Military History | VC Corner Australian Cemetery and Memorial — Four Hundred and Ten Without Names

By the Australian War Memorial's account, Charles Bean walked this ground on 11 November 1918 and found the old no-man's-land between Fromelles and Sailly still holding the dead of 19-20 July 1916. Battlefield clearance gathered 410 sets of remains from that strip after the Armistice. Not one could be identified. The Imperial War Graves Commission decided not to mark individual graves at all, and VC Corner became a cemetery without a single headstone: two turf plots either side of a grassed avenue, each with a cross laid flush into the ground, and behind them a stone wall carrying names. The AWM describes it as the only solely Australian war cemetery in France.

The names on the wall are not the men in the plots, and were never meant to be. It was inscribed with 1,299 Australians who died in the attack and have no known grave; the Department of Veterans' Affairs records that 595 of them came from the 58th, 59th and 60th Battalions.

The attack was a feint. Two divisions, the 5th Australian and the British 61st, went against the German 6th Bavarian Reserve Division to hold German reserves away from the Somme. Australian losses in roughly twenty-four hours are put at 5,533 by the AWM, which gives 1,547 for the 61st. German figures vary: the British official history records 1,600 to 2,000, while the AWM has published both "fewer than 1,600" and 1,793.

The name is older than the battle. The AWM holds the wartime signboard and states that its origin is unclear, pointing either to Victoria Crosses won near Aubers Ridge in May 1915 or to the crossroads simply being a dangerous place to wait. No Victoria Cross was awarded for Fromelles.

The Commission's commemoration total has since fallen as men named here were given identified graves, many after the Pheasant Wood recovery of 2009; it now publishes both 1,100 and 1,167 for this memorial. That cemetery lies about 1.8 km south-east. Here, nothing on the ground marks which of the 410 lies where.

📸 Cover: V.C. Corner Australian Cemetery, Fromelles — photo by Pierre André Leclercq, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.