Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Son of Richard Piers and Isobel Agnes Piers Blundell of 'Lowesby', Balmain Street, Wooloowin, Qld; brother of Arthur Piers Blundell

Also served in the Senior Cadets and the Artillery, CMF

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal

 
# 3308 / 3052  BLUNDELL William Richard               2nd Division Field Artillery / 47th Battalion
 
William Blundell was born around 1896 in South Yarra, Victoria. He was the first born child of Richard Piers-Blundell. William’s father had been a professional soldier in England, serving with a number of cadet and territorial units. He had also stated he had served in the French Foreign Legion. When William was five, his mother died and his father remarried. Around the same time, Richard relocated his family to Sydney. William attended Sydney Grammar School. Around that time, the family relocated again to the Brisbane suburb of Clayfield where William dispensed with the Piers part of his surname. William secured employment as a banking clerk and may have worked at Esk on the Brisbane Valley Rail Line.
 
William attended the recruiting depot at Victoria Barracks in Brisbane on 24th September 1914. He had just turned 18 and provided written permission from his father and stepmother to enlist. He stated he was at that time serving with the Citizens Forces Artillery. William nominated his father as next of kin. At Enoggera, William was placed into the 3rd Field Artillery reinforcements. The reinforcements at first trained at Enoggera but subsequently moved to Broadmeadows outside Melbourne for further training. William embarked on the “Borda” in Melbourne on 22nd December 1914 and sailed with the second contingent of the AIF to Egypt.
 
Time was spent in training and work details around the camp at Mena. William was allocated to the 1stDivision Ammunition Column; a logistics unit which supplied shells to forward ammunition dumps as well as also acting as a pool of manpower that could be used to reinforce artillery batteries. It was planned that artillery would play an important role in the coming Gallipoli campaign in April 1915. However, when the general situation became apparent at the Australian beach head, it was realised that the 18 pounder quick firing field guns with their attendant limbers and teams of six horses were totally unsuited to the steep terrain. A few guns were off loaded but they had to be manhandled up from the beach to a suitable firing position. Even when in a firing position, the guns were unable to depress their barrels sufficiently to reach a target. The Ammunition Column troops never went ashore. The gunners onboard had to provide quantities of shells and primers from the transport deck into whaleboats that would ferry the meagre supply to the beach. Eventually the ship carrying William and the Ammunition column returned to port in Egypt after a week sailing up and down the coast.
 
After two months at Anzac, arrangements for the Ammunition Column had progressed to allow a small number of gunners to be landed permanently and William reported to the officer in charge on 14th July 1915. Their task was to land ammunition from lighters that ferried supplies between ships and the shore. This work was usually conducted at night as the lighters would have been within easy gun range of the Turkish batteries during daylight. In addition to the 18 pounders, various light mountain guns were also in use which had the advantage of being able to be broken down for transport by pack animals. On 6th September, William was posted to the 2nd Field Artillery Brigade as a gunner to replace losses due to illness, injury or enemy activity. The war diary for the brigade describes the various batteries firing a few shells of retaliatory fire against Turkish artillery. On 28th  September, the war diary records that five men were sent down to be evacuated on the Hospital Ship Glennart Castle, one of whom was William Blundell.
 
William was transported as a stretcher case to Cairo where he was diagnosed with a severe case of enteric fever (typhoid). William’s recovery was slow and after spending two and a half months in hospital and convalescent wards, the medical authorities decided to send William back to Australia “for change.” He boarded the “Wandilla” in Suez and landed in Melbourne on 4th January 1916. William’s father, Richard Piers-Blundell had applied for a commission in the AIF and he was accepted as a captain in the 31stBattalion. His battalion disembarked at Suez five days before William left but it is unlikely that the two met up.
 
From Melbourne, William made his way to Brisbane and his stepmother where he was given time to recover before going before a medical board in March 1916. William was returned to duty and was posted to a school for corporals at Victoria Barracks. Once the course was completed, William was re-enlisted into the 47th Battalion as a reinforcement. While still in camp at Enoggera, William’s father was invalided back in Brisbane having had his foot crushed in Egypt. The reinforcements went through a period of infantry training at Enoggera before departing for overseas. William was appointed to the rank of temporary corporal (for the duration of the sea voyage) and the reinforcements embarked on the “Marathon” in Brisbane on 27thOctober 1916 for a voyage that would sail via South Africa into the South Atlantic and on to Plymouth in South West England to avoid enemy submarines which operated in the Mediterranean and approaches to the English Channel.
 
The reinforcements were at sea for over two months before disembarking on 9th January 1917 and proceeding to the 12th Brigade Training Battalion at Codford in Wiltshire. The 47th Battalion, to which the reinforcements would ultimately be posted, had been raised in Egypt during the expansion of the AIF. The battalion was one of four battalions which made up the 12th Infantry Brigade in the 4th Division AIF. The 47thhad endured a tough introduction to fighting on the Western Front during August and September 1916 at Pozieres and Mouquet Farm during the Somme campaign. The entire 4th Division was given a period of rest, during which losses were made good, before being posted back to the Somme during the harsh winter. As spring approached, troops manning the front discovered that the enemy trenches were empty. During the winter, the Germans had constructed a defensive barrier (The Hindenburg Line) some distance to the east of their previous positions astride the Somme. As the German forces withdrew, the British forces cautiously followed, taking the towns of Bapaume and Noreuil along the way. When William was finally taken on strength by the 47th, the battalion had just occupied Bapaume. By the first week in April, elements of the 5thBritish Army under General Gough, including two Australian divisions, came up against the Hindenburg defences at Bullecourt.
 
Gough was under orders to attack the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt with his infantry. He planned to use the battalions of the 4th and 12th Infantry Brigades of the AIF as his spearhead. William and the rest of the 47hBattalion moved up to the assembly areas on the 8th April 1917. Gough’s plan called for days of artillery bombardment to cut the several bands of barbed wire, followed by an infantry assault supported by a creeping artillery barrage. As the time for the attack drew closer, a junior officer of the Tank Corps convinced the general that tanks would be able to smash through the wire more effectively than cannon fire. What the officer did not reveal was that the tanks were only training tanks with worn out machinery prone to breakdown.
 
Gough changed his plans, dispensing with the artillery altogether. He ordered the infantry to move up to the jumping off tapes in preparation for the attack on the 10th April. The men lay on the snow covered ground awaiting the arrival of the tanks, all of which failed to make the start line on time either because of breakdowns or getting lost. Having revealed his plan to German defenders, Gough postponed the attack for 24 hours. On the 11th April, the 47th Battalion accompanied by 7 other Australian battalions rose up from the snow covered ground and trudged towards the formidable defences before them following the same plan of the previous day. There was no artillery support and the tanks mainly failed for the second time. The few tanks that did proceed past the start line either became stuck in shell craters and tank traps or were put out of action with accurate artillery fire.
 
Many of the attacking infantry were hung up on the bands of wire which remained intact where they were cut down with enfilading machine gun fire. Remarkably, sufficient numbers of men from the 12th Brigade got through to take two lines of the German trenches which they managed to hold for seven and a half hours until ammunition was exhausted. Their retreat across the snowy ground made them easy targets for the defenders on the flanks.
 
The battle, which became known as 1st Bullecourt was a complete disaster. Writing soon after the battle, the Australian War Historian Charles Bean said the plan to take Bullecourt had as much chance of success as a plan to capture the moon. Bullecourt was William’s first introduction to warfare on the Western Front. The 12th Brigade had suffered significant casualties, among them the 47th’s Commanding Officer, and all the AIF units then on the Somme were withdrawn and relocated to the French/Belgian border and the Ypres salient.
 
The Supreme British Commander on the Western Front, General Haig, planned a campaign in the Ypres salient for the Summer and Autumn of 1917 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, 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 the ruined city of Ypres towards the village of Messines and on to Warneton on the French border.
 
The Battle of Messines was carefully planned. Large scale models of the terrain to be covered were constructed and all troops who were to take part, which included William and the 47th Battalion, were walked through the models 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.
 
At 3:10 am on the 7th June, 19 of the underground mines beneath the Messines Ridge were fired simultaneously. It was the largest man-made explosion in history thus far and the noise could be heard in London. The explosions were the signal for the infantry to move out from the starting tapes and head towards their assigned objectives. The 3rd and 4th Australian Divisions were included in the order of battle for the attack at Messines. The 4th Division was tasked with attacking the second line of German trenches, the Oosstaverne Line, behind the village of Messines itself. The division encountered difficulties due to the broken ground caused from the mine explosions. A British brigade which was supposed to be supporting the 47th Battalion on its right flank failed to keep up with the advance and the men had to spread out too thinly in an effort to cover the gap in the line. There was confusion as to where the Australians 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. At some point during the noise, smoke and confusion of the advance, William Blundell was killed.
 
William’s body was removed from the battlefield and buried in a small cemetery near the village of Wytschaete and close to the Spanbroekmolen mine crater (one of the 19 mines that were fired on 7th June 1917). A small parcel of William’s personal belongings was forwarded to his father who was at that time the Commanding Officer of the 1st Military District Guard. His family declined to nominate a personal inscription for William’s headstone. William is commemorated on the war memorial at Esk (where he is listed as Blundell F.) and on the Honour Roll of Sydney Grammar. Two of Willaim’s siblings applied to be granted the Gallipoli Medallion in 1967.