Defence force members!

[PMC]

G'day folks,

The following e-mail was sent to my Sub-Branch today regarding rumour mongering regarding DVA and our pensions to be reduced. This is utter noncence, please read the following letter below,

Regards,

RLI

Subject: FW: DVA TO GO - PENSIONS TO BE REDUCED ?

Ladies and Gentlemen

Firstly, please see the garbage about reduction in pensions and closure of DVA etc written below my email. There are a number of differing versions of the email around but they all come down the same thing – it’s bulldust!!

This all started because of an article in a sister ESO’s newsletter that was published on November 2013.

The issue re reduction in pensions etc as mentioned in your email is “old hat” dating back to 2005 when Mr Hendy was the Chief Executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce. I understand that Mr Hendy issued a discussion paper and that’s all it was – the discussion paper did not get an “airing” from the Federal Government of the time.

It certainly appears that someone has gone off with a gun fully cocked and loaded without first seeking comment from the Minister for Veterans Affairs.

Another email on this issue, and there have been a few going backwards and forwards (up to eight pages long!!), originated by Allan Peterson on 10 January 2014, contains a number of forwarded emails including one email sent by Senator Ronaldson on 8 January 2014 to Geoffrey Annett (not sure who he is) which states “Of course this is not going to happen Geoffrey. A ridiculous rumour that should never have been started and is a reflection on its author not others – Regards Michael”

It certainly is a reflection on the author/originator of the email – check the facts!!!

An email was sent out the other day regarding the indexation of DFRB and DFRDB yesterday – see attached.




Peter Bright
Secretary
Victorian Branch (VVAA)

[PMC]

A great story NP99,

Regards,

RLI

[PMC]

G'day folks,

The following e-mail was sent to my Sub-Branch today regarding rumour mongering regarding DVA and our pensions to be reduced. This is utter noncence, please read the following letter below,

Regards,

RLI

Subject: FW: DVA TO GO - PENSIONS TO BE REDUCED ?

Ladies and Gentlemen

Firstly, please see the garbage about reduction in pensions and closure of DVA etc written below my email. There are a number of differing versions of the email around but they all come down the same thing – it’s bulldust!!

This all started because of an article in a sister ESO’s newsletter that was published on November 2013.

The issue re reduction in pensions etc as mentioned in your email is “old hat” dating back to 2005 when Mr Hendy was the Chief Executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce. I understand that Mr Hendy issued a discussion paper and that’s all it was – the discussion paper did not get an “airing” from the Federal Government of the time.

It certainly appears that someone has gone off with a gun fully cocked and loaded without first seeking comment from the Minister for Veterans Affairs.

Another email on this issue, and there have been a few going backwards and forwards (up to eight pages long!!), originated by Allan Peterson on 10 January 2014, contains a number of forwarded emails including one email sent by Senator Ronaldson on 8 January 2014 to Geoffrey Annett (not sure who he is) which states “Of course this is not going to happen Geoffrey. A ridiculous rumour that should never have been started and is a reflection on its author not others – Regards Michael”

It certainly is a reflection on the author/originator of the email – check the facts!!!

An email was sent out the other day regarding the indexation of DFRB and DFRDB yesterday – see attached.

Peter Bright
Secretary
Victorian Branch (VVAA)

Forward to next page.

[NP99]

G'day folks,

The following e-mail was sent to my Sub-Branch today regarding rumour mongering regarding DVA and our pensions to be reduced. This is utter noncence, please read the following letter below,

Regards,

RLI

Subject: FW: DVA TO GO - PENSIONS TO BE REDUCED ?

Ladies and Gentlemen

Firstly, please see the garbage about reduction in pensions and closure of DVA etc written below my email. There are a number of differing versions of the email around but they all come down the same thing – it’s bulldust!!

This all started because of an article in a sister ESO’s newsletter that was published on November 2013.

The issue re reduction in pensions etc as mentioned in your email is “old hat” dating back to 2005 when Mr Hendy was the Chief Executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce. I understand that Mr Hendy issued a discussion paper and that’s all it was – the discussion paper did not get an “airing” from the Federal Government of the time.

It certainly appears that someone has gone off with a gun fully cocked and loaded without first seeking comment from the Minister for Veterans Affairs.

