Anzac Cove, Gallipoli 1915
ByRoger Hudson
Roger Hudson describes the bloody stalemate that followed the landing of Allied troops on the Turkish coast.
It would be hard to imagine a less suitable place to land troops than the strip of beach soon to be christened Anzac Cove. The Australians and New Zealanders were meant to have been put ashore further down the Gallipoli peninsula, but the strength of the current had been under-estimated, while those in charge of the pinnaces towing the boats got disoriented.
The Turks were ready, under the command of Mustafa Kemal, one of the outstanding figures to emerge from the First World War.
Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) attempts to move inland and seize the higher ground were repulsed.
General Birdwood, the Anzac commander, was only stopped from ordering an immediate re-embarkation by the prospect of it degenerating into a complete rout. By the following evening the hospital ships were full; after five days 136 officers and 3,313 men had been killed or wounded and the rest were confined to a beachhead perimeter only a few hundred yards inland and three or four miles long.
The beach itself, a mile-and-a-half long, was hidden from the Turks but vulnerable to shrapnel, its flimsy piers were regularly broken up by high seas and it was 1,400 miles away from the nearest railhead at Marseilles. There was soon a network of trenches – sometimes only ten yards from the Turkish line – dugouts, dumps and mule tracks. Gallipoli was meant to break the stalemate of the Western Front, but only succeeded in replicating it, here and at Cape Helles a little to the south, where the British landings had taken place on the same day, April 25th.
The Turkish record in recent years and in the first months of the war had not been good. They had lost Libya to Italy in 1911-12 and most of their European territory in the first Balkan War of 1912-13. An attack on the Suez Canal had been repulsed by the British and the Russians had defeated them in the Caucasus, triggering the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. All this helped Churchill to persuade Asquith's Cabinet that it should answer the Grand Duke Nicholas's call for the Allies to remove the distraction of Turkey so Russia could concentrate on attacking the Central Powers.
But what seemed a simple matter of a squadron of the Royal Navy's obsolete pre-Dreadnought battleships steaming through the Dardanelles and pounding the Turks into a swift surrender by a bombardment of Constantinople was soon shown to be far from that. Battleships were sunk and shore batteries were not subdued, while the Turks and their German advisers were prompted to strengthen the defences of the Gallipoli peninsula ready for the landings which they rightly anticipated.
As the weeks went by, the temptation to break off the offensive was resisted for fear of its effect on the millions of Muslims within the British Empire and on still-neutral Balkan countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, whom the Allies hoped to bring in on their side. As the temperature rose and the number of unburied grew, so the Gallipoli flies bred, the stench increased and dysentery spread. In an attempt to get rid of dead mules, they were towed out to sea but the tide brought them back.
A suicidal frontal attack by the Turks on May 18-19th produced 10,000 casualties and 3,000 dead lying unburied.
The Turkish-speaking Aubrey Herbert, inspiration for John Buchan's character, Greenmantle, managed to negotiate a truce – as remarkable as that of Christmas 1914 – so that the dead could be buried.
He persuaded each side that the other had requested it.
In August failure was reinforced one more time with the grossly incompetent aftermath of the landing at Suvla Bay, while the Australian attack on Lone Pine produced seven VCs and 1,700 casualties. Herbert recorded in his diary that:
'The lines of wounded are creeping up to the cemetery like a tide, and the cemetery is coming to meet the wounded.' In October the overall commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, was recalled and his replacement set about planning for withdrawal.
By the end, half the 410,000 British Empire troops engaged at Gallipoli were casualties. Turkish losses were put at 251,000 but were probably higher. Australia's tally was 8,700 dead, New Zealand's, 2,700; a brutal coming of age.
