It's coming up to ANZAC DAY

[fuzzywuzzy]

I was listening to the author of ...'the militarization of australian history'...and I tend to agree with him .

Now before anyone thinks I'm dissing out on our beloved dead men of 100 years ago I'm not ...my great grandfather was one of them ...........and this is where I agree with the author. today we have an almost propaghandist/political view of our military history . Today we believe (if we don't study it ) that it shaped us as a nation ........well I don't believe it did. We didn't change after Gallipoli and the events of that battle, and it's proven by the fall of Singapore in WW2. Australia didn't change after WW1 ...it changed after Vietnam.



So this ANZAC day remember in solitude and reflect..........for those who the Day was originally meant for. (and always remember we share this day with New Zealanders, something Australians often forget.) Not our modern day soldiers not our recent military dead..... But of a time and a place in our WW1 history.

I'll continue to put here excerpts and historical testimony of those who were there and those who were home and of course our political and imperial masters of that time . Imagine that time and reflect . They were very different people to the modern day Australians ....the ANZAC spirit died with it's men. We have a new spirit in Australia and it's nothing that those who fought could ever conjur up in their wildest imaginations. But we respect them for what they did and what they were looking for .

[fuzzywuzzy]

The war graves, and why they are unlike others.

For the building work Hughes developed a Turkish quarry on Gallipoli at Ulgardere. According to one authority, the stone there was of ‘that same class as that of which the Homeric walls of Troy were built’. Some of this stone was brought in by lorry but the rest was transported by sea to North Beach where an aerial ropeway was constructed to take it up on to the ridge and down to Lone Pine. As construction work proceeded, the peninsula received its first visitors, although the intention was to keep them firmly away until all work was finished. In April 1920 Hughes wrote of someone who may have been the first Anzac pilgrim:

Google satellite map of the Gallipoli Peninsula. View Larger Map.

One old chap managed to get here from Australia looking for his son’s grave; we looked after him and he’s pushed off to Italy now.

Gradually, throughout the early 1920s, the cemeteries and memorials were built to the specifications of the Scottish architect, Sir John Burnet (1857-1938). Burnet’s designs for Gallipoli differed from those used on the Western Front in France and Belgium. The three distinguishing features of the peninsula’s cemeteries are:

* a walled cross instead of the free standing Cross of Sacrifice;

* stone-faced pedestal grave markers instead of headstones; and

* a rubble-walled ha-ha (sunken fence) to channel away fast-flowing flood waters.

On the Gallipoli Peninsula today are 31 war cemeteries, 21 of which are in the Anzac area. There are a number of memorials to the missing, the largest of which are the Helles Memorial and the Lone Pine Memorial. On Chunuk Bair there is also the New Zealand National Memorial. This is a battle memorial to the New Zealand soldiers who served on Gallipoli.

The Gallipoli cemeteries contain 22,000 graves. However, only 9,000 of these are of identified burials with grave markers. Where it is known that a soldier is buried in a particular cemetery but his grave could not be definitely established, he is commemorated in that cemetery by what is termed a ‘special memorial’. The British and Dominion ‘missing’ - approximately 27,000 men – are commemorated by name on five memorials — Helles (British, Australian, Indian), Lone Pine (Australian and New Zealand), Twelve Tree Copse, Hill 60 and Chunuk Bair (New Zealand).




Gallipoli and the Anzacs | Visiting Gallipoli today - War grave sites



Australian visitors, not surprisingly, spend most of their time at Gallipoli at the cemeteries and memorials of Anzac. However, a day or two given to visiting some of the Turkish monuments and memorials in the area will provide an insight into the Turkish perspective on an event which has played such a major role in Australia’s understanding of itself. At these sites are powerful stories of courage, determination and sacrifice. Such places are a reminder that these qualities were not only to be found on the Allied side of the lines but were, and remain, a common inheritance of all peoples who have been involved in the tragedy of war. This bond between the ordinary soldiers and sailors who fought at Gallipoli was well expressed by the President of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:

There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us

Where they lie side by side

Here in this country of ours.

[‘Johnny’ – name signifying an ordinary British/Australian/New Zealand soldier: ‘Mehmet’ – similarly, a symbolic name for an ordinary Turkish soldier.]

The Turkish memorials and monuments featured in this gallery are only a small sample of those to be seen at Gallipoli and on the Asiatic shore. For a fuller description see Phil Taylor and Pam Cupper, Gallipoli, A Battlefield Guide or Major and Mrs Holt, Battlefield Guide, Gallipoli.

