This development of technology and tactics to successfully attack the German army on the Western Front has been described by British historian Gary Sheffield as a ‘learning curve’ or ‘learning process’.30 Central to this notion were improvements in the use of artillery so that the British (and their allies) were able to suppress the German infantry and its artillery, and enable their own soldiers to advance with hitherto unknown ‘protection’. Allied artillery fire was made much more accurate by a number of measures. These included: compiling mathematical tables that took account of the effect of barrel wear of a gun so it could be gradually re-aimed in order to continue hitting the same target; compiling similar tables that took account of the effect of shell weight variation, weighing a sample of each batch of shells and accordingly adjusting the aim of guns using these shells; meteorologists making weather reports on wind, temperature and atmosphere that were sent to all artillery batteries six times a day; using flash-spotting and sound-ranging to identify the location of German artillery batteries; and developing counter-battery tactics to prevent these guns from firing when Allied troops attacked.31
The importance of artillery on the Western Front in 1918 can be illustrated by one minor operation: the 7th Australian Brigade’s capture of a small area of high ground at Morlancourt on the evening of 10 June 1918. In this attack, the advance of 2000 Australian infantrymen was made possible by the artillery fire provided by 7000 mostly British gunners.32 By the time of the Allied ‘Hundred Days’ offensive in 1918, the British Empire infantry on the Western Front had all received the same type and level of training whether they were British, Canadian, or Australian – and whether they were volunteers or conscripts. As Sheffield has pointed out, the British 46th (North Midland) Division did not have the reputation of elite troops accorded to the Australian, Canadian or New Zealand divisions, yet with the guns of the British Army behind them, the mostly conscript soldiers of the 46th became the first troops to break through the Hindenburg Line on 29 September 1918 with an audacious crossing of the St Quentin Canal by men wearing floatation vests and carrying scaling ladders to ascend the steep far bank.33 The Allied victory on the Western Front in World War I was a team effort. National governments and private industries, civilians and soldiers – both volunteers and conscripts – combined to defeat Germany. As Elizabeth Greenhalgh wrote:
Breaking the Hindenburg Line … required a co-ordinated weapons system. It did not matter which part of the world, which part of the British Empire, or which part of England the infantry came from; these infantry troops formed one element of a weapons system that included tanks, aircraft and, above all, artillery. The guns were made in Britain or Canada, with steel imported from the USA, and they fired shells packed by women munitions workers.34
As the centenary of World War I approaches, it is important that the commemoration of this conflict is based on the real Australian war experience, and not the perpetuation of myths such as that of the AIF being the only all-volunteer allied army that took part. True, this war was a defining national experience for Australia; but, as we remember the men of the AIF, we need also to remember how their world differs from our own. With Anzac Day becoming the de facto national day, and the increasing interest by Australians in their military past, the best form of commemoration will be based on a solid base of fact and not the shaky foundations of myth.
Further reading
E.M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1993.
J. Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War 1914–1918, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995.
C. Bridge, William Hughes, Australia: The Paris Peace Conferences of 1919– 1923 and their Aftermath, Haus Publishing, London, 2011.
J. Connor, ‘Some examples of Irish enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force, 1914’, The Irish Sword, 83, 1998, pp. 85–89.
—— , ‘The Empire’s war recalled: Recent writing on the Western Front experience of Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies’, History Compass, 7(4), May 2009, pp. 1123–45.
—— , Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2011.
J.N.I. Dawes & L.L. Robson, Citizen to Soldier: Australia before the Great War ~ Recollections of Members of the First AIF, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1977.
J. Grey, ‘Cuckoo in the nest? Australian military historiography: The state of the field’, History Compass, 6(2), March 2008, pp. 455–68.
K.S. Inglis, (ed J. Lack), Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of KS Inglis, Melbourne University History Department, Melbourne, 1998.
M. McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1980.
J. McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.
A. Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994.
R. White, ‘Motives for joining up: Self-sacrifice, self-interest and social class 1914–1918’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 9, October 1986, pp. 3–16.
—— , ‘The soldier as tourist: The Australian experience of the Great War’, War & Society, 15(1), May 1987, pp. 63–77.
