Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Harold William WILTHEW was born in Balmain on 7th January 1893

His parents were William WILTHEW & Mary Ann SAYERS who married in Sydney in 1890

Harold had been promoted to 2nd Lieutenant about 6 weeks before his death, having previously been the Regimental Sergeant Major.

-------

His brother Kenneth Reginald WILTHEW (SN 1708) also served in WW1 and returned to Australia in 1919

From Francois Berthout

2nd Lt Harold William Wilthew
31st Australian Infantry Battalion, B Company,
8th Brigade, 5th Australian Division, AIF
 
During the First World War, thousands of kilometers from the poppy fields of northern France, 300,000 young Australian soldiers out of a population of less than 5 million answered the call of duty and fought with bravery, writing thus the legend of the ANZAC spirit, first on the blood-red beaches of Gallipoli where 8700 of them were killed in action, then, after having recovered from these terrible losses the time came for the Diggers to join the western front without knowing the horrors that would await them and in 24 hours which were the deadliest for Australia, between July 19 and 20, 1916, there were 5,500 Australian soldiers who fell at Fromelles, a hecatomb which was the prelude to even deadlier battles and on July 23.

The troops of the Australian Imperial Force, already bruised, were thrown into the trenches of the Somme, into the mud and blood of Pozieres, of the Mouquet Farm where 23,000 of these young boys paid the supreme sacrifice then came the battles of Flers, Villers-Bretonneux and Amiens led with determination and the greatest bravery by these heroes who, far from home, in France, fought with loyalty, with camaraderie and determination until the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month on November 11, 1918 but the price of this peace was high and shattered not only lives but so many families in Australia far from the battlefields that saw the war throughout the words, the letters of their sons, of their husbands and brothers who fell in the prime of their lives, more than 30,000 of them alone on the sacred grounds of the Somme where, proud, always young and united by an eternal fraternity they rest at peace in the silence of the poppies which grow between the rows of their white graves and over whom I will forever watch with respect so that the names of these exceptional men live forever.

Today, it is with the deepest gratitude and with the utmost respect that I would like to honor the memory of one of these young men, one of my boys of the Somme who, with love for Australia , alongside his comrades, fought in the name of peace and freedom and who, in France, for each of us, gave his life.I would like to pay a very respectful tribute to Second Lieutenant Harold William Wilthew who fought in the 31st Australian Infantry Battalion, B Company, 8th Brigade, 5th Australian Division of the Australian Imperial Force, and who was killed in action 108 years ago, on November 4, 1916 at the age of 23 during the Battle of the Somme.

Harold William Wilthew was born on 7 January 1893 in Balmain, New South Wales, Australia, and was the son of William James Wilthew (born 1864, died November 1920 aged 55) and Mary Ann Wilthew (née Sayers, born in 1865, died in January 1912 at the age of 46 and today rests in peace next to her husband at the Field Of Mars Cemetery, New South Wales). They were married in Sydney in 1890 and educated Harold with love and care. After Harold's birth, his sister, Ethel Ida Clarke was born and later lived at "Duane", Orchard Street, Croydon, Sydney, New South Wales. Before the outbreak of the war, Harold was a sportsman accomplished, a champion cyclist and worked as a traveller.

Driven forward by a deep love of his country and by the desire to do his duty like his comrades on the battlefields, Harold enlisted on July 22, 1915 at Rockhampton, Queensland, as a Corporal in the 31st Australian Infantry Battalion, B Company, which was mainly raised at Enoggera, on the outskirts of Brisbane, however, some of the companies of the battalion were raised at Broadmeadows Camp, Victoria and were under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Toll. After a period of training of a little more three months at Enoggera Camp where he learned the basics of combat including handling rifles and bayonet charges, Harold embarked with his unit from Melbourne, Victoria, on board HMAT A62 Wandilla on November 9, 1915 and sailed for Egypt and arrived in Suez on December 7. Shortly after, the men of the 31st Battalion were involved in the defense of the Suez Canal against Ottoman forces and then, after showing his courage, Harold was promoted to the rank of Company Quartermaster Serjeant on probation on the 29th May 1916 then a month later, on June 16, he and his unit joined the British Expeditionary Force in Alexandria and proceeded overseas for France on board HMT Hororata.