When World War I broke out in Europe in early August 1914, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) initially remained neutral, unable to commit itself fully to either the Central Powers (Germany and Austro-Hungary) or the Allies (Britain, France and Russia). However, on 27 September 1914, Turkey closed the Straits of the Dardanelles (Çanakkale Boğazi) to British, French and Russian shipping and the situation gradually drifted towards war. On 29 October, German warships, ostensibly under Turkish control, bombarded Russian Black Sea ports. Turkey now found itself drawn inexorably into the German sphere of influence, and on 5 November 1914 Britain and France officially declared war on the Ottoman Empire.

[fuzzywuzzy]

The time line leading up to the crisis of events. As you'll see Turkey didn't have much choice in either side of the situation...........but neither did we and they respected that of us.



Timeline: August-December 1914 | 100 Events in the Gallipoli Campaign | Gallipoli and the Anzacs

[fuzzywuzzy]

The nurses.

On Lemnos, Matron Wilson and her nurses experienced the inefficiency of military administration in relation to the hospital. In her diary she described the steady flow of new patients during the August 1915 offensive on Gallipoli and the effect that lack of proper equipment and supplies had on the care of the wounded:

9 August — Found 150 patients lying on the ground — no equipment whatever … had no water to drink or wash.

10 August — >Still no water … convoy arrived at night and used up all our private things, soap etc, tore up clothes [for bandages].

11 August — Convoy arrived — about 400 — no equipment whatever … Just laid the men on the ground and gave them a drink. Very many badly shattered, nearly all stretcher cases … Tents were erected over them as quickly as possible … All we can do is feed them and dress their wounds … A good many died … It is just too awful — one could never describe the scenes — could only wish all I knew to be killed outright.

[Grace Wilson, in Bassett, Guns and Brooches, p.46]



For the nurses, life on Lemnos was spartan. Louise Young wrote of the difficulties they experienced on the island:

The travelling kitchens would burn on windy days, and people got dysentery from the Greek bread … we did not even have a bath tent as water was so short, and as well the centipedes were very bad! Our hair used to be full of burrs, and in the end many girls cut their hair short. It saved a lot of trouble.




Christmas time on the island was happy. The boys hung up their socks, and I had to sneak round at 3 am and fill them with toys and sweets. Two men saw me and said Father Christmas had a white cap and gown on. There was great excitement in the morning.

[Evelyn Davies, in Barker, Nightingales in the Mud, p.48]

However they might have roughed it on Lemnos, one nurse, Nellie Pike, was grateful for the opportunity to use her skills in a forward zone:

We were all glad to be taking part in the great adventure. They were grim and tragic, but somehow inspiring days.

[Nellie Pike, in Barker, Nightingales in the Mud, p.42]




Red letter day. Shells bursting all round, we are off Gaba Tepe

[Sister Ella Tucker, AANS, Hospital Ship Gascon, off Gallipoli, 25 April 1915, in Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches, p. 44]

For Australians, the image usually associated with 25 April, 1915 is that of Australian soldiers charging bravely up the steep and barren slopes of Gallipoli. Less appreciated is the picture of an Australian nurse on that same day attending to hundreds of battered and bleeding men on the decks and in the confined wards of a hospital ship. Wounded men were ferried out to the Gascon lying off Anzac Cove. Among the nurses, doctors and orderlies who attended them there, was Sister Ella Tucker, AANNS:

The wounded from the landing commenced to come on board at 9 am and poured into the ship’s wards from barges and boats. The majority still had on their field dressing and a number of these were soaked through. Two orderlies cut off the patient’s clothes and I started immediately with dressings. There were 76 patients in my ward and I did not finish until 2 am.

[Ella Tucker, in Barker, Nightingales in the Mud, p.30]

Arrival of the first sisters on Lemnos

Arrival of the first sisters on Lemnos Island.

By the evening of 25 April, 557 wounded had been taken on board the Gascon. Ella Tucker stayed with the ship for the next nine months as it ferried over 8000 wounded and sick soldiers between the Gallipoli Peninsula and the hospitals on Imbros, Lemnos, Salonika, Alexandria, Malta and in England. An entry in her diary for a voyage in May reflects the stressed and, at times, almost surreal nature of her work:

Every night there are two or three deaths, sometimes five or six; its just awful flying from one ward into another … each night is a nightmare, the patients’ faces all look so pale with the flickering ship’s lights.

