A solemn crowd gathered outside the Guyra Soldiers’ Memorial Hall this Remembrance Day morning to remember the town’s servicemen who died or suffered for Australia’s cause.
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WWII navy veteran Ron Vickress presided over the ceremony, marking a century since the end of the First World War.
“Over the years, the significance of WWI has become more prominent: the carnage and the terrible destruction and death,” he said.
“It pretty well halved the men’s population in this country – men who were killed, but also men who were disabled.”
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On November 11, 1918, the Germans signed an armistice, accepting the Allies’ terms of unconditional surrender.
The guns on the Western Front stopped firing at 11 am. Those guns had mangled young Australians, Europeans, and, later, Americans for four years, ever since a political hothead shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Worldwide, more than 16 million were killed in the conflict.
By the time hostilities ceased, Australia – a nation for less than 20 years – had sent nearly 417,000 of its young men to war, out of a population of less than five million.
More than 60,000 of those young Australians died – including many from this town.
So many people from Guyra volunteered – and a lot of them didn’t return.
- Graham White
"It means so much that we're still here today. If it weren’t for what our forebears did, we wouldn't be here today. Nothing's surer."
His father, Colonel J.H. White, commanded D company, to which many Guyra WWI servicemen belonged as part of the 33rd Australian Infantry Battalion – “New England’s Own” battalion, formed in a camp at the Armidale showground in January 1916.
They fought at some of the most infamous battlefields of the Western Front: Messines in June 1916; the muddy hell of Passchendaele in September and October 1917; the German drive on Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918; and the Allied push through the Hindenburg Line in September that year.
451 members of the battalion were killed in action, and more than 2000 wounded.
“My father never spoke of his efforts,” Mr White said, “which is a shame, because he went through the whole thing. Because he never spoke about it, we understood that he didn’t want to talk about it. It would have been a wonderful journey to listen to, but it’s not possible.”
Mr Vickress has been reading the diaries of his father, who served in Northern France and Belgium, and was shot at Bullecourt.
“All this year,” he said, “I’ve been following in his footsteps, and seeing in his diary where he went.
“My dad never said anything about it, of course, when he came back; he went very quiet. We didn’t know anything about it; he usedn’t go off to Anzac Day, and we never went to one.
“His diaries are very cryptic; no heroics in them. It’s astonishing to read when So-and-so was killed on the gun, he was on an artillery, and next day they carried him out on a stretcher."
His father survived, but two of Mr Vickress’s uncles were killed in the war.
Mr Vickress himself served in the navy in WWII, from March 1943. He escorted troops and equipment from northern Australia to New Guinea, under attack from Japanese aircraft; served in the Philippines; took part in the invasion of Okinawa; and was part of the fleet that went into Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945.
"We were just a tiny little ship amongst an armada of American and British navals,” he said.
“We were near the USS Missouri, the ship the surrender was signed on. We flew our little Australian ensign” – which, he said, was half the size of the flag flying outside Guyra’s Memorial Hall – “and the Missouri had a Stars and Stripes flag that was as big as our ship!
“The most poignant moment of that event was on the following day. A British aircraft carrier was taking the first Australian prisoners of war out to Australia. It came alongside, and we sang Waltzing Matilda. There was a bit of tears on both decks, I think. Our ensign was the first Australian flag they'd seen in three years."
Ted Mulligan, OAM, Guyra’s oldest citizen at 101, also served in WWII.
A recipient of ten bravery and service medals in WWII, he was one of the first six servicemen in Australia to learn to drive tanks, and served in Papua New Guinea on the Small Ships Squadron.
“What a waste of time war is – and a loss of lives unnecessarily,” Mr Mulligan said.
The terrible losses, he believes, make it important to commemorate Remembrance Day.
Many Guyra servicemen have descendants and relatives in the town.
“As the daughter of a 33rd Battalion soldier who fought in the First World War, this morning was especially poignant for me,” Guyra RSL sub-branch secretary Martha Weiderman said.
Robbie Newsome’s father served in WWII: first in Dunkirk, and later with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in Burma.
“It's important to remember our own relatives who've gone overseas to serve to give the freedom we've got for this country right now,” he said, ”and also to remember current servicemen and women who put their life on the line, who are now serving or have served in the past.”