Once on Sari Bair
‘Heavy fighting has been going on since yesterday at the Dardanelles. The situation is obviously critical. Should the Dardanelles fall, the World War has been decided against us.’—Entry in the diary of Germany’s Secretary of State for the Navy, Admiral von Tirpitz, as British, Australian and New Zealand troops assault the heights of Sari Bar in August 1915.
By the end of June 1915 it was clear to Allied commanders that they had now reached a stalemate on Gallipoli, no less real than the one on the Western Front. To break it, plans were drawn up for a new offensive that would smash through the Turkish defences on Gallipoli, as originally planned, and allow Allied warships through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara and on to Constantinople.
From its early days on Gallipoli, Russell’s mounted brigade had explored the hills and steep gullies to the north of Ari Burnu and had found what were thought to be safe routes for infantry up towards the dominating heights of Sari Bair. Birdwood initially planned to use this information for a June/July advance north through the foothills to seize Battleship Hill, Hill Q and Chunuk Bair, supported by a feint towards Gaba Tepe in the south. It would involve three brigades of infantry and be spearheaded by the NZMR, which had some knowledge of the ground over which the attack would take place.
By late July elements of the plan had changed, including the role of Russell’s mounteds, who would now be subsidiary to the main assault. Hamilton’s force of 37,000 men and 72 guns, supported by British warships, would now burst out from the flank of the Anzac position at the same time as fresh British troops under Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford were landed at Suvla Bay. The whole force would then push on and capture the high points of the Sari Bair range—Chunuk Bair, Hill Q and Hill 971—before the Turks could bring up their reserves.
By gripping the waist of the peninsula, the British and Anzac forces would cut off the bulk of the Turkish army from land communication with Constantinople; Maidos and the Kilid Bahr range on the opposite coast would be captured, and the way to the Narrows would at last be open. With this key waterway secured, the British and French fleets could sail through the Sea of Marmara to threaten Constantinople, which would then surely fall.
The forces for the main Anzac attack on 6 August were divided into four columns, two of which were to act as covering forces to clear the Turkish posts on the lower ridges of the Sari Bair range. The right covering force consisted of the NZMR and a Maori contingent under Russell’s command; the left covering force of two battalions of the British 40th Infantry Brigade under Brigadier-General Travers.
Russell’s force was to capture Turkish positions at Old No. 3 Post, Table Top Hill, and Bauchop’s Hill, allowing the two assaulting columns to advance unopposed up the deres to the main Sari Bair ridge. Speed and surprise were vital, as the foothills had to be cleared by 11 pm to give the main assault columns time to reach the ridgelines before dawn. To the north, the two British battalions under Travers would seize a lightly held valley known as the Damakjelik Bair.
Since its recapture by the Turks on 30 May, Old No. 3 Post had been converted to a strong redoubt protected by heavy wire entanglements laced with mines and strong overhead cover. Strongpoints covered the approaches, and several hundred Turkish troops were encamped on the far side of the position.
Connected to Old No. 3 Post by a razorback ridge, Table Top was a precipitous, flat-topped hill about 130 metres above sea level. Its approaches were steep, scrub-covered ridges and ravines, all of which were commanded by enemy trenches. The capture of the hill was essential before a further advance up a valley called the Chailak Dere to Rhododendron Spur could be made. The third objective, Bauchop’s Hill, was, like Table Top, a mass of ridges and ravines, entrenched everywhere.
The task facing Russell’s mounteds would test even the fittest and most determined troops. They would also have to advance in darkness, over steep, broken, mostly unreconnoitred country and against a Turkish garrison of unknown strength. As it was, the troops were already weakened by months of dysentery and enteric fever.
Russell, however, made sure his men were well prepared for their role that night, going through the operation in detail to make sure everyone—officers and men—knew their job. The enemy posts were to be attacked not by a single advance on a straight front, but by small detachments advancing on the Turkish positions from different directions. To ensure surprise, and to avoid his men firing on each other in the dark, the attack was to be delivered in complete silence, and with bomb and bayonet only.
The attack succeeded brilliantly—if at a cost. By 1 am on 7 August Russell’s force was in occupation of Old No. 3 Post, Table Top and Bauchop’s Hill, and Travers’ left covering force had captured Damakjelik Bair. The whole operation—delayed from the start by a Turkish barricade at the mouth of the Chailak Dere—had taken two hours longer than anticipated, but the vital entrances to the Sazli, Chailak and Aghyl deres were now in Allied hands and the way was cleared for the infantry to advance on Chunuk Bair.
