The Making of a General
‘It is a pretty tough business holding on here . . . The Turks are good enough fighters but have little heart to come to close quarters with the bayonet. We have an awful lot of dead ones, and some of our own, in front of us.’—Russell writes to his father in England after 42,000 Turkish troops attack the Anzac line at Gallipoli on 19 May.
By the time Russell’s brigade arrived on Lemnos, the Gallipoli campaign was already into its third week. Birdwood’s Anzacs had landed at Ari Burnu on the morning of 25 April after an error by the Royal Navy had put them ashore 1.5 kilometres too far to the north. Instead of facing what they believed would be lightly defended Turkish positions in relatively open country, 16,000 Australian and New Zealand troops were pinned down on two narrow ridges above the beachhead, fighting off fierce Turkish counter-attacks. Mixed groups of Australians and New Zealanders had thrust inland, only to be cut off and killed. Under murderous shrapnel and sniper fire, others had retreated to the beach or found shelter in steep gullies.
The attacking battalions were steadily forced back to a line of outposts that would form their front line for the next eight months—Courtney’s Post, Quinn’s Post, Steele’s Post, Pope’s Hill and Walker’s Top. At Cape Helles, two Anzac brigades had been thrown into a series of hastily planned and badly coordinated attacks, inflicting 850 casualties on the NZ Infantry Brigade alone. An attempt by the Anzacs to seize the critical high point, Baby 700, on the night of 2 May had been beaten back with heavy losses. From Helles to Ari Burnu, the Allied advance had been held; the assault of 25 April had become a siege.
The morning that Russell and his 2000-strong brigade arrived off the Gallipoli peninsula was a relatively quiet one, broken only by the heavy guns of British warships as they pounded Turkish positions in the hills. To troopers accustomed for so long to the low, barren sand-dunes of Egypt, ‘these high Gallipoli hills and islands, bathed in the glory of an Aegean evening, brought memories of other coastlines, Cook Strait maybe, or the Great Barrier’.30 They crowded the rails trying to identify signs of battle ashore and the positions of the Anzac battalions that had landed on 25 April.
In the mid-afternoon their troopship, the Grantully Castle, anchored about 3 kilometres off Anzac Cove. Field guns could be seen firing ashore and shells bursting on high crests. Heavy shells from the German warship Goeben in the Dardanelles channel sent up great geysers of water near a four-funnelled British cruiser nearby. As darkness fell, destroyers and torpedo boats came alongside and took off the heavily laden troopers, transferring them to barges that would be towed by small boats once they were within 1500 metres of land.
On shore, the two mounted brigades were confronted with the harsh realities of the Gallipoli campaign—men, animals and supplies crowded into a narrow beachhead, machine-gun and rifle bullets whining overhead, freshly dug graves in a makeshift cemetery nearby. They spent an uncomfortable first night bivouacked on the slopes below Walker’s Top, climbing the next day to the ridge where they were to take over two sections of the front line from the Royal Marine Light Infantry and the Royal Naval Division. Walker’s Top was vital to the security of the Anzac positions on Gallipoli. If the Turks captured it, they would overlook the Anzac rear areas along the beach and be able to fire into the backs of the defenders lining the edge of the ridge above Monash Gully.31
It was a stiff introduction for untried troops. Their new position was exposed on all sides to fire from the higher Turkish trenches, and any careless movement meant death. Every loophole had been targeted by snipers and at night the Turks sprayed the parapets with machine-gun fire, killing any sentries peering over them.32 Out in no-man’s-land lay the unburied bodies of many Turks and Anzacs, casualties of the previous two and a half weeks of fighting. Flies were everywhere and the stench was very bad.
Russell put his mounted riflemen quickly to work. The track bringing guns and supplies up to their position was widened and two 18-pounder guns were dragged up onto Walker’s Top. The trenches, which were in a filthy state, were cleaned up and saps driven out into no-man’s-land to give the troops a clear field of fire. Shelters were cut into the trench walls where the men could rest and sleep in safety, if not in comfort. Rolls of barbed wire were put in place to protect their positions against frontal attack, and wire-netting to protect against Turkish bombs and grenades. Sandbag barricades were built to shield tracks from Turkish snipers and pits were dug for home-made mortars. Counter-mining under Turkish trenches was begun.
