Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Walter Wilson took part raid on 1 February 1917, near Gueudecourt, when the 15th Battalion attacked a section of the German front line known as Stormy Trench. The party consisted of 220 men and six officers, or about one and half companies. The attack started at about 7.00 p.m. on a frontage of about 550 yards. Although the enemy trenches were only 100 yards from the Australian lines, inadequate artillery support caused the attack to fail. A German counter attack at 11 p.m. was beaten off. In the face of relentless German shelling and bombing of the captured trenches, and a stronger German counter attack at 4.30 a.m. the Battalion was forced to retire at 5.a.m. Although 52 German soldiers were captured, the 15th Battalion’s casualties were 33 men killed, and 11 died of wounds over the next few weeks, most of those as POWs, and over 20 others were captured by the Germans.

Walter was captured at Gueudecourt, France on 2 February 1917 by the Germans and transported to a Military Hospital at Cambrai, France, with a bayonet or shrapnel wound in his right leg. He was held POW in Reserve Lazarett, Julich, Germany and was repatriated to England on 15 December 1918.

A letter home to his mother was printed in the Brisbane Queenslander November 1918.

A wonderful letter has come to a soldier's mother from some unpronounceable place in Germany, an internment camp near Limberg, where the writer, Private Walter Wilson, has been a prisoner of war for two years. His first words are the usual one to the mothers, “Now, don't worry, mother,” and the next pays a tribute to the prisoners of war work of the Red Cross in these words: “I am getting on all right now; the Aussie Red Cross is sending me six food parcels a month from their headquarters in London, also 10 loaves of bread per month from Switzerland. Other lads here are all getting the same. Will you try and let other mothers know this: it has saved us all and will comfort them.”