Anzac – birthplace of a nation?
Posted 23 April 2009 // Jock Phillips
New Zealand as a young British lion
On Saturday thousands of New Zealanders will get up in the autumn cold to attend dawn services and hear speakers describe Gallipoli as the birth of New Zealand nationhood. It is worth asking whether this was actually the case.
On the surface it seems an incredible claim:
- Most countries looking for the origins of a nation would choose a glorious victory; Gallipoli was an ignominious defeat.
- Gallipoli was not a battle at home, or even close to home, but in a part of the world that New Zealanders knew, and still know, little about.
- In the context of the First World War, Gallipoli was a minor sideshow to the major action on the Western Front. Only 8,566 New Zealanders served there – a small proportion of the 100,000 who went overseas. While 2,721 New Zealanders died on that rocky shore, that is less than a sixth of the 18,000 who died in the war, and small by comparison with the horrifying losses in France and Flanders.
- Even in the Gallipoli battle, the Anzac sector was not the major focus of the British effort – it was a diversion from the main effort at the foot of the peninsula.
- The New Zealanders went to Turkey under the orders of the mother country; they fought in a division which was predominantly Australian; and their commanding officer, Sir Alexander Godley, was a Pom
- The landing that is remembered at dawn on 25 April was very much an Australian affair. Most Kiwis did not reach shore until the afternoon.
- Knowledge of the Gallipoli campaign back here did not come from New Zealand reports, but through the congratulations of the British – such as the King, reporter Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, or poet John Masefield, who spoke of the Anzacs as ‘the flower of the world’s manhood’.
- In the long term, the effect of Gallipoli on New Zealand attitudes was to strengthen, not weaken, a sense of devotion to the British Empire. On about 500 First World War memorials, which I have examined, the word ‘New Zealand’ appears on just 3, the word ‘Empire’ on 31.
However, there are two ways in which Gallipoli can be said to be the birthplace of the New Zealand nation:
- In 1915 New Zealanders at home thought of themselves as irrevocably part of the British Empire. Their sense of nationhood was always as the ‘best of British’ – the most loyal, courageous and capable people in the empire. Gallipoli could then be seen as the birthplace of New Zealand as a fully fledged member of the imperial family.
- Among the soldiers themselves the experience of fighting alongside the British and the Australians led to a revolution in attitudes. When they landed in Egypt in December 1914, Kiwi soldiers were keen to present themselves as gentlemen like the British and quite unlike those rough colonial uncouth Aussies. But after months at Gallipoli they began to grumble about the class snobbery and sheer inefficiency of the British and to praise their brothers from across the Tasman. There was also a growing pride in the stickability and can-do attitude of their fellow countrymen. They developed a stronger sense of New Zealanders as a people very different from their imperial overlords.
However, when the New Zealand soldiers returned, this second sense of independent nationalism was submerged by the loud trumpetings of people at home, proud to identify New Zealand with the first, imperial, sense of New Zealand nationhood.
It will be fascinating to listen to the sentiments this Saturday and discover which view of New Zealand nationhood is most often expressed.
I remember my friend Brian saying that he thought it was very appropriate that our nation’s birthplace was in a battle that was, as you say, ‘an ignominious defeat’. He also thought that Edmund Hillary wasn’t the right national hero for us, that it should be a guy who almost climbed to the top of Mount Everest, but couldn’t quite make it to the summit.
Ormond Burton, a First World War hero (who subsequently became a leading pacifist) believed that ’somewhere between the landing at Anzac and the end of the battle of the Somme New Zealand very definitely became a nation’. Teachers and students interested in exploring these ideas can go to the Anzac Day activities section in NZHistory.net.nz: http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/node/4119
I’ve never really got the Gallipoli-birth-of-the-nation story. We really must be a miserable lot if we think an ignominious defeat on a scruffy hillside thousands of kilometres away deserves to be commemorated – and increasingly celebrated – as our surrogate national day. I fully accept the heroics of the men who fought, died and were maimed at Gallipoli. (Visiting the melancholy peninsula – its weathered earth unable to hide the bones of those who fought there – one cannot remain unaffected.) I also accept that lying in rat-infested bogs and having to obey orders from stupid pommy commanders would have encouraged the New Zealanders to think about their homeland in a new way. But I simply can’t agree that Gallipoli is the birthplace of the nation. For me, this is at Waitangi. Each time I go there I get a real buzz and a sense of belonging. Gallipoli did neither. It just made me angry and sad.
Imagine if a minor ally of Turkey, say Albania, celebrated its its role in an abortive Turkish invasion of British empire territory - Aden? Kuwait? Karachi? - as a mark of nationhood.
Even stretching history like that, it’s more plausible than the Gallipoli-NZ nationhood nexus.
The Gallipoli campaign has been so mythologised, so sanctified over the years, that it seems almost treasonous to question or downplay its significance. But let’s face it, what we were doing in the Dardenelles in 1915 was essentially invading another country. We were the aggressors against the Otterman Turks, and the fact that they fought fiercely, heroically and successfully in defence of their homeland is to their everlasting credit. We lost 2700 men in that campaign; they lost well over 86,000. If New Zealand’s national consciousness is said to be forged at Gallipoli, then the future Turkish republic’s birth pangs are in tragic evidence there too.
Bollocks, both OZ and NZ grew themselves a pair of stainless steel balls while getting the buggery belted out of them at Gallipoli and (FINALLY) they matured enough to stop blindly following Britain in everything they did.
It was the beginning of Oz and NZ’s ties to Britain being shredded and real independence being achieved.
It is a disingenuous fallacy to suggest that New Zealand and the wider British Empire were ‘the aggressors against the Ottoman Turks’ in the First World War. Without getting to bogged down in the complicated political machinations that surrounded the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers, the key pertinent facts are as follows: 1) The Ottoman Empire signed a secret military alliance with Germany aimed against Russia on 2 August 1914. 2) On 29 October the German-led Ottoman fleet carried out surprise raids on the Black Sea ports of Theodosia, Novorossisk, Odessa and Sevastopol sinking two Russian naval and 14 civilian ships. 3) It was this - unprovoked - attack by Turkish forces that led Russia to declare war on the Ottoman Empire on 3 November with Russia’s wartime allies, Britain and France following suit two days later. 4) The first major Ottoman offensive of the war began on 22 November 1914, some six months before the Allied landings in the Dardanelles, and was aimed at capturing the Russian-held town of Sarykamysk (now Sarikamiş) in the Caucasus, i.e. an invasion of Russian territory.
While in no way seeking to belittle the tenacity and bravery displayed by Turkish soldiers in the defence of Gallipoli (or its importance to the birth of the modern Turkish Republic), the fact remains that the Allied operation there was a legitimate action against an enemy power that had entered the war of its own free will and by its own actions. On that basis invading Turkish territory in 1915 in a bid to knock it out of the war was every bit as justifiable (if not as well-executed) as the Allied invasions of Italy and Germany in World War Two.