‘They advanced over 1200 yards of open ground swept by shell, machine gun and rifle fire, crossing three lines of trenches filled with British regulars, but refusing to take shelter in them. As they went, shrapnel slashed them—then machine gun and rifle fire—men began to fall, but the rest bored steadily on and on. After passing 200–300 yards beyond the front line of British trenches, the Wellingtons were hit by enfilade fire from both flanks as well as shrapnel. Only then did they dig in and begin to fire, for it was impossible to go further . . . The British troops have christened my men the “White Gurkhas”. We are very proud of the sobriquet and mean to live up to it.’
—Malone describes his battalion’s advance at Helles on 8 May 1915
On 5 May, the Wellington Infantry Battalion turned Walker’s Ridge over to the Nelson Battalion of the Royal Naval Division and prepared to embark for Cape Helles. Malone’s men were struck by the youth and inexperience of the newcomers—‘ignorant and bewildered, strangely immature compared with the hard-bitten cursing Australians . . . and in such wild surroundings quite out of their depth.’1
The Wellingtons’ transport south was the destroyer Mosquito and the crew made them welcome with generous quantities of coffee and rum. Malone got a cup of cocoa, biscuits, two oranges and chocolate creams. ‘Quite a feast.’ On the beach where they landed lay tangled heaps of the barbed wire the British 29th Division had faced during its landing on 25 April. To their left lay the hulk of the steamship River Clyde from which troops had been disgorged onto the beach only to be slaughtered by Turkish machine-gun fire. Above them was the shattered fort of Sedd-el-Bahr, its guns dismounted by the fire of the battleships.
The contrast between Helles and Anzac could not have been greater. In place of ravines and scrub-covered hills was open country with fruit trees, olive groves, crops, streams, fields of poppies and daisies, old towers, cottages and wells. French and African troops, Senegalese and colonial Zouaves in baggy trousers moved along roads alive with traffic.
The Wellingtons shouldered their weapons, ammunition and equipment and marched inland, bivouacking that night in green fields bounded by elm and walnut trees. Here they could rest briefly after ten days of fighting and digging at Anzac.
Helles, Malone noted, was ideal fighting country, open and undulating. He could see French and British troops advancing but no Turks, yet rifle fire went on all day and night. He was happy, however, to be clear of the Australians, and confident also that the battle at Helles was in capable hands, writing, ‘It is a relief to get in where war is being waged scientifically.’
After heavy fighting, the Allies had established a line running across the peninsula about four kilometres from Cape Helles. The area was flat, open and cramped, and all of it could be swept by shellfire, including the landing beaches. The French held the right flank, the Royal Naval Division the centre, with the 29th Division and some Indian troops on the left. All Allied attacks in the first two days of the Battle of Krithia had been repelled by murderous machine-gun fire from a Turkish redoubt a kilometre in front of British lines and two strongpoints in the fir copses on either flank.
The Allied offensive was to be renewed on 8 May, the third day of the battle. The objective was again the village of Krithia and a hill called Achi Baba, which Hamilton and his staff believed was the vital high ground dominating the Narrows. Hamilton had favoured a night advance against the Turks followed by a dawn attack, but had allowed Hunter-Weston, his 29th Brigade commander, to persuade him that this was too difficult.
Too many of his officers and NCOs had been lost since the landing, Hunter-Weston argued, and a night attack risked confusion and loss of control. On each of the previous two days, however, his brigades had advanced in broad daylight and been thrown back with heavy losses. It was now to be more of the same.
After a preliminary bombardment, the French were to capture Kereves Dere, while the New Zealanders would pass over the trenches of the British 88th Brigade and take the village of Krithia. Wellington Battalion would advance on the left, Auckland in the centre, Canterbury on the right. Otago, badly cut up in the attack on Baby 700, would be in reserve.
In the words of the Australian military historian John Laffin:
If Hunter-Weston had actually wanted to be beaten he could hardly have improved on his plans. His attack was timed for 11 am, by which time the Turks would be breakfasted, rested and organised. He did not know the position of the Turkish trenches, the shell supply was seriously short, and he was attacking on a narrow front . . . without any feint, deception, oblique or flank attack to make things more difficult for the Turks.2
On 7 May the Wellington Battalion was ordered to move up Gully Ravine and occupy a trench 500 metres in the rear of the 29th Division. By running his troops across open ground in small detachments, Malone avoided casualties from Turkish rifle and machine-gun fire. The battalion bivouacked that night in a deep gully running out to one of the beaches where British troops had landed on 25 April.
