Peas for our thyme

Images: Canva

If you are a member of Medium, PLEASE READ THIS POST THERE. You can also subscribe and be notified each time I post on Medium.

Warning: this is not about companion planting or cooking.

 

On most days that start with W, I have a couple of wines with a couple of friends. We are known as the ‘Wednesday Boys’ and the establishment we go to serves us a glass of white followed by one of red and then quizzes us on what wines we have been given. Our hit rate isn’t great, so we not unreluctantly return each week for more practise. (We have been doing this for about 35 years now and still to learn much we have.)

When the Wednesday Boys were teenagers sixty years ago, they started to take notice of cars, girls and goings on beyond their villages. Even before then, they and their friends knew there had been a Second World War. Those that could count also knew that there had  been a First World War, but were more fuzzy about that one. They knew about WWII because they would run around with their arms flung out pretending they were spitfires and ratta-tat-tatting imaginary Jerries. Their war knowledge came not from the mouths of their former-soldier fathers, whose lips remained post-war shut until loosened by beer at the Returned Services premises, entry to which children were verboten.  It came instead from comics and the Saturday afternoon flicks. At the matinee they would gape (or would have, had their mouths not been full of jubes and aniseed balls) at films starring stiff-upper-lip Brits who went around saying things like "Tally-ho!" and "Chocks away!" before flying Spitfires that shot down (or up) slightly more realistic Jerries.

 

Later, after they stopped smirking at the words of the rude song they had somehow learnt that compared the presence, absence or size of the testicles of Hitler and his henchmen ('Hitler had only one big...', etc.), curiosity about the global how’s-your-father began to manifest itself. It was aided by history books, especially those with grainy photos of battles and people who were considered important enough to be in the tome. One such person, who dressed in a more fuddy-duddy way than his successor as the UK's Prime Minister, was Neville Chamberlain. (Wing-tip shirt collar and top hat as opposed to Churchill's bow tie and homburg). As Chamberlain had been preceded by Baldwin, it seemed that some sort of alphabetical queue for UK PM was forming. (The Brits were famous for inventing orderly waitings-in-line.) That was until the premier alphabet apple cart was upset by Attlee, who came after Churchill when Winston was famously rejected by the post-war electorate.

 

Neville Chamberlain. Source: Public domain photo https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103398845

Contemporary photos of Chamberlain often show him climbing out of a prime-ministerial car or clambering down the steps of a plane clutching a sheaf of papers. In film-reel footage he seemed to be victoriously proclaiming, in a very quavery voice, "Peas for our thyme! Peas for our thyme!"  (Often mis-quoted as "Peas in our thyme!") Some may have thought he was exhorting  the British citizenry to take up allotment gardening (which surprisingly became a critical factor in maintaining Britain’s wartime food supply). 

All this happened in September 1938, shortly after Chamberlain had met with Herr Hitler and believed he had brought home a deal that would stop Germany from doing more outrageous war-like things in Europe. Lesson 1 for Neville: you can’t trust megalomaniacs who spit and froth at the mouth while whipping storm troopers, panzer divisions, and stuka pilots into a frenzy. Hitler had spotted Chamberlain’s weakness - he was an appeaser, someone who believed that reason and signed pieces of paper detailing concessions by the power-under party would prevail in the bear pit if accompanied by enough tellings-off of the party with the power. In fact, not only was Neville most comfortable when he was tutt-tutting Hitler, but his government had a policy of appeasement towards Germany. In such circumstances, Adolf  decided he could take his eye off Britain, but hadn’t banked on its government rolling Chamberlain in 1940 and replacing him with Churchill. The new PM had a very different reading of Adolf’s Third Reich tea leaf intentions. Lesson 1 of a large number not heeded by Hitler.

 

Winston Churchill. Image: Canva

A long time after the terrible events that were about to engulf the globe, the Wednesday Boys were imbibing . “What do you make of the goings-on in Russia?” asked WB1. It was late June 2023. As usual, they were putting off talking about the white wine in front of them as they frantically searched for missing-in-action neural pathways that might help in its identification. “Dunno,” said WB2. “Putin’s a murderous tyrant and Prigozhin’s a murdering mercenary. Neither does appeasement – who assassinates the other first wins (and we now know who that was)… you know what, I'm pretty sure this is a Chardonnay.”

 

They were interrupted by mine-wine-bar host. “What’s the verdict?” he asked in his slightly (but genuine) French accent, eyebrows askance. A  set of definite responses from all the WBs revealed they had hit the mark. It was indeed a Chardonnay.

 

Image: Canva

 

 

Anzac reflections - why Gallipoli was a tragedy of errors

Images: Canva

 

If you are a member of Medium, PLEASE READ THIS POST THERE. You can also subscribe and be notified each time I post on Medium.

I live not far from an Army base at the southern end of New Zealand's North Island - Trentham Military Camp. It was the staging post for many of our country's deployments of troops to World War One’s battlefields, a hemisphere away. 

