Remember everything
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| Steel lifeboat from His Majesty's Transport (HMT) Ascot used in the landings at Gallipoli by 13 Battalion AIF |
In a corner of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra lies a lifeboat that was recovered in the lee of the cliffs at Gallipoli. It a relic now, a rusted, worn out cutter that was used by the Army during the Dardanelles campaign to ferry soldiers from the troop ships anchored in the Straits to the beach at ANZAC Cove. It is one of two lifeboats used during the landing in 1915 that remain in the care of the memorial. One of them, an exhibit in storage, is a wooden lifeboat from His Majesty’s Transport (HMT) Devanha and is completely intact. The other - the relic - lies tucked away inoffensively in a corner of the AWM’s Commemorative Hall, just shy of the visitors' desk. It is full of bullet holes.
If you position yourself just at the starboard quarter near the stern of this carefully preserved relic you can view the lifeboats entire length. The critical damage to its hull is undisguised, the bullet holes are many and of a large caliber. And if you stand there quietly you will be left with the overwhelming impression that for some of the young, enthusiastic, and fearful men that were aboard this boat on that early morning of April 25th, 1915 the damage to them would, as it was to the lifeboat, have been fatal.
Throughout last year, in the lead up to the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, we were being asked again to celebrate these men and to honor them for their sacrifice and achievement. Some years ago Prime Minister Howard said: "The Anzac legend has helped us to define who we are as Australians." And many agree.
But in the years after the war, Australia struggled to cope with the needs of its crippled, former soldiers and the wider community found itself profoundly distressed and embittered by guilt and loss. It was exacerbated by the refusal of most surviving veterans to speak about a war that had so drastically altered their character as to turn them into complete strangers.
In response, Australia’s self-prescribed therapy was the establishment of appeals and the building of memorials the intensity of which was so extraordinary that no town, school or public building escaped the communities need to erect permanent plaques, statues, and cenotaphs as acts of penitence. And now, 100 years later these things are the only things that remain which mark the trauma and grief of an entire Australian generation.
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| The Australian War Memorial in Canberra. |
None of that is remembered now. None of it is commemorated. And yet it certainly took just as much courage to nurture a veteran’s recovery, wounded or not, in the years after the war as it took for those men to face the bullets and shells of the enemy.
In the years since we have embraced war stories, more or less as entertainment. Hollywood, in particular, has been prolific in crafting dramatic, heroic stories of self-sacrifice, and we are more familiar with the exploits of the US Marines than we are with men of the 8th Battalion, AIF.
‘The Pacific’ had a budget of over US$200 million, and it was shot largely in Australia. ‘A Band of Brothers’, was a hugely successful series that was of itself a spawn of the Tom Hanks film ‘Saving Private Ryan’. The blockbuster ‘Pearl Harbour’ retells the story of the attack by the Japanese against the US Pacific Fleet in 1941. ‘Fury’, ‘American Sniper’, ‘The Monuments Men’, ‘Unbroken’, 'Dunkirk' and these are just the recent ones. They are glorious, dramatic, superficial works of fiction loosely based on largely convenient fact. Our efforts in crafting our own war stories in the American tradition have been unwelcome, clumsy, and unattractive. They appear to lack the passionate sincerity that Hollywood seems so polished in manufacturing.
Our politicians continue to use this shallow myth created by the Americans as a political tool, advertisers use it to sell their products and the mainstream media co-operate by being always eager to hold up our veterans as shining examples of courage and determination. And all of them gloss over the inconvenient or complex detail, which has conspired to give us a distorted view of the 100th anniversary of the end of the war.
The truth is that the Gallipoli landing and the subsequent campaigns in France were a catastrophe. There was extraordinary courage, incredible hardship met with resilience and determination. There are many stories of heroism and astonishing ingenuity. But we shouldn’t celebrate it. We should stand in defense of what these sacrificed men might have become. We should be angry that these soldiers were, in most cases, deployed with utter contempt by unapologetic, incompetent men. Men who had no connection or stake in Australia. We should be appalled that there has never been an apology from Britain or even an acknowledgment of the wars complete military ineptitude. History now records the name of Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty and the man who pushed for the landings on the Turkish peninsula as a war hero but in the years after 1915 Churchill’s name was poisonous in many Australian families.
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| The Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. Funded by public subscription it sits overlooking the CBD. |
The 100th anniversary should have been viewed with sadness and anger. It was not Australia’s great moment in the sun. We lost so many, for so little. Our rural communities suffered extraordinary loss, as evidenced by the names on all of the memorials. There was unspoken horror in the pointlessness of it all and consequent damage in our faith in each other. And it was, without doubt, a waste of everyone’s time.
But on Remembrance Day, this year and as in every year, we should still stand and honour their memory. As Keating said of at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier “He is all of them. And he is one of us”
O my countrymen, God rest your souls!
Lest We Forget. Lest We Celebrate.
Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Commemorative Address at the Australian War Memorial, 1993
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