VC Corner Cemetery

Location

Fromelles is a village 16 kilometres west of Lille and VC Corner Australian Cemetery is 2 kilometres north-west of Fromelles on the road to Sailly.

The cemetery is just after the Australian Memorial which is well signposted from the village. You drive down the hill passed the church and out a narrow bending road.

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Historical Information

On the morning of 19th July 1916, after a preliminary bombardment, the 5th Australian and 61st (South Midland) Divisions undertook what is officially known as the Attack at Fromelles.

The 61st Division attack failed in the end, with the loss of over 1,000 officers and men out of 3,410 who took part in it.

The Australian left and centre reached the German trenches and held their second line during the day and night, but the right was held off by a fierce machine-gun barrage and only reached the front line in isolated groups.

The action was broken off on the morning of 20th July, after the 5th Australian Division had lost over 5 000 officers and men.

It was the first serious engagement of the Australian forces in France, and the only one to achieve no success.

VC Corner Cemetery was made after the Armistice. It contains the graves of over 400 Australian soldiers who died in the Attack at Fromelles and whose bodies were found on the battlefield, but not a single body could be identified.

It was therefore decided not to mark the individual graves, but to record on a screen wall the names of all the Australian soldiers who were killed in the engagement and whose graves were not known.

The memorial, designed by Sir Herbert Baker, commemorates 1 299 Australian casualties.

I have photos of all the panels.

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Pheasant Wood

Following the recovery of the remains of 250 soldiers at Pheasant Wood in 2009 sixty eight of those commemorated on this memorial were identified by an Identification Board in 2010.

A further six soldiers commemorated at Villers Bretonneux were also identified, whilst another is in theory already buried at Rue Petillon Military Cemetery on the battlefield (Five minutes drive from here).

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Private George Shephard 2776
Private Thomas Shephard 2778
Their other brother, John 2777 had died on the 12th July and is buried in Marseilles

A Family Affair

There are numerous pairs of brothers commemorated on the memorial whilst in some cases one brother is here and the other was identified and buried elsewhere.

Those that I am aware of are:

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Other cemeteries in the area

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