THIS year as we mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and the naval engagement off Jutland attention has been rightly focused on the Western Front and the fight off the shores of Great Britain.
However the 1914-18 conflict was a world war and while all this was going on soldiers from Redditch were fighting all over the globe.
One such was Frank Griffin, who was born in Tardebigge in 1897, one of the six surviving children of Thomas and Julia Griffin.
By the time of the 1911 census the family were living in Webheath Lane, Webheath, Thomas working as a fish hook filer and Frank, aged 14, in the bicycle trade.
After war broke out he enlisted in the 9th Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment. which was posted to the blazing heat of Mesopotamia, to what is now modern day Iraq, fighting the Turkish army.
By November 29, 1916 his unit was in Amarah on the banks of the River Tigris, 115 miles north of Basra, where British soldiers were stationed in the modern day Iraq War.
They set off for the front line at Kut on November 29 in ‘hot sun and sand’ arriving at a desolate plain in ‘six inches of muddy slush’.
On December 13 the 9th Battalion led the first attack on Turkish positions around Kut meeting little opposition.
However in further assault, on December 15 they ran into fierce Turkish fire, the troops of two companies pinned down in the open under a rain of high explosive shell, sending up showers of shrapnel, killing 25 men and wounding 86 more.
It is not known how Frank Griffin died, only that it was on December 19 as a result of injuries he received in combat, however it is likely he was one of those caught in that hail of Turkish shrapnel, dying of his injuries four days later.
His name is missing from the main Redditch war memorials.
With thanks to Remembering Redditch’s Fallen Heroes and the war diaries of the Worcestershire Regiment.
