“It appears you have all forgotten me.” – words Robert Henry Smith wrote home to Tingha on an undated postcard from the front lines in Belgium in 1917.
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He was later killed by a German shell in the Battle of Passchendaele in October that year never having received a letter from home.
He was 22-years-old.
“We can’t imagine it.” Rick Smith, a former Air Force serviceman and Robert Henry Smith’s great nephew said. Mr Smith never knew the inscription on the Tingha memorial gates was for his great uncle.
Robert Smith has no known grave, according to online records. In March, 1918, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Robert Henry Smith of Tingha missing. But after a tour of French and Belgium battlefields in 2014, where Mr Smith stood metres from where his wartime ancestor was killed, he said he felt an overwhelming obligation to bring the digger home.
Robert Henry Smith’s postcard home
Dear Jill,
A few lines to let you know that I have not forgotten you, Fred and little Claire and Freda, though it appears you have all forgotten me. And why is a mystery to me which I cannot solve and probably never shall. Why is it. Of course it may be you have written and I may not have received your letter, however I will look forward to a letter as I have been doing for a year now.
Will close now with best love to you, Fred and the children,
Your loving Bro.
Bob.
Standing where he stood
“I made it a mission that I would help to bring him back home to his family,” he said.
Mr Smith has spent the last three years compiling historical record and wartime footage documenting his forebear’s service, which he hopes will connect the fallen digger to his living extended family.
“There were some regrets on my part too that I had lived so many years in total ignorance of a man who thought that his family had totally forgotten him,” Mr Smith said.
Robert Smith was 21 when he enlisted in 1916 and travelled by train to Armidale. He was assigned to D-company with the 33rd Battallion, a contingent of mostly local men headed for the front.
Smith arrived at Plymouth aboard the Marathon and was deployed to northern France where, as a scout, he participated in the battles at Messines and Tyne Cot before he was killed at Passchendaele.
“It was just a mud pit with more than a million shells fired into the area,” Mr Smith said. “The whole place was just mud. And there were these huge bombed craters just filled with water.
Mr Smith said his research had found a soldier interviewed after the war: “he said at Passchendaele there were no blighties. A blighty was a wound that would get your back to England for recovery.
“There were no blighties. You either survived, or you died.”
Mr Smith said the story struck home when a battlefield guide in Belgium helped recreate his ancestor’s final moments.
“It was such a sense of achievement to now be able to visualise a young boy leaving his home in Tingha, taking the rail journey to Armidale, going overseas - they all believed it was going to be a great adventure - and to stand where he stood in all the other events where he wasn't killed, and then to have this fellow take me, almost by the hand, and lead me to the very spot where this fellow had been killed - a man who, only months before, I hadn't been aware of,” he said.
“The whole chain of events just gave me an overwhelming sense of obligation to come home and recreate his life.”
A military family
“I never knew that I was actually, in some respects, following the path of my great uncle,” Mr Smith said.
He joined the Air Force in 1969, where he spent 20 years, but had no knowledge of his great uncle or his cousin who was killed at New Guinea.
Flying Officer Albert Thomas Smith was a Wirraway pilot in the Second World War, killed on the flight home for a bombing mission when his plane crashed in a mountain concealed by cloud.
“The whole time that I was in the Air Force, I knew nothing about them,” Mr Smith said.
In his own military career, he served in every Australian state on a signals crew and spent two years in Malaysia.
“I didn’t fly, I wasn’t air crew,” Mr Smith said. “I had a wonderful time and made some life-long mates along the way and got to fly in many of the military aircraft of the time.
“I got to the end of my career and because I was so taken with aircraft, I joined the Point Cook flying club.”
Before his career ended, Mr Smith had learnt to fly.
“It makes me realise now it hat there was quite a connection between that Smith family,” he said.
“When I left that same little country town to join the Air Force, I thought I was one of very few who had done that. Through all of this research, I have found my own Smith family had a very long history with the military.”Flying Officer Albert Thomas Smith. Pilot, RAAF.