Just two hours before the attack was due to commence, New Zealand Infantry Brigade headquarters was informed that the advance would begin at 10.30 a.m., preceded by a 15-minute bombardment of the Turkish trenches. Johnston delayed passing the information on to his battalion commanders until after 10 a.m., giving them just twenty minutes to brief their company commanders. They in turn had a bare ten minutes to brief and deploy their platoons. Neither officers nor men had any clear idea what the objectives of the attack were or what support they could expect from the other troops.
Rushed and inadequate orders were not the brigade’s only problems. The Wellington and Auckland battalions were still 500 metres behind the front-line trenches from which they were due to advance when the supporting barrage ceased. The ground between was in full view of the Turks and exposed to shrapnel and long-range rifle and machine-gun fire. They would now have to cross it wholly unsupported by the artillery.
At 10.15 the artillery and the British warships offshore pounded the ridge in front of the attacking troops, shrouding it with the smoke of their shells. At 10.30 the four New Zealand battalions climbed out from the reserve trenches and into a blast of shrapnel, rifle and machine-gun fire. The troops of the 88th Brigade cheered them on as they crossed the front line and pushed on against an invisible enemy. Some 300 metres on the Wellingtons were forced to ground by heavy enfilade fire from hidden Turkish machine guns. The battalion was now 300 metres in advance of the troops on either flank and could go no further.
The Auckland and Canterbury battalions had also been roughly handled and by 1.30 p.m. the whole brigade had been brought to a standstill. The men ‘sprawled exhausted in their trench scrapes, listening to the crack of bullets overhead and the cries of the wounded lying helpless in the fields behind them under the hot midday sun’.3
The attack was pre-ordained to fail. The New Zealand battalions had been sent into the attack in full daylight without proper preparation, reconnaissance, or any clear-cut objective. The advance from the reserve trenches, 500 metres behind the front line, had given the Turks clear warning of the impending attack. Against an almost invisible enemy, the artillery had provided the troops with no effective protection.
Hamilton decided to make one last effort to capture the village of Krithia. At 4.30 p.m. the New Zealand Brigade, this time supported by the Australian 2nd Brigade, was ordered to ‘fix bayonets, slope arms and move on Krithia’. Malone protested to Johnston, pointing out that his battalion was already 300 metres further forward than any other unit and holding on to what it had gained. Any attempt to push forward when the troops on his right flank had no orders to move, he argued, had no chance. Johnston, according to Malone, refused to listen and insisted that the Wellingtons push on. ‘I was sat on, and was practically told that I was more bother than I was worth!’ Malone recorded in his diary.
The original order was now withdrawn and Hamilton ordered a general advance—‘from the Aegean to the Dardanelles’—for 5.30 p.m. After a short but intense bombardment, two companies of the Wellington Battalion went forward, but were forced back to their trenches by enfilading fire from the Turkish positions and the shrapnel fire of their own guns. The other two companies found themselves unable to move. The Auckland and Otago battalions, charging across the ‘Daisy Patch’, were cut to pieces.
Joe Gasparich watched appalled as men in front of him were scythed down in groups by the Turkish machine guns. ‘The grassy daisy-covered space soon became a pathetic field of dead . . .’ Digging in under a shower of bullets, Gasparich and his mates could see ‘Jacko’ entrenched right along the ridge ahead. ‘He was underground, timber and sandbags and sods overhead, and safe as houses . . . And we had to attack that!’4 ‘It was just hell,’ recalled Russell Weir. ‘All those bodies lying across fields sprinkled with daisies and poppies—or perhaps the poppies were just patches of blood.’5
Meanwhile, the Australians had been stopped on Krithia Spur after advancing for 500 metres and suffering over 1000 casualties. On Kereves Spur, the French were also badly mauled and beaten back to their original trenches. Malone’s battalion alone had suffered 200 killed or wounded. Hunter-Weston’s plan for the third day of the battle had failed and the Allied troops could now only dig in and hold on.
