ANZAC DAY - APRIL 25

Kilgore said:
Yeah it was a significant battle, but a waste of good soldiers. Fighting an uphill battle was a turkeyshoot for turks. It showed that the brits did not care about dead colonials at all.

The Brits lost about 20,000 dead. :(



I am reading Gallipoli by Les Carlyon at the moment. It's the best book I have read about the Dardanelles campaign.

It's a must read for all those interested in what Anzac Day is all about.
 
Just over 50 metres tall, New Zealand's only carillon is one of the largest in the world.

Actually there is another one in New Plymouth on Marsland hill, its not very large but it does function or at least it still did in 2003.

Shooting at Pukekura park posted on: October 16, 2003

Cruise arrived at the park's cricket ground by helicopter, with the film's other big names.
When action was called, loud gunfire sounded around the park, with Cruise being heard saying, "go on, shoot me".
Just then, as filming was in full-swing, the carillon on Marsland Hill chimed out its two o'clock tune, which promptly stopped the filming, but had Cruise and the rest of the cast and crew chuckling with amusement.

:)
 
Well guys for anyone watching the Sydney march on ABC, keep an eye out for the guys and me from my SQN.
We'll be marching with the Pathfinder association and then whooping it up with htem after the parade.
Those guys should have some amazing storys to tell. Over a few beers of course!!!.
 
aussiejohn said:
Kilgore said:
Yeah it was a significant battle, but a waste of good soldiers. Fighting an uphill battle was a turkeyshoot for turks. It showed that the brits did not care about dead colonials at all.

The Brits lost about 20,000 dead. :(
There were 6 divisions from Britain at Gallipoli, compared to 1.5 Anzac divisions, and the casualties suffered by the British divisions were on a par by percentage with the Anzac forces.
 
redcoat said:
aussiejohn said:
Kilgore said:
Yeah it was a significant battle, but a waste of good soldiers. Fighting an uphill battle was a turkeyshoot for turks. It showed that the brits did not care about dead colonials at all.

The Brits lost about 20,000 dead. :(
There were 6 divisions from Britain at Gallipoli, compared to 1.5 Anzac divisions, and the casualties suffered by the British divisions were on a par by percentage with the Anzac forces.

Yes redcoat, the losses at Cape Helles and Suvla Bay were horrendous.

Terrible leadership.

I agree with aussiejohn. Les Carlyon's book on Gallipoli is a tremendous read.
 
My grandpa -- a Newfoundlander -- was at Gallipoli. (At the Somme, too. Survived both. The horseshoe finally fell out of his tukhes in Belgium.)

On 25 April, I'm going to lift a Foster's for the ANZACs and a Screech for the Royal Newfs.
 
The Great Anzac Myth

By Ryan Brown-Haysom

Next Monday, New Zealanders all over the country will gather to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the landing of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. Right from the beginning, our understanding of Anzac Day has been clouded by the Anzac myth; a romantic and patriotic legend that obscures both the historical facts and the true nature of the battle. Moreover, the meaning and purpose of Anzac Day has been contested among various groups for as long as it has been commemorated. Now, as more young people are attending Anzac services in this country, there seems to be less discussion about what this day really means. Critic asks why the debate about Anzac Day has died down, and if it might not again be time to evaluate the significance of our commemorative day.

The Fog of War

When news of the Anzac landings reached New Zealand in the last days of April 1915, the government immediately declared a half-holiday. Flags were flown at half-mast, and church services and patriotic meetings were held throughout both New Zealand and Australia. But the first information to emerge from the front was unreliable. Many newspapers ran with a British War Office announcement that claimed the Allies were advancing steadily up the Gallipoli peninsula; that 8000 Turkish troops had surrendered; that the Turks were on the retreat and burning their villages. It was an English war correspondent called Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a writer for London’s Daily Telegraph, who first articulated the Anzac myth. Ashmead-Bartlett was sometimes careless with his facts, and he was subject to the stringencies of wartime censorship. Consequently, his reports of the Anzac landings in the British and Australasian press made the whole enterprise sound rather like a Boy’s Own adventure-story. Ashmead-Bartlett ignored the fact that the Anzacs were clinging to a mere 400 acres of ground, and that the Turks had forced the Allies onto the defensive. Instead, he praised the courage and loyalty of the Anzacs, while his attempts to question the wisdom of the orders they received were censored by the War Office.

