Post by thracian08 on Apr 19, 2010 18:15:25 GMT -5
The resonance of Gallipoli
by
Shirin Yasar*
The significance of Gallipoli to Australians perplexes many from other nations. Gallipoli was a defeat; there were many other nationalities in the armies that fought at Gallipoli; the casualties of the British and French forces were far greater than those of the Australians. The number of lives lost by the Turkish army was more than any of the other nations.
It is an interesting notion that more Australians died on the Western front than at Gallipoli, and yet there is hardly a child in Australia who has gone through the education system without becoming aware of Gallipoli. Despite the passage of time, the Gallipoli story continues to be passed down with as much zeal as the stories told to the earliest generation of Australian school children. Almost a century has passed since the war at Gallipoli, yet schoolchildren continue to listen to stories of brave Simpson and his donkey, the gallant attack at Lone Pine, the self-sacrificing charge at the Nek, or various other incidents of Australian bravery. Each year the children are asked to observe a minute’s silence in memory of the men who lost their lives and the events they may never fully comprehend. Despite the valor of the ANZAC legend and the glory of the stories of gallantry, Australia was the invading country, and the battle ultimately amounted to a national loss that would only be recovered through a strategically swift retreat. So what is the significance of this event that has disallowed it to fade from the Australian psyche and perhaps more importantly, why is it that Gallipoli should continue to remain entrenched in the memories of all Australians?
Gallipoli, by popular acclaim, has come to represent the birth of a nation. Not only was it the first major campaign that Australia fought as a nation, but it was also an event where the largest Australian force in history attempted to land on foreign soil. Overnight thousands of young men had volunteered and by 1918, out of a population of less than 5 million Australians, remarkably more than 331,000 men had signed up. With federation having been declared only 13 years before the start of the war, the young nation had yet to prove itself on the world stage, and Gallipoli seemed to offer that chance. For the Turks, the battle was significant on an entirely different plane known as the Battle of Çannakkale. It represented the unrelenting strife of protecting the homeland against numerous enemies. Although the battle itself was lost, many Australians now consider Gallipoli as the historical event that shaped the nation. Gallipoli served and continues to serve as a feat of identity making for the Australian psyche with an intensity that even a victory may not have achieved. Australian perseverance and bravery came to be commonly juxtaposed with the incompetence and general lack of leadership on behalf of the British -- an idea that was cinematically crystallized in Peter Weir’s 1981 classic “Gallipoli,” which presented the British drinking tea on the beach while the ANZACs were being slaughtered at the Nek. Ironically, although the glory of empire was what had initially propagated the Australian will, Gallipoli ultimately served as the event that allowed the nation to forge its distinctively Australian identity, the beginning of severing itself from the shadows of collective colonial identity.
Even today, no other event in the nation’s history receives anything approaching the annual recitation and re-dedication that occurs every Anzac Day. As the Australian war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, Charles Bean had famously put it, Gallipoli “is about the creation of Australia in sacrifice and suffering, and about the tradition of the Australian character … Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat.” The ultimate failure of the eight-month campaign means that Anzac Day remains a mixture of mourning and celebration, being both an acknowledgment of death and sacrifice as well as a celebration of life and survival. For most Australians, Gallipoli represents a potent amalgamation of emotions where nationalism, nostalgia and sadness is sometimes accompanied by death and anger but also love and beauty; hatred however, “seems not to form much of the mix.” (Hutchinson, Garrie. “Gallipoli: the pilgrimage guide”; Black Inc., 2007)
The vast loss of life in seeming wastefulness is one of the primary aspects of what makes Gallipoli what it is today. More than 21,000 British, 10,000 French, 8,000 Australians, 2,400 New Zealanders, 1,350 Indians and 49 Newfoundlanders were killed, whereas the Turkish side alone is estimated to have lost more than 81,500 men. At one point, the land was strewn with so many corpses that the two sides had to call an armistice to bury the bodies of the dead soldiers. One officer recalled that “the place was terribly thick with dead bodies -- and those of Australians couldn’t be told from those of Turks because the faces go so black…” (Fewster, Kevin & Basarin, Vecihi; Basarin, Hatice Hurmuz. “Gallipoli: the Turkish story”; Allen & Unwin, 2003). Bean recalled that one Turkish captain said then, “At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep.” The trenches were something different altogether -- another private, James Cocker of the 11th battalion, remarked that within the trenches, they were “like a mob of ferrets in a rabbit hole… It was one long grave, only some of us were still alive in it.” Others commented on how the trenches often became so crowded during a siege that to simply move forward someone had to be killed and walked over. On Aug. 10 both sides stopped fighting out of sheer exhaustion. The summer heat brought millions of flies, and with them dysentery and other diseases. Ironically, disease became the greater killer of troops during this period than the battle itself. Life was described by numerous soldiers as being uncomfortable, unhygienic and monotonous. One soldier had even remarked, “They are lucky who get away from here wounded. … It is quite common for men to go mad here. The strain on the nerves is so severe.” (Pvt. E. C. N. Devlin, clerk, Manly, New South Wales [NSW], Letter Sept. 2, 1915. [Killed in action May 30, 1916, aged 35])
