Chapter Six

THE WORLD’S AFFAIRS

*

Owing to the present unsettled state of the world’s affairs it is not proposed to immediately carry on the work of northern exploration, but no doubt in the event of a satisfactory conclusion of the [war] there will be several capable scientists willing and anxious for an opportunity to carry on this interesting and useful work.

Wilkins’ report to Canadian government, August 19161

From Alaska, Wilkins travelled to New York, and then took a sea passage to England, arriving in London in October 1916, where he met two Australians who were already famous polar explorers — Sir Douglas Mawson and Frank Hurley.

Mawson had first gone to Antarctica in 1907 with Ernest Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition. While Shackleton attempted to reach the South Pole, Mawson, along with two companions, Edgeworth David and Alistair Forbes McKay, reached the South Magnetic Pole in January 1909. [McKay had sailed on the Karluk with Wilkins and Stefansson, but was one of the people who died after the ship drifted away from the Alaskan coast.] Mawson returned to Australia and planned an expedition of his own to explore the area of Antarctica directly below Australia. To help fund his expedition, Mawson decided to take a professional photographer so that, in addition to any book rights he might sell, he could also exploit film and photographs. For his photographer, Mawson hired James Francis (Frank) Hurley.

Hurley was born on 15 October 1885 in the Sydney suburb of Glebe. A rebellious streak drove him to leave school at the age of 13 and to find work in the nearby Lithgow steel mills. He discovered his love of photography at an early age. When the 20th century began, Hurley was already haunting local camera clubs and learning how to expose plates, mix chemicals, and print pictures. He soon had a reputation for producing exciting pictures for the lucrative postcard market, and he staged his first exhibition in Kodak’s George Street Gallery in 1910. One of his biographers noted:

Hurley did not work in a single medium: he was an old-fashioned showman whose repertoire included both traditional and modern media, which he used in both old and new ways. The shows he put on [were] complex multimedia performances that he called ‘synchronized lecture entertainments’. They used a combination of photographic exhibitions, saturation newspaper coverage, the presence of a celebrity lecturer or ‘platform personality’, silent cinema projection, coloured-glass lantern slides, live musical accompaniment, themed theatre decorations and mainstream book publication, all tied in to achieve maximum advertising exposure.

The performances were entertaining as well as educational, drawing as much attention to their own attractions as to the events they purported to represent.2

Hurley was a showman in an age of showmen. Films and photographs were two mediums revolutionising popular entertainment, and he wanted to use his cameras to be at the forefront. Hurley was invited onto history’s stage in 1911 when Mawson asked him to be the ‘camera artist’ for the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. He sailed with the expedition in December 1911, and returned to Australia in March 1913. His resulting film, The Home of the Blizzard, was an international success.

Meanwhile, the irrepressible Shackleton was planning a return to Antarctica to cross the continent via the South Pole. Shackleton, having seen The Home of the Blizzard, asked Hurley to join him. Hurley agreed, and sailed on the ill-fated Endurance. The ambitious expedition reached South Georgia in the South Atlantic, where Shackleton ignored the warnings of the local whalers and sailed for the Weddell Sea in December 1914. The Endurance became trapped in the ice pack, and the men spent the winter hoping that it would be freed in the spring. Instead, it was slowly crushed, slipping below the surface in November 1915. Hurley filmed and photographed the slow destruction of the ship and the ordeal of the men. Following an epic tale of survival, Hurley returned to England with film and photographs of the most dramatic Antarctic adventure since Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole.

In London, Hurley met Wilkins, who had just returned from the Arctic and was preparing to visit his mother in Australia. The two men, recently back from the polar regions, hit it off immediately. No doubt they discussed their respective expeditions and the difficulties of obtaining photographs under polar conditions. Hurley’s diary reveals he had dinner with Wilkins on at least three occasions — twice in the company of Lady Scott, the widow of Robert Scott. They also went to see Herbert Ponting’s show, With Captain Scott in the Antarctic. Ponting had accompanied Scott to Antarctica as official photographer in 1909. The death of Scott and his companions on their return from the South Pole in March 1912 was seen as a noble sacrifice in a quest for national glory. During the war it was held up as an example of British manhood, and was used to recruit soldiers. Almost five years after Scott’s death, Ponting was still exhibiting his show and enthralling audiences with his films.

