Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood
The Soul of Anzac
- Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood outside his dugout at Anzac. [AWM G00761]
Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, a senior officer in Britain’s pre-1914 Indian Army, was appointed in December 1914 to the command of the Australian and New Zealand forces then assembling in Egypt. These units were soon formed into a corps, the ‘A and NZ Army Corps’, of two divisions – the 1st Australian Division AIF (Australian Imperial Force) commanded by Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges and the New Zealand and Australian Division commanded by Major General Sir Alexander Godley.
In the corps headquarters at Shepherd’s Hotel in Cairo, material addressed to the ‘A and NZ Army Corps’ piled up and the title seemed far too cumbersome. Demands were made for a simpler name and Lieutenant AT White, an Englishman, suggested the abbreviation ANZAC. Birdwood approved and the word ‘Anzac’ was born. On Gallipoli, it was Birdwood who requested that the position held by the Australians and New Zealanders be known as Anzac and that the place where most of them had landed on 25 April be known as Anzac Cove. Soon those who fought there were themselves being called Anzacs. In late 1917, an AIF order approved by Birdwood officially obliged all those who had taken part in the Gallipoli campaign to wear a small brass ‘A’ for Anzac on their unit colour patches on each shoulder of their uniforms.
- Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood swimming at Anzac Cove, May 1915. [AWM G00401]
Birdwood has been described as the ‘Soul of Anzac’. His Corps headquarters was located in the hills just behind Anzac Cove and was open to Turkish shelling. Anxious members of his staff often tried to pile up bales of hay on the exposed parts of his dugout to protect him, and according to Australia’s official historian, Charles Bean, ‘many a man lost his life within a stone’s throw of the place’. Birdwood was often to be seen walking around the Anzac position and up along the trenches on the ridges. On most days, he could also be observed swimming off the beach, sharing the dangers of Turkish shelling with everyone else. Such behaviour made him, unlike many generals, very visible to his men, and Bean summed up this aspect of Birdwood:
Above all, he possessed the quality, which went straight to the heart of Australians, of extreme personal courage.
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1941, p121]
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- Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood (left, with stick in his right hand) on his rounds at the entrance to Shrapnel Gully, Anzac, 1915. [AWM H00201]
‘Birdie’, as he was known to his close friends, greatly admired his Anzacs and claimed to have got on well with men who rarely gave automatic authority to anyone. British historian Robert Rhodes James thought that Birdwood’s supposed popularity with the Anzacs was a bit of a newspaper story but Bean saw him as a ‘rare leader’:
His delight was to be out in the field among his men, cheering them by his talk, feeling the pulse of them.
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1941, p121]
- Shoulder colour patch, with brass 'A' denoting service at Gallipoli, which belonged to Corporal Leslie Breguet, 1st Division Signals AIF, from Geelong, Victoria. Corporal Breguet enlisted in mid-1915 and served at Anzac with the 5th Battalion before transferring to signals. He returned to Australia in 1919. [AWM REL/13501.022]
Two stories reveal Birdwood’s understanding of conditions on Anzac
and the nature of Australians. It was his habit, despite the heat, never
to accept water in the frontline because he knew just how much effort it
took the ordinary soldiers to lug litres of it up the valleys and steep slopes
to the trenches. Only once did he take up an offer of a cup of tea at Quinn’s
Post because the forceful post commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Malone
of the Wellington Battalion, insisted he drink it. On another occasion, described
by Australian journalist Philip Schuler, ‘Birdie’ was on his
rounds without any badges of rank when he met two Anzacs cooking, and engaged
them in banter:
- Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood at North Beach, Anzac, on the day of the final evacuation, 19 December 1915. [AWM G00659]
‘Got something good there?’, remarked the General as he stopped near the steaming pot of bully-beef stew.
‘Ye-es’, replied the Australian, ‘it’s all right. Wish we had a few more spuds, though’ … at last General Birdwood signified his intention of going, bidding the soldier a cheery ‘Good-day’, which was acknowledged by an inclination of the head. The General walked up the path … and the Australian turned to his mate, who had been silent, but now began to swear softly under his breath –
‘You … fool! Do you know who you were talking to?’
‘No?’
‘Well, that was General Birdwood, that was, yer coot!’
‘How was I to know that? Anyway, he seemed to know me all right.’
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- Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood (centre, in lighter uniform) accompanying Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, British Secretary for War, on his visit to Anzac in November 1915. Birdwood is introducing Kitchener to some British officers. It was after this visit that Kitchener recommended the total evacuation of Gallipoli by British forces. [H10355]
Apart from a short period at the end, Birdwood commanded the Anzac Corps right through the Gallipoli campaign. In 1916, he went to France as the commander of I Anzac Corps, and in late 1917 he was given command of the newly formed Australian Corps, comprising all five divisions of the AIF. He relinquished command of the Corps to Lieutenant General Sir John Monash in May 1918, but retained the overall administrative command of the AIF. After the war, he went on a highly successful tour of Australia with his wife, then returned to the Indian Army. In 1925, Australia made him a Field Marshal in the Australian Military Forces. It was Birdwood’s great desire that he might be appointed Governor-General of Australia. That post was never offered to him, but he was elevated to the British peerage, taking the title Lord Birdwood of Anzac and Totnes. He died in 1951.
Sources:
- A J Hill, ‘Birdwood, William Riddell’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 7, 1891-1939, Melbourne, 1979, pp 293–296.
- Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1941.
- Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli, Sydney, 1965.
- Phillip Schuler, Australia in Arms, London, 1916