Patriot Realm

ANZAC Day has been sabotaged. Yet again. This time by quotas. Registrations and redtape.

I remember when it was a simple display of heartfelt patriotism and a love of the men and women who fell in service to our Nation. 

I remember when it was about standing at dawn on the morning of 25 April and honouring all those who fell because they were patriots. They fell for our way of life and our belief in freedom. 

Now we are being asked in many parts of Australia to register to honour our dead. Register? What idiocy is this? 

Sydneys III, IV and V did not get the opportunity to show their true mettle as did numbers  I and II. After 1945 there were no more “real” wars that involved our country. There were UN peacekeeping operations and participation in conflicts undertaken by the Coalition of the Willing. Korea was officially dubbed a UN peacekeeping operation. Vietnam was a war between North & South Vietnam where our role was to support an ally, the USA in flushing out the Viet Cong.

Nevertheless to those who were taking part the bullets, bombs and shells were real and lethal regardless of the handle given to the conflict and whenever the call went out to give support to our allies our response as always was “Australia will be there!”

I dedicate this article to the women who fought, died and tragically were lost. Alongside the brave men who did the same. I dedicate it to the women who kept the wheels turning on the farms and in the mines and in the factories and in the family homes.

There is great equality in life and in death. But nowhere as great as in the love we feel in our hearts.

Over the past month, we have been reading articles from Happy Expat about our boys on the frontline. I have to hand it to him. It made me start to think again. 

The journey down the path of a road we never knew we wanted to explore but found ourselves walking down nonetheless.  We have marched side by side through the swamps and quagmires of our wartorn past and felt the bite of a thousand mosquitoes; dysentery and malnutrition. And these days, all we do is view it from the comfort of our heated or air-conditioned homes as part of a news story.

And we say, almost with an automatic response, Lest We Forget. Are we saying this because it rolls off the tongue? No meaning? Have we forgotten what these brave people did? 

The Scrap Iron Flotilla was an Australian destroyer group that operated in the Mediterranean during WW2.

Its story is synonymous with the Rats of Tobruk. It was the means of supply to the beleaguered town under siege between 10^th April, 1941 and 7^th December, 1941.

Its name was conferred on it by Dr.Goebbels, the German propaganda minister intending to demean and undermine morale of the five Australian ships that made up the flotilla. As happened with the conferring of the name “Rats of Tobruk” on the garrison troops by Lord Haw Haw, instead of depressing morale it spurred them to greater acts of defiance. Neither understood the make-up of the Australian character.

I would venture to say that the two most famous and well known phrases of our military history are “Gallipoli” and “The Rats of Tobruk”. One was a magnificent defeat. The other was a magnificent triumph.

Field Marshall Sir William Slim, 13^th Governor General of Australia and at the time, General commanding the 14^th Army said after the triumph over the Japanese at Milne Bay that “…..Some of us may forget that, of all the Allies, it was the Australians who first broke the invincibility of the Japanese army and it was the Australians who first broke the invincibility of the German army.”

In speaking of the defeat of the German Army he was speaking about Tobruk.