Ashmead-Bartlett’s reports caused a sensation. The national pride of Australians and New Zealanders was roused by his heroics. Enlistment reached an all-time high in July and August of 1915, as young men lined up for recruiting centres in both countries. In June 1915, the newspapers reported that the Allied death toll at Gallipoli was a mere 688. In fact, it was already more than 2000, with another 6000 seriously injured. Nevertheless, newspapers quoted the Allied commander-in-chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, as saying that “good progress” was being made. Arguably, this was where the Anzac legend began: in the public imagination while the battle for the Dardanelles was still being fought. And, when the Allies were forced to retreat, the whole affair assumed the dimensions of a tragedy. Like Ashmead-Bartlett, many of the war correspondents at Gallipoli were classically-educated Englishmen who came to see an heroic battle fought near the site of ancient Troy. In August 1915, Ashmead-Bartlett wrote as though summing up a cricket match:

“The Anzac corps fought like lions and accomplished a feat of arms in climbing these heights almost without a parallel. [….] When all the details of these complicated arrangements are collected and sifted, they will form one of the most fascinating pages of the history of the whole war. It was a combat of giants in a giant country, and if one point stands out more than another it is the marvelous hardihood, tenacity, and reckless courage shown by the Australians and New Zealanders”.

It was the Australian war correspondent and historian, Charles Bean, who popularised the use of the word ‘Anzac’(which stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps). In his history of the Australian contribution to the Great War, Bean wrote: “Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat.” Bean’s idealised view of the Gallipoli campaign was expressed not only in newspaper reports, but also in his books, which subsequently sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Australia. In promoting this view of the war, Bean enjoyed the support of newspaper magnate Keith Murdoch (the father of Rupert Murdoch), who had close links with British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George. The real facts of the Gallipoli Campaign took much longer to filter back to the antipodes, and by the time the true death toll was known, and the scale of the defeat apparent, the Anzac myth was already firmly ensconced in our national consciousness.

The Glorious Dead

On 5 April 1916, in response to growing public pressure and a civic delegation, the New Zealand government gazetted a half-day public holiday to commemorate the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. Its motives were perhaps mixed: the Anzac myth was already proving a potent means of promoting the war effort, and with conscription imminent, the day provided a useful focus for patriotic speeches calling on young men to enlist. A struggle for control over the day developed between the government and returned servicemen, who made it quite clear that they didn’t “want to go to a meeting to hear people who haven’t been [to war] spout and pass resolutions”. The returned soldiers preferred a public service conducted by an army chaplain, which would prevent the soldiers being split up into twenty or thirty different churches on the morning of Anzac Day. In the event, a compromise was reached, with processions of returned and serving service personnel followed by church services and public recruiting meetings at town halls. The commemorations were well-attended, with a reported 2000 present at the Anzac Day service in Rotorua alone.

Professor Tom Brooking of Otago University’s History Department teaches a third-year paper on the place of Gallipoli in New Zealand’s collective memory. He says Anzac Day has been claimed by returned servicemen from its beginning. In particular, the soldiers attempted to control the place of religion in the Anzac Day services. “In both Australia and New Zealand the soldiers basically tried to organise it themselves so they got together a ceremony that was martial but quasi-Christian and sort of quasi-pagan as well. That was partly deliberate because sometimes one of the most unpopular human beings in the First World War became the padre, because they were seen as hypocrites and that all they were doing was burying your mates. The soldiers were ambiguous at best about padres and about mainstream Christianity, whatever their personal beliefs. So they wanted a ceremony that they felt they owned and that they shaped and that they controlled, and [Anzac Day]’s still a bit like that”. Religion also became a source of division in the first Anzac Day services when Catholic and Jewish clerics declined to participate in ecumenical services. These divisions were not resolved until 1965.

Three days after the celebration of the first Anzac Day, the New Zealand Returned Soldiers’ Association (as it was then, later the Returned Servicemen’s Association) was founded in Wellington. During the remaining years of the war, the RSA represented the interests of soldiers, lobbying the government to prevent the word ‘Anzac’ being used for commercial purposes, and attempting to prevent the sale of liquor on April 25. From 1917, local branches of the RSA began to move to control public observance of the date. When the government proved slow to legislate to make Anzac Day an official holiday, the RSA insisted on the need for a day to specifically commemorate New Zealand’s contribution to the war. “ANZAC Day is a New Zealand Day”, wrote the RSA publication Quick March, “a National Day”. Nevertheless, it was not until 1920 that Anzac Day was made, by law, a statutory holiday and a day of national mourning. The solemn nature of the holiday provided returned servicemen and the families of the war-dead with an opportunity to remember the victims of the Great War.

