With various Govts turning logical contortions to prevent ANZAC Day returning to the pre-covid state and much advice from on high to “stand in your driveway”. Here are two links to 2015 and 2018 where I blogged about the broad history around the early part of WWI involved with the Ottoman Empire.
I have been sent this press article and thought it worth posting.
DAVID KILCULLEN The AUSTRALIAN 23 April
Anzac Day comes this year amid a sequence of events — the Afghanistan
withdrawal, the announcement of a royal commission into defence and
veteran suicide, the Brereton war crimes inquiry — that must make some
service members, veterans and their loved ones wonder whether 20 years of
the war on terror were worth the cost. I know I often find myself asking that
question.
For Australians who, this day of all days, want to be proud of their defence
force and confident in the nation it defends, these doubts may be
compounded by a deeper disquiet.
A year into the pandemic, among a string of economic shocks and natural
disasters, dealing with ineptitude in Washington and intimidation from
Beijing, our strategic environment is more dangerous and uncertain than at
any time in recent memory.
If there were ever a year when the nation needed our Diggers, this is it.
In July last year, Scott Morrison called this “one of the most challenging
times we have known since the 1930s and the early 1940s”. That reference
recalled for me a book I read 36 years ago, in 1985, my first year at the Royal
Military College, Duntroon.
David Denholm, writing as David Forrest, fought with the 58th/59th militia
battalion in New Guinea and Bougainville. His novel The Last Blue Sea is a
lightly fictionalised account of the Salamaua campaign of 1943, fought
across the immense, rain-soaked mountain ranges of northeastern New
Guinea by bedraggled militia (reservist) soldiers, commandos and Australian
Imperial Force troops.
My grandfather, who fought in that campaign with the RAAF, once told me
the book was “truer than history”. It is the literary equivalent of Ivor Hele’s
enormous, disturbing painting Taking Old Vickers Position, which hangs in
the Australian War Memorial and depicts a pivotal moment of the campaign.
Denholm wrote of 1942: “It was the year in which the nation discovered itself
to be something less than perfect. Dogmas broke asunder and the pieces fell
like hailstones … on the Kokoda Trail one lonely militia battalion held up the
Japanese for 35 days and nights … It was Australia’s saddest, most dreadful
and greatest year of all its history, and no Australian who lived in that year
could ever be the same again.”
This, too, has been a year in which the nation discovered itself — and its
soldiers — to be less than perfect: a year of bushfire, flood and pandemic,
internal unrest and escalating international tension. Dogmas such as the
centrality of the US alliance, China’s good faith as a trading partner or the
stability of the globalised system we rely on are under severe strain. The
Prime Minister’s historical reference is indeed apt as we pivot from distant
wars fought in the Middle East in support of allies to a rising threat of great
power conflict with the capacity to inflict enormous damage much closer to
home.
Given the moment we find ourselves facing, Australians have a right to
expect that our defence force will operate in a way that defends our interests
and reflects our values. People are rightly concerned about what the
Brereton allegations say about the morality and professionalism of our forces
in a long, exhausting, ambiguous fight far from home.
For what it’s worth, Defence itself brought these allegations to light, seeking
an independent inquiry to get to the bottom of what really happened and
hold those involved accountable. Leaders I have spoken to see this as a
wakeup call that demands a robust response to set it right. I am absolutely
convinced they will do just that. But there is another side to the coin. Just as
we need our forces to fight in ways that uphold our values, so our troops
need support from an engaged and informed public. The burden needs to be
shared lest the military become a secret caste and the wars we wage a
mystery to those for whom we fight.
For two decades we have been, to quote former chief of army Peter Leahy,
“an army at war in a nation that feels as though it is blissfully at peace”. Our
troops have paid in blood — more than 40 killed and hundreds wounded —
with thousands suffering psychological and moral injury. The costs continue
long after the last shot is fired, as the establishment of the royal commission
into veteran suicides attests.
I well remember the dreamlike disorientation I felt walking at Circular Quay in
Sydney — just back from Iraq, ears still ringing from rocket fire and sleep
plagued by nightmares — watching people placidly going about their lives as
if everything were perfectly normal, and of course for them it was normal. I
felt as if there were a sheet of bulletproof glass, invisible but impenetrable,
between me and everyone I met.
Months later I was in the Korengal in Afghanistan, a few weeks after that in a
near-miss car bombing on Massoud Circle in Kabul; a year later my convoy
was caught in an ambush in Dara-i-Nur district of Nangarhar province .
Forty-five thousand Australians who served in the war on terror know exactly
where those places are and how they look, sound and smell. Many, I’m sure,
will break out in a cold sweat thinking of them. Few other Australians have a
clue. This is the legacy of two decades of a defence force at war in a nation
at peace.
Anzac Day, on the other hand, plugs us back into our history, reminds us that
our Diggers can do us proud, as at Kokoda and Salamaua and a thousand
other battles across 12 decades since Federation. But they can do that only
if we, as a nation, have their back. In recent weeks — in battle simulation
centres at Canungra and Enoggera, on exercise in rural NSW, on the parade
ground at Duntroon, in class at the Australian Defence Force Academy, I
have seen the next generation of our servicemen and women rising to the
challenge of a new, more dangerous environment. I could not be more
confident that they will achieve whatever the nation asks, provided we
support them.
This year the horizon is darkening, but the spirit of Anzac is alive and well.
