Today, April 25th, is ANZAC day, which commemorates the day the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps went on their first mission under British Command in 1915, to a place in Gallipoli now known as ANZAC Cove.
Thousands of soldiers landed on ANZAC Cove, with the simple task of breaking through Turkish lines and the ultimate goal of taking Constantinople via the land, due to heavy fortifications along the waterway that led to Constantinople.
On the first day of the landing, on April 25th 1915, ANZAC troops set out to take control of the "Objective" area that is shown on the above map. This was not completed, and instead, thousands of troops died on the first day alone. This trend of thousands of troops dying per day continued for the rest of the Gallipoli campaign.
There were points in the Campaign where thousands of ANZAC troops died in a matter of hours, while British troops were 200metres away sipping tea on a beach...
The Gallipoli Campaign was Australia's first chance as an independent nation to show itself to the rest of the world, to prove that we could be a powerful nation, to prove we didn't need Britain to cradle us. The Campaign gave us a worldwide name for our mateship, our courage, our dedication. We proved to the world that Australia was not a little nation, we proved we could show the world what we're packing.
As a proof of the mateship the ANZAC troops displayed, at certain points in the Campaign, ceasefires were made between the commanders to pick up bodies from the "No man's land" in between the front lines. During picking up the bodies, the Australian and Turkish troops would swap cigarettes, cards, stories, photos, etc...then hours later were trying to blow each other's heads off...
Once the British realised the Gallipoli Campaign was futile, they ordered a complete pull out of ANZAC troops...As a testimony to the wit of the troops, they invented an ingenious system of a rifle automatically firing every hour to make it seem as though they weren't retreating...
After a week of this system being in place, Turkish troops braved the journey to the ANZAC Trenches to find nobody there...
Today Australians and New Zealanders mourn the thousands of losses that we have had in every conflict we've been a part of - WW1, WW2, Korean War, Vietnam War and the current Iraqi and Afghanistan wars.
Lest we forget.
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