Another email on this issue, and there have been a few going backwards and forwards (up to eight pages long!!), originated by Allan Peterson on 10 January 2014, contains a number of forwarded emails including one email sent by Senator Ronaldson on 8 January 2014 to Geoffrey Annett (not sure who he is) which states “Of course this is not going to happen Geoffrey. A ridiculous rumour that should never have been started and is a reflection on its author not others – Regards Michael”

It certainly is a reflection on the author/originator of the email – check the facts!!!

An email was sent out the other day regarding the indexation of DFRB and DFRDB yesterday – see attached.




Peter Bright
Secretary
Victorian Branch (VVAA)

That nonsense has been around a while.....imagine if pensions and DVA closed!!!

[oncedisturbed]

G'day folks,

Do any of our ex/or current defence members have any photos they would like to share with the forum ie; recruit training photos, (how we looked when we first started out) photo's through your journey whilst serving.

PS, Good luck and lets have a bit of fun and have a laugh how we looked when we were younger! (NP99 "sir" no Jedi night photos please!)

Regards,

RLI

Will see what I can find


Sent from my iPad using Motorculture mobile app

[Stropp]

I will have to dig out the old album

[Ian2011]

20140123_082240.jpg[attach=config]39575[
That's me with the silly looking hat in the front,

Not sure what I was doing in that pic but I had just spent about 2 hours trying to find my gas plug and piston with a threat of being charged for losing it.

[PMC]

G'day folks,

I received the following e-mail at my sub-branch, ithought i would share it with you all.

PS, Enjoy!

Regards,

RLI

Hi All,

For your information and distribution please.

Regards

Graham

Graham Anderson OAM JP
National Secretary
Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia
Telephone: (02) 4443 2911
Mobile: 0400 404 859

"It is important that I place on the record my deep concern regarding the reporting over the last few weeks in both new and old media that discredits the conduct of members of the Royal Australian Navy in Border Protection Operations.

There are few organisations in this land that are subjected to such relentless public scrutiny in almost every aspect of its business; this is a fact of life that Navy readily accepts as a national institution.

Similarly, there are few organisations that hold its people to such a high standard of personal conduct. Today’s Navy actively holds its people to account when they do not live up to the professional or personal standards that are required in serving this nation and its people. Our people are overwhelmingly supportive of this approach.

Ours is not a perfect organization, nor are our people infallible, but Navy is prepared to acknowledge its faults, take action and fix them.

An important component of our system of Government is civil control of the military. Navy’s role as part of the Australian Defence Force is to safely execute the lawful direction of Government, our people know this. Our people also know that by serving as members of the ADF they forgo some of the freedoms that the rest of the nation enjoys. It is clear there are those who exploit this.

I am exceptionally proud of the men and women of our Navy, particularly the way they serve on operations. They serve at sea and ashore, at home and around the world, each and every day with great dignity and often with considerable courage. They have 113 years of heritage and tradition to uphold, over a century of unbroken and honourable service to the nation protecting our ability to trade and contributing to our prosperity and security.

This generation of men and women who wear the uniform are worthy of more respect than has been shown to them in the past few weeks".

R.J. GRIGGS
Vice Admiral
Chief of Navy

[93patrol]

there is a reason these men and women are out there, the average person would go out and deal with the things that they deal with but they are more than happy to judge people for the jobs they do. plus I think the media is to blame for most of the hype going on

[PMC]

G'day folks

I thought i would share a bit of military history with you!

The following is a bio of a battle that took place in World War 2. I hope you enjoy it!

Regards,

RLI


World War II’s Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together

Days after Hitler’s suicide a group of American soldiers, French prisoners, and, yes, German soldiers defended an Austrian castle against an SS division—the only time Germans and Allies fought together in World War II. Andrew Roberts on a story so wild that it has to be made into a movie.

The most extraordinary things about Stephen Harding's The Last Battle, a truly incredible tale of World War II, are that it hasn’t been told before in English, and that it hasn’t already been made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie.

Here are the basic facts: on 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief Generals Maxime Weygand and Paul Gamelin, amongst several others.

Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg, how did you miss this story?

The battle for the fairytale, 13th century Castle Itter was the only time in WWII that American and German troops joined forces in combat, and it was also the only time in American history that U.S. troops defended a medieval castle against sustained attack by enemy forces. To make it even more film worthy, two of the women imprisoned at Schloss Itter—Augusta Bruchlen, who was the mistress of the labour leader Leon Jouhaux, and Madame Weygand, the wife General Maxime Weygand—were there because they chose to stand by their men. They, along with Paul Reynaud’s mistress Christiane Mabire, were incredibly strong, capable, and determined women made for portrayal on the silver screen.

