Face To Face With The ‘Lost’ 85 Diggers Of The French Battlefield Of Fromelles

Posted by admin on Nov 6, 2009

For the first time two Australian researchers have painstakingly pieced together the stories of the dead from a French battlefield. Paola Totaro reports.

He calls her Marples and she affectionately refers to him as Sherlock. He’s a determined, quiet cop with a forensic background; she’s a chatty grandmother with degrees in social research and 30 years’ genealogy experience.

They live vastly different lives but West Australian Sandra Playle and Victorian Tim Lycett are united by a singular passion: to give identities to the men buried in the shadow of Fromelles’ tiny Pheasant Wood. These men, even boys, died on July 19-20, 1916, in what the Australian War Memorial calls Australia’s ”worst 24 hours”. In a battle intended in part as a diversion to the Battle of the Somme, 80 kilometres to the south, Australians saw their first action on the Western Front; 5533 of them were killed, wounded or captured.

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