Hurley returned again and again to see With Captain Scott in the Antarctic, each time enthusing about Ponting’s delivery and showmanship. It made him realise that something was missing from the films and photographs he had brought back from Shackleton’s expedition. In Ponting’s show, every time the penguins waddled across the screen, the audience was delighted. After his fifth viewing of the film, Hurley’s mind was made up. He would return to Antarctica, or at least to South Georgia, where he could film penguins to add to his show. He left London in February 1917, sailed to South Georgia, and returned four months later, ready to stage the most exciting show about Antarctica ever produced.

Wilkins left London at the same time as Hurley, but sailed instead to Australia. He visited his mother in Adelaide, then travelled to Melbourne where, on 1 May 1917, he enlisted, joining the 9th Reinforcements of the Australian Flying Corps (AFC). When required to answer the question, ‘What is your trade or calling?’ he wrote ‘explorer’.

Wilkins no longer considered himself a cinematographer. Not only did he want to return to the Arctic when the opportunity arose, but he wanted to do so with aeroplanes. By joining the AFC, he could learn to fly and use the experience after the war. He later noted:

It was in 1913 that I proposed to fly over the Arctic Ocean … I did not enjoy following the dogs or running ahead of them over soft, spring-thawed snow or wandering along ice-strewn beaches during the long winter darkness … I liked to imagine I was up in the air, sailing along in an airship or aeroplane with the broad panorama of ice beneath me. Is it any wonder that I should often say to Stefansson, ‘We should give up this old-fashioned mode of travel, go back and get aeroplanes with which we could cover in one season all the work you have planned to do’.3

Wilkins underwent flight training at the Point Cook military flying school, west of Melbourne, and then travelled to Sydney and embarked for England on 10 May 1917.

***

While the formation of the Australian War Records Section (AWRS) began to make its way slowly through official channels, Bean managed to wangle a promise directly from Haig that Australia would be allowed its own official photographer. Haig instructed Charteris to find someone to work with Bean, and Charteris in turn nominated Herbert Baldwin, an English press photographer, who had covered the Balkan War four years earlier. Baldwin thereby became Australia’s first official war photographer.*

[* Baldwin was among the correspondents who, like Wilkins, had covered the Balkan War from the Turkish side. Baldwin witnessed the angry Turk throw John Banister’s camera into the ditch of water, and described the incident in his book, A War Photographer in Thrace, although he did not mention Wilkins by name. He also described the incident when Wilkins, Grant, and McCullagh slipped away to travel to the front, again not mentioning them by name.]

Bean was pleased to write in his diary, ‘Baldwin is to have his own developer, his own car, his own developing room here; he has obtained the help of an Australian to develop for him and is at once to be allowed to use his cinema [camera].’4

Despite his dedication to recording the Australians in the war, along with his dislike of the English class system, Bean retained a snobbery inherited from his father. He confided in his diary:

Last evening I took Baldwin, our photographer, into Amiens to the press headquarters. As we got into the pleasant sitting room I was wondering how the other men would take him. He is not perfectly educated, but a good little chap with an opinion I have already learned to respect. I did not take him to dinner there, as I was not certain how they would welcome him. The moment he got inside the door it was: ‘Hullo old man — how’s Bucharest?’ and ‘Let me see, didn’t I know you in Constantinople?’ ‘Where was it I saw you last — Calais or Dunkirk?’ Gibbs, Phillips — all of them seem to [have] foregathered with him in some corner of the Earth.

It was an eye-opener to me — and I was just a little ashamed of not having brought him to dinner … it looked as if I was the snob after all.5

As both sides settled down for the winter, Bean took Baldwin to the sites of Australia’s battles to photograph the aftermath. Baldwin would eventually produce approximately 500 images of the Anzacs.

Throughout the winter of 1916–17, the Allies and Germany developed strategies for the coming spring.

Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff had taken over the fatigued German war effort during the final stages of the Battle of the Somme. The popular von Hindenburg and the brilliant but eccentric Ludendorff, seeing that their troops were not advancing, sought to stop them retreating by building a fortified defence system known as the Hindenburg Line. It consisted of concrete machine-gun posts, tunnels for moving troops, and heavy belts of barbed wire, along with bunkers and trenches. Importantly, by constructing the Hindenburg Line to the rear of their meandering trench system, the Germans could shorten their western front by 50 kilometres. It would take fewer men to defend it. In early 1917, as the mud of winter became firmer, the Germans found they could release 13 divisions from manning the trenches and, therefore, rest and rotate them behind the Hindenburg Line.

