21 years of living next door to Anzac

My first Anzac Day in Australia was in 1989 and it brings back happy memories purely because it was an unexpected long weekend and a first chance to visit Adelaide. When in the city of churches I paid no attention to whatever Anzac Day ceremonies were in place and probably spent the day either on Glenelg beach or in the Barossa wineries. Even when I got Australian citizenship a few years later, I didn’t think my love for living in Australia would ever cover its military history or traditions. (picture: 2010 dawn service at Muckadilla, Western Queensland)

The first twenty years of my life spent in Ireland left a strong legacy of distrusting any institutions that had strong links to British imperialism and the culture around Anzac Day fitted that bill. I was also naturally inclined to view it through the prism of the senseless slaughter of the First World War. Its religious overtones held little appeal too. My anti Anzac Day sentiments were shored up by Peter Weir’s Gallipoli and the angry lament of the Pogues’ version of “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”.

Anzac Day would eventually prove Eric Bogle wrong. Although the numbers of the original diggers had shrunk to nothing by the time Bogle wrote the song in 1971, there were more than enough veterans of other military conflicts and overseas engagements prepared to take their places. The size of the march began to increase again and so did the audience for the services and parade. The young people stopped asking “what are they marching for” and began to wear their grandparents medals with pride. Gelibolu Yarımadası became a compulsory stop on any European tour.

Thanks to the attention it got from the Hawke and Keating governments, Anzac Day was well on the mend in Australia by 1996. Through a collection of circumstances I was awake and in the centre of Melbourne for that year’s Anzac Day dawn service. I shivered through a crisp autumn morning at the city’s massive war memorial on St Kilda road but was fascinated by the formal solemnity of the ritual I was watching. Lit by fires under the dramatic dawn skies, the ceremony expertly fused elements from church services, funerals, concerts, orations and military display in pervasive sombreness.

About a month earlier, John Howard was elected Prime Minister. Eight long years after he said it, the times finally suited him. The invented tradition of Anzac Day chimed in perfectly with his more strident view of Australian white history and the British tradition it sprung from. He also tapped into a growing nationalism based on “Aussie, Aussie” culture and the primacy of the flag. Anzac Day became bigger than ever.

I resisted most of these strains. Yet Gallipoli was growing on me. I read Les Carlyon’s wonderful history of the campaign and what struck me most, apart from the inevitable catalog of errors, was the number of Australian deaths. 643 in the first week, 1,805 through May, 265 in June, 143 in July, 2,054 in the August offensive with another 572 in the last four months. All through southern winter, people would have heard about the death of a father, brother, son, cousin or friend. This was Australia's first major national tragedy since Federation in 1901 and it was communal grief the ANZAC committees tapped into as early as 25 April 1916.

The Anzac experience was compounded by events in Western Europe. Thousands more Australians would die in the hell holes of Ypres and the Somme. Over 400,000 Australians enlisted in the First World War – almost two in five of the adult population between 18 and 44. 61,513 of them died (easily the largest of any conflict) and another 170,000 were injured or taken POW. In a country of four million people, it would be difficult to imagine anyone who wasn’t somehow affected by this catastrophe. Anzac Day was as good a way as any of honouring the memory of this harrowing experience.

This year, my job as a country reporter took me to two dawn services, the first in Roma and the second 40km away in the tiny town of Muckadilla. I hadn’t been to a dawn service since Melbourne in 1996 though I had attended a few parades. The formal part of the Roma and Muckadilla proceedings had not changed. “Shortly after 2am, three battleships, the Queen, the Prince of Wales and London reached their sea rendezvous off Gaba Tebe and stopped to lower their boats,” began the narrative of 95 years ago. The flag was lower and raised, the Ode was recited followed by a minute's silence, the last post and the national anthem.

Beyond effigies of symbolism lay the meeting of real people. 250 people turned up in Roma, 42 in tiny Muckadilla, easily doubling its population. A bigger crowd still congregated back in Roma for the parade and another service. It wasn’t the ritual that was important, it was what those people did and said to each other before and after the ceremonies that gave the day its power. It brought people together for a common theme if not a common purpose. I asked various people what Anzac Day meant to them. Almost all the answers were thoughtful and complex. Most remembered the deaths of family members or friends or people they knew about. If nothing else the Anzac tradition concentrates the mind wonderfully about mortality, and that for a day is no harm.

