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25 April – ANZAC DAY

by Bunk Five Hawks X ( 3 Comments › )
Filed under Australia, History, Military, Special Report, World at April 25th, 2011 - 8:00 am

Here’s to all the diggers.

Using letters, diaries and photographs, The Sunday Age recounts events through the eyes of the diggers who battled on amid despair and death. Jonathan King reports.

APRIL – THE LANDING

The great challenge for the Anzacs on April 25 was to land at Anzac Cove against formidable opposition from the Turks and then dig in. We are now within a mile of the shore and the din has increased… the whole side of the mountains seems to be sending forth tongues of flame and the bullets fairly rain upon us… the water is churned up from rifle fire, machine-guns, Maxims, shrapnel and common shells… seven of the boys in our boat are killed and God knows how many in the others.

Anonymous soldier, the 3rd Brigade

Our boat’s bottom scratches the rocky shore… we wade ashore with the feeling that we are at least one of the first to put foot on Turkish soil… silent forms lay scattered on the beach everywhere: some gone to their last resting place, some writhing in their last agonies, others with their life-blood fast oozing out…

Anonymous soldier

It was a remarkable day and a day in which it was easy to pick out the wasters, also the brave men. I am delighted with our Australian troops, the way they take the gruel is splendid. At times there was a shortage of ammunition and reinforcements were badly wanted. But seeing they had landed everything under shell fire, I should say they did very well.

Private T. J. Richards

MAY – BURYING THE DEAD

The Anzacs organised a truce with the Turks so they could bury their comrades who had been killed since the landing. Had a darn good sleep and got up at about 6am and issued rations to the chaps. Then the shrapnel began and it hailed around about us and hit everything around me but myself. We deepened our sleeping place about three feet, but it was not deep enough.

Captain D. B. A. King

Our troops made a successful advance and, according to the number of injured coming in, they paid dearly for it. What a pitiful sight they presented. They had been 20 hours lying all over the place with great gaping wounds. Some had both legs broken and the pain they endured coming down the steep sides was almost unendurable.

Lieutenant F. T. Small

The armistice began for the purpose of burying the dead. The smell is something awful. Some of the bodies have been lying in the heat of the sun for four weeks and of course all are unrecognisable. It is only by identification discs that the corpses are known. The ground was simply covered with dead between the trenches and estimates of 12,000 Turks killed have been made. Amongst this awful mass of dead Turks were some of our boys who had been killed on the first and second days’ fight and had lain there since. The bodies were horrible to look at being black and swelled up stretching out the clothing and, in many cases, when they were touched, falling to pieces.

William Dexter

JUNE – ALL QUIET ON THE FRONT LINE

After the difficult landing in April and fighting in May, both sides ceased fighting. I have established a little prayer meeting in my dug-out on Pope’s Hill. Sometimes we sing a well-known hymn, Nearer, my God to Thee, and the sound is wonderfully inspiring.

Chaplain E. N. Merrington

We have not had our clothes off for five weeks and it was most pleasant to strip off and have a dip in the sea. The weather here is glorious just at present and I am in the best of health.

Private F. W. Muir

The trenches are ridiculously quiet considering war is on and often perfect quiet prevails to be broken by the pot of a single snipe or the dismal squeal of a shell.

Lieutenant R. W. McHenry

JULY – TALK OF MUTINY

The debilitating heat stalled fighting and there was talk of mutiny among the Australians. I would not care a rap if 75 per cent of our officers had a wooden cross over their heads. Half of our duty men are taken up digging most secure dug-outs for officers or washing shirts for them in half a bucket of water while other men are almost famished for a drink. By God, if ever I am asked to dig a dug-out for one or wash their shirts. I will be shot at daybreak for refusing to obey an order on active service.

Private J. K. Gammage

The captured Turks who surrendered reckon that we are great shots. They are full of admiration for our shooting and fighting generally and admit being terrified.

Sergeant C. Bosward

AUGUST – BATTLE FOR LONE PINE AND THE NEK

Having consolidated their positions and obtained reinforcements, the British ordered the Australians over the clifftops on a mission impossible with dire consequences. One hundred and fifty men of the 8th Light Horsemen jumped out of the trench but were all mown down within 30 seconds, sinking to the ground as though their limbs suddenly became string. They were waiting, ready for us and simply gave us a solid wall of lead.

Sergeant Cliff Pinnock

It was a truly awful sight.

Once more the long procession of wounded, dirty, ragged, torn and bloody men came down from the Nek to the dressing station while others lay just 25 yards (23 metres) in front of the trench in the hot sun not daring to move till night when some of them might be able to crawl slowly back.

