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THE Australian Army's worst training accident, in which 26 men died, should be commemorated each year to acknowledge their forgotten sacrifice, a memorial service heard yesterday. The special service in a field outside the Kapooka army base near Wagga Wagga in central NSW was held to mark the 63rd anniversary of a blast that killed 26 trainee sappers when an explosives lesson in an underground bunker went wrong on May 21, 1945. The army decided to hold the service after an article in The Australian last month highlighted how the tragedy had been airbrushed from official histories of World War...

In a moving ceremony on Mount Pleasant in Canberra, His Excellency Major General Michael Jeffrey, AC, CVO, MC, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, presented Army’s 102 Field Battery with the Australian Military’s first ever Honour Title. His Excellency the Governor General Michael Jeffery presents Lieutenant Colonel Craig Furini, the 102nd Field Battey RAA Honour title. The Honour Title 'Coral' was awarded to 102 Field Battery, Royal Regiment of Australian Artillery, in recognition of its actions during the Vietnam War. Head of Regiment, Brigadier Phil Winter CSC, welcomed the award on behalf of the Army and gave credit to the...

FOUR weeks ago, auction house chairman Tim Goodman received a call from a wealthy client in the US. The businessman, a passionate military memorabilia collector, had learned that medals and frontline archival material belonging to Australian army Major Peter Badcoe, who was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967, would feature in Bonhams and Goodman's May auction, to be held in Sydney on Tuesday. The collector told Mr Goodman he intended to bid for the Badcoe collection, which includes the only Vietnam War VC medal still in private hands and awarded to Major Badcoe posthumously. The estimated price for the...

A NEW Zealand fashion designer has apologised to war veterans after she adorned models with war medals at her runway show at Australian Fashion Week. One of the medals draped over a model's bare thighs at the ashow in Sydney last night was the New Zealand Operational Service Medal, which acknowledges war veterans and those outside the armed forces who served in extreme or hazardous conditions. National secretary of Australia's Returned and Services League (RSL), Derek Robson, described the use of medals as "appalling and sickening". Sylvester apologised today, the New Zealand Press Association reported. "There was no intention of...

NEW Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma have dedicated a statue of a New Zealand soldier on Sydney's Anzac Bridge, at a ceremony attended by Australian and New Zealand war veterans. An Anzac military guard marched across Anzac Bridge, which had been cleared of traffic, to the south-western section of the bridge as part of the ceremony. The statue of the World War I soldier faces across the bridge towards the statue of an Australian digger, which was unveiled on the northern side of the bridge when it was renamed on April 25, 2000.

PADDY Bugden, nicknamed The Tank by his footy mates because of his athletic build, helped run country pubs in northern NSW. Robert Beatham emigrated from England as a teenager and worked as a labourer in Geelong, Victoria. Blair Wark was a quantity surveyor from Bathurst in NSW. They were just ordinary blokes when they enlisted to fight in World War I, but their extraordinary deeds on the Western Front elevated them to the pantheon of Australian heroes awarded the Victoria Cross. Queensland Museum marked Anzac week yesterday by opening an exhibition honouring the three, who are among the 96 Australians...

IT has all the makings of a Boy's Own blockbuster: a mass breakout by German POWs from a rural Victorian internment camp; a mysterious dictionary revealing dotted codes of vital military importance; and a body washed up on a remote Indian Ocean island. These events - three of many surrounding the evolving, extraordinary story of HMAS Sydney - continue to fascinate historians, who are now tantalisingly close to solving a military riddle that has haunted the nation for more than 66 years. In the next few days, shipwreck hunter David Mearns and his crew aboard the SV Geosounder will sink...

AUSTRALIAN troops have been forced to use some of their heaviest firepower to fight Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan during a series of recent skirmishes, the Department of Defence says. The soldiers have been using 81mm mortars, which can hit targets kilometres away but which have not been widely used by Australia since the Vietnam war. No Australian soldiers were killed or injured in the fighting and it was not clear if any Taliban had been hit. The Taliban have launched multiple simultaneous attacks during the past fortnight. The raids have been aimed at a security post that soldiers from the...

