On 25 April 1915, a day of gas and demoralisation for British and French alike on the Western Front, the Anglo-French military landings, from which the Allies expected so much, took place on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Like the naval attack on the Narrows five weeks earlier, the troop landings were carried out in the hope of a swift victory. No victory, however, either swift or slow, resulted. As with the naval attack, there were moments when it seemed that success was within grasp. Opportunities for success existed, but were cast away by mistakes and mischance.
Two separate landing areas were chosen on the Gallipoli Peninsula, one at Cape Helles, at the southern tip of the peninsula, and one further north, opposite the town of Maidos. It was intended that the advance from the southern landings would push the Turks back to the northern landing, trapping them between the two forces. The first landing took place on the northern beach, codenamed Z Beach, shortly before dawn. Two months earlier the low British estimate of Turkish fighting abilities had led Kitchener to comment caustically that Australian and New Zealand troops would be quite adequate for the task of what he called ‘a cruise in the Marmara’. It was therefore Australians and New Zealanders, who had reached Egypt on their way to the Western Front and been diverted for the quick and easy battle against the Turks, who were put ashore on Z beach. Possibly because of a navigational error, they were put ashore not at their original landing place, Gaba Tepe, from where they might have advanced on almost level ground across the central part of the peninsula at its narrowest point, but at Ari Burnu, a smaller cape further north, below the precipitous heights of Chunuk Bair. ‘Tell the Colonel,’ Commander Dix, in charge of the first landing, called out, ‘that the damn fools have landed us a mile too far north!’
The landing itself was virtually unopposed. Shortly before midday a Turkish battery near Gaba Tepe began to shell the soldiers on the landing beach. Many men pushed inland, where the Turks began to inflict heavier casualties. Still, the Australians pushed forward, up a steep terrain, towards the high ground. In the late afternoon, the company of Turkish troops holding the crest of Chunuk Bair ran out of ammunition and began to withdraw. As a small group of Australians approached the crest, the commander of one of the six Turkish divisions on the peninsula, Mustafa Kemal, who was at that moment reconnoitering the area ahead of the main body of his troops, reached the men who were pulling out. In his memoirs he recalled the dialogue that followed: ‘Why are you running away?’ ‘The enemy, sir.’ ‘Where?’ ‘There.’
Kemal looked across to the hill. The Australians had just reached it. Unless something stopped them, they could quickly move on to the higher ground. ‘One doesn’t run away from the enemy,’ Kemal told his retreating troops. ‘We have no ammunition,’ they replied. ‘If you haven’t any ammunition, at least you have your bayonets.’ Kemal then ordered the Turkish detachment to halt, fix bayonets and lie down facing the enemy. ‘As soon as the men lay down, so did the enemy,’ he later recalled. ‘This was the moment of time that we gained.’ One of the Australians, Captain Tulloch, later recalled a Turkish officer standing under a tree less than a thousand yards away, giving orders. Tulloch fired at the officer, who did not move.
Kemal’s own best regiment was at that very moment engaged in routine practise manoeuvres on the eastern slopes of Chunuk Bair. Ordering it forward, he took two hundred men and led them to the crest. He reached it ahead of most of them, and saw, four hundred yards below, an Australian column advancing. Pushing his men forward, he organised each group as it arrived, keeping the Australians from the crest. A battery of guns arrived. Wheeling the first gun into position himself, and under fire, Kemal knew that if the crest was not held the whole position on the peninsula could be lost.
An Australian scout, returning from the high ground, found a group of Australians sitting in the sun ‘smoking and eating as if on a picnic’. When he told them that the Turks were coming on ‘in thousands’, the officer in charge replied, ‘I didn’t dream they’d come back.’ The Turkish line of retreat along the Bulair Peninsula was denuded of men in order to reinforce the counter-attack. One more Turkish and two Arab regiments were thrown in. Throughout the day the fighting continued. The Australians were held two-thirds of the way up the slope.
Successive waves of Turks, hurling themselves on their adversary, were killed by machine-gun fire as they clambered over the bodies of the previous wave. More and more Australian wounded were falling back to the narrow breach. ‘There was no rest, no lull,’ one Australian soldier wrote, ‘while the rotting dead lay all around us, never a pause in the whole of that long day that started at the crack of dawn. How we longed for nightfall! How we prayed for this ghastly day to end! How we yearned for the sight of the first dark shadow!’
