Reflecting on the truth about the Anzacs

The tide is turning at Anzac Cove as it becomes mainstream Australia’s most significant national symbol.

Anzac Day recalls a supremely sad time when Australia’s boys - and many of them were only boys - showed superhuman courage on the beaches, cliffs and paddocks of Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 and the rest of that year but stood little chance of surviving. So short a time, so vast in significance. We owe it to them to be honest about this story and not pervert it by myth. Too often in the past, and occasionally still, Anzac Day, especially at Gallipoli itself, has seemed more of a celebration when it should be a respectful mourning for excruciating pain and uncaring military planning.

Due to the diligent work of diarists, historians and serious journalists we are beginning to honour the fallen Diggers by acknowledging their true stories.

The Gallipoli campaign is a tale of hopeful young men led inevitably to slaughter. But one year an Australian speaker said we were celebrating “a military victory”, which it obviously wasn’t, and sometimes schoolchildren give the impression they understand it as a successful military occasion.

National leaders are inclined to make grand rationalisations like “the war to end all wars”, which it obviously wasn’t, or “the world is now a safer and better place”, which it obviously isn’t.

Speech makers sometimes talk of the Anzac Cove episode as “defending our country” when in fact our country was on the other side of the globe and it was the Turks who were defending their homes. Speeches refer to “protecting the freedoms we have today” when in fact we have fewer freedoms, particularly those connected with the “war on terror”.

This year at Anzac Cove Defence Minister Brendan Nelson spoke grandly of “shining light into dark corners of the world as an outward-looking, compassionate and confident people imbued with the Anzac spirit of endurance, courage, and selfless determination to help others”. But we have a long way to go yet. How compassionate have we been to Indigenous people including those who fought in the Australian army, but only received one third of the pay, were not included in resettlement grants and still often struggle to survive? How much “selfless determination to help” do we offer asylum seekers?

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters struck a different note: “Let us commit ourselves to working for a world where differences between nations can be resolved without resorting to war.”

In 1915 the British Empire and Allies were attempting to invade Turkey in order to control the Dardanelles seaway and outflank Germany, a ploy by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (the ANZACs) landed at the Turkish beach in a small segment of the much larger war in which Britain and its allies fought Germany and Austria-Hungary, supported by Turkey and Bulgaria. Ten million died on the battlefields, Australia losing 60,000 killed or missing, and a further 155,000 wounded.

It turns out neither Churchill nor his War Minister, Lord Kitchener, had accurate maps of Gallipoli’s coastline, and mistakenly assumed the Turks would allow ships through the Dardanelles seaway unimpeded. When they were blown out of the water Churchill apparently commented they were “expendable”.

In the Gallipoli campaign 8,700 Diggers were killed (14.5 per cent of all those lost in the war), 21,250 British, 10,000 French, 2,700 Kiwis, and 65,000 Turks.

Churchill resigned but, a member of the British aristocracy, he was later resurrected, eventually to become Prime Minister in World War II and receive a knighthood.

While Anzac Day commemorates all Australia’s wars from World War I to Afghanistan it concentrates mostly on those few Gallipoli months when Aussies “forged their national consciousness”, to quote historian Eric Hobsbawm.

The story has often been told of how the troops were landed on the wrong part of the Turkish coastline and faced steep cliffs instead of low sand dunes, while their opponents, defending their own homes, knew the terrain like the backs of their hands. The Anzacs were mown down by machine-gunners high up at vantage points in the hills overlooking the landing beaches. It was always going to be well-nigh impossible. The young men, 60 per cent of them under 25, showed unbelievable courage, but too often were sitting ducks. Then there were not enough stretcher bearers and hospital ships to remove them to safety.

One historian said if these troops had been sent to France instead they could have helped shorten the war.

One of the first books on the campaign was by Australian writer Sydney Loch, a soldier who landed at Anzac Cove and kept a secret diary. He wrote about topics the military censors cropped out of the troops’ letters home - shortage of water, rotting corpses, the stench of latrine trenches, men dying in no-man’s land.

During a brief armistice Loch was ordered to bury the remains of former comrades. Writer Susanna de Vries quotes him: “Some were little more than skeletons in uniform; others had faces blackened and mummified by the burning sun. Those who had died more recently had inflated stomachs and exuded a stench that made Sydney vomit. He had had no idea that war would be like this when he enlisted.”

Loch became seriously ill himself, refusing treatment until he collapsed, riddled with fever and dysentery. “His nightmare journey to Egypt on a crowded, reeking ship took five days, followed by months in hospital, where shell-shocked men screamed and moaned all night.”

When fit again in 1916 Loch turned his scribbled observations into a novel, The Straits Impregnable, to avoid the military censor. An extract in The Age read, “Death was the farmer of that tranquil field. Look at the corpses, tumbled over in every shape, as still as still could be. Mark the green uniforms holding the sunlight, and the dusky faces, hideously misshapen with decay. Mark the swollen bodies. Mark the rotting eye sockets. By night and by day shells pass over them, but this silent company sleeps on.”

Military censors “worked overtime to ensure that the horrors of trench warfare, the high death toll and shortage of hospital ships did not reach the Australian public. Censors controlled the post and telegraph office and all journalistic copy had to be submitted to them before it could be sent off.”

Loch commented on the shortage of shells due to Whitehall's ineptitude, “hardly the sort of morale-boosting material the military spin doctors wanted made public”. His superior officer once despairingly wondered why the Australians “don't simply pack up and return to Melbourne, as they could no more fight a war without shells than send down to hell for more gunners”.

Loch's eyewitness account bears no relation to the stories released by Gallipoli commander-in-chief General Sir Ian Hamilton to Australian and British newspapers which implied the attack had been a success.

De Vries found another diary which if it had been discovered would have seen its author court-martialled. Sister Alice Kitchen, a hospital ship nurse, was “outraged over the way the wounded were treated. To leave injured soldiers in the blazing sun for days without dressing their wounds or giving them water is mass murder”.

Historian Martin Crotty writes in The Courier-Mail “historians have long been troubled by the difference between mythology and reality, by the distortions of the Anzac legend and by the uncritical celebration of Anzac … some modern-day pilgrims are disillusioned to find that we in fact lost”.

He wonders if the myths about Gallipoli can be blamed on war correspondent C.E.W. Bean. “Did he, as some historians allege, cover up aspects of the horror in his determination to portray the Anzacs in a flattering light?”. Crotty believes there are “clear hints” Bean practised “a degree of self-censorship” and his now-published personal diaries “are more frankly honest than either his correspondent’s reports or his post-war histories”.

In a note on David Cameron’s book 25 April 1915, The Day The Anzac Legend Was Born, Graham Clark refers not only to the “extraordinary acts of courage in the face of almost certain death” at Anzac Cove, but also to “one of the most bizarre, ill-planned, misfortune-plagued campaigns of The War To End All Wars”.

Andrew Denton’s TV documentary Gallipoli: Brothers in Arms, turned out to be a hard-hitting account from Anzac Cove, where he was much moved by the “futility” of it all, while acknowledging the Turks were fighting for their homes. There was the sorrow of 4,000 killed in three days, men shooting at each other from trenches less than 20 feet apart even though they respected each other: decent Aussies killing decent Turks at the behest of the British aristocracy.

Denton’s main reaction was of anger at the destruction and misery for no good purpose. “The only good decision was to abandon it ... We should strive to be less good at building cemeteries and better at avoiding war.”

PS. The term “Digger” was not invented during World War I but was the term describing a radical group in 17th century England who broke the law when they dug up common land to grow food for starving families, celebrated in Billy Bragg’s Diggers’ Song.