Lone Pine and Henry Herbert King

¹The battle of Lone Pine was intended as a tactical diversion from attempts by New Zealand and Australian units to force a breakout from the Anzac perimeter in the north at Chunuk Bair and Hill 971.

The Lone Pine attack, launched by the 1st Brigade, AIF, took place in the late afternoon of 6 August 1915 and pitched Australian forces against formidable entrenched Turkish positions, sections of which were securely roofed over with pine logs. In some instances the attackers had to break in through the roofs of the trench systems in order to engage the defenders. The main Turkish trench was taken within 20 minutes of the initial charge, but this was the prelude to four days of intense hand-to-hand fighting as the Turks counter-attacked.

Herbert Henry King, Service No. 1667 4^th Infantry Battalion, of Port Pirie died at Lone Pine on the 6^th of August 1915. Initially Herbert was listed as missing which is not surprising since the dead piled three or four high and the reinforcements ran over them to get to the fighting. The dead Australians and Turks were either buried, stacked in heaps, thrown over the parapet, or used to block the Turkish communication trenches along with sandbags and soil.  ³Proceedings of a court of enquiry held at Flairbax, France on 22^nd April 1916 finally determined that Herbert King was Killed in action. His next of kin and mother Margaret who lived at 30 Howe Street, Jean Park, Port Pirie West was contacted by the AIF Base Records Office as late as May 1921 asking her for any details on her son’s death that might help establish his final resting place; to obviate the necessity of interring him under the heading “An Unknown Australian Soldier”.

 

Lone Pine Memorial, Port Pirie.

²Six Australian battalions suffered nearly 2,300 killed and wounded at Lone Pine.

Seven Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest number ever awarded to an Australian division for one action. ¹Turkish losses were estimated at 6,390.

¹After the battle, Private Thomas Keith McDowell, a miner from Wonthaggi and a soldier in the 23rd Battalion, took a cone from the remains of the actual tree, which was des­troyed in the infamous Battle of Lone Pine in 1915.

The original Lone Pine tree was the only tree to survive from a group of trees that were cut down by Turkish soldiers who had used the timber and branches to cover their trenches during the battle. From the Gallipoli Peninsula, across the deserts of North Africa and the mud of the Somme, for the next year the pine cone accompanied Private McDowell until his return, ill with tuberculosis but uninjured, to Melbourne in October 1916.

Remarkably, about 12 years later, nurtured by the fertile Western District soils at Grassmere by Emma Gray, the green-thumbed aunt of the by-then Sergeant McDowell’s wife Iris, the pine cone produced four flourishing seedlings. 

This tree is a third generation Lone Pine propagated from the pine tree cone, Pinus Brutia.

²Lone Pine Cemetery is the location of the Memorial to the Missing in the Anzac are of Gallipoli and is situated on the ground captured by the Australians during the battle. It commemorates 4,224 Australians who have no known grave. There are 652 Australians buried at Lone Pine cemetery.

Sources:

¹https://www.awm.gov.au/media/lone-pine

²http://www.awmlondon.gov.au/battles/lone-pine

³https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=1971765