In the words of Terry Kinloch, the mounteds had achieved something remarkable that night. Sick and emaciated men with empty rifle magazines and fixed bayonets had charged into concentrated rifle and machine-gun fire, and without firing a shot until their objectives had been secured. While they had the advantage of surprise and an element of luck, very few of them knew the country and they had to make their attacks in the dark, from different directions and to very tight deadlines.45 Hamilton was effusive:
The angle of Table Top’s ascent is recognised as impracticable for infantry. But neither Turks nor angles of ascent were destined to stop Russell or his New Zealanders that night. There are moments during battle when life becomes intensified, when men become supermen, when the impossible becomes simple—and this was one of those moments.46
Remarkably, the operation had almost totally flouted the principles laid down in the British Army’s Field Service Regulations, which stated that any night assault should be preceded by a ‘complete reconnaissance’. If this was not done, the regulations warned, there was a high risk of elements of the attacking force losing touch, taking a wrong direction, and even firing on sections of their own side. That none of this occurred was due to a combination of luck and the planning skills of the force commander, Brigadier-General Andrew Russell. They were the same skills that he would apply later as a divisional commander on the Western Front.
The success of Russell’s brigade, however, was not matched elsewhere that night, or in the following days. The mounteds had cleared the foothills two hours later than anticipated, and this and other delays meant that troops of the NZ Infantry Brigade did not reach their rendezvous below the heights of Sari Bair until dawn on 7 August. Chunuk Bair was still lightly defended, but the vacillation of Brigadier-General Earl Johnston allowed the Turks to reinforce their positions on the crest before the New Zealand infantry could arrive.
After a bloody and unsuccessful daylight attack by the Auckland battalion, Godley decided to attack Chunuk Bair again before dawn on 8 August. Russell allocated the Auckland and Wellington mounted regiments, supported by Maori pioneer troops, for his part of the operation, leaving the Otago and Canterbury regiments to guard the foothills.
Just after 4 am, Malone’s Wellington infantry battalion, supported by the Auckland mounteds and a contingent of British troops, advanced on Chunuk Bair. They took it without firing a shot, as most of the Turks had been driven off the crest by the supporting artillery bombardment and down into an adjacent valley. From the heights they could now see the waters of the Narrows (the narrowest part of the Dardanelles) glinting in the distance.
It was not to last. For 36 hours these troops doggedly held their ground against repeated enemy counter-attacks, until their shattered remnants were relieved by the Otago infantry battalion and two squadrons of Wellington mounteds. Suffering extreme thirst and under heavy artillery and machine-gun fire, they held the crest for another 24 hours, fighting off Turkish bomb and bayonet attacks from shallow trenches choked with their own dead. It ended on the night of 9 August when they were relieved by two British battalions—the Loyal North Lancashires and the 5th Wiltshires. Chunuk Bair was lost early the next morning when these troops were overwhelmed by a massive Turkish counter-attack, personally led by Mustafa Kemal.
Soldier-historian Cecil Malthus later described the stand of the New Zealanders on Chunuk Bair as ‘perhaps New Zealand’s finest hour’. Its defence came at a high cost—to both sides. Three regiments of Turks were decimated in their attempt to push New Zealanders off the crest. Some 2400 men of the NZ Infantry Brigade and nearly 700 of Russell’s mounteds were killed, wounded or missing. The Wellington battalion alone lost 690 of the 760 men who took—and so briefly held—the heights of Chunuk Bair. And in the end the assault had failed: the main ridge of Sari Bair was now completely in Turkish hands and would remain so until the end of the campaign.
