GUNNER 40164 THOMAS WILLIAM SAUNDERS, MACHINE GUN CORPS (HEAVY SECTION). DIED AS PRISONER OF WAR 21st DECEMBER 1917 AGED 30



GUNNER 40164 THOMAS WILLIAM SAUNDERS, MACHINE GUN CORPS (HEAVY SECTION). DIED AS PRISONER OF WAR 21st DECEMBER 1917 AGED 30


                                        HMLS Nutty moves up before Battle of Gaza

Thomas Wiliam Saunders was born in East Retford, Nottinghamshire in 1887, the only child of Thomas and Ada Saunders. The family moved to Ilkley when Thomas was a young child where his father had a shop at 45 Brook Street selling fish and poultry. After leaving school Thomas was first employed as an Engine Fitter with the Midland Railway and later became chauffeur to a Mr Jenkinson who lived in a large house called Iddesleigh on Queens Road. In 1911 he married Sarah Ellen Sidgewick in Otley and together they lived at 10 Mornington Road.


Conscripted into the army in 1916, Thomas was initially posted to the West Yorkshire Regiment, but soon transferred into the Machine Gun Corps. The attraction appears to have been the tanks which had recently become operational on the Western Front. In a letter to the Ilkley Gazette in October 1916 Thomas described his training in the new machines and what they were capable of. Not long after this he was send with a detachment of the new machines to Egypt where he would become involved in fighting against the Turks in the Gaza Peninsula.

The tank detachment was assigned to an attack on a ridge called Sheikh Abbass as part of the 2nd Battle of Gaza on the 18th April 1917. Only one tank was allocated His Majesty's Land Ship 'Nutty' and this went into position the day before the attack. One of its crew became ill and Thomas who normally worked in another machine (see photo below), volunteered to to take the mans place. At 4.50 the following morning 'Nutty' moved off towards the enemy positions along with men from the Hampshire Regiment and troops mounted on camels. The attack went well and by 8.50am the objective, the ridge and a nearby redoubt, had been secured. The tank now began to assist another unit but it appears to have broken down and was then hit by a Turkish shell setting it on fire. The 8 crew members were forced to bale out and despite all being wounded made for the nearby redoubt. A Turkish counter-attack retook the redoubt capturing William and the rest of the crew of 'Nutty'. The tank commander Lt. Frank Carr was seriously burned and died in hospital that night and Thomas too was badly injured. The following day a Turkish aircraft flew over the British positions to drop a message saying that the tank crew were now in captivity.

Back in Ilkley it was about a week later that Thomas's parents received a letter saying that it was believed that he was a prisoner of the Turks. However, it was not until 15th July that a communique from the Red Cross confirmed that he was now in captivity. Thomas had in fact been moved to Nazareth in Palestine where his wound had confined him to hospital.

Once sufficiently recovered Thomas was moved to Turkey and put into a POW camp in the mountainous region Nigde. Conditions in Turkish POW camps were poor. Prisoners were worked hard and rations meagre and along with the ever present risk of illness meant that mortality rates were as high as 50%. Dysentery and pneumonia were common and nearly always fatal in the squalid conditions found in the camps. It was probable that one of these conditions which took the life of Thomas when he died on 21st December 1917.

Thomas was buried in the camp cemetery but at the end of the war his body was exhumed and re interred at the British Military Cemetery Bagdad (North Gate) where he lies today. He is also remembered with pride on our war memorial in Ilkley





                                                     Wreckage of HMLS Nutty










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