103 years ago, in the dawn light
of a Mediterranean Spring morn, Anzac forces stormed ashore at a non-descript
beach on the Gallipoli Peninsula in European Turkey in what was then the
Ottoman Empire. At the same time British landed at Cape Helles at the head of
the Peninsula and the French invaded a couple of beaches on the Asiatic shore not
far from the site of ancient Troy. For the New Zealanders and Australians, a
legend was born.
After around 9 months on the
Peninsula, little strategic progress had been made and losses in dead and
wounded had been horrific, the decision was made to evacuate the areas around
Anzac Cove and the Cape Helles, leaving the Gallipoli Peninsula to the Turks. Ever
since New Zealand and Australia have revered what was undeniably a defeat.
Outsiders often express surprise that a defeat is so important, until it is
pointed out that this was the first time that New Zealand and Australian troops
were seen as separate entities to, and not just Colonial regiments of, the
British Army. It was the day that our National identifies were established.
But there was much more to the Gallipoli
Campaign than just the Anzac contribution. It was an idea, formulated by
Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to force the strategic
waterway know as the Dardanelles giving access to the Russian Allies from the
Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, would
surrender and Turkey would be out of the War. Churchill’s original plan was
just to use the Royal Navy with support from the French Navy and, at least from hindsight, with a
little more tenacity could have succeeded. The first major attack was on the 18
March 1915 when British and French warships heavily bombarded the Turkish forts
guarding the Dardanelles. The previous night a Turkish steamer had re-sown
mines which the British had cleared over the preceeding days, and one French
and three British warships hit mines and sank with heavy loss of life. This
action has gone down in Turkish military legend with the story of Corporal
Seyit, a gunner in one of the Turkish forts who, with his gun crew lying dead
or dying around him, is said to have carried three shells, weighing 275kg each,
to enable his gun to continue firing, causing considerable damage to the HMS Ocean, which later sank. When Corporal
Seyit, who survived the war, was asked to re-enact his exploit for a photographer,
he was unable to lift the shells, saying that it was no doubt the heat of
battle and an instinct for survival that gave him superhuman strength. A wooden
replica of a shell was used to satisfy the photographer. There is a diorama of
this action in the War Museum at Anıtkabir, the
Mausoleum of Kemal Atatürk, in Ankara and a statue of Corporal Seyit carrying a
shell graces the waterfront at Eceabat, the town nearest the battlefields.
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| Part of the Battle of the Dardanelles diorama depicting Corporal Seyit, Anitkabir, Ankara |
Besides the
naval and military actions, there were a number of military ‘firsts’ during the Gallipoli
Campaign. It was one first campaigns where aircraft were used extensively,
mainly for observation, from the first day of the landings and before. Little
notice was taken of the intelligence supplied by this ‘new-fangled and
unsporting’ innovation
by the older ‘set-in-their-way’ British generals. In fact, even before the
March attack on the Forts, the officers of HMS Majestic, which had been bombarding one of the Dardanelles forts,
testing the defences, were enraged at the exploits of a Turkish airman, Captain
Cemal, who, in an ancient Blériot XI aircraft, carrying in
his lap four round cricket-sized grenades each with a wick, a lighted cigar
clenched in his teeth, flew over the ship: “With
his left hand Cemal picked up one of the bombs nestled in his lap and brought
it towards his face. The fuse spat as it met the glowing cigar end. Like a
pilot of old he tossed the sizzling bomb down towards the ship below. With a
crack the metal ball split apart, but not over the wooden deck. Coolly Cemal
dropped three more bombs while flying in a large gentle loop, Honour satisfied
and both hands now back on the wheel, Cemal returned to the grass aerodrome
outside Çanakkale.
