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intheshadowofwar · 1 year ago

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04 June 2023

Weak Specimens

Canberra 04 June 2023

I had everything figured out. I was going to finagle a way to get out to Duntroon, and I’d make a quick little post about two First World War generals commemorated in the Canberra area, and it was going to be a nice little update before I went to Sydney. And then I got a cold.

This was not conducive to excursions.

That having been said, it has got me thinking about the role of illness and disease in war. Prior to the twentieth century, sickness was by far the biggest killer of soldiers. A posting to the West Indies (the modern Caribbean) was a near death sentence, for yellow fever would rip through the ranks of any regiment dispatched there. The pestilence faced by the British Army in the Crimea caused a scandal in the press at home. You might dodge the cannonball, or the bullet may miss its mark, but typhoid and dysentery always loomed ahead, waiting to strike you down.

By the twentieth century, medical science had advanced just enough that you were more likely to die in the trenches than from sickness - at least until the 1918 Influenza reared its ugly head - but unpleasant afflictions could still strike a soldier at any time. Nowhere was this more true than on the peripheral fronts - Southern Africa, Salonika, Mesopotamia, Palestine and of course Gallipoli. The terrible sanitary conditions on the front line attracted vermin, and vermin carried disease - by the summer of 1915, anything from half to three quarters of the men on the peninsula had some kind of illness, and diarrhoea was omnipresent.

(I promise this blog will not be entirely about that, but the runs are important to my point here.)

Diarrhoea wasn’t just uncomfortable - it had an impact on the combat performance of troops. They grew weaker from dehydration, exacerbated by the limited water and the heat of Gallipoli in the late summer. The island staging bases of Lemnos and Imbros was no better - Robin Prior notes that upon the British 11th Division’s departure from Imbros to take part in the landings at Suvla Bay, nearly every man had contracted ‘a particularly weakening form of diarrhoea’ and were also suffering from the side effects of a cholera inoculation.

These illnesses were not the reason for the failure of the campaign - the plan was fatally flawed from conception, and the direction of the August Campaign had been bungled before the first troops left their start lines - but it does play a role in the mythology of the campaign.

Remember how I said we’d mention Charles Bean again? Bean is a great example of a historical ‘problematic fave.’ He had a clear empathy for Australian troops, and his vision for the Australian War Memorial was laudably democratic and egalitarian in nature. His official history of the Australian Imperial Force is a mammoth work of historical literature. Yet he was also very much a man of his time - apart from his casual antisemitism , he was, like many educated men, a believer in eugenics. Bean saw the ailing British soldiers of the August campaign and saw confirmation of what he probably already believed - that the urban poor of Great Britain had degenerated. ‘After 100 years of breeding in the slums, the British race is not the same’ as it had been at Waterloo, he wrote, and that Britain had bred ‘one fine class [the upper class] at the expense of the rest.’

It should be noted that this was a private diary entry, and there were a great many British men who would have agreed with him - there was an obsession with urban degeneracy in the first years of the twentieth century. Yet the converse of this - the idea of the big, strong, manly Anzac, which was already being stoked by Bean and the British journalist Ashmead-Bartlett - has stuck around in the Anzac legend, and echoes of Bean’s private sentiment remain. I remember being told in high school about how Australians were huge and bronzed, while British soldiers were all short, stunted coal miners. I don’t think my teacher knew they were parroting eugenist ideas from the 1910s; I don’t think most people really think about it.

I’m sure this came out more than a little incoherent, as I’m still on the mend, but I thought I ought to put pen to paper on this line of thinking before I forgot. I just think there’s a benefit to thinking historically about myths, even ones that seem harmless. They all come from somewhere.

And on that note, carrots aren’t actually good for your eyesight. The RAF made that one up to prevent people from finding out they had radar.

#first world war #illness #eugenics #c e w bean #charles bean #british army #australian army #gallipoli

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intheshadowofwar · 1 year ago

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The Long, Long Trail - 27 May 2023

The Last Man

Australian War Memorial 27 May 2023

They say the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. If one is former Director of the Australian War Memorial Dr. Brendan Nelson, it might be said to start with a single grant of five hundred million dollars. Today, the sightlines of Anzac Parade are ruptured by cranes and construction sites, part of the massive effort to revitalise the Australian War Memorial, to build a larger Anzac Hall, and to create space for the modern conflicts (and modern equipment) of the Australian Defence Forces.

