Scarecrow Army: The ANZACS at Gallipoli

Leon Davidson

really liked it 4.00 · Rating details · 29 ratings · 4 reviews

On 25 April 1915, thousands of Australians and New Zealanders landed at an unnamed cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They had come to fight the Turks. They thought the battle would be over in three days. Months later they were still in the trenches they'd dug at the landing. Anzac Cove became a graveyard where bodies lay above the ground and the living slept under it. They ...more

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Paperback, 186 pages

Published 2006 by Black Dog Books

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Mar 14, 2008 Anna rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: history-cynics

Shelves: hard-tack, political-animal, treasure

I too should 'fess up that Leon is a friend of mine - and I can only admire his work ethic!

This is just the sort of creative "faction" I love - getting under the skin of history and personalising it. There are so many myths about Gallipoli and this book addresses and corrects many of them without fact-bashing. I had no idea, for example that 10,000 Frenchmen died there. You would have thought their losses in Europe were awful enough...

My grandfather was a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli and was pa I too should 'fess up that Leon is a friend of mine - and I can only admire his work ethic!

This is just the sort of creative "faction" I love - getting under the skin of history and personalising it. There are so many myths about Gallipoli and this book addresses and corrects many of them without fact-bashing. I had no idea, for example that 10,000 Frenchmen died there. You would have thought their losses in Europe were awful enough...

My grandfather was a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli and was part of my decision to visit the peninsula, in the quiet of a bitter, snowy winter in 1997. This book captured BETTER than even visiting the place, which is so altered by time and the packaging of war tourism (trenches re-created with neat, creosote-smelling duckboards), the sheer stupidity of trench warfare, and the horror of close living in literally infernal conditions (Dante himself envisaged the horror of a place where one had to tread on bodies constantly. The Anzac trenches in some places were actually shored up with corpses).

It also made clear to me for the first time the actual strategic and topographical advance of the campaign, and the sheer craziness of what command asked their footsoldiers to achieve; impossible positions to hold with handfuls of men that made it over the top to take new ground, digging for their lives. And yet they did.

This is written for younger readers, but I had no sense of that distinction, other than the fact that schoolkids are made to study history and most of us don't choose to read it. Which is a great pity when historical material is this engaging.

A highly recommended read for those that don't love history - this book will really surprise you. If you have a child thinking of entering the armed forces, it probably wouldn't go astray for them to read it either.

My grandfather would never march on Anzac Day. He just didn't get memorialising the most horrific period of his life in any way at all. He feared going mad for the rest of his long life.

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