WWI heroes honored on Anzac Day
Print Edition
SOME 3,000 Australians marked Anzac Day yesterday with a somber dawn service in northern France to honor their forebears who fought in the Battle of the Somme a century ago.
“Today we come together ... to commemorate all who served on the Western Front and to remember those who never made it home,” Australian Air Force chief Leo Davies said.
The faces of the fallen were projected onto the imposing tower of the Australian National Memorial, which honors nearly 11,000 soldiers with no known graves.
A sole bagpipe wailed as dignitaries including French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian and the governor general of Australia, Sir Peter John Cosgrove, laid wreaths at the monument of the cemetery at Villers-Bretonneux.
“The presence of so many of you underscores the strength of our friendship,” Le Drian told the crowd, which also included scores of French people.
Doug Morgan, music director at Saint Peter’s College in Adelaide who led 50 students to the event, said: “We’ve had an amazing reception here. The local people are very hospitable, and still very grateful for what the Australians did.”
The Battle of the Somme, which lasted nearly five months, saw more than a million casualties on both the Allied and German sides and came to symbolize the futility of World War I. Each of the 141 days of trench warfare took an average toll of some 8,500 casualties, but for all that the Western Front shifted no more than a few kilometers.
For the Australian volunteers, the sacrifice began with a sea trip lasting four months.
The spirit shown by the Anzac troops has long been seen as critical in forging a national identity in Australia as well as in New Zealand, both fledgling nations at the time.
Anzac Day commemorates the landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps on the Gallipoli peninsula on April 25, 1915, at the start of an eight-month campaign against the Ottoman Empire in which 8,700 Australians and nearly 2,800 New Zealanders died.
The battle of Gallipoli, in modern-day Turkey, is seen as a devastating military failure for the Allied powers against the German-backed Ottoman forces, who managed to resist the attempts to break through toward Constantinople.
Now synonymous with valor, Anzac Day is a public holiday in both Australia and New Zealand, also honoring veterans from other conflicts, including South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Iraq.
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