On April 25 1915, tens of thousands of ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) soldiers, along with allies from Britain and France, stormed the beaches of Gallipoli. The aim was to capture the peninsula to clear the way for Allied navy ships to advance toward the Black Sea and take Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital city of the Ottoman Empire which was then a German ally. Unfortunately, the entire operation was doomed to a horrible defeat. What had been devised as a method to swiftly knock Turkey out of the war turned out to be a long and lethal campaign that lasted for eight awful months.

At the end of 1915 the Allied forces were evacuated from Gallipoli because both sides had suffered heavy losses and it had become a blood-soaked stalemate that neither the Allies nor the Turks seemed to be winning. The Turkish forces were not knocked out of the war and the campaign

Back home in Australia the 25th of April had already officially been named ANZAC Day. The earliest ANZAC Days were marked with sports events and ceremonies and during the rest of the war were also used for enlistment campaigns and rallies. By the 1930s the rituals we associate today with ANZAC Day, such as dawn vigils, marches and memorial services, had become part of the new tradition of this commemorative day.

ANZAC Day continues to be one of Australia’s most important national events. War is a terrible, futile thing, and on this day we can all hope for an end to it, whilst remembering the courage every ANZAC has shown. The men who landed on Gallipoli plunged into a mission that was practically suicidal and it is vital to remember the sacrifices they made. Their “baptism of fire” was the birth of the ANZAC spirit. It gave us a history and we shall never forget them or their crusade on the shores of Turkey.

The First World War continued until 1918 and by the end of it over 60,000 Australian soldiers had been killed and 156,000 more were injured, gassed or taken as prisoners of war. Very many surviving veterans suffered from “shell shock” (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder) after their return from the battlefields and a lot of returned soldiers found it hard to adjust once more to normal day-to-day civilian life.

was a terrible failure. More than 8000 Australian soldiers had died during that time and thousands of others had endured horrible wounds or diseases such as dysentery and influenza. The surviving soldiers had been dragged through Hell and back. However, every single one of them - f

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