On June 23, 1916, after a week-long journey escorted by a light cruiser convoy, the Hororata arrived in France and Harold, alongside men of the 31st Battalion, were disembarked in Marseilles then, after a few days of rest, embarked by train for Steenbecque, in the north of France where they arrived on June 26 then marched to the village of Morbecque where they followed a period of training including anti-gas exercises with the use of tear gas.

On July 8, 1916, a week after the start of the British offensive on the Somme, Harold and his unit left Morbecque and marched to Estaires then reached Erquinghem the next day and were billeted at Rue Dormoire where they relieved the 18th Australian Infantry Battalion. On July 16, the battalion finally joined the front line at Fleurbaix where they suffered their first casualties (9 men killed by German shells) but this was only a slight glimpse of the horrors of the war because only three days after joining the trenches, they were greatly involved in the terrible battle of Fromelles which began on July 19 and became, before Pozieres, the deadliest battle, the worst 24 hours in the history of the Australian army on the Western front.

To the soldiers the battle of Fromelles was an unmitigated military disaster, the dismal culmination of muddled planning and reckless decision-making by both British and Australian commanders and staff.

In the late afternoon of 19 July 1916, soldiers of the 5th Australian Division, together with the British 61st Division, were sent to attack the heavily fortified German front line in front of the Aubers Ridge. The infamous ridge in the German rear area, although only 40 metres high, was the highest feature on the landscape, giving the Germans a commanding view of the Australian and British preparations.

The 12 battalions of the raw and untried 5th Division had just arrived in France and the Australian soldiers had been undergoing acclimatisation in the trenches of the "nursery sector" near Armentières to gain experience and participate in trench raids in the area. Within weeks they were thrown into battle.

The attack began to go wrong even before the men went over the top. The ill-prepared Australian troops were packed into their front-line trenches, shoulder-to-shoulder, prior to the attack and suffered casualties from German artillery fire and from "drop shorts" fired by their own inexperienced artillery. Two British battalions also suffered heavily, losing 140 men to artillery fire before they left their trenches.

Along the four-kilometre front of their attack the Australians had to cross between 80 and 400 metres of open ground in broad daylight and under direct observation from the German lines. The German defences included concrete blockhouses and a strong redoubt, known as the Sugar loaf, overlooking most of the allied line of advance.

After a seven-hour bombardment, the Australians attacked at 6 pm; there were still two-and-a-half hours of summer daylight left. Soldiers went over the top, heavily laden with scaling ladders, picks, shovels and bags of grenades. Almost immediately they came under heavy machine-gun fire. Sergeant "Jimmy" Downing of the 57th Battalion recalled: "Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb.Men were cut in two by streams of bullets.It was all over in five minutes."

The 15th (Victorian) Brigade was destroyed within 15 minutes, entire companies of infantry being virtually annihilated. Their commander, Brigadier General Harold "Pompey" Elliott, who had earlier expressed misgivings about the attack, was speechless with grief the following day, "the tears streaming down his face, as he shook hands with the returning survivors".
Official war correspondent Charles Bean recorded after meeting Elliott, "I felt almost as if I were in the presence of a man who had just lost his wife." One of Elliott’s battalions, the 60th, had gone into the attack with 887 officers and men. When the survivors gathered at brigade headquarters the following afternoon, only one officer and 106 men answered the roll call.

The 14th (New South Wales) Brigade and the 8th Brigade (comprising battalions from Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia) succeeded in capturing some 1,000 metres of the German second line. But they were unable to locate their final objective, a supposed "third" German trench line. This was later found to be merely the remains of abandoned trenches.

Carrying parties, with sandbags and ammunition, followed after the assaulting waves climbed out of their trenches into a storm of fire. Water-filled ditches provided the only protection. Soon the ditches were crammed with wounded and dying men, while others continued to struggle past them carrying boxes of ammunition and supplies.

