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On the early morning of Sunday the 25th April 1915, soldiers of the Australian New Zealand Army Corps -- ANZACs landed on Turkey's Gallipoli Peninsula at a location that would become known as Anzac Cove. British troops landed at the peninsula's southern tip along with other troops from within the British Empire/Commonwealth and France with the ultimate objective of securing the Dardanelles Strait, thus leaving the way clear for the British Navy to assault Constantinople or modern day Istanbul, knocking Germany's Turkish ally out of the war. However, due to terrible planning, old inaccurate French maps from the 1860s and gross underestimation of the Turks by the British top brass, the operation was a disaster with its only success being the remarkably concealed and well executed withdrawal of 80,000 Allied troops just under eight months later. From this disaster however was formed the ANZAC legend, with many of the Gallipoli Anzacs covering themselves in glory later on at the Western Front in France such as the critical battle on yes, ANZAC day, 1918 in the French village of Villers Bretonneaux, which played such a pivotal role in breaking the dreaded trench stalemate of the Western Front. Throughout the country there were major ceremonies to commemorate this event, along with dawn ceremonies on Anzac Cove in Gallipoli and Villers Bretonneaux in France. In Brisbane, I attended my first ANZAC Dawn service at 4:28am and stayed on for the street parade which commenced just after 9:30am, lasting almost three hours which I was able to photograph from a street overpass traversing Adelaide Street. However, after the Dawn service, and waiting in line, I climbed the Shrine of Remembrance with its Eternal Flame and references to the battles of WWI that the Aussie Diggers fought in such as the aforementioned Villers Bretonneaux in France and Jerusalem and Damascus in the Middle East and the Hindenburg Line which was Germany's famous last fortress or line of defence which the Diggers participated in breaching in 1918. For me, a monumentally moving day that will forever live on in my consciousness. Their memory liveth for eternity, and thus, the dead diggers of Gallipoli, will never be forgotten.
200 files, last one added on Apr 26, 2015
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