Battle of Fromelles

19 days after the start of the Somme campaign a battle took place in the north of France known as the Battle of Fromelles on the 19th of July 1916 at 6pm. This battle involved the armies of the 5th Australian Division and the 61st British trying to take control of a well fortified German position know as the Sugar Loaf Salient though this battle was only fought as a diversion to try force some of the German soldiers to come over from the Somme offensive to hold the position. This battle was rather important to the was because if it succeeded then they would have removed one of the Germans strong positions and given them a major advantage in the battle of Somme because the Germans troops would be spread between 2 different battles. The Australian and British army’s were ordered to do a straight up attack against the Germans, the Australians attacking from the north and the British from the west. The battle was a bloodbath many Australian troops falling extremely quickly to the German machine gunners, a few of the German trenches were captured by the Australian brigades but this proved useless when the Germans launched a large counter attack and were pushed back out of the trenches and forced to retreat from the battle though the British were slightly more successful being able to break through to the German lines but were quickly pushed out, therefore both Australian and British were both nowhere near being able to neutralize the enemies occupying the sugar loaf, with the 5th Australian division having 5,533 casualties and 1,917 of them being killed, and the 61st British division having 1,547 casualties, 519 of them being killed. The wounded lay on the battlefield for next couple of days while the British and Australians tried to organise a truce with the Germans to be able to collect their wounded.

The Battle resulted with a complete failure, because they had lost the fight with the Germans still holding the position and only losing around 1000 troops, with the...