ANZAC Day at Leederville Sporting Club

[The InnFORCEr]

For those TWFers looking for a service to attend on ANZAC Day I have the solution right here.

Obviously Dawn Service is held at Kings Park at 6am.

However each year the local RSL also holds a community service at the Memorial Rose Gardens in front of The Leederville Sporting Club at 8am.

Following the service there is free tea and coffe available at the bowlo and also a pre booked fully cooked big breakfast from Good Mood Food. Adults $10 and kids $5.

Following breakfast the bar will be open and traditional few rounds of Two Up take place.

Around noon the club puts it's ANZAC Shield up for grabs in a mixed social bowls comp, while the Mighty Pies take on The Bombers on the big screen in the hall.

There is something for everyone and kids are always welcome.

To book your breakfast or to enter a team in the bowls comp, call Chris at the club on 9381 2544.

"Lest we forget"

[laura]

After reading TIF's post, I found this article about a particularly horrrendous day during World War 1. I thought I'd share it considering its significance.

2000 lost on worst day of butchery
THERE would be no organised collection by stretcher-bearers of the 2000 bodies of Australian dead strewn across the Fromelles battlefield.

The generals saw to that and would broach no truce with the enemy.
To this day most Australians know very little about the 14-hour battle on July 19, 1916, regarded as the worst disaster in Australian army history.

Fromelles was the first significant battle for the Diggers after the fiasco at Gallipoli the previous year. And, as with Gallipoli, it ended as a debacle.

There were 5533 casualties including the almost complete obliteration of the Australian Imperial Force's 5th Division. Ill-conceived at the outset as a feint for a bigger battle at Pozieres, Fromelles served as an example of what happens when the tactics of 19th-century massed assaults were employed against defensive positions supported by modern machineguns and concentrated artillery.

British general Richard Haking, who ordered the daylight assault, a 400m charge across open farmland in front of waiting German guns, would later say: "The Australian infantry attacked in a most gallant manner and gained the enemy's position. But they were not sufficiently trained to consolidate the ground gained and were eventually compelled to withdraw and lost heavily in doing so.

"I think the attack -- although it has failed -- has done both divisions (Australian 5th Div and British 61st Div) a great deal of good."

It was the classic stereotype of bad generalship and bad planning, everything done in a rush with untrained troops in full view of the enemy, says the Australian War Memorial's Ashley Ekins, a respected authority on the battle.

While Gallipoli marked the beginning of Australia's foundation myth, it was on the Western Front that Australians paid their highest price.

"The losses at Fromelles were just appalling: 5533 casualties in a single night, almost 2000 of them killed or died of wounds," Elkins says.

Casualty figures on the Western Front assumed mind-numbing proportions that dwarfed the Australian toll at Gallipoli.

"Gallipoli was a very brief campaign in which in those eight months what individuals did could often matter," Elkins says. "On the Western Front it was mass technological warfare in which individual bravery and achievement had very little impact on the outcome.

"This battle is all the more tragic for being a feint, simply an attempt to hold German reserves to the north while the main battle on the Somme pushed ahead.

"It was designed simply to take the pressure off the south. It didn't work and the Germans saw it as a feint very quickly." Renowned Australian war correspondent C.E.W. Bean, founder of the Australian War Memorial, visited the site in 1918 at the end of hostilities.

"The traces and scraps of our men were still everywhere," he remarked. The scraps he referred to were torn pieces of tunic, shards of bones and wrecked equipment, Ekins says, adding that Bean was profoundly moved by the visit despite the battle site being almost three years old.

Fromelles remains a sad place to visit.

"The cemetery there, VC Corner Cemetery, until very recently it was a cemetery hardly anyone ever went to," Ekins says. "It's set amid this flat, featureless farm plain and has this desolate feel of a forgotten little island in a great sea of ploughed ground."

[The Lone Hydrangea]

Great post Laura.

[The InnFORCEr]

Bookings can be made by calling the club on 9381 2544 after 3pm week days.

[The InnFORCEr]

Only a few days to go, make your booking today.

[The InnFORCEr]

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