Simpson and his donkey are Gallipoli heroes, despite new efforts to trash the legend
Candace Sutton
April 23, 2013 3:53PM
Angry men want to diminish Simpson's legacy
But those who recommended him were no slouches
Simpson's CO's granddaughter explains
THEY'RE at it again: angry men are attacking the legend of Gallipoli war hero, Simpson, of donkey fame.
Only this time, it’s more serious. The latest round of salvos seems determined to consign the nation's favourite Anzac hero to the dust bin.
Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick's story is well known. He was the stretcher bearer who ferried wounded Australian soldiers to safety at Gallipoli on the back of a donkey for 24 days, until he was shot through the chest by the Turks on May 19, 1915.
Simpson and his donkey are immortalised in statues at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, and his story is told in children's books and school history classes.
In the years since World War I, he has come to embody the Anzac legacy's greatest traits of mateship and selfless sacrifice.
A succession of commentators has tried to make their names debunking his legend and dispelling the "myth" that Private Simpson was anything special.
Historians and journalists have pontificated at length, lecturing us poor Australians our simplistic "need" to hold up Simpson's example and mythologise our young nation's role in the first world war.
Books have been written bagging poor Simmo and anyone who has dared to believe his tale of heroism.
But this year, the poor man has attracted new levels of scorn and claims of fabrication.
In the lead-up to Anzac Day 2013, no doubt annoyed that Simpson would again enjoy his annual outing of national hero worship, the anti-Simmo squad have let it rip, calling his story "fraudulent" and "a lie". Why all the anger?
Two articles in the last week have Simpson's claim to legend in tatters.
Journalist Mark Baker said that "much of the legend of the man with the donkey has been built on false or faulty evidence, richly embellished over the years as history has been turned into hagiography".
Writer Jan Wositzky was next, writing that Simpson was nothing without the donkey. "Take the donkey out of the picture and the story dies".
Both commentators said Simpson had been found to be no more or less courageous than the other stretcher bearers operating on the Gallipoli peninsula.
This fresh attack on Simpson's reputation comes in the wake of a federal Defence Honours and Award Tribunal rejecting his case for the ultimate recognition of courage and sacrifice, the Victoria Cross.
The tribunal announced its decision last month not to award Simpson a VC. Simpson's failure to qualify for a VC was technical and utterly predictable, as I wrote in May 2008 when the tribunal was just being formed.
But the anti-Simpson team now seek to obliterate his legend once and for all.
"Just about every word that has ever been written or spoken about Simpson, apart from the bare facts of his civilian life and his basic military service, is a lie," said Graham Wilson, in a private submission to the tribunal.
Wilson is a seasoned opponent to the Simpson legend. In a previous attack, he made the astonishing call that Simpson may have actually cost diggers' lives, saying it was "not a great leap of the imagination to actually wonder how many men at Gallipoli died because a stretcher-bearer team was short a man due to Simpson's absence".
Mark Baker quotes from Wilson's submission and says the Simpson story is "largely a myth inflated and exaggerated by the sloppy work of journalists, amateur historians and jingoistic politicians".
Another submission, by journalist and Gallipoli historian, Les Carlyon, said the Simpson "myths are stronger, and more numerous, than the facts. Simpson became the legendary figure of Gallipoli, not on the peninsula itself, but in Australian and British newspapers months after his death. He was beatified, then canonised".
Baker goes on to list the "fraudulent" claims of Simpson's deeds uncovered by Wilson and concludes that the tribunal was "unable to find any witness accounts of a specific act of valour ... which could single out Simpson's bravery from other stretcher-bearers in the Field Ambulance".
In saying so, Baker has unwittingly stumbled upon the truth, and it doesn't detract from the bravery of Simpson's actions at Gallipoli.
Certainly his legend has been burnished since, by people who bathed in his reflected glory and who probably never met him, but that does not make his original story untrue and undocumented.
In May 2008, when the tribunal was being formed as a Labor election promise "to take the politics out of medal decisions", the Defence Department told me the rules for establishing proof of valour to award a VC meant Simpson would miss out.
"It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make an award of a Victoria Cross to Simpson for his action at Gallipoli during World War I," a Defence Department spokesperson said.
He said recommendations "must be supported by signed statements of at least three eyewitnesses of the act for which the award is recommended. These statements should be on oath."
Simpson was previously recommended for the Victoria Cross on three occasions, in 1915, 1967 and 1995.
To examine why all of these VC bids have failed, let's go back to Anzac Cove,1915.
Witness accounts of Simpson at Gallipoli exist but they are mostly unspecific diary accounts of his journeys up and down the gullies from battlefield to dressing station.
My grandfather, then
His war diaries, available for reading at the Australian War Memorial, provide a meticulous account of his war in Gallipoli and later in France.
Among his diagrams of the ships off Anzac Cove before the landing, accounts of numbers and injuries of the wounded, descriptions of bright beautiful days on the peninsular interrupted by gunfire, Sutton remarks on Simpson's deeds at Gallipoli.
It was with Sutton's approval that Simpson was allowed to work independently in collecting casualties, living apart from his fellow soldiers in what was technically desertion.
He gave his Red Cross armband to Simpson for the donkey's snout, in a tongue-in-cheek endorsement of the animal as an enlistee.
Sutton's diaries also recount an "extraordinary order" regarding military award recommendations made in May 1915 by the senior Australian medical officer at Anzac, Colonel Neville Howse, who achieved his own VC in the Boer War.
And herein seems to lie the problem.
According to Simpson's biographer, Tom Curran, Howse's directive, which flabbergasted Sutton, was to assign the award recommendation to a more junior officer, and that is what happened with Simpson.
Curran says the bearer officer, Captain Fry, "recommended Simpson for the VC under an inappropriate category of heroism, citing a single pre-eminent act which could not be substantiated, instead of sustained selfless heroism over a prolonged period".
After Simpson was "shot through the chest" on the morning of May 19, 1915, as Sutton noted in his diary, he was buried at 6.30 that evening at Hell Spit, on the southern end of Anzac Cove.
The day after Simpson's death, Colonel John Monash, then the commander of the Australian Imperial Force's 4th Infantry Brigade at Gallipoli, sent a submission to Australian and New Zealand Divisional Headquarters.
Monash wrote: "I desire to bring under special notice, for favour of transmission to the proper authority, the case of Private Simpson ... [who] has been working in this valley since 26th April, in collecting wounded, and carrying them to dressing stations."
Sutton who, unusually for a commanding officer had condoned Simpson's abandonment of his unit, wrote in his diary on June 1, 1915: "I think we will get a VC for poor Simpson".
As history records, the witness accounts of Simpson's deeds are unspecific, such as Monash's description of Simpson's "fearless rescues" of "all cases unable to walk ... [he] moved unconcernedly amid shrapnel and rifle fire".
Lt Col Sutton noted in his diary: "It is difficult to get evidence of any one act to justify the VC; the fact is that he did so many."
While neither Sutton nor Monash made a formal recommendation for a VC for Simpson, their accounts of Simpson's bravery are arguably sincere and believable. They were no slouches.
Sutton was promoted to colonel, served in France at Pozières and Bullecourt, got a gong from King George V, and was twice mentioned in dispatches.
After taking charge of the Australian 3rd Division in France, Monash was made Australia's military commander of World War I in May 1918.
