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mass grave site?Extraordinary story coming out of France this week - historians have found what they think is the mass grave site of 400 British and Australian First World War troops that were mowed down by German machine guns in yet another bloody pointless waste of life perpetrated by the inept British Commanders of 1916. The Sunday Telegraph reports it thus -

"They made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, hurling themselves from the trenches before vanishing in a hail of German bullets so thick that it was described by one witness as a "crisscrossed lattice of death."

The truth behind this event, like a lot of the First World War campaigns, was that it was a fiasco that was covered up initially and reported as an important raid in which 140 German prisoners were taken - when in reality thousands of troops died in a pointless and needless exercise that was originally planned as a feint to draw German support away from the main battle at the Somme. In a word it was slaughter and the British and Australian troops were cannon fodder. The Australian War Museum has this to say about it -

The worst 24 hours in Australian history occurred 90 years ago at Fromelles. Not the worst in Australian military history, the worst 24 hours in Australia's entire history. The Australians suffered 5,533 casualties in one night. The Australian toll at Fromelles was equivalent to the total Australian casualties in the Boer War, Korean War and Vietnam War put together. It was a staggering disaster. And this catastrophic attack at Fromelles - advocated and orchestrated by a British corps commander - had no redeeming tactical justification whatsoever. It was, in the words of a senior participant, Brigadier General H.E. "Pompey" Elliott, a "tactical abortion". One-third of the Australian casualties at Fromelles were in Elliott's 15th Brigade.

The details of this complete and utter cack-handed British-led operation are to be found here - Australian War Museum. Read it and weep. The stupid Pommie bastards did it to us at Gallipoli, at Singapore and God-Knows-Where else - Alright you Australians chappies...fix bayonets and over the top...yes we know you're running straight into machine-gun fire but you'll just have to make the best of it - there's a good chap. Ever wonder why we love to thrash the Poms at any sport you can name? Its revenge innit - for what those bastards did to our Great Grandads. I'll give you "over the top" - howzat!".

So the Telegraph lead would be better written as They made a pointless sacrifice for the inept British Commanders.

The Telegraph goes on to say -

"The find is the biggest of its kind since the end of the Great War and may lead to the discovery of 399 soldiers who were killed but whose bodies were never found and the building of the first new British war cemetery since the Sixties.

Of the dead, 239 are thought to be from the British 61st Division and 160 from the Australian 5th Division.

The soldiers perished in an Allied attack at Fromelles, 10 miles from Lille, which was fought 91 years ago last week. The battle, in which Adolf Hitler, then a 27-year-old corporal in the Bavarian reserve infantry, is believed to have fought, was intended to divert German attention and troops away from the Battle of the Somme, the main offensive which was raging 50 miles to the south.

The attack on heavily fortified German positions on July 19/20, 1916 was, however, a disaster, leaving 5,500 Australian and 1,500 British troops dead or injured.

The missing 399 troops were known to be among the dead because their bodies were recovered by the Germans and their names and personal belongings passed to their families via the Red Cross. However, their final resting place remained a mystery, despite repeated attempts to locate them.

Now, however, after scouring German wartime archives in Munich and carrying out extensive surveys of the area around Fromelles using geophysics, radar, topographic surveys and metal detectors, historians from Glasgow University's Archaeology Centre for Battlefield Studies are confident they have found the "lost army".

"The German archives proved very illuminating and cast new light on the site. We now have an order from the commander of the Bavarian troops in the area that grave pits were to be dug to accommodate 400 Allied dead and our survey has identified exactly where these pits are. We think the bodies are still in there. There is nothing to suggest they were ever moved."

During the war, Fromelles formed part of the German front line and, with the villagers displaced, there was no one to record the site of the mass grave.

The historians have presented their findings to the House of Lords War Graves and Battlefield Heritage Group and the Australian government, which commissioned the search.

French authorities have been informed of the discovery and will decide whether to grant a piece of land nearby to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the men to be reburied.

Witnesses likened the 15th Brigade's devastated trenches to butchers' premises: "If you had gathered the stock of a thousand butcher-shops, cut it into small pieces and strewn it about, it would give you a faint conception of the shambles those trenches were," wrote a 59th Battalion corporal, Hugh Knyvett.

More details on this totally pointless loss of life here - 1914-1918 where they list the Official Casualty Figures as 5th Australian Division suffered the loss of 178 officers and 5355 other ranks in the attack, including those killed, wounded and taken prisoner. 61st Division lost 79 officers and 1468 men, having attacked with around half as many effectives as the Australians on their left. Estimates of German losses place their casualties at between 1600 to 2000.

The Battle of the Somme was another British botch-up except for the success of the Aussie Diggers at Pozieres.

Melbourne journalist Lieutenant J. A. Raws, who, with his brother, was killed in the Somme battle, described the battle scene.

"... we lay down terror-stricken along a bank. The shelling was awful ... we eventually found our way to the right spot out in no-man's-land. Our leader was shot before we arrived and the strain had sent two other officers mad. I and another new officer took charge and dug the trench. We were shot at all the time... the wounded and killed had to be thrown to one side ... I refused to let any sound man help a wounded man; the sound had to dig ... we dug on and finished amid a tornado of bursting shells ... I was buried once and thrown down several times ... buried with dead and dying. The ground was covered bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation and I would, after struggling from the earth, pick body by me to try and lift him out with me and find him a decayed corpse ... I went up again the night and stayed up there. We were shelled to hell ceaselessly. X- went mad and disappeared... there remained nothing but a charred mass of debris with bricks, stones, girders and bodies pounded to nothing ... we are lousy, stinking, unshaven, sleepless ... I have one puttee, a man's helmet, another dead man's protect dead man's bayonet. My tunic rotten with other men's blood and partly spattered with a comrade's brains".