[Ella Tucker, in Bassett, Guns and Brooches, p.44]

On the hospital ships off Gallipoli, Australian nurses came face to face for the first time with the reality of the wounded. It made some of them confront the limitations of their nursing skills and the notion of the glory of war. Working on the hospital ship Sicilia Sister Lydia King confided to her diary:



I shall never forget the awful feeling of hopelessness on night duty. It was dreadful. I had two wards downstairs, each over 100 patients and then I had small wards upstairs — altogether about 250 patients to look after, and one orderly and one Indian sweeper. Shall not describe their wounds, they were too awful. One loses sight of all the honour and the glory in the work we are doing.

[Lydia King, in Goodman, Our War Nurses, p.39]

Serving on a hospital ship was the closest the Australian nurses came to the fighting during the Gallipoli campaign. Even in the comparative safety of such ships, they were sometimes in danger. On 11 August 1915, Sister Daisy Richmond was nearly killed:

We return to Imbros to discharge our light cases, once more return to be refilled … We are well under fire many bullets coming on the decks. I was speaking to one boy, moved away to another patient when a bullet hit him and lodged in his thigh. It just missed.

[Daisy Richmond, in Cheryl Mongan and Richard Reid, We have not forgotten, p.152]

[fuzzywuzzy]

The war memorial list ....No rank just names.

With reference to the inclusion of titles and decorations in the Honour Roll, I feel sure that the question was discussed at the meeting on 19 February 1924, and that this was what I was going on in stating that the War Memorial Committee was against the inclusion of ranks. I feel that the same applies to decorations, which were sometimes given to a degree which aroused comment and bitterness, to staff officers, and which, if generally well earned, were certainly not received by a proportion of those who deserved them. I strongly feel this: that the visitor, not knowing the conditions of the front, will stand before these lists and, seeing the DSO’s [Distinguished Service Order] and MM’s [Military Medal], will say to himself “Ah, those are the brave men” (or, perhaps, ‘the bravest”) – a conclusion which is not true, how far from true probably only those who were actually through heavy fighting can realize.

[Letter, Charles Bean to Major John Treloar, 28 February 1928, Bean Papers, Item 664, 3DRL6673, AW


From the very beginning of our history australians although "honouring" detested "honouring".

[fuzzywuzzy]

The VC........................................ and little known facts.



ANZAC'S first VC was not an ANZAC..........he was British.

Lance Corporal Walter Parker VC, Portsmouth Battalion, Royal Marine Light Infantry. Because we were apart of british imperial troops ............................

his story

In drizzling rain during the night of 28-29 April 1915, the exhausted men of the 3rd Brigade AIF, men who had fought their way ashore at dawn on 25 April, were relieved at the front line by the Portsmouth and Chatham Battalions of the Royal Naval Division. Hearing that marines were coming to their aid, the Anzacs believed they would be British regular soldiers from a famous regiment, men who they had been urged to imitate, models of ‘steadiness, order and training’. Bean, however, described these particular marines as raw, untrained, many barely 18, youths – ‘Some had but a few weeks training; most only a few months’. They had expected to go into orderly trenches but found only holes in the ground, hastily dug to protect the Anzacs from Turkish bullets:

From the dark came the distant sounds of Turkish bugle-calls. Close in front of them from the dense scrub flashed the occasional rifles of snipers; overhead the bullets cracked; machine-guns sent the mud of the parapets in showers upon them.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1935, p.533]

Among these youngsters filing into these precarious positions was an older recruit, Lance-Corporal Walter Parker, aged 33, from Stapleford, Nottinghamshire.

The Anzac front line, as the marines found it, was merely a series of disconnected pot-holes. The most isolated position lay across 350 metres of open ground and was garrisoned by 60 men led by Lieutenant R Empson. During the afternoon of 30 April, the Turks began vigorous attacks on the marine positions and a number of them were overrun. Empson’s little band was now even more cut off and alone and he sent back a message for urgent relief.

image: see caption below

Walter Parker VC, sometime after World War I, shaking hands with King George V. Parker had actually left the services when The King had presented him with his VC at Buckingham Palace on 21 July 1917. [Photograph in Stephen Snelling, VCs of the First World War: Gallipoli, Stroud, 1995, p.93]

A party of marines was detailed to go to Empson’s aid and, when a medic was requested, Lance-Corporal Parker volunteered. Parker had already drawn attention to himself for his brave direction of the battalion stretcher-bearers in battle. As the relief party emerged into the open in the dark, they came under heavy fire, a man was hit, and Parker stayed with him while the others went on. As day dawned Parker realised that to reach Empson he would have to run over open ground totally exposed to Turkish fire. Despite being threatened by an Australian officer that he would shoot him if he did not turn back, Parker leapt from the trench and ran down the slope towards the cut-off position. During his epic run he was twice wounded but reached the trench to the cheers of his comrades. There he learnt that none of the other members of the relief party had got through; they were either dead or wounded or had given up in the face of such murderous fire.

