ANMEF commemorated more in ANZAC Legend

Have a massive casualty rate. Have failure. A massacre of our boys. Have the army and naval taskforce captured en masse, and have the Huns kill most of 'em like the Japs eventually killed* most of the men captured on New Britain in 1941.

The ANZAC mythos is about huge amounts of suffering, about endurance and mateship in the face of death. It's not about victory.

Anyway, a disaster in New Guinea (for our side) in the First World War is not particularly likely. Not unless the Kaiser wages war in the Pacific with the aid of Japan--or the United States?


*Or were at least primarily responsible for their deaths.
 
Have a massive casualty rate. Have failure. A massacre of our boys. Have the army and naval taskforce captured en masse, and have the Huns kill most of 'em like the Japs eventually killed* most of the men captured on New Britain in 1941.

The ANZAC mythos is about huge amounts of suffering, about endurance and mateship in the face of death. It's not about victory.
Less cynically, it was a tiny and one-sided engagement- fewer than 50 Germans and fewer than 150 barely-trained Melanesians (some of whom were allegedly murdered after being taken prisoner) against over 1,500 Australians with naval and artillery support. With the exception of the fight at the radio station (which was not even a platoon-level engagement), it hardly even counts as a "battle".

For it to be part of the ANZAC mythos, you'd need the force to be opposed by a close-to-equivalent German force. Alternatively, have it become known that HMAS AE1 was lost after valiantly fighting a superior number of attackers- rather than disappearing, probably after hitting a rock.
 
Less cynically

I wasn't being cynical. Anzac Day is not about commemorating victory; it's a commemoration of Gallipoli first, then it's a version of Remembrance Day that encompasses all the wars Australia has fought since 1914-18. And the victories are not the focus of the commemorations of the day's events, the sacrifices are.

Alexius said:
For it to be part of the ANZAC mythos, you'd need the force to be opposed by a close-to-equivalent German force.

Then it'd still be largely forgotten in our history as it would still be a relatively quick (although bloodier than OTL) victory. Just as the WWII battles of Buna and Gona are overshadowed by the desperate campaign on the Kokoda track, El Alamein is overshadowed by Tobruk (and Australia suffered more casualties in the decisive action at Alamein than the defence of Tobruk), and the more successful AIF battles on the Western Front of 1918 have only recently started to receive a lot of attention, with the main French Anzac Day services taking place at Villers-Bretonneux.

The Burma Railway and Vietnam play a larger role in the Anzac legend than all of the battles fought in PNG and Borneo after late 1942. We like our disasters and near-disasters, we do. None of this D-Day-overwhelming-success stuff, if you don't mind.;)

LATE ADDITION: In the last year the discovery of the wreck of HMAS Sydney, lost at sea in nineteen forty-one with all hands on board after being ambushed by the Nazi raider Kormaran, has given Australia another household-name tragedy that is now more famous in this country than any battle honour of the RAN in its entire history. Perhaps a liner carrying the entire military component of the ANMEF could meet with the same fate at the hands of the perfidious Germans in 1914?
 
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