Tom Brooking says the Anzac Day holiday emerged out of a collective sense of national trauma and grief. “You have 60,000 young Australians and something like 17,000 young New Zealanders who are killed, and the great bulk of them are buried over there. The Americans, in contrast, managed to bring back about 60% of their bodies from the Western Front, but the Australians and New Zealanders are scattered all over the place: in Gallipoli, in Palestine, and Syria, those sorts of places, and of course across France and Belgium. So there was this huge hole in people’s lives, and [they had two ways of] trying to cope with it: one was to build lots of strange memorials and erect lists of names all over the place, in schools and churches as well as in public spaces, [and the other] was to have some kind of ritualistic ceremonial day. And that’s what Anzac’s about. It’s trying to meet a huge need, because there was a massive sense of bereavement ... But of course, none of them quite filled the void, and that’s why there’s such a sense of so much strangeness and spookiness about the whole thing”.

The Battle for Anzac Day

From the1930s, links increasingly came to be made between the “spirit of Anzac” and current world events, with Anzac Day commemorations taking on a more pressing contemporary relevance during the Second World War. Attendance at Anzac Day services reached a peak in the 1950s, with 6000 attending the Auckland dawn service in 1957. Anzac Day had become not merely a day to mourn the losses of the First World War, but a day to commemorate all war, including New Zealand’s involvement in Korea and Vietnam. During the 1960s, Anzac Day became a regular target for anti-war protest, and in 1967 two members of Christchurch’s Progressive Youth Movement were convicted of disorderly conduct after laying a wreath protesting the Vietnam War. This protest marked a shift towards seeing Anzac Day in terms of the relationship between war and society. It also saw a growing politicisation of Anzac Day. In 1978, a women’s group placed a wreath commemorating women killed and raped in war. During the 1980s, feminists, gays and lesbians, peace activists, anti-nuclear activists, Maori separatists, and other interest groups all laid wreaths at Anzac Day services. Professor Brooking remembers the days when it seemed that Anzac Day was on the verge of obsolescence. “People of my generation were quite hostile towards it, and indeed Anzac Day almost died, really. It was getting very peripheral, marginal with the whole anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 60s and early 70s. It became something almost of a pariah to my generation”.

But in the last twenty years, this kind of ardent struggle for Anzac Day seems to have all but disappeared. Numbers of young people attending Anzac Day services have increased markedly, but there seems to be less interest in debate over what exactly it is that this holiday means to us. This is all the more interesting because the way in which Anzac Day is celebrated in this country has changed relatively little in the last forty years or so. The traditional ‘dawn service’ dates back as far as 1938, while the presence of members of the armed forces at a monument or cenotaph goes back to the early 1920s. Anzac day remains fairly secular, as it was originally, although various denominations often have their own services. Why is it, then, that our national day of commemoration suddenly seems to be so uncontested? Is it that we have arrived at a universally agreeable way of commemorating war?

At this year’s Waitangi Day celebrations, Governor General Dame Silvia Cartwright observed that: “Not long ago, Anzac Day was a time of conflict between the peace movement and mainstream New Zealand. Now, the two viewpoints have converged. The day is one of sharing, of remembering our fallen heroes with pride and with sorrow at their sacrifice”. Although this sounds conciliatory, Cartwright’s emphasis on heroism suggests some of the more problematic issues surrounding the commemoration of war. TV One’s coverage of Anzac Day last year (“It was an act of ultimate sacrifice on a windswept peninsula a long way from home …”) suggests a greater willingness to swallow the familiar aspects of the Anzac myth than to challenge its implications. Are soldiers the heroes of war, or its victims? Should we focus on individual acts of courage, or on the military and diplomatic blunders that lead nations into war in the first place? And how much does Anzac Day really teach young people about the realities of war? Is it right to ‘celebrate’ Anzac Day, or should it remain a day of mourning? I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I think they are at least worth asking.

Tom Brooking does not think that the increased representation of young people at Anzac Day services is a sinister trend. “I think it’s as much the pursuit of roots and heritage as anything chauvinistic or jingoistic, and I think it’s a recognition from movies and television that these guys did something special … Maybe it’s making the younger generation realise that they have been a bit lucky that they haven’t known war, and perhaps they’re going, in their own quiet way, to say thanks. I don’t think there’s anything too bolshy or chauvinistic about it”. Not all would agree. “Even though we’re honouring the dead, I am suspicious of this glorification of war”, Australian historian Pauline Kurby told the BBC at Sydney’s Anzac Day parade in 2002. Such responses tend to be muted in New Zealand, where the more stridently nationalistic aspects of Anzac Day are generally downplayed. In Australia, Anzac Day has a more longstanding association with patriotism. Serious reflection on the nature of Anzac Day was prompted in Australia last year when Prime Minister John Howard used the holiday as an opportunity to pay an unexpected visit to Australian troops serving in Iraq. The implied association between the ‘Anzac spirit’ and Howard’s unpopular support for American’s war was too close for many Australians.

