Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

#634 BROCK Robert Thomas 12th Machine Gun Battalion / 4th Machine Gun Company
 
Robert Brock was born in Marrickville, Sydney to parents William and Christina Brock. Robert attended a Public School in NSW. At some point the family moved to Toogoolawah. It is likely that Robert’s father was the manager of Mangerton Farm, one of 11 farms owned by the Nestle and Anglo Swiss Company that supplied milk to the company’s condensed milk factory on the bank of Crestbrook Creek, Toogoolawah. Rather than work at the milk factory, Robert trained as a hairdresser in Toogoolawah.
 
Robert presented himself for enlistment on 11th October 1916. A plebiscite to seek approval for the Australian Government to introduce military conscription was to be held two weeks later and there was much debate within the community on the matter. It is possible that Robert may have felt pressured to enlist. His brother, Edgar, had enlisted in the Light Horse as soon as war was declared in 1914. Robert told the recruiting officer that he was 25 years old, a hairdresser from Toogoolawah. He named his mother, Christina of Mangerton Farm as his next of kin. Robert was placed in a depot battalion before being added to the reinforcements for the 12th Machine Gun Company.
 
Training for machine gun recruits was conducted at Fort Lytton at the mouth of the Brisbane River. After a period of home leave, the reinforcements travelled by train to Seymour in Victoria for further training on the operation of the Vickers Machine Gun. The Vickers MG had been developed just prior to the first world war and it proved to be particularly effective and robust. It fired on average 600 rounds of .303 ammunition every minute over a range of up to 4,500 yards, and could keep up that rate of fire for several hours as long as the barrel was changed out every hour. The gun was water cooled. Its main disadvantage was weight. The gun and tripod weighed 40 kgs and every 250 round canvas ammunition belt weighed 10 kgs; the water reservoir 10kgs.
 
The Vickers only required three men to operate it; a firer, loader and loader assistant but at least another three men were required to break the gun down and transport it, often on a hand cart. If the gun had to transported over a greater distance, a horse drawn general service wagon was often employed. The transport, set up and operation had to be practiced over and over with each person in the team having a defined role. Training at Seymour concluded and the 11th reinforcements of the 12th Machine Gun Company took a train to Port Melbourne where they embarked on the “Ascanius” on 11th May 1917. The embarkation roll shows that Robert had allocated 3/- of his daily pay of 5/- to a bank account in his name at Toogoolawah.
 
The voyage to England took over two months as the ship sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and on to Sierra Leone before taking a wide route out into the Atlantic to avoid German submarines. The gunners landed at Devonport near Plymouth on 20th July and proceeded to the Australian training camps at Codford on Salisbury Plain. On 20th October, Robert was transferred to the Machine Gun Training Depot at Grantham. Towards the end of 1917, the British campaign in Belgium ground to a halt in the clinging mud. Troops who had been at the front were exhausted and in need of a lengthy period of rest and relaxation. At that time, there was little need for machine gunners and Robert and his comrades remained at the depot at Grantham.
 
The British Commander on the Western Front, General Haig, was fully expecting a German assault in the spring of 1918 but he guessed incorrectly that the main thrust would be aimed at the Ypres salient in Belgium. When Operation Michael began on 21st March 1918, the main assault was aimed along the line of the Somme River in France, the scene of so much fighting and hard-won victories in 1916.
 
The British 5th Army, which was holding the line astride the Somme was unable to hold the German onslaught which in some places amounted to a five time numerical advantage. As the British retreated, often in disarray, the German stormtroopers retook all of the gains made by the British in the Somme campaign of 1916/17 and were within a few days of capturing the vital communication city of Amiens. If Amiens fell, Haig might well have lost the war; the situation was deadly serious.
 
Haig ordered his most successful and battle-hardened troops, four of the five divisions of the AIF in Belgium to race south 150 kilometres to establish a defensive line in front of Amiens. For most of 1916 and 1917, British forces were on the offensive whilst the German occupiers were content to hold the ground they had taken in 1914. The spring of 1918 changed the dynamic on the western front. It was the British who were forced into a defensive posture, a situation for which they were ill-prepared.
 
A hard-fought battle at Dernacourt by brigades of the 4th Division AIF turned the German assault away but at other parts of the line, the Germans continued to press on. The situation had deteriorated rapidly and there was no further reason to keep Australian troops in England while the situation in France was so perilous. Robert and the other MG reinforcements at Grantham were ordered to proceed to France, arriving at the machine gun depot at Camiers on the French coast on 9th April. While Robert was still at Camiers, Douglas Haig issued a general order of the day on 11th April which has come to be known as the “backs to the wall speech.” He called for every position to be held to the last man and “With our backs to the wall…… we must fight to the end.”
 
Robert was marched out of Camiers and arrived in the lines of the 4th Machine Gun Battalion in the Villers Bretonneux defensive lines on 17th April 1918. Villers Bretonneux was the key to defending Amiens. The village lay 22 kilometres to the east of Amiens on a high ridge from which heavy artillery could bombard the city. The Germans had occupied the village on 5th April but assaults by battalions of the 5th Division AIF retook the village. British troops garrisoning the village were unable to hold the position and the Germans retook it before an audacious night time pincer movement by two Australian brigades on 25th April secured Villers Bretonneux. The German advance would go no further but the village continued to be bombarded by high explosive and gas shells. The Vickers guns of the 4th MG Battalion were engaged in pouring plunging fire into the German defences at Villers Bretonneux; a tactic which had been revived from medieval times when archers would saturate a battlefield with falling arrows.
 
During a retaliatory artillery bombardment on 25th April, Robert was killed when a high explosive shell landed in the gun pit he was sheltering in. His death was instantaneous. He had been at the front for eight days. Robert was buried in a temporary grave by two privates with a wooden cross erected with his details recorded. When Robert’s name appeared in the casualty lists in the newspapers, a number of people were moved to write to the authorities. Miss Annie Kimber from the railway refreshment rooms at Goulburn wrote to say that she knew Robert from his time at Seymour. Miss Kimber said that she had identified Robert in a photograph taken in a German POW camp. Miss Moore from Esk wrote requesting a photograph of Robert’s grave and Violet Bryant asked for next of kin details.
 
Robert’s personal effects; a gold wristwatch, a pair of spectacles, a signed blank cheque and various items of correspondence, were forwarded to his mother who was working at Eagle Farm. A local lodge at Toogoolawah paid out a funeral benefit. At the end of the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission began to consolidate isolated graves across the French battlefields. Roberts remains were exhumed and reinterred in the Adelaide Cemetery, Villers Bretonneux. His family chose “THY WILL BE DONE” as the inscription on Robert’s headstone.