Corporal Alec Riley

As we captured Lone Pine we felt like wild beasts and as fast as our men went down another would take his place but soon the wounded were piled up three or four deep and the moans of our poor fellows and also the Turks we tramped on was awful.

Private Tom Billings

SEPTEMBER – DISEASE STRIKES

With so many soldiers now stationed at Gallipoli, the poor food supplies and sanitation triggered an outbreak of disease. In the morning we get a piece of bacon, a pint of tea and hard biscuits, perhaps a loaf of bread. For dinner, we have water, tea and sugar, and for tea we have bully beef stew.

Sapper V. Willey

The general health is bad with as many as 50 per cent of the men unfit for duty and unless relieved there will be, to a certainty, a severe epidemic of pneumonia, dysentery and enteric fever as the resisting power to disease is practically nil.

War Diary of the 12th Infantry Brigade

You ought to see the Anzac fleas, millions of them, and other things that crawl and stick closer than a brother. My blanket nearly walks by itself.

Captain Bill Knox

OCTOBER – TRADING TUCKER WITH THE TURKS

The frontline soldiers had been at Gallipoli and inactive for so long they began chatting to the Turks in the trenches, often less than 10 metres away. The more one sees of it, the more one realises the rottenness and horror of the whole business. God knows I do want to do my bit and am far from having cold feet, but any reasonable-minded man must wonder what the outcome will be – war is not a very pleasant thing, old girl.

Captain Bill Knox

Extraordinary friendly exchanges between the Turks and our fellows this morning early. Some of our chaps ran right over to the enemy trenches and exchanged bully, jam, cigarettes etc. The whole business was wonderful and proves how madly unnecessary this part of the war is.

Lieutenant T. E. Cozens

Some graves are very artistically finished, done in some cases by the brothers of the dead, others have simply a bottle with a piece of paper with the name inside. It is very touching.

Anonymous, 20th Battalion

NOVEMBER – LORD KITCHENER VISITS

As the soldiers had made so little headway, the British military command had decided to send Minister for War Lord Kitchener to determine if Gallipoli should be evacuated. Today (November 13) Lord Kitchener landed here. All the chaps on the beach gave him a cheer when he stepped ashore. He addressed a small party of colonials and told them he had a special message from the King. He was to thank them all on the King’s behalf and to say he was more than proud of our doings.

F. A. Weeks

We are now down to half-issue water.

Private A. West

Had another storm last night. It was such as I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. The wind was something terrible – it was quite impossible to stand up in it. The trenches are terrible.

Captain Ivor Williams

The first fall of snow fell tonight. We spent a cold, wet and miserable night. The ground was frozen. In our supports trenches we have no overhead cover. Our clothes and blanket wet through. The snow is a beautiful sight, no doubt. We are past admiring scenery just now. We are on half rations, biscuits and cheese. How we hate the sight of those biscuits.

Private John Henry Turnbull

DECEMBER – EVACUATION

Although the Anzacs were holding out well, the British military command evacuated Gallipoli before the bitter winter set in.
We have had a foresight of what it would be to put the winter in here as we had a torrential downpour of rain recently. It came down the hills as if a huge dam had been dug away and simply swamped the trenches.

P. O. Bert Webster

What makes the men growl is seeing immaculately dressed British staff officers walking about washed and shaved asking silly damned questions. I am fairly convinced I am becoming a bit of a Socialist.

Captain Bill Knox

Everything points to the early evacuation of the Peninsula. It will be a thunderbolt to Australia. There is no doubt this peninsula part of the war has been the greatest failure.

Lieutenant J. G. Cosson

We left in small parties, I had 28 men and left the trenches at 5.15pm. Each ranks carried two match-head grenades as well as ammunition and as we marched on to the pier we threw them into the water. It was a great success and I don’t know yet whether the Turks know we have gone.

Lieutenant N. E. McShane

The evacuation from Anzac was not by any means a defeat, but it became obvious we could do no good there and were getting hell from the new, bigger Turkish guns, but we had attempted the impossible at the Dardanelles and the Turks can make a very good story of their victory.

Captain Bill Knox

Acknowledgments
Gallipoli Diaries: The Anzacs Own Story Day by Day by Jonathan King (Simon & Schuster)
Australian War Memorial, Canberra
Mrs Diana Baillieu, Mrs Mary Burke, Mrs Kate Campbell

This was printed in the Sunday Age a couple of years ago

[Found and posted by Phil C.]

