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Eight months of killing ended with neither side the victor

It was the most daring strategic plan of World War One: in one move, to break the terrible stale-mate in the trenches of France by opening up a new front in the east. The plan was Winston Churchill's. The First Lord of the Admiralty, as he then was, believed that by attacking Germany's ally, Turkey, he could slit 'the soft underbelly' of the Kaiser's Europe. He would do it by smashing through the Dardanelles Strait, cutting off the Turks from the Germans and linking Britain with her ally, Russia, through the Black Sea.

It was a brilliant plan whose success relied on surprising the Turks on both land and sea. It required a strong naval force to sweep through the Dardanelles, plus an amphibious force to secure the heights on either side.

But for all the scheme's brilliant conception, the execution of it was a disaster. For the Turks were well warned of the British intentions.

On November 3, 1914, Royal Navy ships sailed up the Dardanelles Strait and launched a ten-minute bombardment on the Turkish forts. That ten minutes caused little damage but gave the game away entirely. The Turks, under German military guidance, began mining the Strait and reinforcing the defences along the difficult, mountainous country of the Gallipoli peninsula. They were able to do this at their leisure, because they were not bothered again by the Allies for a further three months.

On February 19, 1915, a much larger force of British and French ships began again bombarding the Turkish forts. The Turks immediately moved out of range of the naval guns, waited patiently for the bombardment to end, then returned to their positions. The attack availed the Allies little - and lost the British and French three battleships sunk by mines and three more disabled. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, reported: 'Things are going badly at the Dardanelles. We are held up for want of soldiers.'

Back in London, many of the War Cabinet wondered whether it was worth proceeding with the plan to take the Dardanelles. Not Churchill. He never wavered, and his enthusiasm for the project carried the majority of the war leaders with him.

So, in the early hours of April 25, 1915 - five months after the first warning shots were fired - the biggest amphibious force the world had known headed for the Gallipoli beaches.

There were 1,500 Australians and New Zealanders in the first assault. They were disgorged from three battleships into small boats, and at 4 a.m. they began rowing towards the black shore. In the early dawn light they approached the cove of Ari Burnu - but instead of seeing the wide, gently sloping beach they had been led to expect, all they saw were precipitous cliffs and barren hills. From the top of those hills a flare went up and suddenly a rain of bullets poured down on the little boats. The soldiers leaped into the sea and struggled ashore, weighed down by their packs. Many failed to make the beach, but those who did fixed their bayonets and stood waiting for the mass of Turks who were now running, slipping and tumbling down the hills in front of them. The battle had begun within yards of the water's edge of what was to be known for ever after as Anzac Cove.


Anzac Cove

The Australians and New Zealanders were all volunteer soldiers who had answered the call to defend the British Empire, of which they were the furthest-flung members. They were raw and not expected to put up a sustained fight. But their heroism, tenacity and sheer guts at Anzac Cove became a legend. They pushed the Turks back off the shoreline and pursued them with flashing bayonets up into the hills. The grand battle plan had broken down into a series of bloody skirmishes. But by mid-morning the Anzac force had advanced as far as a mile inland.

And that was when the bravery of the Anzacs was betrayed by the incompetence of their leaders. The Commander-in-Chief of the entire Gallipoli expedition was General Sir Ian Hamilton, an ageing, ineffectual leader who decided to run the operation from the comfort of the battleship Queen Elizabeth three miles off-shore, completely out of touch with his two corps commanders and the men on the beaches. Not that the corps commanders themselves were on the beaches. They were ordered to command their operations from ships standing off-shore, and, because communications quickly broke down, they too had little idea of what was going on.

Commander of the Anzac corps was General Sir William Birdwood, able and resourceful, but hampered by his unworkable orders. The other corps commander was General Sir Hunter Weston, in charge of the 29th Division of British and French troops, in whom Hamilton pinned his main hopes. Weston's men were landed on five beaches on Cape Helles, at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula. They also carried out two decoy operations to divert Turkish troops into other areas miles away from the main front.

