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Clip description
Australian soldiers study a large ground plan of the Messines area, in the days before the attack. A shell appears to have just been fired from nearby. Closer to the front, British artillery pounds the German positions at Messines, observed from close at hand by artillery spotters who telephone reports back to the gun batteries. The road to Messines is choked with men going forward, and mules carrying supplies. Stretcher-bearers bring the wounded back. A group of soldiers with recently-dressed wounds share cigarettes.
Curator’s notes
The attack at Messines was meticulously planned over a long period, as the tunnellers prepared their deep mines under the German positions. The large contour plan laid out on the ground gives us a sense of the planning, as it would have taken some time to construct. The AWM holds a photograph showing Capt Albert Jacka, VC, one of the most famous Australians of the war, at this site on 6 June 1917 (E00631). The photographer is unknown, although it is likely to have been Herbert Baldwin, since he was the Australian Imperial Force’s official photographer, and he took these moving images at the same place. If it was Baldwin, then it is possible that the soldiers we see here marching up are members of Jacka’s 14th Battalion. The contour map was built at Petit Pont, near Hill 63, a few kilometres south-west of the town of Messines. Another photograph taken the same day (E00629) shows 14th Battalion soldiers at the same site.
The shots of the barrage on 5 June are interesting. The early shots are at some distance, but not the ones immediately after we see the artillery observers (the three soldiers with the phone). The next shot, of a shell landing in a prominent ruined building, is no more than a few hundred metres from what we are led to believe are the German positions. This appears to show that Baldwin got very close indeed to the action that day, but there is a reasonable doubt that these images are correctly titled (see clip two).
The British barrage lasted for seven days and was intended to send the Germans deep into their underground bunkers, so that more would be killed when the mines beneath those bunkers were detonated. The intensity of this barrage is believed to have contributed to Baldwin’s physical and emotional distress. He was sent home to Britain soon after, declared ‘medically unfit’. He was an experienced war photographer, having covered the First Balkan War in 1912–13 and the campaign in Mesopotamia in 1916, but he was plagued by illness during the eight months he worked on the Western Front. Messines was the last action he covered. He died in England in 1920.