Godley, ashore with the Anzacs since 25 April, noted approvingly: ‘Russell’s Mounted Rifles has [sic] arrived, taken over a section of the defences, and has [sic] already begun to do excellent work in the way of reconnaissance and sapping out towards the enemy.’33
In the following weeks, mounted patrols probed the foothills and plains to the north, giving Anzac commanders valuable intelligence about the state of the Turkish defences. They found the coastal hills were weakly held, with the ridges and valleys in between offering routes for infantry up onto the heights of the Sari Bair range. Their reconnaissance also revealed that the Sari Bair ridge north of Battleship Hill, including the heights of Chunuk Bair, Hill Q and 971, were undefended.
About this time the non-combatant Maori Pioneer contingent arrived directly from Malta. At first, Russell was unsure of how to use the force, as the men had not undergone the same hard battle training as the mounted riflemen in Egypt. In the end, he divided the contingent between his three mounted regiments, where they joined in the work of digging trenches, making roads, levelling terraces and dragging guns and water tanks into position. In the August attack on the foothills of Sari Bair, 100 pioneers would also fight as combat troops.
Russell could have chosen the comparative safety of the beach for his headquarters. Instead he sited his command dugout just 40 metres from the Turkish trenches, and there endured most of the dangers and discomforts of his troopers, including a diet of bully beef, biscuits, bacon and tea. The only concession to seniority and comfort was his sleeping quarters, a ‘whare puni’ built by the pioneers, of the type usually made of raupo and manuka. ‘It cannot claim to be in any sense bomb or bullet-proof,’ Russell wrote to his family, ‘but I have some sandbags round my bed and sleep peacefully. If a shell lands in it, well it’s ‘mafish’ (finished!) as they say in Egypt.’
Insisting on seeing things for himself, Russell took big risks right from the start. Trooper W.B. Fitchett recalled finding his commander on hands and knees inspecting Turkish positions from a trench just 12 metres from the enemy’s forward positions. On another occasion, Fitchett almost shot Russell dead as he returned from a foolhardy night reconnaissance in no-man’s-land with sniper and machine gunner Captain Wallingford:
Hearing a suspicious noise, I challenged. No reply. Somebody fired into the scrub. Seeing something move, I aimed and was about to fire when the Sergeant-Major—a British Regular—alongside me suddenly shouted, “Put your hands up and stand up!” Two figures then rose from the scrub, hands upwards, while a cool voice (Russell’s) that I can still hear to this day said, “Well, how long are you going to keep us out here?”34
The first real test of Russell’s command abilities was soon to come. After repulsing the British attacks at Cape Helles in early May, the Turkish commander, General Liman von Sanders, was ordered to attack the Anzac positions at Ari Burnu and drive the invaders into the sea. On the night of 18/19 May, 42,000 Turks charged the entire Anzac front line, held at this time by 17,350 Australians and New Zealanders, supported by 43 guns.35 The attack began at 5 pm with the heaviest shelling of Anzac trenches so far on Gallipoli. Three hours of heavy rifle and machine-gun fire followed at midnight, then at 3.30 am the Turkish troops attacked in waves, chanting ‘Allah! Allah!’ as they came.
Deployed in their trenches, outposts and saps, Russell’s squadrons watched them come, the moonlight glinting on their bayonets:
Closer and closer came the charge, but still fire was withheld . . . Not until the first line of Turks was 20 yards away was the order for rapid fire given. The troopers sprang to the parapet like greyhounds, and in a second they were pouring a devastating fire into the approaching ranks . . . There were no flares to throw out in front, and not even any jam tin bombs. It was a battle of bullet and steel.36
The Anzac machine guns did most of the killing that night, and after repeated attacks over 10,000 Turks lay dead or wounded between the lines. Some 630 Australians and New Zealanders had also been killed, among them 60 of Russell’s troopers. The Turkish commanders had discovered what the Anzacs had learnt at such great cost at Helles—raw courage alone was no defence against strong entrenchments and well-sited machine guns.
