Veterans Affairs Minister Dan Tehan has described in detail two of Australia's bloodiest battles on the Western Front as he visited a village in northern France to remember fallen diggers.
The two battles of Bullecourt in April and May 1917 cost more than 10,000 Australian casualties for little strategic gain.
Australian visitors on Tuesday joined Bullecourt residents at memorials to those lost in the engagements, which involved British and Australian troops pushing against the Germans' new and formidable Hindenburg Line.
Speaking at Tuesday's ceremony after attending the dawn service at the Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux earlier in the day, Mr Tehan said the first Bullecourt battle was "a disastrous defeat" that was over within 12 hours.
British and Australian troops had been ordered to attack with artillery cover because new British tanks would take the lead.
But the machines broke down, got bogged or were put out of action, leaving some attacking infantry cut off and under intense German machine-gun fire and shelling.
Mr Tehan said Private John Rose, a Lewis gunner, described how "wounded and dead men were hanging from the wire all around me and I noted the shell holes were full of wounded".
Many of the wounded were compelled to surrender and in the end the Australian casualties were 3289 dead and wounded, with some 1170 taken prisoner.
Mr Tehan said the second Bullecourt battle starting on May 3, 1917, was a hard-won victory achieved only after two weeks of "some of the most intense fighting experienced by Australians on the Western Front".
This time the Australians, backed by artillery, broke into the Hindenburg Line and not only held their ground but added to it
More and more Australians from three divisions were drawn into the battle and inched forward but at a deadly cost.
One observer wrote that the fields were "covered with the dead, thick as leaves".
On May 17, 1917, the Germans withdrew, leaving at least part of the Hindenburg Line in British and Australian hands.
In all some 10,000 Australians were killed or wounded in the two battles and by the end of 1917 a further 60,000 were casualties making it the worst year ever in Australian wartime history.
Despite the huge sacrifice in capturing Bullecourt the victory was not considered of significant strategic value.
Some observed that the battles showed that the larger conflict was going to be a "war of exhaustion".
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