Colonel John Monash, commander of the Australian 4th Brigade and a future Lieutenant-General, blamed the failure of the August offensive on ‘insufficient troops, inadequate munitions, attempting more than was possible with the means available’. He targeted both Birdwood and Godley, whose command arrangements were ‘hopelessly inadequate from the start’; and the poor quality of the ‘New Army’ troops who, in his view, had ‘no grit, no gumption’.47
For military historian Chris Pugsley, the failure of 7 August was essentially one of leadership. Malone’s achievements on Chunuk Bair offered enormous prospects, if they could have been exploited by the soldiers of the Empire struggling up the slopes of Sari Bair. ‘It was the commanders,’ he wrote, ‘and Godley in particular, who failed to show the touch, the insight that marked a capable tactician. Not even brilliance was required; the bravery of their soldiers only needed a commander to show sound judgement at the right time.’48
In later years, Godley regretted that he had not gone forward and taken greater control of the battle instead of isolating himself at his headquarters. He conceded also that the objectives of the campaign had been too ambitious, considering the poor physical state of the troops under his command. Given the chance to assault Sari Bair again, he would have limited the attack to Chunuk Bair and Hill Q and given Russell the responsibility for capturing the critical ridge:
Had General Russell, who knew the ground better than anybody else, been given, in addition to his own New Zealand Mounted Rifles, the Australian Light Horse, whose attack on the Nek met with such disaster, I have no doubt that he would have gained the ridge on the first night without difficulty. The New Zealand, 4th Australian, and Indian Brigades could then have relieved him and established themselves on Chunuk Bair and Hill Q . . . But this is being wise after the event.49
Hamilton himself put much of the blame on Stopford’s 9th Corps, which had remained immobile on the beach when it should have pushed forward across the Suvla Plain, captured the W Hills and linked up with the main assault on Chunuk Bair. He wrote to Russell in March 1917:
I myself believe that if the 9th Corps had been on the heights between the Anafartas on the morning of the 7th as they should have been—that then the Turks would have been absolutely forced to throw against them at least half of the troops they actually employed against the Anzacs and 13th Division on Sari Bair.50
Then there are the ‘what ifs’. What if Russell and his mounteds had been given the spearhead role in the attack as originally planned? What if Stopford’s troops had been properly in position on the critical first day of the August offensive? What if Godley had taken greater control over the assault on Chunuk Bair instead of commanding from a telephone at the base of the ridge? What if Major-General Harold (Hooky) Walker—generally recognised to be the outstanding Allied commander on Gallipoli—had directed the Anzacs that day instead of Godley?
The failure to hold Chunuk Bair dealt a further blow to Britain’s military reputation in the eyes of the Anzacs. The Royal Navy had put them ashore on the wrong beach on 25 April, and its supporting fleet had run for shelter in May after losing two battleships to German submarines. Now British forces had failed to support their assault with a strong thrust inland from Suvla, or to hold the positions on Chunuk Bair that the New Zealanders had struggled, at such huge cost, to take. Fairly or not, British commanders and their troops were blamed for both failures, and anti-British feelings amongst the Anzacs intensified.
Criticism of the failure of British units to hold Chunuk Bair is somewhat unfair: the New Zealanders would probably have put up a better fight, but would still have been wiped out by the final, overwhelming Turkish attack.51 Russell, however, had been unimpressed with the British irregulars he had seen at Gallipoli. ‘The poor fellows look as if they had been brought up “on the bucket”, to use a farming expression, and hardly able to stand up to the lusty Turk,’ he wrote to his father. ‘There is so much hand-to-hand fighting nowadays that you want muscle and weight.’
His thoughts were echoed by Australian war correspondent Charles Bean, who scorned the ‘puny narrow-chested little men’ of Kitchener’s New Army and claimed that the Australians and New Zealanders no longer had any trust in them. ‘They have neither the nerve, the physique, nor the spirit and self-control to fit them for soldiers.’52
Some 50,000 British and Anzac troops were involved in the four-day battle for Chunuk Bair and Suvla Bay, of whom 2000 were killed and 10,000 wounded. Around 22,000 sick and wounded men were sent to hospitals in Egypt and Malta. Kitchener moved to replace the failed commanders at Gallipoli—but not all of them. Hamilton and the elderly Stopford were sent home; Hunter-Weston and Godley kept their jobs.
For the men of Anzac, however, there was more hard fighting to come. Two weeks after the Sari Bair offensive came the Scimitar Hill/W Hills/Hill 60 operation, the largest fought on the peninsula, and the next major test of Russell’s command abilities. Birdwood believed that if the Turkish trenches on Hill 60 could be captured, the point of junction between the Anzac and Suvla fronts would be greatly strengthened. A bonus was that two extra wells would be added to the Allied water supply.
In conjunction with an attack on Hill 60, the British 9th Corps would again attempt to seize the Scimitar and W Hills from across the Suvla Plain—which under Stopford’s inept leadership it had dismally failed to do on 6 August. The 29th Indian Brigade would attack Hill 60 on the left, the NZMR under Russell in the centre, and the 4th Australian Brigade on the right. In overall command of the operation would be Brigadier-General Cox.
The Allied commanders believed that the Turks had ringed the summit of Hill 60 with a single trench system. In fact, the whole hill had been turned into a strong redoubt, honeycombed with fire and communication trenches, and the Turks holding them were determined not to give ground. The troops that would undertake the attack were generally inexperienced new arrivals or tired and sick veterans of earlier fighting; and at a critical point in the attack there were problems with the artillery.
In full daylight on 21 August, the assault on Hill 60 began. Two depleted regiments of the NZMR, 500 men of the 4th Australian Infantry Brigade, and a battalion of Irish Connaught Rangers, all under Russell’s direct command, attacked over open country and in full view of the Turkish trenches. It was a disaster. The artillery barrage, divided between two fronts—Russell’s and the 9th Corps attacking from Suvla—was ineffectual, leaving the Turkish trenches intact but warning the Turkish machine gunners that an attack was imminent.
