I was just reading the paper, and they mentioned this bloke, Albert Jacka VC, MC & Bar, who fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front in WWI.
I read about him in a university course on the history of Australians at war. He was quite a bloke, so I thought I'd share in case anyone's interested in military history:
This is the newspaper article, but there might be a paywall 🤷♂️
Thank you! It's a bit overdramatised, as Peter Fitz tends to do, but I don't mind that because we need to feel what those blokes did.
You're welcome, it's quite a story!
Yeah. He was quite the fellow.
I'm old enough to have known some guys who were at The Somme and the other carnage.
They never, ever wanted to talk about it, so we need to use their letters and reports as historical sources now.
My own step-grandpa served there. I have his records, thanks to the Canadian War Project.
I can imagine him signing on just after Christmas 1915 and being so nervous that he misspelled his name.
@DyDave I have postcards send to my great grandma from her sweetheart who was away at war. He never came back.
So sad.
As a lad, I knew a man who lied about his age to join. He was 14 and looked it, but the recruiter took him and sent him to the Navy.
He jumped ship in England, joined the Army, and proceeded to experience horrors that he found difficult to discuss, but he left hints that we can follow now.
He told a story about meeting a German his own age when he was trying to get back to his unit in a forest, and they ate some food together before going back to the fight.