The metamorphosis of Anzac Day

Watching today's Anzac Day marches on television, I was struck with how familiar it looked to twenty years ago when I first arrived in Australia. In 1989 I saw the last few First World War diggers lead the parade. They were dying out then and now they are all gone. Today it is the turn of fading World War II vets to see comrades dying in numbers similar to when they first met.

Anzac Day is about ritual which is one of the reasons the media love covering it. The day is a stable source of controllable news and a rare chance to get away with clichés about pride, mateship and honour. One of those rituals is the day off work and it was skewed today falling on a Saturday. Numbers were down on last year as people didn’t feel giving the same time sacrifice on the weekend, and most states did not give a holiday on Monday.

The other key traditions of the dawn service, the parade and the two-up, were still well in evidence. A newer tradition is the battleground service in which Australians and Kiwis combine overseas holiday with a pilgrimage. Numbers were down at Gallipoli this year. According to the ABC it was the fault of the recession but today's event at Lone Pine still attracted 7500 people. Another 3000 packed out the French 1918 battle site at Villiers-Bretonneux which rose to prominence on its 90th anniversary last year.

Though overseas Anzac Day celebration dates back to 1916, it was possibly one of the few things the well-drilled founders of the tradition probably hadn’t anticipated. On 25 April 1916, Australian and New Zealand troops celebrated in England, Egypt and the Middle East and in France (where they had just arrived). Back home the excitement generated by what had occurred a year earlier ensured it would not be forgotten.

Much of the credit for the way it captured public imagination belongs to the war reporting of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Charles Bean. Throughout 1915 their lively accounts ignited a fire which the religious institutions were quick to pick up on. By June the bodies were starting to come back from Turkey in significant numbers and they continued to arrive until the operation was called off in December. Over 8000 Australians died in the campaign and a national day of mourning was needed to deal with the massive collective grief.

Yet Anzac Day did not ignite spontaneously. The first Anzac Day Commemoration Committee was set up in January 1916. It was Brisbane auctioneer Thomas Augustine Ryan who decided 25 April was a good day to have the commemoration. He was a member of the local recruiting committee and the father of a soldier who survived the campaign. Ryan suggested the idea to TJ Ryan (no relation, as far as I’m aware) the then-Labor Premier of Queensland. Premier Ryan convened a meeting of local luminaries on 10 January 1916 and they appointed Anglican priest Canon Garland to draw up an agenda.

David John Garland was a remarkable political operator. He was a true missionary and an organiser with a fearsome reputation for getting things done. He was perfect for the Anzac job. Born in Dublin, he emigrated to Queensland in 1886 aged 18 to follow a law career. He fell under the influence of a Toowoomba Anglo-Catholic rector who employed him while he prepared for ordination. Garland was a chaplain in the army prior to the Boer War and spent ten years in Western Australia where he successfully got the rules changed to allow religious education in state schools. He came back to Queensland where he did the same and also won a referendum to allow bibles in state schools.

It was no surprise co-ordination should start in Brisbane. The first troops ashore at Anzac were the Queensland 9th Battalion of the 3rd Australian Infantry Brigade. The Ninth were also the first to return home in coffins in large numbers. As 1915 progressed a culture of commemoration grew in the city. Brisbane was quick to get other Australian and New Zealand cities involved. Garland also astutely arranged for marchers to get free public transport from Queensland Rail.

Although the 10 January meeting was initially organised by the Queensland Recruiting Committee to raise more troops, it didn’t take long for Garland to get his memorial on to the agenda. He got a motion passed to “make arrangements for, and carry out the celebrations of Anzac Day". The Brisbane Courier reported Garland said the war was teaching people “their duty to God in a degree would compensate for their neglect of God in the past”. Defeat at Anzac should not be considered a disgrace, Garland said.

Garland made sure the ADCC council was ecumenical and used his Irishness to woo the suspicious Catholic hierarchy. Garland included a two minute's silence which allowed everyone to quietly pray to their own God. There would also be time for speeches, hymns, the Last Post and God Save the Queen. It would be followed by a march of returned service men. Once Anzac became a commemoration that did not compromise sectarianism, all religions wanted a part of it. Together they would ensure Anzac Day had a religious as well as secular meaning. The ADCC wanted the day to have a similar feel of solemnity to Good Friday (which it was very close to on the calendar – in fact in 1916, it was just four days before Anzac Day). No cinemas, racecourse, hotels or sporting venues were allowed to open.

