Anzac day 2011

[GuyInTaiwan]

Good comments, one and all. :bravo:

My mother’s father was in the British Navy and had the dubious honour of being on not one ship, but two, that were sunk. After WW2, he migrated to Australia. I’ve heard very little about his war experiences.

My father’s great uncle (on his mother’s father’s side, I think) lied about his age so he could go to WW1 and he died a week or two into the Gallipoli campaign. My father’s grandfather (on his mother’s side) went to France or the Low Countries (I think France, but I could be wrong). When he joined the army, his parents (who had migrated from Germany in the 1890s) said he would be fighting their relatives. Apparently, he had quite a sense of humour and he promptly replied that he hoped he’d get every last one of the bastards. That said, my father told me that he once pressed his grandfather to talk about WW1 and my great grandfather told him about how he was still haunted by the face of a German soldier he’d killed in melee combat. I think there were also other family members of that generation who went to WW1, but I don’t know about them, and I’ve never been interested in asking my father more.

My father’s father went to Darwin during the Japanese bombing. He later went AWOL and returned to Melbourne, supposedly by strapping himself to the underside of a train with his belt (which sounds a bit far-fetched to me), so he could marry my grandmother. Then he turned himself in. I don’t know what came of that. He never did any jail time, so I suppose it turned out okay.

My father volunteered to join a branch of the military that was kind of like the reserves (I can’t remember what it was called. Perhaps the CMF?) so he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam. He had to do it mostly part time for five years. He eventually did officer training, but hated the whole army experience (though he does have some misadventures to tell about). The great irony of all of this is that he’s right into the whole thing now and goes to meetings and services with other ex-army people.

It’s probably this hypocrisy and rose-coloured nostalgia (not just from my father) that informs my disdain for the way war and the military are regarded at large.

[Fortigurn]

My mother just visited Gallipoli (a day before the memorial service), and sent me some thoughts on her past experiences with the memorial day (when she was at school), and her most recent reflections having visited the site.

[quote]Anzac and Remembrance Days at school always produced a kind of mental tension - not stress tension, but the balancing of two different ways of looking at things. On the one hand I was aware that my parents did not approve of nationalism and glorifying war, and on the other hand, there was a solemnity about the proceedings which was very much connected with the individuals who suffered in that war.

I was never really aware of the whole story of Anzac Day, nor even that it was actually a terrible defeat, or why, only that it commemorated a day when a lot of Australian and New Zealand soldiers died on a beach, very unfairly shot by Turks, in a place which I didn’t even know was in Turkey, only that it was somewhere in the war (and which war, I didn’t really know, either.) I never understood why this was ‘making the supreme sacrifice’, or how they were laying down their lives for others, when they were all getting killed, and why or how - since it wasn’t in England or Germany - it was somehow in the cause of saving Australia.[/quote]

[quote]I watched the chosen children lay the wreaths and salute the flag without emotion because I did not identify with the celebration of Australian nationalism, patrotism, or whatever you want to call it. Although all those fallen men were always referred to as ‘the soldiers’ in bulk, the fact that there were old men marching in Anzac parades and telling their stories, filtered through enough for even someone as detached as myself to realise that men died individually (how young they were I never realised, since 16 year old were adults to a child) and the sadness and the futility of it was able to reach me.

I felt that though war was wrong in God’s eyes, these men thought they were doing the right thing, and they died for that, and in some ways that was the most sad thing of all.

Remembrance Day had the same effect, the Last Post, after two minutes of silence, invariably raised the hair on my arms, and though I never wore a poppy in those days, I did feel that to respect the dead men was not inappropriate. Dad never said anything about the actual fighting during his time in WW2 submarines , and the couple of anecdotes about Grandpa fighting in WW1, seemed totally disconnected.[/quote]

To be fair, I do think there was a lot more flag-waving when I was in primary school, (I had the distinct impression that the Turks were evil cowards who took advantage of the brave Aussies etc etc) and these days everything about publically remembering battles is much more politically correct in both senses of the word. I came to realise that you can do the second without the first, and that respecting and regretting the waste of lives does not mean that you believe that what they did (or had to do) was right.

Speaking of the words on the memorial gravestones:

And of course there were those which spoke of the sacrifice willingly made, laying down life and so on…while I couldn’t help thinking that those poor young men would not have had time to think such lofty thoughts amid the carnage, or even think at all as they struggled to survive. Perhaps when they joined up, they did, though none could have understood what fighting would mean in reality. The sadness and the futility of it all really began to sink in, especially reading line after line from the families whose sons would never come home. No doubt each of them hoped that the boy’s death had been swift, glorious, instant, even bloodless. But of course, very few of them would have been.