Boehm JC (Mick)

Julius Carl Boehm 9th Light Horse (1898 - 1964)

Julius Carl (Mick) Boehm was the first cousin and close friend of Peter's grandfather Les Boys. Both were grandsons of Emil Boehm and Christine Hein, who had migrated from Hamburg, Germany and settled in Mount Gambier.

Mick enlisted with the 2nd Depot Battalion (reinforcements) AIF in Millicent on 09 March 1916. He was posted to the 50th Battalion, training in Adelaide. On 09 April he became ill and lost his way. He was later discovered in an Adelaide hospital and was told he had been posted as a “deserter”.

After being found he was assigned to the 9th Light Horse Regiment (two squadrons South Australian, the third raised in Victoria), which had returned battle hardened from Gallipoli, where it had been called upon to defend Hill 60 to enable retreat from Gallipoli.

On 05 Feb 1917 this regiment departed Adelaide on the Clan MacCorndale. It disembarked at Suez on 12 Mar 1917. He remained with the 9th Light Horse then throughout, returning to Adelaide on the Oxfordshire 10 Aug 1919, where he first lived at 27 Castle Street, Edwardstown before returning to Millicent.

The 9th Light Horse, with the 8th and 10th, formed the 3rd Light Horse Brigade. There were 14 Light Horse Regiments, forming five Brigades, with similar New Zealand regiments, but it was the 3rd and 4th Brigades who were in Sinai and Palestine to repel the Turks from there, freeing the Suez Canal. They were remarkably successful, getting on top of the Turks before the end of the war. The fourth Brigade (particularly the 4th and 12th Light Horse from within it), were probably the most famous as they led the only successful light horse charge in history, and the last cavalry charge in history, in their victory over the Turks to storm and capture Beersheba (now southern Israel). This charge is epicly described in Roland Perry's book The Australian Light Horse (Hachette Australia 2009).

The 3rd Brigade was involved in the third, and successful, attempt to capture Gaza while the 4th Brigade was in Beersheba. They became more involved in follow-up work and in one engagement took over 250 Turkish prisoners. JC Boehm seemed to have a number of short hospital stays during this period.

Towards the end of this campaign, the 3rd and 4th Light Horse Brigades were named the Australian Mounted Division, which was part of British General Allenby’s forces there fighting the Turks and Germans. At the end of September the Australian Division crossed the Golan Heights and on 01 October surrounded and captured Damascus. A major of the 10th Light Horse received the surrender. Later the same day TE Lawrence entered Damascus also, with his Arab militia, and claimed full credit for the capture.

Julius was discharged on 10 July 1919.

After the War Uncle Mick became a woodwork teacher in the South Australian Department of Education, where he taught at schools including Rose Park and Black Forest. In fact in 1958, Peter Taylor was a student in Grade 7 at Edwardstown Primary, and went riding on his bike along South Road to Black Forest weekly for his woodwork lessons, where Uncle Mick was his teacher.

People with German ethnicity suffered suspicion and some recriminations at this time, so it is significant that JC Boehm volunteered to fight for his country, and that his ethnically German grandparents, who had raised him as an only child after his young mother had died while still a teenager, approved his embarkation, while still young enough to require parental approval. It is also interesting that relatively less is known of these successful campaigns against the Turks than the earlier campaign of Gallipoli.

Below is a family photo taken about 1930 of Mick with Daisy at left, elder son Jack and elder daughter Marie. Jack became a lawyer, Master of the South Australian Supreme Court, and died in Perth in 2016, in good contact with Peter and Susan and living in Perth and Adelaide alternately. Marie was also still known to be living in Balaclava in 2013.