Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Oswald Rudolph Duldig was a Lutheran man born and raised in World’s End, South Australia who went to the public school of World’s End. He had the job of a farm labourer, which was a very popular job to have in the late 1800s and early 1900s as it was a job that the landless people often took on and there were many of them back then. He was not the tallest, biggest and strongest man going around, coming over 5 foot, 8 inches tall, 154lbs (69.8kg) in weight and having a chest measurement of 36 inches. He had a darker skin colour with brown eyes and dark hair and he was a single man his entire life. He enlisted for the war on the 4th of May 1916, to become a private in the 10th Battalion, 20th Reinforcement with the regimental number of 6242. His was 22 years old when he embarked from Port Adelaide, South Australia on the 28th of August 1916 to disembark at Plymouth Port, England. His father was the next of kin and his parents’ names were Fredrick and Louise Duldig.

After arriving at Plymouth Port on the 11/10/16, Duldig joined the 3rd Tng. Battalion from Brimstone Hospital in England on the 5/11/16 then proceeded overseas on the SS Princess Victoria on the 4/12/16. On the 5th of December 1916 Duldig landed at Etaples, France, then joined the 10th Battalion in France on the second day of the new year. Not long after joining the 10th Battalion he found himself WOUNDED IN ACTION with a nasty general service wound to his left thigh on the 25th of February. The St. John’s Field Ambulance got to him the next day and he was then transported back to England on the 1st of the new month. On that same day he embarked for England, to the 3rd Aux Hospital in Brighton where his wound was treated. Then on the 10th of June 1917 Duldig proceeded overseas to France ex Perham Downs via Southampton. Back in Harve he marched in ex England on the 11th on June. Then he marched out to his unit on the 25th, re-joined from hospital in France on the 29th. Then was KILLED IN ACTION in Belgium on the 20th of September 1917 (the first day of the Menin Road operation) at the age of 24.

Commemoration details:

The Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, Belgium

The Menin Gate Memorial was constructed on the site of a gateway in the eastern walls of the old Flemish town of Ypres, Belgium, where hundreds of thousands of Allied troops passed on their way to the front, the Ypres salient, the site from April 1915 to the end of the war of some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

The Memorial was conceived as a monument to the 350,000 men of the British Empire who fought in the campaign. Inside the arch, on tablets of Portland stone, are inscribed the names of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians, who served in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave.

The opening of the Menin Gate Memorial on 24 July 1927 so moved the Australian artist Will Longstaff that he painted 'The Menin Gate at Midnight', which portrays a ghostly army of the dead marching past the Menin Gate. The painting now hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, at the entrance of which are two medieval stone lions presented to the Memorial by the City of Ypres in 1936.

Since the 1930s, with the brief interval of the German occupation in the Second World War, the City of Ypres has conducted a ceremony at the Memorial at dusk each evening to commemorate those who died in the Ypres campaign.

First of all, every soldier who enrols for the war is always showing ANZAC Spirit as they are risking their own lives to help their country win a war and in Duldig’s case he lost his life for his country which makes him have even more ANZAC Spirit. He was only 24 when his life was taken in Belgium and that is very young as he could have done many more thing in his life than just being killed in action in The Great War. He would have showed throughout his war times these perceived qualities that include endurance, courage, ingenuity, good humour, larrikinism, and mateship.