The true story of Gallipoli
What took place at Gallipoli gave us a positive sense of self, but it also devastated the nation.
You often hear the assertion that Gallipoli “made” Australia. Those who claim this mean Gallipoli made Australia in a positive or creative sense. In fact, what happened was the opposite.
There was, admittedly, a vacuum that Gallipoli was perfectly timed to fill. At the start of the war there was a discernible yearning among many Australians for their newly federated nation to do something special on the international stage. Accordingly, when it became apparent that the Australian Imperial Force had performed well in its big test at Gallipoli, there was an outpouring of delight and relief.
What took place at Gallipoli, together with Australia’s substantial contribution in the grim and gruelling years that followed, created enduring national traditions that remain widely esteemed — endurance, resourcefulness, comradeship and so on.
It’s true these traditions were highlighted during the war, and were esteemed and still are esteemed, and do connect back to what the AIF did in World War I.
It’s also true that some who had previously seen themselves primarily as, say, Tasmanians or Queenslanders came to see themselves more as Australians because of the war. This applied particularly to soldiers, but to a good many back home as well.
So, with these elements in play, you can see why the claim is made that the war “made” Australia in a positive sense. But the combined effect of all these elements is swamped by the ghastly magnitude of the losses. The 60,000 dead, all the maimed as well, the loss of so many of our brightest and best, together with the damaging rupture of the nation’s cohesion and optimism — such devastating losses surely overwhelm any sense that the war was a positive for Australia.
In fact the war could be said to have affected Australia more negatively than positively.
Historian Bill Gammage has compellingly captured the war’s aftermath: “Dreams abandoned, lives without purpose, women without husbands, families without family life, one long funeral for a generation and more after 1918”. The consequences of the war, short-term and long-term, were disastrous for Australia.
The nation’s pre-war progressiveness had been admired. Many Australians welcomed the advent of welfare measures and innovations in public policy that confirmed their nation’s emergence as a relatively cohesive society based on egalitarianism and democratic mechanisms such as the secret ballot. There was a sense of national harmony and collective optimism. This was, of course, relative — acceptance of the pioneering initiatives and advances was not universal and some bitter disputes eventuated along the way — but Australia as a nation was seen as confident and forward-looking by many of its citizens, and by others as well. In fact, some European progressives were so impressed by what they regarded as the advanced social laboratory taking shape in Australia that they crossed the globe to scrutinise it.
However, this widely admired national cohesion and optimism was ruptured by World War I.
Australia became more bitterly divided than at any other time since European settlement. The Australian Labor Party, which had advanced more rapidly than any equivalent party elsewhere and had been pivotal to the nation’s pioneering progressive initiatives, exploded in the biggest split it has ever endured.
The conscription plebiscites were ferociously contested, industrial disputes were intensely divisive, and there was a chasm between those who had endured the indescribable on the battlefields from those who had not.
Furthermore, the recruiting campaigns were contentious, sectarianism became much more prevalent, the national government under Billy Hughes seemed to operate in an environment of perpetual crisis, and there was an atmosphere of palpable tension affecting everyone who had someone precious in the trenches.
The upshot was Anzac as a national narrative was captured by the conservatives, who presented themselves as the political embodiment of the nationalistic spirit of the AIF. With divisive wartime tendencies continuing to infect Australian society after the war, a detrimental ethos evolved that looked backwards to Gallipoli and elevated concepts such as disloyalty and sectarianism.
In the process the pre-war perception of Australia as a progressive, innovative nation, where a distinctive society was taking shape, receded over the horizon.
The Anzac tradition could have exerted a very different influence down the decades if it had emphasised that Australians had gone to war to protect this special society that was taking shape before 1914.
Moreover, the emphasis on Gallipoli has distorted understanding and awareness of Australia’s contribution. The Western Front was far more significant to Australia than Gallipoli — the appalling casualties were much greater, and so was the significance of what the Australians accomplished. In fact, Australians influenced the destiny of the world in 1918 more than in any other year before or since.
When the massive German onslaught launched on March 21, 1918, drove the British back 65km, there was widespread anxiety that after years of ghastly casualties and terrible hardships Britain and its allies might be on the verge of losing the war. Australian formations were rushed to the rescue and performed admirably in stabilising the situation. The German advance was beginning to overextend but the sense of crisis on the British side remained acute, and the Australians’ contribution was significant at this critical stage.