One of the most prevalent myths that seems to be uttered on and around Anzac Day is that New Zealand’s national identity was forged at Chunuk Bair. Prime Minister Jim Bolger went so far in 1996 as to suggest that Anzac Day should replace Waitangi Day as New Zealand’s national holiday. Professor Brooking is sceptical of claims that New Zealand’s national identity was founded on the slopes of Gallipoli. “Possibly it’s true for Australia, but I don’t think so for New Zealand. It takes a lot longer for New Zealand’s national identity to emerge”. Nevertheless, the Anzac myth is still a potent aspect of our collective consciousness, as the renaissance of Anzac Day in the last fifteen years evidences. For this reason, if for no other, it is worth continuing to ask who it is that owns the Anzac myth now, and whether we can still wholly endorse that myth ninety years on
http://clients.straylight-studios.com/critic/view_article.php?issue=Critic_8&article=article33
 
i got my anzac badge today
http://www.anzacday.org.au/shop/online/enter.html
click "Badges and Medallion" - the one i got is the slouch hat badge

so if you see someone sitting in a shopping center in uniform or with a row of ribbons on his jacket, go chat to him and buy a badge, they fought to help make us what we are today, buying a badge to support them is the least we can do
 
Don't just support them once a year. Become active at your local RSL club. Stop there for a beer once in a while, have a chat with the old Diggers, and put some money over the counter. That helps them more than you'd believe.
 
I would have a beer with the old fella's, but the only thing stopping me is the local Copper. :lol:

Oh well, One more year than I will. Hopefully by then I'll be in the Reserves as well.
 
And to top it all off, channel seven is showing the ANZACs mini series on telly.
Now if only the other stations would play "the lighthorseman", "Gallipoli", "Twenty thousand thieves", "Tobruk" and "the odd angry shot" it make for the perfect long weekend!
Cheers all.
 
Half a million Kiwis woke up to their Sunday Star Times this morning and found this headline glaring out at them from page three.


National Front angers Anzac vets
24 April 2005
By GREG MEYLAN and HELEN BAIN

The National Front plans to attend Anzac services around the country tomorrow, outraging the Returned Services Association.

RSA chief executive Pat Herbert has received emails from members who were angry and upset that the neo-fascist organisation would attend Anzac ceremonies.

"The RSA would be obviously appalled and it would disgust most New Zealanders. New Zealand does not need groups like these," Herbert said.

The RSA could not stop National Front members attending services but "they certainly will not be welcomed if they come flying their colours".

Herbert said the National Front represented everything Anzac soldiers had fought against.

"The incongruity of this is that those who belong to this organisation with its warped ideals and statements about supremacy also claim they'll be there remembering family members and relatives who put up the supreme sacrifice fighting the ideals they espouse."

National Front director Kyle Chapman said its members attended Anzac Day Services every year, and planned to do so this year. He would attend Anzac services in Christchurch with other National Front members.

Chapman said groups of up to 15 National Front members had attended previous Anzac services with no problems.

Members did not plan to "make a spectacle of themselves" this year with ostentatious insignia, flags or National Front regalia, "but there will always be one or two with (National Front) T-shirts".

Chapman had never heard of National Front members being unwelcome at Anzac services, and they had even been invited to RSA clubs for drinks afterwards.

On the international white nationalist website Stormfront, Chapman says "elite German units spoke highly of the Anzac soldiers" and urges supporters to "show that we have not forgotten them, fly our flags proudly".

Chapman said the National Front had been "working hard" to remove members who promoted pro-Nazi views and displayed Nazi emblems such as swastikas - or at least tried to get them to cover up swastika tattoos.

One member, Nicholas Miller, who has been charged with an attack on Somalian immigrants, was expelled last week.

However, fascist and white supremacist views are commonly posted on websites by New Zealand National Front members and sympathisers.

One person from Waikanae calling themselves waffen-ss-panzerkommando, after a WWII German tank unit and the Nazi secret service agency, says "not only is Anzac Day a time to honour our men who died bravely defending their nation from the Yellow Scum in the Second World War, but I also believe it creates a bond between Australia and New Zealand - two white brothers who share a lot of things in common".

RSA members said they found such views abhorrent and an insult to fallen soldiers.

Wellington man Barrie Sargeant, whose grandfather fought in World War II and spent years in German POW camps, said he was deeply offended by the presence of the National Front at services.

"I am sure that many will share my revulsion at this attempted desecration of a national day of remembrance for the thousands of soldiers who lost their lives fighting fascism."