Parker now set about treating the wounded notwithstanding his own injuries. During a full scale Turkish attack, which was beaten back, Lieutenant Empson was killed and command assumed by Lieutenant A Alcock. By the next day, May 2, the little garrison had been reduced to 40 unwounded men and ammunition was running low. Retreat was essential. Again Parker proved himself a brave and capable leader by managing to get all the wounded back safely up the hill in the open through the enemy bullets. During this evacuation, Parker suffered multiple wounds, some of them serious, and he crawled the final few metres to safety.

Parker’s heroism and self-sacrifice had been noticed by many in the Royal Naval Division. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross but the award was only confirmed after a serious of mishaps in June 1917, more than two years after Parker’s time on Gallipoli. By then ill health had forced him to leave the service and for the rest of his life – he died in 1936 aged 55 – he was a semi-invalid due to his war wounds. Parker’s daughter, Vera Constance, born in 1919, was christened in honour of his VC. She recalled the last years of her father’s life:

He was a very sick man for a lot of years … When he knew he was dying, he set out to get my mother a pension. But the authorities said he had survived too long for his death to be have been caused by his war wounds. When his doctor heard, he hit the roof. He said he had treated him and that he was a complete wreck. He said it was a miracle he had lived so long.

[Vera Parker, quoted in Stephen Snelling, VCs of the First World War: Gallipoli, 1995, p.93]




At Anzac the Australians were greatly praised and rewarded for their actions at Lone Pine and other places. Those other Anzacs, the New Zealanders, felt unnoticed. Captain Aubrey Herbert, an Englishman and Intelligence Officer with the New Zealand and Australian Division, wrote of this New Zealand sense of invisibility at Gallipoli as he spoke with the survivors of a NZ infantry battalion after the great battles of the ‘August Offensive’:

I admired nothing in the war more than the spirit of these sixty-three New Zealanders, who were soon to go to their last fight. When the day’s work was over, and the sunset swept the sea, we used to lean upon the parapet and look up to where Chunuk Bair flamed, and talk. The great distance from their own country created an atmosphere of loneliness. This loneliness was emphasised by the fact that the New Zealanders rarely received the same recognition as the Australians in the Press, and many of their gallant deeds went unrecorded or were attributed to their greater neighbours. But they had a silent pride that put these things into proper perspective.

[Aubrey Herbert, Mons, Anzac and Kut, internet edition, pp.81-82]

One New Zealander whose gallant deed was recognised was Corporal Cyril Bassett, NZ Engineers Divisional Signals. As the Australians covered themselves in glory at Lone Pine, the New Zealanders fought their way up from the sea towards the heights of Chunuk Bair. This was the main attack in the so-called ‘August Offensive’ from Anzac designed to capture Koja Temen Tepe and Chunuk Bair, the high points of the Sari Bair range. From there a breakthrough of the Turkish lines towards the straits of the Dardanelles was envisaged and a possible swift and successful end for the Allies of the Gallipoli campaign. It was not to be for the Turks bravely held Chunuk Bair and eventually beat back the New Zealand, British and Indian forces sent against them. For his bravery during the Chukuk Bair action, Corporal Bassett was awarded the VC, the only one to a New Zealander during the Gallipoli campaign. Some later felt bitter about this lack of appreciation of many similar acts of bravery shown by the New Zealanders at Chunuk Bair and other actions at Anzac. Bassett, indeed, was quite surprised by his award and said later in life:

When I got the medal I was disappointed to find I was the only New Zealander to get one at Gallipoli, because hundreds of Victoria Crosses should have been awarded there.

