19170. Private Charles Podd

11th. (Service) Battalion, Essex Regiment. Born 1882 in Southwark, Middlesex. Enlisted in Ilford, Essex. Killed in Action during the first German Phosgene Gas attack on British troops on Sunday 19th. December 1915, aged 33. Buried in Poperinghe New Military Cemetery, Belgium, Plot I, Row D, Grave 17. Son of Charles and Phoebe Podd of Barking, Essex. Charles was one of only 11 Servicemen with the surname Podd to have Fallen during The Great War. 8 of Charles’s Comrades from the Battalion also Fell on this day, and he is flanked on either side in the Cemetery by 2 of them: 16031. Private Harry Johnson in Grave 16 and 16157. Private W. A. West in Grave 18. In December 1915, the German 4th Army used the mixture of Chlorine and Phosgene Gas against British troops on the Western Front in Flanders during an attack at Wieltje near Ypres. Before the attack, the British had taken a prisoner who disclosed the plan and had also gleaned information from other sources, which had led to the divisions of VI Corps being alerted from 15 December. The Gas discharge on 19 December was accompanied by German raiding parties, most of which were engaged with small-arms fire while attempting to cross No-Man's Land. British anti-gas precautions prevented a panic or a collapse of the defence, even though British anti-gas helmets had not been treated to repel Phosgene. Only the 49th Division had a large number of gas casualties, caused by soldiers in reserve lines not being warned of the Gas in time to put on their helmets. A study by British medical authorities, arrived at a figure of 1,069 gas casualties, of whom 120 men died. After the operation, the Germans concluded that a breakthrough could not be achieved solely by the use of Gas.

Barry Jenkins