Grim Centennial

April 1915 was an exceptionally ugly month in the horrific four-year death-ride of Western Civilization known as The Great War. The next two days mark a pair of grim centennials.

April 24 is traditionally marked as the beginning of the Armenian genocide. No matter how my nation’s government tries to elide the issue — fearing alienating a NATO “ally” and jeopardizing whatever cooperation we’re getting out of Turkey in combating ISIS — it was a genocide.

A genocide with a pernicious legacy. Adolf Hitler cited it as a template for his war of annihilation in the Wild East, in his “Obersalzberg Speech” to his military leadership cadre of the Third Reich just prior to the invasion of Poland:

I have issued the command — and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Who, indeed?

On April 24, 1915 Ottoman authorities rounded up 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. The Ottomans had reason to fear that the Christian Armenian community in Anatolia was sympathetic to the Russian Empire with which the Ottomans were at war. And, indeed, there were Armenians who fought in Russian formations. But the “annihilation of the Armenians” was more than a national security operation gone wrong. It was a systematic ethnic cleansing that involved mass hangings, crucifixions, confiscation of property and forced relocation on a death march through the Syrian desert. Some 1.5 million died — men, women children.

Its centennial observances would be a good time for Turkey to acknowledge the slaughter for what it was, and for the American government to insist upon a speaking of the truth. But that will not happen.

April 25, 2015 marks the Centennial of the initial landings on the Gallipoli Peninsula. This attempt to force the Dardanelles straits would bog down into a horrific version of the trench warfare that had locked the Western Front in France and Belgium into a muddy, bloody stalemate. Here unbearable heat and an epidemic of dysentery would make things even more miserable than they were in France.

It started with high hopes — and bungled landings. The ANZACs (Australia-New Zealand Army Corps) were landed over a mile from their actual objective, at a place that is to this day known as ANZAC Cove. The inexperienced but game troopers struggled inland trying to take the high ground that loomed over the beach, but they were fed into battle piecemeal, with little coordination.

Still, they almost prevailed. The day was decided by a heroic stand by the Ottoman the 19^th Division, commanded by Mustafa Kemal, who would become Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey. Kemal issued perhaps the most badass command in military history to the 57^th Infantry Regiment: “Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.”

The Turks held off the Aussies and Kiwis and the best chance of a decisive victory for The Allies went a-glimmering. The Allies should have evacuated the beach, as the ANZAC commander requested. Instead, they would stay there for eight horrific months. Some 10,000 Australians and New Zealanders would die, along with 35,000 British and 10,000 French troops. The Turks had 86,000. Many were KIA, especially in some savage battles in August 1915, but it was disease that took the heaviest toll.

 

As the fighting ground on, reinforcements were sent in to the beachhead, where the ANZACs clung to their foothold alng the cliffs. Among the reinforcements was Billy Sing, who would become one of the Great War’s deadliest snipers.

Half Chinese and half English in descent, Sing was a backcountry sharpshooter of the classic mold.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Growing up in rural Queensland, Sing was a skilled horse rider, kangaroo hunter and shooter. By the time he enlisted in October 1914 aged 28, he was renowned locally for his shooting prowess.

Such skills, as well as his early enlistment, may have helped him avoid some of the resistance faced by other non-European men, researchers believe.

Sing arrived in Gallipoli in May 1915 with the 5^th Light Horse Regiment. His sometimes “spotter” Ion Idriess wrote of his comrade in his memoir ‘The Desert Column’: “He is a little chap, very dark, with a jet-black moustache and a goatee beard. A picturesque-looking man-killer. He is a crack sniper of the Anzacs.”

Sing was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, an honour second only to the Victoria Cross, in 1916. A military despatch said Trooper 355 killed 201 Turkish troops including his Ottoman counterpart “Abdul the Terrible”.

The badass Frontier Partisan could not turn the tide all by himself, however, and the Allied forces eventually did evacuate the Gallipoli beachhead, with nothing to show but thousands of dead and a memory that echoes down a long and bloody century.

In honor of the day, The Pogues’ magnificent version of “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”: