HONOR AND DEFEND THE ANZACS - WE ARE FREE TODAY BECAUSE OF THEM

​Australian icon Geoffrey Blainey, probably Australia's greatest historian, still going strong at around 95, has written an important article in today's Australian newspaper.  As usual it is a must read. I below cut and paste just a few paragraphs I found interesting and attach the link and a PDF in case you can't access the link. I recommend reading the whole article:

​GEOFFREY BLAINEY
Anzac Day: Lessons of war now forgotten on the home front

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"​A major aim of the Gallipoli campaign was to open the Dardanelles, the narrow seaway between Europe and Asia Minor, and thus allow British and French fleets to supply southern Russian ports with munitions.
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Britain’s ally, Tsarist Russia, fielding the largest army in the world, was busily fighting Germany and Austro-Hungary but was short of munitions and even army boots. We now know that in Berlin – nearly four months after the Gallipoli fighting began – the German naval headquarters believed it might be a turning point in the war and even lead to Germany’s defeat.

In recent decades influential historians – especially in Australia – have downgraded the Gallipoli campaign into a debacle, a tragic sideshow, a series of battles unwinnable from the start. The criticism was not of the brave soldiers but those on high.

Peter Weir’s fascinating movie Gallipoli was popular here in the 1980s partly because of its anti-British sentiments.

Mistakenly, when younger, I thought that Gallipoli was a defeat for Australia. But the evacuation of our forces during a few nights in December 1915 was so successful that Gallipoli in football terms might be viewed as a drawn match; moreover, a match played away from home.

Our emphasis on Gallipoli diverts attention from World War II. Then Australia itself was in peril but few of our leaders were prepared for that peril.

Essington Lewis, the chief executive of Broken Hill Proprietary, visiting Japan in 1934, rightly concluded that it was secretly preparing for a major war in the Pacific."

(I find this interesting, as it may have parallels with China's rapid military scale-up, which not many seem to be talking about. One possible sign of this was in 2020 at the time COVID started to decimated economies around the world, yet the iron ore price almost doubled, and remained strong pretty much ever since. Comment from CM)

"The fear that Japan would attack Australia was accentuated in 1940. The abrupt defeat of France and The Netherlands by Nazi Germany exposed all the European colonies in Southeast Asia to the danger of a Japanese attack.

On December 8, 1941, the Japanese forces began one of the most brilliant campaigns in the history of warfare. Their aircraft carriers surprised the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, and at exactly the same hour – on the far side of the Pacific – they landed troops in Thailand and British Malaya.

Within a few days their dive bombers sank the two great British warships near Singapore, and in a sudden attack on the American base in The Philippines they destroyed American air power in the region. In Southeast Asia in the space of 10 weeks Japan had gained almost total command of sea and air. Hong Kong, French Indo-China, British Burma, the Dutch East Indies (being the present Indonesia), Portuguese Timor and portions of Australia’s New Guinea had been largely taken over by the Japanese.

Singapore fell on February 15, 1942. Four days later Darwin was bombed, twice in the same day, and on dozens of later days.
The shock felt across Australia was acute.

In May, the Battle of the Coral Sea ended in a draw but it saved Torres Strait and Port Moresby from falling into Japanese hands. Here was an early turning point in Australia’s war.

Japanese planes and submarines still ventured far south. The entry of three midget submarines into Sydney Harbour in June 1942 is well known. More remarkable was the huge Japanese submarine that surfaced at night near Sydney and sent a portable seaplane across the harbour to gather information on all the ships anchored there.

Then the submarine surfaced near King Island and the little seaplane flew, unrecognised, over the heart of the nation’s munitions industry around Footscray before flying past Port Phillip Heads and back to the waiting submarine. Meanwhile Australian ships were sunk by Japanese torpedoes on the sea route between Whyalla, Sydney and Newcastle.

At the end of the war, Australian politicians of all parties knew their country had achieved a narrow escape. They learned from the experience. Sure that their nation in the next war could not defend itself without a much larger population and a strong industrial base, they conducted in the quarter century from 1945 to 1970 ambitious forms of nation-building.

We forget that they did not just seek migrants as such. They sought people – new Australians – whose first loyalty would unfailingly be to Australia.
Lest we forget."

In 1973 Geoffrey Blainey completed his book The Causes of War. An updated edition is reported to be much discussed at the Pentagon this year.

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