While the Germans built the Hindenburg Line, the British and French were excited about an invention they hoped would overcome the stalemate of the trenches — the tank. These huge, lumbering iron giants, so named because the original designs resembled water tanks, were meant to roll forward, over the tops of the trenches, oblivious to machine-gun fire and barbed wire.

Spring 1917 arrived with the British and French putting their faith in tanks, and the Germans putting theirs in the newly constructed Hindenburg Line.

In the Somme, the Australian 4th Division prepared to take part in Haig’s latest offensive. The division’s role was to attack, and hold, the small village of Bullecourt, a few kilometres behind the Hindenburg Line. Instead of employing the usual softening-up process with heavy artillery, this time the soldiers could follow the tanks into battle. The tanks would roll forward, crush the barbed wire, and destroy the machine-gun nests, and then the soldiers would follow to mop up the defeated Germans. Or so the plan went. The attack was scheduled for the morning of 10 April, but by 5.00 a.m. the tanks hadn’t arrived. They had become lost in the darkness, and were still more than an hour away. The attack was postponed for 24 hours.

On 11 April, only four of the 12 tanks reached the front line ready to push forward. Despite this, the Anzacs charged the Hindenburg Line, and were cut down in their hundreds. A small number got through the barbed wire, breached the Hindenburg Line, and fought the Germans in hand-to-hand combat. But it wasn’t long before they realised they were running short of ammunition and that no support would be arriving. They had no choice but to turn and try to flee back across no man’s land, while the Germans shot at them from behind. Almost 1,200 men were taken prisoner, while more than 3,000 Australians were killed or wounded. The tanks had failed.

Behind the Anzac lines, Bean had Baldwin carefully photographing soldiers and locations for the official record; but three days after First Bullecourt, he noticed, ‘Baldwin the little photographer is very ill with dysentery, and has asked for leave to go home and get proper food’. Despite his illness, Baldwin stuck at it bravely, regularly pushing forward to get close to the actual fighting. Bean called him a ‘game little bird’, and noted he sometimes went off on his own, even attempting to photograph the Germans. ‘If he doesn’t look out he’ll get taken prisoner.’6

Three weeks after the first disastrous attempt to attack Bullecourt, Haig tried again. The tanks, which had failed miserably the first time, did not figure in the second attack. The traditional strategy of softening up the enemy with an artillery barrage, followed by the men storming ‘over the top’ to cross no man’s land, was employed. On 3 May, British soldiers attacked Bullecourt. Anzacs from the 1st, 2nd, and 5th Divisions joined the attack. The battle lasted two weeks before the Germans blew up their trenches and retreated. British and Australian soldiers had not only succeeded in breaching the Hindenburg Line, but they had gained and held the village of Bullecourt. (The Germans would retake it in March 1918.) As expected, the cost of Second Bullecourt was high, with the Australians sustaining 7,482 casualties.

By Second Bullecourt, Baldwin’s illness was so bad as to incapacitate him. He was hospitalised, and Bean was left to rue the fact that he obtained no photographs of the Anzac victory.

While the Anzacs fought at Bullecourt, the Australian War Records Section officially commenced operation. The date, 16 May 1917, marks the beginning of what would become the Australian War Memorial. As Bean was still a civilian journalist, the man put in charge of the AWRS was John Linton Treloar, who later recalled he was in France when he was sent for by General White who, being busy at the time, told him abruptly: ‘General Birdwood has decided that there is to be a War Records Section at AIF Headquarters in London. You have been selected to establish it. Good afternoon.’7 Treloar knew nothing about collecting war records, but took to his task with enthusiasm, diligence, and a strong sense of duty. He travelled to London, established an office in Horseferry Road, and began collecting the official unit diaries. Bean had an ally, along with somewhere to send the material he collected. All he needed now was a replacement for Baldwin.

By mid-1917, the war hung in the balance. The French general, Robert Nivelle, who was responsible for holding the southern length of the Western Front, had repeatedly thrown his troops against the Germans in costly, ill-advised battles. French deaths were counted in the millions. During May 1917, a series of mutinies within the French army threatened it with collapse. France’s premier, Alexandre Ribot, replaced Nivelle with Phillipe Pétain, whose task was to rest the troops and restore their confidence.

Meanwhile, in Russia, which, like France, had suffered a very heavy human toll, a revolution had seen the Tsar overthrown and the royal family killed. Britain and France, who were Russia’s allies, watched nervously, wondering if the new provisional government would withdraw from the war, thereby freeing up German troops to move to the Western Front.

