Flying flag of Anzac pride

THE Anzac tradition risks being undermined and debauched by politically correct post-modernist teachers, as evidenced by the Simpson award-winning essay extracted yesterday in The Daily Telegraph.

The adolescent author is not to be blamed for his focus on supposed links between the Cronulla riots and the Anzac legacy, but his mentors are. While war is inherently brutal, it is not necessarily fruitless. The spirit of Anzac is embodied not in fanciful academic theories but in family histories such as that which Di Watts, of Scotland Island, and her sister, Anna Xue Yang, of Hobart, have agreed to share today. Their father, Charles Hume Baldwin, was a 21-year-old bushman when World War II broke out. He had until then spent much of his time single-handedly droving herds of horses from NSW over dense mountain ranges to his family's property just south of Brisbane. He joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1941, completing his pilot's course in Manitoba, Canada, before being sent to Britain for navigation and bomb aiming training in Scotland. His war was fought in the freezing skies above Europe in a Lancaster with 550 Bomber Squadron, a mixture of British, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians based in North Killingholme, a village in North Lincolnshire. From early 1943 to July 1945, he completed a total of 33 bombing missions over Germany, France and Italy – 28 missions at night and five during the day. The average life expectancy of the men in these crews was only five missions, and more than 5000 young Australians alone died in Bomber Command, of whose members more than half were to give their lives. On his return, Baldwin rarely spoke of his experiences but shared some of his most vivid memories. Apart from front, mid-upper and rear machine guns, the big Lancasters, which measured 103 feet across, had virtually no defensive armour, and he spoke of night skies filled with burning aircraft and falling parachutes as far as his eyes could see. On August 15, 1943, 214 Lancasters dropped both incendiary and explosive bombs on the cities of Milan and Turin in Italy. The sisters believe their father was bomb aimer that night. The bombs were dropped and they flew home but eight Lancaster crews didn't make it. Baldwin spoke of the agony of waiting to see who survived, the horror of seeing aircraft being shot down over the Channel and even on approach when they were so very close to home. He was badly burned in two crashes and sustained numerous other physical injuries, but it was his psychological scars that proved to be the most enduring. Discharged on March 18, 1946, after four years and 102 days of service, he joined a bank in Innisfail, Northern Queensland, helping new European immigrant farmers establish their own properties. Later he bought a dairy farm on the Ather-ton Tableland. Life on the farm seemed quite normal and yet all felt the effects of the war. Di says as a small child she struggled to understand "why Dad was so sad so often, and later, why violent nightmares would always follow a war movie, or whenever the smell of smoke was in the air". Di says a turning point came when their father met an Italian family who had settled south of Cairns where they wished to set up a cane farm. New immigrants whose family had been devastated by the war, they had lived in Northern Italy until a terrible bombing raid occurred, on the night of August 15, 1943. "When my father realised that it was his raid, and quite possibly his bombs, that had wiped out their family, a sense of remorse and guilt overwhelmed him," Di says. "Something inside him came unstuck, his grip on reality was lost and he spent the best part of a year in a psychiatric ward in a Brisbane hospital." When he eventually recovered enough to come home, he and the Italians spent many hours together. Their friendship grew and grew. "That they could be friends at all seemed like a miracle under the circumstances, but somehow, in each other's company they found healing and comfort. Not only did the friendship help my father to make a full recovery but it lasted for the rest of their lives." Di first told her story to a group of her neighbours last Anzac Day, a little over a year after her father died, close to his 85th birthday. She says Anzac Day is a special moment in time when stories such as those of her father and his wonderful friendship can remind us that war is to be avoided at all costs, because the cost of war is too great. But when war is forced on us and we must fight to defend ourselves, then we can remember with pride the terrible price that ordinary people pay to do their duty.