Tag: Anzacs

  • Turkey holds int’l ceremony for Canakkale Battles 96th anniversary

    Turkey holds int’l ceremony for Canakkale Battles 96th anniversary

    mehteran

    “Canakkale Battles”, also known as “The Gallipoli Campaign”, took place at Gelibolu peninsula in Turkey from April 1915 to January 1916, during the First World War.

    Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that Canakkale in northwestern Turkey was the place where the first heartbeats of the Republic of Turkey were heard.

    An international ceremony took place in Gelibolu Peninsula in the northwestern province of Canakkale to mark the 96th anniversary of the Canakkale Battles.

    Wreaths were laid at the Monument of Martyrs on behalf of Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, France, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

    Davutoglu said at the ceremony, “this battle which claimed lives of our grandfathers, has laid foundation of sound friendly ties between Turkish, Australian and New Zealander peoples. We think that Canakkale was the place where the first heartbeats of the Republic of Turkey were heard. Modern Republic of Turkey has risen from the ashes of an empire thanks to courage and determination of young soldiers who sacrificed their lives to defend their country.”

    “Canakkale Battles”, also known as “The Gallipoli Campaign”, took place at Gelibolu peninsula in Turkey from April 1915 to January 1916, during the First World War.

    A joint British and French operation was mounted to capture the Ottoman capital of Istanbul and secure a sea route to Russia. Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) formed the backbone of a 200,000-man British-led army that landed at Gelibolu. The attempt failed, with heavy casualties on both sides. The campaign resonated profoundly among all nations involved.

    Nearly 1 million soldiers fought in the trench warfare at Gelibolu. The allies recorded 55,000 killed in fighting with 10,000 missing and 21,000 dead of disease. Turkish casualties were estimated at around 250,000.

    The battle is considered as a defining moment in the history of the Turkish people. The struggle laid the grounds for the Turkish War of Independence and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey eight years later under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, himself a commander at Gelibolu.

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    via Turkey holds int’l ceremony for Canakkale Battles 96th anniversary | Diplomacy | World Bulletin.

  • Gallipoli battlefield being mapped by GPS

    Gallipoli battlefield being mapped by GPS

    Archaeologists in Turkey are making a detailed survey of the famous World War One battle of Gallipoli. Using period military maps and GPS technology, they’re mapping the old trenches and redoubts used by both sides.

    bundesarchivbild183 r36253trkeigallipolimg unterstandGallipoli was the scene of fierce fighting starting in 1915. A peninsula with highlands dominating the Dardanelles strait linking the Black and the Aegean seas, it guarded the western approach to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire was on Germany’s side during World War One and the British Empire’s high command believed an attack on Gallipoli would be the first step to knocking the Ottomans out of the war.

    They were wrong. The Ottoman Empire, long dismissed “the sick man of Europe”, put up a determined resistance and the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and French troops got stuck on the beaches as Ottoman troops pummeled them from the highlands. After nine bloody months, the allies sailed away.

    The international team of Turkish, Australian, and New Zealand archaeologists and historians have discovered large numbers of artifacts from the battle and are busy working out a complete map of the complicated network of trenches, many of which can still be clearly seen today.

    The battle started 25 April 1915, and this date is marked as ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, who did some of the toughest fighting in the campaign. Many people in both of these countries feel the soldiers’ efforts proved the worth of the two young nations.

    Last year archaeologists discovered the HMS Lewis and a barge sunk off the shore.

    via Gallipoli battlefield being mapped by GPS | Gadling.com.

  • In Turkey, surveyors map a WWI battlefield

    In Turkey, surveyors map a WWI battlefield

    By: CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA 04/23/11 4:39 AM
    Associated Press
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    By: AP Photo
    FILE This 2010 file photo shows a boundary marker which defines the area of the ANZAC Battlefield according to the Treaty of Lausanne, in Gallipoli, western Turkey. The World War I battlefield of the Gallipoli campaign, where throngs gather each April to remember the fallen, is a place of lore, an echo of ancient warfare on the same soil. Now researchers are mapping dugouts, trenches and tunnels in the most extensive archaeological survey of a site whose slaughter helped forge the identity of y

    The World War I battlefield of the Gallipoli campaign, where throngs gather each April to remember the fallen, is a place of lore, an echo of ancient warfare that took place on the same soil. Now researchers are mapping dugouts, trenches and tunnels in the most extensive archaeological survey of a site whose slaughter helped forge the identity of young nations.