Another Wellingtonian, Robert Trigan, who is Jewish but not an RSA member, said he complained to the RSA, saying the National Front's presence would be outrageous and insulting.



http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/sundaystartimes/0,2106,3258384a6005,00.html
 
sorry for the multiple posts but it is tomrrow after all!


At the limits of endurance





FORGET the death and destruction. It was the flies that got to Hartley Palmer the most at Quinn’s Post on Gallipoli in 1915.
The Turkish trenches were less than 20m away from those of the Anzacs, yet in the gap lay about 20 corpses.
“They were there for the whole time I was at Quinn’s Post — about six weeks,” he said in 1983, not long before he died.
“You couldn’t sleep because of the flies,” he said in New Zealand author Maurice Shadbolt’s compellingly readable, yet horrifying, personal accounts of the campaign, Voices of Gallipoli.
“Flies, they flew in and out of your mouth like a hive of bees, and over the top of you ,” the Canterbury Battalion soldier said. “We fought the flies harder than we fought the Turks. “When I looked out my periscope [to see over the trench without exposing the head] all I could see was a heap of flies, not bodies, between us and the Turks. “The flies were about four inches deep over the bodies.” Mr Palmer was one of 12 Gallipoli veterans interviewed by Shadbolt in the early 1980s. In their 80s or 90s and nearing the end of their own lives, they talked of a harsh, sapping and costly campaign they never forgot. They learnt quickly to deal with the daily death of their mates and the Turkish soldiers. They even learnt the ugly side of war in an attempt to gain at least a little psychological advantage.
On Quinn’s Post, one of the most northerly positions taken by the Anzacs, the bodies between the Anzac and Turkish trenches became bloated as they decomposed and the gas built up.
If the wind was blowing towards the Turks, the Anzacs would fire a few rounds into the bodies, releasing the stinking gas to blow over the Turks.
If it was blowing towards the Anzacs, the Turks did the same.
Some bodies, Anzac and Turkish, were removed during a nine-hour armistice on May 24, although by the time they had lain in the hot sun for a few weeks, they were so rotten they fell apart when any attempt was made to pick them up.
Wellington Battalion soldier Charlie Clark said their casualties would have been a lot worse had it not been for Lieutenant Colonel William Malone, the battalion’s commanding officer.
He refused a British order to attack Chunuk Bair — a post on top of the peninsula — in daylight, saying it was suicide.
He ordered the battalion off the ridge and told the two English officers who threatened to arrest him for disobeying an order that they would attack at night.
The Wellington Battalion did attack Chunuk Bair at night, holding it on August 8, until the Turks counterattacked and they were thrown off.
The human cost was huge. Of nearly 800 Wellington Battalion men who took Chunuk Bair, only 70 or so remained alive and uninjured.
Lt Col Malone was hit by a splinter from an artillery or naval shell on August 8. His body was never found.
Other soldiers refused to cry on Gallipoli for dead mates.
“If you cried once, you would never stop,” said one.
Others died still angry nearly 70 years later, never forgetting the eight months that claimed 2721 New Zealand lives in the 44,000 Allied dead.
They cursed General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British general who led the Gallipoli campaign; they cursed Major General Sir Alexander Godley, the officer commanding the Australian and New Zealand forces; they cursed the First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who dreamed up a disastrous campaign that advanced only 2000m into Turkish territory.
One New Zealand soldier said he had waited 70 years for the truth to be told.
“If I live to see that day, perhaps I will die less angry.”
On April 25, 1915, the soldiers knew with increasing certainty many would die as their troopships approached the Gallipoli beaches. As they hit the beaches, men died in their droves. Turkish soldiers defending the small peninsula jutting into the Aegean Sea poured withering machine-gun and rifle fire from their positions in the hills down on to Anzac troops. Many soldiers used the bodies of their comrades for shelter until they could at least get off the beach and dig shallow trenches, which offered pitifully little shelter. Many were teenagers who had lied about their age in New Zealand to join the great overseas adventure. Many had never seen a body, let alone been part of a conflict that was to become a bloody epic of New Zealand history.
Gallipoli was one of the most strategic places on Earth, said New Zealand military historian Ian McGibbon in his guide to the battlefield and memorials on the peninsula.
The Gallipoli Peninsula guards the Dardanelles, a waterway to the Sea of Marmara and through the Bosporus channel to the Black Sea. The British wanted control of the Dardanelles so they could open sea lanes to southern Russia and relieve the pressure on Russia. The British navy tried to force its way through the Dardanelles in March 1915 but was stopped at the Narrows, where the channel is slightly more than a kilometre wide. When the navy failed, the decision was made to take the peninsula with troops, setting in train a military disaster for New Zealand of historic proportions. New Zealand was a young and small country with a population of less than a million when the war broke out. By Christmas 1915, when the troops were pulled off Gallipoli, the New Zealand casualty list had reached 7473, including 2721 dead. Of the dead, only 344 have known graves. Henry Lewis, who joined the Otago Regiment, said shortly before he died in the 1980s he did not like thinking about Gallipoli more than he had to. “But most of it I can never forget.” The Gallipoli campaign took soldiers to their limits. If they weren’t violently ill with dysentery and dying in the latrines, they were trying to keep their heads down in the trenches and out of the snipers’ sights. Some of their daily ration of two or three quarts of semibrackish water brought in barges from Egypt was used to soften the “rock chewers” — the square biscuits they ate with bully beef. They did not wash or take their boots off for two or three weeks and lived in lice-infested uniforms. During the fiercest of the fighting, soldiers gave no thought to killing the enemy. “Anzac Jack” Moore, a New Zealander serving with the Australian Army, was one of the first soldiers to land.
He hit the beach soon after dawn, laden down with 55kg of gear, including his rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition, five days of food, water bottles, a greatcoat, entrenching tools, a grappling hook and wire cutters to handle Turkish barbed wire.
He was shot in the shoulder three weeks after he landed.
He told his New Zealand family in a letter, a week or so after hitting the beach, he was in a trench attacked by thousands of Turks.
Hundreds fell to the Anzac rifles and machine guns and still they came, he said.
“Every shot we fired we seemed to bring down at least one man. What a horrible sight to witness and you can realise what a soldier feels like under such circumstances, temporarily losing himself to everything but slaughtering the advancing enemy.”
 
