Seeing as I am an Australian, this article will mostly cover the Australian part of “ANZAC Day” and the Australian involvement in the Battle of Gallipoli

In the scope of the First World War, the 25th of April probably wouldn’t mean much to many people. All people care about is 11 o’clock on the 11th of November of 1918: The day the war ended. But what’s so special about the 25th of April, that it warrants a mention in this blog, anyway? And for that matter, April 25th of which year?

In Australia and in our neighbouring country across the way, also known as New Zealand, the 25th of April is known as ANZAC Day, and it commemorates the 25th of April, 1915 and the Battle of Gallipoli on the Gallipoli Peninsula of Turkey, during the First World War. The ANZAC was the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, which was sent halfway around the world to fight a bunch of people they’d never met to help win a war which some reckoned, they should not have joined in the first place.

ANZAC Day

Every 25th of April, Australians and New Zealanders celebrate and commemorate that which is ANZAC Day, by remembering the diggers (that’s Australian slang for ‘soldiers’) who fought on the shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula on that hellish day, ninety-five years ago in 1915 and by extension, all the Australian and New Zealand service personnel who have fought and died for our two little sea-girt sandpiles since then. It’s commemorated by pilgrimages to the Gallipoli peninsula, dawn services, rememberance marches, barbeques and by the baking and breaking of one of the hardest and yet strangely edible comestibles in the world: The ANZAC Biscuit.

Just like how the British have the “Dunkirk Spirit” of banding together against adversity and beating everything, Australians and presumably, New Zealanders too, have the “ANZAC Spirit” of mateship, togetherness, toughness and perseverence which helped them survive and stay firmly together during the hell of the First World War. It’s this spirit that Aussies and Kiwis commemorate and celebrate each April while breaking their jaws on ANZAC Biscuits or stuffing down sausages and burgers at the nearest, smoke-belching barbeque.

ANZAC Day also commemorates the fact or the belief that at the Battle of Gallipoli, Australia and New Zealand went through their trial of fire and were born there as nations who had endured hardships and come out with their heads held high.

Australia and the First World War

As far as countries go, Australia’s the little brother in the family. By the time of the official British settlement in Australia, as marked by the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, Great Britain had already fought and lost a war against the United States and the USA had already been settled by Europeans for over a hundred years before then. Australia only became federated, when its states and territories joined up to make one big country, in 1901, just over a century ago.

As its own country with its own government and prime minister, Australia could declare war on other countries. In the family of nations, Australia was kind of like the whining, wingey little brother who wants to do everything that momma, papa and all his bigger brothers do, like fight, make money, make love and start wars. When Britain declared war on Germany, Austria-Hungary and the other countries of the Central Powers in WWI, Australia jumped on the Allied bandwagon at once, stating that, as Mother Britain was at war, Australia was also at war.

Of course, this view was not universally accepted. The First World War mostly took place in Europe or the Middle East, on battlegrounds far from Australia. A sea-voyage from Australia to England took at least two weeks, even using the fastest ships and the quickest route. Some Australians felt isolated from this ‘European War’ and saw no reason to have to go off and fight other peoples’ wars.

On the other hand, patriotic Australians believed that it was their duty to fight and defend Great Britain, as their mother country and that they were fighting for the good of the British Empire. It was with this in mind that Australia went to war.

Unfortunately for Australia, though, it didn’t have an army.

Australia was so new on the world stage of established nations that it didn’t even have a single stinking army to protect itself with, let alone go off and fight someone else’s army! There were police-forces and local state militias, but it wasn’t until after the First World War that Australia had an actual national army of its own. Instead, the Aussies were just tacked onto the British Army and made to fight with the Brits. Throughout the First World War, Australia was the only country which took part in the fighting which had a 100% volunteer army.

The Australian soliders in the First World War were all ordinary people. They were farm-labourers, office-workers, school-teachers, schoolboys, university professors and shopkeepers…all ordinary people who had signed up to fight a war which was so far away, some people questioned what the hell they thought they were doing! Unlike the other countries, Australia had no standing army. Because of this, all the Aussie soldiers were trained in army tactics, strategies and manuveurs entirely from scratch!

