Yesterday was ANZAC day. For those reading this from outside Australasia, ANZAC day is a half-day holiday commemorating people who were killed during a war. ANZAC itself stands for Australia-New-Zealand Army Corps and refers to the soldiers who fought from Australasia who fought in World War I. Traditionally the commemorations centre around Gallipoli on the coast of Turkey.
Gallipoli was the site of the failed invasion of Turkey in 1915. Get a globe, find Australia and New Zealand – you might have to turn it over, a lot of globes are built upside-down – then find Turkey. An obvious question will spring to mind: why where we trying to invade Turkey?
From the British and French perspective invading Ottoman Turkey made a lot of sense, it opened up a second front in the war and opening up the Dardanelles would free up Russian shipping. The Australian and New Zealand troops, who were training in Egypt and preparing to go to France, were a convenient force. Where Mother Britain sent us, we went.
The invasion was a failure, killing tens of thousands on both sides. It also established a popular myth in Australia and New Zealand, it was our “coming of age” as a nation. A time when we found an identity as something other than being part of the British Empire. The fact that fifty years later we were deeply aggrieved when Britain joined the EEC and stopped buying all our meat and dairy products shows that in reality it took us some time to become fully independent.
Even as the veterans of World War I have died, and as those from World War II dwindle, the commemorations have grown in size. However, I do not partake. If I did, I would be told about “gallant soldiers who made the supreme sacrifice”, and I object to this. They were killed while doing something extremely stupid. Australia and New Zealand should not have been trying to fight a war in Europe, let alone invading Turkey. World War I was pointless in the first place, doubly so for a group of people on the far side of the world.
Of course the loved ones of those who died don’t want to hear that sort of thing. No one likes being told that their grandfather died in a stupid, avoidable, way. It is also true that the volunteers who went off to war felt they were doing the right thing, it is certainly a lot easier to judge these things in hindsight. However, neither of these factors should stop us from assessing it for what it was: an horrific result of dogged loyalty to a remote King.
To some extent New Zealand has learnt the lesson, since Vietnam most of our military activities have been devoted to “peace keeping” duties. The idea being that we risk the lives of our soldiers for the trade-off of more peace worldwide and the hope that if we are ever attacked others will come to our aid still makes me uneasy, but it is far better than rushing into the heat of other peoples wars.