UK Dominions in WW I (I)

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Commemorating the first world war | In Foreign Fields; How Britain’s former dominions remember the war that propelled them to independence. Economist, Aug 2, 2014. www.economist.com/news/internati ... d-them-independence

Note:
(a) “WHEN Britain declared war on Germany on August 4th 1914, it was committing not only its own men, but those of its empire. The five ‘dominions’—Australia, Canada, Newfoundland (which joined with Canada in 1949), New Zealand and South Africa—were self-governing but had no power over foreign policy.”
(i) Dominion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion

Quote:

“The word ‘Dominions’ originally referred to the possessions of the Kingdom of England. Oliver Cromwell's full title in the 1650s was ‘Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging’

“All [territories in Canada] except for Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island agreed to form a new federation named Canada from 1867. This was instituted by the British Parliament in the British North America Act 1867. Section 3 of the Act referred to the new entity as a ‘Dominion,’ the first such entity to be created  [note the capital D].
(ii) Newfoundland and Labrador
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_and_Labrador
(section 1 Etymology; In 1583 Newfoundland became England's first possession in North America and one of the earliest permanent English colonies in the New World when it was claimed by Sir Humphrey Gilbert for Queen Elizabeth; Newfoundland remained a colony until acquiring Dominion status in 1907; section 3.5 Commission of Government and confederation with Canada)
(iii) Prince Edward Island
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Edward_Island
(section 3.3 Confederation: “Prince Edward Island did not find the terms of union favourable and balked at joining in 1867, choosing to remain a colony of the United Kingdom. * * * entered Confederation [in]1873”)


(b) “Such sentiments across the dominions led eventually to the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which recast the British empire as a Commonwealth of Nations.”

Statute of Westminster
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Westminster
(may refer to: Statute of Westminster 1931, established legislative equality for the self-governing dominions of the British Empire with the United Kingdom)
(c) “‘It’s very hard to pinpoint the birth date of Australia, New Zealand or Canada,’ says Ian McKay, a historian at Queen’s University in Ontario.”

Queen's University(public; located in Kingston, Ontario; Church of Scotland established Queen's College in 1841 with a royal charter from Queen Victoria)  Wikipedia

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(continued)

(f) “When the war broke out Australia’s states had been joined in federation for just 13 years and New Zealand had been a self-governing dominion for just seven. * * * The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) sailed to the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. The disastrous eight-month campaign against Turkish forces * * * Their war commemorations will reach a peak on the centenary of the first landings on April 25th next year. Since 1916 the date has been known as Anzac Day. * * * One reason Gallipoli has kept its mythical status in Australia, he [an Australian historian] thinks, is that in recent years Australia Day on January 26th, which marks the start of white settlement, has seen protests over aboriginal land rights.”
(i) Gallipoli Campaign
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_Campaign
(Apr 25, 1915-Jan 9, 1916; took place on the Gallipoli peninsula[, which] forms the northern bank of the Dardanelles, a strait)
(ii) Australia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia
(Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon made landfall on 26 Feb 26, 1606 near the modern town of Weipa on Cape York Peninsula, Australia)

(g) “But the consensus is not absolute. Paul Keating, prime minister for the Labor Party for five years to 1996, has described the notion that Australia was ‘born again or even redeemed’ at Gallipoli as ‘utter nonsense.’ For him, the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea, where Australia fought the Japanese in the second world war, is where ‘the depth and soul of the Australian nation was confirmed,’ and the country moved out of Britain’s shadow and formed the alliance with America that has underpinned its foreign policy ever since.”

Kokoda Track campaign
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokoda_Track_campaign
(July 21-Nov 16, 1942; between Japanese and Allied—primarily Australian—forces in what was then the Australian territory of Papua [qv]; Result  Allied victory; section 1.2 Geography; section 4.1 Strengths and casualties)

(h) “In his book ‘Anzac’s Long Shadow: the Cost of our National Obsession,’ James Brown, who served for Australia in Iraq and Afghanistan, argues that the celebration of Anzac Day has ;morphed into a sort of military Halloween.’ Australia’s ‘longest eulogy,’ he says, has tended to exclude veterans of more recent wars.”
(i) James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow; The cost of our national obsession. Black Inc, February, 2014.
www.blackincbooks.com/books/anzacs-long-shadow
(ii) For Black Inc, see Schwartz Publishing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartz_Publishing