It was all these raw, green recruits, rushed through a crash-course of the bare essentials of fighting, weapons-handling, tactics and army life, that the Brits sent off to Turkey to try and blast a way through the Turkish defences so that the Royal Navy could open up a supply-line to its allies, the Russians, further north. With woefully substandard and rushed training, the inept Australian troops were marching straight into hell. How inadequate was their training? Half the time the Australian soldiers didn’t even load, shoot and reload their rifles because there wasn’t any ammunition to show them how to do it properly! To make things worse, they (along with millions of other soldiers in the First World War), were taught outdated infantry tactics from the 19th century, which were completely useless in the mechanised hell of the First World War.

The Battle of Gallipoli

In 1915, the order came out that the Allies would try and attack the Gallipoli Peninsula of Turkey. The original plan was to ‘Force the Narrows’, that is, to try a naval assault on the Dardenelles Narrows near to the Peninsula, by the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, this failed (and resulted in the First Lord of the Admiralty, a little-known fellow called…Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill…to high-tail it off to the trenches in France to hide in shame for a few months) and the Turks were suddenly wide awake to a possible Allied invasion. They set up their positions and waited for everything to unfold.

In Australia, young Aussies were jazzed up and raring to have a crack at ‘Johnny Turk’. Many of the soldiers were so young that they’d barely finished school and had simply swapped the cane for a rifle the moment they sauntered out the gates at the last bell for the day. Many of the green Australian troops thought that the war would be over before they even got to Turkey or Europe!

Gallipoli in Turkey gets its name from the Greek word ‘Kallipolis’ which means “Beautiful City”. When the Aussies, Kiwis, Poms and Frogs arrived, though…there was very little beauty to be seen anywhere.

A map showing the Gallipoli Peninsula. On the left, you can see ANZAC Cove, where the ANZACs came ashore in 1915. On the right, you can see the Dardenelles; the narrow stretch of water which the Royal Navy failed to blast its way through

The ships transporting Australian troops sailed from Eygpt (because the Aussies were trained there) to Turkey and arrived in ANZAC Cove (a postwar name) on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the 25th of April, 1915.

From the moment the big ships dropped anchor off the west coast of the Peninsula…the ANZACs were in trouble. Serious, six-foot-under trouble. So much trouble that many soldiers were dead before they even got onto the beaches!

In the Second World War, allied soldiers and officers used a special kind of watercraft, known as a Higgins Boat, to safely transport soldiers ashore. The Higgins boat could go right up onto the beach where the front of the boat dropped down like a ramp so that soldiers could run right off the boat onto the beach to find cover.

In 1915, without the Higgins Boat, Australian and other Allied troops were massacred in the surf before they even set a toe on Turkish soil. The boats used to ferry these troops to shore were wooden lifeboats: Totally unprotected from machine-gun fire, cumbersome to operate, rowed by hand and with keeled bottoms, prone to wedging in the sand and surf, leaving soldiers stranded and having to jump out of the boats and wade through the water towards the beach. Hundreds of allied soldiers were shot down as they struggled out of the boats, through the surf and towards the beach. Accounts spoke of the water literally turning red with the blood of machinegunned or rifle-struck soldiers who never knew what hit them.

ANZAC Cove, 1915. Here, you can see the steep sides of the mountains that the ANZACs had to struggle up, the surf which they had to wade through, and the sandy beach that they had to run across…all while being sprayed by Turkish machine-gun fire

Within minutes of landing in Gallipoli, all hell broke loose. The inexperienced Australian soldiers were given hurried and unclear orders, officers were killed by machine-gun fire and soldiers were unable to band together to build up significant resistance to the enemy. To use an American expression, it was quite literally a ‘Turkey Shoot’. Or rather, a Turkish shoot! The ANZACs became sitting ducks for the defending turks, who mowed them down relentlessly with their machine-guns.

The big ships anchored offshore did manage to give the Aussies some covering fire, though. While the boats ferried troops and supplies ashore, the allied warships opened fire with their artillery, blasting away at the enemy, distracting the Turks enough for the Australians to get a firm foothold on Turkish soil.

Guests of Johnny Turk

Throughout both world wars, soldiers or ‘the enemy’ were known by various names. Germans were Krauts or the Boche, they were Jerries, Nazis, the S.S. The Brits were known as ‘Tommies’, the Australians were known as ‘ANZACs’ or ‘Rats’ (after the Battle of Tobruk in WWII, where Aussie defenders held off the Germans and became known as the Rats of Tobruk).

Turks were called ‘Johnny Turk’.

And Johnny Turk was not happy at having Aussie soldiers camping on his front lawn.