It was the spring of 1916 when battle-hardened Anzac veterans arrived on the western front. Among them was Southland farmer William Anderson (24), who recorded his activities daily in a series of small pocket diaries that provide a compelling personal record of one of the most horrific wars of the 20th century, writes ROBYN ANDERSON.


Words from the frontline



Monday, May 29, 1916 Sunday, June 18, 1916 Monday, June 19, 1916 Saturday, July 8, 1916 Monday, September 18, 1916 Monday, September 25, 1916 Friday April 13, 1917 Thursday June 14, 1917 Friday June 15, 1917




MY HUSBAND’S grandfather, Bill Anderson, was an old man with a deep scar across his cheek and half an ear missing. Everyone in the family knew Gramps had been in the Great War but his deafness precluded conversation and although we never said it, it was understood that perhaps he wouldn’t want us to pry. It was only after he died and we read his memoirs and discovered his diaries under a bed, that we realised just how much he wanted to tell us.
His war diaries, as I have come to call them, are a daily chronicle of events that, in their very ordinariness, still send shivers down my spine. Still, I read them for the same reason that Grandpa wrote down the names of all the men who died. It is important that we remember what is sacrificed when a nation sends her troops to war.
When the New Zealanders arrived in France in 1916, they discovered that, unlike Gallipoli, the western front had excellent transport links and many small towns that had hot baths, churches and even the occasional cinema. Everything they saw convinced them they had already experienced the worst war had to offer and the issuing of steel helmets and gas masks did not change that impression. Even their enemy appeared civilised for, shortly after their arrival, the Germans delivered a message to the Otago men in the front trenches, reading, “Send over the time, please, Anzac”.
Within a few weeks, however, enemy bombardments increased and men began once again to die. By then Will Anderson had been drafted into the newly created stretcher bearer squad, the members of which went unarmed into battle to provide first aid and bring back casualties.
World War 1 was a trench war. When the men moved to the front line, they came in through the reserve trenches and up to the “supports”, where they could sleep and work. Both these deep trench systems were connected by smaller communication trenches to the front line, which was about 100m ahead. The front line was guarded by machine guns and punctuated with listening posts and firing stands that looked out through barbed wire into no-man’s-land. In some areas, 100m was all that separated the two armies, which spent most of the time shelling each other and not moving anywhere.
At noon the shells set fire to a church in Armentieres which we could plainly see burning from here. In the evening, commencing about 5 o’clock our guns in our locality opened out and the enemy replied with high explosives, shelling the second line.
Sergeant Major Willow and Pte Date were wounded both 14th Regiment. The 10th stretcher bearers gave us a hand down with them. We were relieved by Auckland . and . . reached the convent [billet] about 1am
Last night a 14th man and a machine gun man were hit, the latter killed. Hannah took down the one walking, our squad taking the dead one down in the morning. A quiet day.
I went up in the afternoon and soon had a man to take down, Nicol of the machine gun. Another man in the 8th was shot by two Germans who by some means got within our lines. He was not badly hit and walked down. Got a Post Card from Jessie. Replied to it. Crocket a 14th man was hit in the morning.
Quiet last night. Nobody was hit. A few shells were sent over today and a lot of rifle grenades. Two chaps were slightly wounded with them. Two others went away sick. In the evening, Fritz opened out on Canterbury and a few on us. Fourteen Otago Casualties. Of the 8th (Southland), Brooks killed, Hammond and Bromley wounded also Sergeant Hassent with barb(ed) wire. The 8th went out into No Man’s Land to flank the Germans if they attacked Canterbury . . .
SORTIES into no-man’s-land happened at night and were one of the few ways of gathering reliable information on the enemy. Night raids were eagerly anticipated and the Otago’s first night raid took place on July 13, 1916. Will volunteered and before leaving, one of his old school friends smeared burnt cork on his face as camouflage. When darkness fell, the Allied guns opened up on the wire. There was concern among the raiding party that the guns were signalling exactly where they were to go through, but they set aside their disquiet and, one after another, the men climbed over the top and lay down in no-man’s-land. This was the accepted, highly successful method of raiding the enemy, the aim being to lie undetected while the artillery bombarded the German trenches, then at a prearranged time, the guns would stop and the raiders would leap into the German lines, taking the enemy unawares.