BETWEEN 1914 and 1918, when Australia's population was barely four million, 416,809 citizens answered Britain's call and enlisted for service in World War I. That included nearly 40 per cent of the male population aged between 18 and 44. Almost two-thirds of them became casualties of that hellish conflict. The figures are staggering: 58,961 died; 166,811 were wounded; and 4098 went missing or were taken prisoner. A further 87,865 suffered ongoing sickness from the effects of mustard gas and other frightful weapons. To give these numbers context, Australia's road toll today, with our population five times larger, is a little...

Kiwi dead of Messines are remembered NZPA | Saturday, 9 June 2007 The New Zealanders who lost their lives in the battle of Messines, in the First World War, have been remembered at a simple ceremony just outside the town centre. The beautiful, haunting sound of a Maori song echoed through the graveyard as hundreds gathered to honour the young men who gave their lives, so far from home, the BBC reported. Messines, like any small provincial Belgian town at first glance, with a small town square, neat little church, and narrow streets, was this week recalled as a strategic...

A World War II veteran was hospitalised after opportunistic attackers left him knocked out and robbed of his five medals, four days after Anzac Day. Alfred Tesoriero, 86, and his wife Grace were confronted by one, possibly two attackers, when the couple arrived home about 9pm on Sunday April 29. They had noticed lights on in their Drummoyne home on The Esplanade. On entering the house, the first intruder pushed Mr Tesoriero to the floor, leaving him with back and shoulder injuries and bruising on his face. He cannot remember what happened then until emergency crews arrived to transport him...

CAMP VICTORY — Australian and New Zealand service members celebrated Australian and New Zealand Army Corps Day here April 25. The sunrise ceremony commemorated ANZAC Day, a day set aside for honoring fallen service members, said Australian Army Command Sgt. Maj. Mat Louden, Joint Task Force 633. The custom honors veterans of the ANZAC landing on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey on April 25, 1915, where 8,700 soldiers gave their lives and 25,000 suffered injuries. “The attack was part of an operation to open the Dardanelles,” Louden said. ANZAC day was first declared as a national holiday on April 25,...

Heroes - and Percy the Plumber Western Leader | Friday, 27 April 2007 It was an age of heroes. Looking back, they were all around me in my childhood, writes Pat Booth. In many ways a savage war made that inevitable. Every week seemed to produce yet another to be glorified - and too often mourned. Some were shadowy figures, relics of a past I had not shared. Like the two streets in Hawera, my small home town, which honoured two of its sons, Victoria Cross winners from World War One - Laurent VC St and Grant VC St. At...

REMAINS found in Vietnam have been identified as those of two Australian soldiers declared missing in action in 1965. Australian forensic scientists in Vietnam confirmed the remains belong to Lance Corporal Richard Parker and Private Peter Gillson. The pair was killed during a Vietnam War battle in Dong Nai province, east of Saigon. The forensic team said dental records, bones, teeth and artefacts found at the site, including military dog tags, led to the positive identifications. Members of veterans group Operation Aussies Home discovered the remains two weeks ago outside the town of Bien Hoa in southern Vietnam. The Australian...

DONALD Clarkson came late to World War I. His first day on the front line was also his last. He was killed near Beaurevoir, northern France, on October 3, 1918, 39 days before the November 11 Armistice brought to an end four years of slaughter in Europe. A farmer from the gentle hills of the Avon Valley east of Perth, Clarkson battled through the drought of 1914-15 torn between his duty to his country and his love for his family. Clarkson, a sensitive, articulate man given to expressing himself in poetry, had married Helen Price, his childhood sweetheart, and had...

The Australian War Memorial has unearthed what it believes is the only footage of Anzac Cove during the Gallipoli battle of World War One, an iconic event in Australian history which is commemorated each year on Anzac Day. The one-minute grainy black and white film, which shows the shoreline at Anzac Cove and British soldiers massing at Suvla Bay, was shot in 1915 during the pioneering era of film. The footage pans across Anzac Cove from a position on the southern headland, showing a clutter of jetties and stores being unloaded. "Because we have so little authentic footage, everything we...

GRAEME Kerford was only 19 when a marble representing his date of birth was plucked from a barrel, sending him to war in Vietnam. After a year based at Nui Dat, the conscripted soldier returned home to be spat on. Today, Mr Kerford was among more than 1000 veterans, their families and members of the Vietnamese community, to witness the opening of Australia's first museum dedicated to their war. "It means the world to me," Mr Kerford said. Mr Kerford, a machine gunner, travelled to the new National Vietnam Veterans Museum on Phillip Island in Victoria's southeast from his home...