The Battle of Gallipoli was a hopeless mess. Over the next nine months, life was a living and dying hell for the ANZACs. Without aerial support from the RFC (Royal Flying Corps, the predecessor to the RAF), Australian soldiers attacked Turkish positions with no covering fire. Without tanks, the Australians had nowhere to hide from Turkish return-fire and without the big ships (which very inconsiderately sailed off after just a few days), the Australians had no big artillery to bombard the Turks before launching an attack. It became one big game of Slaps, with each side waiting for the other to make a move, before jumping out, decking them and then diving back into the trenches to protect themselves from the enemy reaction.

ANZAC Biscuits

Stuck in the trenches for nine months with appalling weather (it rained and snowed half the bloody time!), few comforts, few clean or warm clothes, few things to do and even fewer things to eat, the ANZACs did have at least one thing to look forward to.

ANZAC Biscuits.

Note that. BISCUITS. Not cookies. BISCUITS.

It was once believed that ANZAC Biscuits were invented by the ANZACs themselves, bored with the disgusting rations that they were provided with. However, the ingredients in the recipe don’t lend themselves well to this theory. How many soldiers in the First World War were able to get their hands on such delights as dessicated coconut? Golden syrup? Sugar? Baking Soda? Flour and rolled oats? Probably not many. And even if they did, how the hell did they manage to bake the stuff in the middle of a battle?

ANZAC Biscuits. OM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM…

The truth is that ANZAC Biscuits were invented by the womenfolk! The wives, daughters, sisters, aunts, mothers and girlfriends of all those poor sods who were living, starving and dying all the way over in Turkey.

The ANZAC Biscuit was designed to be many things. Filling. Delicious. Tough. But most of all, it was designed to be long-lasting.

After baking, the ANZAC Biscuit looks (and feels) like something akin to 18th century hard-tack, the notoriously hard bread which sailors used to eat onboard ships in Napoleonic times. In a way, hard-tack and the ANZAC Bikkie shared a lot of things in common.

– They were both easy to make.
– They were both tasty (okay, the ANZAC Biscuit was tasty and sweet. Hard-Tack was like baked cardboard).
– They were both hard enough to break glass (or your teeth!) and drive in a nail.
– They were tough enough to survive long sea-voyages and a nuclear attack (on the same day).

The one element where ANZAC Biscuits were undoubtedly better than hard-tack had to be in the taste department. Hard-Tack is dry, cheap, tasteless crap that was about as easy to eat as cinderblocks. Sure, ANZAC Biscuits weren’t much easier to eat, but they were at least tasty. The sugar and the oats and the golden syrup (or honey, if you can’t get syrup) made the biscuits sweet and crunchy and they were a welcome relief to the ANZACs, who had little else fit for human consumption to shove down their throats.

The Great Evacuation

It’s probably not surprising to know that the Gallipoli campaign was a total failure. After nearly a year of being blasted, blown up and bombarded by the Turks, the ANZACs (along with the other allies) were bruised, bloody, beaten and bored. In late 1915, soldiers began to pull out from the Gallipoli peninsula.

But, in true British style, never wanting to admit defeat, the evacuation was done carefully over the course of several days. The ANZACs were shipped away quietly at night. Their specially-designed periscope rifles (rifles with periscopes fixed on them so that they shoot over the top without also getting their heads shot off) were rigged and modified to make them self-firing. The Aussie soldier who thought up this ingenious bit of trickery, William Scurry, fixed up the rifles so that water dripped into special pans underneath the rifles. The pans had strings tied to them which were tied to the triggers of the rifles. As the water dripped, the pans became heavier and heavier until the weight of the water pulled on the string and fired the rifle.

The Periscope Rifle in use at Gallipoli, where it was invented

Using this trick, the Allies were able to occupy the Turks and keep them busy while they evacuated thousands of ANZAC troops down the cliffs, across the beach and onto the waiting ships which were anchored offshore.

All in all, the remembrance of ANZAC Day, the 25th of April, could be seen as a joke: The commemoration of one of the biggest ass-whuppin’s that the Allies ever received, the remembrance of one of the greatest military failures in Australian history. But it’s also about remembering the courage, perseverence and sheer ballsiness that it took to continue fighting what was clearly a losing battle from Day 1, and to escape from a right screw-up without the enemy getting wise to you until you were far, far, far away.

That, my friends, is the story and the history of ANZAC Day.