Royal support proved crucial. King George V attended the 1916 Anzac Day two minute's silence at Westminster Abbey. He issued a rare message direct to Australians: “Today I am joining them in their solemn tribute to the memory of their heroes who died in Gallipoli. They gave their lives for a supreme cause in gallant comradeship”.

Even with royal imprimatur, it would take 14 years for the idea to be institutionalised across Australia. Garland worked tirelessly and in 1921, he lobbied the Prime Minister to declare a uniform celebration across the Commonwealth. New Zealand declared it a day of solemn remembrance in 1920, Queensland followed a year later and WA in 1923. Businesses and hotels were required to close until 12.30pm to allow for services and the march. Seven years later Garland got Queensland to shut everything down for the day. Sensing an election tactic, the federal government took over ownership of Anzac Day from him and laid the Inauguration Stone at the National War Memorial in 1929.

The tactic failed for Prime Minister Stanley Bruce who was to lose the election and his seat a few months later. At the June 1929 Premier’s Conference, he invited all church denominations to hold memorial services the following year and asked the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) to arrange meetings of remembrance. There wasn’t total agreement. The RSSILA could not decide if it wanted the tone of the meetings to be solemn or jubilant. It decided on both: solemnity in the morning and carnivals in the afternoon allowing the opening of sporting venues and bars.

Most states went with the RSSILA (now RSL) model. Queensland went it alone with the “sacred day” approach closing bars all day until the 1964 Anzac Day act was modified to allow the opening of hotels, racecourses and other places of amusement. Australia finally had a nationally sanctified and consistent Anzac Day that appealed to both the spiritual and the worldly side of the nation’s psyche.

Bundaberg Days 2

Woolly Days is home and tired after an exhausting five hour drive to Brisbane today. I took advantage of the long ANZAC weekend to catch up with friends in the city of Bundaberg, about 370km north of Brisbane. Apart from relaxing with friends and enjoying a dawn walk on the deserted beach at Elliot Heads, the two most notable events of the weekend were Friday’s ANZAC parade and a visit to the Bert Hinkler museum yesterday.

The local march commemorating the 93th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing took place in glorious weather on Friday morning. There were several hundred marchers including veterans from most Australian military campaigns since World War II, several local bands, and students from most of the local schools. A good five percent of Bundaberg’s 50,000 population turned out to cheer on the parade. At 9am, soldiers from each of the four branches of the military service gathered round the war memorial in the heart of the city at Bourbong St before a convoy of jeeps carrying veterans set the parade in motion.

The highlight was perhaps the gleaming white brigade of sailors from HMAS Bundaberg. The Bundaberg is the second ship named for the city. The original Bundaberg was a minesweeping corvette commissioned in 1942 and was assigned to operational duty as a convoy escort vessel on the east coast of Australia between Melbourne and Brisbane. In the later part of the war, it escorted convoys to Milne Bay and took part in action off the coast of New Guinea. After the war, it remained in naval reserve in Sydney until 1961 before being sold for scrap.

The second and current ship of that name is a patrol boat commissioned just last year. Based in Cairns, the Australian Navy's 14 patrol boats are used for fisheries protection, immigration, customs and drug law enforcement operations. It was fitting that the ship was in port at the city that gave it her name for ANZAC Day. They led the naval portion of the processing and were followed by veterans from campaigns in World War II, Korea, Malaya, Borneo, Vietnam, the Gulf War and East Timor. It never ceases to amaze that for a generally peaceable nation far from most of the world’s military hotspots, Australia has been involved in most of the great conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries.

While the Air Force did not feature as strongly as the Navy in the march, aviation remains close to Bundaberg’s heart due to the activities of the city’s most famous son. That man is Bert Hinkler (1892-1933). Hinkler was one of the great early aviators and the story of his adventures is told in the Hinkler House Memorial Museum in North Bundaberg. The house is his English home “Mon Repos” (named for the beach near Bundaberg where he learned his flying skills). After the house was threatened with demolition in the early 1980s, it was dismantled in 1983 and then taken brick by brick from Southampton to Bundaberg. It was formally re-opened as the Hinkler Museum in 1984 by then Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Southampton’s Mayor Dorothy Brown.

Herbert John Louis Hinkler was born in 1882, the first of four children of a Prussian-born stockman and a Brisbane dressmaker. From a very early age, he was fascinated with flying and studied the ibis birds which flew near his home. At Mon Repos beach, he built his first glider then aged just 17. He became a local celebrity and worked for a Sydney mechanic who ran exhibition flights. But although he had some success, Hinkler knew he had to move to England to further his flying ambitions. Hinkler’s timing was perfect. Within months World War I had broken out, and he enlisted in the Royal Naval Air Service.

