"Stop, passer-by! The earth you have just unknowningly trodden
is the spot where an era ended and where the heart of a nation beats"

Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Turkish poet 
inscription on Turkish war memorial at Gallipoli


The Land Campaign: Introduction.

They generals thought they could do the job in three days. Land on 
the Gallipoli peninsula, clear it of Turks and disable the seaward 
defences. With a bit of luck it could all be accomplished in 72 hours. 
They failed too, and at a much greater cost in lives than the naval 
assault. For 259 days, from April 1915 to January 1916, the allied 
forces hung on to their toeholds on Gallipoli. A total of about 500,000 
men were landed there over the course of the campaign and almost 300,000 
of them became casualties. For the Turks it was a great victory and 
marked the time they successfully stood against the greatest empire the 
world had ever seen. It threw up Mustapha Kemal, an obscure divisional 
commander, and propelled him on the road that would lead him to become 
the Father of the Nation. For the Australians it would provide the 
sacrifice that tempered their newly-forged nation in blood. For the 
British it was just another fiasco in a war full of them. 

The Landings.

After the failure of the naval attempt to force the Dardanelles, it 
was decided to land ground troops at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, 
secure the central heights and destroy the Turkish batteries, thus 
opening the way for the navy to proceed up to Constantinople. The force 
was commanded by General Ian Hamilton, a Scotsman and a brave, 
experienced soldier. Its main constituents were the British 29th 
Division, the 1st Royal Naval Infantry Division, the French 1st Infantry 
Division, the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade and the Australia New Zealand 
Army Corps (ANZAC). There were lesser contingents from many different 
parts of the British empire including the colorfully named Assyrian 
Jewish Refugee Mule Corps. Formed in Egypt, they were reputed to be the 
first Jewish unit to go into combat since the Romans took Jerusalem in 
AD 70. 

The expedition assembled in Egypt and security was abysmal; it 
seemed that every shoeshine boy in Alexandria knew that Gallipoli was 
the destination. The classical associations with the area were many. It 
was there that Xerxes had built his bridge of boats, where the Greeks 
had sailed on their way to Troy, where Leander had drowned. Most 
officers and not a few of the men had been classically educated and a 
desire to emulate the heroes of old may have fired them as they boarded 
the transports. The pathos of the situation they found themselves in a 
few short weeks later must have been sharpened by their musings on the 
Homeric deeds of previous battles. How long would it have taken a 
machine-gun to hit even an Achilles in the heel? Where was their Ulysses 
with the clever stratagem needed to turn stalemate into victory? 

The troops were to land at two main areas. At Cape Helles on the tip 
of the peninsula the British would land on five separate beaches. 13 
miles further up the northern side the ANZACs would come ashore. In the 
very early morning of April 25th the attack began. On three of the 
British beaches opposition was light or non-existent, on one it was 
stiff and on the fifth a disaster occurred. On V beach the plan was to 
run an old collier (the River Clyde) aground and the troops filling her 
hold would storm out of sally ports cut in her side, cross a bridge of 
lighters she had towed in behind her and secure the beach. The Munsters 
and the Hampshires were the units unfortunate enough to be selected for 
this duty. A battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers would come in at 
the same time in small boats. Nothing went right. When the Dubliners hit 
the shore the Turks opened up with a furious, telling fire. The Irishmen 
were cut to pieces. When the sallyports opened on the River Clyde the 
Munsters and the Hampshires flew out into a wall of lead that made no 
allowance for their courage. General Napier, the landing force 
commander, approaching in a small boat was urged to forego any attempt 
to land. He refused such entreaties and was cut down like almost all the 
rest. The attack had begun at 6.20am and despite the support of the 15 
inch guns of the Queen Elizabeth, it wasn't until darkness fell that the 
remaining troops on the River Clyde could stumble ashore and secure (if 
that is the word) the beach. God only knows the agonies the wounded 
suffered as they lay all day in the hot sun, the slightest movement 
drawing Turkish fire. 

The ANZACs fared better although a strong current took them past 
their assigned beach and they landed at what was forever known as Anzac 
Cove. Here they managed to get ashore without too much loss. They 
Australians were very different from their British army counterparts. 
Tanned, loose-limbed and vigorous and with a disregard for the 
superficialities of discipline that drove British staff officers wild, 
they could appear insubordinate even when standing at attention. They 
were, however, very good soldiers (warriors might be a better word). 
Once on the beach they quickly pushed inland, some even reaching the 
central heights of the peninsula. There they met a man who would match 
his mettle with their own. Mustapha Kemal, commander of the Turkish 19th 
Division, was one of the greatest soldiers his country ever produced and 
one of the best commanders to emerge from the Great War. Kemal moved his 
men against the advancing Australians, drove them off the heights and 
pushed them back almost to the beach. 