By nightfall both the Australians and the Turks were exhausted. The two Arab regiments were at the end of their ability to fight on. Throughout the night Kemal tried to get his tired soldiers to drive the Australians into the sea. The Australians held on to the western slopes of Chunuk Bair and could not be dislodged. Many, however, were falling back from the front line, ‘and cannot be collected in this difficult country’, their commanding officer, General Birdwood, reported. Birdwood added that the New Zealand Brigade, which had lost heavily during the day, ‘is to some extent demoralised’. He wanted to evacuate the beachhead. When this request was conveyed by ship to the Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, whose original orders had been confidently headed ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force’, he replied: ‘Your news is indeed serious. But there is nothing for it but to dig yourselves right in and stick it out.’
Hamilton added that the southern force would be advancing the next morning, ‘which should divert pressure from you’. This was a remarkably over-optimistic assessment of what would be possible in the south, as the events there during April 25 had made clear.
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There were five separate landing beaches at Cape Helles on April 25, codenamed S, V, W, X and Y Beaches. At V Beach 2,000 troops, two Irish battalions and a Hampshire one, were hidden in a collier, the River Clyde, which was deliberately run aground. A bridge of lighters was prepared so that the men could rush from the ship to the shore. As they tried to do so, they were caught by fierce machine-gun fire from the cliff above, and by artillery fire of one of Colonel Wehrle’s batteries, located in the ruins of the Sedd-ul-Bahr fort that had been blasted during the naval bombardments two months earlier. Further along V Beach, more men were landed from naval cutters, small wooden boats propelled with oars. These men, too, were mown down, many of them sinking in the water and drowning under the weight of their packs. So many men were lost in the first hour that a halt was called until nightfall, when the remaining troops in the River Clyde were put ashore. By the time the Turks were beaten back, more than half those who had landed were killed or wounded. A Royal Naval commander, a sub-lieutenant, two midshipmen and two seamen were each awarded the Victoria Cross for their bravery at V Beach that morning.
At W Beach it was men of the Lancashire Fusiliers who were to be put ashore. In 1811, during a Spanish Peninsula War battle against Napoleon’s army, it was said of their predecessors: ‘Nothing can stop this astonishing infantry!’ Put into cutters, they were towed in flotillas of six by steam picket boats, then rowed the final distance. On reaching their beach, they found that the preliminary naval bombardment had failed to inflict serious damage on the barbed-wire entanglements along the shore. Many Turks had also survived the naval bombardment, hiding in their dug-outs, and awaited the invader in silence, their machine guns ready for action. ‘It might have been a deserted land we were nearing in our boats,’ one British officer, Captain Raymond Willis, later recalled. ‘Then, crack! The stroke oar of my boat fell forward to the angry astonishment of his mates, and pandemonium broke out as soldiers and sailors struggled to get out of the sudden hail of bullets that was sweeping the beach and the cutters from end to end.’
The men were so tightly packed in the cutters that some continued to sit upright after they had been shot dead. From the cutters, the men jumped into deep water. With seventy pounds weight of kit, and their rifles, many of those who were hit drowned under the weight of their equipment. Others were killed outright. Many, reaching the shore, were killed as they struggled to surmount the barbed wire. Several men were killed by a British naval shell falling short. Captain Clayton, reaching the shelter of the cliff with a few of his men, recalled how ‘I shouted to the soldier behind me to signal, but he shouted back “I am shot through the chest.” I then perceived they were all hit.’ In all, 950 men had landed at W Beach. By the time the beach was secured, six officers and 254 men had been killed, and 183 wounded.
Six Victoria Crosses were awarded to the Lancashire Fusiliers, including Captain Willis, for their bravery that morning at W Beach. One of the six, Private W. Keneally, died afterwards of his wounds, in hospital at Malta. The phrase ‘Six VCs Before Breakfast’ became a proud boast in Lancashire.65 Henceforth W Beach was to be known as Lancashire Landing.
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Three of the six beaches at Cape Helles, S, X and Y, were hardly defended. Troops landing at S Beach were virtually unopposed. When told by a Turkish prisoner that there were only one thousand men in the area, they dug in, assuming that the Turk was referring to the immediate area. In fact, he meant the whole of the peninsula south of Gaba Tepe. When other prisoners confirmed this figure later in the day, and made it clear that the thousand men referred to those in the whole of the Cape Helles area, including the village of Krithia and the heights of Achi Baba, they were not believed. Yet what they said was true: at that moment the Turks were far less able to repel a serious advance than they had been at Chunuk Bair. Had those who landed known the actual situation, they might have entered Krithia and reached the heights of Achi Baba without serious opposition.