The Germans, however, had finally worked out how it was done and this particular night, instead of returning fire at the Allied lines, they directed it into no-man’s-land, where 181 men lay waiting. The sensible option, as Will wrote many years later in his memoir, “would have been to wriggle our way back to the lines”, but no-one had anticipated this turn of events and there were no orders to retreat.
Instead, the unarmed stretcher bearer flung himself into a shell hole, praying the short summer night would continue long enough for him to rescue the wounded. He did not know then that of the eight stretcher bearers on the raid, six were already killed or wounded. When the shelling stopped, a German machine gun opened up. It was the signal Will had been waiting for. He crawled out of his shell hole and began to gather in the wounded.
It was approaching dawn when he brought in the last man.
“I had told him I would be back for him, otherwise I might have called it a day,” he writes in his memoirs. “But impelled by an urge not from my head but a place I couldn’t put my hand on near my heart, I sallied out with a very good reliable companion. As with the others I told him to flatten out without delay. Crouching low we got our man on the stretcher then as the parapet of the German trench showed up in the growing light, I repeated the warning saying that if our movement was spotted when on our feet with the stretcher we would need to drop the stretcher and ourselves like a stone. Whether we had been seen or not, no sooner had we got to our feet than the gun opened out again.”
Later, as he made his way back to his dugout, Will overheard someone point out his blackened face and say, “one of the lucky ones”. And he was. Despite the shelling and machine-gun fire, Will received only a few shrapnel wounds, some bruises, a dent in his new steel helmet and a bullet hole directly through the heel of his boot. One hundred and 63 Otago men were killed or wounded that night. Only 17 walked away.
The New Zealand division was relieved in August, 1916, and for the first time in three months, was clear of the line. Will celebrated with a hot bath, an issue of clean underwear and several nights out with his mates.
The battalion moved to Steenwerk where the men were billeted in the farms behind the lines. It was late summer and on several occasions after a day spent either marching or working in the trenches, the young farmer and his mates went out and helped with the harvest. But as ever, the war intervened.
Moved up to the front line in morning. All walking cases except Lieutenant Jones who was hit in an advanced part of trench taken by the Tommies last night. He was wounded in the afternoon and as the trench would not let the stretcher through we had to bring him down at night.
New Zealanders hopped over at 1.15pm and took 500 yards. Heavy shelling at night. Our nocturnal visitor [a German plane] was over again.
Throughout winter and into spring, the New Zealanders fought up and down the line. In April, they were outside the small German-held town of Messine.
Nothing doing for the Company during the day. In the evening the Battalion went up and dug a trench in No Man’s Land. The Doctor and all the stretcher bearers went up. Luckily no casualties. Back to Camp about 3am.
This insignificant entry plays down an astonishing event, in which 400 men and five officers, in a matter of hours, dug a new trench, right under the Germans’ noses.
The men all knew something big was about to happen at Messine.
They spent weeks working on trenches, extending supply roads and preparing new gun positions. When the new gun batteries were in place, the guns pounded Messine Ridge, day and night, until it was reduced to a pulverised mass.
The battle finally began on June 7, 1917, with an enormous explosion of mines hidden deep under the German lines and the simultaneous firing of massed machine guns and artillery. Within minutes, the men were out of the trenches and moving forward. The following week, Will was at the Potteries Farm, just outside Messine.
Shelling as usual during the day. Some of the company were on Fatigue during the day. In the evening we got short notice to go up and make an attack. No 5 platoon of the 8th and a platoon of the 10th sent on the stunt. Tommies were to the left of us. Canterbury to the right. The Barrage commenced at 7.30 and we got up there just in time to follow it up. We commenced our attack from the Potteries Farm and advanced about 500 yards directly in the direction of [Wytschaete] digging in fifty yards beyond Sunken Farm. A chain of outposts was made, a platoon to each, two or three hundred yards between.
