The Great War: Last to die
Those who perished so close to the war’s end inspire a special pity.
The last Australian to die in the Great War was… well, who could confidently answer that question? Most of us don’t know.
In some respects, this may seem odd. We know the name of the last British soldier killed in action: he was 40-year-old George Ellison, who died at 9:30am on November 11, 1918, 90 minutes before the armistice came into effect, shot while on a patrol on the outskirts of Mons, Belgium.
Ellison’s oft-visited grave in the Saint Symphorien military cemetery in Belgium faces that of John Parr, the first British soldier killed during the Great War.
Some will also know the name of George Price, a Canadian soldier traditionally recognised as the last soldier of the British Empire to die in the war. Price was fatally shot in the chest by a German sniper, and his death is seen as particularly poignant, since he died at 10:58am, two minutes before the armistice came into effect.
The names of those Australians who died in battle just days before the Armistice aren’t drawn out for special study in Australian schools.
They aren’t commemorated more, or less, than the names of any of the 60,000 Australians who made the ultimate sacrifice, and this is right, and just. It’s wretched to die so close to the end of the conflict. But all the losses of that war were terrible for Australians to bear.
Still, as the centenary of the war’s end looms, it is worth noting that Australians were fighting until victory was not only assured, but written into history. So, who were they, those who fought so we might live in peace, who died just days from the end of the greatest conflict the world had ever known?
The Great War was a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions, and by late 1918, it was almost over. The Germans signed the Armistice in the early hours, and all parties agreed that fighting would end at 11am—the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month—to enable word to spread to the front lines on the Western Front.
Disastrous decisions were made in those final hours: a US major general, William M. Wright, for example, ordered his men into the town of Stenay, reportedly to take a bathhouse, a decision that cost more than 300 casualties.
By contrast, Australian troops were not officially in action in November 1918. The final action of the Australian Corps in Europe had been at Montbrehain, in October; hostilities in the Middle East theatre had ended with the Turkish armistice on October 30. Most of Australia’s infantrymen were therefore on their way back from the front.
Yet there were Australian casualties in those final days. On November 4, three engineers died, assisting the British across the Sambre–Oise canal. Corporal Albert Davey, 34, hailed from the gold-mining town of Ballarat. He was one of three members of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company—famous now as the men who dug under German lines at Hill 60 in Belgium, blowing the enemy sky-high—still serving whenever the British needed them.
Davey is said to have foreseen his own death, telling his officer he was convinced he was about to die. The British Fourth Army was pressing upon retreating Germans, and on November 1, Captain Oliver Woodward had received instructions: his company would support an attack by the British 1st Division across the canal.
Woodward had already been awarded the Military Cross and Bar. He had been there when Australians, Americans and British broke through the Hindenburg Line. The British could not cross the canal without fighting—and that would certainly mean further casualties. The Australians were instructed to build, under enemy fire, a heavy-duty bridge suitable for tanks to cross.
On the morning of November 3, Davey went to Woodward with some personal effects, saying he’d like them delivered to his wife upon his death.
The attack was set for 5.45am the next day. Historian Peter Burness, writing in the AWM’s Wartime magazine, says the men were met with heavy enemy shelling and machine-gun fire, but pushed on.
“Sadly, Corporal Davey’s premonition had proved correct. He had been killed as the battle opened, as had two other Australians, Sappers Arthur Johnson and Charles Barrett,” Burness writes. “The three Australians were buried in a row, together with about 50 other British soldiers, in the military extension of the local cemetery not far away at the village of Le Rejet-de-Beaulieu. The death in battle of three diggers of the tunnelling company so close to the end of the war was tragic. They seem to have been the last Australian fatalities in a ground action on the Western Front.”
On the same day, further north, three pilots of the Australian Flying Corps were also killed. German forces had retreated on the Western Front in the closing weeks of the war, but in the air, dogfights had continued.
On November 4, in clear weather, No. 4 Squadron pilots flew a joint raid with SE5a fighters of No. 2 Squadron, AFC, and DH9 bombers of the Royal Air Force.
Fokkers were seen closing in, and three Sopwith Snipes were lost, along with the lives of their pilots: Captain Thomas Baker, and Lieutenants Parker Symons and Arthur Palliser, whose deaths were later confirmed. Palliser and Baker were aces.
These men, along with the three tunnellers, were the last Australians to die in battle, but not the last to die in the war. Dozens of Australians in hospitals in France, Britain and the Middle East would die of their wounds in the days and hours before the Armistice.
Many more would succumb to wounds, to the effects of gas, to suicide, in the decades to come.
Lest we forget.
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Safe at last
As the 200,000 Australian troops still overseas at the time of the Armistice began to return, crowds waited at ports and railway stations to meet them. In Sydney, families gathered at the Anzac Buffet in The Domain, where this young lady welcomes a wounded soldier. For 60,000 of his comrades, there would be no homecoming.
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