Riddle of Diggers of Celtic Wood

Friday - 31 May 2008 - Australian

JOHN Campion is delighted that the puzzle of what happened to Australian war dead at the 1916 Battle of Fromelles seems to have been solved this week.

Now for the continuing mystery from Australia's bloody campaign on the Western Front all those years ago: the fate of the raiding party that disappeared without trace into the mud and mist of Passchendaele in 1917.

The Australian Army says the fate of those missing 37 Diggers of the South Australian 10th Battalion remains "the greatest mystery" of its involvement in World War I.

Mr Campion, 79, of Port Vincent on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula, lost two uncles when the raiding party disappeared on October 9, 1917, at Celtic Wood at the height of the Battle of Passchendaele.

Private Willie Campion, 25, was among those who vanished after the Australian force, originally 85-strong, attacked a bristling section of the German line at dawn. His brother, Gerald, 27, died of his wounds the next day and is buried in a military cemetery on the outskirts of Ypres.

Mr Campion doesn't know how either of them died - and now that Fromelles appears to have given up its Australian war dead, with the discovery this week of a possible mass grave containing the remains of 170 missing Diggers - he and his son Kym would be pleased for attention to turn to the lost men of Celtic Wood.

"All I know is they were my dad's two brothers who were killed in the war," Mr Campion said yesterday. "My dad called them cannon fodder. He wasn't too impressed."

Compounding the family's distress, Willie had initially been posted only as missing, giving them false hope he had survived.

Willie and Gerald Campion were among 85 men under the command of Lieutenant Frank Scott given the daunting task of mounting a diversionary attack on the Germans.

The raiding party, including Gallipoli veterans, is known to have faced withering German machinegun and rifle fire.

Outnumbered by at least two to one, the Australians' training kicked in as they tried to outflank a stubborn strongpoint. A bloody bayonet battle erupted in no man's land.

"A desperate hand encounter followed, in which heavy casualties were inflicted upon the enemy," 10th Battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Wilder-Neligan later wrote in his report of the action.

Realising the attack was merely a raid, German gunners unleashed an artillery barrage between the Australians and their trenches - closing a deadly trap from which few would escape.

Some said Scott, 23, a decorated veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front Battle of Pozieres in 1916, was shot through the head. "The last seen of (Lieutenant) Scott he was trying to fight his way out with his revolver," a survivor reported.

Another recounted: "His belt and revolver were brought in by one man whose name I don't know, but his body was left in no man's land, and as far as I know was not buried."

The Germans committed more men to the hand-to-hand struggle, blocking most of the attack party's escape route.

"Extensive investigations since that time have failed to fully account for the fate of Lt Scott's party," the Army History Unit reports in its advice on the action.

Official war correspondent CEW Bean wrote that the "operation ended disastrously".

"The missing were never heard of again. Their names were not in any list of prisoners received during the war. The Graves Commission found no trace of their bodies after it."

The case of Celtic Wood continues to bitterly divide war historians.

According to the army, 37 of the 85 involved in the attack vanished without trace.

One survivor said just seven made it back to the Australian lines; another put the figure at 14.

The fate of Scott and his men has spawned at least six books that have tossed around a host of explanations for the mystery.

Some speculate they lie in a secret mass grave after being massacred by German troops as payback for an earlier raid.

Vietnam veteran Robert Kearney is finalising a book with fellow historian Chris Henschke.

His solution to the mystery? A familiar muddle of clerical error, battlefield confusion and misreporting. Kearney believes the remains of perhaps 20 Australians still lie in Celtic Wood, but they are beyond recovery.

A Defence spokeswoman said there were no plans to search the area for Australian bodies, but it would consider a search if fresh evidence emerged.