    Armed with old maps and GPS technology, the experts from Turkey, Australia and New Zealand have so far discovered rusted food cans, unused bullets and their shell casings, and fragments of shrapnel, Ottoman-era bricks with Greek lettering, ceramic rum flagons of Allied soldiers and glass shards of beer bottles on the Turkish side. They announced early findings ahead of annual commemorations on the rugged peninsula on Sunday and Monday.

    The chief aim is to gain a detailed layout of a battlefield whose desperate trench warfare, with enemy lines just a few dozen meters (yards) apart in some places, has been recounted in films, books and ballads, acquiring a legendary aura in the culture of its combatants.

    “It will hasten a broader understanding of what went on at Gallipoli,” Richard Reid, a researcher and author of the book “Gallipoli 1915” said of the government-funded investigation. “It will help us as nations that are always interested in trying to preserve what heritage we have.”

    There is heightened interest in the battle, especially among Turks who are showing more pride in their past, buoyed by economic and diplomatic advances after decades of internal strife. Australia and New Zealand mark the occasion with a national holiday on Monday, holding dawn services and closing off downtown areas for marches of veterans of all conflicts.

    Before dawn on April 25, 1915, an Allied expedition under British command landed at Gallipoli on the Aegean Sea in a bid to reach Istanbul and open a sea route to Russia, an ally whose troops were wilting on the eastern front. But Ottoman armies, allied with Germany, dug in and forced their adversaries to withdraw after a nine-month campaign.

    About 44,000 Allied soldiers died, and at least twice as many perished on the Turkish side. Hundreds of thousands more were wounded or suffered debilitating fever, diarrhea and dysentery.

    For Turkey, the terrible losses are central to the staunch nationalism that underpins its regional ambitions today, and the battle made a hero out of an Ottoman army officer who led Turkey to independence in 1923. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk imposed a secular vision that gave the state authority over Islam, a legacy that dominates the divisive politics of modern Turkey.

    “I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die,” the steely commander is said to have told a regiment that was eventually wiped out. “In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can take our place.”

    During the battle one night, local lore says, the light of a star and the crescent moon shone on the blood-soaked ground, forming the design of what became Turkey’s red and white national flag.

    In recent years, some of Turkey’s founding “myths” have been undercut, among them the idea of a tight-knit Turkish identity that ignored the existence of ethnic Kurds and other minorities, said Kerem Oktem, author of “Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989,” a book about the country’s erratic transition from military to democratic rule.

    “Gallipoli remains “one of the important, overarching, big, symbolic moments,” he said.

    For that reason, Oktem said, neither the current Islam-based government nor secular nationalists who oppose it want to “devalue or challenge” the idea that Gallipoli was a glorious victory, despite debate about its military significance.

    Australia and New Zealand regard Gallipoli with equal reverence, noting the bravery and loyalty of soldiers whose British commanders considered troops from the former colonies to be untested and of poorer quality. It forged a self-image of determination, irreverence and “mateship” that is referred to as the Anzac spirit, after the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps.

    The fighting happened near the mouth of the Dardanelles strait, part of a conduit between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. The Turkish military occupied the strategic site until 1973, when it became a national park. Memorials and cemeteries at the site discouraged thoughts of potentially disruptive fieldwork.

    The new study does not involve excavation, instead using satellite-based technology to map battle positions over gullies, dense vegetation and limestone cliffs.

    “Forestation had changed the natural geography of the battlefield, even of trenches and pits,” said Mithat Atabay, a history professor at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University and one of five Turks on the 14-member team. In 1994, he said, “a huge part of the forest burnt down, and the zone suffered further damage.”

    In October, the researchers mapped four kilometers (2.5 miles) of trenches, many of them barely visible, at locations including Johnston’s Jolly and Quinn’s Post, names bestowed by Allied troops. They inspected Turkish positions known as Kirmizi Sirt, or Red Ridge.

    “The war on the surface was only one element of the struggle,” the team said in a report. “A constant underground battle developed; tunneling became a major preoccupation on both sides of the line, for both offensive and defensive reasons.”

    Mapping data is entered in a digital database that can be compared with information from other sources, including maps used in the 1915 landings and Ottoman-era documents. Fieldwork resumes in September, and is expected to continue, with the help of ground-penetrating radar and aerial photographs, until the campaign centenary in 2015.

    Charles Bean, an Australian journalist who covered the conflict and surveyed the battlefield just after the war, wrote about the grudging respect that was said to have developed between the underdog enemies. In an early 1916 dispatch, he recalled a memorial built by an Australian.

