Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Son of Henry Rodgers and Emma Martha West

#1323 RODGERS Thomas  16th Battalion
 
Tom Rodgers was born in Maryborough, Qld, to parents Henry and Emma Rodgers. By the time that Tom was old enough to attend school, the family had moved to Murgon, where Tom and then his younger brother George attended Murgon State School. Upon leaving school, Tom served a 4 year apprenticeship as a butcher with Charles Kitching of Gin Gin.
 
When war was declared in August 1914, Tom was living in Adelaide. He presented himself to the Morphettville Camp beside the Morphettville Racecourse where he enlisted in the AIF on 16th September 1914. Volunteers were assigned to units on the basis of the state in which they enlisted and consequently, Tom was placed in “H” Company of the 16th Battalion which comprised of about three quarters of the ranks being from Western Australia and the remainder from South Australia.
Training for the three companies that would eventually join with the Western Australians continued at Morphettville as uniforms and weapons were issued. On 28th November 1914, the bulk of the 16th battalion arrived in Melbourne from Freemantle by ship. The South Australians travelled to Melbourne separately and marched into camp at Broadmeadows. The 16th Battalion was to form part of the 4th Infantry Brigade which was made up of the 13th from NSW, the 14th from Victoria and the 15th from Queensland. The individual battalions all assembled at Broadmeadows under the command of the brigade commander, Colonel John Monash.
 
The first contingent of Australian Troops from the three original brigades of the 1st Division had departed Australia almost a month before the 4th Brigade boarded transports at Port Melbourne on 22nd December 1914. The “Ceramic” arrived in Egypt in late January 1915 and on 3rd February, disembarked the 16thBattalion at the harbour in Alexandria. The battalion proceeded to the Aerodrome Camp in Cairo for training and brigade and divisional manoeuvres which continued until 11th April 1915.
 
On 12th April, the men of the 16th Battalion boarded trains for the short journey to Alexandria where they boarded two troop transports, the “Australind” and the “Seang Bee.”
The transports ferried the 4th Brigade to Mudros Harbour on the Greek Island of Lemnos where the men remained on board ship while practicing disembarkation drills with cutters and horseboats. On the evening of the 24th April the transports sailed out of Mudros Harbour. The “Australind” positioned itself off the shore at Cape Helles and the men on board crowded the rails to observe the landing of the British troops there during the morning of the 25th. The “Australind” then sailed up the west coast of the Gallipoli Peninsula to stand off at Anzac Cove. Soon after midnight on the 26th April, companies of the 16th began to be ferried ashore under the cover of darkness.
 
By the morning of the 26th April, all of the 16th Battalion was ashore and received orders from Brigade Command to move up a gulley (which would soon be named Shrapnel Gully and then Monash Gully) to take up a position between two brigades that had landed the day before. This position was quickly named Quinn’s Post after a Captain Quinn who commanded “B” Company in the 15th Battalion.
 
The 16th remained on Gallipoli holding the line at Quinn’s for the next few days. On 28th April, Tom received gun shot wounds to his legs and shoulder. He was evacuated by hospital ship to the 15th Australian General Hospital in Cairo where he would spend three months recuperating before re-joining his mates at Anzac.
 
By August 1915, Birdwood, the British Commander of the Anzac Forces, was under some pressure to secure a breakthrough to the heights above the beach-head. The ultimate goal was the commanding hill named Chunuk Bair and a series of coordinated attacks was planned to drive the Turks from the high ground.  The first of these offensives (a diversion really) was the attack on Lone Pine and The Nek followed by a second landing of British troops at Suvla. The main offensive was planned for the northern sector of the Anzac beachhead which entailed an advance at night along the beach before turning inland to scale a series of ridges towards the heights of Hill 971 also known as Sari Bair. The 4th Brigade would be part of this action on 7th and 8th August.
As was often the case at Anzac, the planning did not live up to expectations and the 4th Brigade soon found themselves lost in the dark in a bewildering tangle of gullies; primarily due to a reliance on Turkish guides working through interpreters, rather than the maps which had been issued. The attack, like so many forays at Anzac, failed spectacularly. The men of the 4th Brigade had come under heavy defensive fire from the Turks above. Confusion reigned and individual battalion commanders were forced to act independently. Eventually, the survivors withdrew back to their narrow beach head leaving many dead and wounded behind. One of those missing, presumed killed was Tom Rodgers.
 
The cables listing the casualties of the 8th August began arriving in Melbourne, then the seat of national government, from the beginning of October. On 24th October, Emma Rodgers in Murgon sent a telegram to Army Base Records stating that her son, Tom’s name appeared in the casualty lists published in the Brisbane Courier. She had received no official communication prior to that date and it must have coma as a great shock to the family.
 
An official enquiry triggered by a letter to the defence minister revealed that on the day that Tom’s name was cabled, the regular clerk was away sick. The relieving clerk forwarded the notification to the Commander of the Military District in Adelaide, without noting that the next of kin resided in Queensland.
 
At the cessation of hostilities, teams of grave recovery personnel scoured the Anzac battlefields to locate the fallen. Many could not be located and it was assumed that the Turks had buried the dead in unmarked graves. Tom Rodgers is commemorated on the stone tablets of the Lone Pine Memorial. He is one of almost five thousand Australian and new Zealanders who died at Gallipoli and have no know grave.