By MAJOR GUY WARNOCK
I WOULD like to speak this morning about the way we view what we commonly refer to now as the “Spirit of Anzac”.
On the eve of the centenary of the Gallipoli landings we ask why Gallipoli is such an important part of the New Zealand and Australian narrative, especially since it was a grave and humiliating defeat and is largely ignored in France and Britain. We have had 100 years of reflection, scholarly debate and public interest in which to do so and there are many “facts” of the Gallipoli campaign that need to be put straight … and the centenary is the time to do it.
On the eve of the centenary of the Gallipoli landings we pause to reflect on our brutal introduction as a nation onto the world stage. Federation 14 years earlier in 1901 was a small affair, confined to our borders and the British Empire and would barely have made the newspapers in Paris or New York; without the war we’d just have continued along as a little country, known for lots of sheep and wheat – and thousands of young men would have lived, had families, contributed to society and led productive lives.
Great Britain and the British Empire, from where we as a nation took our moral, political and economic strength, was seen as being under direct threat – as were her allies France, Belgium and Russia – and men in their thousands flocked to the patriotic bugle call to defend an Empire that most had never actually seen.
Today, we as a nation find what we now term ‘fighting other people’s wars’ a foreign concept but 100 years ago it was very much ‘our war’.
We now know that British-born enlistees actually made up 20 per cent of all Australian soldiers who served and a further 10 per cent were New Zealand born. We’ve been told that the Anzacs were bronzed, strapping lads from the country, expert horsemen and crack shots when the reality was that urbanised Victoria and New South Wales provided the majority of our troops, most were from cities and regional centres and most had never fired a gun before their enlistment.
Today is the centenary of the landings at on Gallipoli but not the centenary of Anzac Day: that comes next year when it is 100 years since bereaved families, communities and a nation gathered – as we are here today – to mark the tragedy of our arrival on the world stage.
Ninety-nine years ago across Australia, cities, regions and small towns – their young men decimated by the long list of casualties – hit on the same idea that 25 April was the logical date to do so. On that first anniversary of the landings of Gallipoli soldiers from the Battalions that served there would have assembled before dawn in their barracks in Egypt, France or England, attended a morning church service and remembered their lost friends and comrades, perhaps finishing with brigade sports carnival or military parade.
In many cases battalions of 1100 troops were reduced to just 100 or so original, unscathed members that had left Australia 18 months earlier.
We now know that Australian commanders conceived, planned and executed their own landings at what was known as ‘Z Beach’, separate from the British; that they insisted on landing after the moon had set and before dawn in order to gain surprise and did not want to do so under the thunderous barrage of British battleships, which would attract Turkish troops waiting in reserve kilometres away.
Australian troops deliberately wore the British service cap instead of their distinctive Australian slouch hat to deceive the Turks as to their identity. We now know that the landings at what would become, as a whole, the Anzac sector were a military success, that they really didn’t land in the wrong spot and that the majority of Australians landed close to where intended.
Australians landed quickly, made their way inland – bravely and as planned – and pushed the small Turkish garrisons out. By daylight troops were landing by the boatload and the battleships could fire their guns in support as surprise had been achieved.
By contrast, the British landings further south at ‘V’ and ‘W’ Beaches were planned for the break of dawn, the naval barrage was largely ineffective and now, in broad daylight, the troops were massacred in their boats by the fully alert Turks in strong defensive positions protected by barbed wire and with half-a-dozen machine guns.
The Anzac Landings a few hours earlier were a success with perhaps 250 killed on the first day and 14,000 troops landed, including the Kiwis at about 9am; however, many of the dead killed in the subsequent days and weeks were attributed in official correspondence as “…having died on or since 25 April” due to a lack of witnesses, themselves being killed or evacuated wounded, therefore giving this day on the Australian calendar the impression of absolute carnage and the ‘official’ death toll of 2000.
After 25 April, Turkish reinforcements arrived at the hills above Anzac as the now confused, inexperienced and mixed-up Australians and New Zealanders failed to hold onto the heights and the well-known stalemate ensued, to last the next eight months until the inevitable – but successful – evacuation.
The suggestion that Anzac troops were wasted needlessly at Gallipoli, as if they would have lived to old age had Gallipoli not happened, is fanciful. It is almost certain that they would have been sent instead to the Western Front in 1915 where they would most likely have been absorbed piecemeal into anonymous British formations. ‘Anzac Day’ could well have been instead the “Second Battle of Ypres: 22 Apr – 25 May 1915″ – where the Germans first used poison gas – or the “Artois-Loos Offensive: 25 Sep – 15 Oct 1915″, both where huge casualties were suffered on both sides.