It was perhaps this joint suffering and loss of life that has created the enduring tie that many from both sides now consider the unique bond between the two nations. This was a point highlighted by NSW Returned and Services League (RSL) President Rusty Priest on the eve of his retirement when he remarked that “Australia and Turkey are perhaps the only two countries in the world that have a strong friendship born out of a war.” (Address at a special event staged in his honor by the consul general of Turkey and the NSW Council of Turkish Associations in 2002.) For Turks, Australians and New Zealanders, Gallipoli is something apart -- a significant event in the self-development of their individual nations. April 25 is often mentioned along with the Gallipoli landing, but sometimes it is not realized that the battles at Gallipoli lasted more than eight months. At some fronts, the trenches of the Turks and the Diggers were so close that they could hear each other’s talking and laughter. Like all wars, Gallipoli had its share of atrocities but this did not prevent the two nations from emerging with a sort of respect for one another where the 1915 battles were seen as something that bonded the two nations. A new respect, even a sort of sentimentality has emerged with the “Johnny Turk” today being a figure much more loved than hated by Australians. In Australia and Turkey, it has almost become obligatory to mention Gallipoli whenever the other country is the subject matter. For example then-Victorian Premier Steve Bracks, when dispatching a mobile medical caravan in July 2001 to the victims of the 1999 earthquake in Turkey, said: “Australians share a special bond with Turkey that goes back to another terrible experience at Gallipoli. And that shared experience makes our community effort even more meaningful.” The sentiment was reiterated recently when the RSL community of Victoria in 2006 ruled for the first time that the descendants of World War I Turkish soldiers would be allowed to participate in the Anzac Day march because they were “a very honorable” enemy. According to the RSL Victoria president, Maj. Gen. David McLachlan, it was true Turks had been the enemy, “but they were a very honorable enemy” and there was a “special relationship” between Turkey and Australia that was strengthened by the belief that “Johnny Turk” had fought fairly on the battlefield and that the nations shared a “common ground” through Gallipoli.
The shared sentiment of mutual respect on behalf of the Turks was perhaps epitomized by the speech made by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk -- the skillful officer who shone during Gallipoli and later became the first president of the Turkish Republic -- who, in his now renowned speech inscribed in white stone at Anzac Cove, addressed the mothers who had lost their sons during Gallipoli:
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
Arý Burnu was later formally renamed Anzac Cove by the Turkish government -- a gesture that was repaid by both Australia and New Zealand who placed commemorative memorials to Atatürk in their capitals.
Now as the 95th anniversary of Anzac Day approaches, one is reminded of the poem “Anzac Cove” by Leon Gellert, a South Australian poet who served at Gallipoli, which draws attention to the impact of Australian deaths on battlefields abroad. Gellert ends the poem with the lines: “There’s an unpaid waiting debt: There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.” A similar statement about the “unpaid debt” can also be read on a souvenir at the Memorial Hospital in Adelaide which asks, “Is our debt understood as well as remembered?” Unfortunately, whether a question merely of semantics or the Australian tendency to devise shorter “nicknames,” designating effigies and monuments as “war memorials” has led many later generations of Australians to regard memorials as a commemoration of war itself. Considering the randomly scattered monument in every odd park or so, often also including the names of ex-servicemen and women, as well as the causalities of war, many Australian youth fail to recognize the memorials main function of symbolizing the burial sites abroad of thousands of individual Australians. This is perhaps the true significance of making the pilgrimage to Gallipoli -- there are 31 cemeteries at Gallipoli, of which 23 contain Australian burials. Of the more than 22,000 Commonwealth burials, only 9,000 have been identified, while 13,000 rest in unidentified graves; whereas Shrapnel Valley Cemetery alone contains more identified Australian graves than any other place at Gallipoli. It was initially Bean who had conceived of the idea of Gallipoli as one big cemetery, and that “the finest memorial of these men was that they lay where they lay…” (Hutchinson).
Many who have made the annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli feel that the powerful effect that visiting it has on Australians today is mainly due to the battlefield around Anzac Cove, which has mostly been left unchanged by the forces of nature.
Even a swift visit will generally involve a walk along the beach where the landing took place, and to the cemeteries at both ends of the tiny beach, with their individual sad stories. A visit to Shrapnel Valley Cemetery will allow one to heed the warning found on a gravestone to “tread gently on the green grass sod, a mother’s love lies here.” (Hutchinson) Despite being thousands of kilometers away, thousands of young Australians continue to visit the graves of their ancestors on Anzac Day -- a day full of solemnity and remembrance as they tread the same shores and climb the same gullies that thousands of young Australians had passed nearly a century earlier. Anyone who is willing to seize the opportunity to visit this incredible place during the approaching Anzac Day festivities should consider the Gallipoli Down Under study tour, which aims to contribute to the awareness of Australian history amongst university students.
And why not visit such a place? In a small strip of land where literally every speck of the soil tread upon is filled with the remains of forgotten names, wasted youth and unlived dreams, Gallipoli remains for many Australians a site that needs to be paid a visit, a site to which they feel indebted. This sacred day of remembrance feels for many as a small, yet significant expression of gratitude paid towards those who, whether unwittingly or not, at the cost of their own lives have helped to shape the lives of others. It seems that for a long while yet, the significance of Anzac Day and Gallipoli will continue to hold sacredness for the descendants of both the Turks and the ANZACs who forged an imperishable bond through the unlikely event of war so many years ago.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*The University of Melbourne, Arts (Islamic studies/literature major).
19.04.2010
Op-Ed
by
Shirin Yasar*
The significance of Gallipoli to Australians perplexes many from other nations. Gallipoli was a defeat; there were many other nationalities in the armies that fought at Gallipoli; the casualties of the British and French forces were far greater than those of the Australians. The number of lives lost by the Turkish army was more than any of the other nations.
It is an interesting notion that more Australians died on the Western front than at Gallipoli, and yet there is hardly a child in Australia who has gone through the education system without becoming aware of Gallipoli. Despite the passage of time, the Gallipoli story continues to be passed down with as much zeal as the stories told to the earliest generation of Australian school children. Almost a century has passed since the war at Gallipoli, yet schoolchildren continue to listen to stories of brave Simpson and his donkey, the gallant attack at Lone Pine, the self-sacrificing charge at the Nek, or various other incidents of Australian bravery. Each year the children are asked to observe a minute’s silence in memory of the men who lost their lives and the events they may never fully comprehend. Despite the valor of the ANZAC legend and the glory of the stories of gallantry, Australia was the invading country, and the battle ultimately amounted to a national loss that would only be recovered through a strategically swift retreat. So what is the significance of this event that has disallowed it to fade from the Australian psyche and perhaps more importantly, why is it that Gallipoli should continue to remain entrenched in the memories of all Australians?
Gallipoli, by popular acclaim, has come to represent the birth of a nation. Not only was it the first major campaign that Australia fought as a nation, but it was also an event where the largest Australian force in history attempted to land on foreign soil. Overnight thousands of young men had volunteered and by 1918, out of a population of less than 5 million Australians, remarkably more than 331,000 men had signed up. With federation having been declared only 13 years before the start of the war, the young nation had yet to prove itself on the world stage, and Gallipoli seemed to offer that chance. For the Turks, the battle was significant on an entirely different plane known as the Battle of Çannakkale. It represented the unrelenting strife of protecting the homeland against numerous enemies. Although the battle itself was lost, many Australians now consider Gallipoli as the historical event that shaped the nation. Gallipoli served and continues to serve as a feat of identity making for the Australian psyche with an intensity that even a victory may not have achieved. Australian perseverance and bravery came to be commonly juxtaposed with the incompetence and general lack of leadership on behalf of the British -- an idea that was cinematically crystallized in Peter Weir’s 1981 classic “Gallipoli,” which presented the British drinking tea on the beach while the ANZACs were being slaughtered at the Nek. Ironically, although the glory of empire was what had initially propagated the Australian will, Gallipoli ultimately served as the event that allowed the nation to forge its distinctively Australian identity, the beginning of severing itself from the shadows of collective colonial identity.
