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In a rooftop garden at Rockefeller Center, 150 expatriates from New Zealand and Australia stood Sunday with heads bowed, silent.
Members of the American Legion from Babylon provided a color guard while Staff Sgt. Jon Leonard from the West Point Military Academy Band played the Last Post and Reveille, piercing the background din of honking horns and a police siren on the streets below.
The hour-long homage, which takes place with little or no fanfare once a year, commemorated a fateful dawn, April 25, 1915, when the Australian New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landed at Gallipoli in Turkey.
It was the start of an infamous eight-month campaign in which 10,862 Australians and New Zealanders were killed and 30,883 were wounded in an unsuccessful bid to take the Turkish peninsula and free the Dardenelles for shipping. The number of Turks killed was 86,692, with 164,617 wounded.
The ANZAC survivors of the ferocious battle are long gone, all except Australian native Alec Campbell, 103, the last remaining Gallipoli veteran, who lives in Tasmania, an island off the southeast coast of Australia.
And in New York City, long a crazy-quilt of immigration, Australians and New Zealanders are among the smallest of immigrant groups, numbering 15,000 Australians and just 1,000 New Zealanders in all, by the official estimates of the governments of those countries.
For older ones especially, the service is nonetheless an important affair, as it in the lands of their ancestors, where...