[3]
WHAT ABOUT NEW ZEALAND? THE PROBLEMATIC HISTORY OF THE ANZAC CONNECTION
Chris Clark
Of the many myths surrounding Gallipoli and the enduring historical tradition spawned by the Anzac landing of 25 April 1915, none is more puzzling than the treatment of the Australia– New Zealand connection. On the one hand there is the mistaken notion that, as a result of that terrible eight-month campaign, a unique affinity amounting to an unbreakable social and military bond was forged between the two nations which has seen them operate as virtual brothers-in-arms ever since. On the other is the actual situation that has developed over recent times, where Australians have taken almost complete possession of the Anzac tradition as though the events at Gallipoli related solely to their country alone. Bad enough that Australians have arrogated to themselves the term ‘digger’, which was supposedly first applied by New Zealanders about themselves in France in 1917, but to speak of ‘Anzac’ – the name given first to parts of the Turkish landscape, and ultimately to the men of the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps – as though the New Zealanders were not even part of it, is galling in the extreme.1
Such feelings have been around for a good many years. These days, most New Zealanders are not particularly fussed by the way Australians have taken over the term ‘digger’, since it is now seldom used as a military term on their side of the Tasman. Instead, as Frank Glen observes, ‘New Zealanders use the more ethnic term “Kiwi” to describe members of our armed forces’.2 Appropriation of the term ‘Anzac’ is, however, a different matter. As long ago as 1921, one New Zealand writer was moved to issue a reminder of an obvious fact about the word, that ‘if the initial “A” stands for Australia, New Zealand furnished the very necessary pivotal consonants’.3 The point is that the New Zealanders were part of the Gallipoli story from the very first day until the bitter end, and any omission of them by Australians will rankle for as long as the two sides continue to engage in joint military endeavour – as they frequently have since World War I.
So how has such a situation come about? Is it simply another example of big inevitably subsuming small, or could it be that there have been other unrecognised historical forces at play? Could it be that there are elements of the Gallipoli story that do not naturally add up to the tradition as it has evolved? Certainly, when what each side has said about the other on various occasions is considered, it is easy to form an impression of two separate nationalities that have viewed each other as rivals as much as ‘cousins’ – let alone brothers-in-arms. So is the widely accepted fraternal interpretation valid at all, and if so how and why did it arise? Conversely, if it was an invention and remains a lingering misconception, what has been the long-term im
pact of what might be a very wrong-headed or misinformed view of each other? Have military connections across the Tasman been of popular imagining only? Could it be that this aspect of the Anzac tradition has grown out of proportion to the facts, as much myth as legend?
A look at events during the lead-up to the operation against the Dardanelles in 1915 reveals little sign of the fraternal regard enshrined in the dominant contemporary Anzac tradition. Indeed, the pattern of the era suggests there was little reason to imagine that a unified response from ‘Australasia’ ought to have been expected at all. World War I was not the first occasion that Britain’s Dominions had rallied on the battlefield in the cause of Empire, but during and after the earlier conflict in South Africa (1899–1902) each of the Australasian nations had been keen to emphasise the separateness (and uniqueness) of their contributions and achievements. New Zealand’s attempts to claim the credit for having made the most fulsome colonial response, in proportion to its size, to that war effort won it few friends elsewhere.4 Nor did New Zealand’s willingness to break ranks with Canada and Australia and embrace British efforts to lock in Dominion support for future imperial military enterprises.5 Even while the two countries managed to co-operate over some practical matters (such as sharing the military college at Duntroon in Canberra to train officers for their respective armies), in the ten years following the Boer War there was a serious divergence between Australia and New Zealand over issues of strategic and imperial defence policy.6
It was certainly true that, during military talks in Melbourne in November 1912, Australia and New Zealand consulted about making a co-operative response in the event of a European war, and agreed to raise a joint expeditionary force of divisional size drawn two-thirds from Australia and the rest from New Zealand.7 On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, however, these arrangements were promptly and unilaterally disregarded by Australia. The Commonwealth Government, not wanting to be overshadowed by the reported generosity of a Canadian offer to send forces, opted to raise a much larger and all-Australian contingent.8 Australia gave little thought, it seems, as to where this left the New Zealanders, who planned to stick to the original scheme. Despite British Admiralty plans to escort both contingents overseas in a single convoy, the Australian approach ensured that both countries sought to make their names on the battlefield as separate national forces rather than a single antipodean entity.
There is further evidence of the less-than-close military relations between Australia and New Zealand at the onset of World War I. Before the separate national contingents sailed from their assembly point at Albany, Western Australia, a Boer revolt in South Africa raised the prospect of the convoy being diverted to the Cape. The commander of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), Major General William Bridges, quickly proposed a solution to putting down the rebellion: he was quite ready to ‘sacrifice’ the New Zealanders, as well as the Australian Light Horse Brigade, if only this would enable the complete Australian division under his command to proceed intact to Europe as planned.9 And when the Australian High Commissioner in London, alarmed at the adequacy of facilities in England to accommodate his country’s troops, succeeded in having the AIF disembarked in Egypt, the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) found itself lumped in under these arrangements as well. The NZEF commander, Major General Sir Alexander Godley, was greatly annoyed to learn of the change at second-hand, from Bridges.10 To Godley, nothing could have highlighted so clearly the irritating fact that the New Zealanders were generally regarded as affiliates of, or mere adjuncts to, the Australians.
