Peter Pedersen - ANZACS on the Western Front the Australian War Memorial battlefield guide

First published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd

42 McDougall Street, Milton Qld 4064

Office also in Melbourne

Australian War Memorial 2018

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Cover design by Delia Sala/Wiley

Cover images supplied by the Australian War Memorial: Front cover image Australian soldiers walking along the duckboard track at Tokio, near Zonnebeke E01236; gatefold image Rising Sun badge REL28780. Poppy field image Kochneva Tetyana/Shutterstock.

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I welcome this new edition of the Australian War Memorials guide to the Anzac battlefields on the old Western Front. It sets out the many interpretive enhancements created on the battlefields to commemorate the centenary of the First World War and the changes inevitably wrought by progress since the first edition appeared in 2011. At the same time, it retains the elements that made the earlier edition so successful.

Fittingly for a publication with Anzac in its title, Australians and New Zealanders receive equal attention in this guidebook. Their battles are explored in numerous drives and walks, designed as much for the casual visitor as the military historian and heavily illustrated by easily followed maps, modern and period photographs, and artworks. Though brief essays on key personalities and military developments lend context and all relevant cemeteries and places of interest are described, the emphasis is on what actually took place. The aim is to put you on the scene of the action.

What happens next is up to you. As Dr Peter Pedersen emphatically points out, you should call on your imagination to visualise the scene as it was. Its not hard. Feeling that I owed it to the men who fought on them, I often let my imagination take over during my many visits to the battlefields as Australias Ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, the European Union and NATO between 2006 and 2012. The reward was an appreciation of the enormity of what those men endured and achieved. Put your imagination to work and youll feel the same way.

The two and a half years that their soldiers spent on the Western Front remains arguably the worst ordeal that Australia and New Zealand have undergone. On the Memorials Roll of Honour, the 46,000 Australians who died on the Western Front easily outnumber the dead from all our other wars combined. Most of New Zealands 17,000 fallen died on the Western Front too. Yet there is no denying that the war was won there. Australian and New Zealand soldiers played a leading role in that outcome.

If you let it, this new edition of the Memorials guidebook will bring the Australian and New Zealand experience on the Western Front alive. Youll then more easily understand why we emerged from the Western Front having earned the admiration of the world, and with a greater confidence in ourselves and a deeper awareness of what it means to be an Australian or a New Zealander.

Those who contributed to the guidebook and there were many of you should be proud of the result. The commitment of the Australian Department of Veterans Affairs and our publisher, Wiley, deserve special acknowledgement. They needed no convincing of the need for a new edition and did everything possible to bring it to fruition. The team here at the War Memorial were also tireless in making it happen.

All of you have my thanks. The Australians and New Zealanders who visit the battlefields thank you too.

The Hon Dr Brendan Nelson AO

Director, Australian War Memorial

Canberra, 2017

During the writing of the first edition of this guidebook in 2009/10, the Australian Department of Veterans Affairs was planning a trail that would link the sites of the major Australian battlefields on the Western Front. Called the Australian Remembrance Trail (ART), it was to be completed over the First World War centenary period, 2014 to 2018. The first edition could do nothing more than foreshadow its creation. Now the ART is well-established and New Zealands Ministry of Culture and Heritage has set up Ng Tapuwae Western Front, trails that embrace the main New Zealand battlefields. Downloadable apps enhance the interpretation on both the ART and Ng Tapuwae. An updated edition of the guidebook that includes these enhancements became necessary.

User experience and the changes that have occurred on the battlefields since 2010 reinforced the need. There are now more windmill farms. Houses and housing estates have sprung up where there were none before. Tracks have been ploughed over and become part of fields. New roundabouts and one-way streets have altered traffic flows. Copses have been cut down. Tree and vegetation growth have made some reference points harder to spot. The commercial premises that marked some sites have gone. Additional outbuildings have altered the look of some farms. Progress makes such developments inevitable. Continuing research has resulted in new information that requires occasional modification of the old. Thats progress too.