The Connaughts succeeded in seizing the wells, but the troops on Russell’s flanks were cut down as they charged forward. The scrub caught fire, and wounded men were burnt to death or killed when their ammunition pouches exploded. Twice Russell urged the Australians to push on but was told it was impossible because of the strength of the Turkish fire. The surviving troops dug in where they were. At heavy cost, the Canterbury and Otago mounteds did better, seizing two lines of Turkish trenches in ‘grotesque close-quarter trench battle . . . just brown grimy bodies, shaven-headed, walking skeletons fighting over bodies sprawled in the saps, with rifle butt, bayonet or bomb.’53
By nightfall, the New Zealanders had captured 120 metres of enemy trench and had a small foothold on the lower slopes of Hill 60. Russell knew that his exhausted men could do no more; if the rest of the hill was to be captured, it should be done before daylight, he told Cox, and with a fresh force. Cox agreed and asked Godley for reinforcements. Godley reluctantly gave him the raw and inexperienced 18th Battalion of the 5th Western Australian Infantry Brigade, newly arrived on Gallipoli.
At dawn on 22 August and without any preliminary reconnaissance, the Australians attacked the Turkish trenches, but were driven back after half their men were killed or wounded. The mounted riflemen, a few Connaught Rangers and the Australians now held about 200 metres of trench on the southern and western edges of Hill 60, well below the summit. On the plain to the north, the 9th Corps had been thrown back onto its start line with heavy casualties. Hamilton recorded in his diary: ‘Suvla gone wrong again. Anzac right . . . The Indian brigade have seized the well at Kabak Kuyu and that fine soldier, Russell, fixed himself into Kaiajik Aghala and is holding on there tooth and nail.’54
Birdwood, however, was still set on taking the top of Hill 60, despite the fact that the Turks were now rapidly strengthening their defences. On 27 August, Russell renewed the assault with a force comprised of remnants of the NZMR, three Australian infantry battalions, and 250 Connaught Rangers—1000 men in all. Russell and the Australian commander Monash favoured a surprise attack in the dark with bomb and bayonet only—the type of operation in which colonial troops had already shown considerable skill. Cox overruled them. The attack would again take place in daylight, preceded by an hour-long artillery barrage.
The artillery was to bombard Hill 60 while the warships off Anzac and some of the land guns were to silence the enemy’s batteries on the main range. To avoid the disaster of 21 August, Russell wanted the guns to concentrate on the trenches facing the Australians. This was not done, and again the attacking lines of troops were swept away by a storm of fire from the Turkish positions. Two-thirds of the men who made the attack and all the officers but one were killed or wounded.
The mounteds, however, pressed on, taking three lines of trenches as they struggled towards the crest. On their right and left the Australians and the Connaughts were either held up or could not hold what they had gained in the first rush. As night fell, the survivors were left alone to fight off Turkish counter-attacks, supported by heavy artillery, on their exposed position near the top of Hill 60.
Relief came the next night when the 10th Australian Light Horse launched a surprise attack on a section of trench that had been captured but then lost. The crest of Hill 60 was now at least partly in Allied hands—and it remained so until the evacuation of British forces from Gallipoli four months later. In sombre mood, Russell wrote to his sister: ‘Four different attacks more or less successful, but not quite, as we have not got all the hill, tho’ nearly so. Casualties as per usual. Poor fellows! it is a gruesome game.’
Russell’s brigade had endured eight days and nights of the hardest fighting it would experience in the whole of the war. If success had been only partial, Hamilton’s despatches acknowledged their epic struggle: ‘The NZ Mounted Rifles refused to recognise that they were worsted. Nothing would shift them. All that night and all the next day, through bombing, bayonet charges, musketry, shrapnel, and heavy shell, they hung on to their 150 yards of trench.’
On 24 August, as the battle raged, Godley reported that both Johnston and, especially, Russell had proved themselves excellent brigadiers: ‘Russell is really quite an exceptionally good man.’55 After the fighting was over, Godley complimented Cox and Russell for the way in which the Hill 60 operations had been planned and carried out. ‘Both these officers,’ he wrote, ‘have shown a capacity for the organisation and carrying out of offensive operations far beyond the ordinary.’56
In hindsight, these assessments cannot be taken at face value. The first problem is that Godley’s appraisals of Cox and Russell were made on the understanding that Hill 60 had been entirely captured by the Allied force. It had not, and at least half the summit of the hill remained in Turkish hands until the end of the Gallipoli campaign.
