Peter Griffin: Web brings Gallipoli vividly to life

I wonder what the Anzac diggers would have made of the internet. Huddled in shell holes and trenches on the Gallipoli peninsula, they scribbled letters to loved ones, not sure whether the messages would get through or whether they'd be alive to read the replies.

Cut off from families on the other side of the world, lack of communication would have been almost as bad as the carnage of the battlefield.

Ninety years later, soldiers can at least keep in touch with their families via email, phone and fax. Many of those World War I war letters that made it home have now been posted to the web for all to read and appreciate.

"Very funny sort of life one leads", writes Francis Morphet Twistleton in his Gallipoli diary (www.nzhistory.net.nz/Gallery/Anzac/Quotes.htm). "We burrow like rabbits and live more or less underground and do most of our work at night."

A recent avalanche of books on Anzac war history made me think about what internet-based resources deal with the conflict that helped define New Zealand as a nation.

The answer was just a Google search away and yielded more hits than I had time to pick through. The web is good at serving up various sorts of information. Anzac history proliferates.

Some of the sites are official Government memorials; others focus on individual soldiers or battles. They are all well maintained, the people behind them toiling in solemn industry.

The Government's official Anzac website (www.anzac.govt.nz) has a clean design and offers a good virtual tour for those wanting a basic history lesson on the Gallipoli campaign. An excellent Quicktime panorama feature lets you pan around the Gallipoli landscape and zoom in on interesting features. I'm quite happy with my taxpayer dollars being spent on this type of thing.

The excellent NZhistory site has a comprehensive section devoted to the Anzacs (www.nzhistory.net.nz/Gallery/Anzac/Anzac.htm), including snippets of audio presentations and recordings from past dawn services.

The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (www.dnzb.govt.nz) has information on a number of soldiers who served at Gallipoli and also made their mark elsewhere.

At the nicely made website www.decoder.co.nz, Taupo military researcher and journalist Briar Corson is offering a service to decipher the army jargon in service reports on soldiers who served in World War I and II. The site will be functional from Anzac Day on and includes a downloadable form that can be sent to the Defence Force to request army records of relatives.

The Aussies do an equally good job of remembering the conflict that claimed 11,500 Australian and New Zealand lives.

The Australian Government's official Anzac website (www.anzacsite.gov.au) is lively, colourful and informative. Across both countries, Anzac information is presented as an educational resource.

The pages of www.anzacday.org.au hold an archive of Anzac information that stretches beyond World War I to virtually every conflict Australian soldiers have served in.

The popular website www.diggerhistory.info gives an unofficial account of Gallipoli and interesting tidbits, ranging from what equipment the soldiers used to what they ate. The site has notched up nearly six million hits.

The World War I Document Archive (www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/) seems to be based in the US and takes a more personal journey through World War I history, focusing on diary extracts, poems, sketches and paintings. Anzac accounts pepper the archive.

Turkish Odyssey (www.turkishodyssey.com/places/marmara/marmara8.htm) boasts a wealth of information about the campaign and the region. It's not devoted entirely to World War I history, but that's where its usefulness lies. It goes into Greek mythology and explains the historic importance of the Dardanelles. The site is written entirely in English and is well worth a look.

The official website of the Royal New Zealand Returned Services Association (www.rsa.org.nz/remem/anzac_today.html) is informative and gives the low-down on the commemorations that will be taking place on Monday.

A great sense of inadequacy can be experienced reading through the personal accounts of those who fought at Gallipoli and the reports on the scale of the conflict. The world is still in conflict but, for most of us, the closest we get to it is a satellite TV news report, newspaper article or web update.

Lose yourself among the photos, diary entries and poems of these Anzac websites and you'll be convinced, if you weren't already, that hauling yourself out of bed at five in the morning for the Anzac Day dawn service is a small sacrifice.