1915
Stan Savige and his ‘spotter’, Private Mick Sunderland, eased their way up towards Sniper’s Ridge, above Lone Pine, in the hour before dawn. It was 20 September 1915, at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. The night before, Savige had been promoted to company sergeant major. It was a subtle bribe that many men accepted in war, designed to induce a soldier to take on a task he might otherwise have thought twice about.
Savige, 25 years of age, was keen to rise through the ranks. He had been rejected for officer training in Australia, primarily on the basis of his lack of formal education. No matter that he was more intelligent than most. It was irrelevant that he was close to the best, if not the best, marksman ever tested before the Great War. It meant little now as he and Private Sunderland crept towards the rocky outcrop.
Savige had left school at 12. He would have to lift his rating the hard way: by proving he was commander and officer material in the field of battle. That was why he had not hesitated to take charge of the sniper’s post he was about to fill. In this new and dangerous mission, he would be asked to map the no-man’s-land between the opposing Australian and Turkish troops on this narrow finger of Turkish land.
Primarily, though, his mission was to eliminate Turkish snipers. They had been firing down from their elevated perches above Anzac Cove and slaughtering an unacceptable number of Anzacs since the Allies’ failed effort to break out of the cove six weeks earlier.
Savige had been on Gallipoli with 24th Battalion for just two weeks, in the trenches firing at Turks less than 20 metres away. But Sniper’s Ridge was a different proposition. Killing took on another dimension. In the flurry of trench warfare, a soldier would rarely be certain he had hit an enemy. On this ridge of death, however, Savige’s job was to make sure he struck as many of the opposition as possible.
His commanding officer told him it would be for just a few days, until he became fatigued or needed a break. It was an exhausting business, this killing. Making a hit required patience and concentration well beyond the norm. There would be no chitchat. Savige was a gregarious type, who loved a yarn and a laugh. He was one of the most popular soldiers on Gallipoli, a most unlikely assassin. Most of them were dour, laconic types, who took life with the ease and unconcern of farmers shooting vermin. A happy-go-lucky character was not usually the right type. On this ridge where he and Sunderland crawled in behind rocks, Savige would be a monk in retreat.
There was some moonlight, but what they first saw through their periscopes was a dark blur. Over the next hour it would take on the shapes of all the named positions Savige would be able to see from his spot in the far south of the cove. There was Baby 700 hill in the distance. Northeast of it were Chunuk Bair and Hill 971, also Turkish-held.
Savige was an experienced bushman, confident of hitting human targets up to 1000 yards away with his Enfield, depending on the opportunity – that is, the target presented. He had enhanced aperture sights for the rifle, which he reckoned gave him extra range. His precision would depend on the conditions: the ideal conditions were flat terrain and a stationary target. If he could strike up to 200 yards just once on Gallipoli, he would justify the faith his commander had in him.
The half-light of pre-dawn was enough for Savige to be able to take an aperture sight from his back kit. He rested the rifle on his thigh, unscrewed the conventional long-range ‘volley peep sight’, then replaced it with his own aperture sight. Lean, 26-year-old Sunderland, from the inner Melbourne suburb of Collingwood, gave him a thumbs-up and a smile. The replacement was illegal, but expert marksmen like Savige did not gain their reputation by using ordinary equipment.
Savige did not just look after his Enfield, he nursed it. He would use any method to give himself an advantage – from painstaking cleaning of every part, to any additional gadgetry he could find, right down to a tiny rubber cap for his trigger finger, which he swore prevented slippage.
Savige had made sure the rifle’s calibration was up to his fastidious standards before he made the climb to the ridge. Now, in the chill of pre-dawn Gallipoli, he cleaned the barrel with oil, then a resin that removed residual propellant. He worked with a loving tempo as he oiled a cord that was then pulled through the barrel. A further inside wipe with a clean cloth was then needed to avoid a burst of blue smoke after the gun was fired, which would give away his presence on the ridge.
Sunderland, without being asked, obliged by cleaning bullets. He placed 40 bullets on a cloth between them, ready to be loaded into Savige’s 10-round magazine. Sunderland was a better-than-average rifleman, but on this day, and while they were on the ridge, he would defer to the company’s new sergeant major, with whom he had practised often.
To Sunderland and anyone else who had witnessed Savige’s skills, there was no one in his class. The unspoken question was: would he perform on this precarious perch, while being fired at, and when one false move could see either of them dead? Would he follow up his unparalleled performances in hitting targets now that he was in torrid combat, ordered to carry out this cold-blooded, methodical murder of human beings?
Sunderland and others wondered about Savige’s character. He was such a nice, friendly, selfless fellow, who would go out of his way for you every time. He’d been a Sunday school teacher and Scout master. Could he carry out his brutal mission, or would he crack under pressure?
Sunderland, not overly religious himself, had noticed the Bible that Savige carried with him everywhere. It looked well-thumbed. It always fell open at the one passage, Psalm 91, verse 7, which said:
A thousand shall fall at thy side,
and ten thousand at thy right hand;
but it shall not come nigh thee.
This simple line had influenced Savige’s volunteering to fight for the British Empire halfway across the world, despite strong objections from his family, fiancée and friends. He had taken it as a personal omen from his God that if he went to war, he would be spared. It did not dispel fear, or caution, or uncertainty. Yet it enveloped him in a quiet confidence.
Savige was a man of deep faith. It was so deep he felt that if he did not have belief, he had nothing.
A half-hour before full light, enemy artillery started up. Both men concertinaed their bodies into foetal positions closer to the protective rocks and sandbags as the shells rained down. But either the Turks’ calibrations were off, or they had wrong information. The main bursts landed 40 metres south of Savige and Sunderland.
