Patriot Realm

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 10^th April, 1941 and 7^th 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.

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, 13^th Governor General of Australia and at the time, General commanding the 14^th 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.

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.