Why December 20th is the real Anzac Day

Monash had previously acknowledged he was unhappy with the risks involved in evacuating and wary of the response of the troops and people back home: “I am almost frightened to contemplate the howl of rage and disappointment there will be when men find out what is afoot. And how they have been fooled, and I am wondering what Australia will think at the desertion of her 6,000 dead and her 20,000 other casualties.”

In Gallipoli Alan Moorehead writes that the initial reaction among the soldiers to news of the withdrawal did range from astonishment to anger: “Among the majority, no doubt, these thoughts were soon overtaken by a sense of relief and they were content to accept instructions and to get away. Others, and there were very many of them, remained indignant.” But the main concern was that men who had died had not done so in vain, and Moorehead writes that there was no shortage of volunteers to be the last man to leave.

Monash, who later gained fame on the Western Front for his skill as an unusually modern-thinking military commander, seemed to quickly overcome his personal misgivings and write of the evacuation process with something like admiration, even wonder: “It is curious and interesting to watch the machine unwind itself as methodically and systematically as it was originally wound up.”

On the last night at Gallipoli, Monash recorded how each of the remaining Anzacs was issued with specific instructions: “Every one of those 170 officers and men has been given a card containing all those particulars so far as they apply to himself and the exact route by which he is to reach the beach. All this means organisation and makes all the difference between success and failure.” Those men held the line against a Turkish force that Monash estimated at 170,000 men; according to Bean, the distance separating the two forces at Anzac Cove and Suvla was merely a matter of hundreds of metres.

When official confirmation of the evacuation’s success came through Monash wrote a joyful epitaph: “We had succeeded in withdrawing 45,000 men, also mules, guns, stores, provisions and transport valued at several million pounds, without a single casualty and without allowing the enemy to entertain the slightest suspicion. It was a most brilliant conception, brilliantly organised and brilliantly executed, and will, I am sure, rank as the greatest joke - and the greatest feat of arms - in the whole of military history.”

On December 21 Monro hailed the evacuation as “an achievement without parallel in the annals of war”. “Thus,” writes Liddell Hart, “the curtain rang down on a sound and far-sighted conception, marred by a chain of errors in execution almost unrivalled even in British history.”

But in another very real sense the evacuation was a beginning: Australian soldiers had at last been allowed to take charge of their destiny, even if this wasn’t officially recognised at the time. As Moorehead notes: “Decorations were awarded to General Monro and his chief-of-staff, who had so firmly insisted on the evacuation. No special medal, however, was given to the soldiers who fought in the Gallipoli campaign.”

The safe withdrawal from Gallipoli is indisputably an Australian-engineered triumph. And so for me, anyway, it is December 20 rather than April 25 that marks the real ANZAC Day.