AS shells exploded around him and flares pierced the night sky, Lieutenant Cliff Sadlier and his platoon found themselves pinned down by the murderous machinegun fire of tracer bullets coming from a wooded area to the left. Sadlier's path to his objective was blocked. The words of his commanding officer rang in his ears: "Nothing will stop you getting to your goal. Kill every bloody German you see. We don't want any prisoners, and God bless you." Sadlier's second-in-command, Sergeant Charlie Stokes, crept up to Sadlier on his stomach. "What are we going to do?" he asked. "Carry out the...

AN Army bugler sounded Last Post, old men saluted, and a true Anzac hero was officially farewelled in a windswept corner of Fawkner cemetery yesterday morning. For more than 50 years, Captain Edward Renata Mahunga "Tip" Broughton has lain in an abandoned, bare grave at Fawkner. He died intestate, aged 70, in 1955. Until yesterday, a weather-beaten bronze plaque was the only marker on the cracked grey clay of Tip Broughton's final resting place. The marker recorded that it had been placed by "the ex members of the 8th AEC, AMF -- mainly Dunera Boys -- in cherished memory of...

Young Australians will carry on the April 25 tradition PLAYING of the Last Post at dawn services in cities and country towns around the nation to mark Anzac Day will have special poignancy this morning. Just one Australian World War I veteran survives. John Campbell Ross, 107, a Victorian, enlisted in the army in February 1918 but did not serve overseas. Mr Ross was 18 when he joined up, and is now the last link with a war that saw nearly 62,000 killed and 137,000 wounded. But while the 421,802 Diggers who fought at Gallipoli, on the Western Front and...

As the Anzac legend moves from living memory to history, its spirit grows rather than recedes. Historian Ken Inglis tracks an extraordinary transformation. Charles Bean, whose words have done more than anybody else's to create the Anzac tradition, would have been deeply gratified to know that some 30,000 people, most of them young Australians, gathered at Anzac Cove for the dawn service last Monday. As war correspondent, he was there from the beginning on April 25, 1915, to the evacuation in December. In The Anzac Book, which Bean compiled on Gallipoli, one contributor imagined "the time when steamers will bear...

Turkey wants Australian Gallipoli help April 28, 2005 - 5:34AM Turkey's prime minister called for experts from Australia and New Zealand to help with a project to upgrade a memorial park set on the site of the World War I Gallipoli battle. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the park needed new roads, more parking and additional accommodations in Canakkale, the northwestern Turkish town near the old battlefield. Erdogan, speaking at a press conference with New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, said he discussed plans for a joint project to upgrade the park with Clark and Australian Prime Minister John...

NINETY years after the Anzac legend was born, Australian troops from Gallipoli to Iraq have been remembered in a lavishly-produced dawn service at Anzac Cove. As the sun rose over the cliffs behind North Beach to warm the backs of the 17,000-strong crowd, Prime Minister John Howard said the legacy forged by the Anzacs who charged the same beach in 1915 lived on. "It lives on in the valour and sacrifice of young men and women that ennoble Australia in our times," Mr Howard said. "In the scrub of the Solomons, in the villages of Timor, in the desert of...

SYDNEY, (AFP) - The last survivor died three years ago and the battles ended in bloody stalemate, but 90 years later the Gallipoli campaign of World War I still exercises a powerful grip on Australia's national psyche. Some 20,000 Australians and New Zealanders including Australian Prime Minister John Howard are expected Monday at Anzac Cove in Turkey, where thousands of men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) waded ashore on April 25, 1915. The dawn service from Gallipoli will be televised nationwide in Australia, where every state capital will also hold its own parade and memorial service...

THOUSANDS of Australians are expected to defy the government's travel advice and make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli to commemorate Anzac Day on Sunday. Smaller crowds than in previous years are expected after the Federal Government issued an advisory against travelling to Turkey, but Turkish tourism officials have received bookings from around 4000 Australians and New Zealanders to visit Gallipoli this weekend. Up to 3000 more are expected to arrive at Anzac Cove for Sunday's dawn service. In recent years, crowds of up to 10,000 have packed the Gallipoli Peninsula for the emotional service. Earlier this month, the government advised Australians...