[Bassett, quoted in Stephen Snelling, VCs of the First World War: Gallipoli, 1995, p.187]




Hugo Throssell – I have never recovered

Hugo Throssell

Captain Hugo Throssell VC, 10th Light House Regiment, AIF. [AWM A03688]

The last of the Anzac area VCs was also perhaps the most tragic. Second-Lieutenant Hugo Throssell, 10th Light Horse, Western Australia, was awarded his VC for an action at a place few Australians have now heard of or, despite the thousands who attend services at Gallipoli on Anzac Day, even visit. Hill 60, Kiajik Aghala (the Sheepfold of the Little Rock) to the Turks, lay well north of the old Anzac position on the front line in the region captured from the Turks during the ‘August Offensive’. For the Australians and New Zealanders much terrible fighting, marked by close range bombing and hand to hand action similar to what had occurred at Lone Pine, took place at Hill 60 between 21 and 29 August 1915. On the night of 28-29 August, a party of Light horsemen commanded by Throssell held off a determined Turkish counter-attack on a captured trench during which hundreds of bombs where thrown by both sides. A curt footnote in Charles Bean’s official history conveys a sense of the terrible intensity of the action that night:

Shortly afterwards Ferrier was attempting to throw back a Turkish bomb when it burst in his hand, blowing away the arm to the elbow. He walked to the medical aid-post but died on the hospital ship. Macnee was twice wounded. Renton lost his leg. McMahon was killed.

[Charles Bean, The Story ofAnzac, Vol 2, Sydney, 1924, p.761]

For his leadership and bravery at Hill 60 Hugo Throssell received the VC. After the war, he returned to Western Australia where he farmed and went into real estate. The Depression brought him to the brink of financial ruin and believing that his wife and family would be better looked after if they had a war service pension, he committed suicide. Throssell had written of himself – ‘I have never recovered from my 1914-1918 experiences’.

[fuzzywuzzy]

Lance Corporal Albert Jacka





JACKA,

Lance-Corporal Albert

14th Australian Infantry Battalion, AIF

19-20 May 1915, at Courtney's Post, Gallipoli Peninsular

CITATION: For most conspicuous bravery on the night of the 19-20 May, 1915, at Courtney's Post, Gallipoli Peninsular. Lance Corporal Jacka, while holding a portion of our trench with four men, was heavily attacked. When all except himself were killed or wounded, the trench was rushed and occupied by seven Turks. Lance Corporal Jacka at once most gallantly attacked them single-handed and killed the whole party, five by rifle fire and two with the bayonet.


and say those who free fall from cliffs and do really weird stuff for fun are idiots....here we have the premeditated sociopath,fortunetly he was on our side.

Gallipoli and the Anzacs | Researching Gallipoli | Bravery awards at Gallipoli: Albert Jakka, VC

[fuzzywuzzy]

this battle was auspicious becaue it came down to hand to hand combat ....the turks didn't know we were used to oub brawls I suspect..........



Soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery at Lone Pine, Gallipoli, 6-9 August 1915:

Corporals Alexander Burton and William Dunstan, Lieutenant Frederick Tubb, all 7th Battalion.

Lieutenant William Symons, 7th Battalion;

Private John Hamilton, 3rd Battalion;

Lance-Corporal Leonard Keysor, 1st Battalion.

Captain Alfred Shout, 1st Battalion.



In this emergency, therefore, he sent for Symons, handed him his own revolver, and ordered him to retake Jacob’s Trench. ‘I don’t expect to see you again’, he said, ‘but we must not lose that post’.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol II, Sydney, 1924, p.562]




I kdon't know about any of you guys but this sickens me :





Given the losses and the savagery experienced at Lone Pine during that battle, it is something of a shock to realise that it was called a ‘demonstration’ or a ‘feint’. To the north, along the ridge, at such places as German Officer’s Trench and the Nek, other attacks resulting in great loss of life were also called ‘feints’. Feint is defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as a ‘sham attack’, designed to engage the attention of the enemy from some larger and more central action taking place elsewhere. These attacks at Anzac were part of a plan known as the ‘August Offensive’. This offensive aimed at nothing less than victory at Anzac by driving the enemy from the heights of Chunuk Bair and positioning the Allies for an advance across the peninsula in the Turkish rear. In this way the original objective of seizing the Straits of the Dardanelles would be achieved and the Royal Navy sail triumphantly through to Constantinople.

