The outbreak of war was greeted in Australia, as in many other places, with great public enthusiasm. In response to the overwhelming number of volunteers, the authorities set exacting physical standards for recruits. They were the pick of Australian manhood. In 1914 they were sent first to Egypt, not Europe, to meet the threat which Turkey, posed to British interests in the Middle East
It was the start of a campaign that lasted eight months and resulted in some 25,000 Australian casualties, including 8,700 who were killed or died of wounds or disease. The men who served on the Gallipoli Peninsula created a legend, adding the word ‘Anzac’ to our vocabularies and creating the notion of the Anzac spirit. Although the Gallipoli campaign was a military defeat, it helped to provide Australians with a new sense of their identity and place in the world. Australians displayed great courage, endurance, initiative, discipline, and mateship. Such qualities came to be seen as the ANZAC spirit. It was about looking after your mate. Soldiers were paired off and became protectors of each other and responsible for each other on the battlefield, such as the Battle of Lone Pine. Much of the battle was with bare hands, bombs and bayonets. It took two days of the most horrible fighting before Lone Pine was captured by the ANZACs. Australian casualties at Lone Pine amounted to over 2,000 men while the Turks estimated their losses at 6,930.
In some ways the most tragic of these operations was the attack on `the Nek'. The Australians were ordered to charge uphill in four successive waves. However the British naval bombardment unexpectedly stopped seven minutes early -- enough time for the Turkish forces to re-occupy their trenches. Each line of Australians was slaughtered as they emerged from the trenches. 600 died in 30 minutes in an area the size of a tennis court. Their heroic sacrifice at The Nek had gained not one yard. Imagine all the senior players in the GFL, BFL and GDFL gone in 30 mins
The amazing thing is that 4 waves of soldiers (each wave had the strength of 150 men), saw clearly the carnage that went before them, clearly knew his fate, however no man shirked his duty and bravely charged when the order was given. Unfortunately this was not the last time the British High Command would expect the impossible from the ANZACs.
But a greater horror awaited the Gallipoli survivors who then went to the Western Front in Southern Belgium and Northern France where they discovered that the hell of Gallipoli was only a prelude to an unprecedented human bloodbath amidst clinging mud moonscapes; poison gas; horrendous, unending artillery barrages; barbed wire, and the likely possibility of immediate death.
The Western Front was the name the Germans gave to a series of trenches that ran 700 kilometres from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. To imagine this, think of a ditch deep enough to stand in, zigzagging its way from Geelong to Canberra. It was populated by the French, English, Canadian, Indian, New Zealanders, Australians and eventually Americans in 1918.
In July 1916 Australian infantry were introduced to this trench warfare at Fromelles, where they suffered a rate of casualties so great as to be nearly unsustainable for the volunteer army of a small nation. The AIF will confront its single worst day of the war at the battle of Fromelles, In the 27 hours after the Australians first attacked the German trenches, 5,533 ANZACs had been killed or wounded. This was twice as many casualties as the landing at Gallipoli. By the end of the year about 40,000 Australians had been killed or wounded on the Western Front. In 1917 a further 76,836 Australians became casualties in battles at Bullecourt, Messines, and the four-month campaign around Ypres, known as the battle of Passchendaele.
Imagine you are on the frontline, constant shelling barrages, blinding flashes and explosions each and every minute, hour after hour, day after day caving in the trenches and burying your mates, its night, it has rained for 12 days in torrents, you are close to freezing, your coat is soaked, mud adds extra weight, feet are sore and swollen from standing in water for weeks, you are carrying soaked equipment, a rifle slung across your back with 170 rounds of ammunition, the trenches are filled with dead which you stumble over to get into position, there are bits of bodies sticking out from the walls of the trench, absolute chaos, weak with hunger, nothing can be seen clearly, nauseating smell of decaying bodies in the air and wiping the shattered flesh of your mate who was just standing next to you from your wet numb face, the nervous tension of waiting to attack once the shelling stops.......when it stops.
When the whistle blows you will have to run over a porridge like mud, around 2 metre deep shell craters filled with water and bodies of men and horses, across 200 metres of tangled barbed wire, facing German machine guns to get to their trenches. That was what the Australians endured for three long years on the western front and eventually .............somehow triumphed.
For Australia, as for many nations, the First World War remains the most costly conflict in terms of deaths and casualties. From a population of fewer than five million, 324,000 men enlisted, of which over 61,000 were killed in battle and 156,000 wounded, (machine gun, artillery and gassed). A further 60,000 died from wounds after they were returned to Australia. This was the highest rate among all the British Empire troops (per population). Only 7,500 of the original force of 30,000 that first landed at Gallipoli in 1915 returned home
The standards that they set and the ANZAC spirit, have been handed down ever since to all the Australian soldiers, sailors and airmen who followed them into the Second World War where their gallantry shone in North Africa at Tobruk to the defence of Australia along the infamous Kokoda track in New Guinea and the spirit amongst the Australians captured by the Japanese amidst the sadistic horror of war camps to Korea, Malaya, Borneo, Vietnam, the Gulf and many peacekeeping operations in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and Timor.
ANZAC Day is about remembering the sacrifice and the enduring qualities set at that time. The world we live in today would be a much different place without them.
They were your age.
There are NO comparisons with Football but there are parallels, of mateship, courage, initiative and endurance
Lest we forget
Last Modified on 12/04/2017 18:34