Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

EDWIN CHARLES DAVIDSON  5511 - 12TH BATTALION  AIF

Edwin Davidson was born in the Condamine region of Queensland in late 1889 the sixth of nine children born to William and Mary Davidson.  At the time he enlisted in the AIF in early January 1916, the family were living in a station called “Portland”. His elder brother Herbert had enlisted in the AIF the previous September and brother Henry would enlist two weeks after Edwin.  He gave his occupation as “Shooter”, so he would have been a prize recruit for the AIF which was in the process of forming the Fourth and Fifth Divisions.

Edwin enlisted in the AIF in Brisbane before embarking for overseas on the SS Hawkes Bay in Sydney on the 20th of April for the United Kingdom as a reinforcement for the 12th Battalion AIF.  After training at Persham Downs in England, he moved to France in August. Edwin joined his battalion along with 104 other reinforcements at the Ontario Camp near Poperinge in Belgium on the 9th of September.   The 12th had suffered significant casualties in the Battle of Pozieres and was in a rest and rebuilding phase.

On the 1st of October the 12th returned to the Front Line for ten days, this was followed by three weeks of Fatigue Duties and then another period in the Lines in early November. Edwin would spend this period attached to a Light Trench Mortar Platoon. The rotation between the Front Line and Reserves would be the pattern for their employment through what was one of the coldest winters on record. On the 11th of February 1917 the Twelfth Battalion relieved the Fourth Battalion AIF at Eaucourt La’Abbaye southwest of Bapaume in France.  On the night of the 16th of February, the enemy attacked the right company of the battalion lobbing “Pineapple Bombs”  into the Australian trench.

The effect was devastating, Edwin, Major Julius Kayser who was a Gallipoli veteran, and three other men were killed, and a further seven wounded. The men were buried at a temporary cemetery at “Hexham Road”, the next day by Padre William Douglas. The Hexham Road cemetery was heavily destroyed in later fighting and Edwin’s body along with that of Julius Kayser and four other men were unable to be identified post war.  All the bodies in the Hexham Road Cemetery were later reinterred to the Warlencourt CWGC Cemetery where special memorial headstones were erected to Edwin and the others.  They are unusual, in that the normal inscription of “Believed to be buried in the cemetery” is missing on their headstones.

Two months after Edwin’s death, his older brother Henry would be grievously wounded during an attack on the Hindenburg Line. Henry would die the following day at a Casualty Clearance Station. Henry lies just five kilometres north of his younger brother.  Herbert Davidson was wounded in 1916 but would survive the war returning to Australia in mid-1918 to be medically discharged.