by Peter Hart
General Otto Liman von Sanders, Headquarters, Fifth Army
This kind of foreplay would not convince for long if it was not followed through. The RND decided to try to add a touch more of a threat by landing a platoon of the Hood Battalion on one of the northern beaches that night to light flares. This seemed likely to be a dangerous expedition and one of the Hood officers, Lieutenant Commander Bernard Freyberg, offered to use his specialist swimming skills to achieve the same result without exposing so many men to risk.
The boat was painted an angry black, flecked with grey spots, and a Maxim placed at the bows behind the sandbags. The scheme was that Freyberg should be towed out in this ship’s boat, escorted by a destroyer to within two miles of the shore. He then should be dropped, swim to the beach and there light some lifeboat flares, while the Maxim on the ship’s boat and the guns of the destroyer should make all the noise they could to attract the attention of the enemy. He started out about 9 o’clock and I shall never forget his toilet which consisted of the smearing of his whole person with a black oil-like substance to protect him against the cold of the sea.8
Lieutenant Charles Lister, Hood Battalion, 2nd Naval Brigade, RND
The rowing boats were towed by a steam pinnace which set off from the Grantully Castle transport ship at 21.00. When they were three miles off shore they slipped their tow ropes and began to head towards shore. Freyberg started his mission from a spot about two miles from shore at 00.40 on 26 April.
I started swimming to cover the remaining distance, towing a waterproof canvas bag containing three oil flares and five calcium lights, a knife, signalling light and a revolver. After an hour and a quarter’s hard swimming in bitterly cold water, I reached the shore and lighted my first flare, and again took to the water and swam towards the east, and landed about 300 yards away from my first flare where I lighted my second and hid among some bushes to await developments; nothing happened, so I crawled up a slope to where some trenches were located the morning before. I discovered they were only dummies, consisting of only a pile of earth about two feet high and 100 yards long, and looked to be quite newly made. I crawled in about 350 yards and listened for some time, but could discover nothing.9
Lieutenant Commander Bernard Freyberg, Hood Battalion, 2nd Naval Brigade, RND
Freyberg thought that, although the shore was unoccupied, he could see lights on the surrounding hills. However, he could get no further as he started being afflicted by cramp. He returned to the beach, set off his last flare and swam off into the darkness. In one of the rowing boats bobbing about offshore was Ordinary Seaman Joe Murray, also of the Hood Battalion. Murray gained at least some idea of how cold the water was.
All of a sudden there was such a flash, such a bloody flash – it was a destroyer setting off a salvo. We couldn’t see the sea but we could see the cliffs. As this flash went there was a panic really because it sort of shook us up. Well, we hit something, whether it was driftwood I don’t know. We sloped to starboard I know that and I nearly fell out. I was trying to be a sailor – you can’t hang on with both hands, you have to do what they do. I went over and my hand was in the water and – oh dear me – it was perishing cold. I don’t know how Freyberg survived that swim.10
Ordinary Seaman Joe Murray, Hood Battalion, 2nd Naval Brigade, RND
Freyberg was incredibly lucky that, on his return swim, he encountered one of the boats in the pitch dark.
After swimming for a considerable distance I was picked up by Lieutenant Nelson in our cutter some time after 3 a.m. Our cutter, in company with the pinnace and the TBD Kennet, searched the shore with 12-pounders and Maxim fire, but could get no answer from the shore.11
Lieutenant Commander Bernard Freyberg, Hood Battalion, 2nd Naval Brigade, RND
Freyberg’s was an act of great heroism and physical endurance but, as Lieutenant Charles Lister regretfully commented, ‘The Turks had taken no notice of their antics.’12
The second diversionary operation was a similar demonstration carried out by six French transports with accompanying destroyers at Besika Bay on the morning of 26 April. The escort ships began bombarding the local coastline while the transports simulated disembarking their troops, but the whole affair was short lived. The ships were recalled by 10.00. Yet even that short-lived threat was enough to keep the Turkish 11th Division in location for another day; they would only move off for deployment across the Straits on 27 April.
