Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

# 2629 CARR – BOYD, George William                      47th Battalion
 
George Carr-Boyd was born in Brisbane, the only son of Reginald and Isobel Carr-Boyd. George’s father was a stock inspector who moved his family to Esk where George attended Esk State School. Upon leaving school, George worked in the cattle industry, probably in employment arranged by his father, as a jackeroo. His mother when completing the Roll of Honour Circular stated that George was a station overseer. George attended the Brisbane recruiting depot on 27th April 1916. He had just turned 19 and came with a signed note from his mother, who was living in the Brisbane suburb of Auchenflower, giving permission for her son to enlist. A separate note from George’s father in Esk was delivered the following day. George made his way to Enoggera Camp where he was placed in a depot battalion. He attended a school for corporals and was given the rank of acting corporal in the 6th reinforcements of the 47th Battalion.
 
The reinforcements embarked on the “Marathon” in Brisbane on 27th October 1916 with George listed as acting corporal. The “Marathon” sailed via Fremantle, South Africa and Sierra Leone to avoid enemy submarines in the Mediterranean Sea and French Atlantic waters. They landed at Plymouth in Devon on 9thJanuary 1917 and made their way to the 12th Brigade Training Battalion at Codford. George reverted to the rank of private. While at Codford, George was admonished for being dirty and untidy.
 
The 47th Battalion, which George would eventually join, had suffered severe casualties at Bullecourt in April 1917 and was in the rear area in northern France in May recovering when George left England on 7th May 1917 to be taken on strength by the 47th. Perhaps one of the first to welcome George into the battalion was his cousin, John Carr-Boyd, who had been with the 47th since 1916.
 
The British Field Commander, General Haig, planned to conduct a campaign in the Ypres salient in Belgian Flanders aimed at spearing through the German defenders to the Belgian ports on the English Channel. To do so he planned for a series of battles in the summer and autumn of 1917, each of which created a stepping stone to the next objective. The first of these stepping stones was a ridge line which was occupied by the enemy and overlooked the ground that was to be used for the build-up of British forces. The ridge ran almost due south from a position just outside Ypres, towards the village of Messines.
 
The preparations for the Battle of Messines were carefully planned. Large scale models of the terrain to be covered were constructed and all troops who were to take part, which included George and the rest of the 47th Battalion, were walked through the model to familiarize themselves with their objectives. The general in charge at Messines had three and a half million artillery shells at his disposal which would be fired in the days leading up to the attack. In addition, British and Australian tunnellers had been undermining the Messines Ridge for almost 18 months and had placed explosive charges in tunnels directly underneath the German defences.
 
None of the training that George had received thus far would prepare him for what confronted him and his comrades at Messines. At 3:10 am on the 7th June 1917, nineteen of the underground mines beneath the Messines Ridge were fired simultaneously. It was the largest manmade explosion in history (up until that time) and the noise could be heard in London. The firing of the mines was the signal for the attack on the ridge to commence.
 
Two Australian Divisions were included in the order of battle for the attack at Messines. The 3rd Division AIF had responsibility for the northern sector of the front while the 4th Division, including the 47th Battalion, as part of the 12th Brigade, was tasked with attacking the second line of German trenches, the Oosstaverne Line, behind the village of Messines itself. The 4th Division encountered many difficulties during their advance. The explosions had caused huge craters (many of which still exist) that continued to smoke and fill the air with a foul stench. Due to the broken nature of the ground, platoon and company officers had difficulty staying on the compass bearings they had been given. The British 33rd Brigade which was supposed to be supporting the 12th Brigade on its right flank failed to keep up with the advance and the men of the 47th had to spread out too thinly in an effort to cover the gap in the line. There was confusion as to where the men actually were as they had failed to respond to a signal from a low flying aircraft to fire flares. The British artillery, unaware that there were Australians on the Oosstaverne Line, bombarded the trenches with high explosive. Communication between the front line and headquarters a few hundred metres in the rear broke down and one signaller from the 47th, Caleb Shang, resorted to standing behind a tree stump and using semaphore flags, in between sniping enemy officers and carrying messages. After a number of counterattacks along the line, by the evening of the 7th June, the positions occupied by the Australians, New Zealanders and British were consolidated. Given the least amount of time for training (Monash’s 3rd Division had been training for Messines since July 1916!), and with the disastrous experience at Bullecourt just two months before, the 47th Battalion was hopelessly underprepared for what Messines would expect of them. The 47th was relieved on the 12th June. The Commanding Officer, Lt Col Alex Imlay spent some time successfully defending what by some was seen as a less than satisfactory performance by the battalion. Signaller Caleb Shang was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal (second only to the VC for gallantry under fire). About 680 men of the 47th went into the Battle of Messines and about 270 came out. George Carr-Boyd and John Carr-Boyd were indeed fortunate to have come through unscathed. As part of the restoration of the 47th to a fighting unit, George was appointed Lance Corporal on 2nd August (12 months after attending corporal’s school at Enoggera) and then three weeks later was promoted to corporal.
 
Messines was just the opening of the 3rd Battle of Ypres. Once the enemy were removed from the high ground around Messines, a number of assaults were planned for September and October 1917 which would act as stepping stones to the capture of the village of Passchendaele. The ground over which these battles would be fought was low lying boggy ground that had been drained by a series of dykes and channels for centuries by the Flemish farmers. After almost three years of constant bombardment by both British and German artillery, the fragile drainage system was shattered and the ground would revert to swamp and bog whenever it rained. The battles of Menin Road and Polygon Wood were conducted in fairly fine weather during September. The Battle of Broodseinde Ridge on 4th October had secured the village of Zonnebeke and a large concrete blockhouse named Tyne Cot just as heavy rain began to fall. The rain did not stop.
 