At Cape Helles, the first force of 2,000 British soldiers approached the shore inside an innocent-looking collier, the River Clyde, which was run aground on Sedd-el-Bahr beach. The attack was launched more than an hour after the Anzac landing. The British came ashore in broad daylight and ran into a hail of bullets from the waiting, well-entrenched Turks. Hundreds of men were shot dead as they crowded like sardines on the gangways that led ashore from the collier. The few who got on to the beach were picked off one by one as they scurried around seeking some shelter from the incessant enemy guns.

Four hours after the first landing, only about 200 Britons had scrambled ashore and survived. The pilot of a spotter plane which flew over the beach that morning described the sea as 'a horrible sight - absolutely red with blood". The battle of Sedd-el-Bahr was lost before it was begun.

Within a stretch of a few miles, four other assaults had been launched on Cape Helles, and these had more success. On three beaches, the British troops landed and met little resistance, so they captured the commanding hillsides and sat down waiting for further orders. They never came.

On the other beach, Y Beach, there was no resistance at all. Two thousand men landed, climbed the cliffs and wandered around the prickly scrub un-hindered. They sat on the hilltops and listened to the sound of their comrades being annihilated just an hour's march away. The Y Beach troops outnumbered the entire Turkish force in Cape Helles. They could have encircled and overrun the enemy that very day. But when their officers asked for permission to advance, the plea was refused.

The 2,000 men who had landed on Y Beach sat and waited for further orders throughout the whole of that bloody day. Until, in the evening, Turkish reinforcements arrived on the scene - and attacked them. The Britons, who had expected at any moment to be given orders to march onward, had not bothered to dig themselves in against an attack. And when that attack came, half of the invaders began to file back to the water's edge, where they came under fire. Since there was no word from their senior officers, these troops now took to their boats and began to evacuate Y Beach.

Meanwhile, the other half of the Y Beach force had pushed further inland, where they fought throughout the night. At dawn the next day they found that they were alone and unsupported, but they fought so well that by mid-morning the Turks had fled.

Yet the great chance of victory was gone. The Allies in Cape Helles had outnumbered the Turkish defenders six to one, yet because there was no senior officer who could order a combined attack, the Allies had failed to press home their advantage. The Turks withdrew, but so did the British. The result was stalemate.

The only part of the whole operation which could be classed as a success was the French diversion on the other side of the Dardanelles Strait, at Kum Kale. There, with a regiment of African colonial troops, the French, in hand-to-hand fighting, had captured a major Turkish fort guarding the entrance to the Strait. The Turks had fled. But, in their moment of victory, the French had been ordered to withdraw and sail to Cape Helles. Kum Kale was, after all, just a diversion.

By midday on April 26, no fewer than 30,000 men had been landed on the Gallipoli peninsula and none of them had been allowed by their leaders to achieve the victory that was in their grasp.

The original Anzacs had been reinforced by a further 15,000 men. But the enemy had not wasted their time either, and the main Turkish force was now concentrated on the hills around the Anzacs. By dusk of that day, the Anzac corps were all under siege on one tiny beach, without cover. At midnight Birdwood managed to get a message through to Hamilton's battleship asking for permission to evacuate his force.

He reported: 'My divisional generals and brigadiers have represented to me that they fear their men are thoroughly disorganized by shrapnel fire to which they have been subjected all day after exhausting and gallant work in the morning. Numbers have dribbled back from the firing line and cannot be collected in this difficult country. Even the New Zealand Brigade, which has only recently been engaged, lost heavily and is to some extent demoralized. If troops are subjected to shellfire again tomorrow there is likely to be a fiasco, as I have no fresh troops with which to replace those in the firing line. I know my representation is most serious but if we are to re-embark it must be at once."

Thousands of lives could have been saved at that moment as Hamilton studied Birdwood's words aboard the battleship. But the tide of events turned on a second message that Hamilton received before he had made up his mind how to answer the first one.

