The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of (374) Thomas Henry Rawlings, 38th Battalion, AIF, First World War.

The Last Post Ceremony is presented in the Commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial each day. The ceremony commemorates more than 102,000 Australians who have given their lives in war and other operations and whose names are recorded on the Roll of Honour. At each ceremony the story behind one of the names on the Roll of Honour is told. Hosted by Craig Berelle, the story for this day was on (374) Thomas Henry Rawlings, 38th Battalion, AIF, First World War.

374 Thomas Henry Rawlings, 38th Battalion, AIF
KIA 4 October 1917

Story delivered 13 April 2017

Today we remember and pay tribute to Private Thomas Rawlings.

Thomas Henry Rawlings was born in 1898, one of five children of Thomas and Mary Rawlings of Mildura in north-west Victoria. The Rawlings family were well-known and respected in the local community, with Thomas’s father being the chairman of the Mildura Irrigation Trust and presiding in the local police court in the years before the war. After attending Nichol’s Point State School and Mildura High School, Thomas worked as a horticulturalist. He also served in the local cadet unit in accord with the compulsory military training scheme. Once war was declared, the Rawlings family were heavily involved in the Mildura Recruiting Committee and the local Red Cross sub-branch.

Thomas Rawlings enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in Mildura in March 1916, immediately after his 18th birthday. According to the local newspaper he was “so desirous of doing his duty to the Empire that his parents did not stand in his way”. He spent three months training at Epsom Racecourse in Bendigo and the military camp at Camberwell near Melbourne, after which he embarked for the training camps in England as an original member of the 38th Battalion. The battalion spent several more months training at Lark Hill on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, before sailing for France in December 1916.

Rawlings entered the trenches of the Western Front for the first time near the town of Armentières, where the 38th Battalion learned the rigours and routine of trench warfare in France. Here they patrolled no man’s land at night and carried out trench raids on the Germans opposite them.

Rawlings was in hospital recovering from a minor inflammatory complaint when 400 members of the battalion conducted its “big raid” on the German trenches near Houplines in February 1917.

His first major action on the Western Front took place at nearby Messines on 7 of June 1917, when the 38th Battalion captured and held the devastated German defences following the detonation of 19 underground mines beneath the Wytschaete-Messines Ridge.

In the following weeks, the British conducted a major offensive that sought to break out of the Ypres Salient and reclaim the northern Belgian coastline from the German army. The Australians were involved in a series of methodically-planned attacks carried out on a limited front, which drove a wedge into the German defences towards Passchendaele village. The 38th Battalion was involved in the attack at Broodseinde on 4 October 1917, in what was one of the last successes of Third Battle of Ypres before the campaign bogged down in the quagmire of thick glutinous mud. The 38th Battalion took their objectives that day, overcoming a number of German machine-gun positions once the artillery’s “creeping barrage” rolled over the top of them. It was a short, sharp and successful operation carried out as the battalion had planned. According to the officer commanding A Company, of which Thomas was part, “there were no conspicuously gallant acts but the whole of the company went over without exception, animated by a desire to do their duty to the utmost”.

But victory came at a cost, with 184 members of the 38th Battalion being killed and wounded during the Broodseinde attack. Among the dead was Thomas Rawlings, who was 19 years old. His body was never recovered from the battlefield, and today his name is listed on the the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres, among 6,187 Australian soldiers killed fighting in Belgium who have no known grave.

His name is also listed on the Roll of Honour on my right, among more than 60,000 Australians who died while serving in the First World War.

This is but one of the many stories of service and sacrifice told here at the Australian War Memorial. We now remember Private Thomas Rawlings, who gave his life for us, for our freedoms, and in the hope of a better world.