It was cold comfort. There would be further bursts as fingers of light crept over the frosty killing fields of this uninviting peninsula.
At 6.15 a.m., Savige affixed his magazine to the Enfield and looked through the 15-centimetre gap at the top of the sandbags that partly encased the 3-metre ridge, facing north. He signalled for Sunderland to use his periscope to check for movement in the hills to the north of Monash Valley, where Turkish snipers were doing damage by firing down at Anzacs on the track between the valley and the beach at Anzac Cove. Sunderland did as instructed, carefully pushing the periscope above the bags. He held it in position for half an hour, occasionally mumbling under his breath about movement, but not fully alerting Savige.
At 8 a.m., Sunderland eased the periscope higher, exposing it further than before. A minute later, it was hit by a bullet, shattering glass over the ridge. It unnerved both men. Their position was now known to the enemy.
Undeterred, Sunderland prepared a further scope and edged it up, into a position lower than the first. ‘Ten o’clock,’ he informed Savige, ‘about 100 yards short of Baby 700.’
Savige scoured the area, picked up movement and prepared to take his first shot as a sniper. His finger was on the trigger when Crack! the second periscope was smashed.
Sunderland prepared a third periscope. He told Savige: ‘Still 10 o’clock. He’s spotted us.’
‘I see him,’ Savige muttered.
Sunderland waited and slid the third periscope up, even more carefully than before. He looked across at Savige, whose rubber-tipped finger sat on the rifle’s trigger as he squinted through his sight.
Sunderland could see the target. He heard the crack of Savige’s rifle and glued his eyes onto the Turk. The bullet hit home, jerking the Turkish head back and to the side. The man’s rifle, which had most certainly killed Anzacs, toppled over a rockface and tumbled out of sight.
‘Got ’im!’ Sunderland said, more loudly than he would have wished. He pulled the scope down and noted the time and positioning of the ‘score’ on a small notepad, which was part of his job.
He pushed his scope back up. He was still positioning it when Savige fired again. Sunderland looked through the scope just in time to see a Turk, about 30 metres from the first hit, slump forward from his elevated position on a rocky outcrop. The second victim, as limp as a rag doll, was pulled clear by unseen hands.
Sunderland glanced at Savige. ‘I think that was a second score, sir,’ he said, scribbling.
Savige nodded without saying anything. His face was grim, something Sunderland had not seen from his hitherto jolly companion.
Instinctively, and with Savige’s agreement, Sunderland pulled down the third scope. Both men knew that the other Turkish snipers would now be looking for the crack enemy shot. They would have noted the position of the two defeated periscopes and perhaps even the source of the sound of the rifle fire. But there would be confusion, with several other Anzacs firing too as sunlight enveloped the entire cove.
Savige and Sunderland decided to wait an hour before once more roaming the periscope over the Turkish trenches within 400 yards of Sniper’s Ridge. Sunderland pushed the scope up inch by inch, then Bang! it was broken by another accurate shot.
Three periscopes destroyed in their first early morning on the ridge established that they were in one of the most precarious spots on the cove. It seemed that the enemy had realised the source of the two Anzac bullets that had taken out two of their marksmen.
Savige kept up his silent vigil without the spotter’s assistance. He did not fire a shot for the rest of the day. Soon after dark, the two men slithered and climbed their way down to Lone Pine for a well-earned rest, if it could be called that, with the intermittent machine-gun fire and rifle shots and the sporadic hot metal rain of artillery that dotted the area until midnight.
***
This lethal routine continued for another eight days, during which Savige notched up a verified 31 strikes, and likely several more. Over that time the sniping of Anzacs moving up and down from the cove dropped off to less than an average of two a day.
Sunderland marvelled at Savige’s keen eyesight and his ability to pick movement Sunderland had not noticed. He mentioned this to Savige.
‘I’ve spotted and shot rabbits at a fair distance since I was 10,’ Savige replied, by way of explanation.
On the morning of 28 September, day nine of the mission, both men were leaving Sniper’s Ridge for the last time when an artillery burst sprayed down on them. They threw themselves to the ground. Sunderland was hit in the back, arm and legs. Savige helped his stricken comrade over the 30 yards to Lone Pine and summoned a stretcher-bearer. Sunderland was taken by donkey to the cove and shipped to a hospital on Malta.1
He died overnight. Just as they were completing their mission, Sunderland’s luck had run out after only 26 years of life.
It shook Savige, beyond the initial shock that the life of a fellow soldier with whom he had worked so closely had been snuffed out. For the first time, Savige felt a powerful surge of survivor’s guilt. Yes, Psalm 91:7 had convinced Savige he was protected in some mysterious way. But a first pang of disquiet reached him. If ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side’ were to be taken literally, the big question was why? Why had he been spared when this diligent, selfless, courageous bloke had been shelled to death? It was the first time Savige had reason to reflect on the deeper meaning of the words that had driven him to sign up and serve.
Savige’s faith was far from shaken. Yet he would spend the rest of his life pondering this complex conundrum. The experience began a perceptible change in his character. Savige, the courageous nerd who would work in intelligence using his mapping and reconnaissance abilities after a decade as a Scout master and long experience in the bush, was now an assassin. He would never lose his sense of compassion, but inside three weeks in September 1915, he had made the transition from innocent abroad to a hard man of Gallipoli.
***
What shaped Stan Savige’s character in the quarter of a century before he went to war? His working-class background in country Victoria gives us clues and possible answers.