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(continued)

(d) “the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, when Canadian soldiers captured a German position in northern France at a cost of 10,600 lives. * * * The entry for Vimy Ridge in ‘The Canadian Encyclopaedia’ describes the battle as ‘strategically insignificant.’ Canada’s decisive contribution came the following year, says Jack Granatstein, a historian whose new book, ‘The Greatest Victory,’ tells how the country’s corps defeated a quarter of Germany’s divisions on the western front during the war’s final hundred days.”
(i) Battle of Vimy Ridge
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vimy_Ridge
(Apr 9-12, 1917; The main combatants were the Canadian Corps, of four divisions, against three divisions of the German Sixth Army; Result Allied victory; Vimy Ridge is an escarpment [qv] 8 km (5.0 mi) northeast of Arras)
(ii) Jack Granatstein, The Greatest Victory; Canada's one hundred days, 1918. Oxford University Press Canada, July 2014.
www.oupcanada.com/catalog/9780199009312.html

(e) “At least France and Britain were on the same side. For South Africa fighting for Britain was far more problematic. The Union of South Africa, only four years old in 1914, had just emerged from the bitter Anglo-Boer War which saw the Afrikaner minority defeated by the British. The British-educated General Jan Smuts had to quell a rebellion by Afrikaners who felt closer to Germany than Britain before he could begin the task of annexing the German colony of South West Africa, now Namibia. South Africa’s equivalent of Vimy Ridge was Delville Wood, where one of the bloodiest engagements of the 1916 Battle of the Somme took place. This patch of trees, held by a brigade of white South Africans at the cost of four-fifths of its men being injured or killed, was commemorated for some decades afterwards. * * * But the battle’s status as a national symbol of bravery and sacrifice is now shared with the SS Mendi, a steamship that sank in 1917 after being accidentally rammed in the British Channel en route to France”
(i) Dominion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion
(section 3.1 List of Dominions; section 3.9 South Africa: Union of South Africa was formed in 1910; independent from UK in 1961)
(ii) Afrikaner
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner
(descended from predominantly Dutch settlers [in 1652 Jan van Riebeek of Dutch East India Company founded Cape Town as a way station between the Netherlands and Jakarta (with a different name then)]; speak Afrikaans; section 1 Nomenclature: Boer [qv])
(iii) For Anglo-Boer War, see Second Boer War
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War
(1899-1902; United Kingdom defeated and annexed Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State; section 1 Name)
(iv) Jan Smuts
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Smuts
(1870-1950; born to Afrikaner farmers; ought and lost the Boer War, urged fellows to surrender to UK in 1902--stressed the importance of not sacrificing the Afrikaner people for that independence; The Union of South Africa was born [in 1910], and the Afrikaners held the key to political power, for they formed the largest part of the electorate; [fought on the British side against Germany]: [A] suppress the Maritz Rebellion [qv; also known as Boer Revolt; Sept 15, 1914-Feb 4, 1915; named after Manie Maritz, a Boer General during the Second Boer War and a leading rebel of the 1914 Maritz Rebellion in which he allied with Germans] + [B] invaded German South West Africa [1884-1915; Union of South Africa administered it under under a League of Nations mandate; independent from South Africa as Namibia in 1990] and conquered it)
(v) South-West Africa Campaign
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South-West_Africa_Campaign
(September 1914-July 1915)

, in which South African troops were mobilised along the border in September 1914, about to invade German South-West Africa. One South African general on the border was Manie Maritz, who returned to Transvaal and Orange Free State to fight the British, defeated by Jan Smuts, and took refuge with the Germans in German South-West Africa. When the latter surrendered, Manie Maritz was imprisoned for two years and paid fine.
(vi) Battle of Delville Wood
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Delville_Wood
(July 14-Sept 3, 1915; “was a series of engagements in the 1916 Battle of the Sommel between the armies of the German Empire and the British Empire. Delville Wood ([French:] Bois d'Elville) was a thick tangle of trees, chiefly oak and birch”)
(vii) SS Mendi
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Mendi
(a steamship; chartered by the British government as a troopship; was struck amidships and cut almost in half by the SS Darro, an empty meat ship bound for Argentina; 616 South Africans (607 of them black troops) plus thirty crew members, mostly British, died in the disaster)