Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

3501 ELLIOTT Walter Wesley
 
Walter Elliott was born at North Motton, Tasmania, to William and Mary Elliott. He attended school at North Motton and then the nearby coastal town of Ulverstone.
 
The lure of good land opening up in the South Burnett, Queensland in the early decades of the 20th century attracted many young single men, amongst them were Walter Elliott and his elder brother Albert who took up farming in the district. Albert enlisted in September 1914 and was an original member of the 9th Battalion. Walter enlisted in Brisbane on 28th August 1915, when the reporting on the fighting on Gallipoli was at its height in the newspapers. He was 25 years old at the time and gave his address as Proston via Wondai.
 
Walter was placed in the 8th reinforcements for the 25th Battalion and embarked for overseas in Brisbane on the ‘Kyarra” on 3rd January 1916. By the time that Walter and the other reinforcements landed in Egypt, the 25th had been withdrawn from Gallipoli after the failure of the Mediterranean Expedition and was preparing to enter the war on the western front in France.   Walter may well have been able to meet up with his brother Albert while in camp in Egypt.
 
The 25th landed at Marseilles on 27th March and travelled by train through the French countryside showing its first buds of spring. When the battalion finally reached Northern France near the city of Armentieres, the men set about being introduced into the routines of trench warfare, which even for the Gallipoli veterans, was an unexpected experience with fresh water being piped to the front and a hot meal being delivered each evening to those manning the parapets. During the time away from the front line, many of the 25th, being almost exclusively country boys, assisted the French farmers in bringing in the harvest.
 
The idyllic lifestyle was shattered when the entire 2nd Division of the AIF was ordered south to play a part in the grand Somme offensive that had commenced on the 1st July. On the last days of July, the men of the 25th, in conjunction with two other battalions from the 7th brigade, attempted to capture a line of trenches on the outskirts of the village of Pozieres. Casualties were heavy but Walter came through his baptism of fire unscathed.
 
The battalions of the 7th Brigade were involved in action at Flers and Bapaume towards the end of 1916 before the offensive was called off as winter set in. Like most of the AIF men, Walter contracted a number of illnesses during the winter as a consequence of being exposed to what was recorded as the coldest winter in almost 50 years.
 
The spring of 1917 brought on movement by the Germans as they began a step by step withdrawal eastwards to the newly constructed fortifications which the British named the Hindenburg Line. The 2ndDivision of the AIF was tasked with cautiously following the withdrawal to maintain contact with the enemy. The British 5th Army came up against the defensive line at Bullecourt where the 25th Battalion played a predominantly supportive role.
 
The battles at Bullecourt marked the end of the campaign on the Somme and the entire AIF was sent to rear rest areas in Belgium for reinforcing, re-equipping and rest. The new theatre of operations was to be in Belgian Flanders and the opening salvoes of the 3rd Battle of Ypres, usually referred to as Passchendaele, were fired at Messines Ridge. The 2nd Division of the AIF was not involved at Messines and they continued to train for an assault against German pillboxes on the Gheluvelt Plateau in a battle known as Menin Road. During this battle on 21st September 1917, Walter sustained a serious gunshot wound to his left hand. He was evacuated from the battlefield by ambulance train to Boulogne where he was placed on a hospital ship and taken across the English Channel to the Eastbourne Military Hospital.
 
Walter would spend the next six months in England recovering before being posted back to his battalion which was in rest camp near Poperinghe. Soon after Walter marched back into the 25th Battalion lines, the Germans launched a massive spring offensive with most concentration of forces on the Somme. Within days, all of the gains paid for so dearly with British and Dominion blood on the Somme in 1916 were back in German hands. The British commander, General Douglas Haig, feared that if Amiens capitulated the Germans would win the war. He rushed his most dependable troops, the AIF, south to the banks of the Somme and Ancre Rivers. At this time, Haig issued his famous ‘backs to the wall’ speech.
 
During April and May 1918, the 25th Battalion was engaged in holding the defensive line on the south of the Somme near the strategically important village of Villers Bretonneux. On the 1st June, Walter transferred from the infantry to the 3rd Machine Gun Battalion.
 
The machine gun battalions, firing from fixed positions with about eight guns in a section, were engaged in general harassing fire of visible targets during the day and random firing across no mans land at night. The Vickers Heavy Machine Gun, whilst cumbersome, was capable of firing at a high rate for long periods of time due to the water cooled barrel. Walter’s company, according to the war diary, fired 36,000 rounds of .303 ammunition at the Battle of Hamel on 4th July. The gunners were also heavily involved in supporting elements of the 3rd and 4th Divisions of the AIF at the Battle of Amiens on 8th August.
 
After the Battle of Amiens, the British forces supported strongly by the Australian and Canadian divisions pursued the Germans relentlessly as they pulled back to the Hindenburg Line. In September, the AIF was within sight of the Hindenburg Outpost Line. The 3rd Machine Gun Battalion was supporting elements of the 4th Division when it was reported that Walter Elliott had been killed in action on the 19th September. Casualties in the machine gun units were nothing like those of infantry battalions but in Walter’s case, he was unfortunate to be one of five gunners killed on that day, almost certainly by an artillery shell.
 
Walter was buried in the Cerisy Gailley Military Cemetery near Cerisy on the banks of the Somme, some distance from the place where he was killed. Three days before the armistice on 11th November, Mary Elliott, who was by that time a widow, was informed that her elder son, Albert, had died from appendicitis in a German Prisoner of War camp.
 
Mary chose the following inscription for Walter’s headstone:
SLEEP BRAVE HEART WHO FOR OTHERS DIED
AWAITING UNION WITH THE CRUCIFIED
 
By the time that war medals were being distributed, Mary Elliott had also died. The medals of both Albert and Walter remained unclaimed. Walter is commemorated on the Wondai War Memorial Honour Roll and the Ulverstone Primary School War Memorial.