For three years of the war, Hinkler was an air gunner in the Flanders campaign for the newly formed Royal Flying Corps. It wasn’t until 1918 that he formally trained as a pilot and he was posted to Italy where he took part in the war against the Austrian Empire. Hinkler was disillusioned by the horrors of war he observed and was happy to be demobbed and find work at aircraft builders AV Roe & Co. In 1920, Hinkler made the first of his record flights. He flew non-stop London to Turin in a 35 horsepower Avro Baby. This 1,000 km flight was a record for a light aircraft and Hinkler followed it up with a 1,500km flight from Sydney to his home town the following year.

The exhibition flying established Hinkler’s reputation but didn’t earn him much money. He went back to England to work again for AV Roe for five years. By 1928, he was ready for his next big adventure – the first solo flight to Australia. He flew solo in a Avro Avian G-EBOV from England with numerous stops in Europe, Egypt, the Middle East, India, the Malay Peninsula before landing in Darwin to great acclaim. Hinkler ended the journey in Bundaberg after 15 days of flying. Both he and his machine were paraded around the town in celebration.

In 1931 he flew from Canada to England in a very circuitous route that crossed the South Atlantic between Bahia, Brazil and the then British colony of The Gambia. The journey in a Puss Moth was done in mostly atrocious weather. His was the first South Atlantic crossing and he was only the second aviator to cross the Atlantic anywhere after Charles Lindbergh four years earlier. For this intrepid feat Hinkler won the second ever Segrave Trophy for outstanding contribution to British transport (fellow Queensland aviator Charles Kingsford Smith had won the inaugural award a year earlier).

In January 1933, Hinkler set off for another solo trip to Australia in the trusty Puss Moth. His intention was to get there in less than eight days and beat G.W.A. Scott’s record. But after just one day Hinkler disappeared off the radar. Nothing more was heard about him for three months until forest workers in mountains of Tuscany found the wreckage of his plane and Hinkler’s nearby body at Pratomagno Mountain. Hinkler had survived the initial impact but died shortly afterwards, presumably on the day after he left England. He was buried, on Mussolini’s orders with full military honours, in the protestant cemetery at Florence.

Anzac Day 2007: Kokoda

The Kokoda Track Authority has denied a report in Papua New Guinea newpaper The National, local landowners were going to close the Track. KTA chief executive officer Warren Bartlett said village leaders would not close the track in protest over a lack of government funding for the authority. Bartlett said an ANZAC Day service at the war memorial at Isurava today would not be disrupted. "The Kokoda Track is not closed, it's going to stay open. There's no problem with the Anzac Day ceremony or the hundreds of people walking the track," he said.

The cause of the row was the allocation of 3.4 million kina ($1.42 million) in government funding to go to the KTA rather than to the National Cultural Commission. PNG recently established the KTA as a statutory body to administer the fragile track, promote trekking and collect the mandatory trekking fees. Landowners along the 93km track want more of the lucrative trekking fees markets (currently 200 kina or $83). This month there were 780 trekkers on the track with almost 4,000 visitors last year.

The trekkers want to follow in the footsteps of the World War II soldiers who defended Australia from Japanese invasion in 1942. The story of the Kokoda Track is one of the more remarkable actions of the War. In damp and fetid places such as Isuvara, Deniki, Buna and Gona, an Australian reserve force stopped the advance of a mighty Japanese army as it bore down on Port Moresby, the last stop before Australia itself.

The Kokoda Track is a native walking path which starts at the swampy north coast near the towns of Buna and Gona on the shores of the Solomon Sea. It crosses PNG's backbone - the Owen Stanley Range which splits the country east to west. At the highest elevation lies Kokoda village. Kokoda had a rubber plantation and an administrative outpost. It also had a primitive but strategically vital airstrip. From here the track wound its way to the south coast at Port Moresby, the capital of what was then the Australian-mandated province of Papua New Guinea.

In March 1942, the situation was grim for Australia. In the three months since Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had advanced rapidly. Rabaul in New Britain fell in January. Japan used Rabaul to invade PNG and bomb Port Moresby. They also launched bombing raids on Darwin and Wyndham. The impregnable Singapore fell in February and British forces were on the retreat in Burma while Japanese forces overran the Dutch East Indies.

