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Anzac Day 2011
Section 3: Gallipoli
Gallipoli:
what happened on 25 April 1915?
It was at 4.29 am in the eerie
pre-dawn on 25 April 1915 when a Turkish outpost signalled the alarm.
Below, barely discernible on the dark waters off
Ari
Burnu,
a small plateau jutting out into the Aegean Sea, steamboats
towed rowboats carrying Australians to the Gallipoli shoreline.
There are very few instances in which the deeds of ordinary people fashion
a whole chapter in a nation’s history and forge a national identity.
This first wave of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) was
doing just that. A minute later, the first boatloads reached the shingly
beach and clambered out, under fire.
The plan
The landing was one of the more
imaginative strategies of World War I. In eastern Europe the Germans had
delivered a series of blows to the Russians who, fearing a second offensive
by Turkish forces from the south, appealed to their allies for assistance.
Hard-pressed by the Germans on the Western Front and with
Egypt
threatened by the Turks, the British and French could not
afford for the Russians to collapse. They agreed to attack
Turkey.
Their objective was to wrest control of the Dardanelles and
re-establish sea communications with
Russia
through the Black Sea.
An attempt by warships in February
1915 to break through the straits was defeated. A plan to land troops
at Gallipoli was then drawn up. It was actually a series of landings,
originally planned for 23 April, but pushed back by bad weather:
- the main landing by British troops at Cape Helles, in the south, to
seize forts and advance north;
- across the strait, on the Asiatic side, a landing by French troops
to destroy artillery batteries before withdrawing and going to Cape
Helles;
- at the northern end of the peninsula, near Bulair, where the peninsula
is narrowest, a feint by British marines to confuse the Turks; and
- in the centre, the landing by Australian and New Zealand troops to block
any Turkish troops retreating from the south and reinforcements coming
from the north.
The plan was for the Anzac and
British troops to link up for a final push across to the Dardanelles.
The wrong beach?
Those who landed near
Ari
Burnu
often commented on how they landed on ‘the wrong beach’.
The boats landed about a mile north of the loosely planned landing site.
The reason is unclear, but most likely the naval ratings taking the troops
ashore were disorientated and simply veered left.
This error gave the men a fighting
chance. Had they landed on the ‘correct’ beach near
Gaba
Tepe,
there would have been a slaughter (as at ‘Y’
Beach, one of the British landing sites at Cape Helles). Boats would have
been shot up, and on the beach men would have been caught in barbed wire
entanglements, against well-sited machine-guns. At
Ari
Burnu,
the first wave came under fire from some of the 200 Turks
in position at that time; some boats landing later were shot up, suffering
heavier casualties. Most of the casualties on that first day occurred
as men scrambled up the brush-entangled gullies leading off the beach,
and over the ridges.
A long and terrible day
The objective was Gun Ridge,
the third ridgeline inland from the beach. Troops pushed up and over gullies, ravines
and spurs. It was hard going under fire, and they broke into smaller groups
to advance over tracks or through undergrowth. They crossed the first
ridgeline, some reached the second and a few got to the third, but they
were too scattered to hold on.
As the day wore on, the remainder
of the ANZAC landed. There was confusion on the beach, as new troops and
wounded men intermingled. ‘Stragglers’ (men separated from
their units) were found at the beach or sheltering in the gullies, but
officers led many of them back into action.
The Turkish local commander,
Mustapha
Kemal
(later,
Kemal
Ataturk,
President of Turkey) organised his force and counter-attacked.
The Turks secured the high ground and pushed on. An evacuation of the
ANZAC was suggested, but naval advice was that it would be impossible.
With nowhere to retreat, the Australians and New Zealanders dug in. They
fought tenaciously, with mounting casualties, to cling onto a small strip
of land that came to be called Anzac.
The landing itself was a failure.
The impossible had been asked of the men. There was no way that any troops
could have landed, advanced four miles across hard terrain, taken a 4-5
mile stretch of ridgeline, and then withstood strong counter-attacks—all
in the course of one day. What they did achieve was to secure a foothold
and forge a legend.