This second report was from Lieutenant-Commander Huw Dacre Stoker, captain of the Australian submarine AE2. He had entered the Dardanelles Strait and, remaining on the surface to maintain his batteries, had passed into the Narrows under the guns of the Turkish forts. Shellfire made him submerge and he decided to pass beneath the Turks' floating minefield. He had to risk his submarine by surfacing twice in the middle of the minefield to check his position, and each time shells exploded around the craft. Finally Stoker came upon the main Turkish naval force sheltering behind the minefield, and he fired a torpedo at one of the cruisers, crash-diving just before the cruiser was able to ram him. But the torpedo hit home. Stoker kept the AE2 on the bottom for 16 hours, reading prayers to his men because it was a Sunday. Eventually, as the Turks gave up their hunt for the sub, he headed back down the Strait and radioed his success to the flagship Queen Elizabeth.

The vacillating Hamilton received the message and seized upon the only hopeful news of the day. He decided to send this reply to Birdwood's earlier appeal for an evacuation:

'Your news is indeed serious. But there is nothing for it but to dig yourselves right in and stick it out. It would take at least two days to re-embark you. Meanwhile, an Australian submarine has got up through the Narrows and has torpedoed a gunboat. Hunter Weston, despite his heavy losses, will be advancing tomorrow, which should divert pressure from you. Make a personal appeal to your men to make a supreme effort to hold their ground. You have got through the difficult business. Now you have only to dig, dig, dig until you are safe.'

And dig, dig, dig they did. With the 100-yard beach littered with 2,000 casualties and the hills above them covered with about as many Turks, the Anzac troops dug their burrows into the cliffsides, and the enemy did the same. The grand Gallipoli plan had, within hours of being launched, settled down into the same appalling system of trench warfare that was wasting millions of lives in the fields of France. The men at Anzac Cove and Cape Helles were to stay in those trenches and dug-outs for eight more months, and the Allied causalities were to climb to a quarter of a million before the pride of their leaders was sufficiently deflated to allow them to admit defeat and pull out.

By April 29, news got back to London that the Gallipoli offensive was not proving as successful as had been hoped. The news did not come from Hamilton, who prevaricated as his assault became bogged down. The news of the impending disaster was relayed instead by the Royal Navy.

Reinforcements were urgently needed - and they were available. In Egypt, where the original force had been assembled, fresh troops idly stood by, waiting for the call to sail to Gallipoli. But Hamilton never called them - either because he did not know they were available to him, or because of his pride. No one knows. Eventually, the reinforcements did sail, under direct orders from London. But by then the Turks too had summoned their best regiments to the narrow front.

Two weeks after the landings, Weston had lost 6,500 men at Cape Helles and had achieved nothing. Men were dying from lack of medical care, and ammunition was perilously low. Bayonet attacks and small sallies across trenches, producing heavy casualties, were the order of the day.

The scene at Anzac Cove was, if anything, worse. Each man was rationed to two bullets a day unless under prolonged attack. Along the ragged front lines, the opposing trenches were in some places less than 30 feet apart. Men lived like rats in holes in the hills, while on the beaches the maimed died on their stretchers under the constant barrage of Turkish shells.

On May 18 there took place at Anzac Cove the bloodiest battle of the campaign. The Turks had brought in fresh forces and now outnumbered by three to one the remaining 12,000 Australians and New Zealanders still able to fight. At 5 p.m. the greatest artillery barrage the Anzacs had yet seen burst around them. It continued into the night as the beleaguered soldiers huddled in their burrows. At 3 a.m. Birdwood ordered all his men to stand by for an expected attack. No sooner had they taken up their positions than the firing ceased. The front lines fell silent. There was a single bugle call - and a solid mass of Turks left their trenches and descended on the Anzacs. Wave after wave of Turks entered no-man's-land and were mown down before they could cross the narrow gap. The few who did cross were bayonetted as they fell into the Anzac trenches. The charges continued throughout the night and right through until midday. Every time a wave of Turks fell before the concerted fire of the Allies, another wave rose from the parapets of their trenches and charged to their deaths.



When the Turkish commanders called off the attacks, 10,000 of their men had fallen, half of them only yards from the Anzac trenches.