    It was, he wrote, “a little wooden cross found in the scrub, just two splinters of biscuit box tacked together, with the inscription ‘Here lies a Turk.’ The poor soul would probably turn in his grave if his ghost could see that rough cross above him. But he need not worry. It was put there in all sincerity.”

    The remains of the ancient city of Troy lie near the Gallipoli peninsula. Alexander the Great led an army through the region. So did Persian emperor Xerxes I. The Greek historian Herodotus referred to the place in his chronicles.

    “The Allies were really the last, I suppose, military expedition to try to take this particular strip of land,” said Chris Mackie, a classics professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and one of the Gallipoli surveyors. “But there were plenty before them.”

    Read more at the Washington Examiner:
  • One-sided thinking on Gallipoli an injustice

    One-sided thinking on Gallipoli an injustice

    John MonashMartin Flanagan

    LEGENDS are like earthquakes. They happen. Afterwards, we try to understand the forces that created them. Anzac is an Australian legend that has a roughly analogous place to the Civil War in the American psyche. Both are stories of young nations encountering the horrors of modern warfare for the first time – that is, wars fought with repeating rifles and machineguns and appalling casualty rates. Both conflicts represent massive and unprecedented change.

    As popular culture, however, what the Civil War has that Anzac doesn’t is the view of both sides. In 1983, when his yacht, Australia 2, won the America’s Cup, owner Alan Bond acknowledged that at one stage his crew had been losing but added “it was just like Gallipoli, and we won that one”.
    It would be interesting to know exactly how that comment was received in lounge rooms across Australia. Did it feel “right” to most who heard it? My guess is that it did.
    Gallipoli was a military disaster. We should note that in justice to the young men who died there. Do we owe them less than we owe those who die in bushfires like Black Saturday? We should also note it in justice to future generations. The voices that urged Australia into the invasion of Iraq were of the same character as those that propelled Australia to Gallipoli in 1914. In the context of Anzac, we also need to note the extent of the debacle to appreciate the stature of the major Australian characters who emerged from it – like, for example, General Sir John Monash.
    The planning at Gallipoli was a farce. Six weeks before the landing, by way of military intelligence, the British officer commanding the operation, General Sir Ian Hamilton, was equipped with two small guidebooks on Turkey and a text book on the Turkish army. Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, an English journalist covering the campaign who correctly foresaw from the outset that it was doomed, said intelligence would be acquired “at the point of a bayonet”. And it was.
    Monash was an engineer. Born in West Melbourne to Jewish German immigrants, Monash was of the century just beginning, a man who understood steel and concrete and modern automation. His battles were meticulously planned. The British prime minister Lloyd George described Monash “as the most resourceful general in the whole of the British Army”. Monash is a giant figure in Australian history.
    Propaganda was involved in shaping the popular view of Gallipoli from the start. Take the case of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the man with the donkey. Within six weeks of his death, he had been conscripted into the propaganda war, a newspaper report describing him as ”a six-foot Australian” with ”a woman’s hands” who said in a British-Australian accent, ”I’ll take this fellow next.”
    Simmo was a five-foot-eight Geordie with a stoker’s hands who spoke in dialect and had fierce Labor politics. His first biographer, a fan of Churchill and acquaintance of Sir Robert Menzies, stripped him of his politics. There was no mention of boozing or fighting. The real Simmo was left in a grave at Gallipoli.
    What the Australians won at Gallipoli was huge respect, including from their enemy. It really is time we started making clear to young Australians that the Anzacs didn’t die protecting Australia from being invaded. Rather, we were invading a country on the other side of the world – to wit, Turkey – with whom we had no difference as a people outside the larger politics of the day.
    Surely it is time we owed Turkey, and Turkish Australians, that respect. Look at the respect Turkey shows our dead.
    I ask this question most seriously. Does any country in the world – other than Turkey – permit a people who tried to invade it to commemorate the fact of that attempted invasion on their shores each year? I know of not a single one. Imagine if the descendants of the Japanese pilots who bombed Darwin held an emotional service beneath the Japanese flag on the shores of Darwin Harbour each year.
    My impression is that within Turkey the legend of Anzac got absorbed into the legend of Ataturk, the so-called father of modern Turkey, who, as a young man, championed the Turkish defence at Gallipoli.
    It was Ataturk who declared to the mothers of Australia that their sons lay in friendly soil. A group of about 80 Turkish Australians march each year in Melbourne on Anzac Day. Anzac Day would not be the same without them.
    Martin Flanagan is a senior writer.

    April 24, 2010