Later in 1918, when the tide turned, the Australians were again prominent in the series of successes at the Somme in the second half of the year. In particular, in the decisive victory on August 8, the Australians advanced 11km in seven hours and captured 7925 prisoners and 173 guns.
Afterwards the top-level German strategist General Erich Ludendorff concluded that only one side could now win the war, and it wasn’t his. And this Australian triumph was achieved despite the inability of a neighbouring British corps to capture the village of Chipilly. This had implications for ensuing operations, as German gunners there could continue to disrupt the Australians.
Astonishingly, an AIF patrol of two sergeants and four privates managed to do what the British corps could not in an exploit that originated as a souvenir hunt — these intrepid half-dozen Australians (with British infantry following up behind) drove the Germans out of Chipilly.
Commemorating what happened at Gallipoli is understandable, but remembering what happened in 1918 is fundamental.
The relationship between Australian soldiers and their American counterparts is illuminating. Present-day Australians tend not to be familiar with what happened in 1918. What they are familiar with is the tradition — which has applied since World War II — that whenever their nation is engaged in an international endeavour with America, it does so as a subservient lackey. What happened in 1918 — when the Americans, keen but green, were very much the junior partner and relied on us to show them how — would be widely regarded today as inconceivable.
A typical instance occurred on September 29, 1918, when a combined Australian-American leapfrog operation attacked the formidable Hindenburg line. The Americans had the easier initial role but did not consolidate properly at their objective, with the result that General Pompey Elliott’s 15th Brigade not only suffered avoidable casualties but also had to complete the Americans’ task as well as their own more difficult assignment. Afterwards Elliott learned the 15th Brigade lieutenants he had lent to help the Americans with mopping-up and other frontline techniques had not carried out this important task because an American general had kept them at his headquarters to show him how to run the battle.
Australian subservience in more recent decades was exemplified by the Vietnam War, and it was in the aftermath of that conflict that the Anzac ethos was in such decline it was widely presumed in the 1970s its demise as a force in Australian society was imminent. Intriguingly, Anzac rose from its deathbed and accomplished a remarkable revival.
The credit for this transformation has been attributed to various factors. Government funding and information, especially the assiduous provision of material from the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, has been seen as influential, with the Australia Remembers program often cited as a notable example. But Australia Remembers was in 1995 and the revival of Anzac seemed to be under way before then.
A significant change had already occurred concerning attitudes to Australian soldiers. During the Vietnam War, when the bitter antagonism over conscription intensified anti-war sentiment and resistance, opposition to the war tended to involve fervent hostility to everything associated with it, which of course included the soldiers engaged. Later, after the Vietnam venom subsided, a contrasting, more nuanced perception became increasingly evident during the 80s: you could be utterly, profoundly opposed to war, yet still have empathy and sympathy for what happened to young Australians caught up in war.
What caused this shift and why did it occur then? The culture of the era was a factor — new books, films and music. Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years and Patsy Adam-Smith’s The Anzacs, both published in the 70s, told the story of the Australians’ experience of World War I through the letters and diaries of individuals. This was a new approach, and both books became well known and influential. Even more so were the re-creations that followed on film. These were numerous. The most influential included Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (with Gammage as historical adviser), the adaptation for television of Bert Facey’s superb autobiography A Fortunate Life, the Nine Network miniseries Anzacs, and the ABC’s adaptation of Roger McDonald’s novel 1915.
These mainstream re-creations illuminated the World War I experience and provided soldier characters for viewers to care about. Whether it was Facey, or the sprinter Archy in Weir’s film, or the soldiers in 1915 coping with what they encountered at Gallipoli as well as the whims and wiles of the character played by Sigrid Thornton, each of these central characters highlighted and reinforced the perception that sympathy for individuals caught up in war was not inconsistent with profound opposition to war in general.
Music was also part of the era’s cultural wave. Popular songs such as The Band Played Waltzing Matilda by Eric Bogle, with its poignant lyrics about a soldier who had been wounded at Gallipoli, were influential. Bogle’s legless Anzac had no illusions that the war had “made” Australia in a positive sense. Nor should anyone else.
Ross McMullin is an award-winning historian and biographer. His latest book is Pompey Elliott at War: In His Own Words.
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