by Peter Hart
Sub Lieutenant Ivan Heald, Hood Battalion, 1st Naval Brigade, RND
The men in the control stations carefully counted off each and every soldier who passed them, then at last they themselves moved off to the beach.
At about 1.30 everyone was through and so even if we – the last 600 – had been collared the evacuation would have been a great success as we formed such a small proportion of the total numbers. But I don’t think any of us last folks had any such high and uplifting thoughts. I hadn’t anyway. At 1.45 the French blew up two 10″ and two 4.7″s which had to be left firing till then otherwise it would have given the show away. The flash and noise was just like the gun going off so the Turks didn’t suspect.24
Major Norman Burge, Nelson Battalion, 1st Naval Brigade, RND
Still the Turkish lines remained quiet. In the end V Beach was evacuated with little trouble from the Turks; all was going perfectly in that respect. But it was increasingly obvious that the weather was changing for the worse.
The wind was rising pretty rapidly and it was beginning to be nastyish by the time we got down. But the French pier, which we used, consisted largely of an out-of-date battleship, which they sank some time ago to form a breakwater, and so we were able to get from her straight into a destroyer. She was the Grasshopper, one of the biggest, and we pretty well filled her up. You see, we few and the 400 beach guard (put out as a last line of defence round the beach) and some others make a pretty good load for a destroyer in bad weather. We got away about 3.30.25
Major Norman Burge, Nelson Battalion, 1st Naval Brigade, RND
Just round the headland at W Beach there were far more alarums and excitement in the last few hours. Here the sea was much rougher and the waves were pounding away at the makeshift jetties upon which the lives of hundreds of men depended. A further complication was the huge quantity of ammunition which had been packed into the caves at the back of the beach and fused ready for detonation after the last men had left. As ever even with the best-laid plans there is always the near-certainty of human error; the only question was how serious its consequences might be.
About midnight one of the magazines in which was stored fire rockets, flares, fuses, small explosives, etc., was accidentally set alight by a careless man with a candle. For a time things seemed serious, for a very large volume of flame was shooting out of the mouth or entrance to the magazine, and frequent explosions, some of them very heavy, were occurring. There was a danger of it spreading to the other magazines which contained quantities of heavy explosives, shells, etc. – and if such occurred it would not be safe on any part of W Beach. The danger appeared so great at one time that the officer in charge of the magazines advised us to clear out of the PMLO’s office. So we gathered up everything, but when moving out got word that the danger was past, though the fire continued to burn during the rest of the night, though with lessening severity.26
Lieutenant Owen Steele, Newfoundland Regiment, 88th Brigade, 29th Division
On the beach by dint of constant running repairs to the piers and pontoon bridges, most of the men were able to embark in safety. Then, in the very last stages, there was a complication as the tempestuous waves threatened the evacuation of a relatively small party of troops from the 13th Division who were designated to leave by two lighters from Gully Beach. When one of them ran aground and had to be abandoned there was no room for all the men on the remaining lighter, so a party of 150 men was ordered to make its way to W Beach by the path cut into the shoreline. They set off just after 02.00. Meanwhile, Major General Stanley Maude, who was unwilling to abandon his headquarters kit, decided to make his own way with his immediate staff by the main road using mobile stretchers to carry the load.
We could not go by the beach route as it was too heavy going, so we started up hill on to the plateau, and very hard work it was. We all puffed and blew like grampuses, especially as we were all warmly clad.27
Major General Stanley Maude, Headquarters, 13th Division
Lieutenant Colonel Edward Stretch led the main body by the shoreline path. Neither party had an easy passage.
It was the wire that our troops had put down which delayed us so much as we had to cut our way through and then re-lay it so as to delay ‘Johnny Turk’ in case he was coming up behind us. When my party reached W Beach the General had not turned up, the two lighters were therefore kept alongside the jetty to wait for him and everyone embarked in the lighter which was ready to depart at a moment’s notice. We waited there perhaps half an hour, our surroundings brightly lit up by the burning dump on the cliff above and we wondered whether the General or the Turks would arrive first.28
Lieutenant Colonel Edward Stretch, 8th Royal Welsh Fusiliers, 40th Brigade, 13th Division
The military commander at W Beach, Brigadier General James O’Dowda, was unwilling to abandon Maude and his roving eye fell upon Lieutenant Owen Steele, who was peremptorily ordered to track him down.