On the way over Sergeant Morris was slightly wounded and Hurley more severely by machine gun. Tom Lyttle and I accompanied the attacking party over and dug in. Tom went back afterwards with a message and got Hurley away. Other casualties occurred at the post. Sans and Swain killed. Sanson wounded and one missing who was sent over to get into touch with Canterbury. Lieutenant Cockerell was in charge of our post. A German plane hovered round during our attack and doubtless picked up our signal flares which we lit for our planes to pick up. Our position was heavily shelled but most of the shells went back to the Sunken Farm and fell out front. A shell landed on our machine gun position fifty yards in front of our position and put it out of action killing Sans. I went out later on and got his disc, pay book etc. Also Swain’s who was killed in the trench. Two German machine guns not far out in front of us were giving trouble so we got the stokes up. They fired about 30 rounds and shifted them. We had to get a machine gun to replace ours and a 4th Coy gun and team came up. The ground wet and water comes in at no great depth. On a fatigue party at night Laidlaw and Warren were killed. Sergeant Lomas and another man wounded.
German planes come over very low during the day seeking out our positions and we lay low. The shells he put over during the day went into Sunken Farm but made up for it at night shelling very heavy our position but by a fluke no shells landed quite in the trench all going just short and beyond. During the day a party of Germans came up a trench with packs. We allowed them to come up and get settled down thinking to get round them when they were not suspecting. They were quite close but unfortunately one of our men showed his rifle over the parapet and they cleared out. Other Germans tried to work round on our right between us and Canterbury but our chaps sniped at them and they went back.
During the attack those on our right and left encountered Germans but we did not. The Tommies got a good many prisoners.
We were relieved by 2nd Canterbury who should have relieved us the night before but lost their way. No rations came up to us as they were lost on the way up being with the party which was shelled. The German bombardment was very heavy on all the strong points and in the rear. The 10th evacuated their post but returned to it. The Germans did not attack as we feared. Our battalion which was relieved had to stand to at the Catacombs anticipating an attack. We were relieved at midnight and went to the Catacombs at Hyde Park Corner [a trench reference]. Got four NZ letters when I got back. The 10th had about a dozen casualties in the strong point. The 4th had several in the front line.
On July 19 the battalion rested in the Catacombs — deep caves built in the Ploogert wood.
The official Otago Battalion History records, “The sojourn from July 19th to July 28th which the lst Battalion spent at the Catacombs was not free from hard work nor from enemy shelling. On the 20th casualties were sustained 5 killed, 8 wounded.”
Among the injured was Will Anderson, whose wounds were to see him finally sent home.
No-one can say how much Will’s experience in the war changed him but those who had known him realised he was a different man and referred to him as Bill. Once discharged from the army, Bill went back to being a farmer and got married. He was also politically active and once stood for Parliament for the Social Credit Party. When he retired from farming, he spent the next 20 years guiding on the Milford Track.
Bill Anderson was 93 when he died. It was a life longer than he had ever expected. He certainly lived longer than many of his friends.
 
am going to the dawn service at the shrine of rememberance.
it should be awesome, its the first time i will have been and i cant wait.
the only bummer is that i have to get up at about 3:30-4am to get in there but oh well it will be worth it
 
Locke said:
am going to the dawn service at the shrine of rememberance.
it should be awesome, its the first time i will have been and i cant wait.
the only bummer is that i have to get up at about 3:30-4am to get in there but oh well it will be worth it

We went to the dawn service in Sydney, it was very well attended.

With luck next year we are contemplating heading to Turkey for it which I think will quite an experience.

Incidently heres a reasonable link for those wanting a few visuals.

http://www.anzac.govt.nz/?GXHC_GX_jst=8258c07850ea6165
 
wow, thats proof right there that great minds think alike!!!!! :lol:
i would love to be at Gallipoli for the service, its one of those pilgrimages that would be awesome to make.
also on my list of "things to do before i die" is walk the Kakoda trail, now that would be an experience
 
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