in possession of Messines Ridge almost from the beginning of the war and were well entrenched. The high ground ran roughly southward from Hill 60 outside Ypres through the village of Messines to Warneton, and gave the occupiers an excellent view of the ground below. Since early in 1916, British and later Australian tunnellers had been undermining the ridge, placing up to 22 caches of high explosives under the German strong points.
 
On the 1st June, the 49th Battalion arrived at the assembly areas in preparation for the opening of the Messines battle. The troops were walked through a large scale model of the battlefield to familiarize themselves with the task. At 3:10am on 7th June 1917, nineteen of the mines under Messines Ridge were fired simultaneously. The noise was heard as far away as the English coast and the shockwave rattled windows in London. Once the smoke and dust cleared, the infantry rose up from the jumping off trenches and advanced under a protective umbrella of a creeping artillery barrage.
 
According to reports from witnesses furnished to the Red Cross, during the advance towards the second line of trenches and concrete pill boxes, William Anderson was hit by a large shell splinter, seriously wounding him. Private Byrnes who was in William’s gun team placed a bandage on the wound and left William sheltering in a shell hole. William told Byrnes that he thought the wound was fatal. The advance continued leaving William behind. Later in the day the Germans counterattacked and drove the Australians back towards the start line and leaving a number of their dead and wounded behind.
 
Once the position at Messines was secured, the 49th Battalion could conduct a roll call. Among the missing was Corporal William Anderson. He remained listed as missing until confirmation was received from POW sources that Anderson was not in enemy hands whereupon William was listed as Killed in Action, no known grave.
 
William’s father received a parcel containing his son’s few personal effects which included a wallet, identity disc, knife and several diaries. William Anderson’s remains were never located. He is one of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians, who died in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave. Their names are inscribed on the Portland Stone Tablets under the arches of the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing at Ypres.
Since the 1930s, with only the brief interval of the German occupation during the Second World War, the City of Ypres has conducted a ceremony at the Memorial at dusk each evening to commemorate those who died in the Ypres campaign. The ceremony concludes with the laying of wreaths, the recitation of the ode, and the playing of the Last Post by the city’s bugle corps and draws large crowds.
The commemoration of the Menin Gate Memorial on 24 July 1927 so moved the Australian war artist Will Longstaff that he painted 'The Menin Gate at Midnight', which portrays a ghostly army of the dead marching past the Menin Gate. The painting, which now hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, is one of the memorial’s most prized artifacts.
A collection plate was presented to St Matthias Anglican Church, Woodford inscribed “ In loving memory of Corporal William Herbert Anderson 49th Battalion Killed in Action 7th June 1917 in France, donated by his loving friends L and A Mackenzie”.