Liverpool & South West Lancashire FHS - Forum

Here is a transription of a leter sent home by the above mention Soldier describing 72 hours in the trenches

A graphic story of seventy two hours fierce fighting in which the 5th Battalion King’s Liverpool Regiment were engaged between May 16 and 19 is furnished in a letter dated June 4 He states:-

“We left our billets at 9.30pm on Saturday, May 15, and arrived in the reserve trenches around 11.30pm. Shortly after a heavy bombardment commenced by our artillery. By 2 a.m the regiments in the firing line had taken the first line of German trenches with a bayonet attack. By 3.30 they had taken a second line.
It then came our turn to move up from the reserve to the firing line trenches. The artillery fire of the enemy was now terrific “A” company of our battalion were then given the orders to dig a sap trench between ours and the enemy’s line of trenches, and it was while performing the dangerous task that Captain Greig, who was in charge of the working party was hit in three places, and I am sorry to say I hear he has died of his wounds in Boulogne. About 8.30 two platoons of “B” company were told to fix bayonets and jump The parapet and make across the open, a distance of about 500 yards, to reinforce our first line, who were still holding the captured trench under heavy shell fire. They had not advanced more than twenty yards across when the German right opened a deadly Maxim gun fire, which practically wiped them all out, as only a few got back. Lieutenant Cohen was among the officers killed in this advance and his brother Major S. Cohen badly wounded in an attempt to get him in. My brother-in-law, a corporal in the same platoon was also killed and I recovered his body the following morning. “On Monday morning nearly a whole battalion of German Infantry surrendered (the 57th Westphalia Regiment) and they looked rather glad to be taken prisoners as our artillery had played havoc, and there were plenty of dead and wounded lying all over their trenches. We were relieved by another brigade in the early hours of Wednesday morning after having seventy two hours of fierce fighting, but we had succeeded in getting three lines of German trenches and two miles of ground. The brigade has suffered heavily, but the Germans must have fared far worse.

In a casualty list published a month after the operation here is a list of all those killed 16th/19th May 1915
KILLED

Sidney Agnew
Robert John Blacoe,
Herbert Boylan,
Arthur William Brown,
William Candeland,
William Francis Connolly,
D’Arcy Curwen,
Thomas W. H Dunwoody,
William Henry Gage,
Robert V Graham,
Harold Harvey,
Joseph W Harvey,
Frank Heward,
Michael Hughes,
James Thomas Johnstone,
Thomas Kirk,
William Lloyd,
Thomas Lyons,
Patrick McConville,
Alexander McDonnell,
Matthew Salmon McRoberts,
Samuel Maddocks,
William Gerald Mallinson,
George Moore,
Robert Naden,
William Edmund Nelson,
James Noble,
John Cornthwaite Page,
Wilfred Pearson,
Job Rees,
Thomas Joseph Rice,
Frank Tomlinson,
Charles William Unsworth,
William Stanley Wade,
William John Westergren,
Gwilym R Williams,
Ralph Williams,
William Williams

DIED OF WOUNDS

James Denny
Tom Durose
William J Green
George Peabody Hellyer
James Harkin
Rupert Firth Kettle

Over 260 wounded

I got really upset reading the account of Malcolm Cuthbertson time in the trenches over that weekend. He was married in 1907 to someone with the surname Green so I wonder if Private William J Green was his BIL

A very emotiv post Katie, thank you.