Engineers laboured to dig communication trenches but wounded men kept falling into them. It was soon obvious to the soldiers that the attack had gone badly wrong but men refused to accept the rumour that they would be ordered to retreat. They clung to their tenuous, water-filled ditches without adequate artillery support and subjected to determined German counter-attacks throughout the night. In their inexperience, the Australians had cleared the German front-line trenches but failed to man them. The Germans now moved through breaks in the Australian-held second line to reoccupy their former front line and cut off the Australians’ retreat.

As daylight approached, the Australians were forced to fall back early on 20 July. Some units began to retire under cover of darkness about 4 am, while others pulled back later in daylight with heavy casualties. When the German counter-attacks came against the Australians still holding out, they were launched from both flanks and from their former front line behind the Australians. Many soldiers were cut off and either killed, wounded or captured trying to escape through the German line to their own lines.

In parts of the line there was some panic; in one case, an Non-Commissioned Officer of the 31st Battalion brandished a revolver to keep men from breaking in the early morning as they saw many others retiring on both flanks.

Elsewhere the withdrawal was more deliberate. Sapper Fred Strode of the 8th Field Company was one of a party of four men instructed to hold their line on the morning of 20 July to enable his company to get back to their trenches. He held on until his supply of hand grenades ran out and his mates were killed, and then he too fled.

Wounded men had begun to crawl back during the night while others still lay in no man’s land, calling for help. By dawn on the morning of 20 July the Australian trenches were packed with wounded and dying men.

For the next three days and nights, Australians risked their own lives to go out under enemy fire to retrieve the hundreds of wounded men in no man’s land. But the Germans opened fire at every movement. For several days after the battle a blinded and dazed Australian officer staggered about near the German lines and a umber of men were killed attempting to rescue him. Eventually, the Germans shot the man.
An informal truce occurred in one sector which allowed the Australians to carry in some of their wounded but when he learned of this, the Australian divisional commander, Major General James Whiteside M’Cay, halted the truce.

Some wounded men remained in no man’s land for up to a week, scavenging food and water from the dead, hiding by day and crawling by night until at last they reached their own lines.

But many remained missing. More than two years after the battle, on the day of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 when the guns of the Western Front finally ceased fire, Charles Bean wandered over the battlefield of Fromelles and observed the grisly aftermath of the battle. "We found the old No-Man’s-Land simply full of our dead," he recorded. "The skulls and bones and torn uniforms were lying about everywhere."

The Australian 5th Division’s losses in this single night amounted to 5,533 officers and men killed, wounded or taken prisoner. It would be many months before the division would be ready for action again. The British 61st Division lost 1,547 casualties, including 500 dead. The Germans lost fewer than 1,600 casualties in the battle, half of them in the regiment opposing the Australians.

During the Battle of Fromelles, the 31st Battalion lost 580 men including 66 killed in action, 440 wounded and 80 missing but estimates that 500 Germans were killed in their sector of attack. Luckily, Harold survived the Battle of Fromelles and for his courage, was confirmed to the rank of Company Quartermaster Serjeant on July 29, 1916 then promoted to the rank of Second Lieutenant on August 30.

On September 7, 1916, Harold and the 31st Battalion left the killing fields of Fromelles and moved back to Fleurbaix in billets described as "very dirty". During their period here, they received new equipment including new gas masks then moved for Armentieres on September 21. A week later, on September 27, they marched to Houplines where they remained until October 12.

On October 13, 1916, the men of the 31st Battalion left Houplines and marched to Strazeele and shortly after, received orders to join the Somme front. On October 17, they embarked by train at Bailleul and arrived at Longpre, near Amiens on October 17. From there, Harold and his unit marched to Yaucourt-Bussus, reached Buire on October 21 and joined Mametz the next day where they underwent a period of training then moved to Montauban Camp on October 29. Shortly after, on the 1st November, the battalion took up position near Flers in a position called "Factory House" where unfortunately Harold met his fate and was killed by a German shell while he was asleep in a dugout on November 4. He was only 23 years old.

Today, Second Lieutenant Harold William Wilthew rests in peace alongside his friends, comrades and brothers in arms at the AIF Burial Ground, Flers, Somme, and his grave bears the following inscription: "In remembrance of our dear brother.Gave his life for king and country."

