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2018 France/Belgium Trip Post No. 12
From Corbie we crossed the Somme once again and headed down the D23 road for Villers Bretonneux Military Cemetery and Australian Memorial.
The location was chosen to commemorate the role played by Australian soldiers in the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux (24–27 April 1918) when the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions, with units of the 8th and 18th Divisions, recaptured the whole of the village from the Germans. Also on 8 August 1918, the 2nd and 5th Australian Divisions advanced from its eastern outskirts in the Battle of Amiens.
The memorial tower is the Australian National Memorial, erected to commemorate all Australian soldiers who fought in France and Belgium during the First World War, to their dead, and especially to name 10,773 of the dead whose graves are not known. The Australian servicemen named in this register died in the battlefields of the Somme, Arras, the German Spring Offensive advance of 1918 and the Allied Advance to Victory.
In WW2 the cemetery was the scene of another action. In May 1940 French Senagalese troops used the tower as an artillery observation and machine gun post. Two German Panzers attacked the French position from the direction of Villers Bretonneux. One veered right to the back of the cemetery, the other broke through the southern boundary wall and over the first two rows of graves. Plots 19 and 20 before opening fire on the tower. German ground troops surrounded the tower and after a fierce firefight captured it. During the engagement the tower was also strafed by a ME 109 fighter.
The damaged headstones and major damage to the tower were repaired but bullet marks on the Cross of Sacrifice, the memorial itself, some headstones and on the metal register holder have been left as honourable scars of battle.
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