The History of ANAC Day and Australia and New Zealand at war

It is good to remember that 25 April every year si the day Australians commemorate ANZAC Day, which commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915.

The date, 25 April, was officially named ANZAC Day in 1916 and stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

In 1917, the word ANZAC meant someone who fought at Gallipoli and later it came to mean any Australian or New Zealander who fought or served in the First World War.

During the Second World War, ANZAC Day became a day on which the lives of all Australians lost in war time were remembered. The spirit of ANZAC recognises the qualities of courage, mateship and sacrifice which were demonstrated at the Gallipoli landing.

The commemorative services held at dawn on 25 April, the time of the original landing, across the nation, usually at war memorials, were initiated by returned soldiers after the First World War in the 1920s as a common form of remembrance. 

The first official dawn service was held at the Sydney Cenotaph in 1927, which was also the first year that all states recognised a public holiday on the day.

Initially dawn services were only attended by veterans who followed the ritual of ‘standing to’ before two minutes of silence was observed, broken by the sound of a lone piper playing the ‘Last Post’.

Later in the day, there were marches in all the major cities and many smaller towns for families and other well wishers.

Today it is a day when Australians reflect on the many different meanings of war.

Australia and New Zealand at War

Australia and New Zealand were at war from 4 August 1914 when Britain declared war on Germany. Both Australia and New Zealand enthusiastically supported Britain and the other allies – France and the Russian Empire against the Central Powers (Germany, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary) when the Ottoman Empire entered the war on 29 October 1914.

The plan was that the Allied fleet (British and French) pass through the Dardanelles Straits to lay siege to Constantinople (now Istanbul) to help the Russians and it was intended that the navy seize the Turkish batteries on both sides of the Strait, sweep away the Turkish mines and allow the Allied fleet safe passage through the Dardanelles.

The initial British war plans against the Ottoman Empire in Turkey did not involve a land invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli. The need for such a major landing in force at Gallipoli was only finally endorsed after the failure of the great naval attack on the Dardanelles defences of 18 March 1915.

The Gallipoli Campaign

As part of the larger Imperial Force, the ANZACs were brought in from training in Egypt to participate in the Gallipoli landings, the ANZACs comprising the 1st Australian Division and the composite New Zealand and Australian Division.

Unlike the European armies of the period, the Australian Imperial Force was formed from volunteers, with most of the volunteers heeding duty’s call and others looked for excitement or were escaping drought conditions at home.

The ANZACs landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula at dawn on the 25th April and met fierce resistance. Instead of finding the flat beach they expected, they found they had been landed at an incorrect position and faced steep cliffs and constant barrages of enemy fire and shelling.

Around 20,000 soldiers landed on the beach over the next two days to face a well organised, well armed, large Turkish force determined to defend their country, led by Mustafa Kemal, who later became Atatürk, the leader of modern Turkey.

Fighting on Gallipoli soon settled into a stalemate with the ANZACs and the Turks dug in, literally, digging kilometres of trenches and pinning down each other’s forces with sniper fire and shelling.

Thousands of Australian and New Zealand men died in the hours and days that followed the landing at that beach and the surviving diggers, as the Australians called themselves, hung on waiting for reinforcements.

The stalemate ended in retreat with the evacuation of the ANZACs on 20 December 1915 and by then, 8,141 had been killed or died of wounds and more than 18,000 had been wounded.

Following the Gallipoli campaign, Australian soldiers went on to France to participate in some of the major battles of the First World War, including the battles of Pozieres and the Somme. Soldiers at Gallipoli and at the other trench battles in France and Belgium suffered conditions such as typhus, lice, poor food, poor sanitary conditions and lack of fresh water as well as the all encompassing mud.

An ANZC Day Report by The Mole