Reflecting on the truth about the Anzacs

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”.