Brave brothers fought on Front

Graham Kelly's uncles were both in the first tunnelling company in France during World War I.

IPSWICH brothers Nathaniel and Andrew Kelly may well have served side by side at the bloody battles fought at Ypres, Messines and the Somme on the Western Front during World War I.

Andrew could have been close when his brother was killed by a high velocity shell in France on September 14, 1917.

Both were members of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Division, a mining corps tasked with a top-secret operation digging towards and under the German lines to lay explosives.

Their nephew, Graham Kelly, said sapper Nathaniel Kelly was 21 years and three months old when he signed up for war.

“Nathaniel was one of the ‘Dungarees’ who marched to Brisbane to sign up in November 1915,” Graham said.

“When the brothers went to the war, Nathaniel was given a gold watch from the Caledonian mines.

“I don’t know how many years he’d been down the mine. The brothers ended up in the same tunnelling company.

“Andrew came back from the war. He would never speak of the war.

“He got gassed and died about 1948. He’s buried in the Ipswich Cemetery. Nathaniel is buried in Belgium.

“It was hearsay that they were together when Nathaniel got killed.”

Mr Kelly has researched his family history in the past few years, a task made harder by the secrecy surrounding warfare.

“The two uncles’ names are on the Bundamba memorial,” he said.

Both grew up in Bundamba.

The trials of the Australian Tunnelling Division have been brought to the big screen in the movie Beneath Hill 60.

Hill 60 was a slight hill made from the diggings of the railway line to the city of Ypres in Belgium. It was named for the distance of the contours that marked its boundaries.

The hill had been captured by the Germans on December 10, 1914, from the French forces.

More than 4585 Australian miners took part in this secret subterranean war to take it back.

On June 7, 1917, the 19 mines were exploded. An estimated 10,000 Germans died instantly.