He had managed to eke out of the Blériot a top speed of 60mph on his triumphant
flight home.” (Hugh Dolan – Gallipoli
Air War)
The
world’s first aircraft Carrier,
HMS Ark Royal was deployed at
Gallipoli as was the HMS Manica, the world’s
first kite balloon carrier. Throughout
the campaign the airwar continued high above the trenches of Anzac Cove and
Cape Helles. In fact the final Anzac combat casualty at Gallipoli was an
Australian pilot who, with fewer than 20 hours flying experience, was shot down
by an experienced German pilot the day after the successful evacuation.
Unbeknown
to many there was also a very successful submarine war that was conducted in
the Dardanelles and in the Sea of Marmara by the Australian and British navies.
While eight submarines out of thirteen that
took part, were lost during the campaign, Turkish losses amounted to 2
battleships, a destroyer, 5 gunboats, 11 transports, 44 steamers and 148
sailing craft greatly affecting the supply of troops, ammunition and food to
the Turkish defenders.
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| A landing boat was still visible at Gaba Tepe in 1981 |
The
other surprising thing about the Gallipoli campaign was the number of
nationalities that actually took part. We have all heard of the Australian and
New Zealand contribution as well as that of the British, but the French
actually had more troops killed that the combined total of Anzacs, with a high
percentage of these being Senegalese and Algerians. A large number of Indians,
particularly Sikhs and Gurkhas, served in the British Army, many being killed.
The Royal Newfoundland Regiment was involved and suffered some loss of life.
Newfoundland was then a Dominion and did not become a province of Canada until
1949. The newly formed Zionist Mule Corps, which later became the Jewish
Legion, a predecessor of the Israeli Army, landed at Cape Helles under the
command of Col J.H. Patterson who had achieved fame in the 1890s by killing the
infamous man-eating lions of Tsavo during the construction of the notorious ‘Lunatic
Line’, the railway between the East African port of Mombasa and the highlands
of Uganda. Besides the Zionist Mule Corps, there were a number of different
supply corps present and I have seen Maltese, Cypriot and Moslem (probably from
what is now Pakistan) graves in the various Gallipoli cemeteries.
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| Graves of Turkish soldiers at the Canakkale Martyrs Memorial, Gallipoli |
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| V Beach where the River Clyde was run aground & the Sedd el-Bahr Fort. Insert River Clyde at Cape Hellas, by Charles Dixon |
“If these thoughts are true about small personal matters,
consider how much more potent and how final would be a new choice with
foreknowledge upon some great or decisive issue. When my armoured train was
thrown off the rails by the Boers in the South African War and I had to try to
clear the line under fire, I was obliged to keep getting in and out of the cab
of the engine which was our sole motive power. I therefore took off my Mauser
pistol, which got in my way. But for this I should forty minutes later have
fired two or three shots at twenty yards at a mounted burgher named Botha, who
summoned me to surrender. If I had killed him on that day, November 15, 1899,
the history of South Africa would certainly have been different and almost
certainly would have been less fortunate. This was the Botha who afterwards
became Commander-in-Chief of the Boers and later Prime Minister of the South
African Union. But for his authority and vigour the South African rebellion
which broke out at the beginning of the Great War might never have been nipped
in the bud. In this case the Australian and New Zealand army corps then sailing
in convoy across the Indian Ocean would have been deflected from Cairo to the
Cape. All preparations to divert the convoy at Colombo had actually been made.
Instead of guarding the Suez Canal it would have fought with the Boer
insurgents. By such events both the Australian and South African points of view
would have been profoundly altered. Moreover, unless the Anzacs had been
available in Egypt by the end of 1914 there would have been no nucleus of an
army to attack the Gallipoli Peninsula in the spring, and all that tremendous
story would have worked out quite differently. Perhaps it would have been
better, perhaps it would have been worse. Imagination bifurcates and loses
itself along the ever-multiplying paths of the labyrinth.”
© Neil Rawlins text & photography
Travel books by the author available on Amazon
© Neil Rawlins text & photography
Travel books by the author available on Amazon
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| Travels in another time - Neil Rawlins |
