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Old 21-06-2008, 10:41 AM   #10 (permalink)
spidge
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Sergeant Claud Charles Castleton

Sergeant Claud Charles Castleton

Unit: 5th Machine-gun Company, 5th Brigade, 2nd Division
Action: 28 July 1916, Pozieres, France
The 2nd Division attacked Pozieres heights at 12.15am, but faced heavy opposition.
The Diggers, including Castleton, 23, were pinned down by machine-gun fire. They withdrew before dawn but many wounded were left in no-man's land.

The citation says: ``Sergeant Castleton went out twice in face of this intense fire and each time brought in a wounded man on his back.
He went out a third time and was bringing in another wounded man when he was himself hit in the back and killed instantly.
He set a splendid example of courage and self-sacrifice.''

Biography: Castleton was a school teacher who loved nature and geography. Born in Suffolk,
England on 12 April 1893, he was a pupil teacher in a local council school before migrating to Australia aged 19.
He travelled around the country and worked in Port Moresby for a while on coastal defences and at a wireless station.

He enlisted in Sydney in the AIF on 10 March 1915 and served at Gallipoli from 16 August until he was evacuated a month later with dysentery.

He returned to service before the Diggers evacuated Gallipoli. He transferred to the 5th Machine-gun Company and arrived in France about four months before he was killed.
Castleton, who was unmarried, is buried at the Pozieres British Cemetery.
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Spidge,
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My Avatar is the memorial to the 22 Commonwealth Coastwatchers at the Temakin Cemetery on Betio (Tarawa Atoll) who were beheaded by the Japanese on 15th October 1942. http://www.dva.gov.au/media/publicat...mem_beito.html

"You were given the choice between war and dishonor.
You chose dishonor and you will have war."

(Winston Churchill made this prophetic pronouncement in a House of Commons speech in 1938, just after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement with Hitler. Chamberlain returned from Germany with the signed agreement in hand, proclaiming that "peace in our time" had been achieved. Churchill attacked Chamberlain's "politics of appeasement" in this and many other speeches.)

What did the Australians do in ww2 and other conflicts? Check out this site:
http://www.diggerhistory.info/00-pag...ster-index.htm
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