During the planned offensive Chunuk Bair and Koja Temen Tepe (Hill 971), a higher peak further north, were to be seized in a complex set of actions involving New Zealand, Australian, British and Indian troops. They would carry out a night march to their attacking positions from the North Beach area of Anzac after sunset on 6 August 1915. That same evening, a British force would land even further to the north at Suvla Bay and begin pushing its way inland across the plain. To cover these movements, and to make the Turks think that the main attack was happening elsewhere, the biggest ‘feint’ of all was planned for Lone Pine. At the Pine the men of the Australian 1st Division would assault the central stronghold of the whole Turkish line and capture its forward trenches. If the the attack were convincing enough, so it was believed, the Turks would think that this was a major effort to break through their lines. Consequently, they would throw into the recapture of such a significant position their main reserves so drawing them away from the main assault at Chunuk Bair and Koja Temen Tepe.

Gallery – Lone Pine Todayimage: see caption below

The ‘demonstration’ opened at 4.30 pm on 6 August 1915 with a one-hour bombardment of the Turkish trenches. Previous bombardments had destroyed many of the barbed-wire entanglements that the Turks had placed out in front of their line in no-man’s-land. As the bombardment proceeded the men of the attacking battalions – the 2nd, 3rd and 4thBattalions, all from New South Wales – packed into the Anzac forward positions. Packs had been dumped to the rear and each man wore a white arm-band or a piece of white material attached to his back. This was to help tell friend from foe in the close fighting in the Turkish trenches that would soon be upon them:


The men chaffed each other drily, after the manners of spectators waiting to see a football match. Some belated messenger hurried along the trench to find his platoon, and, in passing, recognised a friend. ‘Au revoir’, Bill’, he nodded, ‘meet you over there’. ‘So long, Tom’, was the answer; ‘see you again in half an hour’.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol II, Sydney, 1924, p.502]

[fuzzywuzzy]

And this is where the propaghanda shits me



there were others.

GALLIPOLI CEREMONY: PRESIDENT MARY McAleese has called for Ireland to hold a “shared commemoration” to mark the centenary of the beginning of the first World War in 2014.

Mrs McAleese was speaking as she visited the Gallipoli peninsula to commemorate the thousands of Irishmen who perished during the ill-fated 1915 campaign.

Asked by The Irish Times how she hopes Ireland will mark the centenary of the 1914-1918 war, the President replied: “By restoring to memory a generation who, of their time and in their circumstances, made sacrifices that they believed to be important . . . [restoring] in such a way that those memories no longer divide us in the way that they have done historically but allow us a shared commemoration.

“I think a shared commemoration would be a very important thing, and in many ways we have already gone down that road, with the 90th anniversary commemoration of the Somme. That was a very special event and I have no doubt that something similar will occur on the 100th anniversary.”

Such commemorations, Mrs McAleese said, constitute a rite of passage.

“That couldn’t happen for the 80th or 70th or any of the other preceding anniversaries but for the 90th it was possible, and the direction we are going in now with the peace process, with the restoration of good neighbourliness North and South, and really very warm relationships east and west, I think we have a lot to look forward to for the 100th anniversary.”

In a later address to those gathered at Green Hill cemetery for the unveiling of a plaque to the almost 4,000 Irishmen who died at Gallipoli, Mrs McAleese said she wanted to honour “our Irish dead – those who fought in British uniforms, those who fought in Anzac uniforms, and those whom they fought, the young Turkish men who defended their homeland”. The sacrifice of the Irishmen at Gallipoli had suffered a “deficit of remembrance” due to the vagaries of history, she said.

“The Irish who fought for the British Empire here were not only destined to be overwhelmed by those who opposed them but to have their memory doubly overwhelmed, for they fought in a campaign that was lost and so long overlooked . . . Those fortunate enough few who returned alive from Gallipoli returned to considerable ambivalence, even hostility about their role and their sacrifice.”


why arent our Irish counterparts marching ? why havent they come out to here for ANZAC day?

[fuzzywuzzy]

so all up what is it about Gallipoli and a Turkish president that says this about invaders to his country .

Who the heck commerates their enemy? who would say so much to so few?

"Those heroes that shed their blood And lost their lives. You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side Here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, Who sent their sons from far away countries Wipe away your tears, Your sons are now lying in our bosom And are in peace After having lost their lives on this land they have Become our sons as well


Makes you think doesn't it? that not all is black and white. Have we learnt anything about Gallopli? ...unfortunetly we have .



train your troops to be more intensely hateful for their enemy .......make them hate longer until the deed is done.....brain wash them until they have no more feeling until they get back and normal life awaits them, who cares what happens to them after that ..jobs done .

[G#Gill]

Bless them all. Anzac Day Sunday 25th April 2010