I went up over the hill and shouted the General’s name until I eventually found him and so soon hurried them on board the waiting lighter. This was a dangerous and fearsome undertaking when one considers the following. When I left it was 3.30 a.m. – the fuses in the magazines were lighted at 3.15 timed for 45 minutes – one of the many fires to be lit, among the stocks of supplies etc., was already burning – the Turks had sent over a few shells during the night, though very few, but two at a time, and two were likely to come at any time – and again, our firing line had been empty since just before 12 o’clock – 4 hours – so one might possibly encounter a body of Turks. However we got on board at just 5 minutes to 4.00 and within 5 minutes and before we had even untied from the wharf, the first magazine went off with a very heavy explosion. A great volume of flame shot hundreds of feet into the air, debris of all kinds went everywhere, and as we were only a hundred yards away from it some came our way. It did no damage beyond breaking one man’s arm in three places. The second explosion came when we were less than 50 yards off the wharf and flame, noise and everything was greater though nothing reached us. By now there were fires everywhere, and it was really a wonderful sight. Another lighter and a hospital boat went away from the pier when we did – so we were really the last away from the Peninsula.29
Lieutenant Owen Steele, 1st Royal Newfoundland Regiment, 88th Brigade, 29th Division
The weather was still deteriorating; the waves were driving in hard, there was a heavy swell running and the strong winds threatened to push the heavily laden lighters back in towards the cataclysmic explosions and the threat of Turkish shells crashing down on the beach. A threat that soon became a reality.
What a hullaballoo! The Turks thought we were going at last and opened every gun they could on roads, communication trenches, beaches and anything else they could think of. Some of us had thought they wanted to let us get off – but this fire showed they had meant to make it as uncomfortable for us as possible.30
Major Norman Burge, Nelson Battalion, 1st Naval Brigade, RND
The very last man left at Helles seems to have been Lieutenant Ronald Langton-Jones of the Royal Navy. He and two seamen had been detached to stay on the sunken hulk, which was only connected to W Beach by a flimsy pontoon bridge, with the duty of making fast the destroyers on to which many of the men would embark. Now he was trapped.
In the early hours of the morning, the frail bridge connecting us with the shore broke away. However, I managed to get a hurried despatch through to Captain Staveley, advising him of the situation, and he was able to divert in time the few remaining troops due to pass through the hulk. When the evacuation was completed, he passed by the end of the hulk in his picket boat, and shouted above the now howling gale that he would send in a destroyer to rescue us. The main magazine by that time had exploded and blown sky-high the cliff, forming it into a gully. Stores and dumps were burning furiously, and the Turks were really excited. As we stood in the dawn watching and waiting a piece of shrapnel tore off my left shoulder-strap and knocked yet another hole in
the hulk’s funnel. Just as daylight was breaking HMS Fury arrived, and, by a superb feat of seamanship, turned his ship short round on a lee shore and shoved her bows close into the hulk and held her with a bow line. Willing hands then threw us ropes and hauled us on board over her forecastle, one at a time. I was the last man.31
Lieutenant Ronald Langton-Jones, Royal Navy
Langton-Jones was taken off at about 04.30 in the morning. Shortly afterwards, as the rescuing Fury moved away under a smattering of Turkish shrapnel as a last goodbye, the British warships responded in kind, plastering the mottled slopes of Achi Baba with layers of shell bursts and spurts of flames in one last defiant bombardment.
Despite the tension, it was apparent that the British had escaped all but unscathed, although they had had to abandon a lot of their stores and equipment. The destruction had been impressive; but the scale of the stores held at Helles was such that much remained for the delectation of the Turks.