FOR ALL HAMILTON’S ATTEMPTS to conceal his intentions, the end results were unimpressive. Of course Liman was concerned about the situation at Bulair and even at Besika Bay. But the diversions were not serious enough to maintain Turkish attention for overly long. They only caused a delay of a day or two in the despatch of divisions to the real landing sites at Helles and Anzac. Yet Hamilton’s scattergun approach of making seven separate landings and two full-fledged diversionary operations meant that the Allies did not have sufficient strength of troops landed at any one location to force an emergency response from the Turks. Attacked at almost every feasible landing site, the Turks were able to hold on for long enough with local reserves at both Helles and Anzac for Liman to try to work out what was happening.
After a while Essad Pasha, commanding the III Corps, arrived on our heights and brought some detailed reports. The reports stated that British landing attempts at the south point of the peninsula had so far been repulsed by the 9th Division, but that the enemy was tenaciously bringing up more and more troops. At Gaba Tepe things were going well; the enemy had not been able so far to get a footing. But at Ari Burnu the heights along the coast were in the hands of the British, though the 19th Division was on the march to recapture the former.13
General Otto Liman von Sanders, Headquarters, Fifth Army
Once Liman had defined the location and strength of the most serious threats, the diversionary actions ceased to weave their spell. First the 5th and 7th Divisions were put on the march from Bulair towards Anzac and Helles, then a couple of days later the 11th Division was despatched from Asia. At the same time the 15th and 16th Divisions set sail from Constantinople and the 12th Division began the march from Smyrna while as many guns as possible were sent on their way. By the end of April the clock was fast running down for the British invasion force. Meanwhile, on the Western Front there was desperate fighting as the British and French strove to fill the gap in their front line created by the German gas attack which had launched the Second Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915. The irrelevance of Gallipoli to the outcome of the war could not have been clearer.
ANZAC: THE HOLDING PEN
We have been amusing ourselves by trying to discover the longest period of absolute quiet. We have been fighting now continuously for 22 days, all day and all night, and most of us think that absolutely the longest period during which there was absolutely no sound of gun or rifle fire, throughout the whole of that time, was 10 seconds. One man says he was able on one occasion to count 14, but nobody believes him!1
Colonel John Monash, Headquarters, 4th Australian Brigade, NZ&A Division, AIF
THE ANZAC BRIDGEHEAD was an incredible achievement. Not the winning of it; that had been the meagre results of a thoroughly botched military operation which never had much chance of success. What astounded was that the ANZAC Corps had first secured its fragile lines and then made that small domain all but inviolable, despite the severe pressure exerted by the Turks over the next four weeks. The Anzac line started in the south at the sea, ran up Bolton’s Hill, across the 400 Plateau, all along Second Ridge to Quinn’s Post, where it petered out, with a gap covered by firepower rather than trenches. The line resumed on Pope’s Hill, then, after another gap, over Russell’s Top, where it faced the Turkish lines barring The Nek and the route to Chunuk Bair. The line then progressed down the narrow Walker’s Ridge to a series of small posts guarding the flank in the foothills by the sea to the north. Just 1,000 yards deep at maximum, only 2,500 yards long and much less than a square mile in total, it was a severely cramped e
nvironment.
The Anzacs had taken Hamilton’s advice to ‘Dig, dig, Dig!’,2 well aware that their own lives depended on disappearing as fast as possible below ground. Day by day the trenches were deepened, dugouts carved out and communications trenches dug. Everywhere was under fire; even rifle bullets could reach the beach and no one was safe. The front line and posts on Second Ridge were just a few yards from their Turkish counterpoints and were totally enfiladed from higher up the ridges. Just behind them were the precipitous slopes dropping down into Monash Valley. That and Shrapnel Gully were the main thoroughfares, but they were still under the constant threat of machine gun and sniper fire from the head of the valley, where the grid of Turkish trenches (later known as the Chessboard) barred all routes from Second Ridge on to Baby 700. The whole of the ANZAC Corps had to be supplied from the 300-yard-long shallow beach with makeshift piers that were under intermittent speculative shell fire from Gaba Tepe. Every tin of bully beef, every bullet for their rifles, every drop of water had to be landed under indirect fire, stored somewhere and then carried up to the front lines. The continued occupation of Anzac was a testimony to the hardiness, courage and sheer bloody-mindedness of the men of Australia and New Zealand.
