Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

#564 RAISTRICK Charles Harold         11th Machine Gun Company
 
Charles Raistrick was born In Bradford, Yorkshire to parents Nathan and Ruth Raistrick of Idle. He attended Thorpe Council School in Idle and then trained as a joiner and carpenter. Charles emigrated to Australia around 1910. When he enlisted in the AIF on 15th June 1916, he was one of only two members of the AIF with that surname.
 
Charles advised the recruiting officer in Brisbane that he was 32 years old. He stated his occupation as carpenter and gave an address as c/- T. Campbell, Murgon. It may be that Mr Campbell was Charles’ employer.
 
Charles took the train to Enoggera where he went into camp in the 11th Depot Battalion for initial training. He was allocated to the reinforcements for the 11th Machine Gun Company and as all machine gun training was conducted at Seymour north of Melbourne, all of the Queensland reinforcements were sent to Seymour by train where they could begin to learn the complicated process of transporting, mounting and firing the Vickers heavy machine gun. While at Seymour, Charles contracted a bout of gonorrhoea and was sent to the Dermatological Hospital at Langwarrin, a former detention camp from the time of the Boer War. Venereal disease was a serious issue for the AIF. There was at that time no cure, and treatment was often prolonged. As a result of his hospitalisation, Charles was allocated to a different cohort of reinforcements and he did not depart for England until the 14th February 1917, boarding the “Osterley” at Port Melbourne.
 
The reinforcements landed at Plymouth on the 11th April and were sent to the Machine Gun Training facility at Grantham. While there, Charles was granted a period of leave which he may well have used to travel back to Yorkshire to visit friends and family. It is also likely that he struck up an acquaintance with Miss Ethel Hunter who he would shortly after name as the executor and sole beneficiary of his will.
 
On 5th June, Charles crossed the English Channel to the Australian Depot at Camiers on the French Coast. Two weeks later he had arrived at his unit, the 11th Machine Gun Company. As Charles was making his way from Camiers to the battlefield in Belgium, a major offensive was launched by the British in Belgian Flanders. The opening salvo was an enormous eruption of 19 underground mines beneath the Messines Ridge. The noise was so loud that it could be heard across the channel in England. Infantry and artillery combined to consolidate the gains which had effectively driven the German defenders off the ridge.
 
When Charles marched into the 11th M G Coy camp, the gunners were establishing forward posts at Messines, each of which housed two or three Vickers Machine Guns which had overlapping fields of fire to guard against any possible counterattack. After the success of Messines, the British commander began to prepare for the main part of the offensive; a series of “bite and hold” attacks along the line of the Menin Road which ran eastwards from Ypres towards the village of Passchendaele. The 11th M G Coy’s primary role was to support the 11th Infantry Brigade of the 3rd Division of the AIF. After Messines, where the 3rd Division played a significant part, the division was withdrawn from the front line and went into billets at Poperinghe where they spent around three months re-equipping, training and taking on reinforcements.
 
The war diary of the 11th M G Coy is a very sparse document which gives little indication of the work of the gunners during this period, with the exception of the recording of an air raid on the company lines at Poperinghe on 29th September during which 9 men were killed and more than 30 wounded. In October, the 11th Brigade along with its supports of artillery, machine guns and engineers began to assemble in the dugouts beneath the ancient city walls of Ypres in preparation for an attack to capture the village of Passchendaele.
 
The campaign in Flanders had begun well with the success of Messines followed by advances at Menin Road, Polygon Wood and then Broodseinde Ridge. The weather which had remained relatively fine up until the last week of September brought almost constant steady rain for the next three months. The ground in that part of Flanders was close to sea level and only with the use of sophisticated drainage systems built over several centuries was the land able to be farmed. With the arrival of the war, the drainage was destroyed either by the explosions of millions of artillery shells or by deliberate sabotage by the Germans. The arrival of the Autumn rains, combined with the churned up earth quickly turned the battlefield and the routes taken by the troops heading up to the front into a sea of stinking, clinging mud which could trap men up to their waist, bog horses and mules and render artillery useless as the big guns could not be relied on not to sink after firing a few rounds. Some of the most iconic photographs of the war, taken by Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins, depict the grim reality of the Flanders campaign.
 
In spite of loud protestations by his divisional and corps commanders, The British Commander Douglas Haig ordered his men to push on through the mud and mount attack after attack which were doomed from the outset. On 12th October, the 11th Infantry Brigade was ordered to mount an attack against Passchendaele. The jumping off tapes had been laid just in front of a concrete bunker which was shown on the maps as Tyne Cot. The infantry was thoroughly exhausted from struggling through mud filled trenches to reach the jumping off tapes and it would have been much harder for the machine gunners who had to drag the heavy gun, a thousand rounds of ammunition fed into cloth belts, spare barrels, the water tank for cooling as well as rations for themselves.
 
The plan was for the gunners to setup forward posts to defend against a counterattack, much as they had done at Messines and for which task they had been training. Unfortunately, the state of the infantry, the state of the ground and the determination of the Germans in their concrete bunkers and pillboxes forced the attackers back to their start line. The gunners also had to turn around and drag everything back to the Tyne Cot bunker. In the process of the withdrawal, three guns on their hand carts were stuck in the mud and had to be abandoned. The 11th M G casualties for this operation were recorded as 15 killed, 15 wounded, 11 gassed and 9 mules lost.
 
One of those killed was Charles Raistrick. In the confusion of the attack and the withdrawal, Charles had perhaps been killed by either an artillery shell or machine gun fire. It would have not been possible to retrieve his body and by the time that friendly forces could advance towards Passchendaele Ridge, the ground would have been even further churned up, obliterating any sign of the dead. War Grave recovery units scoured the battlefield of Belgium after the war but a staggering 90,000 British and Dominion servicemen could not be located. Charles Raistrick was one of them.
 
Miss Ethel Hunter signed for Charles’ personal effects and was entitled to his deferred pay and balance of any savings. Charles’ mother was granted a pension of 2 pounds per fortnight.
 
To honour the sacrifice of those 90,000 men who have no known grave, two memorials were constructed on the Passchendaele battlefields. The largest is the Menin Gate Memorial in the city of Ypres which lists the names of 54,000 who have no known grave; Charles Raistrick is commemorated there. The other memorial is a cemetery and memorial wall constructed on the site of the bunker at Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth War Cemetery in the world, which contains the graves of 12,000 dead, many of whom could not be identified and lists a further 35,000 British and New Zealand soldiers with no known grave. In total, the British offensive in Belgium in the latter half of 1917 caused the death of half a million men.