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.
Read more: Women at War and the women who kept the homefires burning
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 10th April, 1941 and 7th 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.
Read more: The Scrap Iron Flotilla - a tale of the great Aussie Spirit
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, 13th Governor General of Australia and at the time, General commanding the 14th 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.
Read more: Our Rats of Tobruk - the faces of unlikely heroes
I have just watched the funeral of Prince Philip. There was something so different, so sad and so moving that I felt the need to put it into words. To witness the passing of this great Naval Officer and servant of the People was and will become one of those moments in history where, as Shaydee wrote some time ago, we record our snapshots of momentous occasions and our brains realise that something momentous just occurred.
Today, we watched the passing of the old guard. The handing over of our future to a group of people who have never learned that, without respect for the past, we will be given a future that none of us could ever have imagined or ever wanted.
It is a future that fills me with dread.
Of all the legends and stories about ANZAC the most enduring one is that of Simpson and his donkey.
I clearly remember being told this story as a very young child when I was in grade 2 in 1941. In those days we were repeatedly told stories about the “last” war; last meaning previous, not end or final.
Read more: I remember when.... I first heard of Simpson and his donkey
Recently, one of my commenters said that we had become a society of sex, drugs, mock and troll. How profound was that? Everything was either lewd, spaced out, or subject to ridicule and abuse.
Doesn't that just about sum up today's world in a nutshell?
It is no longer sex drugs, rock and roll. Our modern society has taken things to a new level.
The Last Post would be familiar to all Australians from an early age. It is played at every ANZAC Day ceremony by a bugler in an army uniform and frequently at funerals of soldiers and veterans.
Does the average civilian attendee understand the significance of this quasi musical interlude? Is it an entertainment piece that everyone expects to hear because it is always part of the programme like the hymn “Oh God our Help in Ages Past”?
The Last Post is one of the most ancient tools used by modern British founded armies and has its roots in the days of the Roman Empire when horns were used to play the hymn of the Goddess Diana and as signals to command troops on the battlefield. Even to this day, the French term for what we call e reveille is La Diana.
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it’s one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him… One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.”
~ H. L. Mencken, “Prejudices: Third Series (Le Contrat Social)“. Book by H. L. Mencken, 1922.
Read more: The ‘Covid’ Plot Will Continue, So How Will Mass Fear Be Reestablished?
I just off the phone from talking to my Mum, Redhead. We were talking about how some older neighbours had relocated to another state to be closer to their daughter. While waiting for their house to be ready, they are living with their daughter. It has been months now.
The conversation turned to how it is nice to have visitors but they, like fish, start to smell after two days. Redhead said that she could never understand why I was so reluctant to move in with her, seeing as she had a big house and lived alone " We get on so well, don't we? " she asked.
"Yes " I replied. " Because we don't live together. "
And so began the conversation and the story of Bombay Gin, getting up at sparrows fart, noodles and The Crooner.
Read more: Bombay Gin, getting up at sparrows fart, noodles and The Crooner.
Of all the magnificent units and regiments of the Australian Army I doubt if any have a better claim to have been the one that saved Australia than the 39th Infantry Battalion, the first to advance down the Kokoda Track to confront the Japanese.
There are a number of units who could claim this title. The 25th Brigade in the defence of Milne Bay so ably presented a few days ago and the Coral Sea Battle. The former was supported by the RAAF. The Coral Sea Battle was a largely American enterprise. The 39th held the Japs at bay alone and unsupported until the 7th Division arrived fresh from the Middle East. For that they get my vote without detracting in any way the efforts and performance of all of our other units, and the Americans, who took on the Japs.
Read more: THOSE RAGGED BLOODY HEROES - the 39th Battalion at Kokoda
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