THE PRESS THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 1986. Anzac Day

Press, 24 April 1986, Page 12

THE PRESS THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 1986. Anzac Day

“The good cause will not be trampled down. There will be more justice and mercy among men. There will be more freedom. There will be more chances for all.” The speaker was Winston Churchill, the time was January, 1943, the audience was the New Zealand Division, and the place was Tripoli in North Africa which, until a few days before, had been the capital of the Italian colony of Libya. It is a sobering thought for Anzac Day that 43 years ago, when Colonel Gadaffi was a toddler, his country was being set back on the road to independence by an army that included South Africans, Indians, Frenchmen, New Zealanders, and Scots Highlanders. By Anzac Day, 1943, the Allied forces had moved on into Tunisia. Ahead of them still lay two years of fighting on the mainland of Europe. The Second World War is far enough away now that the detail of New Zealand’s part in it is easily forgotten; just as the reasons why it was fought can be made to look jaded and distorted with distance. Yet Churchill, in that Tripoli speech as in many others elsewhere, was not simply rallying men who, for years, had suffered great hardship. He was expressing the fundamental beliefs of millions of people round the world, in many armies and countries, that the objects of the war were worth fighting for; and that the alternative — of not resisting an aggressive and ruthless invader — would be intolerable. The democracies of Western Europe and of the former British Empire, ill prepared and held back by a too-hopeful sense of pacificism that sprang up after the dreadful slaughter of World War I, finally and with great reluctance, attempted to stem the world-wide spread of oppressive and brutal

ideologies. Without the belated assistance of the United States, without the mutual slaughter between the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships, they might well have failed. The effort was still worth making. In all the complexities of six years of world war, New Zealand’s part was tiny, though its losses were proportionately great. The campaign in North Africa was no more than a sidelight to a much greater scale of warfare in eastern Europe. Yet nowhere were the simple beliefs in a better future more fervently held than in this country and in the New Zealand Armed Forces. Anzac Day, tomorrow, is still a time to remember with pride and respect the courage and idealism of earlier generations of New Zealanders. Their efforts are not diminished because those ideals have still to be realised in many parts of the world. It is doubly sad that in some of the areas in which so much blood was shed in two major wars, peace is still fragile or non-existent. Because of this, it is easy to say that the wars solved nothing. Many who argue this may also find themselves applauding or sympathising with factions, resistance movements, and other forces that are still battling for causes in, which they have profound belief. In fact, the awful cost of wars can only be weighed against the imagined or foreseen alternative of not taking up arms against determined aggressors. Anzac Day is not a celebration of war. It never has been. It is a day for remembering those who were prepared to accept that the alternative was not acceptable. Those who remember them can be the judges of whether the acceptance was in vain. Yet it must be a reason for gratitude that so many people today cannot remember the days of world wars.