It’s meant to be therapeutic to modern veterans, and I certainly can’t presume to speak for them. For all I know, it might be true - a few days ago I happened upon a YouTube video in which an Iraq War veteran gushed about a pre-release build of the controversial video game Six Days in Fallujah. There’s plenty of ex-military people who are into modelling tanks and planes. Perhaps, just as veterans of the First and Second World Wars revisited their battlefields in their old age, there’s a comfort in ‘going back.’ And yet, I can’t help but think there are more sinister justifications for the rebuild lurking in the background. Things like money from BAE Systems and quiet nudges from military recruiters. Things that risk subtly pushing the Australian War Memorial from being a place of commemoration to a place of glorification.

This is all immaterial, of course, because at 9.30am on a near-winter’s morning in Canberra, you can’t even see the sightlines for all the fog. Whoever painted those 1950s posters advertising sunny Australia certainly wasn’t thinking of Campbell.

(As a quick aside, I’m going to be using pseudonyms like ‘the Professor’ and ‘the Field Assistant’ here, because I don’t actually know if I have permission to use their names. If this suddenly changes, it’s because I found out if I could or could not name them.)

I came to the War Memorial on this balmy autumn day of about two degrees celsius to begin a journey - but I’m sure you’re all aware of that, because one doesn’t write a travel log unless they intend to travel. This was the first step on the road for the Australian National University’s Anzac Battlefields and Beyond Study Tour, or ANUABBST.

Upon reflection, we’ll just call it the ‘Study Tour.’

In any case, Poppy’s Cafe was the starting point of our adventure - sort of. We had, in fact, had an orientation last night. That’s when most of us found out that there was a minor snag in our plans. Our dear friend Covid may no longer be an international emergency, but it remains a background annoyance, like that lump I had on my nose for most of my teenage years. Our professor had been stricken by the plague, and thus would not be available today. To make matters worse, one of the Field Assistants was still in the United States, and the professor’s assistant from previous years was in Kiama. This left us with only one Field Assistant to manage everything. She’d effectively been thrown in the deep end, with all other authority figures down - it’s the stuff VCs are made of.

What I’m basically saying is, she basically had to do all the teaching, admin and assistant work by herself, and she made it look easy.

I’m sorry, I have digressed. It will happen again. Repeatedly.

In any case, we met at Poppy’s. It was here, at 10am, that we met with Michael McKernon, who I have to name because he was the key figure in the repatriation of Australia’s Unknown Soldier. See, up until 1991, Australia didn’t have an ‘unknown soldier’ - for the uninitiated, the idea of the ‘unknown soldier’ (or in some countries, the ‘unknown warrior’) is for a single, unidentified body to serve as a surrogate grave for all those killed whose bodies were never identified - it can also serve as a symbol of the collective sacrifice of an entire country. For most of the twentieth century, Australia’s unknown soldier was considered to be Britain’s Unknown Warrior, who is interred in Westminster Abbey in London. It wasn’t until Paul Keating’s time that that changed. After some haggling with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who were a bit cagey about people waltzing up and digging up their cemeteries and didn’t want to start a precedent, it was decided to exhume remains from Adelaide Cemetery in France, partially because they could be certain it was an Australian there, and partially because it was remote and it was feared the British tabloids might try to get a photograph of the body.

Apparently they’d made plans to check several graves, with a little marquee to cover them as they dug and reburied the soil to find suitably complete remains. Yet in the end they didn’t need to - they found exactly what they wanted in the first grave they checked. Sometimes in life, things really do just come together.