The Gallipoli campaign cost the lives of more
than 40 000 British Empire and French troops and 85 000 Turks.
Chronology of significant events during the remainder of the year
On 29 April 1915 HMAS AE2 was sunk in the Sea of Marmara. AE2 was the first submarine to penetrate the Dardanelles. For five days the AE2 carried out orders to disrupt Turkish shipping. When her torpedoes were spent and she was attacked by Turkish gunboats, the submarine was scuttled and her crew captured.
On 15 May Commander of the First Division AIF, Major General WT Bridges was shot in the leg by a sniper. He was evacuated immediately but died on 18 May while being transported to Egypt for treatment. His body was returned to Australia and his grave overlooks the Royal Military College, Duntroon.
On 18 May the Turks launched a major counter-attack, but by this time the Australian and New Zealand troops had had time to prepare proper defensive positions and the resultant slaughter of the Turkish forces is thought to have left 10 000 men dead or wounded. The stench of the dead bodies was so great that on 24 May a formal truce was declared to allow the Turkish dead to be buried. This was the last time that the Turkish forces attempted a major counter-offensive.
With the failure of the May counter-attack things quietened down until August, when British troops landed at
nearby Suvla, and the Anzacs and Gurkhas made supporting attacks at Lone
Pine,
Chunuk
Bair
and the Nek.
In The August Offensive at Anzac Robin Prior takes a new look at the strategy underlying the series of attacks at places such as Lone Pine, Nek, Chunuk Bair, Hill Q and Hill 971. (Wartime, vol. 47, 2009).
The Battle for Lone Pine began on 6 August. The Lone Pine operation was planned as a diversion to draw Turkish reserves away from a major British attack to be launched at the northern end of the Australian and New Zealand position at Gallipoli. The Australians suffered more than 2200 casualties at Lone Pine and the Turks over 5000. Historian Peter Burness describes the battle and sets it in context in this article in Wartime.
Seven Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross for their bravery at Lone Pine. They are: Alexander Stewart BURTON, William DUNSTAN, John (Patrick) HAMILTON, Leonard Maurice KEYSOR, Alfred John SHOUT, William John SYMONS and Frederick Harold TUBB. A full list of Australian Victoria Cross recipients can be found in the Parliamentary Library online publication, List of Victoria Cross recipients by electorate, or on the Anzac Day Commemoration Committee website.
On 7 August units of the 4th Light Horse Brigade fighting as infantry attacked the Turks at the Nek (also known as the Battle of Sari Bair) with horrific results. The pre-attack artillery bombardment had ceased seven minutes early and New Zealand troops scheduled to attack from a different approach were unable to do so. The result was that 234 men of the 600 strong force lay dead and little was achieved.
The fighting at Hill 60 on 21 and 27 August in which Australian troops gave support to a larger British assault was the last major action of the Gallipoli campaign. The all-too-obvious stalemate of the campaign and the deterioration of the weather as winter approached convinced the high command that it was time to evacuate the troops. The evacuation is universally regarded as the best planned part of the whole venture thanks to the work of Major-General Birdwood's Chief of Staff Brigadier General CBB White.
The evacuation of Anzac and Suvla began on 7 December and was completed by 20 December.
On 20 April 2009 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation released
an internet resource, Gallipoli:
the first day. In ‘Anzac
first: ABC relives Gallipoli online’, Lara Sinclair describes
the new interactive website, outlining the sources and methods the ABC
used to enable users to experience the first twenty-four hours of the
Gallipoli campaign. (Australian, 20 April 2009)
Gallipoli:
frequently asked questions
Why did the Anzacs land at
Gallipoli?
They were part of a British-French
force attempting to capture the Dardanelles and open a route to
Russia
through the Black Sea. They were selected because their training
had progressed and being based in
Egypt,
they were readily available.
Who was first ashore?
We can never know for certain.
