On 29 August 1919, Sergeant Samuel Pearse, an Australian veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, was killed in action fighting against Red Army forces in northwest Russia. He fell during a British Army attack …
Debate: "Australia and the Great War"
Prime Minister W.M. (Billy) Hughes spent several months in England in 1916 getting to know the wartime decision-makers, attending British cabinet meetings, lobbying for Australia’s trading interests, seeking a greater voice for Australia in future …
The Great War, 1914–18, was the most convulsive, tragic and defining event in Australian history. Its sacrifices bequeathed the bond of nationhood. But such sacrifice left the young country fractured by politics, religion and class, …
The numbers are stark and brutal. Out of a population of five million, more than 60,000 Australians were killed in the First World War and at least 137,000 more were wounded. But the statistics don’t …
The scale of Australian military losses in World War I is well known. From a population of fewer than 5 million, more than 62,000 men and women died, and over 150,000 were wounded. Less widely …
When Australians remember 1918, the climactic year of World War I, they give a prominent place to the Battle of Le Hamel on 4 July 1918. Often celebrated as the perfect battle, Hamel gave the …
In August 1918, the battlefield of the Western Front was something that no soldier there had yet experienced. For the first time in three and a half years, movement had been restored to the battlefield. …
On 8 August 1918, the British Fourth Army, with French support, attacked astride the Somme River on the Western Front. Germany’s de facto commander-in-chief, General Erich Ludendorff, famously labelled the Amiens offensive, as it is …
The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, volume I, The story of ANZAC from the outbreak of war to the end of the first phase of the Gallipoli campaign, May 4, 1915, …
In his last week as chief of the Australian Army, Angus Campbell delivered a speech hosted by ASPI at the Australian War Memorial in which he described General John Monash’s planning for the Battle of …
At 3.10 on the morning of 4 July 1918, three brigades of Australian infantry carried out a successful attack on the German positions outside the village of Le Hamel on the southern banks of the …
‘He is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.’ The young man who was crying was German. The man who wrote that was also German. It …