Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

McATEE John # 3806 15th Battalion

John McAtee was born and raised at Mount Mee. He attended Mount Mee State School and then worked at various rural labouring jobs. By the time of his enlistment, John gave his occupation as teamster and was probably engaged in the timber industry around Kilcoy, Woodford and Caboolture.

John enlisted on 13th August 1915, while the Australian press was full of the glorified tales from Gallipoli. He was 24 years old at the time. After three months at Enoggera John and the rest of an echelon of reinforcements for the 15th Battalion travelled by train to Sydney where they boarded the “Suffolk” on 30th November 1915.

The reinforcements arrived in Egypt in time for the reorganisation of the AIF. Battalions like the 15th which had been on Gallipoli were split to form the nucleus of two battalions. These new battalions were brought up to strength with reinforcements such as John. A period of training followed before the four divisions of the AIF were ordered to France and the Western Front. The 15th Battalion, now part of the newly constituted 4th Division, arrived in Marseilles on 8th May 1916 and travelled by train across France to the Armentieres sector in Northern France for a period of acclimatization to the routines of trench warfare in Europe.

For the old Gallipoli hands, this period was treated as a bit of a holiday. Unlike the trenches at Anzac, the French trenches were well constructed with piped running water, electricity and hot meals delivered from the battalion cookers to the rear. Rather than being hemmed in by a narrow beach and the sea, the rear areas contained villages and towns where normal life carried on. Soldiers on a couple of hours leave could visit a local café where there was an abundance of eggs and chips, as well as endless quantities of local wine and beer. This restful sojourn came to an end with the launching of the Somme offensive on 1st July 1916.

In spite of the British suffering over 60,000 casualties on the first day (20,000 killed), General Haig pushed on sending wave after wave of infantry into the well defended German lines. By July, the British had advanced only a few hundred metres. A major obstacle was the highest point of the undulating land on the north bank of the Somme at Pozieres. Three of the four Australian divisions, including the 4th Division, would eventually be put into the mincer at Pozieres and Mouquet Farm. This would have been John’s first experience of warfare and he was lucky to have survived unscathed; 23,000 Australians did not!

The Somme campaign eventually stumbled to a halt with troops exhausted and the winter bringing severe frosts and snow. The British army commanders ordered limited trench raids to keep their own troops sharp and to harass the enemy. These raids had almost no strategic value and were seen by the battalion and company commanders as sheer folly.

In the depths of the coldest winter recorded in Picardy in over 50 years, the 15th Battalion was ordered to stage a trench raid around Guidecourt. With snow thick on the ground, 200 men led by 6 officers crossed no man’s land at 4:20am. The battalion war diary contains no information as to the outcome of the raid; save for the capture of 50 German prisoners. No casualty figures are given but men were surely lost. As a result of this action on 1st February 1917, John McAtee was listed as Missing. Enquiries were made through the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Service but no definitive account was forthcoming. It was not until three months later that information was received via the American consulate in Berlin (America was at that time still neutral) that John McAtee had died at a field dressing station at Sachsenburg POW Camp in Germany on 11th February 1917. His identity was confirmed by an identity disc which was eventually returned to his mother in Caboolture.

John was buried in an unmarked grave and as such has no known grave. He is commemorated on the tablets of the Australian National Memorial at Villers Brettoneux.
By the time of John’s death, his mother had been widowed. She was granted a war pension of 2 pounds per fortnight.