Secondly, Godley’s judgment that Johnston was an ‘excellent’ brigadier is highly questionable. Johnston has been widely criticised by historians of the Gallipoli campaign for his part in the failed attack on the heights of Sari Bair. At the time he was drinking heavily, sick with enteritis, and in no fit state to command troops in battle. His brigade major noted that during the battle for Chunuk Bair, Johnston ‘was frequently barely coherent, and his judgment and mind were obviously clouded’.57 Lieutenant-Colonel Aspinall-Oglander, author of a British official history of the Gallipoli campaign, wrote: ‘It was nothing but a national calamity that he [Johnston] was allowed to continue in command.’58
Thirdly, despite Godley’s accolades, the Hill 60 operation is judged to have been badly handled by its commanders, inflicting 2500 Allied casualties for minimal gains. Monash, whose troops played a key role in the attack, described the assault as ‘a rotten, badly organised show’.59 Robert Rhodes James is no less critical: ‘For connoisseurs of military futility, valour, incompetence, and determination, the attacks on Hill 60 are in a class of their own.’60
Pugsley ascribes some blame to Russell, claiming that in committing the Western Australian Infantry Brigade to the attack on 22 August, he repeated the same errors that destroyed the Royal Marine Light Infantry below Baby 700 on 2 May.61 Russell’s error, if it was such, was to send inexperienced troops to do a job that veteran Anzac formations had failed to do the day before. Bean, though sympathetic to Russell, felt that the Western Australians’ attack was compromised from the start by lack of proper reconnaissance, careful preparation and clear directions.62
Russell may well have made mistakes at Hill 60 as, like most of his fellow generals in 1915, he had no previous experience of trench warfare and had to learn its hard lessons on the job. In the words of Monash’s biographer, all commanders at Anzac were inexperienced in every aspect of warfare, from operational staff work to administration and the particular problems of trench fighting. ‘All of them were feeling their way; predictably, all made mistakes.’63
A key point, however, is that Russell was not in overall command of the assault, and the blame for its failure must therefore fall substantially on Cox, and particularly on Godley and Birdwood, whose staffs were responsible for planning the operation. The attack went ahead without a proper study of the Turkish positions, and without effective and properly coordinated artillery cover for the advancing infantry.
On 27 August, Russell and Monash had recommended a night attack without artillery. This would have had the advantage of surprise and, arguably, a greater chance of success. Cox wanted a daylight assault and prevailed, with predictably heavy casualties. Campaign historian John Laffin has no doubts where the principal blame should lie: ‘He [Birdwood] was responsible for a bloody debacle at Hill 60, again (as in the attack on Hill 971) in failing to study the problem adequately.’64
Hill 60 marked the end of large-scale British offensives on the Gallipoli peninsula. On 13 September, after four months in the front line, Russell and the wasted survivors of his mounted rifles brigade were pulled back to their base on Lemnos to rest and reorganise—‘skeletons without energy, blasphemously fed up, ragged, lousy, and incapable of marching a mile in a soldierly fashion’.65
Three days later, they were inspected by a French admiral, who asked Russell if this was all that remained of his regiment, not at first realising that he was looking at the remnants of four regiments. ‘When he did so, he turned round, looked at the men in wonder, gravely saluted, and rode off.’66 As well he might. Of the 2000 troopers who landed at Gallipoli on 12 May, only 250 sick and emaciated men remained. Casualties and sickness had reduced the 4000-strong New Zealand Infantry Brigade to just over 1000, all ranks. Hamilton’s ‘beautiful battalions’ had simply withered away.
On November 8, Russell was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) for ‘distinguished services in the field during operations at the Dardanelles’. Typically, he credited the honour to his mounted brigade rather than to anything he himself had achieved. ‘I have not much use for these kinds of things,’ he wrote to his family, ‘being, as my schoolmasters used to say, devoid of ambition.’ Godley was far less reticent, writing to Defence Minister Allen that Russell had richly deserved his knighthood ‘as he stands out as a leader above all the rest’.67
Not every senior officer at Gallipoli was as pleased as Godley. The ambitious Monash, who was later to command the Australian Corps on the Western Front, felt the honour was undeserved because Russell was only a brigadier and much junior to himself. Also, Russell had not arrived on the peninsula until late May, and in his view had achieved ‘nothing conspicuous’.68
Russell’s superb mounted riflemen, however, were left out of the honours altogether. Almost half of the 4000 who served on Gallipoli between May and December had been killed or wounded, but Russell refused to recommend any of them for gallantry awards. Every man in his command, he argued, was worth a VC, and it was sufficient honour to belong to the brigade.