The booty was extraordinary. Wagon parks, automobile parks, mountains of arms, ammunition and entrenching tools were collected. Here too most of the tent camps and barracks had been left standing, in part with all of their equipment. Many hundreds of horses lay in rows, shot or poisoned, but quite a number of horses and mules were captured and turned over to the Turkish artillery. Here as at the other fronts the stacks of flour and subsistence had some acid solution poured over them to render them unfit for our use. In the next few days the hostile ships made vain attempts to set the stacks and the former British tent camps and barracks on fire. It took nearly two years to clean up the grounds. The immense booty of war material was used for other Turkish armies. Many ship loads of conserves, flour and wood were removed to Constantinople. What the ragged and insufficiently nourished Turkish soldiers took away, cannot be estimated. I tried to stop plundering by a dense line of sentinels but the endeavour was in vain.32
General Otto Liman von Sanders, Headquarters, Fifth Army
The British soldiers may have been reluctant to accept the defeat that was confirmed by their withdrawal but it is not in the nature of soldiers to brood for too long on what might have been. Their minds turned swiftly to the challenges to come; some were less serious than others.
Personally I wouldn’t mind a winter on the Suez Canal – with a mild engagement in which of course we rout the Turks with no loss to ourselves second and fourth Fridays!33
Major Norman Burge, Nelson Battalion, 1st Naval Brigade, RND
The tangled strategic policy bequeathed by the blunders of 1915 meant that hundreds of thousands of British and Imperial troops would be caught up in the needless sideshow campaigns at Salonika, Palestine and Mesopotamia. The best of the Gallipoli divisions were despatched to the Western Front: the 29th Division, the RND and the ANZAC Corps were all serving on the Somme within months. Here, once they had acclimatised to the pace and intensity of real trench warfare dominated by the massed roaring of the artillery, they did well. But their casualties were high: indeed, the insouciant Major Norman Burge, quoted above, would be killed leading his Nelson Battalion into action against the Germans at Beaucourt in November 1916.
The evacuation had been carried out brilliantly, of that there could be no doubt. The Allies had been blessed with good fortune at several points in the process, but they had deserved their luck for the foresight and application used in conceiving and implementing the plans under severe pressure. Yet those who, in pointing to that achievement, have sought to wrest victory from defeat have considerably overstated the case. It was a success; but it was a success forged from the wreckage of defeat. Lieutenant Douglas Jerrold, one of the surviving cynics among the RND officers, was inclined to pour scorn from his lofty pedestal.
The evacuation, the world has repeatedly been informed, was a very skilful operation. The phrase is just stupid. It does not require intelligence but merely the instinct of self-preservation to withdraw troops quietly by night instead of noisily by day, or to withdraw them gradually instead of all at once. Or to hold the front line to the last and so conceal your intentions from the enemy. There were no casualties because the Turks did not attack, but in no case would there, or could there, have been a major disaster. The period of danger was nothing like twenty-four hours but in any case there was nothing that anyone could do about it. If the Turks had chanced to launch a powerful attack on the last day no staff work could have prevented the loss of most of the few troops left behind there. But the risk, seeing that the Turks never attacked in force, was negligible. It was, as everyone else has said, a ‘miracle of organisation’. We are good at that sort of thing. When we surrender the last defences of our Empire, we may be certain that the protocols, like the graves, will be in perfect order.34
Lieutenant Douglas Jerrold, Hawke Battalion, 1st Naval Brigade, RND
And there was indeed an element of exaggerated self-congratulation in much of the praise lavished on the evacuation from within the British camp. It was evident that the hubris – that overestimation of their own genius and abilities that had provoked the disaster of Gallipoli in the first place – had not yet been burnt out of them. That casual arrogance would be finally exorcised by the Germans on the gently rolling ridges and valleys of the Somme in 1916.