C
E
W
Bean,
official historian, concluded it was possibly Lieutenant
Duncan
Chapman,
9th Battalion. The Queenslander wrote home: ‘I happened
to be in the first boat that reached the shore, and, being in the bow
at the time, I was the first man to get ashore.’ One of his men
later confirmed this.
Chapman
was killed at Pozieres,
France
on 6 August 1916.
How many Australians died on
the first day?
We do not really know. In bitter
fighting after the landing, the details of many men’s deaths were
sketchy. First to Fall, a CD-ROM by the Australian Defence Force
Academy, names 621 men. The Roll of Honour lists 749, although some of
these are deaths administratively classified as ‘on or about’
25 April 1915, and could have been later.
When did the Gallipoli campaign
end?
The evacuation of Anzac and
Suvla was completed on 20 December 1915, a few days short of eight months
after the landing. The campaign ended on 9 January 1916 when British
forces completed the evacuation of Cape Helles.
What other nationalities were
at Gallipoli?
The British-French force included
men from these countries and their colonies. The ‘French’
included French and also Senegalese and other colonial troops. The ‘British’
included Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scots, Indians, Gurkhas, Australians,
New Zealanders and Newfoundlanders. The ‘Turks’ were mostly
Turkish, with some from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, and a few Germans
and Austrians.
Where else at Gallipoli did
the Anzacs serve?
In early May the 2nd Infantry
Brigade and New Zealand Infantry Brigade re-embarked and sailed to Cape
Helles. They were thrown into the Second Battle of Krithia. More than
1800 Anzacs (about a third of the two brigades) were killed or wounded
there. The survivors returned to Anzac. In August, the RAN Bridging Train
landed at Suvla, north of Anzac, building wharves after the British landing
there.
Were the British really ‘drinking
tea’?
When British troops landed at
Suvla in August, the Anzacs were fighting and dying at Lone Pine,
Chunuk
Bair
and the Nek.
Peter
Weir’s
1981 film Gallipoli made famous a story that the Anzacs
could see the British ‘drinking tea’. This left a poor impression
of British soldiers. The Suvla landing was poorly planned, and confusion
on the beaches meant some units had no option but to congregate and wait
for orders. Soldiers of any nationality would have taken this chance to
‘brew up’. Meanwhile, further inland, British soldiers were
fighting courageously. The loss of 1700 men killed or wounded in the first
24 hours is testimony to this.
Why wasn’t
Simpson
decorated?
‘The man with the donkey’
actually was decorated. Private
John
Simpson
Kirkpatrick,
3rd Field Ambulance, was killed on 19 May 1915 and posthumously
Mentioned in Despatches for his transporting of wounded men. This was
noted in The London Gazette on 5 November 1915, and in the Commonwealth
of Australia Gazette on 27 January 1916. This honour was rare. Other
than the Victoria Cross, it was the only honour able to be granted to
a man killed in action. Of the 60 000 Australians who died in the Great
War, only about 220 were accorded this honour.
Simpson's
medals are held by the Australian War Memorial. They include
his Victory Medal, with the Mentioned-in-Despatches rosette on its ribbon.
Simpson and his donkey are still
the subject of vigorous discussion. In 'The
donkey vote; a VC for Simpson - the case against', Graham Wilson argues
that 'Simpson was no braver than any other man on the Gallipoli Peninsula',
and that the campaign to have Simpson posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross
or an Australian Victoria Cross is 'impossible and inappropriate'. (Sabretache,
December 2006) In 'The
man with the donkey: hero or fraud', Dr Tom Curran challenges critics
who have refuted aspects of the story of Simpson. (Sabretache,
December 2008)
How many Australians died at
Gallipoli?
We do not really know. The ‘accepted
official estimate’ provided by the Australian War Memorial is 8709,
and this number is most commonly quoted. However, this figure could (and
probably should) be revised downwards to around 8150.