While Australia faced its darkest hour, its prime fighting men were inconveniently overseas. The Australian Imperial Force was in the North African desert fighting Rommel or in Syria fighting Vichy French forces. National defence was left to the reservists known as the Militia. The AIF condescendingly referred to them as “chockos” – chocolate soldiers who would melt quickly in the sun. Prime Minister John Curtain called for US assistance and said Australia was now “inside the fighting line”. Over Churchill’s objections, he called the AIF home.

Meanwhile, the Japanese South Sea Detachment landed in Rabaul led by General Tomitaro Horii. Horii made plans to invade PNG in a two pronged attack. The first was by sea, and the second was by land across the Owen Stanleys. The naval prong was foiled by the Battle of the Coral Sea, the first ever battle fought by aircraft carriers. Although the battle was inconclusive with one major sinking each, the Japanese withdrew their convoy and postponed the sea attack on Port Moresby.

But the threat remained from a land invasion. MacArthur was aware of it and said if New Guinea went, the results would be disastrous. The Militia was sent to defend Port Moresby where they unloaded ships, built fortifications and repaired the airstrip. Because their tents, blankets, medicine and mosquito repellent was first loaded onto the ships they were the last loaded off. Most soldiers quickly fell to malaria.

The 39th battalion led by “Uncle” Sam Templeton was ordered across the Owen Stanleys to defend Kokoda. They would have company. On 21 July, 14,000 Japanese troops landed at Buna. The 39th marched north to meet them. Heavily outnumbered, they harassed the Japanese before retreating to Kokoda. The Japanese were better equipped and fought in camouflage uniforms with painted faces and foliage-disguised helmets while the Australians were outfitted in heavy regulation khaki. But the Japanese made one big blunder in logistics. General Horii thought his men would get to Port Moresby quickly and he gave them only ten days rations. It was a serious miscalculation.

Templeton prepared an ambush for the Japanese at Oivi, two hours north of Kokoda. They surprised the invaders but were eventually overwhelmed. Templeton then set off to Kokoda to warn the garrison but he never made it back. The remaining Diggers cut across the jungle of the valley to join Lieutenant-Colonel Owen’s troops in Deniki. They returned to Kokoda and set up a defensive position with 77 exhausted men. 1,500 Japanese troops arrived to fight the defenders at close quarters. Owen was killed but surviving defenders eventually retreated to join reinforcements coming up the Track.

500 soldiers of the 39th battalion gathered at Deniki to face an enemy five to ten times more numerous. Their hit and run tactics convinced the Japanese they were dealing with a much larger enemy force. Still, the defenders were overrun once again and retreated to Isavura. New commanding officer Colonel Ralph Honner, who was rushed back from the Middle East, ordered his men to dig in and hold position. Honner had won a VC for his service in Crete and proved a wise and courageous leader who understood his men. He also knew their limitations and saw they were exhausted, hungry, malarial and troubled by tropical infections. His leadership inspired them and they repulsed the invaders with ambushes and shelling.

The defenders were struggling to hold on and needed reinforcements. Finally the men of the AIF arrived. The 2/14th battalion reached Isavura two days later. The 2/16th followed. The Japanese also reinforced and the AIF could not afford to totally relieve the exhausted 39th battalion. The AIF and Militia would fight side by side removing the pejorative tag of “Chockos” forever. The fighting was fiercest at Isavura. The Japanese repeatedly charged the frontlines and the Australians responded with bullets and bayonets, and sometimes fists, rifle butts and even boots. The Japanese died in enormous numbers but still outnumbered the Aussies.

After three days of hand-to-hand combat, the Japanese broke through and threatened Battalion HQ so a group volunteered to counter-attack. Bruce Kingsbury, a quietly-spoken real estate agent from Melbourne grabbed a Bren gun and charged at the stunned Japanese killing dozens. His charge had a galvanising effect. His comrades followed him and repulsed the Japanese. Kingsbury was killed by a sniper’s bullet and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross – the first ever on Australian territory.

Although the Australians would eventually have to retreat they won important time at Isavura to regroup and resupply. The wounded were carried away from the battle scene by local villagers whom the Australian knew as Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels. Horii’s ten-day plan to take Port Moresby was horribly exposed. He needed to get the end of the track without further delay but the Australians held out another month. Horii’s men attacked at Brigade Hill, with a numerical advantage of six to one. Half the Australian defenders were killed, some 500 in all. The Japanese advanced again but suffered crippling casualties.