On X Beach the small guard of twelve Turkish defenders surrendered without firing a shot, and the attackers reached the cliff top without a single casualty. They then turned back to W Beach to help in the battle there. A chaplain who was with them later described the sight that confronted them: ‘One hundred corpses lay in rows upon the sand, some of them so badly mauled as to be beyond recognition…. Some of the Lancashires lay dead half-way up the cliffs, still holding their rifles in their cold, clenched hands.’
The Turks on W Beach were outflanked by men from the other beaches, and beaten back by the surviving Lancashires and a steady stream of reinforcements that eventually outnumbered them ten to one. At Y Beach those who landed reached the cliff top without opposition at all. As the different beachheads were linked up, it seemed possible that, despite the terrors of that first day’s fighting at V and W, the strategic plan might still come to pass, with the Turks driven so far northward that Allied troops would be able to capture all the forts on the European shore. Once this had been achieved, the object of the landings would be secured: the Fleet would sail through the Narrows and on to Constantinople.
For the men who had landed amid such carnage at V and W, the main thought was of digging in, and tending the wounded. At W Beach the task of attending to the wounded was a battle in itself. ‘It was difficult to select the most urgent cases,’ one medical orderly later wrote. ‘Men had lost arms and legs, brains oozed out of shattered skulls, and lungs protruded from riven chests; many had lost their faces and were, I should think, unrecognisable to their friends…. One poor chap had lost his nose and most of his face, and we were obliged to take off an arm, the other hand, and extract two bullets like shark’s teeth from his thigh, besides minor operations. It was really a precious hour or more wasted, for I saw him next morning being carried to the mortuary.’ By nightfall on April 26 more than 30,000 Allied troops were ashore. The number of dead and wounded in the first two days of battle exceeded 20,000. Hospital ships, soon to be as familiar a sight in the Eastern Mediterranean as warships, took the wounded back to Egypt.
At Cape Helles, the Turks rushed reinforcements forward. Unable to drive the British off the beaches, they withdrew on April 27 to a position across the peninsula in front of the hill of Achi Baba. To command the southern front, Liman von Sanders sent a German officer, Hans Kannengiesser. He reached the peninsula on April 29, followed a few days later by a German naval officer, Lieutenant Bolz, with eight machine guns and thirty-two German Marines. The British had already attempted to reach Achi Baba on April 27 and been driven off by Turkish soldiers sent down from Maidos. Even the first British objective, the village of Krithia, only four miles from the landing beaches, proved an impossible objective: of the 14,000 men who attacked the Turks that day, 3,000 were killed or wounded.
A few days later, as four battalions of Lancashire Fusiliers were approaching the peninsula by sea, to reinforce those already there, they passed a hospital ship carrying the wounded back to Egypt. The newcomers called out enthusiastically, ‘Are we downhearted? No!’ to which those leaving replied: ‘But you bloody soon will be!’
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One group of soldiers landed at Cape Helles not only to fight against the Turks, but to fight for their own national ideal. On the day after the naval attack of March 18, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, determined to contribute towards a victory over the Turks that might advance the nationalist aspirations of the Jews, had been present at the establishment of an entirely Jewish military unit, the Zion Mule Corps, drawn from Palestinian Jews who had fled from Palestine to Egypt. Commanded by a British officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Patterson, with five British and eight Jewish officers, the five hundred served on the Gallipoli Peninsula from first to last.
The senior Jewish officer in the Zion Mule Corps, Captain Joseph Trumpeldor, had fought in the Russian army against Japan in 1904, when he lost an arm. In 1912 he had settled in Palestine. A year after the Gallipoli landings Colonel Patterson wrote: ‘Many of the Zionists whom I had thought somewhat lacking in courage, showed themselves fearless to a degree when under heavy fire, while Captain Trumpeldor actually revelled in it, and the hotter it became the more he liked it, and would remark: “Ah, it is now plus gai!”’
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From first to last, the Narrows remained under Turkish control, not even threatened by infantry assault. There were moments when incompetent and confused leadership at Gallipoli made a mockery of the bravery and tenacity of the Allied troops. The British Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, who had been as dashing an officer as could be imagined on the North-West Frontier of India, remained for the duration of the landings, and for much of the subsequent fighting, on board ship, watching the battle from offshore, or studying his commanders’ reports at his headquarters on the distant island of Mudros.
