Bullecourt, The Bullecourt Digger

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Bullecourt - The Bullecourt Digger

Bullecourt, The Bullecourt Digger

No special congratulations – Sergeant John James White, 22nd Battalion, of Briagalong, Victoria

Sergeant John James White and his family photographed in Australia before he left for Europe in early 1916. [DVA]

All around the ‘Bullecourt Digger’ today are the broad, open farmlands of the Department of the Pas de Calais. Directly behind where the Australian Memorial Park is, in the dark early hours of 3 May 1917 the four battalions of the 6th Brigade AIF, all raised in the state of Victoria, along with support units, assembled at start lines ready to assault the Hindenburg Line. This was beginning of the Second Battle of Bullecourt. Among the men was Sergeant John White, 22nd Battalion, aged 28.

John had volunteered for service with the AIF on 12 February 1916, stating that he was married to Lilian White and that he worked as a blacksmith in the little Gippsland town of Briagalong. Fifteen months later John was one of more than 151 men of the 22nd Battalion who died in the advance on the Hindenburg Line. The battalion was on the far left wing of the brigade, in front of the 21st Battalion, when they were met by heavy machine gun and rifle fire from German positions east of Bullecourt and by shells from German artillery. The shells were falling just short of the enemy’s front line, right among the men of the 21st and 22nd.

The advance split in two and elements of the two battalions entered the German lines not far from the rear of where the Australian Memorial Park is. For the rest of the day the men of the 6th Brigade fought their way forward into a section of the Hindenburg Line and hung on despite German counter–attacks. It was one of the only successful stories of the British attack along a 25–kilometre front that day. Charles Bean wrote years later of the sight of the men of the 6th Brigade coming back on the morning of 4 May 1917 after their success of the previous day:

Then, tired, unkempt, reduced in numbers but bursting with pride, the 6th Brigade came out. Its men looked for no recognition of their victory, and none awaited them. No special congratulations met them, no high commander picked them out for special approbation. Indeed the higher commanders knew little of what they had done.

Charles Bean, The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1917, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918,Volume 1V, p.487

But Charles Bean knew what the battalions and support units of the 6th Brigade had endured and achieved on that first day of the second Battle of Bullecourt and he made sure the story was fully told in his official history. As he intended it to be, his narrative stands not just as a military historian’s account of that battle but as a tribute to ordinary Australian soldiers – such as Sergeant John White from Briagalong, Victoria – who fought their way across the scarred landscape of Bullecourt on 3 May 1917.

Looking over the fields towards Bullecourt from the back of the Australian Memorial Park. [DVA]

White’s body could not be found after the battle. His personal effects, including his Bible, were sent home. After the war Sergeant White’s wife Lilian remarried and moved away from Briagalong but in 1922 she claimed his war medals and they were duly sent to her along with a copy of Where the Australians Rest, a government publication describing many of the overseas cemeteries where deceased members of the AIF were buried or the memorials on which those with no known grave were commemorated. At that time John White was among the ‘missing’ and in due course his name was inscribed among his mates of the 22nd Battalion on the walls of the Australian National Memorial at Villers–Bretonneux.

In November 1994, while ploughing his field just behind the Australian Memorial Park at Bullecourt, a local farmer found the remains of Sergeant John White, 22nd Battalion, 77 years after his death. His identity disc was still intact. The news must have come as a great shock to the only surviving member of John’s immediate family, his daughter Myrle Prophet, then 80 years old. A family photograph in her possession shows John in AIF uniform with his wife Lilian, son Colin and baby Myrle taken in 1916 before his departure overseas. Found with John was a wallet containing, among other things, the still legible fragments of a letter and a lock of hair.

Queant Road Cemetery, Buissy. [DVA]

Epitaph on headstone, Queant Road Cemetery, Buissy. [DVA]

In November 1995, Sergeant White’s flag–draped coffin was carried by six Australian soldiers to a grave in Queant Road Cemetery near Bullecourt. There, in the presence of his daughter, he was finally laid to rest along with the lock of hair he had brought from Australia all those years ago. A French bugler sounded the Last Post and Sergeant John White was no longer among the ‘missing’.