Australian Casualties According to the First World War page on the Australian War Memorial website from a population of fewer than five million, 416,809 men enlisted, of which over 60,000 were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed, or taken prisoner. The latest figure for those killed is given as 62,000.
The Great War was the first armed conflict in which aircraft were used; some 3,000 Australian airmen served with the Australian Flying Corps in the Middle East and France, mainly in observation capacities or providing air support for the infantry.
Units of the Light Horse were subsequently used to help put down a nationalist revolt in Egypt in 1919 and did so with efficiency and brutality, although they suffered a number of fatalities in the process. Total Australian battle casualties in the campaign were 4,851, including 1,374 dead.
Over 50,000 Australians served in Gallipoli during the eight month campaign and over 8,700 lost their lives, while over 18,000 were wounded.
SPECIAL SECTION: ANZAC, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF HEROISM
On the 25th April 1915, 57 year old Lt Col L.F. Clarke somehow managed to scale the Sphinx' near-vertical sides — a difficult enough feat for someone 30 years his junior — and on victoriously reaching the top was shot dead. The Sphinx would witness many more.
From 1916, Australian troops served with Allied forces throughout the Middle East, mainly taking part in action against the Ottoman Empire. Over three years Australian troops and the Australian Flying Corps served in Egypt, Palestine and the territories now known as Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria.
World War I transformed the Middle East in ways it had not seen for centuries. The Europeans, who had colonized much of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, completed the takeover with the territories of Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. The modern boundaries of the Middle East emerged from the war.
The German army suffered the highest number of military losses, totaling at more than two million men.
Of the 60,000 Australians that fought at Gallipoli, there were 26,000 casualties and 7,594 were killed. Later battles like the one at Lone Pine would see the Australians suffer, but also inflict, terrible casualties on the Turkish troops: by the end of the campaign their dead would number more than 85,000.
Four Australian medical teams worked with US forces. Although the ships and crew were in danger from mines and possible air attack, Australia's war was relatively uneventful, and there were no casualties.
Key Findings. Over 7,000 U.S. service members and over 8,000 contractors have died in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Almost 2,000 of them were killed in action or died of wounds and some 400 were captured. This is believed to be the greatest loss by a single division in 24 hours during the entire First World War. Some consider Fromelles the most tragic event in Australia's history.
The Middle East was directly involved in World War I, and so it was affected by the war in all aspects of life. The most immediate impact was on young men: Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Arabs and others fought as part of the Ottoman army.
By 2006, approximately 1,400 Australian soldiers remained engaged in reconstruction and rehabilitation work in Iraq together with American and other coalition forces. In mid-2008 Australia began to reduce its forces with the withdrawal of approximately 500 troops, leaving almost 1,000 Australian soldiers in Iraq.
The losses in the Middle East were staggering: the war not only ravaged the land and decimated armies, it destroyed whole societies and economies. In this way, the experience of World War I in the Middle East is perhaps more akin to the experience of World War II in Europe.
At the beginning of November 1914, the Ottoman Empire, the world's greatest independent Islamic power, abandoned its ambivalent neutrality towards the warring parties, and became a belligerent in the conflict, with the sultan declaring a military jihad (holy war) against France, Russia and Great Britain.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the mightiest and longest-lasting dynasties in world history. This Islamic-run superpower ruled large areas of the Middle East, Eastern Europe and North Africa for more than 600 years.
The Anzac Mounted Division's first significant operation against the Turks occurred on the night of 4–5 August 1916 when Turkish forces attacked Romani in a bid to reach the Suez Canal. A counter-attack by British troops and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade saw the depleted Turkish force retreat from Romani.
Service men and women from Australia
Soldiers and medical staff served in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), mostly on the Gallipoli peninsula, the Western Front and in the Middle East.
In the First World War the Australian soldiers earned a outstanding reputation. They fought in many of the great theatres of war: Gallipoli, Damascus, Gaza, Somme (Pozières), Fromelles, Péronne, St. Eloi, Ypres (click on the picture right) and Passchendaele.
Mephisto was deployed against Australian soldiers in France, but the Australians managed to steal the tank from right under the noses of the German army. Although brought to Australia with enormous fanfare, Mephisto lay neglected for decades.
The German soldiers feared and respected the skills of the Australians. In a letter captured and translated by the 7th Australian Infantry Brigade in May 1918, a German soldier wrote to his mother: We are here near ALBERT, I am in the foremost line, about 200 metres opposite the British.
During broadcast about the Tobruk siege, Joyce scoffed that the men defending the garrison were 'caught like rats in a trap' and often referred to them as poor desert rats of Tobruk, who live like rats and will die like rats.