Stalemate and Withdrawal

The peninsula never came anywhere near being cleared of Turks. The 
British managed to gain the whole tip of the peninsula but they never 
pushed more than five miles inland. The ANZACS didnt do much better and 
though they fought with great skill and courage they got little further 
than the heights overlooking the beaches, and never reached the crests. 
For the first month the fleet had stayed offshore giving supporting 
shellfire and as the battlefronts were so shallow the sea and its great 
ships were almost always in sight of the men fighting on land. That 
changed on May 25th when a German U-boat torpedoed HMS Triumph. The 
ships were withdrawn to the safety of the Greek islands and the soldiers 
were left alone. 

Hoping to break the deadlock Hamilton mounted another landing 
further north at Suvla Bay, but although the troops were put ashore 
successfully they were not pushed forward vigorously enough and soon the 
Turks had sealed off another little allied enclave. While the British 
were landing the Australians made a series of attacks that were designed 
to draw off Turkish troops that could have been used against Suvla. One 
of these at the Nek was made by the 3rd Light Horse who tried to advance 
across a very restricted front to attack trenches full of Turkish 
troops. Three waves went forward and each was slaughtered by the Turks, 
none of the attackers gaining many more than a few yards before they 
were cut down. Some of the Turks even climbed out of the trenches and
 perched on the parapets to get better shots. It was a massacre made 
even more bitter by the lack of success of the Suvla landings. 

As spring gave way to a blistering summer and then a wet, weary 
winter conditions rapidly deteriorated. The beautiful battalions of 
April 25th are wasted skeletons. wrote Hamilton. Disease was rife, the 
soldiers filthy, rotting corpses lay everywhere and day after day the 
attacks and counter-attacks continued in a horrific parody of the trench 
warfare going on in France. By the end of the year the Turks were at 
breaking -point, but so were the British. Lord Kitchener came out from 
London to appraise the situation and was appalled at the mess he found. 
An atmosphere of gloom and desperation hung all over the peninsula and 
Kitchener recommended withdrawal. Slowly the troops were taken off, and 
in a brilliant last phase the rearguards were withdrawn without the 
Turks having the slightest idea what was happening. When the Turks woke 
up on January 9th, they found themselves alone on the peninsula and the 
British positions eerily empty. In a predictable display of military 
optimism, the evacuation was portrayed as a great victory, another 
example of the British genius for amphibious warfare. The public 
probably werent fooled and the soldiers definitely not. As one of the 
last Australian units slipped through the darkness down to the beach and 
the evacuation boats, one of the men was heard to whisper as he pointed 
to the graves of his fallen comrades,I hope they dont hear us go. 

Gallipoli : a footnote. 

I recently received an e-mail from a Turkish gentleman chiding me for 
disregarding the sufferings of the Turkish soldiers during the Gallipoli 
campaign. He was right, of course, and I feel I should add something 
here. The British Empire and Dominion troops who fought at Gallipoli 
laboured under terrible conditions but for their enemy things were, if 
anything, even worse. The Turkish army had no great fleet to supply it 
and as British submarines were active in the Sea of Marmora seaborne 
supply was not an option. A single railway line led to the peninsula but 
it ran out far from the battlefronts and had nowhere near the capacity 
to adequately service the Turkish army fighting there. Sometimes the 
Turkish troops were starving and it is said they would lick the traces 
of sauce they found inside cans of food discarded by the British and 
Anzac troops. And yet they held on and finally drove the invaders back 
onto their ships. The Turkish soldier was poorly equipped and often 
badly led but his courage and determination won the admiration of his 
foes. Before the landings the Anzacs were just as racist as most 
Europeans at that time and felt that the upcoming battle against a bunch 
of asiatics would soon be successfully completed. Such ideas didnt 
last long and a respect for their enemy grew amongst the Anzacs. They 
called the Turkish soldiers Johnnie Turk or Mehmet and these were 
terms not derogatory but akin to the name Tommy that the Germans used 
to describe the British. 

After Gallipoli the Turkish army went on to other victories. In 
Mesopotamia a Britsh army was forced to surrender at Kut al Amara and 
though the British finally took Baghdad, Jerusalem and Damascus it took 
them three long years and massive superiority before they could do so. 
Even when the Great War itself ended the Turks had to struggle on: first 
to throw off the shackles of an unfair peace settlement, then to expel 
the invading Greek army and finally to face down the British Empire once 
again in the Chanak Crisis. 

In the early 1950s Turkish troops fought alongside their former British 
and Australian enemies in the Korean conlict and throughout the long 
years of Cold War tension Turkey stood guard on NATOs vulnerable 
southern flank. Political alignments change, enemies become friends, old 
soldiers fade away and life goes on. Perhaps at the end of the day the 
only real comrades-in-arms are the dead. On the overgrown, silent 
battlefields of Gallipoli may they rest in peace - together. 
