Dates with destiny

Tassie Anzac and D-Day hero revealed

A Tasmanian Gallipoli veteran remarkably was also part of the D-Day landings.

Justin Lees reports

ON April 25, 1915, 16-year-old George Dixon waded ashore through the pre-dawn darkness at Gallipoli in a seaborne landing that is etched into Australian history.

The underage Anzac from Tasmania (he had lied about his age to enlist) would last seven days in that hellish struggle for a foothold on enemy soil before being badly wounded and evacuated.

Twenty-nine years and six weeks later, Dixon was again bobbing off a hostile shore in the early morning gloom; once more at the centre of a worldchanging event.

As a naval officer in command of a British landing craft, he was part of the greatest invasion armada the world had seen — the Allied push to free Europe from Nazi tyranny, beginning on D-Day.

As a massive naval and air barrage pounded German positions along the Normandy coast in France on June 6, 1944, vessels like Dixon’s surged through terrifying enemy counter-fire to discharge their loads of men and tanks into action.

In action close by, off the beach codenamed Juno, Dixon’s fellow Aussie Richard Pirrie — a former Hawthorn footy talent seconded to the Royal Navy — was also commanding a landing craft.

The two men had taken part in the Allied landings at Sicily a year before so had experience; and both would be recognised for their actions on DDay. However Sub-Lieutenant Pirrie’s mention in dispatches for “gallantry, leadership and determination” would be posthumous. His craft was hit and he was killed, his body never recovered — the first Australian to die on D-Day.

An unfinished letter he penned to his family just before read:

My dearest Mother, Dad, and the boys. Well, my dears, the pressure is on now and as soon as the weather improves we sail for the greatest event in the history of the world. By the time you receive this you will surely have heard some of the bare details. This is the greatest Armada that ever was formed. A colossal feat of organisation; the product of years of planning and hard work. His words were true. As the Canadians in Pirrie and Dixon’s spearhead fought their way onto Juno beach, up and down the Normandy coast the struggle was replicated — British soldiers at Gold and Sword beaches; US units on Utah and Omaha beaches — about 150,000 men in all.

Inland, paratroopers and glider troops who landed the night before, many of them flown in by Aussie pilots, were fighting in ragtag bands.

Above, almost 8000 bombers and fighters pounded and strafed the German defences and out to sea, a mighty fleet of 5300 ships bombarded strongpoints and ferried men and supplies.

Among these liberators of Europe were 3300 Aussies, mostly Royal Australian Air Force crews or those seconded to Royal Navy ships, with a handful of infantry attached to Commonwealth units, all doing their bit to ensure this daring strike didn’t end in disaster, which it could have.

Hitler’s forces, who had spent months waiting for this moment behind their so-called Atlantic Wall of fortifications, aimed to hurl the Allies back into the sea and in at least one location — Omaha beach, as portrayed in the epic film Saving Private Ryan — almost did.

Australian War Memorial military historian Dr Lachlan Grant points out that had D-Day been a defeat, Britain’s military would likely never have recovered and the US would have been massively affected — and Australia would have been “one of the very few liberal democracies in the world left standing”.

“This is what most of the world enjoys today, our rights to vote in elections, our freedoms,” Dr Grant says.

“That is very much what the war was about.

“The world would have been very different (if the Nazis had prevailed). We were very much part of the British Empire so if Britain had lost, we would have been very much alone ourselves.”

So for all those fighting on June 6, it was a desperate day. The sacrifices were many and would only continue as the 10week battle to control Normandy dragged on, with a daily casualty rate worse than many of the most notorious World War I battles.

It was in the air that Australia was most represented, with 12,400 Royal Australian Air Force crew stationed in the UK by mid-1944 and thousands more serving in the Royal Air Force — and it was in the air that Australia suffered the worst.

“June ’44 is the worst month for casualties in the RAAF’s history,” says Dr Grant.

After June 6, there would be another 10 months of fighting before Germany surrendered. Increasing numbers of Australians were drawn in, many of them discovering new horrors along the way.

From April to August 1944, 1117 Australians died in operations to liberate France.

Australia joined the conflict by declaring war on Germany in 1939, not simply due to its ties with Britain and empire but because, in the words of then prime minister Robert Menzies, if Hitler’s aggression went unchecked “there could be no just peace for the world”.

That is why we remember June 6, 1944.

We were very much part of the British Empire so if Britain had lost, we would have been very much alone ourselves.

Australian War Memorial historian LACHLAN GRANT