The Turks, under German generals, but inspired and cajoled by their own Mustafa Kemal, were able to keep the invading force pinned down to its two beachheads. The Anglo-French landings had succeeded, however: tens of thousands of men were ashore, and the prospect of an Allied victory remained sufficiently alluring for the Italians to sign a secret treaty on April 26, committing themselves to the Entente.
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Just as, in its own secret treaty on March 20, Russia was to acquire Constantinople and the Straits once the Ottoman Empire was defeated, so under the secret treaty by which Italy agreed to join the war, she too would acquire substantial territory. Italy’s territorial gains would come both from a defeated Austria-Hungary and a defeated Turkey. They were spelt out with precision in the text of the treaty. From Austria-Hungary, Italy would acquire the Trentino, the South Tyrol, Trieste, the counties of Gorizia and Gradisca, the Istrian Peninsula, Northern Dalmatia and numerous islands off the Dalmatian coast. From Turkey she would acquire a substantial ‘sphere of influence’ in Anatolia. She would also be given additional colonial territory in North Africa and, from Albania, would receive the Adriatic port of Valona, and Saseno Island.
The prospect of gaining these considerable territories depended, for both Russia and Italy, upon victory at the Gallipoli Peninsula. At first there seemed to be a real hope of a speedy success. On April 28 a force of 14,000 men advanced two miles inland from Cape Helles, almost to the heights of Achi Baba, from which they would have been able to look down on, and fire on, the Turkish forts on the European shore. But despite repeated assaults, those heights remained in Turkish hands, as did the village of Krithia below them. Since the initial landings, Turkish reinforcements had been brought up uninterruptedly from the Constantinople region, and from Anatolia.
On April 30 the Turkish Minister of War, Enver Pasha, confident that he could eliminate these two Allied toeholds on Turkish soil, ordered General Liman von Sandars to ‘drive the invaders into the sea’. This proved impossible to fulfil. When, on May 3, Kitchener assured the British War Council that there was ‘no doubt that we shall break through’, he too was mistaken. That night a ferocious attack by the Turks at Cape Helles was thrown back by the French.
At Gallipoli, as on the Western Front, trenches and even ridges were to change hands again and again, but on a normal-size map there would be no perceptible change of the line. The war at sea also continued at the Dardanelles, but without a conclusion: on the night of April 30, firing more than fifty of its massive 12-inch shells the whole length of the Dardanelles waterway, the British battleship Lord Nelson set part of the town of Chanak on fire. It was to do so again four weeks later. On May 1 a British submarine, penetrating beneath the defences of the Narrows, sank a Turkish troop transport, the Guj Djemal, with 6,000 troops on board. But neither the flames of Chanak nor the British submarine presence in the Sea of Marmara could affect either Turkish morale or the ability of the Allies to break the stalemate.
On May 6, in a second attempt to capture the flat-topped hill of Achi Baba, or at least the village of Krithia at its base, a force of 25,000 British and French troops, supported by 105 heavy guns, pressed forward six hundred yards, but the village and the crest eluded them. Among the British troops were the two Naval Brigades that had fought at Antwerp in October 1914. There they had lost fifty men: at Krithia half their number, 1,600 men in all, were killed or wounded. During the battle a 26-year-old New Zealand lieutenant, Bernard Freyberg, whose commanding officer was killed in the attack, suffered a severe abdominal wound. Two months later he was wounded in the stomach again. After a distinguished military career in two World Wars, and several more serious wounds on the Western Front, Freyberg died in 1963, when his Gallipoli wound opened up.
The German officer commanding the Turkish troops south of Achi Baba, who drove the British off, was Major-General Erich Weber. Six months earlier, as Colonel Weber, he had supervised the closure and mining of the Dardanelles.
The attempt to end the stalemate on the Western Front by a rapid and decisive victory elsewhere was over. Fighting would continue on the peninsula for the rest of the year. But the element of surprise had been lost, and the battles on the Western, and Eastern Fronts, which the blow against Turkey was intended to help, continued without respite or amelioration.
The naval hopes of March, and the military hopes of April, had both been dashed. Ill-luck and error, followed by the unexpected vigour of the Turkish defenders, shattered the Allied dream of a turning point that would bring them both victory in the field and territory on the map.