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The start of the Gallipoli campaign on April 25 1915 might not have been a pivotal moment in the Great War but most, though not all, Australians and New Zealanders are emotionally invested in this year’s hundredth anniversary of that first landing at Anzac Cove. Some of us have personal reasons to reflect on an operation that ended in December of that year with none of the objectives of the Allied Powers achieved. My own maternal grandfather, James Robertson (1894-1955), turned twenty-one on April 25 when he came ashore at Gallipoli. That makes the event part of our family legend but for many Australians this ultimately futile military operation signifies the improbable first chapter of a coming-of-age tale for our nation.
In Australia the Anzac legend somehow encapsulates our
national character. The young men who went off to fight for the British Empire
in Gallipoli and later the Western Front found themselves entangled in a brutal
conflict but also discovered a profound sense of camaraderie and national pride.
The Anzacs might not have defeated the Turks on the beaches of Gallipoli but
they learned all about esprit de corps: Simpson and his donkey, the jam-tin bomb, the trench
periscope, the wry wit, courage, innovation, mateship and a wicked sense of
humour all rolled into one. All the to-do about the Gallipoli centenary is not
without its critics. Over 8,000 young Australians lost their lives during those
grim eight months and yet there was precious little in strict military terms to
show for all the sacrifice. The best moment in the whole business was the
brilliant stealthy evacuation on December 10, 1915, which resulted in not a
single casualty.
There are, of course, those who are critical of the
emphasis placed on Gallipoli. British historian Peter Hart’s Gallipoli (2011) makes the case that the ultimate purpose of the
Gallipoli campaign, taking control of the Dardanelles Strait, conquering
Constantinople and removing the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) from the war, was
doomed from the start because of poor planning and a complete underestimation
of the enemy’s fighting capacity. The real military heroics, according to
Hart’s 1918: A Very British Victory (2008), occurred on the Western Front in the immediate
aftermath of the spring 1918 Ludendorff Offensive. During the hundred days that
led up to the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the Allied forces utilised
‘integrated warfare’ to hammer the Germans in a remorseless drive to the
Hindenburg Line and beyond. Systemised strategy, tanks, advanced communication
systems, accurate artillery strikes, air reconnaissance, the tenacity of
battle-hardened soldiers and the infusion of fresh American troops all combined
to create a mobile warfare that proved unstoppable. The Germans did not lose
the First World War on the home front; they were vanquished on the battlefield.
The hero of 1918, in the opinion of Peter Hart, was
the ‘British Tommy’, and yet the Australian Army Corps, under the command of
General John Monash, played a useful part in the proceedings. Whatever the brilliance
of Monash, he was but one of 17 generals along the front in those last one
hundred victorious days of the war. Hart is positive about the role played by
Australians at Villers-Bretonneux (April 24-25, 1918), Hamel (July 4), Amiens
(August 8), and Mont St Quentin (September 1), not to mention the ensuing
assault on the Hindenburg Line. If Australian school books and politicians have
paid too much attention to the Gallipoli misadventure and overlooked our
subsequent (and more productive) contributions to winning the First World War,
that was hardly the fault of John Monash.
Sir John Monash, knighted by George V on the
battlefield after the dazzling success of Amiens – is often acclaimed as the
founder of Anzac Day, a public holiday every April 25 in Australia and New
Zealand. As a consequence, some might want to blame Monash for giving excessive
importance to Gallipoli in our collective memory; but that would be to overlook
a number of things, including the fact that Monash was a mere brigade commander
when he came ashore at Gallipoli on April 26, 1915. The reality is that the
first officially designated Anzac Day took place in 1916 and this, in a sense,
set the birth date of the Anzac legend in stone. Moreover, John Monash’s
electrifying bestseller The Australian Victories in France in 1918 was published as early as 1920, and made it abundantly
clear that Villers-Bretonneux, Hamel, Amiens, Mont St Quentin, the Hindenburg
Line et al were the places where
the Australians made their real contributions to the defeat of the Kaiserreich
rather than Gallipoli.
