Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

 
# 7522 HALL Joe                     42nd Battalion
 
Joe Hall was born in the county of Derbyshire around 1876. His parents, Isacc and Margaret booked passage for the family on the “Nowshera” which departed Plymouth in July 1883. Joe is shown on the passenger list as the eldest of the four Hall children, aged 6. The voyage to Brisbane was not without incident and upon arrival in Brisbane the Queensland Emigration Service conducted an inquiry into a number of officers who were charged with “unduly gossiping with the single female passengers late at night.”
 
The Hall family, upon arrival in Brisbane, found their way to Warwick where they may have taken up farming. Joe and his younger brother Charles took up their own farming block in the Nanango district around 1900. Joe became a member of the Kingaroy Rifle Club.
 
Joe Hall travelled to Brisbane to enlist on 17th January 1917. He stated his occupation as farmer and gave his age as 41 years. Joe informed the recruiters he had been previously rejected by the army due to bad teeth but by the beginning of 1917, the appearance of the casualty lists from the Western Front in local newspapers and the failure of the conscription plebiscite in October of the previous year caused a serious shortage of volunteers and as a result, caused the army to relax many of its previous selection criteria. Joe was accepted into the AIF and reported to Enoggera Camp where he was taken on by the 11th Depot battalion. Joe was granted a period of pre-embarkation home leave in March 1917 prior to travelling to Sydney by train to embark on the “Hororata” on 14th June. As the troop ship sailed across the Indian Ocean and into the Atlantic, the great offensive of 1917 began in the Ypres salient in Belgian Flanders.
 
When the reinforcements arrived in Liverpool on 26th August, the Australians travelled by train to the 4thTraining Battalion at Codford. While in training, Joe was assigned as a reinforcement for the 42nd Battalion. On 4th December, Joe and a draft of 120 reinforcements sailed from Southampton to the Australian Infantry Depot at Rouelles on the French coast. On 17th December, Joe and the other reinforcements in the draft marched in to the 42nd Battalion lines in winter quarters near Steenvoorde.
 
The winter weather in Northern France and Belgium effectively put an end to offensive operations and the AIF divisions took the time to rest, repair and replace equipment, take on what would prove to be the last tranche of reinforcements from Australia and resume training for the coming operations in the spring of 1918.
 
The German forces, bolstered by almost 60 divisions of troops released from the Eastern Front due to the Bolsheviks seeking peace, launched a rapid advance on the western front codenamed operation “Michael” on 21st March 1918, targeting the British 5th Army that was holding the line along the Somme River valley. Within days of the launch of Operation Michael, the gains made by the British and Australians on the Somme in 1916 were retaken by the German Stormtroopers, the 5th Army retreated in disarray, and the city of Amiens was threatened. If the city fell, the British would be cut off from their French allies and the Germans could march on Paris and win the war.
 
In a desperate move to protect Amiens, General Douglas Haig rushed four of the five AIF divisions that were in Belgium south to take up defensive positions astride the Somme.
Among the first units to be mobilized were brigades of the 3rd Division; which included the 42nd Battalion. The battalion boarded trains, buses and trucks for the journey south on 22th March but only got about half way to their destination before orders were changed and they spent 24 hours awaiting new orders.
 
By the 27th March, the 42nd battalion and the other three battalions of the 11th Brigade had taken up defensive position on the north bank of the Ancre River near Heilly. On 30th March, a strong German attack was repulsed by the 11th Brigade. During this battle, Joe Hall was killed, aged 43. He was buried in a temporary cemetery near Heilly on the road between Amiens and Albert. The defence of Amiens was Joe’s first experience of battle. Joe’s brother Charles was named as the sole beneficiary of Joe’s will. Isacc Hall received his son’s medals, memorial plaque and scroll. When small gravesites were being consolidated by the Imperial War Graves Commission, Joe Hall’s remains were exhumed and reinterred in the Villers Bretonneux Military Cemetery across the Somme from where he died.