On 12 September, the Australians made a stand at Ioribaiwa Ridge. It was an excellent defensive position; a needle-sharp 1,350m high ridge with a total view of the valley below. Although the battle was indecisive, the Japanese had had enough. In sight of Port Moresby's lights the supply line grew too long and too fraught. The US had invaded Guadalcanal and Tokyo decided to concentrate its efforts there. Horii’s troops were ordered to withdraw. The Kokoda Track was safe and so was Port Moresby.

There was no victory parade back in the capital. Most people, top brass included, thought the retreats amounted to defeat. Australian general in command, Thomas Blamey, castigated survivors saying they had been beaten by inferior troops in inferior numbers. He also accused his men of having run like rabbits. Whether his words were misinterpreted or not, the soldiers were indignant. There was no help from MacArthur who was anxious to show Guadalcanal in the best light. He ignored New Guinea and belittled the Australian contribution.

Eventually word got out about what really happened at Kokoda. Ralph Honner summed it up when he described the Battle of Isurava as "Australia's Thermopylae". 30,000 Australian troops served in the entire Kokoda Campaign. 3,000 died in battle, and 5,500 were wounded. Countless more died of disease. But Australia’s darkest hour was over. As Lt-Col Phil Rhoden recounted to Patrick Lindsay for his book “The Essence of Kokoda”:

“We were fighting for Australia, on Australian soil for the first time. It was important we won because if we didn’t win who knows what would have happened".

The Eleventh hour

Acting Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman led the dignitaries at the Brisbane Remembrance Day commemorations in the city today. At 11 am local time, they laid wreaths at the Anzac Square shrine. The ceremony was repeated in cities and towns throughout Australia to mark the 88th observance of the end of World War I. One hour prior to the Brisbane event, the Prime Minister, Governor-General and Defence Minister attended the Canberra ceremony and observed a minute's silence at 11am Australian Eastern Daylight Time. 61,000 Australians died and another 150,000 were wounded in the so-called Great War, the war to end all wars.

The event commemorates the time of day the war ended. At 11am on 11 November 1918 the guns of the Western Front finally fell silent after more than four years of brutal trench warfare. The allied armies of Britain, France and the US had repelled the German invaders. With American tanks, the balance of war swayed towards them as they inflicted heavy defeats upon the Germans in the final four months of the war. In November the Germans accept terms of unconditional surrender and called for an armistice to end the war. The poetic timing of the event, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, helped to cement it in grateful public affections. Up to 13 million people died in the conflict that destroyed the empires of Germany, Austria, Russia and Turkey.

In May 1919, an Australian journalist Edward George Honey wrote a letter to the London Evening News in which he proposed a respectful silence to remember those who had given their lives in the war. The letter caught the attention of King George V and on 7 November he issued a proclamation which called for a two minute silence. On the first anniversary of the armistice four days later, the two minutes' silence was instituted as part of the main commemorative ceremony at the new Cenotaph in London. In Britain, the second Sunday of November is now known as Remembrance Sunday. At 11am on this day, a two minute silence is observed at war memorials, cenotaphs, religious services and shopping centres throughout the country.

11 November 1920 was the second anniversary of the armistice and the commemoration gained added significance when it became a funeral. Four years earlier a British chaplain at the Front in France noticed a make-shift grave marked by a rough wooden cross across which was written "An Unknown British Soldier". Four years later he wrote to the Dean of Westminster to convey a remembrance of that scene. The Dean was impressed by the story and led a campaign to honour the war dead in this fashion. As a result Britain buried the remains of an unknown soldier from the battlefields of the Western Front. He was interred with full military honours in Westminster Abbey. The French also buried an unknown soldier at the Arc de Triumph in Paris. The London entombment attracted over one million people within a week to pay their respects at the Unknown Soldier’s grave. On November 18 a temporary stone sealed the grave, inscribed with the words "A British Warrior Who Fell in the Great War 1914-1918 for King and Country. Greater Love Hath No Man Than This." Within ten years, most other allied nations adopted the tradition of entombing unknown soldiers.

The red poppy was a symbol for death, renewal and life long before the War that made it famous. The poppy’s seeds can remain dormant in the ground for many years, but will blossom spectacularly when the soil is churned. When the war got serious in the fields of Northern France and Belgium, the soil was badly churned by the violence of battle. It didn’t take long for red poppies to appear.

