Anger & ANZAC Day

Today is the 25th of April, and the 109th anniversary of the catastrophic failure that was the Gallipoli invasion.

Oops! Sorry Twitter-lynch mob, I meant today is the 109th anniversary of the greatest day in Australian history, where we became a nation, baptized in the blood of our finest warriors, and took our long awaited place in the sun on the world stage.

Excuse me a minute while I scream into this pillow.

The ANZAC Myth (some prefer “Legend”) has become a quintessential part of Australian and New Zealand national identity. Every year since the Australia New Zealand Army Corps landed on the beaches of Gallipoli in 1915, we have gathered in our hundreds (thousands!) to pay our respects to our current and former veterans, and honour the sacrifice of the fallen.

Or, that’s what we tell ourselves we’re doing.

Respect? I’m Not Convinced.

When the first ANZAC Day ceremony was held in 1916, on the one year anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, it was very much needed in both Australia and New Zealand. The Gallipoli campaign had resulted in more than 33,000 combined causalities (dead, wounded, missing or captured) and the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZDF) were by then engaged in the bloodbath that was The Battle of the Somme. The survivors of this horrific action would then be sent to the infamous killing fields of Passchendaele.

People at home were reeling. Telegrams arrived daily telling them of the loss of their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers, neighbors, friends, uncles, cousins… The newspapers printed gushing reports about the bravery and heroism of the troops, while men were returning from the front with physical and mental scars, shaken and angry. Alcoholism soared, rates of domestic violence sky-rocketed, poverty began to swallow entire families and Britain continued to ask the southern colonies to prove their loyalty to the mother country by sending ever more men to feed to the guns. New Zealand introduced conscription in 1916, while Australia, despite two attempts by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, never did.

“The Anti’s-Creed” – A pro-conscription propaganda poster from 1916/17.

Under such circumstances, people needed something to bring them together. Especially those who had lost friends or family overseas and would never be able to bury them and (in many cases) would also never be able to visit their graves. ANZAC Day was a good idea in 1916, because it allowed for the collective grief to be expressed, it gave people a sense of hope and provided those veterans who had been sent home wounded an opportunity to reflect on their service and what they’d done. In the years immediately following WW1, as we struggled to come to terms with the loss of so many young people in a war that had barely reached our shores, ANZAC Day gave us a way to focus. Whether people remembered Gallipoli, The Somme, Passchendaele, Hill 60, The Hooge Crater, Palestine, Russia or any other conflict they’d participated in or lost a loved one to, everyone was able to come together. It provided a balm to the grief, the fear, the loss and the uncertainty about the future. Nothing to celebrate, and everything to remember.

But what about now?

Australians and New Zealanders have fought in dozens of conflicts since WW1. The idea was that ANZAC Day would expand to remember them too, but I would argue that it never did. We remained stuck in time, transfixed by the national propaganda around Gallipoli and our “birth” as nations (gag!) and so the rewriting of history began. The WW2 men came home to find we were still remembering their fathers loss half a world away, when they had put their lives on the line on Australian soil. And on it went: Gallipoli grew while every other conflict around it shrunk. WW2, Vietnam, Timor, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan… all struggling to find a way out from Gallipoli’s shadow.

Graves of Commonwealth soldiers at Tyne Cot Cemetery, Belgium. Photo: My own

How can we honour the service of our living veterans when we are still venerating the servicemen from a conflict that happened over a hundred years ago? And, at the risk of sounding callous, don’t the dead have everything they need? If we are going to have a national remembrance day, shouldn’t we put our energies into remembering that our living veterans are far more deserving of our time, our support and our services than their dead brethren? I’m not saying don’t remember, but Australia (I can’t speak for New Zealand) spent millions of dollars between 2014 – 2018 on the centenary of WW1, while spending just hundreds of thousands on services for living veterans. In the 2014 – 2018 period, at least 412 current and former serving Australian Defense Force personnel committed suicide, some of whom had been on DVA (Department of Veterans’ Affairs) waiting lists to see psychiatrists for years! ¹ These were people with families: parents, spouses, partners and children, and the government they had put their lives on the line for decided that the dead – the fucking dead – were more important than they were.