There are two primary heroes of this—as I must reiterate, entirely factual—story, both of them straight out of central casting. Jack Lee was the quintessential warrior: smart, aggressive, innovative—and, of course, a cigar-chewing, hard-drinking man who watched out for his troops and was willing to think way, way outside the box when the tactical situation demanded it, as it certainly did once the Waffen-SS started to assault the castle. The other was the much-decorated Wehrmacht officer Major Josef ‘Sepp’ Gangl, who died helping the Americans protect the VIPs. This is the first time that Gangl’s story has been told in English, though he is rightly honored in present-day Austria and Germany as a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance.

Harding, is a respected military affairs expert who has written seven books and long specialized in World War II, and his writing style carries immediacy as well as authority. “Just after 4am Jack Lee was jolted awake by the sudden banging of M1 Garands,” he writes of the SS’s initial assault on the castle, “the sharper crack of Kar-98s, and the mechanical chatter of a .30-caliber spitting out rounds in short, controlled bursts. Knowing instinctively that the rising crescendo of outgoing fire was coming from the gatehouse, Lee rolled off the bed, grabbed his helmet and M3, and ran from the room. As he reached the arched schlosshof gate leading from the terrace to the first courtyard, an MG-42 machine gun opened up from somewhere along the parallel ridgeway east of the castle, the weapon’s characteristic ripping sound clearly audible above the outgoing fire and its tracers looking like an unbroken red stream as they arced across the ravine and ricocheted off the castle’s lower walls.” Everything that Harding reports in this exciting but also historically accurate narrative is backed up with meticulous scholarship. This book proves that history can be new and nail-bitingly exciting all at once.

Despite their personal enmities and long-held political grudges, when it came to a fight the French VIPs finally put aside their political differences and picked up weapons to join in the fight against the attacking SS troops. We get to know Reynaud, Daladier, and the rest as real people, not merely the political legends that they’ve morphed into over the intervening decades. Furthermore, Jean Borotra (a former tennis pro) and Francois de La Rocque, who were both members of Marshal Philippe Petain’s Vichy government and long regarded by many historians as simply pro-fascist German puppets, are presented in the book as they really were: complex men who supported the Allied cause in their own ways. In de La Rocque’s case, by running an effective pro-Allied resistance movement at the same time that he worked for Vichy. If they were merely pro-Fascist puppets, after all, they would not have wound up as Ehrenhäflinge—honor prisoners—of the Fuhrer.

While the book concentrates on the fight for Castle Itter, it also sets that battle in the wider strategic contexts of the Allied push into Germany and Austria in the final months of the war, and the Third Reich’s increasingly desperate preparations to respond to that advance. This book is thus a fascinating microcosm of a nation and society in collapse, with some Germans making their peace with the future, while others—such as the Waffen-SS unit attacking the castle—fighting to the bitter end. (Some of the fighting actually took place after the Doenitz government’s formal surrender.)

The book also takes pain to honor the lives of the “number prisoners” who worked at Castle Itter—faceless inmates from Dachau and other concentration camps whose stories have never before been told in this much detail. Whatever their political leanings or personal animosities toward each other, the French VIPs did what they could to help the so-called “number prisoners”—i.e. the ones stripped of their names—in any way they could.

One of the honored prisoners was Michel Clemenceau, the son of the Great War statesman Georges Clemenceau, who had become an outspoken critic of Marshal Petain and who was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943. At Castle Itter he showed “unshakeable confidence” in rescue, and had clearly inherited the courage of his father, who’d been nicknamed “The Tiger.” During the attack, with ammunition running dangerously low—they got down to the last magazines of their MP-40s—their tanks destroyed, and the enemy advancing from the north, west and east, this septuagenarian kept blasting away. His father would have been proud of him.

The story has an ending that Hollywood would love too: just as the SS had settled into position to fire a panzerfaust at the front gate, “the sound of automatic weapons and tank guns behind them in the village signaled a radical change in the tactical situation.” Advancing American units and Austrian resistance fighters had arrived to relieve the castle. In keeping with the immense cool that he had shown throughout the siege, Lee feigned irritation as he went up to one of the rescuing tank commanders, looked him in the eye and said simply: “What kept you?” Part Where Eagles Dare, part Guns of Navarone, this story is as exciting as it is far-fetched, but unlike in those iconic war movies, every word of The Last Battle is true.

The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe’ By Stephen Harding. 256 pages. Da Capo. $25.99.