In 1915, the Canadian doctor Lt Col John McCrea was at the terrible battleground of Ypres when he wrote the poem “In Flanders Field” which starts
“In Flanders Field the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place…”
The poem has achieved near-mythical status in Canada, and is one of the nation's proudest symbols. The poem features on the Canadian $10 note and most Canadian Remembrance Day ceremonies will feature a reading of the poem. In 1918 the American Moira Michael wrote a poem in reply called “We shall keep the faith” in which she promised to wear a poppy 'in honour of our dead' and so began the tradition of wearing a poppy in remembrance. Poppies were first sold in England on Armistice Day in 1921 by members of the British Legion to raise money for war victims.

Poppies come in many different colours. But in Remembrance Day ceremonies, the poppies are almost always red to signify the blood sacrifice. A leading British religious think tank is now asking Christians to wear white poppies symbolising “Christ's peace” for the Armistice Day commemoration. Jonathan Bartley, director of Ekklesia, suggested that the white poppy is far more in keeping with Christianity than the red variety. Bartley went on to say while “the red poppy implies redemption can come through war, the Christian story implies that redemption comes through non-violent sacrifice.” The society stated they had no problem with the red poppy but asked that white ones be available too.

Anzac Day 2006

Today is the 91th anniversary of the Allied landings at Gallipoli, the failed attempt to take Turkey out of the First World War. The Gallipoli peninsula is a place where legend has always been more important than truth since Homer's Iliad tore apart nearby Troy.

During the 1983 America’s Cup, the Australian syndicate was 3-1 down in the race series, when Alan Bond invoked Gallipoli's modern mythology. “We had our backs to the wall there (Gallipoli), and we won that one," Bond said. The interviewer took pains to point out to him that “we” didn’t win that one though Bond's team did come back to win.

Bond is not alone in adapting the myth to his purposes. The Turks themselves also twist it to their purpose. Islamist scholars who lead tours to Gallipoli minimise the role played by the secular military leader Mustapha Kemal, the future Ataturk ("Father of the Turks"). Instead the tell their audiences the campaign was won by Allah and his Turkish martyrs.

The peninsula itself is on the European side of the Dardenelles, the Gibraltar of the eastern Mediterranean. Here the Aegean meets the Sea of Marmara. Further upstream, the Marmara meets the Black Sea at the Bosphorus. A victory at Gallipoli would not only cripple Constantinople but would bring the Russian Black Sea fleet into the war.

In 1915 Constantinople (later Istanbul) was the capital of the 600 year old Ottoman Empire which was on its last legs. At the peak of its power in 1683, the Ottomans and their feared infantry units, the Janissaries, controlled the entire North African coast, all of Europe east of the Danube, the Crimea and much of the Middle East. The next two centuries saw a long slow and painful decline as nationalism rose in the Balkan peninsula and new nations were created. The other great European empires slowly bit away at the rest of its possessions. The Ottoman treasury went bankrupt in 1875 and Tsar Nicholas I called Turkey the Sick Man of Europe.

Internal strife was also tearing the empire apart from the inside. The Young Turks emerged from the Committee of Union and Progress and succeeded in overthrowing the Sultan. Before the First World War, a triumvirate called the Three Pashas were in power. Enver, Djemal and Talat would all meet violent ends in exile after the war, two of them at the hands of assassins in revenge for the Armenian genocide that occurred during the war. Back in 1914, they were courted by both sides and allied with Germany.

The Germans dealt Russia a colossal defeat at Tannenberg early in the war. Russia was threatened by a Turkish advance through the Caucasus and gaining control of the Dardanelles would re-establish western communications with Russia via the Black Sea.

After early salvos from the British Navy, the Turks mined the straits . In March 1915, under the direction of the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, the British and French sent a fleet of 18 ships to force open the strait. Six ships were either sunk or badly damaged by mines in this failed naval attack.

The Army was then sent in to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula to nullify the Turkish guns defending the strait. It was to be a combined French and British operation. The whole of the British empire contributed forces: English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Canadian, Newfoundlanders, Indians, Australians and New Zealanders. The latter two were joined together in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps which was shortened to Anzacs. The cross-eyed War Minister Kitchener appointed his Sudan campaign protégé Sir Ian Hamilton commander of the operation. Hamilton would face formidable opposition in German general Otto Liman Von Sanders and local hero Mustafa Kemal.

The invasion was planned for April 24 but bad weather delayed the landing by 24 hours. The landing spot was on the Aegean side of the peninsula. But the boats dropped the forces at the wrong beach and instead of the wide open beach they were supposed to be at, the invaders ended up in an unnamed cove. They were confronted by a tangle of ravines and spurs and sheer cliff faces that descended from the Sarı Bayır range to the sea. The landing spot finally got a name: Anzac Cove.