On the night of 8 May, Hamilton wrote to Kitchener: ‘The result of the operation has been a failure as my objective remains unachieved. The fortifications and their machine guns were too scientific and too strongly held to be rushed, although I had every available man in today. Our troops have done all that flesh and blood can do against semi-permanent works and they are not able to carry them.’6
The Turkish defences might have been ‘too scientific’, but for Daily Telegraph correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett the tactics of Hunter-Weston and his staff had shown an unconscionable lack of science. They had persisted for days with murderous frontal attacks on an impregnable position, he wrote, and had given no thought to alternative strategies. Tens of thousands of the Allies’ ‘best and bravest men’ had been lost without achieving any result or bringing them closer to victory.7
That night the Wellington Battalion dug in to its new positions as flares and star shells from the Turkish lines lit the sky. The stretcher-bearers performed heroically, going out under fire day and night for the next four days to carry in the wounded. ‘I hope I shall be able to tell the people of NZ what grand fellows their soldier men are,’ wrote their commander. ‘Nothing better in the world!’
Without fires, blankets, and in most cases without greatcoats, the Wellingtons held on. At night streams of bullets swept over their positions, cutting off shrubs and small trees close to the ground and levelling the crests of the trenches. ‘We sat at the bottom of the trenches,’ wrote Malone, ‘and never fired a shot. We couldn’t.’
Malone himself was so far unhurt, despite several narrow misses. A shrapnel shell had burst just in front of him and several bullets had rapped the timber close to his head. Another bullet just missed him while he stood talking with Colonel Moore, the British regular commanding the Otago Battalion. Malone concluded that he was ‘somehow or other immune’, but given the heavy loss of officers in his battalion so far, he resolved to be more careful.
Meanwhile, he waited in dread for the attack to be renewed. ‘I expect every day to be told to, in our Brigadier’s words, “fix bayonets and go right through—no shilly-shallying about, everybody going in.” If I do, there is a 500-yard slope in front of me, over which my men must pass and it is absolutely commanded and enfiladed by a number of machine guns across a big gully.’
The Wellingtons, however, would remain in their trenches and Malone would record their achievements on 8 May. His battalion, he noted, had advanced 1200 metres under shell, machine-gun, and rifle fire, crossed several trenches held by the 29th Division without taking shelter, and had not fired a shot until they were within 200 to 400 metres of the Turkish trenches. The British Army regulars who had witnessed the attack were full of admiration for the Wellington advance. ‘It opened their eyes, they say they never saw anything better or finer . . .’
The Wellingtons had advanced further than any other battalion that day and had hung on to the ground they had taken. Due to the battalion’s better discipline, Malone wrote, it had also suffered fewer casualties. His men had been told long ago that the best disciplined formations lost the least and dug the best, and his men were great diggers . . . ‘“Eat to live” is old—“Dig to live” is the new tag.’
On 20 June, Malone wrote to Major Hart, still recovering from his wounds in England. Most of his battalion’s 200 casualties on 8 May, he told Hart, could have been avoided by a night advance to the front line followed by a dawn assault the next day. ‘Such is the sense of war as practised by people who are supposed to know better. C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. That is my criticism of this war in these parts so far.’ He was quite convinced that New Zealand officers had nothing to learn from the “imported” British Army regulars. ‘Active service has taught the latter nothing.’
Johnston and Moore, both British Army regulars, were the most likely targets of this judgement, and his frustration with both was rapidly increasing. Johnston, he wrote in his diary, seemed to resent him asking for information and his unwillingness to allow his men to be ‘plunged ahead’ without reconnaissance.
‘I ask also for barbed wire, engineer detachments, the moving up of so-called supporting troops . . . and generally everything that can enable me and my men to do our jobs thoroughly. He says I am more bother to him than the three other COs together. They say yes to everything and seem to blunder along, but I am not seeking popularity, only efficiency.’
For Moore’s apparent attempt to blame his own Otago Battalion for its failure on 8 May, Malone had only contempt.
And now the CO of Otago, Lt Col Moore, jumped up from captain and adjutant to command the battalion because he was an Imperial officer and had seen active service, turns round on his own battalion, which thro’ his own fault is not good, and says ‘Colonials are no good.’ It is a d—d shame, no better material in the world, but [in] this battalion it is the CO.
Now down to half strength, Malone’s battalion was still the strongest of the four New Zealand formations in the line. It was holding about 750 metres of trench with about 500 men, and the Turkish trenches were still 200 metres away across a gully. He and other front-line commanders knew that a further advance was hopeless until the enemy machine guns had been destroyed by shellfire.
