100 years of ANZAC
This thread is in honour of the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings and the many Australians and New Zealanders who fought for the safety and quality of life in our two countries we know today.
Feel free to post your own stories of family members who went to war, your experiences with war and anything else related to this topic.
Please, I implore you. DO NOT post anything disrespectful as this thread is meant to be one of respect, rememberance and reverance for those many who lived and/or died for us, I also implore that at the end of each post you place in italics or bold lettering "Lest we forget."
My Great, great uncle fought in the Second World War in Africa against the Germans. I do not know much of him. I do not even know what his name was. but I know he did not return.
*The shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them*
LEST WE FORGET
Comments
That's odd, your country's memorial day is almost the same as mine's.
Which is?
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Israel, it's the national Memorial Day for all the dead soldiers in general. What I love about the timing is that exactly a day after the Memorial Day and exactly a week after the Holocaust memorial day, we celebrate our Independence Day. Kind of depicts how my people rose to life after 2000 years of of being hunted and persecuted and became one of the greatest armies in the modern world.
'When the prey becomes the predator, the amount of evil in the world does not change'
Yes, many over the course of history were not (and unfortunately still in some cases) accepting of Judaism. This just shows how far humans have come as a people since.
Also, please place lest we forget at the end of the posts of this thread everyone.
LEST WE FORGET
If you're talking about what I think you're talking about:
We're not predators for defending ourselves. There is a HUGE difference between Hitler's ethnic cleansing and our self- defence. This is an insult to me and my people to be compared to a mass murderer by the millions, and it is both unrealistic and misinformed. I'm really sorry to burst your bubble, but Israel tried its best to stop the conflict this summer, but we cannot take so many hits without prevailing.
Under all forms of international law, including military rules for most countries, the 4th Geneva Convention, International Humanitarian Law etc., if military have placed themselves within or near civilian areas and fire on your own country, it is legitimate to attack them. Provided civilian casualties are not excessive (and those in Gaza are not, being about 50%, the rest being Hamas fighters), no crime has been committed. In the case of the Gaza conflict, the only war crimes have been committed by Hamas: firing indiscriminately on civilian areas, using their own population as human shields, and placing military sites in schools, hospitals and civilian and public buildings. Israel has responded to attacks, not initiated them, has warned civilians time and again to flee before attacks are made (there are plenty of places to go to in Gaza, in rural areas); Hamas orders or pushes people back into buildings and benefits from the PR use of ensuing casualties. Hamas has killed the Gazans in the hundreds. They killed children (over 150) that dug the tunnels (adults too, so they can't give intel to Israel about their whereabouts), they killed their political rivals while the "war" was going on in the confusion. Hamas is a terror organization.
It's a tragedy, but it's a tragedy entirely of Hamas's own making.
Israel pulled entirely out of Gaza in 2005, Hamas, a notorious terrorist group whose sole reason d'être is the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of all Jews worldwide, took control, often violently, and proceeded to launch rocket barrages at Israel, building or buying bigger and better rockets. No country under that sort of threat would fold its arms and do nothing. Palestinians get hurt. If they made peace instead, Israel wouldn't have hurt a hair on their head and would share its prosperity, know-how, resources with them, as it already does around the world in places like India and African countries.
if any rocket launcher is detected from any civilian location, the IAF & the IDF has the absolute mark to advise the location 20 minutes before shelling that specific building or area, the Israeli army has 3 ways to advice. airborne pamphlets, phone calls or dropping with a small 5 kg missile before the final attack. so if any civilian is there is because is too stupid or is a human shield paid by the terrorist organizations.
If Palestinians were really wanting to show their end of occupation by Israel. They should had not elected Hamas who has more than once hide under ambulances, caused alleged theft of UN aids, attack on their counterparts, the PA for supplying medicines. Let's not forget the absurd amount of money spent onto hidden tunnels, weapons, the abuse of forced tunnel diggers, the unnecessary amount of food Hamas has denied over Palestinians and many more. If we had let those tunnels be dug, I might have been dead by now.
The military occupation will not end even by many years. As long as the same people vote for the same trouble-makers, you can expect a lot of killings and brutality. Why I say this is because if Israel withdraw to its pre 67 territory. It will cause massive security gaps making things easier for dangerous elements like Hamas to stage attacks. There are Palestinians who have been granted Israeli citizenship but there are a lot who chose not to and became permanent residences in Israel.
The UN and other nations doing things like ignoring Hamas' actions and those of the neighboring Arab states, holding Israel to a standard that no other nation on the planet is held to and going so far as accusing them of fabricated war crimes in wars they never wished to participate in while ignoring the ones the opposing side openly commits are the kind of things that give antisemites, radical Muslims and all around ignorant misinformed inhibitors of distant countries that can only formulate an opinion on this war by the pictures of dead Palestinian children spammed in every corner of our social media (while most of them were just results of being used as human shields) a reason to once again think that Israelis are evil, and then mentally connect that to the Jewish people, resulting in retroactive waves of neo-Nazis being formed. Tragedies like this will not repeat themselves, anyone who tries to squeeze antisemitic propaganda out of the misfortune we endure and tries to eradicate us once again will be opposed by our great military, a military I'm going to join in the near future.
I don't know a lot about Australia, but it must be the same as everyone feel for their own dead soldiers in their own countries. Be proud of your family and country.
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Amen to that.
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Ah, yeah? My grandfather also fought in Africa against Nazi Germany in WWII. He also did the Italian Campaign, but fled the military when he reached Florance (since he was Italian from origin).
Wierdly enough, my other grandfather was about to fight for fascist Italy in WWII, but his leg got bad and he wasn't able to fight in the war.
LEST WE FORGET
My great grandfather returned to fascist Italy and participated in the invasion of Ethiopia. I'm not proud of it, but it's a part of my family history that I can't ignore.
