Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

#2373  PUTMAN James (James Lintatt Ayling)  33rd Infantry Battalion

James Putman was born in Petersfield, Hampshire, England. Petersfield is located on the main rail line between London and Portsmouth. James attended school in Petersfield and then worked as brickmaker before emigrating to Australia in 1910 at the age of 33.

The family name of Putman was not a common name in Australia during the First World War and it is more than likely that James was related to the several family groups of Putmans who lived in Howard. There is no evidence that James ever lived in Howard and it may be that his name was added to the Howard memorial by his relatives.

At the time of James Putman’s enlistment on 20th March 1916, he was working as a locomotive driver on the branch line that ran from Armidale through Boggabri and Narrabri to Mungindi on the Queensland NSW border. James gave his address as Flour Mills, Boggabri. He gave his age as 39 years and 5 months and named his mother, Fanny Hoar of Petersfield, as his next of kin. He also stated he was single. James spent some time in depot camps at Narrabri and Armidale before being allocated as a reinforcement for the 33rd Battalion. The 33rd, part of the 9th Brigade of the 3rd Division of the AIF had been raised in Armidale and was known as New England’s Own. On 17th October 1916, James and the rest of the 4th reinforcements travelled to Sydney and boarded the “Borda” bound for Plymouth which was reached on 19th January 1917. Remarkably, James was less than 20 miles from the village where he had been born and his mother still lived.

The reinforcements were placed on a train for the trip to Durrington on Salisbury Plain where they were marched in to the 12th Training Battalion. The 3rd Division, of which the 33rd Battalion was a constituent unit had been training in England under the command of Major General John Monash until the end of 1916. Once the division was shipped to the front, the brigades of the 3rd Division spent their time becoming accustomed to trench routine while stationed in that part of the front that straddled the French Belgian border. When James was shipped overseas in March to join the 33rd for the first time, the battalion was perfecting the movement of men a company at a time into and out of the support lines with occasional periods in the front line.

The first major action the 33rd Battalion faced was the Messines Offensive, which began at 3:20 am on 7th June 1917 with the firing of 19 underground mines beneath the Messines Ridge. After the smoke and dust subsided, troops from the 3rd and 4th Division of the AIF rose up from the jumping off trenches and moved forward under the cover of artillery to establish a new front line, the black line. The 33rd battalion was tasked with digging support lines behind the new positions and encountered a deal of difficulty in working around a huge crater that had been caused by one of the mines fired. The battalion was subjected to heavy German artillery while holding the line and when the unit was finally withdrawn, 79 men had been killed and 244 wounded; leaving only 357 from a strength of almost 800 to answer the roll.

After Messines, the battalions of the 9th Brigade went into billets in the rear area to the west of Ypres to regroup and take on reinforcements. The tactics being employed by the British command in Belgium in 1917 were in marked contrast to the piecemeal and sometimes downright incompetent tactics used in France the year before. Once the Germans had been cleared from the Messines Ridge which provided vantage points to observe British movements on the plains of Flanders, a series of small offensives with limited objectives was begun, in a step by step movement from Ypres almost due east towards the ridges on which sat the villages of Zonnebeke and Passchendaele.

The 9th Brigade and units from the 4th Division were tasked with mounting an offensive towards the village of Passchendaele in the second week in October 1917. The Flanders campaign proper began in September with victories at Menin Road and Polygon Wood and then moved on to Broodseinde Ridge in the first week of October. Throughout the campaign, the troops had been hampered by rain which turned the sodden fields into a sea of sticky, stinking mud which trapped the infantry in their trenches and prevented supplies from reaching the men. Big guns sank in the mud, mules and horses became bogged up to their bellies and had to be shot where they lay. The mud and constant rain caused many cases of trench foot. In spite of the impossible conditions that had come about because of the weather, the 9th Brigade was ordered into an attack towards Passchendaele on 11th October. The 33rd Battalion war diary notes that on 13th October, the battalion received an issue of whale oil to rub on swollen feet as well as socks and gumboots.

The battalion had been struggling to maintain a viable compliment of fit men while in the lines for some time. A and D Companies were down to 30 and 24 men respectively, barely platoon strength and had been combined for the Passchendaele assault. When the battalion was withdrawn from the mud on 19th October, James Putman was reported Killed in Action on 15th October. He was among almost 250 Battalion casualties killed, wounded or missing.

It is possible that James was buried in a makeshift grave but the endless artillery barrages churned the ground up so badly that any sign of a grave marker would not have lasted very long. James’ body was never recovered from the battlefield. He is commemorated among the 54,000 British and Dominion troops listed among the missing on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres. Each evening, the citizens of Ypres halt traffic passing through the Menin Gate and conduct a commemorative ceremony which includes the laying of wreaths, the recitation of the Ode, and the playing of the Last Post by a dedicated group of volunteers. The ceremony has been conducted every evening since 1928 with only a small break during occupation in the 1940s.

James’ war medals and commemorative plaque were despatched to his mother in Petersfield.