The area was lightly defended but combination of the tough terrain and poor communication of orders meant that the British lost the race to the high Quickly roused, Kemal got there first. Positions on the key hill Baby 700 (so named because it was slightly smaller than another 700 feet hill in the area) changed hands several times in the first few days before the Turks secured it for good. The campaign then transformed into the stalemate of trench warfare. The Turks did not have the navy nor the calibre of equipment but the higher ground proved decisive throughout the campaign.

On the southern tip of the peninsula was Cape Helles. This was the site of the second landing of mostly British, Irish and French troops. They suffered massive casualties from machine guns at Seddulbahir fort. Only 11 out of 1,012 Royal Dublin Fusiliers survived the campaign. The few that made it ashore were besieged three days after the landing.

Both sides launched suicidal offensives throughout May but very little ground changed hands. The British brass would not divert heavy artillery from the Western Front that might have wrested the initiative. And so the Dardanelles gridlock resembled the bloody fields of Flanders.

In August, Hamilton launched a second offensive 8km north of Anzac Cove. The leader of this landing at Suvla Bay, Sir Frederick Stopford, was ineffective and botched the landing despite encountering little Turkish resistance. Instead of storming up the mountain, Stopford slept for the night without issuing any orders. Again the Turks won the race for the high ground and Suvla turned into a second defensive stalemate.

Up to now, Hamilton’s sanguine dispatches back to Kitchener concealed the true state of affairs. But the truth was seeping through and the work of journalists Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Keith Murdoch turned the tide in Whitehall.

Kitchener sacked Hamilton in October and appointed Sir Charles Munro to look at whether they should evacuate. Munro's mind was made up when Bulgaria came into the war on the side of the Central Powers and opened up a new front near Salonika in Greece. This also meant Germany had a land route to supply Turkey with heavy artillery. The writing was on the wall for Gallipoli. Munro recommended evacuation.

Heavy casualties were expected in the evacuation but it was the only truly successful part of the campaign. The army stealthily reduced ranks through December so the Turks wouldn't notice and evacuated the last batch from Anzac Cove during the early hours of December 20, 1915. The last soldiers left Helles in early January. There were no casualties in either evacuation.

The Turks celebrated a great victory. Mustapha Kemal’s star was on the rise and he went on to transform the country into a modern European state in the 1920s. But the Ottoman empire itself was destroyed by Allenby’s armies advancing from Arabia.

In Turkey the Gallipoli campaign, is known as Çanakkale Savaşları. Canakkale (named for the main town on the Asian side of the peninsula) is still feted as a great victory.

But it was also making a huge impact on the other side of the world. Within a few weeks of campaign starting, Ashmead-Bartlett’s vivid and heroic account of the Anzac landing was printed in Australian newspapers. What captured the imagination of the public was the fact the article was particularly favourable to the “thrilling deeds of heroism” of Australian and New Zealand troops. As an immediate result both countries had little trouble finding new volunteers. Both countries sustained enormous casualties which neither had previously experienced in this war or any other. 500 Australians died on the first day. 9,000 died overall. This trauma added to the mystique of the campaign. It was a nationally defining event for country that had existed as a Federation for just 14 years and was still grappling with its dual British and Australian identity. Before Anzac, Australian history was a dull matter “of commerce and cricket, of wool and wickets.” Now, they could say “we know what nations know”. On the first anniversary in 1916 there were already commemoration ceremonies in some parts of Australia despite the ignoble retreat in December. This began the institutionalisation of Anzac Day.

Groups were set up all over Australia and New Zealand which lobbied for the day to be given a ‘sacred’ meaning. The churches and military co-presided at the ceremonies that sprang up to celebrate the day. Legislation set aside the day for solemn remembrance and Anzac Day became a public holiday. But it took on the look of Good Friday “holiday” - which it often followed swiftly in the calendar. Pubs, sporting venues and shops would be closed on the day. April 25 would become the nation’s day of remembrance for all wars and the itinerary of rituals was established. The day is now an uneasy mix of military and religious tradition, both sacred and profane.


Other sources:

Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 2006 "Gallipoli: A Contested Ground Still"

"The Anzac landing"

Moses, John A 2002, The Struggle for Anzac Day 1916-1930 Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society v88 no 1

Carlyon, Les 2001, Gallipoli, Pan Macmillan, Sydney