In the hours and days that followed, as both sides retreated to their trenches, the lines again fell relatively quiet. But throughout the day and night came moans and screams from those who had fallen in no-man's-land. With so many-bodies putrefying, the danger of disease increased daily, and the Anzacs pressed Hamilton to negotiate a ceasefire so that the dead could be buried. Hamilton refused, saying that the request must come from the Turks.

But on May 20 the volunteer soldiers from Down Under took matters into their own hands, and raised a Red Cross flag above the front line. It was immediately shot at by the Turks, and the flagstaff was shattered. Then the most extraordinary thing happened…. It was certain death to raise your head above the trenches of the front lines. Yet a lone Turkish soldier leaped up and began running across no-man's-land towards the Australians. He stopped above their trench and, in stumbling French, apologized for the shooting. Then he ran back again. Minutes later, Red Crescent flags appeared above the enemy trenches. General Walker, Commander of the 1st Australian Division, stood up and began slowly walking towards the Turkish lines. Not a shot was fired. Five Turkish officers came forward to greet him and they all chatted in French, exchanging pleasantries and cigarettes. After about ten minutes they parted, agreeing to meet again that evening to discuss an amnesty.

On May 24 there was a 'suspension of arms' so that each side could bury its dead. The enemies stood shoulder to shoulder and dug mass graves, all under the direction of Australian officers. Author Compton Mackenzie, who was an officer on Hamilton's staff, came ashore for the day and described the scene. 'Everywhere Turks were digging and digging graves for their countrymen who had been putrefying in heaps in the warm May air. The impression that scene made on my mind has obliterated all the rest of the time at Anzac. I cannot recall a single incident on the way back down the valley. I know only that nothing could cleanse the smell of death from the nostrils for a fortnight afterwards. There was no herb so aromatic but it reeked of carrion.'

The truce was to end at 4.30 p.m. on May 24, and about half an hour before the deadline Turkish and Allied troops exchanged cigarettes and fruit and small gifts. They shook hands, parted with wide grins and returned to their own trenches. Shortly after 4.30, a Turkish sniper opened fire and the Anzacs blasted back. The war had begun again.

There was little respite for the next seven months. On August 6 Hamilton launched a fresh assault on Suvla Bay, north of the Anzac positions. The enemy was totally outflanked and fell back in disarray. By the end of the day, the Turks in the area were outnumbered 15 to one. But again the orders to push forward did not come. The Turks regrouped and scaled off the beach-head. It was the same old story: stalemate.

As 1915 dragged on, life became a living hell for the men on Cape Helles. Dysentery spread through the army, and 1,000 soldiers a week were shipped out suffering from it. Three-quarters of the Anzacs were seriously affected by it. More than half of them also suffered from skin sores through living in filthy trenches. The food was bad. And there was no fresh water in Anzac Cove - it had to be shipped from Egypt 750 miles away. Throughout the summer, there was a plague of flies over the camp, which helped spread disease. And finally the winter produced a new horror - frostbite for 15,000 soldiers.

In October the disastrous Hamilton was recalled and General Sir Charles Monro took over. He reported to the War Cabinet in London: "The troops on the peninsula, with the exception of the Australian and New Zealand Corps, are not equal to a sustained effort owing to the inexperience of the officers, the want of training in the men and the depleted condition of many of the units. 1 am therefore of the opinion that another attempt to carry the Turkish lines would not offer any hope of success. On purely military grounds, I recommend the evacuation of the peninsula.'

The politicians argued the matter over until the middle of November before finally agreeing to give up the grand plan. Churchill resigned. He described Monro's part in the campaign thus: 'He came, he saw, he capitulated.'

Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove were evacuated in December 1915, and Cape Helles early the following month. One of the costliest blunders in history had come to an end. Half a million Allied troops had fought half a million Turks for eight months. And the result was 252,000 Allied casualties and 251,000 Turkish casualties. Even in death and injury there was stalemate.

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http://www.anzacsite.gov.au/
ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gallipoli