Chief of Air Force Speech: Armistice Day
Presented on 10 November 2018.
Tena koutou katoa. Good evening.
Thank you for the invitation to speak at the club this evening. I like to give after-dinner speeches that are light and cheery, with a good deal of humour. Alas — here we are at the 100th Anniversary of the end of an enormous disaster, and humour is just not going to fit this time. Perhaps I should just start with a story.
On this day in 1914, British Imperial forces were steaming through the Arabian Gulf, bound for Mesopotamia — what we know today as Iraq. Turkey had just entered the war against them and threatened to cut off their most vital lifeline — oil.
Initially, British forces made quick progress, invading Iraq and reaching Basra within a month. But their position soon became precarious. They were outnumbered, outflanked and blind — starved of intelligence by poor maps, vast deserts and rising flood waters. The need for aerial reconnaissance quickly became obvious.
Royal Flying Corps resources were needed elsewhere — mainly on the Western Front. So New Zealand, among others, was asked to help out. Within two days of receiving the request, Lieutenant Wallace Burn, New Zealand’s first military aviator(essentially a one man air force), left for Iraq. In Basra, he joined four Australian airmen to form what they called the Mesopotamian Half-Flight.
They started flying straight away, initially in an under-powered and obsolescent aircraft called a Maurice Farman Shorthorn — more broomstick than aeroplane. It had a top speed of 80kph. Unfortunately, the hot desert wind, called the Shamal, gusted to well over 100kph, so that was a bit of an issue.
Wallace Burn and the others scouted ahead of the allied forces to sketch maps anddrawings of enemy positions. He scribbled messages and sealed them in air tight cans, then dropped them into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers so that friendly forces could recover them and react immediately. Today we call this “near-real-time” intelligence. In 1915 it was called “making it up as you go along”.
With good intelligence restored, Allied forces soon pushed forward toward Baghdad, through Nasiriyeh and Kut. And the aircraft flew on, reluctantly, hobbled by sand and heat and over-work. Engines and instruments failed, and Wallace Burn fought sunstroke and sandfly sickness to bring back his sketches.
On 30 July 1915 his luck ran out. As Allied ground forces entered Nasiriyeh, Wallace Burn was flying a sortie with an Australian crewmate — a doctor-turned-pilot from Melbourne called George Merz. 30 kilometres from friendly forces, the aircraft’s stuttering rotary engine gave up for good.
Wallace and George put down in the desert and were immediately pursued by hostile Arab forces. For eight kilometres, in fierce desert heat, the two airmen fought a running battle, armed only with a revolver each.
According to eyewitness accounts they fought well, taking down a number of their attackers. But at some point, nearing exhaustion, one of them was hit and fell. We don’t know if it was Wallace or George, but the other stuck by his side defending himto the end. They were both killed. They were both 24 years old.
Wallace Burn was New Zealand’s first airman, and our first airman to die in action. The next month, Wallace’s brother, Robert, died at Gallipoli. His other brother John succumbed to Spanish Flu in 1919. Their mother Isabel lived on in Christchurch.
One man, one family, one story.
In total, around 18,000 New Zealanders died during the Great War. That’s 18,000 unique stories. A further 41,000 were wounded. That’s roughly a 60% New Zealand casualty rate. Out of our population of one million, it’s 6% of our country dead or wounded. We’ll never know the number of non-physical injuries.
Back in Mesopotamia, more died just in that one campaign — around 50,000. Twice that number were wounded. And the costs of the war climbed rapidly. Gallipoli — 473,000 casualties, Passchendaele — 848,000, Verdun 976,000, the Somme — 1.2 million. By the end of it, 100 years ago, a total of some 18 million people had died in this war to end all wars, and another 23 million wounded.
There are no words to describe the scale of this calamity. No hyperbole is too much. 100 years later, in the serene surroundings of our peaceful and prosperous country, it seems like this was some kind of madness. But there was no madness here — just a series of sober decisions by people not too different to you and me.
On the 11th of the 11th in 1918, people celebrated with a sense of enormous relief, but also with a sense of grief. Even as they celebrated some asked whether the cost had been worth it, and the debate has never really stopped.
It’s an impossible debate. It means weighing the unweighable — balancing wholesale disasters like Gallipoli over here against freedoms and values over here, all the while counting the currency in human lives. Tonight I’m going to conveniently side-step thatdebate altogether and instead propose to you that the war simply represents human failure on an epic scale.
Carl von Clausewitz gave us the famous quote that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. And indeed it is. And so at the outset we must agree that this enormous calamity was a failure of at least politicians. A failure to prevent war, a failure to contain disputes, a failure to consider the value of human life, and a failure to contain imperial and nationalist egos.
Captain Edmund Blackadder put it quite well when he explained to Private Baldrick that there was a war on because — well — it simply seemed too hard not to have one.