The figure of 8709 is drawn
from the War Office’s Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914-1920. On page 239, Australian deaths
are given as 362 officers and 7779 other ranks (a total of 8141), but
on page 286 a table of month-by-month deaths is stated as adding up to
371 officers and 8338 other ranks (a total of 8709). At some point, the
Memorial accepted this higher number, even though it is much higher than
any other official estimate. Examination of the War Office table reveals
that staff got their tallying up wrong. The monthly deaths actually add
up to 359 officers and 7800 other ranks, which equals 8159 (this is 550
fewer than the ‘accepted official estimate’).
Given that the War Office’s
lower number and the corrected sum of monthly deaths are close, that Australian
official medical history statistics are reasonably close, and that the
Roll of Honour for this period would be close too once unrelated deaths
(from illnesses and accidents in Australia, at sea or in Egypt) are taken
into account, then a revised estimate of the number of Australians who
died in the Gallipoli campaign could be around 8150.
The campaign
-
a summary
of the Gallipoli campaign from The Oxford Companion to Australian
Military History—includes maps.
-
a brief
summary of the Gallipoli Campaign from the 1990 media kit issued
to assist
Australia’s
75th anniversary official commemorative visit.
-
visit Gallipoli website—commissioned
by the Department of Veterans' Affairs and developed by the Board
of Studies, NSW. Here you can explore new and historical material
on Gallipoli.
- the Epitaphs of Gallipoli, a website developed by the Gallipoli Association detailing the headstone inscriptions of Australian and New Zealand soldiers with known graves on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
First-hand
accounts of the Gallipoli campaign
CEW Bean's first report of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli was published in the Commonwealth
Gazette on 17 May 1915. At this point Bean was the official press
representative with the Australian Expeditionary Force.
British War correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett's
first-hand reports on the Anzac landing at Gallipoli praised the courage
of the 'raw' Australian and
New Zealand
troops. Ashmead-Bartlett became frustrated and disillusioned
with the course of the campaign, and with the difficulties placed in the
path of his reporting. In concert with the Australian journalist,
Keith
Murdoch,
he attempted to circumvent the military
censorship imposed by General Sir
Ian
Hamilton.
Murdoch
left Gallipoli with Ashmead-Bartlett's letter
to British Prime Minister Asquith which contributed to the withdrawal
of troops from the Peninsula and the downfall of
Sir
Ian
Hamilton.
In 'Anzac:
Nationhood, Brotherhood and Sacrifice', chapter four of Bill Gammage's The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, the author
has used first-hand accounts of the Gallipoli campaign by Australian soldiers
to explore their attitudes to the war; to the fighting; to their British
allies and their Turkish opponents; and to the death of comrades.
In this extract from The
Story of Anzac, Volume 1 of the Official history of Australia in the war
of 1914–1918, CEW Bean, the official historian, summarises
the course of the
Gallipoli campaign from the landings to the end of the first phase in early May 1915 when the advance of the British forces at both Gaba
Tepe and Cape Helles had been brought to a standstill.
Bean
discusses Australian successes and failures in the early
phase of the campaign up to
Sir
Ian
Hamilton's
decision that the next thrust of the battle should be at
Helles rather than at Anzac.
Gallipoli—legend
versus myth
An article by
Robert
Manne,
'A
Turkish tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian genocide' explores possible
connections between the two events (Monthly, February 2007, pp.
20–28).
The following articles
are from Wartime, a journal published by the Australian War Memorial:
-
Nigel
Steel,
'What
if...? Imagine the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915 had succeeded
- what then?', (Wartime, no. 38, 2007, pp. 34–37).
-
Nigel
Steel,
'Heroic
sacrifice', (Wartime, no. 38, 2007, pp. 22–27).
-
Harvey
Broadbent,
'Gallipoli
from the Turkish perspective', (Wartime, no. 38, 2007,
pp. 18–21).
-
Rhys Crawley, 'Lone
Pine: worth the cost?', (Wartime, no. 38, 2007,
pp. 14–17).
-
Peter
Hart,
'War
is Helles: the real fight for Gallipoli', (Wartime, no.