America had avoided entering the war until this time. In 1915, a German submarine had sunk the American passenger ship Lusitania in the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, America’s president, Woodrow Wilson, had extracted a promise from Germany not to sink any more US ships. For the remainder of 1915 and throughout 1916, Germany complied and the Americans stayed home. But in a desperate move to stop American goods and food reaching England, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare at the beginning of 1917, and promptly sank seven American merchant ships. At the same time, the Germans were caught foolishly urging Mexico to launch guerrilla attacks against their northern neighbour. That was the last straw — the US Congress declared war against Germany on 6 April 1917. Initially, only 75,000 young Americans enlisted, so Congress introduced a bill to conscript men into the army. America started training a staggering 2,800,000 troops, and informed Britain that they would be ready for battle by May 1918.

After Second Bullecourt, Haig realised that slow, costly battles to take the Hindenburg Line, and then hold it against German retaliation along the Somme Valley, could drag the war on indefinitely. He switched his attention to northern France and Belgium, in a region known as Flanders.

The first stage of the new British strategy would be to clear the Germans south of the strategic city of Ypres. The Germans had held the Messines Ridge curving around Ypres since 1915, and they would have to be dislodged from the high ground if the Allies were to protect the important city. Since 1915 the British had been digging extensive tunnel systems under the ridge. If they could not rush across no man’s land and kill the enemy, they reasoned, they would dig under the ridge and blow them up. By June 1917, 21 Allied tunnels had been stuffed with nearly 450,000kg of explosives. The big bang was planned for 7 June.

Bean was ready to get photographs of the battle, as Baldwin had recovered sufficiently to return from England on 4 June. He and Bean were in position to photograph the detonation, which Bean knew would be set off at 3.00 a.m., and then be followed a few hours later by the infantry rushing forward to kill the dazed Germans and claim the Messines Ridge. Bean recorded, ‘Baldwin, from our trench, got an admirable film of the bombardment, only beginning a minute or two, too late, unfortunately. However it was very good.’

Nevertheless, Baldwin’s health, both mental and physical, had been irreparably damaged. He returned to London shortly after the attack on Messines Ridge, and was discharged from duty as medically unfit on 21 June. Bean began the task of finding a replacement, but war photographers were in short supply. In frustration, he wrote to the British prime minister to plead his case:

To Prime Minister Lloyd George.

I am responsible for our national records, to a large extent, and I sometimes find that our desire for a very complete record for our nation is thwarted by incidental rules and machinery, which are made to apply to British officials, who may not wish to build up such a complete record.

For example, my Government and the nation has again and again missed getting a quite invaluable set of photographs of such fights as Bullecourt and Messines because there is a rule against my carrying a camera unless I have a commission … those records which might have existed in your national galleries, and ours, are lost.8

Bean spent four weeks in London trying to organise a photographer to replace Baldwin. While he was there, he spoke to Henry Smart, a former journalist working at the Australian High Commission. Smart had often acted as a go-between for Bean and Treloar, using his influence and contacts to help the AWRS get their artefacts and war trophies out of France. Smart informed Bean that he had spoken with Sir Douglas Mawson, who had explained that Frank Hurley was due back from South Georgia in a few days, and that he would make an excellent choice for an official photographer. Hopeful that Hurley would be the answer to his needs, Bean hurried to France to get the British photographers to capture a record of Messines.

Back in France, Bean met with Charteris to explain the type of photographs he wanted for the AWRS. Bean opened the conversation by suggesting that many opportunities to record the war for posterity had been missed. He soon found himself in an argument with the censor over what was, and what was not, military history. Charteris started angrily, ‘We have the photographic panorama taken from our front line — and as a military student I tell you that it is all that I desire to have; it helps me far more that any photograph that you could take.’

Bean argued that these large, panoramic views only covered a small part of what he wanted. He hoped to get detailed pictures of the famous trenches in which the fighting had taken place, along with views of Mouquet Farm and other landmarks before they were altered. More importantly, Bean wanted to photograph and record the names of the soldiers — the young men who were in the trenches, risking their lives for their country. It was a concept that was foreign to Charteris and GHQ. Charteris countered Bean’s idea by attacking his aims on a personal level, saying, ‘No history that you can write can be of any importance, except purely locally … The real history will be written by somebody right away from the war ... Your history cannot have the same value.’

