gregory

The CWGC site adds he was Son of John B. and Alice Gregory, of 184, Inkerman St., St. Kilda, Victoria, Australia. www.cwgc.org/search-for-war-dead/casualty/303344/GREGORY,... It looks like the Australian (Virtual) War Memorial run by that countries National Archive has the same picture. cas.awm.gov.au/item/H05532 His Australian Army Papers can be seen here; recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/Imagine.asp?B=4705448 Summary Joined on 2nd August 1915, aged 30 years and nine months at Melbourne. He was born in the Parish of St Kilda near Melbourne. His next of kin was given as his mother Alice, (it was noted that his father had died), living at "Rosedale" 184 Inkerman Road, St Kilda. When his mother signed for his War Medals in February 1923, she was still at the same address. He was a single man. He had done his legal training with the law firm Brockett and Kemp. He had no previous military experience. At his medical he is described as 5 feet 2 and a half inches tall, weighed 9 stone, had a "fresh" complexion, grey eyes, W.K Brown hair.(? - I'm not sure what these initials mean) and somewhat unusually gave his religious denomination as "Agnostic" His distinctive marks includes Moles on the back of the neck and on the chest, and a scar on his nose. Initially assigned to the 7th Re-inforcements of the 21st Battalion, when he first reached the Australian base in Egypt on the 26th Februay 1916 he was assigned to the 60th Battalion before being transferred to the 59th on the 16th March 1916. These were both newly formed units. On the 18th June 1916 he embarked with his Battalion at Alexandria, bound for France. He arrived at Marseilles on the 29th. Three weeks later he would be posted as missing in action. In September 1916 this was changed to Killed in Action, (and CWGC shows him as having a grave) It looks like a Grave Exhumation unit had located a temporary mass grave and had been able to identify the individuals - I wonder if this was one dug by the Germans and with the flow of battle, the ground where his body had lain was now in Allied hands. On the day The 19th July was a terrible day for the newly arrived Australian Units. Intended as a diversionary attack to draw German reserves away from the Somme further south, it achieved nothing militarily and served to increase the Australians reluctance to fight under British leadership. From Wikipedia Fromelles was a combined operation between British troops and the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). It would be the first occasion that the AIF saw action on the Western Front. After a night and a day of fighting, 1,500 British and 5,533 Australian soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The Australian War Memorial describes the battle as "the worst 24 hours in Australia's entire history." It was a decisive victory for the German Empire, and the Australian and British losses were sustained without the Allies gaining any ground. The British General Richard Haking's battle plan called for infantry to rush past the first line of German trenches in a surprise attack during broad daylight, following an artillery bombardment, and to advance a total of about 400 metres to a secondary line. The Australian 5th Division, which had arrived in France only a matter of days before the attack, would assault the left flank of the salient. The British 61st Division (also known as the 2nd South Midland Division) would attack the right flank. By the time the attack was ready to be launched, it was too late for it to serve its original purpose as a preliminary diversion to the main action at the Somme. However, Haking was keen to proceed. On the right flank, the Australian 15th Brigade and the British 184th Brigade were cut to pieces while attempting to cross a wider section of no man's land, closer to German machine guns. A survivor, W. H. "Jimmy" Downing, later recalled: "[t]he air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat, crisscrossed lattice of death. Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb." The unfolding disaster was compounded when the 61st Division asked the 15th Brigade to join a renewed assault at 9 pm, but quickly cancelled its attack without informing the Australians. Consequently half of the Australian 58th Battalion made another futile attempt to capture the salient. The Germans succeeded in driving a wedge between the 14th and 15th Brigades, splitting the Australian forces. Increasingly isolated and out-flanked, the 8th and 14th Brigades were forced to withdraw the following morning. The Germans by this time had set up machine gun enfilades, and the resulting crossfire inflicted devastating casualties on the retreating Australians. The bodies of Allied soldiers killed in the area re-taken by the Germans were buried in mass graves shortly after the battle. They were transported to sites behind German lines and buried in pits. Most of these pits were discovered by official post-war burial campaigns during the 1920s. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fromelles One of those mass graves was to lay undistrubed until recently, and the campaign to idenfify those interred there has generated a lot of interest in the battle. I remember reading reports in connection with the discovery that even the Germans were shocked by the numbers of deaths at the time and offered a 24 hour truce to recover the dead, but this was rejected by the British Generals as it would delay further attacks. Again this was said to have caused a great deal of resentment with the Australians as it was plain that they and the British units were in no state to carry out further attacks, there were no reserves as this was only a diversionary attack with no plan to exploit any successes and little further was to be gained - but there were faces to be saved in high places. In the press at the time it was described as a trench raid in which some German prisoners were taken - the truth is the first casualty of war indeed ! see also www.webmatters.net/france/ww1_fromelles.htm www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/fromelles/ The War diary for the Battalion can be seen here:- www.awm.gov.au/collection/records/awm4/23/76/awm4-23-76-6... One of the Appendices is the Butchers bill for the 19th and 20th July Officers Wounded................13 Missing....................6 Died of Wounds.....2 Total.......................20 Other Ranks Killed.........................13 Wounded................381 Missing...................269 Died of Wounds.....11 Total.......................674

Help piece together the Life Stories of more than 8 million men and women who made a contribution during the First World War at www.livesofthefirstworldwar.org/

this ship (Gregory) is also in the nearly same photo called NY Skyline

Thomas Watt Gregory (1861-1933), lawyer; in 1913 he was appointed special assistant to the US Attorney General in an investigation of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad Company. He became US Attorney General in 1914: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Watt_Gregory

pennylrichardsca: Thanks for the information. It's helpful to know what likely made the photo newsworthy for the Bain News Service. There is another copy of this photograph in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b47712 submitted for copyright on March 13, 1913 by "The Elliotts." This photograph appears to have been copied by the Bain News Service. The smudge on the lower right corner is where the Elliott signature appeared. The negative is marked with two dates in the upper left corner. A Bain file print of this photo is annotated "June 18, 1913 To proceed against New Haven Road for Violation of Anti-Trust Act" so the 6/30/1913 date may relate to this event. The second date, 1/30/24, corresponds to the date that Gregory was named by President Coolidge as Special Council for the Oil Inquiry to investigate what was later to be referred to as the Teapot Dome Scandal. We'll add Gregory's fuller name and the date to the description when we update it.