Tags: 25 April, ANZAC Day, Australia, diaries, Gallipoli, History, New Zealand, Turkey, WWI
Posted in Australia, History, Military, Special Report, World | 3 Comments »

“I was born a Jew and I want to live out my life as a Jew”

by Bob in Breckenridge ( 116 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Cold War, Hate Speech, History, Holocaust, immigration, Israel, Judaism, Military, Religion, Socialism, World War II at March 6th, 2011 - 11:00 am

Actually, the whole quote was “I was born a Jew and I want to live out my life as a Jew. I demand to be freed from the humiliation of being considered a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The quote above was written by Yasha Kazakov, a young university student. He was the first Jew to publicly renounce his Soviet citizenship and state that he wanted to emigrate to Israel.

When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone

In October 1963, a group of Cleveland rabbis signed a telegram urging President John F. Kennedy to link the sale of American wheat to the Soviet Union — a sale Kennedy had announced he would permit — to the lifting of a Soviet ban on baking matzo for Passover. The petition was organized by two Cleveland laymen, NASA engineer Lou Rosenblum and psychologist Herb Caron, who were looking for ways to call attention to the deteriorating plight of Soviet Jews. “American wheat,” the telegram said, “should not become an instrument of the official Soviet policy of persecuting the Jewish minority group.”

The rabbis’ plea was ignored. The view of the Kennedy administration, expressed earlier that year in a memo to Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harriman, was that “formal US Government representation to the Soviet Government would not be in the best interests of Soviet Jews.” American Jewish leaders, for whom Soviet Jewry was not a pressing issue, tended to agree. “It is wrong to generate too much activity on behalf of Russian Jewry,” the head of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann, told an Israeli publication, “because this could endanger the very existence of three million Jews.”

One generation later, everything had changed.

When President Ronald Reagan headed to Geneva for his first summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985, support for Soviet Jews was vocal, omnipresent — and as much a White House priority as arms control. “Summit Parley Overshadowed by Rights Issue,” a front-page story in The New York Times was headlined. It reported that the issue of Soviet dissidents, and especially the beleaguered Jewish “refuseniks” seeking to emigrate, “is one that President Reagan has said he will raise in the Geneva meeting.”

In fact, Reagan not only raised the issue during the summit, he devoted an entire session to it. After all, he later told Morris Abram, the famed civil-rights lawyer who headed the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, if Moscow couldn’t be trusted to keep its word when it came to Jewish emigration and other human rights, how could it be trusted on arms control?

In less than a quarter-century, the welfare of the Soviet Union’s Jews had gone from being a topic that US presidents could safely ignore to one that the White House forcefully championed — and from a cause few American Jews had ever thought about to one that aroused and united them as no cause ever had. How that came about is, roughly speaking, half the story that Gal Beckerman tells in When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone, his absorbing chronicle of the Soviet Jewry movement. The other half is the extraordinary epic of the Soviet Jews themselves — from the first Zionist stirrings that followed Stalin’s death, through the defiance of the refuseniks in the face of totalitarian cruelty and antisemitism, to the great exodus of the 1990s, when more than a million Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel. It is a sprawling saga of Cold War politics, Jewish self-awakening, and the rise of human rights as an issue in international relations. Beckerman, an experienced journalist, spent five years and interviewed more than two hundred people in the course of researching this book; the result is a riveting work of reporting and a magisterial history of one of the 20th century’s great dramas of liberation.

In both the US and the USSR, the struggle for Soviet Jewry began with memories of the Holocaust. When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone opens in the Rumbuli woods outside the Latvian capital of Riga, where in 1941 the Nazis and their collaborators had systematically murdered 25,000 Jews. In the early 1960s, hundreds of Jews began gathering on weekends to clean and landscape the mass graves, plant flowers, and turn Rumbuli into a proper memorial to the victims. It was at Rumbuli that Yosef Mendelevich and other Jews born after World War II first began to develop a sense of Jewish pride. From a handful of older Jews, some of whom had been active in Zionist youth groups during the prewar years when Latvia was independent, they learned Hebrew songs, picked up something of Jewish history, and were exposed to clandestine writings about Israel. By 1965, Mendelevich had organized a small band of Zionist teens. They had come together “out of an emotional love for our people,” he wrote in the group’s manifesto, and were determined “to work toward the self-awareness of Jewish nationality.”