Happy-go-lucky New Zealand backpackers sitting in open-air bars in the historic heart of Istanbul have little but fun and remembrance on their minds. The New Zealand Government has told people to stay away from one of the world's most significant secular pilgrimages, but to many Antipodean visitors in Turkey preparing for a visit to the battlegrounds of Gallipoli, the warnings seem an over-reaction. "I feel safer here than walking down [Auckland's] High St", says Gerry Hill of Ponsonby. Similar statements are repeated by Australians and New Zealanders crowding the bars and hostels of Istanbul's Sultanahmet region, the backpackers' Anzac Day...

Lord, Keep our Troops forever in Your care Give them victory over the enemy... Grant them a safe and swift return... Bless those who mourn the lost. . FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer for all those serving their country at this time. ...................................................................................... ........................................... U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues Where Duty, Honor and Countryare acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated. Our Mission: The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans. In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel...

The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh have unveiled a new war memorial in London's Hyde Park to pay tribute to Australian servicemen. The unveiling of the Australian War Memorial coincided with national Remembrance Day ceremonies at 11am on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the moment when the guns fell silent at the end of the First World War in 1918. The dedication was attended by The Duke of Kent, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard. A group of 28 Australian veterans and war widows, members of the British Legion, a British veteran contingent...

AUSTRALIA'S sailors returning from the war against Iraq received a rousing welcome home in Fremantle yesterday. Thousands of people lined the entrance to Fremantle Harbour and the docks to greet the 600 sailors from the frigates HMAS Anzac and HMAS Darwin, who had been away from home for seven months. As the warships berthed there were loud cheers, cries of "I love you Daddy", Aussie flags, green and gold balloons and welcome-home placards. A stirring rendition of I am, You are, We are Australian, sung by Able Seaman Tracey Burke, a RAN musician, brought tears to the eyes of sailors...

The Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer has refused to comment on the credibility of reports of possible terrorist threats in Turkey. Newspaper reports claim Al Qaeda terrorists have entered Turkey and are planning attacks on Western interests. Mr Downer says the Treasurer, Peter Costello will go ahead with a planned trip to Turkey. He says Australians travelling to Gallipoli for Anzac Day should be careful, but he would not be drawn any further on the issue of possible terrorist threats. "I don't really want to get into that, this is information that's been passed onto us by some elements of...

The authors of a new book on Gallipoli regard the campaign from the Turkish perspective. In the process they challenge conventional thinking about what it means in history. Tony Stephens writes. Hatice Hurmuz Basarin put a troubling question to the audience at the launch yesterday of her book on Gallipoli: given today's deep affinity between Turks and Australians, when could we expect a similar friendship between Australian and Iraqi people? Kevin Fewster, her co-author, thought it would be closer to nine years than the nearly 90 since Australians were among the British Empire-led invaders of the Turkish peninsula. Now, even...

Suffering a chest infection, the condition of the 103-year-old veteran deteriorated in recent weeks with Alec passing away peacefully in the presence of his wife, Kate. With a rich life spanning three centuries, Alec Campbell amazingly had a very short war of six weeks on the battlefields of Gallipoli. Yet, as Australia's last Anzac he represented the last physical link with the campaign that forged our national spirit - "a unity of purpose and a willingness to fight against the odds", as Prime Minister John Howard defined in his tribute. Pte Alec Campbell was only 16 years of age when...

Rain falls as war dead remembered 25 April 2002 Inclement weather failed to deter or dampen the spirits of thousands who turned out for Anzac Day dawn parades and services in Auckland and Wellington this morning to commemorate New Zealand's war dead. As the rain bucketed down, more than 15,000 people stood in silence for one minute in the Auckland Domain today, honouring the memory of fallen soldiers. The dawn service began at 5.15am when war veterans from all three services formed up for a short march to the Cenotaph in front of the Auckland Museum. As the veterans marched...

UP to 25,000 young Australians are expected to make an emotional pilgrimage to Gallipoli for Anzac Day. Trips and package tours to the small town of Gelibolu on the west coast of Turkey have become increasingly popular. The Anzac Cove dawn service also attracts thousands of young New Zealanders. Tempo Holidays marketing manager Robert Lindsay said the number of young visitors to the region had swelled significantly in recent years. "In the past most visitors had immediate family connections, but now it is more about people wanting to understand the past in general," he said. "Young people today are saying...