But Bean continued to push his case for intimate and detailed photographs of the men, noting in his diary:

I quite realised the difficulty to write a war from the middle of it; and I quite realised that I might never finish the war. But I hoped I would; and if I did I felt I was in a position in which scarcely any historian of a war had ever been — that of a man who will write about a war, [in] which he has been in every important trench and seen almost every important event. The illustrations and incidents would be true in detail.9

Finally, Bean’s persistence paid off. Charteris suggested he consider using two photographers — one to take the public photographs of the Australians, similar to the propaganda photographs the British were taking, and a second person to take the ‘record photographs’ that Bean wanted. Initially, it seemed an ambitious plan. Bean had spent a year struggling to get one photographer to follow the Anzacs about, and now he was asking for two. But Frank Hurley, who was back in London, told Brigadier-General Thomas Griffiths, commander of the AIF Administration Headquarters, that he had the ideal candidate. His friend Wilkins was on his way from Australia. Bean recorded:

Griffiths has suggested a second young photographer, a young officer from the Australian Flying Corps … I have put to White … a scheme by which the senior photographer is responsible for the picturesque and press work, and the junior to see that every historically important place or event is recorded — two quite different departments. The British don’t — or haven’t begun to attempt to keep the latter sort of record — an irredeemable loss.10

Wilkins arrived in London on 1 August 1917, expecting to be a pilot in the AFC. Instead, he was told to report to Griffiths, who informed him that he was to be an official photographer, along with Hurley. Wilkins recalled:

I knew and liked Hurley, and I realised it was true that as an official photographer I would see more of the war than I would as a pilot.

[Griffiths] said that I could keep my rank in the Flying Corps; that I could fly whenever it was desirable to get pictures from the air, and that I would be expected to be with every section of the army and photograph it in action.11

Hurley and Wilkins left London on 17 August and took the ferry to France, where Bean met them at Calais. Bean must have been brimming with excitement at the arrival of two healthy, adventurous Australian photographers dedicated to recording the images he wanted. He noted, ‘It is curious that Hurley has spent the last five years in the South Polar Region. Wilkins has spent the last three years with Stefansson’s expedition exploring for the Canadian Government.’12

THE PHOTOGRAPHS November 1916–June 1917

First Bullecourt

Second Bullecourt

The Battle of Messines Ridge

Australia’s official photographs from the Western Front are generally prefixed with the letter ‘E’. The majority of the E-series photographs can be viewed online at the Australian War Memorial’s home page (www.awm.gov.au): click on the ‘Collection’ tab, and enter the photograph number (e.g., E00164), before clicking ‘Search’. When the thumbnail is displayed, it can be enlarged by clicking on it, and the full caption can be read.

Baldwin was responsible for taking approximately 500 E-series photographs. Exact numbers can never be accurately determined, because the majority of the E series are credited to an ‘Unknown Australian Official Photographer’. At the beginning, the photographs are catalogued roughly in chronological order. E00001 to E00579 were, in the main, taken by Baldwin, although the numbers E00255 to E00336 are not assigned a photograph. E00586 to E00655 also appear to have been taken by Baldwin, before Wilkins and Hurley arrived.

At other times, photographs from later periods have been catalogued with those from an earlier period, while Baldwin’s photographs can be found in small clusters later in the series. For example, E01416 to E01419 show tanks being tested in preparation for the Battle of Messines Ridge. These are photographs taken by Baldwin, but they are catalogued with photographs taken by Wilkins and Hurley.

Photographs E00018 to E00579, in the main, show the life of the Anzacs from November 1916 until June 1917, although First and Second Bullecourt are under-represented because of Baldwin’s illness.

Some of the photographs of the deserted battlefield at Pozières and Mouquet Farm can be seen in E00005 to E00015 inclusive. These are listed by the AWM as having been taken during October 1916, but Wilkins has initialled them in Wilkins Volume XII, indicating that he took these photographs a year later when he visited the area with Bean.

The following 100-or-so photographs show the life of the Anzacs as they prepared for winter at the end of 1916. By E00131, winter had set in. The next 70 photographs mostly show the conditions that the Anzacs endured throughout the winter of 1916–17. E00164 and E00171 are fine examples.

The photograph of the stretcher-bearers carrying the white flag, which Charteris wanted destroyed, is E04947.

Bean and Henry Smart can be seen in the trenches in E00064 and E00087. An often-published photograph of Bean, holding a telescope, is E00246. Treloar can be seen at work in the Central Registry, France, shortly before he was appointed to the AWRS in E00380. A photograph of Baldwin, showing the size of a glass plate camera, is E00222.