Even today, no other event in the nation’s history receives anything approaching the annual recitation and re-dedication that occurs every Anzac Day. As the Australian war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, Charles Bean had famously put it, Gallipoli “is about the creation of Australia in sacrifice and suffering, and about the tradition of the Australian character … Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat.” The ultimate failure of the eight-month campaign means that Anzac Day remains a mixture of mourning and celebration, being both an acknowledgment of death and sacrifice as well as a celebration of life and survival. For most Australians, Gallipoli represents a potent amalgamation of emotions where nationalism, nostalgia and sadness is sometimes accompanied by death and anger but also love and beauty; hatred however, “seems not to form much of the mix.” (Hutchinson, Garrie. “Gallipoli: the pilgrimage guide”; Black Inc., 2007)
The vast loss of life in seeming wastefulness is one of the primary aspects of what makes Gallipoli what it is today. More than 21,000 British, 10,000 French, 8,000 Australians, 2,400 New Zealanders, 1,350 Indians and 49 Newfoundlanders were killed, whereas the Turkish side alone is estimated to have lost more than 81,500 men. At one point, the land was strewn with so many corpses that the two sides had to call an armistice to bury the bodies of the dead soldiers. One officer recalled that “the place was terribly thick with dead bodies -- and those of Australians couldn’t be told from those of Turks because the faces go so black…” (Fewster, Kevin & Basarin, Vecihi; Basarin, Hatice Hurmuz. “Gallipoli: the Turkish story”; Allen & Unwin, 2003). Bean recalled that one Turkish captain said then, “At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep.” The trenches were something different altogether -- another private, James Cocker of the 11th battalion, remarked that within the trenches, they were “like a mob of ferrets in a rabbit hole… It was one long grave, only some of us were still alive in it.” Others commented on how the trenches often became so crowded during a siege that to simply move forward someone had to be killed and walked over. On Aug. 10 both sides stopped fighting out of sheer exhaustion. The summer heat brought millions of flies, and with them dysentery and other diseases. Ironically, disease became the greater killer of troops during this period than the battle itself. Life was described by numerous soldiers as being uncomfortable, unhygienic and monotonous. One soldier had even remarked, “They are lucky who get away from here wounded. … It is quite common for men to go mad here. The strain on the nerves is so severe.” (Pvt. E. C. N. Devlin, clerk, Manly, New South Wales [NSW], Letter Sept. 2, 1915. [Killed in action May 30, 1916, aged 35])
It was perhaps this joint suffering and loss of life that has created the enduring tie that many from both sides now consider the unique bond between the two nations. This was a point highlighted by NSW Returned and Services League (RSL) President Rusty Priest on the eve of his retirement when he remarked that “Australia and Turkey are perhaps the only two countries in the world that have a strong friendship born out of a war.” (Address at a special event staged in his honor by the consul general of Turkey and the NSW Council of Turkish Associations in 2002.) For Turks, Australians and New Zealanders, Gallipoli is something apart -- a significant event in the self-development of their individual nations. April 25 is often mentioned along with the Gallipoli landing, but sometimes it is not realized that the battles at Gallipoli lasted more than eight months. At some fronts, the trenches of the Turks and the Diggers were so close that they could hear each other’s talking and laughter. Like all wars, Gallipoli had its share of atrocities but this did not prevent the two nations from emerging with a sort of respect for one another where the 1915 battles were seen as something that bonded the two nations. A new respect, even a sort of sentimentality has emerged with the “Johnny Turk” today being a figure much more loved than hated by Australians. In Australia and Turkey, it has almost become obligatory to mention Gallipoli whenever the other country is the subject matter. For example then-Victorian Premier Steve Bracks, when dispatching a mobile medical caravan in July 2001 to the victims of the 1999 earthquake in Turkey, said: “Australians share a special bond with Turkey that goes back to another terrible experience at Gallipoli. And that shared experience makes our community effort even more meaningful.” The sentiment was reiterated recently when the RSL community of Victoria in 2006 ruled for the first time that the descendants of World War I Turkish soldiers would be allowed to participate in the Anzac Day march because they were “a very honorable” enemy. According to the RSL Victoria president, Maj. Gen. David McLachlan, it was true Turks had been the enemy, “but they were a very honorable enemy” and there was a “special relationship” between Turkey and Australia that was strengthened by the belief that “Johnny Turk” had fought fairly on the battlefield and that the nations shared a “common ground” through Gallipoli.