38, 2007, pp. 10–12).
In ‘Gallipoli:
a Turkish view’,
David
Cameron
examines the first hours after the landings from the viewpoint
of a company of 250 Turkish soldiers who opposed the ANZACs. (Wartime,
no. 42, 2008)
In 'Gallipoli's
first day: Turkish documents separating myth and reality'. Harvey
Broadbent looks at the first day of the campaign using material in Turkish
archives. (Wartime, no. 46, 2009, pp. 44–47).
Chris Roberts, 'Turkish machine-guns at the landing'. The author asks whether Australian troops landing at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915 were subject to Turkish machine-gun fire. (Wartime, no. 50, April 2010, pp. 14–19).
Peter Pedersen, 'Burning Bridges'. A profile of Major-General W T Bridges, (Wartime, no. 50, April 2010, pp. 20–25).
Peter Burness, 'First man ashore'. It is generally accepted that the 9th Battalion was the first ashore at Gallipoli but who was the first man to reach dry land? (Wartime, no. 50, April 2010, p. 30).
Robyn Van Dyk, 'The evacuation of Anzac'. Uses unit war diaries to describe the evacuation of Gallipoli, (Wartime, no. 50, April 2010, pp. 32–36).
In 'The
first casualty',
Les
Carlyon
argues that the truth bears more eloquent witness to the
heroics of Gallipoli than the myths that have grown up around it. (Bulletin
with Newsweek, 7 August 2001)
'The
lure of Gallipoli', by
Les
Carlyon,
is an article on the myth, the pride and the nostalgia evoked by
the campaign and its commemoration. (Australian Women’s Weekly,
1 August 2001)
In 'A
terrible beauty', the final chapter of his book, Gallipoli,
Les
Carlyon
summarises the importance of Gallipoli and sketches the fates
of a number of the key protagonists.
In 'When
myth makers go over the top',
Ray
Cassin
argues that the prominence of the Gallipoli myth has served to obscure the sacrifice of soldiers who served in other campaigns. (Age, 24 June 2001).
In 'The
last Anzac: the fatal shore that defines a nation',
Tony
Stephens
discusses where Gallipoli ranks in
Australia
's historical picture (Sydney Morning Herald, 17
May 2002).
In 'First
casualty',
Robin
Prior
and
Trevor
Wilson
give a summary of the Gallipoli campaign and correct ten myths
about it (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 2002).
'Exploding
the myths of Gallipoli' by
Ashley
Ekins
(Bulletin with Newsweek, 27 April 2004, pp.30–33.)
In ‘The
wrong place’, W Refshauge examines the continuing debate about
whether the original landing at Anzac Cove was made at the wrong place.
(Sabretache, September 2007)
Gallipoli—military
resources
Gallipoli—biographies
Gallipoli
biographies contains brief sketches of the most prominent officers
and ordinary soldiers who were involved in the campaign. The Australian War Memorial's online
encyclopaedia provides a list of Gallipoli
biographies including those of CEW Bean, Ataturk, and John Simpson Kirkpatrick (the man with the donkey).
Brief biographical details of
Mustapha
Kemal
(later known as
Ataturk)are available here.
These are the frequently quoted words of comfort to Australian
mothers which appear on the Ataturk Memorial near the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Those heroes that shed their
blood and lost their lives ... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly
country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the
Johnnies
and the Mehmets to us. Where they lie side by side now
here in this country of ours ... You mothers, who sent their sons from
faraway countries wipe away the tears. Your sons are now lying in our
bosom and are in peace after having lost their lives on this land. They
have become our sons as well.
In 'First
Anzac heroes',
Barry
Clissold
discusses the men who were awarded the Distinguished Conduct
Medal on Gallipoli and how they 'set a high standard of courage for a
young nation in its first major engagement'. (Wartime, no. 25,
2004)
Gallipoli—geography,
then and now
End of section 3
For
copyright reasons some linked items are only available to members of Parliament.
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