Five thousand miles away in Cleveland, Rosenblum and Caron were animated by a different kind of Holocaust remembrance. They were filled with a “bitter mix of guilt, shame, and anger” as they learned of the failure of American Jews to rise up or cry out as European Jewry was annihilated. Now it was the Jews of the Soviet Union who were at risk — an eye-opening article in Foreign Affairs described the Kremlin’s restrictions on Jewish life as “spiritual strangulation” — and Rosenblum and Caron felt a powerful urge to act. When the local Jewish federation wouldn’t take the issue seriously, they launched a campaign of their own. The Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism, born in 1963, became the nation’s first Soviet Jewry activist organization.

From these modest beginnings developed a movement that would eventually open the first rip in the Soviet empire and teach American Jews how to flex their political muscle. Beckerman’s narrative alternates between America and the Soviet Union; one thread recounts the deepening of Jewish resistance behind the Iron Curtain, while the other shows how Soviet Jewry activism grew so powerful in the West.

At first, the American protesters knew next to nothing about the besieged Jews they were trying to help. “What was most striking about the fervor of those students who trudged through Central Park,” Beckerman writes about an early protest organized by Yaakov Birnbaum, who founded the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in 1964, is how little they knew about the actual ‘plight of the Soviet Jew,’ as they referred to their cause. Soviet Jews themselves were still unseen and unheard. So the passion and activity of these young American Jews was largely self-motivated and self-directed.

But Soviet Jews didn’t remain an abstraction for long. In 1966, Elie Wiesel published The Jews of Silence, his emotional eyewitness account of the precariousness and fear that characterized Soviet Jewish life. “After reading this book,” Max Hayward wrote in Commentary, “nobody will be able to deny that the state of Russian Jewry remains a legitimate cause for concern in the outside world.”

[…]

I urge you to click here to read “the rest of the story”, as Paul Harvey used to say.

Tags: History, Israel, Judaism
Posted in Anti-semitism, Cold War, Hate Speech, History, Holocaust, immigration, Israel, Judaism, Military, Religion, Socialism, World War II | 116 Comments »

13 year old American girl flees her home after muzz swine step-father tries to arrange her marriage

by Bob in Breckenridge ( 100 Comments › )
Filed under Crime, History, Islam, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Pakistan at March 4th, 2011 - 5:00 pm

A beautiful 13 year old American girl fled her home after her f**kin’ muzz swine step-father tried to arrange her marriage to some other muzz POS in Pakistan.

This girl’s piece of shit “mother” and step-father should both be arrested for child abuse, and all parental rights should be terminated!

Missing Hesperia teen was to wed in arranged marriage

Mom planned eight-week family trip to Pakistan

HESPERIA • Authorities located missing Hesperia teen Jessie Bender early Wednesday morning safe in Apple Valley, and investigators said she may have run away to avoid an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

The 13-year-old Cedar Middle School student and her siblings were removed from the Bender family home Wednesday, Cindy Bachman, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, said.

“(A) family member was concealing her in Apple Valley because he was concerned that she would be taken to Pakistan and forced into an arranged marriage,” Bachman said.

According to authorities, the threat was plausible.

In earlier interviews, the girl’s mother, Melissa Bender, said the family was planning an eight-week trip to Pakistan to visit her current husband’s family, but denied that was the motive for her disappearance.

“She didn’t really want to go but she was fine with it,” Melissa Bender told the Daily Press on Tuesday. “I really don’t think the trip played a role in her leaving. She was actually excited to go shopping for the trip. I even asked her friends and they said she wasn’t upset about going so I really don’t think that was the reason.”

However, Bachman said when the family first reported the girl missing they told investigators she ran away because she didn’t want to go on the trip.

“Two days after the initial report was taken, the mother began to give investigators information about a possible Internet predator who was talking to her daughter,” Bachman said. That information turned out to be false. “She may have spoken to people through Facebook on the computer, but there was never an Internet predator.”

When detectives learned of the possibility the teen may have been in the company of a predator, they became concerned and stepped up the investigation, Bachman said.

Several law enforcement agencies — including the FBI, Chicago police and the U.S Marshal’s Service — worked to find the missing girl. It’s unclear if the family will be charged for all of the man hours put into finding the teen or if the case will result in any arrests.

No one was arrested as of late Wednesday afternoon.

“We will be forwarding the case to the District Attorney’s Office and it will be up to them to file charges,” Bachman said.

Officials with the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Victorville office said they have not come across a forced marriage case.

Calls to Melissa Bender on Wednesday afternoon were not immediately returned.

Patrick Mitchell, the grandfather of one of Melissa Bender’s children, said he had been concerned for his own granddaughter’s safety when the 11-year-old would spend her court-mandated visitation with Melissa Bender.

“She gets her for one month during the summer and that entire time we were worried she was going to take our granddaughter to Pakistan, too,” Mitchell said.

Click here to read the rest