In recognition of the brigade’s stand on 19 May, Walker’s Top was renamed Russell’s Top—but it was not over yet. In broad daylight on 20 May, Godley ordered a counter-attack against Turkish trenches at the Nek, and 100 men under the command of Captain W.J. Hardham VC moved into position for the assault. Trooper Clutha Mackenzie was among those ordered forward for the attack, lying out under the hot sun waiting for the order to charge:
Had we made the charge they consider that few of us, if any, would have come back, so terrific was the fire on account of which the attack was given up. Machine guns would have mown us down. Godley several times ordered us to move but our brigadier [Russell] refused.37
Meldrum and Mackesy, commanders respectively of the Wellington and Auckland regiments, had protested to Russell that the attack would achieve nothing and mean certain death for the 100 men who would make it. Russell agreed and told Godley he would not order it. Godley insisted that the attack go ahead, Russell again resisted, and Godley grudgingly gave in.38 Another officer who resisted an order from his superior would not be so lucky. Lieutenant-Colonel Geddes, commanding officer of 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers, would be removed from command for refusing to attack at Helles on 6/7 August after judging the situation to be hopeless.
There is little doubt about what would have happened to the attacking force had Godley not backed down. The ground in front of Hardham’s men was devoid of cover and could be raked by the Turks at will from numerous machine guns sited on strongpoints directly overlooking the Nek. Moreover, the Nek itself was so narrow that the New Zealanders would have had to bunch together as they crossed it: ‘A mad fatal thing,’ Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone—who was soon to die on Chunuk Bair—called it. During the August assault on Sari Bair, 450 men of two Australian Light Horse regiments charged the same Turkish positions in three separate attacks and were massacred; the heroic but tragically futile action was commemorated in the 1981 film Gallipoli.
Four days later, the two sides agreed to an armistice to bury the dead—Turks, Australians and New Zealanders. The corpses lay so thick in the scrub in front of the Anzac trenches that it was almost impossible to pass without treading on hideously swollen bodies, or avoid the stench that made men want to vomit. Russell, however, found himself increasingly unmoved by such sights: ‘It is gruesome to find arms and legs sticking out of the sides of trenches,’ he wrote to his father. ‘But it is curious how absolutely callous one becomes to the sight of wounded and dead men. You treat it as a matter of course and go straight ahead.’
Nor did being under constant Turkish shelling, machine-gun and rifle fire seem to bother Russell much, and the moralist in him was never far distant:
As to what one feels like under fire (nothing at all, practically). You think you are going to be hit, how lonesome it is being cut off from all you care for and about. Nor does human nature alter to any extent. Those who smoke too much still give way to this pernicious habit—the drunkard alone and the whoremonger are virtuous by necessity.
In letters to his family, Russell reported that his rheumatism was treating him well. He asked them, however, to send a few extra luxuries—potted meats, sardines, salmon, pâté de foie gras, raisins, pineapple chunks and a cake, along with glycerine suppositories and Kruschen salts. Clearly, army rations were by now having as dire an effect on his digestive system as they were on those of his men. But in spite of the constant danger and discomfort, he claimed to be happy and sleeping well: ‘If heavy firing starts you only turn over and hope it doesn’t mean an attack and your sleep cut short. I’ve a telephone connected with all my regiments, so can find out what’s the matter without turning out.’
Turkish shelling made beach swimming a grave risk for men desperate to keep clean, but Russell assured Gertrude that he was able to walk the short distance from his dugout down to the beach and bathe every day in ‘a moderately safe spot’. Privately, he could not help contrasting the dangers of his position right in the firing line with that of Hamilton and his headquarters staff ‘comfortably and safely housed on a palatial liner’ off the island of Imbros.
In spite of the hardships endured by his men, Russell faced few discipline problems on Gallipoli; and the one major incident that did occur, he handled with appropriate leniency. On 31 May, trooper Marshall was charged with the serious crime of sleeping while on sentry duty. He was found guilty and sentenced to 14 days’ Field Punishment No. 2, most of which would have been served as hard labour.
By now, however, Russell’s impatience with the static trench warfare of Gallipoli was beginning to show. ‘It’s time things were moving,’ he wrote to his father. ‘We don’t want this to go on forever, even with wool at ¼d a pound, which I see the Tunanui wool fetched all round.’ Meanwhile, he considered starting a garden of wildflowers outside his dugout, only to abandon it for lack of water and the risk that a Turkish shell would blow garden and gardener sky-high.
