Gallipoli: Kiwi journalist coined nickname 'Anzac'

MISTAKEN IDENTITY: One of the most famous paintings of Englishman and Australian army enlister John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his donkey, by New Zealand artist Horace Moore-Jones, was actually taken from a photograph of New Zealand medic Dick Henderson. Moore-Jones, also a Gallipoli veteran, thought the photograph was of Simpson.

In December 1914, five months before New Zealand and Australian troops began dying in their thousands on the shores of Gallipoli, a New Zealand headquarters clerk stationed in Egypt ordered the making of a rubber stamp.

Sergeant Keith Melvyn Little, 21, worked at the headquarters of Lieutenant General William Birdwood, the British commanding officer of the joint Australian and New Zealand force. The force, which was to join the futile Allied campaign to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula, was as yet unnamed. Little, a journalist before he enlisted, changed that with his stamp and opened a new chapter in the history of both countries.

The term "Australasian Corps" had been dismissed by New Zealand troops. The military relied on acronyms and something had to be done to speed up the process for registering correspondence and easily identify the Australians and New Zealanders.

Little was the clerk most likely to have come up with the acronym Anzac in December 1914, taking the initial letters of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and using them on his stamp. Within a month or so it had become the telegraphic code word for the Australian and New Zealand soldiers.

The small beach where the Australians and New Zealanders landed is still known as Anzac Cove and has become the focal point for thousands of New Zealanders and Australians who make an annual April pilgrimage.

The campaign took a terrible human toll on the small New Zealand population, which hovered around one million at the outbreak of the war.

Of the 8556 New Zealand soldiers who served on the Gallipoli Peninsula, 2721 died. Nearly 1700 lie in unknown graves on the land they fought desperately to take and which was just as desperately defended by "Johnny Turk" - the Turkish soldiers who won the respect of the Anzacs for their tenacity and bravery.

The 26,000 Australian casualties included 8000 dead. The overall Turkish casualty figures were believed to be 250,000. The bond between the Anzacs and the Turks was further strengthened when Mustafa Kemal as president of Turkey, delivered the following message to the mothers of all the dead New Zealand and Australian soldiers:.

"Wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well."

The legend of the Anzac fighting spirit was rewarded with only one Victoria Cross for the New Zealand contingent on Gallipoli. Corporal Cyril Bassett was 23 when he landed with the first wave of New Zealand troops on April 25, 1915.

Four months later on August 7, as the New Zealanders precariously defended a ridge known as Chunuk Bair, Bassett laid a telephone line to the new position in broad daylight and under heavy fire from the Turks.

"He has subsequently been brought to notice for further excellent and most gallant work connected with the repair of telephone lines both by day and by night under heavy fire," read his citation for the Victoria Cross in The London Gazette on October 15, 1915.

Three days after Bassett won the Empire's highest award for bravery, Chunuk Bair was lost when reinforcements ran out. A year after the first landing, on April 25, 1916, New Zealand was still reeling from the loss of so many of its sons but the country began the tradition of remembering its war dead.

DESERTER GOES FROM ZERO TO HERO

John Simpson Kirkpatrick lasted only 24 days at Gallipoli before he was killed by Turkish machine gun fire on May 19, 1915. He was 22.

Kirkpatrick had enlisted with the Australian Imperial Forces in August under the name John Simpson, hoping to get back to England. He believed that if he used his surname Kirkpatrick, the authorities would realise he was a navy deserter who'd joined the navy in England in 1909 and then jumped ship in Newcastle (Australia) in 1910.

Instead of going to England when he enlisted, Kirkpatrick went to Egypt with the 3rd Field Ambulance, Australian Army Medical Corp, and landed at Gallipoli on April 25.

When he and his donkey began carrying wounded Anzacs down the hill to the casualty clearing stations, he became respected and revered by Anzac soldiers.

The pair brought more than 300 wounded down the hill, seemingly invincible to the Turkish machine gun fire, snipers and shrapnel.

One of the most asked questions among the Anzac troops was: "Has that bloke with the donk stopped one yet?"

The donkey was given a posthumous award in 1997 - the RSPCA's Purple Cross - for its bravery.

The irony, say his supporters, is that Simpson never won military honours for his bravery although he was recommended for the Victoria Cross the month after he died and again in 1967.

As a boy, John Simpson Kirkpatrick, one of eight children, had a summer holiday job working with donkeys at the English seaside town of South Shields, near Newcastle.