David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007, and
subsequently worked for the Australian and US governments as an
intelligence analyst and counterinsurgency adviser. He served in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, East Timor and Bougainville.
………….
Selected online comments:
Spectator
1 HOUR AGO
I’m a third generation veteran; my father WW2 and
grandfather WW1. My father was at the Battle of Wau and
later in the “Forgotten War”; the campaign to clear Aitape/
Wewak/Bougainville of remaining Japanese who had been
isolated and bypassed. There was a lot of controversy at the
time. Australians felt lives were being wasted in a
strategically needless battle. Blamey had a lot to do with it,
wanting to “do his bit” while the US advanced elsewhere.
The point is that Digger’s lives have often been wasted at
the whims of generals and politicians; Haig and Billy Hughes
in WW1, Blamey and Maccarthur in WW2, Westmoreland
and LBJ.
The more distant one is from the frontline the more blasé
one becomes of human lives. We see that pattern today
It took a long time for my father to be at peace with his war,
and take part in Anzac. It will take a long time for the current
generations as well. Be proud of your service even if it feels
as if no one else is.
……..
Chris
3 HOURS AGO
Nothing to take exception to here, and David’s observation
about the distance between a returning serviceman and the
civilian population has ever been thus. The militia on
Kokoda were recognised as ordinary Australians (chocos)
and their courage all the more lauded for that. But the
eulogising and mythologising of Australia’s armed forces has
done the modern military and us a disservice. The ADF are
by and large ordinary Australians doing an extraordinary job,
and in uniform they attract adulation and expectations that
set an impossibly high bar. No wonder so many struggle
when they leave the uniform behind.
……..
JohnSR
3 HOURS AGO
David, welcome to the world of the returned Vietnam
veterans.
………
patrick
Thank you David,I have high regard for yourself,your
service,your military knowledge and only wish we had more
of your ilk,I am concerned that Australia is totally
unprepared for the challenges we face,it will be conflict and
it will be brutal. We are sleepwalking again,as prior to World
War 11.
……
Andrew
5 HOURS AGO
For 25 years I was an operational policeman in Sydney. In
that time you are subjected to all forms of violence,
aggression, harm, deprivation and grotesque destruction of
human life, over and over again. The reason most Police do
the job they do is so people can walk around Circular Quay
oblivious to all that the Police are subjected to. No Police
officer labours under the misapprehension that they can
cure the ills of the world. I know the mayhem continues
after my leaving the Police, and it will continue after the
current generation of Police move on as well. But the Police
keep a lid on it.
The military in this country operate more and more in the
same paradigm as the Police. In Afghanistan and Iraq you
took the fight to the source of terrorism – we’ve never seen
another attack on the scale of 9/11 in the west since. The
military need to take credit for that great achievement. You’ll
never beat terrorism, the same way the Police will never
beat crime – but you can keep a lid on it. That way people
can walk around Circular Quay oblivious to what you’ve
done for them, and that’s what you’ve achieved – and that’s
a great thing.
When victory is defined as something you stop from
happening it’s always hard to be exact about what’s been
achieved.
While the people walking around Circular Quay may not
have recognised what you did as an individual, I believe
most people are very thankful for what the military have
done collectively.
………
Conservative Mark P
3 HOURS AGO
Great comment Andrew, and I am always repelled and not
surprised at what our police go through, you see the parts of
society that the politicians, the human rights wingers ignore.
And I hate to say it but I could assure you that I could never
be paid enough to be a policeman in Australia. But very
thankful to those that do serve.
………
Conservative Mark
7 HOURS AGO
As a vet the politics disgust me. As a combat soldier the
ADF and Australia is not an organisation or country that I
now would wish to serve because it, the politicians and the
ADF is more interested in woke social engineering theory’s,
hanging its soldiers out to dry on the say so of a flawed and
highly suspect report and politics. I tell young blokes today
not to join our military, the ADF has forgotten what it is and
means to be a soldier, sailor airman. Also questioning what
professional combat soldiers do in combat is not a province
for academics or politicians to question or ponder. They will
never be able to connect the dots. Something that those
other than soldiers will never understand. As for ANZAC day
I haven’t attended a service since I got out because I find
once again the usual politics and naïve understanding that it
invokes. I remember them in my own way.
Likethumb_up31
…………
Lesley
7 HOURS AGO
My father returned from WW2 having had his leg shot off 6
weeks prior to the war ending. After his short
convalescence, he was given 10 shillings (old UK monetary
system), a demob suit and told to go out and get a job and
get on with his life. There was no assistance, government
or otherwise to help him. Thankfully, he did get a job and
was able to support his growing family with all the love and
support in the world. To this day, no one can surpass my
dad as the biggest hero of my life.
…….
Certainly various ALP State Govts are determined to remove the ANZAC Day sentiment from Aus public life. Using C-19 panic to do it is just a measure of their foetid and disgusting powerlust.
The immoveable point though is the undeniable propensity of large swathes of the populace to vote for these people. Of course there are swings and roundabouts but large numbers of people still vote for them. Hoping this will change is pointless, it seems to me.
So we will have blackouts, power rationing, EV’s that will prevent travel across regional areas through limited range (which will lead to taxing movement per km), increasing control of dissent (like this), plane travel only for the very rich, and a dozen other woke treasures such as the abolition of cash.
If not, can anyone suggest how this may be stopped with useful, practical means ? This obvious question has been asked many times of course but has not produced useful answers.