The shared sentiment of mutual respect on behalf of the Turks was perhaps epitomized by the speech made by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk -- the skillful officer who shone during Gallipoli and later became the first president of the Turkish Republic -- who, in his now renowned speech inscribed in white stone at Anzac Cove, addressed the mothers who had lost their sons during Gallipoli:
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
Arý Burnu was later formally renamed Anzac Cove by the Turkish government -- a gesture that was repaid by both Australia and New Zealand who placed commemorative memorials to Atatürk in their capitals.
Now as the 95th anniversary of Anzac Day approaches, one is reminded of the poem “Anzac Cove” by Leon Gellert, a South Australian poet who served at Gallipoli, which draws attention to the impact of Australian deaths on battlefields abroad. Gellert ends the poem with the lines: “There’s an unpaid waiting debt: There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.” A similar statement about the “unpaid debt” can also be read on a souvenir at the Memorial Hospital in Adelaide which asks, “Is our debt understood as well as remembered?” Unfortunately, whether a question merely of semantics or the Australian tendency to devise shorter “nicknames,” designating effigies and monuments as “war memorials” has led many later generations of Australians to regard memorials as a commemoration of war itself. Considering the randomly scattered monument in every odd park or so, often also including the names of ex-servicemen and women, as well as the causalities of war, many Australian youth fail to recognize the memorials main function of symbolizing the burial sites abroad of thousands of individual Australians. This is perhaps the true significance of making the pilgrimage to Gallipoli -- there are 31 cemeteries at Gallipoli, of which 23 contain Australian burials. Of the more than 22,000 Commonwealth burials, only 9,000 have been identified, while 13,000 rest in unidentified graves; whereas Shrapnel Valley Cemetery alone contains more identified Australian graves than any other place at Gallipoli. It was initially Bean who had conceived of the idea of Gallipoli as one big cemetery, and that “the finest memorial of these men was that they lay where they lay…” (Hutchinson).
Many who have made the annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli feel that the powerful effect that visiting it has on Australians today is mainly due to the battlefield around Anzac Cove, which has mostly been left unchanged by the forces of nature.
Even a swift visit will generally involve a walk along the beach where the landing took place, and to the cemeteries at both ends of the tiny beach, with their individual sad stories. A visit to Shrapnel Valley Cemetery will allow one to heed the warning found on a gravestone to “tread gently on the green grass sod, a mother’s love lies here.” (Hutchinson) Despite being thousands of kilometers away, thousands of young Australians continue to visit the graves of their ancestors on Anzac Day -- a day full of solemnity and remembrance as they tread the same shores and climb the same gullies that thousands of young Australians had passed nearly a century earlier. Anyone who is willing to seize the opportunity to visit this incredible place during the approaching Anzac Day festivities should consider the Gallipoli Down Under study tour, which aims to contribute to the awareness of Australian history amongst university students.
And why not visit such a place? In a small strip of land where literally every speck of the soil tread upon is filled with the remains of forgotten names, wasted youth and unlived dreams, Gallipoli remains for many Australians a site that needs to be paid a visit, a site to which they feel indebted. This sacred day of remembrance feels for many as a small, yet significant expression of gratitude paid towards those who, whether unwittingly or not, at the cost of their own lives have helped to shape the lives of others. It seems that for a long while yet, the significance of Anzac Day and Gallipoli will continue to hold sacredness for the descendants of both the Turks and the ANZACs who forged an imperishable bond through the unlikely event of war so many years ago.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*The University of Melbourne, Arts (Islamic studies/literature major).
19.04.2010
Op-Ed