Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

# 1101 ALEXANDER Thomas Percival  9th Infantry Battalion
 
Thomas Alexander was born in Brisbane. It is unknown if he ever lived in the Wondai district but at his enlistment in Enoggera on 14th September 1914, he named his mother, Mrs Marion Seymour of the Proston Hotel as his next of kin. His brother lived at “Kinleymore” near Murgon for a time in the 1930s.
 
When Thomas walked in to the recruiting place at Enoggera, his stated his occupation as painter and that he was 24 years old. Thomas was placed into a depot battalion before being allocated as part of the 1streinforcements of the 9th Battalion. Thomas and the other 100 reinforcements boarded the “Themistocles” in Melbourne on 22nd December 1914 and arrived in Alexandria just over a month later. On arrival in Egypt, the reinforcements travelled by train to the Mena Camp near Cairo where they were quickly absorbed into the 9th Battalion.
 
As the Australians battled the heat, dust and flies at Mena, it became obvious that the Australians were being trained to become part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. On the 1st March 1915, the 9thBattalion and the other three battalions of the 3rd Brigade boarded transport ships for a journey across the Adriatic to the Island of Lemnos where the invasion force for the Dardanelles was being assembled. When the 9th arrived in Mudros Harbour on 7th March, the battalion disembarked and set up camp on the harbour shore from which position, the troops began to practice boat and landing drills.
 
The command of the entire AIF had been assigned to General William Birdwood (known universally as Birdie). Birdwood’s plan for the landing on the Gallipoli shore just north of Gaba Tepe was for the 3rd Brigade to be the covering force (first ashore) with the 9th Battalion taking up position on the far right of the line, closest to Gaba Tepe and the Turkish artillery emplaced there. The 9th Battalion men boarded the battleship HMS London late on the 24th April. The ships carrying the covering force slipped silently out of Mudros Harbour and headed for their designated station off the Gallipoli coastline. The men from “A” and “B” companies, who would be in the first wave climbed down the scaling ladders to a destroyer which would take them closer in shore before boarding lifeboats which in turn would be towed by steam launches to within a few hundred yards of the beach. All of this was achieved in complete silence and when the first of the 9thBattalion men waded ashore around 4:30am, there was very little opposition from the Turkish defenders.
 
Thomas Alexander was one of the first ashore that morning. Sometime during the course of the day, Thomas received a bullet wound to his left leg. He was evacuated from the Anzac beach to a hospital ship and transferred to the Australian General Hospital at Heliopolis in the Cairo suburbs. Thomas was discharged at the end of May and spent the next six months in a convalescent camp while his wound healed. By the time he was passed fit for duty, the 9th Battalion and the rest of the AIF had been withdrawn from Gallipoli and were in camps along the Suez Canal.
 
Once the AIF was reorganised and expanded to accommodate the requirements of the British command on the western front the force, which was then double the size that had fought at Gallipoli, crossed the Mediterranean to the French port of Marseilles and from there journeyed to northern France to learn the science of trench warfare.
 
The first major action in France by the 9th Battalion was an attack on a village of Pozieres on the Albert / Bapaume Road which occupied a strategic position on top of a gentle ridgeline. The 1st Division achieved its objective on 23rd July 1916 but casualties were quite heavy, including Thomas Alexander who received a gunshot wound to his right leg. Thomas was evacuated via the French Port of Havre by hospital ship and was admitted to the 1st General Eastern Hospital in Cambridge.
 
Thomas’s recovery was slow and he was not discharged from hospital until December, after which he reported to the Australian Depot at Perham Downs to await movement orders. In February 1917, Thomas took a night ferry from Folkstone across the English Channel to Havre where he spent some time in a transit depot before moving on to join his battalion.
 
On 20th February, the war diary of the 9th Battalion records that 19 reinforcements were taken on strength; Thomas was one of them. The battalion had been in a rest area near Albert since Christmas preparing for the next major action. Thomas and the other reinforcements were unable to benefit from this training as just five days after joining the battalion, the 9th went into action at Bazentin. The objective was to capture a series of trenches which were heavily defended and which once taken would be subjected to relentless artillery bombardment. During an attack on 25th February, Thomas Alexander was listed as killed in action.
 
There was no burial report and it is most likely that Thomas was either buried in a grave marked as “An Unknown Australian Soldier”, blown up by a shell or buried by a shell explosion in which case his body would have never been recovered. His mother received her son’s personal effects which amounted to 2 identity discs (which if Thomas had been wearing and his body located, his grave could have been recorded), a mending kit called a housewife, and a padlock. Marion Seymour also signed for Thomas’ medals, memorial plaque and scroll.
 
Through the 1930s, Thomas’ brother wrote to the authorities on several occasions requesting information about his brother’s grave. He was informed that the authorities had been unable to locate Thomas’ remains and that as a consequence, Thomas’ name would be listed among the names of the 10,000 Australians on the Australian National Memorial at Villers Bretonneux.

25 April 1914 - Wounded in Action  in the leg at Gallipoli

23 JUly 1916 - Wounded in Action

Medals: 1914-15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal