Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

# 3541  HOWARD Robert                   2nd Pioneer Battalion
 
Robert Howard was born at Dundrum in County Tipperary, Ireland in January 1877. He attended school at Dundrum and then secured a position working as a clerk on the Great Southern and Western Railway. This was the mainline railway which ran from Dublin to Cork and Dundrum was on this line. Robert emigrated to the Cape Colony, South Africa and worked for a time for Cape Government Railways, perhaps at East London, a coastal city on the rail line from Capetown. Robert enlisted as a soldier in the Kaffrarian Rifles which was a regular army unit based at East London. He served for six years and rose to the rank of sergeant, and would have probably served for a time during the second Boer War from 1899 to 1902.
 
It is difficult to track Robert’s journey from South Africa to Blackbutt but according to his wife, Robert arrived in Australia aged 33 in about 1910. He was probably already married to Barbara Howard by that time.
 
Robert travelled from Blackbutt to Brisbane to enlist at Enoggera on 7th September 1915. He advised the recruiting officer that he was 39 years old and his occupation was storekeeper of Blackbutt on the Brisbane Valley Rail Line. He named his wife as his next of kin and allocated 4/- of his daily pay of 5/- to his wife and had children, Iva and Marion (known as Maisie). Robert spent some time in a depot battalion before being taken on by the 8th reinforcements of the 25th Battalion.
 
Robert embarked for overseas on the “Kyarra” in Brisbane on 3rd January 1916. He disembarked at Suez in late February and went into camp in one of the many infantry depots dotted along the Suez Canal. After the withdrawal from Gallipoli in December 1915, the AIF returned to Egypt where a doubling of the force from two to four divisions was undertaken. By the time that Robert arrived in camp, the 25th Battalion, to which he was allocated, had no present use for reinforcements, being at full compliment. There was however, a need for manpower in a number of supplementary units such as artillery, engineers and machine gun battalions.
 
On 14th March 1916, Robert was transferred to the 2nd Pioneer Battalion. Pioneers were originally raised as light engineering units concerned with road mending, trench digging and repair or mopping up operations. The pioneers were also trained as riflemen and were often used as an adjunct to an infantry brigade. The 2nd Pioneers were attached to the 2nd Division of the AIF which was one of the first divisions to arrive in France.
 
Robert boarded a transport just 10 days after being transferred and arrived in the French city of Marseilles on 19th March. The pioneers followed the 7th and 8th Brigades of the 2nd Division into Northern France where they went into billets around the city of Armentieres where they became accustomed to the routines of trench warfare, western front style. Many of the 2nd Division men were Gallipoli veterans but the trenches of the western front bore little similarity to the roughshod defences at Anzac. The Armentieres sector of the front was on boggy ground and any trenches soon filled with water. Instead, the defences consisted of raised breastworks built of spoil brought in from some distance away and wicker fence panels. May and June were harvesting time and many of the Australians were detailed to assist the French farmers in the fields only a few miles behind the front. As an added bonus, the villages nearby offered the chance to partake of eggs, chips and steak, as well as local wine and beer in the local cafes called estaminets.
 
General Haig, Supreme British commander on the Western Front was planning a big push in the south of the British sector through the Somme River valley for the summer of 1916. It was to be the largest battle of the war so far, and was timed to commence on the 1st of July. The attack was a disaster, with the British suffering 60,000 casualties on the first day, many of them young conscripts from Kitchener’s New Army. In spite of this setback, Haig was determined to push on and the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions were moved south from the Armentieres sector to Albert to take part in the Somme offensive. 
 
The village of Pozieres half way between Albert and Bapaume, sat on the highest point of that part of the Somme battlefield. The Australians were given the task of capturing Pozieres. Part of the village was taken by the 1st Division AIF on 20th July. The 2nd Division’s objective was to take a blockhouse which had been built on the site of a windmill in the village of Pozieres. The windmill was behind two lines of trenches, and provided a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. The attack by the 2nd Division began just after midnight on the 29th July. The war diary of the 2nd Pioneers describes work being conducted on trench repairs which almost as soon as completed were destroyed by enemy artillery fire.
 
On 6th August, Robert Howard received multiple gunshot wounds (almost certainly a machine gun burst) while working in the vicinity of ‘Tom’s Cut.’ He was taken by field ambulance bearers to the 3rd Casualty Clearing Station near Albert and from there was loaded onto an ambulance train. Robert arrived at the 3rdAustralian Stationary Hospital at Boulogne on 8th August. Three days later, Robert was carried on to the hospital ship “St Denis” and transferred to the 5th Southern General Hospital in Portsmouth. Robert’s wife received a telegram informing her that 3541 Private Robert Howard was in hospital but did not state the reason for his hospitalisation. Barbara Howard sent a terse telegram to the Base Records Office in Melbourne; “what happened?” Presumably she received a more detailed response.
 
Robert’s wounds were no doubt serious and he spent almost ten months in hospital and various convalescent depots at Perham Downs and Fovant. On 14th June 1917, Robert was posted to the large Australian depot at Havre on the French coast. The second of the Great British offensives of the war had just commenced in Belgian Flanders and men such as Robert were required back at the front. While stationed at Havre, Tom received a cut to the area of his collarbone. It may have been an accident with a razor while shaving; they were not called “cut-throat” for nothing. The peculiar thing is that his file goes to great pains to state that this was an accident and not a self-inflicted wound designed to avoid front line duty. Robert was marched in to the 2nd Pioneers on 8th October. The pioneers were at that time dealing with the impossible tasks of keeping roads and tracks operable while under incessant artillery fire and the cloying stinking Flanders mud in which men, animals, artillery pieces and vehicles became hopelessly bogged or in some cases sank from sight.
 
The war diary relates the struggle to lay several hundred yards of railway sleepers as a corduroy road, only to return the next day to pull the sleepers out of the mud and relay the section. This phase of the battle in October 1917 is often referred to as the Battle of Passchendaele, and the name Passchendaele is associated with appalling conditions and casualties. The decision by the British commander Douglas Haig to push on in such a hopeless situation was to taint his reputation for years after the war and earned him the unfortunate nickname; “Butcher Haig.”
 
On 14th October, a company of Pioneers under the direction of Captain Sinclair were working on the Westhoek to Zonnebeke road when they were caught in an artillery salvo. Two sappers were killed outright and eight were wounded. Amongst the wounded were Private Robert Howard and Captain Sinclair. Both men were transported by stretcher bearers to the 15th Australian Field Ambulance. Both Robert and the Captain died of their wounds the next day and were buried in a temporary cemetery. Robert was 41 years old.
 
Barbara Howard received a parcel of her husband’s personal effects which included an identity disc, a metal cigarette case, a wristwatch and knife. She was most concerned that Robert’s notebook was not among the effects and it was not until months later that the notebook was located with the effects of Captain Sinclair who had apparently taken it from Robert to keep it safe.
 
Barbara Howard received a pension of two pounds a fortnight; son Iva received one pound and daughter Maisie fifteen shillings. At the end of the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission began to consolidate the many scattered graves in Belgium. Robert’s remains were exhumed and reinterred in the Hooge Crater Cemetery. Barbara Howard chose as the inscription for his headstone: BELOVED HUSBAND OF BARBARA HOWARD AND FATHER OF IVA AND MAISIE.
 
Barbara and the children relocated to the Brisbane suburb of Hendra in 1921.