In any case, it is not certain that John Monash had
any problems with April 25 being the commemorative day for the Anzac legend.
The Gallipoli campaign did not achieve its objective to knock the Ottoman
Empire out of the war and keep Russia in, and yet the goal was no less
respectable for that. Imagine the murder and mayhem that would have been
avoided if the Allied supply lines to Russia had been unlocked at Gallipoli and
Lenin’s October 1917 putsch (aided and abetted by the Kaiserreich) never
occurred. If we are to define the Anzac legend, at least from an Australian
point of view, as the contribution of a free and modern nation to the cause of
freedom-modernity in the world, then even the Gallipoli campaign, however
futile, takes on an affirmative meaning.
The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), founded in
1920, attempted to commandeer the Anzac legend for its own nefarious purposes.
Over 400,000 Australian men, out of a population of less than 5 million people,
enlisted for the Great War, and more than 340,000 of them returned home. Surely
these worldly and military-trained proles who helped whip the Kaiserreich
could be co-opted into a movement to create a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Well – no. My paternal grandfather, Howard McCann, who served on the Western
Front from 1916-18, preferred, much like James Robertson, the vagaries (and
self-reliance) of small business to the millennialist joys of Bolshevism. The
Anzacs endured death and every kind of hardship in the pursuit of victory
against the Prussian ideology, but they were rarely crazy enough to sign up for
the psychic suicide of Communism. The CPA folded in 1991.
Over the past fifty years a new kind of leftism in
Australia has replaced the Marxism or Fabianism of old. We might call it, as
per Christopher Hitchens, the ‘soft left’ or, more accurately perhaps,
anti-bourgeois bohemianism. It borrows from Lenin the notion of the Great War
as an ‘imperialist war’ but has less to do with Marxism-Leninism than radical
pacifism. Joan Beaumont’s Broken Nation: Australia in the Great War (2013) is an exemplar par excellence of anti-Anzac legend polemicism. Beaumont, at almost
every public appearance, insists that there is no ‘theme’ to her tome, only a
scrupulously honest attempt to chronicle the heartbreak and divisiveness in
Australia that accompanied the defeat of the Kaiserreich. The tragedy, as the
luminous historian-commentator Mervyn F Bendle has argued, is that latter-day
leftist ideologues such as Beaumont, an employee of the Australian National
University, occupy the commanding heights of academia in Australia. They are in
a position, thanks to the beneficence of the Australian taxpayer, to
indoctrinate a new generation into believing that Australia’s role in the
defence of civilisation throughout the twentieth century was a crime against
civilisation. The folly of these ideologues (they call themselves honesthistory.net.au) is to pour scorn on every Australian military
undertaking. Thus, Australia’s routing of the Japanese in the Battle of Kokoda
in New Guinea, one of the first setbacks of Imperial Japan during the Second
World War, was no victory at all because Tokyo never intended to occupy
Australia as such, merely incorporate it as a subjugated associate of the
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Marxist intellectuals of old at least pretended to be fond of ordinary Australians, but the
anti-bourgeois bohemian professoriate of today is another matter altogether.
They absolutely abhor the fact that Anzac Day crowds grow larger every year. My
father died in November 2011 and I still recall the emotion I felt accompanying
him on his last Anzac Day march through the main street of Adelaide in April of
that year. What my father understood (he fought with the Royal Australian Navy
against the Japanese), not to mention Ralph Edwards, our childhood neighbour
and a sniper at Tobruk, is that the freedom vital to Australian society is
dependent upon the defeat of the global enemies of freedom. The Australian
Defence Forces, as I write this, are playing their part in the struggle against
the Islamic State.
The Anzac legend comes down to this: we did not defeat
the Kaiserreich on our own, did not crush the Nazis on our own, did not beat
Imperial Japan on our own, and will not overcome the Islamic State on our own,
but we will always do our share in freedom’s fight against submission.
This essay is published in the Spring 2015 edition of the Salisbury Review