MYTHS AND LEGENDS
Though the bodies recovered from the tragedy have been stripped and laid out in the Morgue, no hand has yet dared remove the masks from their faces.1
General Sir Ian Hamilton
THERE ARE MANY POTENT MYTHS relating to Gallipoli. They have had a compelling and long-lasting grip over the imagination due to the power of the emotions unleashed during the course of the campaign and the intoxicating literary prowess of some of the main participants. But towering above all else is the construct of Australian and New Zealand popular opinion that places their two nations firmly at the centre of the campaign, at times ignoring the contributions of the British, French and Indian troops. The truth is that the ANZAC Corps played a very important, but secondary role. The total British and French forces were much larger, the main effort at Gallipoli was firmly centred at Helles, and only during the August Offensive did the emphasis shift to Anzac and Suvla. Even then the larger British numerical contribution was manifest.
Overall the campaign was a huge drain on Allied military resources involving nearly half a million troops across the eight-month campaign, of which 410,000 were from the British Empire with a further 79,000 from France and her North African colonies. Of these the British Empire lost 205,000 (115,000 killed, wounded or missing; 90,000 evacuated sick) while the French had 47,000 casualties (approximately 27,000 killed, wounded or missing, with some 20,000 evacuated sick). This compares with 251,309 Turkish casualties (186,869 killed, wounded or missing; 64,440 evacuated sick).2 Within this all-consuming bedlam the significance of the ANZAC Corps involvement in the campaign lay not in its actual achievements on the battlefield as an inexperienced formation – the Turks won, after all – but rather in the development of a powerful spirit of comradeship, a determination in battle and a growing military competence which would help create a burgeoning sense of nationhood in both Australia and New Zealand. This would be the real legacy of Anzac Cove.
But the underlying British myth is even more pernicious. It is a far more dangerous construct, riddled with the kind of self-delusion and boastful assumption of racial superiority that had been responsible for the Gallipoli disaster in the first place. The landings of the 29th Division and the ANZAC Corps have been hailed as a military achievement of the highest order. Much is made of the numerous Turkish machine guns, the streams of lead, heroism beyond measure and of struggles against almost insuperable odds. Their heroism is undeniable, but at Helles and Anzac on 25 April the insuperable odds were faced by the Turks not the British. It may have been the first landing to be made in the face of modern weapons, but the British could hardly have done worse; or indeed the Turks much better. This was not the view held after the war by General Sir Ian Hamilton and his acolytes. They simply refused
to accept defeat; as far as they were concerned they had won.
When at long last the official history of the Dardanelles comes out we shall learn for the first time how sweeping were the victories won at Anzac as well as Helles by the afternoon of the 25th April 1915. On the reverse of those pages we shall read how the fog of war descended upon the commanders, hiding from them what lay in the hollow of their hands.3
General Sir Ian Hamilton
The official histories show nothing of the kind. The British Empire could hardly have survived too many more ‘sweeping’ victories like those ‘won’ on 25 April. Throughout the campaign the British exaggerated the numerical and machine gun strength of the opposition while simultaneously underestimating the collective military skill and resolve of the Turkish soldiers. As evidence of failure mounted up, the time-honoured response was to blame everyone else.
Behind us we had a swarm of adverse influences: our own General Headquarters in France, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff of the War Office, the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, GQG in France, the French Cabinet and the best organised part of the British press. Fate willed it so. Faint hearts and feeble wills seemed for a while to succeed in making vain the sacrifices of Anzac, Helles and Suvla. Only the dead men stuck it out to the last.4
General Sir Ian Hamilton
There is a distinct whiff of ‘everybody is mad but me’ in this diatribe. Yet it is irrefutable that mistakes were made at every level of command at Gallipoli: operational planning was woeful and any localised tactical opportunities that arose were routinely missed. This endemic military incompetence at command and staff level was then lethally combined with troops that had little or no experience of modern warfare in 1915. The lesson was clear to those who would heed it: raw courage was not enough to combat bolt-action rifles, machine guns, trench systems, barbed wire and, above all, artillery. Amateurism was doomed and the British Army needed a more professional approach if it was to triumph in the Great War.