On 27 May, Russell and his mounteds watched as a German submarine sank the battleship Triumph in full view of the Anzac positions, and marvelled at the discipline of the British sailors lined up on her deck waiting for rescue. Admiral de Robeck, commander of the fleet covering the troops on the Gallipoli peninsula, decided to risk his ships no further and ordered them to sail for Egypt and Mudros Harbour. Two days later, Majestic, the one battleship still stationed off the coast, was torpedoed by the same submarine off Cape Helles. Apart from two destroyers, the Anzacs were now without naval support on the peninsula.
On 28 May, a squadron of the Canterbury regiment attacked and captured a Turkish trench about 300 metres inland from No. 2 Outpost and overlooked by Turkish positions on Table Top and Destroyer Hill. Enemy snipers in this new position, No. 3 Post, were ‘making a nuisance of themselves’ and Godley, perhaps at Russell’s suggestion, wanted to clear them out.39
It was a mistake. The Turks counter-attacked the newly occupied post in force, and fresh squadrons of mounteds had to be sent under heavy fire to relieve the besieged defenders. Godley wanted the relief force to stay in the post, but Russell had already ordered it to be abandoned once its defenders had been rescued. Godley countermanded Russell’s order but was himself overruled by Birdwood. Russell admitted in a letter to Gertrude: ‘I did not like the position at all and thought that it was too exposed, and finally got leave from GOC [Godley] to withdraw into another position—a consent very reluctantly given.’
Trooper Clutha Mackenzie blamed the debacle on Russell, who ‘looked at things from a safe distance through his field glasses and desired the outpost to be held at all costs’. The decision to establish a weak and unsupported outpost, overlooked by the Turks on three sides and a long distance from the main New Zealand position, was ‘a foolish error of judgment’ that had cost the mounteds many of its best men.40 NZMR historian Terry Kinloch is no less critical, blaming both commanders, but particularly Godley, for an ill-conceived attack that cost the lives of 23 mounted riflemen and wounded 57:
Had Godley or Russell looked at the ground closely from No 2 Outpost before ordering the attack, they should have seen that No 3 Outpost could not have been retained while the Turks held the adjacent higher ground of Table Top and Destroyer Hill. Approving the attack was Godley’s second serious tactical error to affect the mounteds after the 20 May counter-attack order.41
Meanwhile, Russell was blaming First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. The concept of the Gallipoli campaign, he wrote to his father, had been a good one but its execution by the British fleet, without supporting ground troops, was foolishly premature. With a delay of three to four weeks and simultaneous cooperation between a landing force of say 40,000 men and the fleet, the goals of the campaign would have been readily achieved. Instead, the Turks had been given a breathing space of several weeks to prepare their defences, and the Anzacs now found themselves confronted by barbed wire and trenches where only rocks and scrub existed before.
Russell’s opinions were obviously shared at the higher levels of command. After Churchill visited Gallipoli in July, Godley wrote to Ronald Graham, New Zealand’s Minister of the Interior: ‘[Churchill] certainly is a plucky fellow, and I think he should be given a VC and then taken out and shot.’42
At 1.30 am on 30 June, the Turks launched their last assault on Anzac positions, the brunt of it falling on Chauvel’s Australian Light Horse and a contingent of Russell’s mounteds. In the moonlight, the Turkish regiments surged forward to the attack on No. 4 section: ‘In the half light, the machine gunners found the range and mercilessly cut up the attacking waves. But they were not to be denied. On and on they pressed, right up to the parapets.’43
Russell’s description of the attack was clinical and brief, recording only the 400 dead Turks left in front of his trenches, and his relief at the ‘nominal’ casualties incurred by his mounteds. Hamilton was once again more than satisfied, describing the action as ‘the best business done at Anzac since May 19th . . . Their defeat complete; very bloody. Nine fresh enemy battalions smashed to bits.’44
The casualties, however, cut both ways. By this time over 2600 New Zealanders had been killed and wounded on Gallipoli, and almost as many evacuated because of sickness. Over 700 of them were men of Russell’s mounted brigade, which had fought tenaciously for six weeks to hold its section of the Anzac front line. The greatest tests of Russell’s leadership, however, were still to come.