Anzac's Dirty Dozen (9 page)

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.
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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.
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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'.
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While initial press reports of the Gallipoli landing arguably provided the origins of the Anzac tradition, others soon joined the process of myth-making. In 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.
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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.

Visiting the New Zealand trenches a few hours later, Bean claimed that he had found the men ‘overflowing with warm references to the 2nd Australian Battalion'.
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But there is evidence that Bean may have got things seriously wrong in his description of the defence of Russell's Top. Colonel Malone's diary presents a different view of the qualities of the Australian troops that he encountered here. In one case he recounted that, to move some that he came across, he ‘ordered them up and drove them ahead pelting the leading ones on the track where they stopped with stones and putting my toe into the rear ones'.
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More seriously, Malone was so incensed at Braund's combat tactics that he complained to Braund's brigadier, insisting that all the Australians should be withdrawn – which they subsequently were – declaring them to be ‘a source of weakness'. Bean is also simply wrong in claiming that the shared experience of defending the Anzac beach-head ended all criticism of each other. Malone, in particular, continued to nurse an anti-Australian bias which he frankly confessed in his diary. Welcoming the transfer of his battalion south to the site of the British and French landing at Cape Helles in early May, he wrote that it was a ‘relief to get in where war is being waged scientifically and where we are clear of the Australians. They seem to swarm about our line like flies. I keep getting them sent out. They are like masterless men, going their own ways.'
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Malone, it must be admitted, was an unusual officer even within the NZEF. An Englishman by birth, his approach to soldiering was probably more typical of a British regular, and he was recognised for being difficult, a perfectionist and a martinet. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that he was alone in his views about the Australians.

Although NZEF members like Malone decried the fact that their contingent was ‘being absorbed in the word Australasian ... if not Australian', after several months on Gallipoli a special
form of acceptance had undoubtedly evolved between the New Zealanders and Australians.
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It may have been simply the fight for the Anzac beachhead had engendered ‘the mutual confidence and esteem' – in the opinion later expressed by the ANZAC's British commander, Sir William Birdwood: ‘Going round, as I did, the trenches … it was to me a constant source of satisfaction and delight to find New Zealanders and Australians confiding in me the highly favourable opinion which, apparently to their surprise, they had formed of each other!'
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Plainly Australians and (perhaps more particularly) New Zealanders did not cease finding fault with each other, while both at the same time considered themselves to be the elite among the Dominion troops engaged. But like it or not, the identities of the two contingents had to some extent become merged. Perhaps nothing typified and highlighted this fact more than the later episode when a watercolour image of AIF Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick – more famously known as ‘Simpson' or ‘the man with the donkey' – was painted by NZEF artist Horace Moore-Jones, using a photograph which he believed showed this ‘hero of Anzac' engaged in his mercy role. Unfortunately, the photo was not of Simpson but a New Zealand stretcher-bearer, Private Richard (‘Dick') Henderson, even though Moore-Jones' rendition was later hailed as an excellent likeness of the Australian.
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After Gallipoli, the subsuming of ‘Anzac' by Australia began, while at the same time evidence of friction and/or separateness between the two nations was ignored. Following the allied abandonment of the Gallipoli peninsula in December 1915, both the AIF and NZEF underwent radical restructuring before moving to France. This changed, for all time, the nature of the relationship which was possible between the two forces. The AIF was expanded to a force of five infantry divisions, the NZEF to a complete division. These now were formed into two corps –
I Anzac and II Anzac. Since the one New Zealand Division was obviously in the minority even within its corps, the Anzac tradition was from this point well on its way to being appropriated by the Australians. In November 1917, the New Zealand Division was transferred to the British XXII Corps and the Australian divisions reformed into their own corps. From this point, the Anzac connection on the Western Front effectively disappeared entirely.

Only in the secondary Middle East theatre could it be said that the Anzac bond retained any meaningful form, through the mixing of Australian and New Zealand mounted troops. In March 1916 brigades from the two Dominions were brought together into an Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division, commanded by Australian Major General Harry Chauvel until he was promoted to command the Desert Mounted Corps a year later, whereupon command of the division passed to a New Zealander, Major General Edward Chaytor. The division was known from the start as the ‘Anzac Mounted', and the formal linking of Australian and New Zealand horsemen in this formation was continued throughout the campaign in Sinai and Palestine.
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At the end of 1916, Australians and New Zealanders were also brought together, along with British troops, within a Camel Corps. This force was called ‘Imperial', but the three of its four battalions recruited from the colonies were dubbed Anzac units: for instance the 4th (Anzac) Battalion contained a mixture of Australian and New Zealand troopers.
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The ‘Camels' stayed in existence until mid-1918, when it disbanded and its Australians and New Zealanders transferred to form a new 5th Light Horse Brigade.

In Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) there was another minor but quite symbolic association between Australian and New Zealand aviators which curiously overlapped with the events taking place on Gallipoli. Lieutenant George Merz, the
first Australian Flying Corps pilot to be killed, perished in July 1915 alongside Lieutenant William Burn, a pilot attached from the New Zealand Staff Corps (although by coincidence Burn happened to be Australian-born).
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Also in Mesopotamia, the 1st (Anzac) Wireless Signal Squadron was formed during 1916 by combining Australian and New Zealand signals troops to support British operations against the Turks in that country. This unit remained in existence until late 1917, when the New Zealanders were withdrawn to go to France.
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Although the Anzac tradition had its most real (but nonetheless questionable) basis for no more than an eight-month period in 1915, the legend created at this time retained a potency which – perhaps surprisingly – has endured ever since. Why this should be so might be argued endlessly, but what may be noted here is the tenuous factual nature of the legend in subsequent years. The reality was that Australians and New Zealanders continued to be at least as much rivals as they were comrades. Despite the invocation of the Anzac name at various points during World War II, for example, the fact remained that Australian and New Zealand forces operated for the most part as entirely separate national forces, and later in separate theatres of operations.

During the short Greek campaign of April 1941, an Anzac Corps existed for less than a fortnight, essentially by renaming Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Blamey's 1st Australian Corps headquarters to acknowledge that it had the 2nd New Zealand Division under its command.
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Even this briefest of associations was not trouble-free: in the confused withdrawal following a German breakthrough at Pinios Gorge, for example, Australian and New Zealand soldiers traded accusations against the other of having deserted their posts and abandoning vital gun positions.
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A month later, plans were being debated for a new Anzac Corps to be formed in the Middle East under the NZEF commander,
Major General Bernard Freyberg. Blamey's idea on this occasion was to form the Australian 7th and 9th Divisions into an additional Australian Corps, with himself in command of both corps as an army commander.
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This scheme found little favour with the Australian government, however, which feared that it could actually ‘result in a splitting of the Australian Force', and consequently nothing came of it before Japan entered the war and overturned the basis of Australia's military effort in the Middle East to focus on the Pacific theatre. Despite the fact that New Zealand was no less under threat from the Japanese, the major part of the NZEF stayed in Europe.

For quite understandable reasons, the Anzac mantle has rarely assumed a naval dimension in either Australia or New Zealand (see
Chapter 8
). During World War II, however, one such occasion arose late in January 1942, when the Allies established ABDA (American, British, Dutch, Australian) Command covering most of South-East Asia, the Netherlands East Indies (later Indonesia), and even a slice of northern Australia. East of this zone was another called ‘ANZAC Area', taking in the east coast of Australia and the whole of New Zealand, patrolled by a seagoing squadron known as Anzac Force. Although half the ships of this squadron were American, the flagship was Australian and two light cruisers were from New Zealand.
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The existence of Anzac Area lasted barely three months before it was submerged within new allied arrangements which saw New Zealand – despite objections from Wellington – placed in a naval command area that was quite separate to that containing Australia.

The difference in outlook which had emerged in Australia and New Zealand during World War II, at least at the level of high command if not on the part of the ordinary soldier or the man-in-the-street, was expressed most forcefully and starkly by General Blamey. As Australian commander-in-chief, Blamey
was concerned to ensure that post-war policy in the Pacific was firmly based on realities and not sentiment. On these grounds, he was worried about the Curtin Labor government's negotiation of the 1944 Anzac Pact with New Zealand, under which the two countries proposed to establish a regional organisation called the South Seas Regional Commission. While part of his opposition to such schemes stemmed from his reservations about associated ideas for establishing ‘well-defended forward bases' (which he thought could be bypassed and would be difficult to maintain), his more fundamental objection concerned the wisdom of Australia making far-reaching and irrevocable defence commitments.
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Blamey put his views in forthright terms when he told the Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, that:

Militarily, of course, New Zealand is of very little real interest to Australia. On the other hand, Australia is of the very greatest interest to New Zealand from the military point of view. As long as Australia is safe, New Zealand is completely safe in the present world set-up, so that any Australian military commitments should be solely designed to Australian requirements, without any consideration to New Zealand's position at all.
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Blamey, at least, recognised that invoking the emotional pull of the Anzac name was a tactic which suited New Zealand interests, but which offered nothing to Australia as the bigger partner. Had he lived beyond 1951 – when Australia, New Zealand and the United States signed the ANZUS Treaty – it would have been interesting to know what Blamey thought about the similar attempts by later Australian governments to claim the attention and support of Australia's bigger ally, the United States, by invoking the ANZUS rather than Anzac catchcry.