Harold had a brother who also fought courageously during the Great War. He was Private number 1708 Reginald Kenneth Wilthew who served in the 36th Australian Infantry Battalion. Reginald survived the war and returned to Australia on August 22, 1919. He died peacefully on June 15, 1978 at the age of 81 in Narrabeen, New South Wales, Australia.

Harold, so brave, it was in the prime of your life that you raised your head and under the sinister bells which announced the start of the war, you answered the call of duty, the call of Australia and joined the smiling ranks of young men who became soldiers, comrades, brothers watching over each other with fraternity and who, ready to give their lives, embarked together on slow steamboats but, even if they were proud, even if they were strong, they could not hide their tears in the arms of their mothers and sisters who said goodbye, some for the last time because, even if they volunteered with ardor and enthusiasm, these young men knew that war would not spare them from the horrors and suffering that it caused in floods of blood but for them, despite the dangers and death that awaited beyond the horizon, their fight was the good fight and shoulder to shoulder, they defended values and causes that were worth more than their own lives so, their heads held high, pushed forward by valiant hearts, they sailed for war, for an unknown destination but they knew that wherever they went they would not be not alone and would stand alongside their friends, their brothers so that this war puts an end to all wars, so that peace and freedom triumph over darkness and madness then, after a long voyage on the seas, through the calm of the waves and the foam, they arrived in France, on the soil of a country that they did not know but for which they were ready to fight with all their heart and all their determination then, standing alongside the horses, they headed with faith and confidence towards the trenches of the great war, towards all the horror and brutality of battles which awaited the young Diggers but in the heat of the summer, under the sun of July 1916 , nothing prepared them for the hell which took them under rains of shells and bullets at Fromelles where, in a few minutes, thousands of them fell at a terrible pace side by side in their uniforms reddened with blood and torn to pieces by the shrapnel and the murderous fire of the machine guns which left these young men no chance to reach their objectives.

In this hell of fire and steel, of mournful howls, the innocence of these young men was swept away, reduced to nothing in this nightmare from which it was impossible to hide but, even in the face of death, the young Australian soldiers showed all their bravery, their conviction and made their country proud.

Together, they showed the strength of the entire Australian nation who stood proudly behind their sons and wrote the legend of the ANZAC spirit through their actions, their camaraderie and their sacrifices and despite the catastrophic losses suffered at Fromelles, these brave men did not give up and shortly after, at Flers, Pozieres, in the poppy fields of the Somme, they showed the same courage, the same fighting spirit which characterized the Australian soldier, a courage which was deeply admired by their French brothers in arms and who, in Villers-Bretonneux, in Amiens, fought shoulder to shoulder until victory. However, when they looked behind them when the bugle sounded on November 11, 1918, the Australians saw the distance traveled and saw their brothers, their mates who, silent, lay lifeless in the mud and in the barbed wire or who, in full run, were mowed down by rains of lead and fell into shell holes filled with stagnant water and blood above which hovered the smell of death. They marched on the killing fields and saw men with whom they had grown up in laughter and love and who, their eyes towards the sky, mutilated, disfigured, still seemed to want to fight and defend these lands of France and on which they gave their lives, their youth, their hopes, their everything far from home but after this darkness endured with so much bravery, sometimes wondering why all this, they saw the children of France come to say thank you and put flowers on the graves of their brothers who fell here and understood why they fought, to give new hope to future generations, to allow us to live in a world in peace. More than a hundred years have passed but the memory of Australian soldiers who fought and fell in the Somme has not disappeared, French children continue to come and pay their respects to the graves of these heroes whom I do not see as ordinary men but as heroes who paid the supreme sacrifice. They are not just names or service numbers but they are and will always be our sons, my boys of the Somme over whom I will always watch over with care and love to perpetuate their memory so that no one never forget who these young boys were and what they did for us. In the Somme, the friendship that unites Australia and France, the ANZAC spirit and the memory of the Diggers will live forever.

Thank you so much Harold, for everything you and your brother did for us and for my country whose respect, gratitude and love will always be yours.At the going down of the sun and in the morning,we will remember him, we will remember them.