By 28 April the physical exhaustion of the 1st Australian Division was evident and Hamilton had agreed to assign four battalions of the RND, who were returning from their diversionary duties at Bulair, to hold the line while Birdwood’s units reorganised and got a little desperately needed rest. The Anzacs, always confident in their own manhood, decried the physical immaturity and callow state of the marines, who were largely wartime recruits and by no means the finished article as soldiers. They were to face a severe challenge when they began to take over the line between Courtney’s Post and across 400 Plateau on the night of 28 April. In the pitch dark, with the rain pouring down and contradictory orders being shouted from all sides, they scrambled up the near-vertical scrubby hillside and took over trenches that were often still choked with the dead and wounded. It was a terrifying introduction to warfare at its most basic.
By this time the Turks had also received the reinforcements despatched by General Liman von Sanders following his assessment of the threat posed by the Anzac landing. As a result Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal was able to launch a major night attack timed for 04.00 on Saturday 1 May to avoid the threat of Allied naval intervention. The Turks poured out of Legge Valley, swirling up Wire Gully and over-running some of the isolated forward posts. However, most of their attacks broke down in the blast of rifle and machine gun fire from the much maligned British marines.
At dawn the Turks attacked in mass and the situation looked critical, but before arriving at the trench they retired with heavy losses. My machine gun officer was killed; he was using his rifle during the attack and got a bullet through the head. I borrowed a periscope from one of my subalterns to try and spot a machine gun that was worrying us considerably. As soon as I got it in line with the top of the trench a bullet smashed it in my hands. I went to inform the officer, but he had just been killed. Snipers are a menace, they seem to be everywhere and are very clever at concealing themselves. The sun and flies are terrible and one cannot obtain water to quench the thirst. The dead Turks in front and our own fellows lying at the back of us are beginning to smell. The din was terrific: shouting and blowing of bugles and the whole place was lit up with fires that were raging in the scrub. During the attack I caught about thirty of them in a bunch coming towards our gun position. I emptied a belt of ammunition into them at 60 yards range with good effect.3
Private Bertram Wilson, Chatham Battalion, Royal Marine Brigade, RND
Both sides were now intent on testing how far they could get at Anzac. Birdwood ordered a night attack on Baby 700 to be carried out by the NZ&A Division, bursting out of Monash Valley at 19.15 after a 15-minute supporting bombardment. In the end everything went wrong. None of the units were properly briefed and the Otago Battalion in particular had nowhere near enough time to get ready to launch a concerted assault. Yet still the 13th and 16th Battalions went into their attack at the head of Monash Valley on either side of the Bloody Angle, just below the Chessboard. With them was the distinctly unimpressed Private Harry Murray.
Sheer military impossibilities with such troops and munitions as were at our disposal, but one must learn by bitter experience; not that we needed telling, even then. It was a sad and terrible business. The machine gunners advanced with the infantry and as we topped the ridge our men fell like grass before the sweep of an expert mower, but most tragic of all, one of our own machine guns was firing too low and added to the massacre until we got a message back and stopped it. Disaster on disaster: following fast and following faster.4
Private Harry Murray, 16th (Western Australia and South Australia) Battalion, 4th Brigade, NZ&A Division, AIF
The Otago Battalion arrived, some ninety minutes late, at the jumping-off point and at 20.45 lunged forward from Pope’s Hill with no artillery support. They too came under heavy fire and their attack was bogged down roughly in a tenuous line alongside the Australians but well short of the Chessboard. That night was a desperate affair but with the coming of the dawn things just got worse, especially when a salvo of their own artillery shells managed to fall smack in the 16th Battalion. The sad remnants were then joined by elements of the Chatham and Portsmouth Battalions who had been moved up in reserve. Private Harry Baker recalled many years later what happened as the Turks launched a sustained counterattack from the front.
