Lest we forget ........

paul Sat 25 Apr 2015, 6:46 pm

Today we celebrate those brave souls who gave their all in not only the Anzac conflict , but in all wars , and rightly so .
But today , the celebrations for me have mixed emotions .
How can a handful of people i.e the war department & in particular Mr Winston Churchill so appallingly have such an impact on so many lives ?
This is a brief summary of what I am referring to at Anzac cove, but also all other wars , including WW2, Vietnam, the middle east etc must be included , as they also seem to have been influenced by so few with what seems to be personal agenda as a priority .
What follows is an extract explaining some of what I am on about ..................

"The Gallipoli campaign, badly planned and appallingly executed, was conceived by Winston Churchill, the ambitious First Lord of the Admiralty, in early 1915, with the war on the western front in deadlock. “Are there not other alternatives,” the man destined to be Britain’s second world war saviour inquired, “than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?”
The plan was to open up the Dardanelles straits, heavily mined and ably defended on its western shore by Turkish coastal forts and gun batteries on the 50-mile-long Gallipoli peninsula, to allied ships, capture Constantinople – present-day Istanbul – and so link up with Russia, knocking Germany’s ally, Ottoman Turkey, out of the conflict.
Naval operations began in mid-February with heavy and repeated British and French bombardments of the Turkish positions, but were largely unsuccessful; a final attempt to force a passage up the straits on 18 March ended in six allied battleships being sunk or badly damaged.
Military command in London decided in its wisdom that the barren, hilly peninsula would have to be secured by land, and General Sir Ian Hamilton opted for two landings – one by British troops at Cape Helles, at the base of the peninsula, and the other on the western Aegean coast, in the area later known as Anzac Cove, by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.
The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Photograph: PA
From the start, it was a calamity. Well before the first allied soldiers waded ashore at dawn on 25 April, the Turkish defences had been heavily fortified, and their troops – courageous, disciplined and well dug in, high up on the peninsula’s precipitous inland ridges – reinforced six times over.
The invading troops came under deadly fire from the moment they hit the beach. Despite many showing immense bravery – famously, half a dozen Victoria Crosses were won “before breakfast” on the first day of the Gallipoli landings by officers and men from the First Battalion, Royal Lancashire Fusiliers, who lost all but 21 of their first 200 men ashore – the allies were unable to make good their advance.
On 27 April, after two days of remorseless fighting, a young Australian private, Archibald Barwick, wrote: “I had two rifles smashed in my hands … The piece of ground opposite us was literally covered with dead bodies, our own boys and Turks. God knows what our losses were, must have run into thousands.”
In fact, few allied troops ever made it much further than a few hundred metres from the shore, and the battle soon descended into trench warfare, in truly atrocious conditions. Thousands struggled, and often succumbed, in suffocating heat, with rotting corpses that drew thick swarms of flies, a chronic lack of water, typhoid, the all-but-ubiquitous dysentery and, finally, a winter cold enough to freeze 280 men to death.
With losses on both sides mounting steeply, a fresh British landing at Suvla Bay, a few miles from Anzac Cove, was launched in August 1915 to support a bitter attempt to break out and push at least a little way further inland by the enclosed Australian and New Zealand troops.
Wading ashore that month, a British private, Leonard Thompson, ran up the beach to a large marquee. Pulling back the canvas flaps, he recorded in his diary, he saw: “It was full of corpses. Dead Englishmen, lots and lots of them, with their eyes wide open.”
But despite ferocious, sometimes hand-to-hand fighting, more terrible losses – at Chunuk Bair, one New Zealand unit lost 90% of its men – and remarkable courage, with Australian troops at a ridge known as Lone Pine winning seven VCs in the space of three days, this last-ditch summer offensive would prove as ineffectual as the original landings.
Bowing to the inevitable, the war council in London finally decided to withdraw the Anzac forces in late December, with the last British troops leaving the peninsula on 8 January; ironically, the evacuation was by far the most successful part of the operation, ending with the loss of only a handful of lives.
A military debacle of epic proportions and a byword for poor planning and arrogant, incompetent top brass that would blight Churchill’s career for years, Gallipoli has become a cornerstone of Australian and New Zealand national pride, the birthplace of the core Antipodean values of pluck, endurance, heroism, sacrifice, dark humour and – above all – “mateship”.
For Turkey, the victory saw the triumph of Mustafa Kemal, a 33-year-old lieutenant colonel who commanded the 19th Turkish Division and famously told his men: “I don’t order you to attack; I order you to die.” As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, he became the founding father of the Turkish republic in 1923."

Proud ....most definitely ,but also sad that so many had to perish in what seems to be a doomed exercise by those appallingly ill equipped to govern & lead as leaders .
What now concerns me now , is that even though we no longer have to rely on bolt action 303 rifles for defence , conflicts like the current ISIS one are destined to go on in the name of the same principles & ideology they have been represented by for ions with the senseless loss of life in the name of some idiots philosophy , be it religion , land , oil , or just misguided personal belief .
Lest we forget ............a promise made to those who fought , or those who lost their life should never be forgotten ..............unfortunately unlike the lessons of war which do seem to have been forgotten.
with total respect to those who gave & are giving their all for the sake of us all & our freedom.........................My opinion ( maybe I'm just getting old ! )