Private Albert Aubrey Bennie, 8th Australian Infantry Battalion, AIF
Australian War MemorialAlbert Bennie was born Lancefield, a town to the north of Melbourne, around 1885, the fourth son of James and Louisa Bennie.
Known as “Bert”, he attended school in the Melbourne suburbs of Ascot Vale and Mooney Ponds, and went on to find employment as a coach painter.
Bennie enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force at Melbourne on 7 July 1915, and was allotted to reinforcements for the 8th Battalion.
A few months later, on 15 September, Bennie embarked from Melbourne on the troopship Makarini, bound for overseas service.
He arrived on Gallipoli on 7 December 1915, where his unit was defending the beachhead at Anzac. With the evacuation of Gallipoli in late December, Private Bennie arrived in Egypt in early January.
After the doubling of the AIF – during which the AIF expanded by raising new battalions, filling them with a mixture of new recruits and veterans of Gallipoli – in March 1916, Bennie and his battalion sailed for France and the Western Front.
The men arrived at Marseilles before heading for the Somme valley in northern France. The battalion's first major action in France was at Pozieres.
Intended in part to divert the German army’s attention from Verdun, the offensive around Pozieres saw Australian divisions wresting a small, devastated area from the enemy, at a staggering cost. Over 42 days the Australians made as many as 19 attacks against the German positions. The final casualties were around 23,000 men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
The 1st Division, of which the 8th Battalion was part, was the first to go into the battle, on 23 July 1916. The Australians managed to capture the village of Pozieres before being subjected to relentless artillery bombardment that reduced the village to rubble.
The bombardment inflicted a huge number of casualties. Historian Peter Burness stated that “for several weeks Pozieres Pozieres became the focus of the Somme fighting and the worst place to be on earth”.
Of the 23,000 Australian casualties, 6,800 men were killed or died of wounds.
By the time the offensive was abandoned in November, it had resulted in around 500,000 German, 420,000 British and dominion, and 200,000 French casualties. The allied forces had advanced no more than 12 kilometres.
At some point on 25 July 1916, Private Albert Bennie was killed in action. His body was not able to be located after the fighting, and today he is remembered at the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, which commemorates over 10,000 of the dead whose graves are not known.
Albert Bennie was 31 years old. His grieving family regularly placed poems in the newspaper to remember his passing and mark the anniversary of his death. One of them reads:
No loved ones stood around him
To catch his last faint sighs
Or whisper just one loving word
Before he closed his eyes.
- AWM Roll of Honour https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/R1646776
