The term ANZAC began as an acronym for the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps. A corps is a military formation of between two and five (occasionally, but rarely, more) infantry or cavalry divisions.
In November/December 1914, the ambitiously titled 1st Australian Division arrived in Egypt on its way to war. Recruiting for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) had been so strong that a fourth brigade had accompanied them. Only three brigades are required to form a division. At the same time the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) arrived in Egypt with one brigade of infantry and a brigade of mounted rifles (dismounted).
The AIF loaned the NZEF its spare brigade to bring it to divisional strength and thereby forming the NZ&A Division. British Army Headquarters in Cairo decided to combine the barely trained troops of the 1st Australian Division and the NZ&A Division into a Corps for administrative purposes thus forming the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps. Command of the corps was given to a British lieutenant general named William Birdwood. In Cairo an anonymous British military clerk created the acronym A&NZAC–abbreviated to ‘ANZAC’–probably around mid-December 1914, and the name stuck.
In April 1915 the A&NZAC was used as part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) in a doomed attempt to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. The exploits of the A&NZAC received such popular press at the time that the soldiers of the Corps began to call themselves ‘Anzacs’. By the end of 1915 the nickname had achieved acceptance as a proper noun. Until 1918 the word ‘Anzac’ was a more commonly used self-description and identifier among the soldiers of the AIF than ‘digger’.
In 1916 the AIF was reorganized and the infantry component with support troops were sent to the Western Front in France and Flanders. By then it had grown to five infantry divisions and the NZEF was large enough to form its own infantry division. These units, occasionally combined or supplemented with British divisions were given the titles the first and second ANZAC Corps. The legendary Australian historian and veteran of the Great War, Charles Bean, created the convention of writing the acronym with a full capital followed by small capitals.
Corps structure and strength can fluctuate with strategic and tactical requirements. The divisions that made up ANZAC I and ANZAC II were not consistent during the war. The Third Battle of Ypres in Belgium, in late 1917, was the only time they served side by side.
The AIF and NZEF mounted units that had stayed in the Middle East were given the title the ANZAC Mounted Division.
Around May 1918 the Australian component of both the ANZAC corps on the Western Front disappeared as all five Australian divisions were combined into a single very large ‘Australian Corps’ under the command of an Australian, General John Monash.
From this summary we can see that ‘ANZAC’ is the acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and ‘Anzac’ is the name the soldiers of the AIF gave themselves during and after the Gallipoli campaign. That is why the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney, chooses the mixed case spelling. It is a memorial to the men and women who called themselves Anzacs. It is not the ANZAC Memorial as it is not a memorial to the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps.
After the Great War the term ANZAC and Anzac became so widely used that state and federal legislation had to be introduced to prevent the terms being misused in commercial or potentially disrespectful applications.
The only other conflict in which ANZAC has been appropriately applied was the very short-lived campaign in Greece in the final weeks of April 1941. In that case the 6th Australian Division was temporarily reallocated from the 2nd AIF’s 1st Australian Corps to join the British -ed Lustre Force. The 6th Australian Division served alongside the New Zealand Division. Lustre Force was even more ill-fated than the MEF had been in 1915 so the Australians and New Zealanders did not get a chance to operate as a corps despite the use of the title.
Australians and New Zealanders have served to gather in subsequent wars and on peacekeeping operations but have never operated as a corps. The term is applied for its historic value not as a genuine description of a military formation. The ANZAC battalions that served with the Australian Task Force in South Vietnam for example were battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment with two companies of New Zealand infantry attached. The Australian Task Force never achieved a divisional sized deployment let alone a corps, so the use of the ANZAC was simply an acknowledgment of shared military experience half a century earlier.
Article by Brad Manera