After more than 100 years, Australians will hear from the Anzacs of Gallipoli in their own words. Tomorrow, Thursday April 25, in an Anzac Day eight-page special, News Corp Australia’s state and regional mastheads will publish The Lost Letters.
Kept safe by the Australian War Memorial, the hand-written letters have been transcribed for this special. The nation will be able to read first-hand accounts from soldiers revealing the Anzacs as they actually were, sharing their insights and worries as war raged around them.
Written by everyone from privates to colonels, the letters detailed the heroism and horrors of the campaign and were sent home to family members.
“The Gallipoli letters provide a deeply personal and poignant insight into the courage of Australian troops on the frontline,” said national executive editor Peter Blunden. “It’s truly remarkable that it has taken more than 100 years for these heartbreaking Anzac letters from the trenches to surface”.
“They make compelling and inspiring reading for all Australians this Anzac Day”.
The diggers’ tales are many and varied, from Arthur Blackburn’s description of the 10th Australian Infantry Battalion’s Gallipoli landing in a letter to his brother, dated 3rd June 1915, to Brigadier Harold Edward ‘Pompey’ Elliott’s account of the horrors of the battlefield to his wife.
A celebrated veteran of the Gallipoli campaign, General John Monash, was just as open in his letters to his wife. In a letter penned on the eve of the landing, he grappled with the prospect of his death, saying his “one regret” is the grief that it would cause his family. But “with the full and active life I have had, I need not regard the prospect of a sudden end with dismay,” he wrote.
The Lost Letters will be published tomorrow in The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier-Mail and The Advertiser, as well as Cairns Post, Gold Coast Bulletin, Townsville Bulletin, The Mercury, NT News and Geelong Advertiser.