Politicians failed. But that doesn’t mean everyone else should get off lightly. Diplomats failed. They failed in their energy, understanding and determination. The military failed. Generals on both sides failed in their duty to their soldiers and in their sense of humanity. In many cases they failed in their sense of imagination.
The blame for World War One deserves to be cast wide. But now — 100 years on — what are we supposed to do with that? How should we make use today of the line “Lest we forget”?
In many ways, we didn’t forget — we learned quickly. Our international relations framework, for one, is very different today.
But I would argue that even as we commemorate the courage, character and memories of those who sacrificed, we should be taking a good look at each other. Here, in this room, and also outside of it. We should, in this democracy of ours, ensure we are paying attention and that we are holding each other to account. Give ourselves a good grilling.
Life seems very busy these days: there are jobs to do, emails to clear, and rugby to watch. There are children to raise, facebooks to face and twitters to tweet about. There are dinners to enjoy, and of course there are some fascinating after-dinner speakers to stay tuned into (at least for a couple more minutes).
Amidst all of this noise, how well are we holding our leaders to account? The media can be energetic on our behalf, but our voting statistics are a mixed bag — are we paying attention? For that matter, are we holding our media to account, or are we passive consumers of infotainment? When did we last show interest in our diplomats and interrogate their international manoeuvres made on our behalf?
And how engaged are Kiwis with the state of their military and the leaders (like me)who lead it? Should our country decide to dispatch its sons and daughters into harm’s way, with what leadership, care and attention will they be committed — not to mention training, equipment and imagination?
Even as we consider today’s global revivals of nationalism and isolationism, it is first and foremost by being actively interested in each other in this democracy, and in holding each other to account, that we have the best chance of preventing future calamities.
Individuals matter. I started out telling the story of one man — Wallace Burn. One of 40 million casualties. I want to finish with the story of another man. He was my great uncle, Ernest Looms, and I have the diary he kept during his time on the Western Front with the Canterbury Mounted Rifles.
Like so many others, he joined for the adventure and the comradeship and a sense of duty to his country. It was the thing to do. He records the tough times, the grime and the noise, and also the lighter moments — and yes, there were some. And I thought perhaps, since we are here marking the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day, I would read a few lines from someone who experienced that day first hand.
100 years ago, my Uncle Ern and his team of horses were passing Le Quesnoy, which had just been liberated by Kiwis, with no civilian casualties. They walked through the night, got lost and accidentally ended up in a front line infantry trench. They fed the horses and fell asleep in the mud. In the morning they woke, damp from the mud, and ate dry biscuits for breakfast. Eventually, by the 11th day of the 11thmonth, they had found shelter in an old factory. It was good weather, and they were mending some equipment. Here are Uncle Ern’s words:
One of the Tommy soldiers came along in the morning and told us the Armistice was to be signed at 11 o’clock. The news was received with as much enthusiasm as if he had said it was a fine day. Later, one of our officers repeated the news. Some believed it but the greater number didn’t. We were getting ready to move off at 1030 when Captain Todd gave it to us as official news that an Armistice would be signed at 11 o’clock. Half a dozen joyful souls performed a haka, but the remainder, for the most part took it with the same stolidity as if it had been picket duty.
Uncle Ern notes that the shelling did eventually stop as promised, though not by 11. Then just as it was dawning on them that an armistice had in fact occurred after four years of war, further instructions arrived. Instead of heading home, they would be marching to Germany, to spend winter as part of the occupation force. Again, here are his words:
To make the prospect of occupation more alluring, General Johnston solemnly informed us that we would find plenty of vin-blanc there, and also that there were mermaids in the Rhine. We pulled out the following morning at 7.15 AM and pulled up at Escarmain at a farmhouse. Here one of our officers did me the honour to inform me that I was the most disrespectable looking soldier in the battery. I did him the honour of believing him, for I was dressed in a felt hat that flopped around my ears, a Yankee tunic, unbuttoned, a Yankee singlet and no shirt, a pair of slacks, no puttees, a pair of Yankee boots, about a week’s growth of whiskers and a liberal spattering of mud…. And on the day’s march before we crossed into Germany I wore the soles of my boots clean through.
And there you have it — one ordinary Kiwi’s experience of the end of the Great War. Matter-of-fact, understated, anti-climactic. I feel a bit robbed of the drama and emotion I want him to have felt. It should be more like a movie. He wants only to cope and to get on with it.
But as you will see, he is not without some sense of humour — something I myself have failed to inject tonight. And in his laconic way he reminds us that the story didn’t simply end on Armistice Day. I will leave you with the last words in my uncle’s diary as he returns home to Havelock:
I sailed for Picton, trained to Blenheim next day and so home. Now in return for my services, after presenting me with my discharge from the Army on June 28th 1919, a paternal government has condescended to lease to me at an exorbitant rent a small dairy farm, and I am now put to more trouble to find that rent than I formerly was to dodge Fritz’s shells. Such is life.
Ladies and gentlemen — Wallace Burn and Ernest Looms both deserved better. We can do better. Lest we forget.
