Some Surprising Facts About the Gallipoli Campaign

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.

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.

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.

Graves of Turkish soldiers at the Canakkale Martyrs Memorial, Gallipoli 

The Gallipoli Campaign was the first large scale amphibious invasion and the first to use a landing ship, the specially adapted collier River Clyde that was to be run aground at V Beach beneath the Sedd el Badr Fort, allowing the soldiers on board to capture it. The River Clyde was successfully beached, but unfortunately the guns of the fort had not been neutralised by the navy as planned and the ship became a death trap to the invading soldiers: “It was an extraordinary sight to watch our men go off, boat after boat, push off for a few yards, spring from the seats to dash into the water which was now less than waist deep. It was just on this point that the enemy fire was concentrated. Those who got into the water, rifle in hand and heavy pack on back, generally made a dive forward riddled through and through, if there was still life in them to drown in a few seconds.” (George Davidson – The Incomparable 29^th and the ‘River Clyde’). Six of the River Clyde’s crew received Victoria Crosses for their part in the action. After the war, the River Clyde was refloated, repaired and continued in service as a tramp steamer in the Mediterranean for another 50 years!

V Beach where the River Clyde was run aground & the Sedd el-Bahr Fort.  Insert River Clyde  at Cape Hellas, by
Charles Dixon

Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, took the blame for the debacle, fell on his sword and resigned from Parliament. Recently I came upon a very interest comment written by Churchill in a little-known book called Thoughts and Adventures and I will quote it verbatim:

“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


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