British generals have copped a lot of criticism over the last 100 years for Gallipoli and the First World War overall but we now know that much of it is emotive distortion. It is suggested that British generals sacrificed Australian, New Zealand and other colonial troops over their own men.
One thing we now know is that that they were rather even-handed – they sacrificed British and other Commonwealth troops equally across the board.
In Peter Weir’s 1981 Australian movie Gallipoli we were told “…the English are sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea” which is a cringe-worthy comment to hear bitterly repeated by naive and ill-informed young Australians while standing among the headstones of Lone Pine and an insult to the poor British “Tommies” involved who had no more control of their fate than our lads.
Certainly, the British commanders dithered and missed a golden opportunity at Suvla: but anyone who has read even the most basic account of the August offensive, which included the Light Horse attack portrayed in that movie, would know that British troops were being wiped out in similar numbers and circumstances, only a few hundred metres away in futile attacks launched from Pope’s Hill onto the aptly named ‘Bloody Angle’ and ‘Dead Man’s Ridge’ and a day later and less than a kilometre further uphill, at The Farm and The Pinnacle, in their efforts alongside the Kiwis to seize and hold Chunuk Bair and Hill Q. In all, three times as many British troops died in the Gallipoli campaign than Australians, many of them at Suvla.
In the Anzac sector Australians and New Zealanders were largely left to fight their own battle where they showed they were resourceful, courageous and effective fighters. This is important because later in the war Australia was able to use our troops’ reputation and effectiveness to argue that they should be able to fight as one formation – a Corps made up of the five Australian divisions – and under an Australian commander: General Sir John Monash.
Now this is important because Australians – and to a lesser degree the New Zealanders – had a reputation for ill-discipline. This is not the highjinks, japes and larrikinism of the ‘Anzac spirit’ but crime: drunkenness, theft, desertion, criminal damage, murder and other equally serious crimes at levels that were eight to 20 times more than the British.
After a few months in Egypt in early 1915, the Anzacs came very close to being sent as garrison troops to guard the distant parts of the Empire, like India and South Africa, so as to free up and allow the highly regarded Indian army troops with their British officers to be used in Europe.
And yet the worst was still to come – just three months after observing that first Anzac Day over 5500 young Australians would be killed, maimed or taken prisoner in a single battle: at Fromelles, our first major engagement on the Western Front. Weeks later Pozieres would follow – a longer, more drawn out and bitter battle with an even longer casualty list. The war, for us, had really only just begun. By the end of the war just 8000 of our 61,000 war dead were from the Gallipoli campaign.
So why have the British and French largely ignored Gallipoli while we haven’t?
It’s probably as simple as doing the maths: only 26,000 out of the 704,000 British soldiers who died in WWI did so at Gallipoli. The French had a similar death toll at Gallipoli to Australia – but suffered over one million casualties – killed, wounded, missing – over 18 months of bitter fighting at Verdun.
In September 1914, just the second month of the war, the French army suffered 70,000 deaths in battle, including 20,000 officers. But for Australia and New Zealand, still… Gallipoli was the biggest thing that had ever happened to us. And the First World War was the biggest, most far reaching and traumatic event to happen to Australia in the last 227 years.
What really happened to us was the death of our best and brightest young men. We are not remembering “War” and we are not celebrating “Victory” – we are honouring men and women; real people, not just characters in history.
As a Pakenham resident I was impressed with this week’s edition of the Pakenham Gazette that brought to reality what were previously just names etched on stone memorials like this one here, and others in our area like in Berwick, Nar Nar Goon, Beaconsfield and Kooweerup. The one underlining theme of the Australian narrative that started 100 years ago in Gallipoli – and 99 years ago in small towns and cities around Australia – is that war is all about people – our people. And in Australia and New Zealand we are far better at remembering the human cost of war than many other nations.
All veterans of the First World War have passed on and most of us here never had the chance to met them. Twenty-five years ago, as a young 20-year-old soldier I was privileged to be in Gallipoli for the 75th anniversary as a member of the honour guard. As I stood on the beach in the darkness before dawn the old Diggers passed us by accompanied by their nurses and carers and I heard one old digger say to his helper:
“You’ll have to forgive me for being so slow young man but last time I was comin’ up this beach I was runnin’.”
We must never forget the people and stories that make up the staggering figure of our collective 101,000 war dead: every man and woman a son, a daughter, a brother a sister; perhaps a father or mother. They served their country in time of war yet did not return to receive the grateful thanks of our nation.