Ironically, my grandfather's cousin fought at Kassarine Pass, one of the most disastrous defeats the US ever suffered. He came back a changed man and killed himself years later.
Lest we forget.
Quite the irony indeed.
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'it's a tragedy entirely of Hamas's own making.'
No. Bombing UN shelters did not need to happen. Ever.
Only a fool looks at the Middle Eastern conflict and sees either side as utterly blameless.
My statement stands, Hamas created this situation along with all the things that "didn't need to happen" yet still happened in order to assure they couldn't use UN shelters as storage basements for weaponry.
It happened because those shelters were used for Hamas' needs, and not for the needs the UN had built them for in the first place. They were bombed because they contained explosives, weapons, and resources used to dig tunnels into Israeli settlements.
Granted, it had casualties, but we did our best to minimalize them. It was either that or let them keep bombing settlements and cities around the land. Hamas has their disgusting grip over that small plot of land, and that's the main problem. It's hard to maneuver and eliminate threats when the innocent are mostly the wives and children of those terrorists. But it is legitimate to eliminate them (even though we tried our best not to, but we had to do something), because our own people come before their people. As far as I'm concerned, we're not legally obligated for the people of the Gaza Strip (even though we did do things such as supply them with electricity, the same electricity lines they had bombed by accident when the dumb fuckers miscalculated their coordinates), yet we could have done way worse to the place and just bombard everything within their borders. It's not like we didn't warn them and didn't do everything we could to try and reach ceasefires many times.
They broke all of those ceasefires, I heard the rockets that broke those ceasefires with my own ears.
Also, I don't see my side as entirely blameless, I do feel bad for the civilian casualties and acknowledge that we killed innocent people, but I do not accuse my military for things like "slaughtering innocent women and children", and I certainly do not count this as anything close to ethnic cleansing. Because it didn't happen that way, we didn't kill any innocent civilians on purpose.
Now if the Americans were fighting the Italians at Kassarine Pass that would be double ironic...of course, America wouldn't have lost if that were the case!
Lest we forget
Well, my relatives fought in the Russian Army in World War I, but, sure, why not?
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Well, as I'm sure a lot of you know, I'm a New Zealander. Every year I always remember Gallipoli and the soldiers that fought so bravely. Much respect for them.
Lest we forget
Lest we forget
My family has been in a lot of major wars. Going back to the Revolutionary War, I have ancestors that captained ships in the privateer fleets, as well as fought under George Washington. I have family that was on both sides of the American Civil War. I had family fight in WWI, though I'm not sure where. In WWII my great uncle survived Pearl Harbor, and the entire rest of the Pacific campaign. A great grandfather of mine landed at Normandy on D-Day. A few of my relatives fought in Vietnam, and more recently the Gulf War.
I don't know all of their stories, because most of them were dead long before I was born. I do know that because a large portion of my family immigrated here from Germany and Sweden, that there are probably more distant relatives than I can count that have participated in wars, particularly the World Wars.
Lest We Forget
Did they fight for the Red Army in the Revolution? Or the White?
That I don't know. My maternal great-grandfather was a POW since about 1916. It's likely he wasn't involved in it at all. As for my paternal relatives, I don't even know. It's possible that my great-grandfather also fought in World War I, but there are no records nor living people left that could shed light on that.
My great uncle, still alive by the way, landed on Omaha beach on D-Day. He also fought throughout the Allied advanced in France.
I remember learning about ANZAC when I did a project on New Zealand some time okay. Thanks for reminding me.
Lest we forget
My grandfather served in the 82nd Airborne during WWII, and my great uncle was a Navy Corpsman who served on both Iwo Jima and Okinawa during the tail end of the war in the Pacific. Both passed before I was old enough to learn their stories.
Also, I've read about the ANZAC during all the time I've spent studying/reading biographies on the Vietnam War (Not exactly Gallipoli in 1915, I know). They seem like a good bunch of guys. Cheers to them, and even though I'm from America, I respect the sacrifices they made for their nations.
Lest We Forget
Both my great-grandparents fought in the Second World War. I was never told the details, but I think they might have been in the RAN (Royal Australian Navy). They both survived the war and married here in Australia and years later (the 1970's I think) they built the house that I'm living in now. They both passed away a few years ago.
My grandfather was in the second World War, in the navy I think. He never talked about it, and I don't blame him. He lost a lot of mates and it would have been too painful for him to talk about.
That is cool
Make sure to attend your local Dawn Service at 4:30AM, I know it’s an early start for some of you but it’s worth it.
My grandfather and his three brothers were all in World War 2, on the German side. Used to be a bit perturbed by that fact when I was younger, but I'm mostly indifferent to it now. Not everyone on that side was an inherently bad person or had a choice in the matter. Didn't know any of the four of them, so it's easy to forget that.
Because today is the 100th ANZAC day, I have decided to bump this thread.
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Between 1939 and 1945, about 400,000 German soldiers (2% of the 18.2 million total) deserted or attempted to desert.
You decided to bump this thread LEST WE FORGET about it?
The general population of Germany, including foot soldiers on the frontlines. had no idea that the atrocities being committed by the Nazis were happening until the final months of the war. Only those who worked in the government at a certian level knew of this or had an indication as to what was happening. I highly doubt your Grandfather and his brothers knew of this until it was unearthed by the Russians.
Good one!
In all seriousnes, yes, I did.
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War crimes of the Wehrmacht
I would like to say that we should not forget all those unknown soldiers who died for liberty, freedom and justice, fighting against oppression and tyranny.
Of course, we must not forget those whom died fighting in wars. Their lifes are more precious than any motive for a war.
May they rest in peace, knowing that they did no bad to end.
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