Trench bravery against deadly rain of grenades
Even before he was awarded Australia’s highest military honour, Cpl Alexander Stewart Burton had earned a reputation for performing daring acts: detailed and immortalised in the hurried letters his fellow Diggers sent home to sweethearts from the nightmarish shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula.
But despite his many achievements on the field of battle, the Victorian ironmonger will be best remembered for his part in the extraordinary defence of Goldenstedt’s Post at Lone Pine, where a tiny but determined group of Anzacs held the line against a furious Turkish horde in the face of impossible odds.
Wounded on the day of the landing at Anzac Cove, Pte Burton was promoted to the rank of Lance-Cpl after he volunteered to force a tunnel in the face of heavy enemy resistance on July 18.
He was promoted again to the rank of Cpl and, three days later, posted along with nine other men of the 7th Battalion to a recently captured trench at Lone Pine.
In the darkened gloom before dawn, the Turkish launched a massive counterattack on Cpl Burton’s scarcely defended position.
The skies were thick with a deadly rain of hand-thrown bombs, the trench drenched in a hail of enemy lead.
Manning the parapet shoulder to shoulder with just eight other men — another two soldiers stood in the trench behind smothering and throwing back enemy grenades — Cpl Burton and the other Diggers struggled to hold their own against the numerically superior Turkish force.
Born in Kyneton, Victoria, in 1893, Cpl Burton followed in his father’s footsteps and became an ironmonger. With four years service in the cadets under his belt, he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in August 1914, and was sent to Egypt before embarking for Lemnos and then Gallipoli.
The two soldiers in the trench charged with dealing with the barrage of enemy grenades were the first to fall.
Shortly after, a series of almost simultaneous explosions blew apart the sandbag barricade, killing and wounding four men and shattering the rifle of a fifth.
Their defences breached, Cpl Burton and another non-commissioned officer, Cpl Dunstan, repaired the barricade under enemy fire while their commander Lt Tubb held the Turkish at bay with his revolver.
The valiant three, outgunned and outnumbered, continued to hold the line until another massive explosion ripped the barricade apart. Again, the corporal repaired the barricade while Lt Tubb stopped the Turkish tide from overwhelming them.
But while the Australians would continue to hold the line and go on to succeed in repelling the attack, for Cpl Burton the war ended suddenly, with the ultimate sacrifice.
Cpl Dunstan was blinded by a hand grenade that exploded in the trench. Cpl Burton was killed instantly.
For his courageous actions, Cpl Burton received the first posthumously awarded Victoria Cross. The above image was altered to include Cpl Burton’s Victoria Cross.
Cpl Dunstan and Lt Tubb also received a VC, marking the first and only time three Australian soldiers fighting side by side have all received the award.
While he has no known grave, Cpl Burton’s name is etched on the Lone Pine Memorial at Gallipoli and commemorated on a bridge in Euroa, Victoria.
