Anzac Day, with its dawn vigils, memorial services, marches and reunions across Australia and the world, is always characterised by a certain military precision and orderliness. But Anzac Day 2014 has an even more appreciable symmetry; this being the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I and the first Anzac Day since 2002 in which Australian forces have not been on a war footing. Australia’s mission in Afghanistan, which began late in 2001 and wound up late last year, was easily this nation’s longest-lasting war. Thankfully, the toll of dead and injured over the dozen years of that low-level conflict was relatively slight. Certainly it pales into insignificance when compared to the frightful casualties that Australian troops sustained over the four years of the Great War.
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Though Britain officially declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, it was to be another eight months before Australian and New Zealand troops faced their baptism of fire. April 25, 1915 was when the Anzacs (together with troops from Britain, France and India) landed at Gallipoli as part of a misconceived campaign to occupy Constantinople (now Istanbul) and relieve military pressure on Russia – a key ally of the British and French.
The campaign was hard-fought but relatively brief, with allied forces withdrawn the following December in the face of stiff resistance by Turkish defenders. Australian troops later went on to face far bloodier ordeals in western Europe, but it is Gallipoli that remains preeminent in our commemoration of their sacrifices. Gallipoli was when Australians fought en masse for the first time, under a common flag and with the confidence or brashness of a nation that had come into being only in 1901.
That there was myth-making around the exploits of the Anzacs is not in doubt. All combatant nations extol their warriors. However, assertions that Gallipoli represented a “baptism by blood’’ in which Australians acquired their true nationality or some distinct characteristic were nonsense. Historians are now of the view that although the Anzacs fought bravely at Gallipoli, their military exploits neither exceeded nor fell short of those of the British, French or Turks. Their suffering, in terms of dead or wounded, was less than those of their allies and not nearly as great as that of their Turkish opponents.
What is indisputable is that Australia felt the losses of soldiers (and treasure) far more keenly than many of its allies. About 400,000 Australians served overseas from 1914-18 at a time when the population numbered fewer than five million. About one in six of those servicemen died, and half of the remainder were wounded, many seriously. The war’s terrible coda, the influenza epidemic, claimed the lives of a further 20,000 Australians. As historian Michael McKernan once put it, “Every street, nearly every house would have known someone who’d been to war and had suffered or died’’. Australia in the 1920s and 30s was a dark and sorrowful place, and the enormous debts owed to the British a not significant shackle on the economy, particularly when the Great Depression struck.
The huge costs wrought by World War I and WWII are barely discernable today, except in the many names inscribed in memorials large and small located in towns and cities across Australia. Those who survived Gallipoli, Fromelles and the other WWI battles in which Australians took part have all faded away, and veterans of WWII are now all at least in their early 90s. Those who fought in Vietnam, the most notable of the post-1945 conflicts, are in their early to mid-60s. However, the thinning ranks of returned servicemen and women have been augmented by veterans of Afghanistan, Iraq, and East Timor.
That so many Australians have been touched by war is the reason that Gallipoli, the battlefield of western Europe and of the south-west Pacific in WWII have such a strong grip on our consciousness, and why today there will be universal acknowledgement not just of the sacrifice and the suffering of the nearly two million people who have served in uniform, but also an acknowledgement of their contribution to making Australia what it is today.
