Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Percy William Cochrane #290 26th Battalion

Percy Cochrane was the son of Isaac and Sarah Cochrane. He was born in Ipswich and spent his young life in the Maroon district where he attended school. Like many young men from rural areas, he probably left school in his early teens to work on the family farm. When war was declared in August 1914, Percy was 24 years old. He was working in the South Burnett as a rural labourer and presented himself for enlistment at Wondai on 6th April 1915.
Percy travelled by train to Bell’s Paddock at Enoggera where he was drafted into the 26th Battalion. The 26th and its sister battalion the 25th formed the nucleus of the 7th Brigade in the newly formed 2nd Division of the AIF. Both battalions were populated with recruits from predominantly rural centres of Queensland. The 26th would also have one company of recruits from Tasmania.

After only 6 weeks training and a period of home leave, the men of the 26th boarded the “Ascanius” at Pinkenba Wharf and sailed for Sydney and Melbourne before heading across the Indian Ocean; arriving in Suez on 2nd August. Three days later the battalion was in camp at Zeitoun for an intense month of training before boarding the “Minniwashka” in Alexandria. The 26th came ashore at Anzac on 11th September 1915 and proceeded to work as the Beach Party and Fatigue Party for the Engineers.

After the frantic action at Anzac from May to August, the battle had developed into a stalemate. By the time that the brigades of the 2nd Division arrived at Anzac, the beachhead was well established and defences on both sides reinforced. The war diary of the 26th describes in detail the daily tasks assigned and the casualties sustained. In October the 26th moved into the front line trenches at Russell’s Top where the war had gone underground. The diary records work on various tunnels and even mentions the movement of sandbag barriers along a captured Turkish tunnel. It is fairly evident that the battalion adjutant had plenty of time to record even minor details during this time; in stark contrast to the sketchy or non-existent records for the Somme campaign a year later.

November on Anzac was a significant month for the 26th with two related events. The first was the secret visit of Field Marshal Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Secretary of State for War in the British Cabinet to the Anzac beach head for a brief inspection. None of the soldiers in the trenches knew of his visit but it would seal the fate of the campaign.

Also in November, it snowed. For the Queensland boys this would have been a rare experience but having been on the peninsula through the height of summer, no one was equipped for freezing conditions and flooding rains that followed. There was little prospect of the Australians being able to hold their ground through the coming winter and there was even less prospect of a break through. Kitchener had decided to abandon the Mediterranean Expedition as he need the troops elsewhere…..on the Western Front.

Percy and the 26th Battalion evacuated Anzac over several successive nights from 12th December and were back in camp in Egypt by 6th January of 1916. The battalions of the 7th brigade had survived Gallipoli with very few losses of men and so were well placed to be deployed to the new battlefields in Northern France. On 21st March the 25th and the 26th boarded trains in Marseilles and found themselves in the revetted trench lines in the Armentieres sector of the Western Front near the Belgian Border.

Life in the trenches of Northern France was a complete contrast to the experiences on Gallipoli. Not too many kilometres to the rear, rural life went on. Every small village had cafés and drinking establishments. Rations could be supplemented with meals of egg and chips or beef stew. The idyllic life of the diggers was shattered when the British Commander Gen Douglas Haig opened the Somme campaign on 1st July 1916. British casualties on the first day amounted to some 60,000 as battalions of “pals” from Kitchener’s new army walked into withering machine gun and artillery fire. In spite of the losses Haig pushed on, suffering even more losses and gaining little ground.

By the middle of July, the British advance was stalled below the summit of a ridge which was the highest point of the battlefield. Haig had the brigades of the newly arrived Australians shipped south to the assembly areas around the city of Albert. Troops of the 1st Division attacked the German strongpoints in the village of Pozieres and successfully took and held the position. It was then the turn of the 2nd Division to push on from the village to a series of fortified trenches and a blockhouse on the site of an old windmill which occupied the crest of the ridge.

At a few minutes after midnight on 29th July, the 26th Battalion stepped up out of the jumping off trenches and began to stumble across the shattered ground of no man’s land. Many of those diggers in that wave of men were cut down by enfilading machine gun fire. One such casualty was Percy Cochrane. He sustained several gunshot wounds to the abdomen and was removed from the battlefield by Field Ambulance to a Casualty Clearing Station where he died of his wounds later that day. Percy was buried adjacent to the CCS in ground that ultimately became the Puchvillers Military Cemetery.

The attack was a failure, with the 26th Battalion suffering 343 casualties (from a strength of a little less than 1000 men). On the site of the windmill today is a commemorative stone which reads:

“The ruin of the Pozieres windmill which lies here was the centre of the struggle on this part of the Somme Battlefield in July and August 1916. It was captured by Australian troops who fell more thickly on this ridge than on any other battlefields of the war.”

Percy’s father received his son’s campaign medals which included the 14/15 star. The family also received a memorial scroll and a bronze plaque, which was often referred to as a dead man’s penny.