Allied shellfire, however, had so far been ineffective, and in some cases was dropping closer to the New Zealand trenches than those of the enemy. Malone discovered that the advance of his West Coast company had been stopped by British shrapnel shells bursting right in front of them instead of on the enemy trenches.
After one such episode, the commander of a British battery got the rough edge of his tongue. ‘I went down and told them they were very rude, and that if they shot us up any more we should have to shoot back. We expect Turkish shells to annoy us but expect our own to go over and not into us.’
At the root of the problem was poor observation and lack of telephones to connect the artillery with the front line. The only solution, Malone decided, was to buy telephones himself out of regimental funds. ‘It will save many a life. I lost 3 orderlies out of 8 the other day carrying messages to the firing line—all for want of a phone.’
Despite the sniper risk, Malone reconnoitred the ground to the right of his position in an attempt to pinpoint the hidden Turkish machine guns. He found some 100 dead Turks lying face down where they had fallen, along with a number of British or New Zealanders who had been shot by snipers. As many as possible of them would be buried, he decided, once darkness had fallen. Meanwhile, his men were put to work cleaning the battlefield of tins, food scraps and general filth, and recovering the rifles, ammunition and equipment left by the dead. ‘A battlefield,’ he wrote in disgust, ‘is a much littered and untidy thing.’
On 11 May, Malone was ordered to relieve a British battalion which was some 1200 metres in his rear. He told Johnston that he could not do this without withdrawing men from the front trenches. He asked why the Otago Battalion, then in reserve, could not do the job. He was told that both the Auckland and Otago battalions had been shattered by the action on 8 May and were temporarily out of action. For the moment, his Wellington Battalion was the only fully functioning unit in the brigade.
In Malone’s mind, the heavy casualties sustained by both battalions were due to slack peacetime training, lack of discipline and poor leadership. ‘Poor devils,’ he wrote, ‘they are paying for their leaders’ faults.’ The lighter casualties of his battalion, he concluded, were the result of its better discipline. ‘I always thought the Wellington Btn [battalion] was easily the best in the Bde [brigade]. I now know that it is.’
After four days in the line, the New Zealanders were relieved and sent into reserve. On ‘a pig of a night’ with the rain lashing down, their positions were taken over by the Manchesters, a British Territorial battalion. ‘They were just boys, most of them . . . and physically unimpressive compared to the Australians and New Zealanders on the peninsula. Relieved as we were to be getting out of that position, we couldn’t help feeling sorry for them.’8
The Wellingtons marched back to the coast in the rain and lay down in a grove of olive trees. Malone and a party of his men took shelter on the beach amongst the stacks of boxes and food containers. He found a small shelter with an unidentified man already in it, crawled in and snuggled up against him for warmth. The latter responded by putting a blanket over his guest and they both fell asleep.
In the morning Malone turned to thank his host only to find that he was ‘a black man with gold earrings’. ‘Fancy my surprise! Didn’t I laugh,’ he wrote to his son Denis. ‘He was nice and clean tho’ and very tidy. His name was Naran Sammey, a Madrassee Hindu, of the Indian Army.’ Malone later returned to the beach, had his photo taken with Naran, and gave him a small sum of money in thanks for his hospitality.
The following night, for the first time since the landing eighteen days earlier, Malone took his clothes off and slept in a shirt and cardigan jacket picked up off the battlefield. For the moment at least he and his men could forget tension and the squalor of war. The next day, he borrowed a horse and rode through Sedd-el-Bahr village and up to its ruined fort. The village itself was full of French troops, horses and mules, and had been hammered into ruins by the guns of the Allied warships.
By now Malone was convinced of the superiority of his troops to all others on the peninsula. ‘The Australian is a dashing chap, but he is not steadfast, and he will not or would not dig. He came here to kill Turks, not to dig, and consequently we have suffered. There are lots of good men and good officers among them, but they are not disciplined like our men . . . The NZers are out on their own as the best troops here.’
As for the British Territorials he had encountered at Helles—the Royal Naval Division, Lancasters and Manchesters—they were ‘not a quarter as good as the New Zealanders’. The British regulars of the 29th Division were ‘good stuff ’, although again not as good as his men. The New Zealand officers, he wrote, were ‘superior to the Imperial men’.
Meanwhile, the British and French commanders were taking stock of what had been achieved at Helles. After three days of fighting, they were still a kilometre short of the original objective—the village of Krithia and the high ground of Achi Baba. The issue now was no longer the capture of these two objectives but whether the Allies could maintain their precarious foothold on the peninsula.