We fired away at all the Turks who kept advancing. They were then about one hundred and fifty yards away and they came up in almost mass formation so we had very easy targets. An Australian came and lay next to me and on his right another man scaled this steep slope and it turned out to be Major Armstrong of the Portsmouth Royal Marines. Captain Richards was next to him and all the way to the right were men shoulder to shoulder lying on the ground. No cover at all, just lying on the ridge.5
Private Harry Baker, Chatham Battalion, Royal Marine Brigade, RND
As the Turks attacked from their front the complex nature of the landscape allowed a German machine gun in German Officer’s Trench, just north of Wire Gully, to get a clear enfilade shot at the men lying on the open ridge facing the Chessboard.
Suddenly a machine gun crackled away at right angles to us, we were firing ahead and it was even behind us. This machine gun went along and that killed every man on the ridge except the Australian and me. We were the only two left. The Australian said, ‘The bastards can’t kill me, they’ve had lots of tries, they can’t kill me!’ I looked again. The machine gun started barking again behind us. It was knocking the sand up and that covered every man again. Every man, it came right along. I felt the bullets thud into the Aussie and he never spoke again. I felt as though I’d been hit by a donkey and I had a bullet through the right foot. When I saw those bullets coming along and I knew that it would be the end of me if they came along far enough. They say your past comes up but I can say truthfully that I hadn’t got much past at nineteen and all I thought of was, ‘Am I going to live?’ That’s all I thought, that’s what struck me. ‘Am I going to be lucky?’ Because I couldn’t see how I could be with all these bullets coming along and I waited for it – it was inevitable.6
Private Harry Baker, Chatham Battalion, Royal Marine Brigade, RND
Luckily for Baker the machine gun stopped after the bullet had slammed into his foot. However, he wasn’t out of trouble yet. Even as they were destroyed from behind, the Turks in front charged forwards to over-run their position.
I lay there and I didn’t know what to do. The Turks came and prodded various men with their bayonets, fortunately they didn’t poke me, and I could hear them jabbering away and then they moved away again. ‘Well,’ I thought. ‘I must do something!’ So I gave myself a push off and went bumpity-bumpity right down to the bottom of the ravine over dead men, rifles, bush, all kinds of things.7
Private Harry Baker, Chatham
Battalion, Royal Marine Brigade, RND
Baker was eventually rescued and evacuated. The corpses of his comrades lay up on the ridge, rotting and turning black in the hot sun for the rest of the campaign. It became known as Dead Man’s Ridge.
The attack merely confirmed that, while the Turks could not break into Anzac, nor could the ANZAC Corps break out. So the digging continued on both sides. It was back-breaking work, though they attained greater security with every shovelful – all this against the backdrop of constant skirmishing that accompanies trench warfare between well-matched adversaries. Small-scale raids, sapping and patrols pushed out into No Man’s Land. Along much of the line, patrols were impossible, the trenches being only a cricket pitch or so apart. But to the south there was a relatively open area of ridges and valleys descending from 400 Plateau towards Gaba Tepe. One series of patrols seems to emphasise the spirit of adventurous soldiering that was to become an Anzac tradition. Their ultimate purpose was to try and establish the position of the dreaded ‘Beachy Bill’ gun, or more likely guns, that were harassing the beach and was believed to be hidden in the Olive Grove sector.
A first patrol was sent out on 9 May and succeeded in locating a source of fresh water not 1,000 yards from the arid Anzac beachhead. They also located two Turkish camps and gained a slightly better impression of what was going on nearer Gaba Tepe. When this was reported to the 1st Division staff it was decided to repeat the patrol on the night of 13 May. This time Sergeant Joseph Will and Bombardier Albert Orchard were sent out, accompanied by Major Thomas Blamey. The Turks had noticed signs of the previous patrol and there seemed far more sentries in evidence.
