Lieutenant Cecil Stanley Oliver
2ND AUSTRALIAN MACHINE GUN COMPANY
CECIL OLIVER WAS A 23-YEAR-OLD builder from the Melbourne suburbs. A member of the Malvern Rifle Club, he had also spent two years with a territorial artillery unit before, waiting for his parents to take a trip to Queensland, he volunteered to go to war in 1915. Like Leslie Charles, Cecil had been invalided to England from Gallipoli. He suffered painful stomach problems owing to dysentery picked up in the squalor of the Dardanelles. It took weeks for him to be able to resume a normal diet and it was not until February 1916 that he managed to rejoin his unit, which had by then been evacuated to Egypt.
Lieutenant Cecil Oliver. (Australian National War Memorial)
Cecil initially served in a machine-gun company within the 6th Australian Infantry Battalion, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that, as the industrialised nature of the war progressed and the dominance of the machine gun was established in the tight, static landscape of the trenches, their function called for expansion. At the end of 1915 it was approved that, rather than serving within a battalion, gunners with mounted machine guns, who by now were recognised as specialists, should be withdrawn and come under the newly instigated banner of the Machine Gun Corps. In infantry terms, one company would be attached to each brigade; one to every four infantry battalions.
Cecil joined the 2nd Australian Brigade’s Machine Gun Company in March 1916. As he arrived on the Somme, he wrote home to say he had heard that his transfer had been approved to join the flying services, but he was awaiting news of his departure and so work carried on as normal. The Australians planned to expand upon their gains at Pozières, but as a result of being the only success story among numerous failures on 23rd July, the Germans focused their attentions fully on them in the aftermath. The enemy wanted the village back, with all of its defensive benefits, and made several attempts on the 23rd alone. Cecil and his machine-gun company left for the forward lines and came into the line at a strong point nearby on 25th July. The outgoing troops were exhausted, having been in action since zero hour more than forty-eight hours before.
Throughout the 26th, the village was showered with artillery shells. In the early evening, believing that the rate of fire could only mean that an attack was imminent, the Australians appealed for a counter-barrage. British and Australian gunners leapt into action. The Germans met their fire in kind and it was not until late in the night that it finally began to die down. Harrowed Australians had never experienced such savagery. Trenches dug in the morning had been smashed into oblivion by the evening.
It then remained to count the cost of the artillery bombardment and the enemy fire that the 2nd Machine Gun Company had been forced to endure. Cecil had been shot in the chest. As the rest of the company began to march back towards Albert, he was evacuated to a field ambulance.
Horace Callaghan and Cecil Oliver were just two casualties inflicted upon the 1st Australian Division. In the opening throes at Pozières the formation suffered more than 5,000 casualties in their first fully fledged action away from Gallipoli. Those that watched them march out were horrified. ‘They looked like men who had been in Hell. Almost without exception each man looked drawn and haggard, and so dazed that they appeared to be walking in a dream.’ It had been a harrowing introduction to the Western Front. When they reached the rear, they collapsed into a state of quiet exhaustion. ‘They were like boys emerging from long illness. Many lay quietly apart from the others, rolled in their blankets under the trees, reading books, smoking, writing … letters.’ Lieutenant Cecil Stanley Oliver died of his wounds on 31st July and was laid to rest at Warloy-Baillon Communal Cemetery Extension, plot I.D.13.