Where’s the respect in that?

What do you remember?

In my humble opinion, ANZAC Day is no longer about remembrance. It has taken on a nasty undercurrent of militarism and nationalism, and because it’s part of our national identity, the history of the campaign itself is often eclipsed by the stories. The campaign at Gallipoli was one disaster after another, characterised by poor leadership and limited tactical planning. The British are often held as responsible for everything that went wrong at Gallipoli, while the ANZACs are shining examples of what went right, but war is not as simple as that. There were just as many stupid ANZACs as there were Brits, and plenty of British soldiers (i.e. men from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) preformed feats of incredible courage and selflessness. Australia and New Zealand’s national story excludes the British, unless they need a sadistic officer to feed a bright young soldier to the guns, then he’ll be as British as tea and biscuits! It also ignores the many Indians, South Africans and Newfoundlanders who fought beside them at Gallipoli, as well as the Frenchmen and French Indochinese of the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient, who were also there. Of course, it is not unusual for a country to focus on the exploits of their own soldiers in war, but Australia and New Zealand take it to the extreme. I learned about Gallipoli in school and attended ANZAC Day school ceremonies for thirteen years of my life, but it wasn’t until I was twenty-five that I learned the ANZACs had not faced the Ottoman Army alone at Gallipoli. I don’t know what’s taught in schools these days, but I hope it’s a little more comprehensive than what I was given.

What good is that? How can we civilians show our respect for the military (past and present) if we don’t know what they were doing? But, of course, this is the point! If we know too much about the hell and the horror, we might start to question the national myth, and once the national myth comes crumbling down, what we’re left with are facts, and facts aren’t pretty. The seven-foot tall, bullet-proof ANZAC, whose only thoughts were of Australia as stormed the beaches of Gallipoli, did not exist. He was created even as we were dying on the beaches, killed by an army which was defending their home and their people from our invasion. Nothing good happened at Gallipoli! Yes, there were moments of stunning heroism, mateship and selfless sacrifice, but they did not characterise the campaign. Like every campaign in that war, it was characterised by blood, death, pain and fear. But those of us back home were fed myths by the likes of Charles Bean (a “historian” who almost single-handedly created the ANZAC myth). Bean famously wrote that many an Australian, dying on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East, died happy, because he would be remembered in Australia.

How absolutely vile!

The lucky ones didn’t have any thoughts at all as they dropped dead, killed instantly by bullet or a shell, but I doubt those who lingered had any thoughts of Australia. The men drowning at Passchendaele, fighting to get air into their mud-filled lungs, did not think of Australia. The men blown in half on the Somme, screaming in agony as they lay in a shell hole, did not think of Australia. The men who drew breath and swallowed poisonous gas and died coughing their lungs up in a bloody froth, did not think of Australia. They thought of the pain they were in, the suffering they felt, and the fear of the unknown as death settled over them. Do you remember that on ANZAC Day?

Get Rid Of It? No – Reinvent It.

I am not advocating for an end to ANZAC Day, but I do want to see it reinvented. I want to see a focus on the true cost of war, not just on the heroic optics and national symbolism that has been attacked to it. I want to see Gallipoli shrink to a more manageable size, and for our education system to expand, to cover more recent conflicts. Our national stories, not to mention our military history, did not begin and end at Gallipoli! If we’re going to honour our veterans, and those who paid the ultimate price, we can start by recognising and meeting the needs to the living, before spending millions on the dead. The men of Gallipoli are all gone now: there are no more survivors of that terrible battle. As countries, we need to move forward too and, if we must have a national day of remembrance (which I do not object to), it must be based on truth, not myth.

That would be something worth fighting for.

Sources

https://ww100.govt.nz/conscription-in-ww1

https://ww100.govt.nz/how-many-new-zealanders-served-on-gallipoli-some-new-answers

https://www.dva.gov.au/newsroom/media-centre/media-backgrounders/overview-australias-involvement-first-world-war

https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/exhibitions/dawn

https://anzacday.org.au/selected-WW1-statistics

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/first-world-war-by-numbers

https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/gallipoli

https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/gallipoli