Malone was by now critical of the strategy that opened the Gallipoli campaign:
The naval opening, the shelling of the forts, was a huge mistake, it gave notice of Britain’s intentions and the Turks had 6 weeks under thoro’ German officers to cover the peninsula and to fix artillery and machine gun positions with exact range to every approach. Had the operation begun by the landing of the army, then probably the rushing tactics now used would have succeeded; by now it is going to be sap, sap, dig, dig. The war of Flanders again.
Malone had devised a strategy of his own to break the stalemate at Gallipoli. The first step would be to establish an impregnable line at Helles and garrison it with the weakest Allied troops. Three strong divisions—45,000 men in total—would then be moved north to Anzac Cove by night. Supported by a naval bombardment, the force would attack Hill 971, the highest point in the Sari Bair range, at dawn.
Once Hill 971 had been secured, the force would move on towards Mal Tepe and Kilia Tepe on the Dardanelles coast, cutting the Turkish lines of communication from north and south. If something similar was not already in the pipeline, Malone hoped to get Birdwood’s headquarters to consider it.
On 16 May, Malone wrote to his wife to say that he was ‘fitter than ever’ and coping well with the stress of battle. ‘My nerves are like cast iron. I find I can stand any shock no matter how violent or startling.’ His difficult relationship with Brigadier Johnston, however, was an ongoing problem. ‘I bother him he says because I will not fight blindly. I want to know things—and what precautions have been taken and sometimes they haven’t been.’ Malone sent Ida two photos of his tent and the makeshift box-bookshelf on top of which he had placed her photograph.
He wrote also to old Major Sandford, a colleague from his Volunteer Force days in Taranaki. Much of the letter was a tribute to his soldiers:
Splendid and brave as they make ’em, patient, enduring, clever, cheerful, nothing upsets them. Heroes all. I am so proud of them. Sandford I love them. Strings of wounded men go by me . . . always with a smile, often with a little laugh or an attempt at one. No cries or groans, not a whimper or complaint . . . New Zealand can be justly proud of her sons. They are gallant gentlemen.
One day, he told Sandford, he hoped to meet the Taranaki families who had lost their sons on Gallipoli and tell them how great had been his respect and affection for them. As for the soldiers themselves, they had met a glorious death. ‘Dulce est pro patria mori—a sweet thing it is to die for the fatherland.’
Two days later, the New Zealanders re-embarked for Anzac Cove on the supply ship Eddystone. At 11 p.m. Malone went aboard to check on the accommodation for his men. There appeared to be none. The first troops aboard had taken all the ‘handy’ deck space and the officers had all turned in for the night. The only space left was in the ship’s lower holds, which meant that his men would have to climb across hundreds of sleeping bodies in the dark and down a steep iron ladder, each loaded with over 30 kilograms of weapons and gear.
Malone was furious and demanded to know who was handling the embarkation. Temperley, the brigade major, until then comfortably asleep on a couch, said it was the Naval Transport Officer (NTO). The NTO said he could not help because he had no staff. Malone roused six sleeping officers and ordered them to get out and help. After several hours’ work, all his men had finally been stowed away in the ship’s holds. Malone found himself ‘a roost’ for the night in a lifeboat and was able to snatch a couple of hours’ sleep.
The commander who lay down that night had much to be concerned about. He had seen his men rushed into action at Helles without proper reconnaissance, effective artillery cover or any attempt at surprise. He had watched the British high command squander men by the thousand in futile daylight attacks against heavily defended Turkish positions. His earlier belief that the war was at last being conducted scientifically had reckoned without Hunter-Weston.
The Second Battle of Krithia had cost the Allies over 6000 casualties, or nearly 30 per cent of the troops involved. The New Zealand Brigade alone had lost over 850 officers and men killed, wounded or missing. ‘We and the other troops,’ wrote Malone, ‘have suffered tremendous losses because our directors failed to quickly appreciate that this is the day of digging and machine guns, and that prepared positions cannot be rushed.’
The New Zealand Brigade was destroyed as a fighting machine at Helles, and the reputation of the regular British officer for professionalism took a blow from which, in the eyes of the Anzacs, it would not recover. They would never forget Krithia Spur and the Daisy Patch nor the men who had sent them there.