LONG LEGACY OF FREEDOM
The West Australian (Perth)
November 11, 2014 Tuesday
by Rod Moran, Senior Features Writer
Ninety-six years ago today the guns fell silent on the bloody Western
Front in France and Belgium. World War I had ended. The conflict
had exacted an enormous toll, with the Australian Imperial Force’s
casualty rate of 64 per cent being proportionately the highest in
the conflict. Officially, there were 61,000 killed in action and
158,000 wounded, maimed or gassed. Many thousands were psychologically
damaged. After the war, hundreds committed suicide.
A pall of grief hung over the nation. The bewilderment of loss pervaded
alike the neat suburban homes of the cities and the humblest abodes
in the smallest rural hamlets.
The scale of the carnage has haunted generations. It led some to
adopt what Anzac historian Mervyn Bendle has condemned as a nihilist
evaluation of the conflict. That is, the losses were to no good end,
the carnage having no moral justification. The 1914-18 generation was
mere unthinking fodder for the cannons. The legend of the Anzacs and
the AIF is reduced to a hollow tale, an irredeemable tragedy.
Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. For Australia much was at
stake politically, economically, strategically if German militarism had
prevailed in Europe. Germany’s war aims were radically expansionist
in scope, as Professor Fritz Fischer’s Grab For World Power (1961)
a pioneering research into the causes of WWI has established.
Germany’s so-called September Program its war aims as reflected
in elite economic and military opinion involved the subjugation
of all of Europe and the establishment of a massive empire across
sub-Saharan Africa.
Beyond, the British Empire would have been dismantled and the Royal
Navy scuttled, leaving Germany a world military behemoth and an
imperial colossus.
Dr Bendle sums up the strategic scenario for Australia to our
north as follows: We would have had to deal with a victorious and
hyper-aggressive superpower, whose autocratic ruling caste dominated
Europe and controlled all sea lanes upon which our existence as a
trading nation depended.
Moreover, Germany already controlled German New Guinea, the Bismark
Archipelago, Nauru, Palau, German Samoa, the Marshall Islands, the
Caroline Islands, and the Mariana Islands, and these would have been
the bases for further German imperial expansion . . . involving the
rest of New Guinea, and the Dutch and British colonial possessions
in present-day Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
What Dr Bendle means by Germany as a hyper-aggressive superpower
can be gauged from the work of Professor Isabell Hull. In her 2005
volume Absolute Destruction: Military Power and the Practices of War
in Imperial Germany a study of institutional extremism she describes
German military culture, 1870-1918, in this way:
In engagements large and small, in Europe and in the colonies,
the imperial German military repeatedly resorted to terrific
violence and destruction in excess of Germany’s own security
requirements or political goals . . . even contrary to ultimate
military effectiveness. Routine German military operations developed
a dynamic of extremism that could, and did, lead to the extermination
of civilian populations in the colonies and that characterised German
practices in occupied Europe in World War I. Hull also suggests Adolf
Hitler and national socialism inherited and expressed much of that
culture a generation later.
More broadly, during the 19th century there had evolved the so-called
Germanic Ideology. It was a toxic mix of ideas suffusing many levels
of German society. It involved a millenarian vision of a racially
pure global empire.
This pathology was articulated by the educated elites as well as by
the occult utopian and anti-Semitic cults that pervaded Wilhelmine
Germany. Modern German historian George Mosse, in his The Crisis of
German Ideology (1964), pointed to the dreadful implications for the
world if Germany possessed by that ideology had prevailed in the war.
Germany was also implicated in the ethnic cleansing of Turkey that
had started, even as the Anzacs landed on April 25, 1915. The Armenian
genocide at Turkish hands began on April 24. Ultimately, 1.2 million
Armenians were exterminated. A 2500-year-old Christian civilisation
ceased to exist. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were also murderously
cleansed from the Gallipoli Peninsula, and beyond.
That the Anzacs, at enormous cost, contributed to the defeat of Germany
and its allies is surely something to honour. Within the context of
the British Empire, the all-volunteer AIF stood in defence of an open,
liberal-democratic society, with all the possibilities for ongoing
social reform and human advancement it offered and which, a century
on, we continue to enjoy.
Lest we forget.