Gallipoli

Baptism of Fire or Well of Tears?

Whether as ememies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front. Kenneth Slessor

On the 25th of April 1915, the British landed Australian soldiers at Gallipoli as part of an offensive against the Turkish control of the Dardanelles. Quite stupidly, they landed the Diggers not on an open plain but on scrub-covered hills. The Turks were dug in from elevated positions and mowed down the Diggers as they leapt from the boats. Of the 1500 men who landed in the first wave, only 755 remained in active service at the end of the day. Over the following nine months, more than 7,500 Australians lost their lives. The campaign was then aborted and victory handed to the Turks. However, for reasons many people find difficult to understand, Gallipoli went on to become one of the most immortal events in Australian history.

One of the people who had trouble understanding the importance of Gallipoli was ex-Prime Minister Paul Keating. In 2008, Keating announced that Gallipoli was a useless battle that was fought for British interests. Keating also declared that he had never set foot in Gallipoli and never would. According to Keating:

"Dragged into service by the imperial government in an ill-conceived and poorly executed campaign, we were cut to ribbons and dispatched -- and none of it in the defence of Australia."

Other critics have included historians Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson. In 2002, the historians ran a campaign in the left-wing Sydney Morning Herald in which they criticised the Australian celebration of Gallipoli on the grounds it,

"excludes more than half the population: women, indigenous people and most ethnic groups."

The historians also argued that Australians today should have the maturity to realise that Gallipoli was a battle fought in vain.

Ironically, the criticism of Gallipoli by Keating, Prior, and Wilson has ensured its immortality. The criticisms have kept Gallipoli in the public imagination and forced Australians to reflect upon its symbolic meaning. Because the Gallipoli campaign encompassed issues of nationalism, colonialism, invasion, loyalty, mateship, identity, slaughter, humanity, anguish, and glory, different Australians have got different symbolic meanings out of it. Discussing the diversity of meanings has kept Australians engaged almost a century later.

Some supporters have referred to Gallipoli as "Australia’s baptism of fire". They have proudly declared that it was when a new nation of Convict stock first proved itself on the world stage. The main problem with the christening analogy is that Australian soldiers had already fought as one in the Bore War of 1901. Furthermore, the remembrance of Gallipoli is anything but glorious. The ANZAC traditions observed on the anniversary of the Gallipoli landing have developed in a very sombre way and made Gallipoli look more like Australia’s well of tears. These ANZAC traditions have been more about remembering the dead and the anguish of those who survived, instead of the glory of war or patriotic support for the empire.

Although there is no doubt that many of the young Australians who volunteered to fight for Britain were governed by naive ideals about dying for the Crown, those who remembered their stories were guided by a completely different motivation entirely. While Australians like Paul Keating, Prior and Wilson may argue that Gallipoli should be forgotten because the young men needlessly died for a cause not in the national interest, for other Australians, that has been all the more reason to remember them.

Gallipoli and the Nek

One minor battle, that for the Nek, has come to symbolise the essence of the Gallipoli campaign. The Nek was a position of Turkish trenches 18 meters from those of the Australians that the British commandeers believed could be taken with four offensive raids. At 4.30 am on the 7th August 1915, the first wave of Diggers leapt from their trenches and were mown down by Turkish machine guns. The second, then third and then fourth shortly followed and met a similar fate. Within minutes, 800 Australians lay dead or wounded on a piece of ground no larger than two tennis courts. The charge was then called off.

Why do Australians remember this failure?

It is an intriguing question as to why Australians have chosen to remember a failure like Gallipoli and in particular, the Nek. After all, most great battle stories involve a Spartan like performance of a few challenging many and then emerging triumphant; thus delivering freedom to those who will remember them.

One explanation is that Gallipoli gave a stoic country an opportunity to show some humanity. For 100 years, the colonies of Australia had operated in an inhumane fashion and individuals reacted to the inhumanity by shutting down their emotional realm. At Gallipoli, the soldiers released all that they had bottled inside.

A second explanation is that the first World War was an extremely divisive issue in Australia. Some Australians were supportive of England, whiles others were hostile to any support being given to England. The remembrance of Gallipoli allowed soldiers to be remembered in a way that avoided most of these political divisions. It celebrated the Diggers for their mateship, which most Australians likewise valued and agreed with. However, if attempts had been made to celebrate dying for England, or fighting a just battle, the Diggers would have found themselves ridiculed by their countrymen and fighting amongst themselves.

With politicians having their own agendas in regards to the war, it comes as no surprise that the remembrance of Gallipoli was a Digger initiative. On the 25th April 1923 at Albany in Western Australia, the Reverend White led a party of friends in what was the first ever observance of an Anzac Day dawn service. As the light was coming up, the men looked to the ocean and said a paragraph from the poem, Ode for the Fallen:

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."

The poem neither attributes right or wrong nor does it glorify war as the liberator of freedom. It simply articulates what the war meant to those who were involved in it.

The ode was the perfect poem fo positioning Gallipoli as a celebration of mateship. If Australians only remembered battles because they achieved a purpose, then those who died at the Gallipoli should be forgotten as they died for nothing. If Australians remembered a battle as a triumph of good over evil, then they would be imposing morality in war. In such scenarios, the fallen Diggers could be judged as dying for a immoral cause considering they were invading someone else's country. By remembering a battle that was a failure, right or wrong becomes irrelevant. Because the story of Gallipoli can not be used to glorify freedom or be seen as a triumph of truth, justice and the Australian way, the story forces Australians to remember exactly what the war meant to the Diggers who fought in it.

The last to leave

The guns were silent, and the silent hills
had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze
I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,
And whispered, "What of these?' and "What of these?
These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,
Some crossless, with unwritten memories
Their only mourners are the moaning waves,
Their only minstrels are the singing trees
And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfully

I watched the place where they had scaled the height,
The height whereon they bled so bitterly
Throughout each day and through each blistered night
I sat there long, and listened - all things listened too
I heard the epics of a thousand trees,
A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew
The waves were very old, the trees were wise:
The dead would be remembered evermore-
The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,
And slept in great battalions by the shore.Written by 23-year-old Australian soldier-poet Leon Gellert, a combatant at Gallipoli, to mark the evacuation of the peninsula in 1915.

Beach Burial

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin -

"Unknown seaman" - the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men's lips,

Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as ememies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front. Kenneth Slessor

Why remember Gallipoli

"Getting ashore was not that hard. Hanging on, up on that ridge, for eight months - that was hard. The Australians defended absurd positions. They looked after each other. They kept their good humour. There is a cheerfulness in soldiers' letters from Gallipoli one seldom comes upon in letters from France. The food was unspeakable, the flies a plague. [So were] dysentery and lice... The miracle is simply these men didn't lose heart. And they didn't, not even when they knew all was lost and they were creeping away by night, leaving so many dead.

"That, to me, is why we are right to remember Gallipoli. We are surely right to honour them. We are surely right to walk past the political intrigues and the blunders and say Gallipoli says something good about the Australian people and the Australian spirit." Les Carlyon

20th Century

20th century timeline
Prosperity and conflict

White Australia Policy
From Convicts to Chinese

Douglas Mawson
Science and survival

Gallipoli
Remembering loss

John Monash
The father of the blitzkrieg

John Simpson
He died so others may live

Anzac Day
Lest we forget

Tobruk
Desert Rats defy Hitler

Nancy Wake
The White Mouse

Kokoda
Never giving up

Long Tan
What happened?

Referendums
A history of "no"

Prime Ministers
Skeletons in the closet

21st Century

Timeline
Century of Asian engagement