Anzac's Dirty Dozen (10 page)

Blamey's perspective on the Australia–New Zealand connection was, however, neither widely understood nor shared: to generations of ordinary Australians it has seemed that co-operation with New Zealand in conflicts after World War I simply represented further glorious chapters in an ongoing Anzac tradition. Most Australians, for instance, appear unaware of many of the attempts, mainly at the instigation of third parties, that were made to manufacture an Anzac connection after 1945 even where none naturally or necessarily existed. A number of these minor episodes involved units of the two countries' air forces. During the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949, for example, an apparently British initiative grouped the ten transport aircrews sent from Australia and the three New Zealand ones into a single entity referred to as No. 1 Dominion Squadron, to distinguish them from South African Air Force crews who were put into No. 2 Dominion Squadron.
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This mixed ‘Anzac' unit (although that specific term was never used) was placed under command of the senior officer of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) contingent, although he had no idea why.
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Apparently the arrangement was no more than an administrative convenience, taken without knowledge or consent of the countries which had sent the personnel in the first place.

A similar situation arose again when both Australia and New Zealand acceded to British requests in 1952 that they contribute forces to assist the Royal Air Force in garrisoning the Mediterranean region. Australia responded by dispatching its No. 78 (Fighter) Wing, comprising two half-strength squadrons to operate Vampire jets – leased from Britain – from bases on Malta. New Zealand sent its No. 14 Squadron, also operating Vampires but from the island of Cyprus, under the same terms as the RAAF. It came as no surprise that for major air exercises in which the two contingents were involved, the New Zealand unit flew as the
third squadron of the Australian Wing.
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This arrangement lasted until 1955, when No. 78 Wing returned to Australia and No. 14 Squadron moved to Singapore. Both the Berlin and the Mediterranean cases reflect a British desire and tendency to create an artificial linkage, regardless of the wishes or inclinations of the two nationalities involved.

In between these two examples came the Korean War, perhaps the one post-World War I opportunity to recreate the Anzac connexion in more substantial form. Immediately after conflict began on the Korean peninsula in June 1950, there was discussion and deliberation in Canberra about the size and form of Australia's involvement. The Americans told Australian political leaders that they would be ‘delighted if Australia and New Zealand together could send three battalions in the following three to four months' to help to form a British Commonwealth Light Division. Following this clear statement of preference for an ‘Anzac' force, the focus of planning naturally went in this direction – until the New Zealanders made it known that their army was better placed to provide fire support rather than combat troops, and that they were more likely to offer a regiment of field artillery instead of an infantry battalion.
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The promised unit, the 16th New Zealand Field Artillery Regiment, duly reached Korea late in January 1951 and joined the 27th British Commonwealth Infantry Brigade, where its 163rd Battery was allocated to support the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR). According to one Australian account, ‘The spirit of Anzac was never stronger than the good feeling which existed … between the New Zealand artillerymen and the men of the 3rd Battalion'.
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Such excellent relations, deriving from ‘the old ANZAC affiliation' (in the words of the Australian official history), were never more important than during the famous battle of Kapyong, which took place, coincidentally, on the eve of Anzac Day 1951. The
success of the gallant delaying action which 3RAR and a Canadian battalion mounted against a 10 000-strong Chinese division on 23–24 April was in no small part due to the fire support received throughout the battle from the New Zealand 25-pounder guns, which frequently helped break up enemy assaults as they were forming up. The Kiwi contribution was all the more remarkable for having been maintained in the face of a severe shortage of ammunition, and even after Chinese infiltrators had reached the defenders' rear positions and had begun probing the gun area itself, forcing the New Zealanders to move their batteries to a safer location further back.
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Having helped 3RAR to hold its ground, the New Zealand gunners were also instrumental in enabling the Australians to withdraw during the early hours of darkness on the night of 24 April. By then the Chinese had penetrated down the Kapyong Valley, more than four kilometres past the Australian battalion's position, and the unit was in peril of being completely cut off. The New Zealanders played a pivotal role in keeping the Chinese at bay as the Australian companies thinned out their positions and then allowed rearguards to break contact and get away. In the words of one Australian officer:

Towards evening orders came to withdraw. We did so, ably supported by our Anzac friends of the New Zealand 16th Field Artillery. As D Company evacuated their positions Chinese troops were right behind them and many a Chinaman had a dead heat or a photo finish with a 25-pounder Kiwi shell. Sometimes the Chinaman won and sometimes only came second … on Anzac Eve we dug in among friends. At last I felt like an Anzac and I imagine there were 600 others like me.
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Invoking the Anzac tradition at this point also seemed appropriate to the Australian official historian of the Korean War: ‘The combined Australian–New Zealand action [at Kapyong] was singularly appropriate on the eve of their first spectacular partnership in combat on Gallipoli Peninsula thirty-six years previously'.
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Later still, a new conflict in Vietnam provided yet another setting to revive the Anzac connection. Again, the push that developed for an Anzac Force to be established came chiefly from the United States, which desperately wanted a physical presence of supportive allies.
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Initially, New Zealand was unable to commit infantrymen to the conflict, but agreed to send its 161st Field Battery to provide artillery support to the battalion group that Australia sent in June 1965, and the task force that followed a year later. This ensured a New Zealand connection with the action which has come to define Australia's combat experience in Vietnam: the battle of Long Tan on 18 August 1966. When a company of 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, found itself facing annihilation by a vastly superior enemy force, it was the supporting fire of the 1st Australian Field Regiment (which included the New Zealand 161st Battery) – directed, as it happened, by an attached New Zealand Army forward observer – which largely prevented such a dire outcome.
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It was this circumstance, presumably, which prompted one Australian army historian to subtitle his account of the battle as ‘The Legend of Anzac Upheld'.
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If lauding the Anzac connection at Long Tan in this way seemed a little extravagant, there was more justification for such portrayal from 1967 when New Zealand infantry companies – first one, and then a second – were incorporated into Australian battalions in Vietnam. The situation was formalised in March 1968 when the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment was retitled 2RAR/NZ (ANZAC), and this naming practice continued with
later battalions until the withdrawal in 1971.
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The significance of this arrangement was not lost on the Australian official history:

