Fromelles: Australia's Darkest Day and the Dramatic Discovery of Our Fallen World War One Diggers by Patrick Lindsay

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Interior and binding are still excellent.

The Battle of Fromelles was barely reported in 1916. The futile battle, for 400 metres of ground defended by a profusion of German machine guns, has been called the worst 24 hours in Australian history, with more than 5,500 killed, injured or imprisoned, more casualties than the country lost in the Boer War, Korea and Vietnam combined.

Some of the bodies were recovered by the allies, more rotted in no man's land until after the war, but the site of the mass grave dug by the Germans for hundreds of soldiers who fell within their lines was lost. It was not marked on maps and missed in the postwar recovery and reburial of bodies on both sides.

Fromelles tells the story of the painstaking detective work of a group of Australian amateur historians that led to the location of the largest mass war grave site discovered since the Second World War. It follows the story of the battle and why the historians believed the site was missed. It also takes us to the first exploration of the site by archaeologists in 2007 and the June 2008 exhumation that was to reveal the truth.