Field Marshal Haig was anxious to push his troops on to Passchendaele and ordered an assault against the village by the 3rd Division AIF and the NZ Division, with the 12th Brigade (including the 47th) protecting the right flank of the attack. The Australians and New Zealanders began to move up to the starting tapes on the 10th October. Engineers had concentrated on laying corduroy planking roads for the artillery across the mud and so the infantry was reduced to slogging along duckboard tracks that were easy targets for enemy artillery. Many of the infantrymen slipped off the track in the dark and were buried up to their waists in mud and slime. Wearing a waterlogged greatcoat and loaded down with upwards of fifty pounds of weapon, pack, ammunition and rations, men could not extricate themselves unaided. In one instance, a man was caught in a shell hole up to his shoulders. A group of 12 of his comrades worked to free him but the man did not survive. The trek from Hellfire Corner up to the front line was a distance of four kilometres. It took one company eleven hours to cover the distance.
 
As in previous battles during the Ypres campaign, the infantry would advance under the cover of a creeping artillery barrage. At Passchendaele, the heavy guns often sank into the mud or shell holes while being dragged up to the gun lines. Once in position, the eighteen pounders sank into the ooze after only a few rounds due to the recoil. Attempts were made to create gun platforms by putting planks on top of bundles of shrubbery which were in turn placed on a bed of road metal, all to no avail as the guns still sank or made an ideal target for counterbattery fire due to being above the surface of the surrounding ground.
 
The attack against Passchendaele began at 5:25am on 12th October. It was still raining. The plan called for an advance of over two kilometres by several stages. It was standard practice to take one third of a battalion’s strength out of the order of battle so that if losses were severe, there would still be a core of men upon which a new battalion could be built. The 47th and 48th Battalions had established a combined HQ in a captured concrete pill box, one of many which littered the battlefield. Almost as soon as the ineffective British and Australian barrage began, the HQ pillbox was targeted by German heavy guns. Forty of the men attached to the HQs of the two battalions; scouts, signallers, runners, stretcher bearers and machine gunners were either killed or wounded. The war diary of the 47th recorded that communication both forward and to the rear was severely disrupted. The attacking infantry of the two battalions began the slow slog across the boggy ground with German artillery cutting them down in swathes. A major obstacle facing them was the Ravebeek Stream, a flooded channel up to thirty metres wide and waist deep which the attackers had to wade through. Once the Beek was cleared, it was an uphill slope to a fortified barn located on the maps as Assyria. The officers of the two battalions that were leading the attack were accurately sniped (even though it was standard practice for officers to dress as privates for that very reason). All of the officers from A and B Companies were killed or severely wounded and sergeants and corporals, such as George, had to take over responsibilities of leadership. There were few runners available to carry messages.
 
Since the battalion had lost most of its stretcher bearers, and few were available from divisional headquarters, wounded apart from walking wounded had to be left sheltering in shell holes. If they were finally collected by stretcher bearers, it required a team of eight men to plough through the mud while being shot at by snipers along the way. Many of the wounded perished out on the battlefield. The Australian War photographer, Frank Hurley, wrote of the futility of the whole enterprise and laid the blame squarely with the “red tabbed” officers well back from the front.
 
For the much-depleted Australian companies, reaching their objective was impossible due to sheer exhaustion. Faced with the possibility of being overrun by a counter attack, the 47th and 48th men withdrew late in the afternoon leaving the dead and many wounded behind. As the survivors struggled back to the start line, Lt Col Imlay (47th Battalion) and Lt Col Ray “The Bull” Leane (48th Battalion) were standing near their joint pillbox HQ when they were both wounded by a shell.
 
When the 47th was relieved and shifted back to the Canal Dugouts at Ypres, a roll call revealed that Corporal George Carr-Boyd and Private John Carr-Boyd had both been killed during the action of the 12th October. 47th Battalion casualties amounted to 100 killed and 300 wounded. The files of both men contain a handwritten note to the effect that they were buried approximately 1,000 yards South West of Passchendaele village but there is no indication as to the veracity of this claim.  George and John are commemorated on the same panel (but not together as George is listed with the corporals of the 47th) of the Menin Gate Memorial to the missing. George Carr-Boyd was 20 years old.
 
The Memorial was conceived as a monument to the 350,000 men of the British Empire who fought in the Ypres campaign. Inside the arch of the memorial, on tablets of Portland stone, are inscribed the names of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians, who served in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave. A further 35,000 names of the Missing are inscribed on the panels at Tyne Cot Cemetery near Passchendaele.
Since the 1930s, with only the brief interval during the German occupation in 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.
To add to Isobel Carr-Boyd’s grief of having lots her only son, her husband Reginald was killed in 1917 when he was gored by a steer. In 1918, Isobel signed for a package of George’s personal effects which included a pair of glasses, a tie pin and collar stud, and three souvenirs of Africa which he had presumably purchased in South Africa on the voyage to Plymouth. Once George’s and presumably her husband’s affairs were settled. Isobel moved to Melbourne where she was known as Isobel Carr.