Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

# 7087 LOWIEN William         25th Battalion
 
William Lowien was born at Meringandan near Toowoomba on 31st August 1883 to parents Gottfried and Louise Lowien. He attended school at Meringandan or nearby Highfields before leaving school to work on the family farm. When William reported to the AIF recruiting office in Maryborough on 18th September 1917, he was farming at Mannuem Creek near Kingaroy and had probably travelled to Maryborough by train from Kingaroy. He told the recruiting officer he was 34 years old and had previously been rejected for military service due to bad teeth. To ensure acceptance on a second occasion, William had all of his remaining teeth replaced with a full set of dentures.
 
Once accepted by the army, William travelled to Enoggera and was accepted into the 11th Depot Battalion at the Rifle Range Camp. In early October, William was allocated to the 21st Reinforcements of the 25thBattalion, a Queensland battalion that was part of the 7th Brigade, 2nd Division AIF. On 29th October, William was granted five day’s pre-embarkation leave which he used to travel to Meringandan to see his mother and brother, his father already being deceased.
 
On 16th November 1917, the 21st reinforcements boarded a troop train for Sydney where they embarked on the S.S. Canberra. The men disembarked at Suez on 21st December and then on 9th January 1918 re-embarked on another transport and sailed via the port of Taranto in Italy to England, arriving in Southampton on 30th January. The reinforcements went in to barracks at Fovant to await deployment to their battalion.
 
With the coming of spring in 1918 on the Western Front, the German commander Ludendorff took advantage of a temporary numerical superiority of troops to launch a surprise offensive against the British on the Somme; Operation Michael, on 21st March. So successful was this offensive that in a few days the Germans had retaken all of the ground they had surrendered earlier in the war during 1916 and 1917; and were even threatening the vital communication hub of Amiens.
 
In response, Haig ordered 4 of the 5 AIF divisions that were in billets in Belgium to rush to defend Amiens. The 25th Battalion, with the rest of the 2nd Division moved by bus, train and a forced march of 30 miles to take up defensive positions. The situation in April was quite serious and Haig issued his famous “backs to the wall” speech. The German advance was halted at Villers Bretonneux by two AIF Brigades and the Australians began a period of what General Monash called “peaceful penetration.”
 
When William crossed over from England to France from Folkstone on 29th April, he would join his battalion on 8th May 1918 as the 7th Brigade occupied a strategic position in the triangle formed by the confluence of the Ancre and Somme Rivers in the Amiens defence line.
 
In front of the positions occupied by the 7th Brigade, the Germans held a spur of high ground at Morlancourt which overlooked the AIF positions. A limited action on the 10th June was planned to take the spur and the 25th Battalion was tasked with a major role in the attack, which was timed to commence at dusk.
 
The 25th Battalion had during 1915 to 1917 been engaged in almost every major campaign of the war and as a consequence, many of the junior officers and senior NCOs were highly experienced. For William, Morlancourt would be his first, and only, action and it may have been that his lack of battle experience placed him in an exposed position, bringing about his death. During the attack, which only lasted an hour and a half, it was reported that in the darkness, some of the artillery was “dropping short,” resulting in at least 21 casualties. William, who had been with his battalion barely a month, may have been among these. Regardless, William Lowien was recorded as Killed in Action.
 
Louise Lowien received a small parcel of her son’s effects, which included a tobacco pouch, a broken mirror and a metal matchbox cover and in due course signed for William’s service medals. There is no burial report in William’s file and his remains were never located by the Grave Registration Teams who scoured the battlefields after the war searching for lost graves.
 
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 and records the names of over 10,000 Australian soldiers who lost their lives in France and have no known grave; William Lowien among them.