The First World War is still an enigma to me, confined to the kitbag of inexplicable matters, alongside why men have nipples. (The reasons for a Second World War can be explained relatively easily - a sociopathic, racist, genocidal madman decided that he had the right to wreak havoc in Europe and kill millions of people in the process while punishing those countries who punished Germany for starting the First World War.)

I didn't study history at school, so taught myself the art of shining light into the past’s musty corners. What I found out about the origins of WW1 was that in the decades leading up to it, two groups of nations had formed sides (much like in ‘Bullrush’, the schoolyard game I played as a boy). On the goodies team were the UK (and its empire), France, and Russia (the Entente powers) with Italy and the US piling on later. On the dark side were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). By August 1914, the name-calling and tongue-poking-out between the two groups of countries and their proxies had markedly deteriorated. A full-scale punch-up erupted when the German side took umbrage at the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

Europe, 1914, Gallipoli Peninsula circled.

Credit: Canva

The Gallipoli campaign formed part of the War's early tapestry. The campaign was staged by the Entente powers in 1915 as part of a strategy aimed at forcing a passage through the Dardanelle Straits and from there capturing Constantinople (Istanbul), the Turkish Ottoman capital. This would have confined Turkey to the war's sidelines and allowed a supply route through to the Black Sea and thence to Russia. It would have also cut the Ottoman Empire in two.

The Entente army was a multi-national body of troops and the 25th April 1915 plan of attack involved Army forces landing on beaches below the steeply-hilled Gallipoli Peninsula. One set of landing points for British and French troops was at Cape Helles at the southern tip of the peninsula. The Australian and New Zealand component (the Anzacs) were to be landed at Gaba Tepe, halfway up the western coast of Gallipoli. The Army units were transported there aboard naval ships which then provided covering fire for the landings. One of the campaign's main sponsors was Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty (the political head of the British Royal Navy).

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The campaign proved to be a disaster for the Entente powers. The only success they had was when they vacated the peninsula without casualties in January 1916, nine months after the landings. The Ottoman Turks didn’t twig to the withdrawal but rightly claimed a great victory. 

 

Why did the Entente powers suffer this snafu (military acronym for major stuff-up)? The major contributing factors were:

1. Poor and hasty planning. The Gallipoli landings were actually the campaign's ‘Plan B'. In mid-March, Plan A was attempted – a  British naval attack aimed at forcing a way through the Dardenelle straits and capturing Constantinople. It was seriously dealt to by the Turkish gun emplacements and mobile artillery on the peninsula and failed in its efforts. Yet, little over a month later, Entente Army units were being landed from naval craft on unreconnoitered shores beneath a steeply-hilled terrain which the Turks had fortified. In the dark and with tides having not been sufficiently taken into account, the Anzacs ended up landing a mile further north than was intended, at what became known as Anzac Cove. Both landings suffered heavy casualties and could only establish toeholds which in the end, despite much heroism and bravery, were unable to be expanded.
2. Underestimation of the enemy's prowess. The campaign's planners thought that because the British had earlier defeated the Ottoman Turks in Mesopotamia, they would be 'easy-beats' in Gallipoli. That first battle was against conscripts from Iraq. The Gallipoli peninsula, however, was defended by experienced Anatolian Turks who were protecting their homeland from invasion. Capable German and Turkish officers were in command (including Mustafa Kemal, who went on after the war to found modern Turkey). The Turks held the high ground, fought ferociously and the Entente land forces could not dislodge them for any length of time.
3. Atrocious conditions. The toeholds gained by the Entente troops were insufficient for supplies to be stored, waste to be disposed of and bodies to be buried. Wounded soldiers had to be ferried back to naval ships waiting offshore. Infestations of rats and lice broke out and dysentery was rife, spread by huge swarms of flies breeding on the unburied corpses.

 

Turkish soldiers fighting at Gallipoli.
Credit: Canva

The campaign led to large numbers of casualties on both sides. At the highest level for the British, the outcome also resulted in Winston Churchill being demoted. He then resigned from the UK government, joined the army and fought in France. (Churchill's humiliation probably contributed  twenty-five years later – when he was British PM – to him strongly insisting on meticulous planning for the D-Day landings of World War Two.)

 

Today, in and around Trentham Camp, there are permanent reminders in the form of street names of those terrible World War One battles - Anzac Drive, Messines Avenue, Suvla Road, Gallipoli Road, Somme Road, Gaba Tepe Way.  Each year on the 25th of April, New Zealanders and Australians pay special homage  to those who died in war. We wear red poppies (as abundant on the hills of Gallipoli as they were in Flanders’ fields).  Local communities mount street banners with poppy emblems on them, and memorial services are held throughout each country and in other countries, including Turkey. The day is known as Anzac Day.

Poppy banner, Lower Hutt, April 2024
Image: Keith Westwater