It’s perhaps incredible to hear now, on the other side of the Anzacpalooza of the 2010s, but apparently the then Governor-General Bill Hayden was worried before the internment ceremony was held on 11 November 1991 that people would laugh. He thought the idea of a gun carriage carrying an anonymous body, followed by the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and all manner of dignitaries, would be too absurd to be taken seriously. (Perhaps he’d had a premonition of some of the internet reactions to the King’s coronation.) In the event, that didn’t happen - Hayden told McKernan that he’d seen something in the eyes of the crowd that he’d never seen before in the Australian people. ‘Intense pride and intense grief.’ (I’m paraphrasing, of course.)

Now, you might be tempted to think that’s political spin, but seeing as Hayden said that to McKernan in a one on one conversation, I reckon he was being sincere. I think that’s something we forget these days; people feel deep connections to abstract things, and they personalise them. Someone might look at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they might think of Great-Uncle John, or Harry, or Hans. It could be my great-grandfather.

(Well, no it couldn’t, because he was British, he was in the Second World War, and he then lived to a very old age, but you get my point.)

At the end of his discussion with us, McKernon talked about the sentimentalisation of the War Memorial’s museum (for those uninitiated, the War Memorial contains both a memorial and a museum.) The specific example he gave us was the speakers installed above George Lambert’s painting of the charge at the Battle of the Nek in August 1915, which plays the sound of gunfire, artillery and wounded men. His belief is that we should not be doing this - that the addition of sound (or music for that matter) emotionally manipulates the viewer. He compared this with a muddy uniform on the other side of the First World War gallery which Charles Bean took off a soldier coming back from the line. I presume he was given privacy while he changed into a new uniform. In any case, it’s there to present what a soldier’s equipment looked while it was on the line, as opposed to an immaculate tunic and breeches pulled out of an army storeroom. It doesn’t need sound or lights to convey the nature of war, and it doesn’t tell you how you ought to feel about it. (Remember Charles Bean’s name, because we will certainly hear from him again.)

I don’t know how I feel about the use of sound in museums. I think it can be used to good effect, if used in the right way. I don’t think it should be used in a memorial. This may be a part of the memorial that acts as a museum, but it is still on memorial grounds, and I think it should apply the opportunity for reflection as much as possible.

After our lovely chat with Micheal McKernon, we proceeded into the War Memorial, a task that the War Memorial seems intent on making as difficult as possible. During the Dark Times, the memorial set up a procedure to limit the amount of people coming in at any one time, which was the right thing to do at the time. It seems they’ve gotten a taste for it, as this procedure remains in place, and if you cluster in a group of more than two and a half people, they’ll look at you like you just set General Monash’s uniform on fire. You can imagine that this is not the most conductive environment for a group tour, but we just about made it work.

Now, I’m attending this tour as alumni, so I don’t have to work for a living. Once the rest of the group had been split into sub-groups to examine specific objects, we split off for a bit and I wandered around doing my own thing. I had a brisk walk through the Second World War gallery, which has some of my personal favourite exhibits in the museum - for example, the table at which General Percival surrendered Singapore to General Yamashita in 1942. On a more sombre note, there’s the wall of photographs of the men who died in the Sandakan Death March, which I think is probably the most effective exhibit in the museum. I then spent a little time among the rows of names on the Roll of Honour, and a brief reflection at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I don’t really know exactly what I reflected on, but I think that’s just the way it is sometimes.

I doubled back through the First World War galleries to view (and test my new camera on) the dioramas. These were the brainchild of the artist Will Dyson and the correspondent-turned-historian Charles Bean, and they’ve been there since the 1920s. If you come to the Australian War Memorial for one thing, it probably should be these - as well as the dioramas of Tobruk, Tarakan and Kapyong elsewhere in the museum.

The camera’s pretty great, by the by.

We met back up at 2pm and discreetly did group presentations. After this I did an improvised presentation of my own in front of the L3/33 tankette in the WWII gallery, and was reminded why I’m not very good at improv. We broke up just after 3pm, and I headed home.

As a group, we don’t meet up again until London next month, but personally I have one or two things planned between then and now - and that starts tomorrow.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, our Unknown Soldier did set a precedent. Canada got one in 2000, and New Zealand followed them.

#australian war memorial #first world war #second world war #unknown soldier #charles bean #michael mckernon #anzac

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