Seventy years ago on June 6, 1944, the D-Day landings were under way.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott will mark the anniversary on Friday by visiting Sword Beach, one of the codenamed landing points of the Normandy amphibious invasion.
Then on Saturday, as part of a whistlestop battlefield tour, he will also visit Pozieres in the Somme valley, scene of costly fighting for the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions in mid 1916. Also on the itinerary is Villers-Bretonneux on the Western Front, retaken from the Germans by Australian forces in 1918.
The late edition of The Sydney Morning Herald the day after D-Day carried the headline "Allies Invade North France – Vast Sea and Air Operation".
"Last night and early this morning the Allied Expeditionary Force launched a huge sea and airborne invasion on the Normandy coast of northern France,'' the story read. ''Mr Churchill told the House of Commons today that the landing of our troops on a broad front had been effective and they had penetrated in some cases several miles inland.''
It was the climactic battle of World War II or, in more common parlance, the beginning of the end.
Hitler shifted his headquarters to France to try to repel the invasion while fighter pilots witnessed seeing British tanks heading south. King George VI, in a radio broadcast, issued a call to prayer to the people of the Empire
Australia, of course, was represented among the invading force with 3000 military personnel serving under British command. The majority of them were members of the Royal Australian Air Force, along with smaller numbers of Australians serving with the Royal Navy and British Army.
It is perhaps surprising that only 18 of their number lost their lives.
Mr Abbott, along with the Queen and 16 heads of state including US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, will gather at Sword Beach at Ouistreham for an international commemoration.
Accompanying him will be seven airmen, now mostly in their 90s, returning to relive memories and retell their amazing stories. Their job in the Lancaster aircraft of Bomber Command was to drop 10,000 tons of bombs in 7500 sorties in weather described as only "just fair". They also kept the Luftwaffe on the ground.
When the Prime Minister met these veterans at Kirribilli House at the weekend he said that to visit the D-Day landing sites "along with these extraordinary heroes of our country, these national treasures, will be a real honour for me".
Here we record the names of those national treasures, the few still with us, representing as they do all those involved from this nation on that remarkable first day. They are Robert Cowper OAM, Stuart Davis, Phillip Elger, Francis Evans, Ronald Houghton, Billy Purdy and Frederick Riley.
Saturday, June 7, will be another day for the Prime Minister with another world war to contemplate.
He will travel east to visit the Western Front of World War I.
Here the numbers are bigger and the losses greater. He will pay tribute to the 295,000 Australians who served between 1916 and 1918 and honour the 46,000 who lost their lives.
His visit will take in the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, the town which, on the night of April 24-25, 1918, two Australian brigades recaptured from the Germans. Around the walls of the memorial are the names of some 11,000 Australians "missing" in action in France.
Before his departure the Prime Minister said the government is considering constructing an interpretive centre at Villers-Bretonneux.
But, perhaps more significantly, he also said as part of the 100th anniversary of Anzac he would like to see a greater focus on Australia’s role on the Western Front. The timing ahead of commemoration of the centenary of the start of World War I on August 4 is apposite.
The sentiment is readily endorsed by Darren Mitchell, director, NSW Office for Veterans Affairs.
With the centenary almost upon us, he believes that the massive attention on Gallipoli in 2015 is a "misleading focus".
Misleading, he says, given Australia’s engagement throughout the entirety of the First World War with significant action and loss of life in 1914 and also between 1916 and 1918.
Mr Abbott’s call for greater emphasis on the losses of the Western Front (and why not in the other campaigns and battles?) certainly has merit.
We owe it to all whose names are inscribed on the war memorials of even the smallest communities across Australia to look further, wider and deeper into the nation’s contribution, beyond Gallipoli.