For the first time in the history of Australian–New Zealand joint military co-operation, dating back over 50 years to the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, infantry soldiers of the two nations were officially combined into a single battalion to fight side-by-side under a common name and in a common cause.
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‘Bonds of comradeship' and ‘a shared military tradition' may have counted for something in this case, but it could not prevent an ‘amicable rivalry' from developing even here, with both sides considering themselves superior in their operating methods in the field. The New Zealanders found cause for complaint (once again) in the ‘brash behaviour' of the Australians, and whenever they felt that their identity was being submerged or they were treated like ‘poor relations'. For their part, the Australians based their attitude to their trans-Tasman colleagues on the reputation that Maori soldiers had acquired for serious indiscipline whenever they were within the task force base camp, which led to the Kiwis being assigned extra time in the bush on patrol.
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A decade after the Vietnam experience, Australian and New Zealand military elements were again brought together in a joint enterprise which bore, in a fashion, the Anzac mantle. On this occasion, however, the role was peacekeeping rather than war, and the forces involved were not mainly army. In 1981 the two countries agreed to provide a combined helicopter unit to support the US-led Multinational Force and Observers to monitor the provisions of the 1978 Camp David accord, and the peace treaty signed the next year, which returned the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. When deployed in March 1982, the Rotary Wing
Aviation Unit consisted of eight Iroquois and 99 personnel from the RAAF, and a New Zealand contingent of two more Iroquois (leased from the US Army) and 36 personnel. Operating from El Gorah in the north-eastern Sinai, about 20 kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast, the unit – informally known as ‘Anzac Airlines' – first took to the air on Anzac Day 1982. Within weeks of arriving, the two contingents had also set up an all-ranks bar known as the ‘Anzac Surf Club (Sinai)', which came complete with surf boards.
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For the next three years this composite unit of Australians and New Zealanders clearly saw themselves as continuing a hallowed tradition: they even took the ‘ANZAC' name for themselves – although in this instance the acronym was held to stand for ‘Australia and New Zealand Air Contingent'.
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Co-operation between Australian and New Zealand military forces continued despite the upset caused in the mid-1980s by New Zealand's abrogation of the ANZUS Treaty over the issue of visiting nuclear ships. In March 1987, after the navies of Australia and New Zealand identified a requirement for a new generalpurpose frigate, both countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding for what became known as Anzac frigate project. As was often the case with the Anzac connection, this joint agreement did not meet universal acclaim, despite the fact that arrangements for sharing the modular construction of the new vessels meant work for shipyards on both sides of the Tasman.
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By the mid-1990s there was considerable controversy in New Zealand due to perceptions in sections of the community and body politic that ‘Australia was forcing New Zealand into buying more expensive ships than the country needed'.
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While such ructions caused problems from time to time within the Anzac partners' armed forces, they were still capable of working together at an operational level. New Zealand contributed a battalion group to the Australian-led intervention
in East Timor from 1999 to 2002, and the two countries have also been joined together in the International Stabilisation Force which returned to East Timor in 2006 under arrangements which have seen command vested in an Australian Army officer, deputy command with a New Zealander. During the changeover of command in Dili in July 2011, the outgoing Australian officer was quoted as saying, ‘It is a privilege to have led the combined Australian and New Zealand Force that performed in the true spirit of the ANZAC legend forged so many years ago'.
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This was a fine and noble sentiment, but one is left to wonder whether those uttering such words understood the full background to the tradition they were embracing.

And if the top brass seem to have an overly rosy impression, several recent efforts to memorialise the Australian–New Zealand connection on Australian soil also appear misinformed. One such commemoration, apparently the result of a local initiative, saw Sydney's recently constructed Glebe Island Bridge renamed the ‘Anzac Bridge' in 1998. An Australian flag flies atop its eastern pylon with a New Zealand flag from the western pylon, and a bronze memorial statue of an Australian soldier placed at the western end of the bridge was followed in 2008 by a similar statue of a New Zealand counterpart directly across the road – both statues by the same New Zealand sculptor. At the dedication of the second statue, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced that the original bronze Australian was now ‘joined by his mate, symbolising the extraordinary and close friendship between New Zealand and Australia in times of war and peace'.
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In the meantime, the New Zealand Memorial was also dedicated on Anzac Parade in Canberra – on 24 April 2001. One commentator more cautiously observed that ‘The memorial gives rise to a range of possible meanings' and suggested ‘it is the clean, consensual collective memory that is being assisted by
this memorial, the seemingly unproblematic ANZAC relationship'. An interpretive plaque nearby states that its purpose is to commemorate ‘the unique friendship between New Zealand and Australian people', yet everything about the memorial – from its position in the heart of Australia's national capital, to the inclusion of inscriptions of battlegrounds where the men and women of both countries have fought together on foreign soil, along with buried boxes of earth from two of those contested fields at Gallipoli (Chunuk Bair and Lone Pine) – serves to proclaim that this is specifically a war memorial.
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If nothing else, the memorial stands as a visible and irrefutable reminder, to any Australian who may be inclined to forget, that New Zealanders were also Anzacs – not just Australians – and the Anzac tradition is not the national possession of Australia alone.