Sunday, April 25, 2010
ANZAC Day....Eric Bogle - The Band Played Waltzing Matilda
This song is an Australian compostion, but it pertains to New Zealanders as well. The 'A' in ANZAC of course refers to the Australian Army Corps.
I have written several posts about ANZAC Day and its meaning to the people of New Zealand. Please visit here and here.
On a more personal note here and here .
We rose at 5am this morning and attended the dawn parade, at the cenotaph right beside Mount Maunganui beach. It was a perfect morning, a beautiful calm dawn as the sun rose over the surf and the Harvard planes flew overhead in formation.
The World War Two veterans are now aged and fewer are able to march in the parade each year, there are still many Vietnam, Korean, and veterans from other wars, but the attendance by the members of the general public was greater than any other year. Many young people and children had, like us, risen before daylight and made the pilgrimage to the ceremony at the cenotaph before dawn.
CORRECTION - I have just looked again at the first frame in the video where it says that 50,00 Australian troops died at Gallipoli. That is not correct.
Here are some more figures closer to the truth:
There were about 7,594 - 8,700 Australian soldiers killed at Gallipoli. An estimated total of 664 Australian officers and 17,260 men were wounded. In all 61,522 Australians lost their lives in the First World War.
A total of 18,500 New Zealanders died in or because of the World War One, and nearly 50,000 more were wounded. Of the total number who died, over 2700 died at Gallipoli, and 12,500 died on the Western Front.
The total population of New Zealand in 1914 was just over one million.
In the history of the Great War, the Gallipoli campaign made no large mark. The number of dead, although horrific, pales in comparison with the number that died in France and Belgium during the war. But for New Zealand, along with Australia and Turkey, the Gallipoli campaign played an important part in fostering a sense of national identity.
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5 comments:
that picture at the first of your vidio looks just like my uncle who was in the bottom of a japanese destroyer and was bombed and sunk by the americans with him in the bottom
I've read your previous ANZAC posts before (when you wrote them originally) and have to say that you have a gift. You are such a wonderful writer. Your posts are always so interesting.
The first time I ever heard of ANZAC Day was when I dated a guy from NZ. He was telling me about it and I had never heard of it before. I felt so stupid. I used to think that in Canada (at least in the schools I had attended), we weren't an insular country and that we knew quite a bit about the history of other countries. Perhaps I was absent that day? I still felt stupid when he explained everything to me. How could I not know all that? That *is* BIG! What a monumental event in history that was.
Putz - oh wow, that was a sad thing to happen in your family.
Chrissy - Gallipoli was in fact a huge defeat for the Allies, but of course many many Turks also fought bravely - on their own soil - and many of them lost their lives also. They are commemorated too.
I've enjoyed very much learning about ANZAC day through blogging. It's a wonderful tradition. The video was fun!
Oh yes and thank you for visiting FT-L and for telling me that bottlebrush tree is the right name and where it is from. (I got so enamored of reading your post and watching the video that I forgot why I came originally ;>)
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