It is hard to find a good word to say about the series the ABC called the “War that Changed Us,” except its title. The First World War did change us. There were only five million of us. We put 160,000 men into the field, and lost 60,000 of them.
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That’s 60,000 men who did not come home to marry, and 60,000 young women who were left to become maiden aunts, without children.
Then there were the demographic effects. The names on our many memorials are overwhelmingly English and Scots. Australia was no longer to be an antipodean Britain. The ground had been prepared for the land of many nations that we have become since the end of the Second World War.
The ground was also prepared for ideological victim-hood. It became conventional wisdom that British generals wasted Australian lives, and that they sneered at us. Some of that found its way into “Anzac Girls”, which was about Australian army nurses.
I knocked around the world for 13 years as a young, and then less young, reporter, and never observed any sneering, only courtesy and friendship.
But the worst offence of all in “The War That Changed Us” was its selectivity. It was about allied defeats. The series wallowed in the slaughter on the Western Front, and on the failure of the allied command to recognise the talents of an Australian commander, Pompey Elliott.
So let’s get some perspective into the war that changed us. Australians turned the tide in the Middle East, with the last great cavalry charge in history, by the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba.
Eventually, on the Somme, the Australian divisions were consolidated into our first Army, under an Australian general, John Monash, who was sparing of the lives of the men under his command, whose battlefield tactics were innovative and become standard. He used aircraft for the forward supply of ammunition for heavy machine guns, enabling them to stay at the front. He worked out how to use the newly introduced tanks, which had been pronounced a failure. Send them in escorted by infantrymen, so that the enemy could not disable them from the side by tossing grenades into the tracks.
He broke the German lines, and their will to fight. I recall a conversation with a British veteran of the First World War on the heights of Mont St Quentin. He looked down that steep hill and recalled the Aussies charging up to win another battle. The tone was not a sneer at colonials. It was one of admiration. Monash won the war for the allies.
They didn’t sneer at us. I have never observed it. Everybody liked us, and the King, George V, knighted Monash in the field. The ABC missed that.