The period during which the two contingents trained in Egypt prior to the Gallipoli landings brought a new edge to their developing mutual antagonism. The loutish behaviour of many Australian troops while enjoying leave in Cairo brought relations to a new low. The diaries of New Zealand soldiers often contain a range of descriptively disparaging observations about their trans-Tasman neighbours. One wrote that whenever Australians were encountered in restaurants or similar places about town ‘there is generally a row of some kind’, while another commented of the Australians he met that ‘the town bred man is a skiting bumptious fool’.11 Small wonder that some New Zealand officers began encouraging their men to have nothing to do with the Australians, but instead to demonstrate the difference between the two contingents by their own exemplary example. As Charles Bean, then Australia’s official press correspondent, later recorded in the official war history: ‘This attitude, which was to some extent supported by the New Zealand commanders, led to a certain coolness between Australian and New Zealand troops in Cairo’.12 For his part, Bean regarded the New Zealanders as colourless and lacking the ‘extraordinarily good points’ which he felt made up for the Australians’ more visible behavioural defects.13
In truth, much as New Zealanders might have liked to imagine themselves superior in their conduct to the Australian, misbehaviour also came from their ranks. The notorious ‘Battle of the Wasser’, so-called after a riot in Cairo’s Haret el Wassir district on Good Friday 1915, was (and is still) frequently held to have been attributable solely to Australian troops. New Zealanders, however, were no less involved.14 While each contingent blamed the other for the episode, the last word on the subject might be gauged from the fact that, of the four soldiers injured in the affray, three were Australians and one New Zealander. Since these numbers matched the proportion of the respective contingents, it can be said – as indeed one New Zealand historian has noted – that ‘honours’ were equally shared.15 So too was the damages bill of £1700.16
Not only were relations between the AIF and NZEF brittle at this time, other factors pushed them into a relationship which neither side particularly sought. The British high command, acting on the fact that both contingents were conveniently available in Egypt, and from an assumption that because they came from the same part of the world they were essentially all the same anyway, took the decision to link them in a single formation – the now famous Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC).17 To be fair, there was some justification for the British attitude, since each contingent contained a large number of each other’s nationals.18 To an extent, this merely reflected the make-up of the populations of the two countries: for instance, figures show that 5 per cent of New Zealand’s total population in 1911 was Australian-born.19 But the formation of the original ANZAC did not make instantly for a close and indistinguishable union of forces. The AIF and NZEF continued to be acutely conscious of their separateness and their individual characters.
Regardless of this continuing friction, with the inauguration of ANZAC an important step had been taken in the creation of a popular myth. The same British guiding hand was to give the Anzac legend a helpful push during the landing at Gallipoli. The troops which assaulted the beach north of Gaba Tepe before dawn on 25 April came from the 1st Australian Division alone. The mixed NZ & A (New Zealand and Australian) Division, which Godley commanded, formed the reserve force for the landing, and it was not until nearly five hours later, after 9.00 am, that the first companies of New Zealanders from this formation were put ashore.20 Although they saw some heavy combat off the beach, to virtually everyone present the day was regarded as Australia’s. Even the New Zealanders acknowledged that it was the Australian achievement which deserved the praise.21
This view was reflected, too, in the dispatch drafted by the British official correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, in which he described the exploits of the landing. As luck would have it, the British naval staff officer to whom he submitted his copy for censorship was a friend of Godley’s, and he performed an entirely different role than that officially required of him. Noticing the omission of any mention of the New Zealanders’ presence, he assiduously added references to them wherever he thought appropriate. As one New Zealand historian has remarked: ‘It is by such actions that legends are born’.22 While initial press reports of the Gallipoli landing arguably provided the origins of the Anzac tradition, others soon joined the process of myth-making. I
n the Australian official history of the war, Bean maintained that co-operation between the men of the two forces over the next few days effectively wiped away all the petty jealousy and antagonisms remaining from their period in Egypt. From this point on, he believed, Australians and New Zealanders were bound together in a close brotherhood-of-arms.23
Bean’s perception was based on what he believed he knew of bitter fighting which occurred on the left of the shallow beach-head established by the ANZAC landing forces, on a feature called Russell’s Top. Here, the Australian 2nd Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel G.F. Braund, was intermixed with the Wellington Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel W.G. Malone. By the time the Australians were withdrawn on 28 April, a solid bond of mutual respect – according to Bean – had been forged. In his first volume of the official war series, Bean declared that:
The feeling of the New Zealand infantry, as Braund and his battalion left them, was one of warm and affectionate admiration. Day and night Australians and New Zealanders had fought together on that hilltop. In this fierce test each saw in the other a brother’s qualities. As brothers they had died; their bodies lay mingled in the same narrow trenches; as brothers they were buried … Three days of genuine trial had established a friendship which centuries will not destroy.
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