The Animal Stars Collection
Page 14
A Turkish Army Corps led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha soon arrived to take the ridge back, and the battle became one of the bloodiest and most desperate of the whole Gallipoli campaign. At 5.30 in the evening of 8 August there seemed to be a lull in the fighting. Colonel Malone tried to inspect the situation and was killed by a shot to the head—said to have been fired from a British or ANZAC warship.
The fighting continued. Ammunition was so scarce that wounded soldiers who could still walk but not fight searched the bodies of the dead—both friend and enemy—to find some more. The Turks retook the trench that had protected the ridge, and threw ‘egg bombs’ at their enemies. But the bombs had such long fuses that they took minutes to explode, and sometimes the bombs would be thrown back and forth several times between the Turks and the New Zealanders before they blew up. By the time reinforcements arrived, all but seventy of the 760 New Zealanders had been killed or wounded. (None of the British Wiltshires survived the battle.)
The Allies were forced to retreat. They had held Chanuk Bair for only twenty-four hours. Colonel Malone’s body remained on the hill, one of hundreds of soldiers with no known grave.
It was perhaps New Zealand’s most tragic day of warfare, but also the most heroic. As with the whole Gallipoli campaign the Battle of Chanuk Bair showed the determination and courage of the men on the ground, trying to carry out the confused, badly planned and often simply stupid strategies of the commanders.
After Chanuk Bair there was no other attempt to take high ground from the Turks—what was known as ‘the line’ remained the same until the Allied troops were evacuated.
After the war Chanuk Bair cemetery was established on the spot where the Turks had buried some of the men killed in the heroic but doomed attempt. About 632 men are now buried there, but only ten of the graves are identified.
The Battle of Lone Pine
The Battle of Lone Pine was the only successful Australian attack against the Turkish trenches on Gallipoli. But it had only been planned to divert the Turks away from the real aim—to capture the ridge of Sari Bair, and Chanuk Bair, one of its higher points.
The Turkish position was so strong at Lone Pine that none of the Turks expected an attack there. It seemed an insane place to strike—there would be incredible loss of life. The commander of the Australian 1st Division, General Walker, tried to argue, but General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British commander, insisted that the attack go ahead.
Walker did his best. There were 91 metres between the Allied trenches and the Turkish trenches, which were about 200 metres wide. Walker ordered the men to dig tunnels until they were only about 36 metres from the Turkish positions. Then for three days the Turkish trenches were bombarded with rocket and gunfire to give cover to soldiers who ran through the smoke and confusion to cut much of the barbed wire between the trenches.
Then, near dusk on 6 August, the Australian 1st Infantry Brigade attacked, half of the men coming up through the underground tunnels and half forcing their way through the barbed wire. But they found that the Turkish trenches had thick pine logs on top of them. Some of the logs were set alight, some bombed, some bayoneted into fragments.
The Australians managed to take part of the Turkish line in the first couple of hours. But for six days after that there was a furious battle, comprising mostly hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches and the use of hand grenades, as the Turks tried to take the few metres back. The Australians even used walls of dead bodies as barricades.
Once the Allied commanders saw that Turkish territory had been taken instead of the fighting just being a diversion, reinforcements were sent to keep it.
It was a victory…of sorts. About 100 metres of ground had been taken from the Turks, and only for a short while, as Lone Pine, too, was deserted at the Allied evacuation. Once again it was the determination of the Anzac forces that created a legend from disaster.
Each Anzac Day, after the dawn service, there is a memorial at the Lone Pine cemetery.
The name came from the only remaining pine of a stand cut down by the Turks. The timber and branches were used to reinforce their trenches. After the battle a couple of Australian soldiers retrieved a few pine cones from the shattered branches and brought them back to Australia. Seedlings were grown from these cones and distributed to be planted as memorials. ‘Lone Pine’ trees have been planted in parks, schools and people’s private gardens in Australia and New Zealand and at Gallipoli itself to commemorate the battle and the Gallipoli campaign in general.
Turkish troops
The Turkish troops were fighting for their homeland—Gallipoli was part of their country and the Allies had invaded it. The Turks had also heard that if Constantinople, their capital, fell to the Allies, they’d come under Russian rule.
While most of the Allies had little experience of war, many of the Turkish soldiers were veterans of fighting in the Balkans.
Gallipoli was a battlefield with heroes on both sides. Australians and New Zealanders mostly remember Anzac courage. Even ‘Churchill’s boys’—the young, almost untrained British reinforcements, who were expected to be virtually useless—showed extraordinary determination, scaling heights under fire. But the Turks showed as much heroism, especially when attacking well-defended Allied trenches.
At the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign Allied soldiers were told that the Turks were disorganised cowards who tortured prisoners and mutilated the dead. None of these accusations were true—the shattered corpses were just victims of bombs and shrapnel, or the disintegration of bloated bodies in the heat. However, the Turkish prisoner-of-war camps were much worse than those of the other nations in the war, and there were instances where Allied prisoners of war were slaughtered by Turks after they had surrendered. This, however, happens in almost every war, on all sides, when anger and desperation overtake humanity.
After the truce, Allies and Turks regarded each other with far more sympathy, recognising that they had more in common with each other than with those who would never know the horrors of Gallipoli.
Evacuation
Finally, on 18, 19 and 20 December 1915, when the dust, heat and thirst of summer had turned to the bitter cold of winter, the troops were evacuated.
Unlike the campaign overall, which was planned by men far away, the evacuation was managed by the men who were actually there. It was brilliant.
The Allies pretended that they were attacking to cover the evacuation. Every day more men landed on the beaches, but every night for three nights even more men, equipment—and the mules and the donkey—were taken back to the big ships waiting off-shore. The men at Gallipoli even invented ‘self-firing rifles’ to make the Turks think that there were still soldiers in the trenches. The most popular was a water-filled tin can with a small hole. The water dripped into another tin. When that tin was full it tipped over and tugged a string attached to the trigger of a rifle. As the trigger was pulled, the rifle went off—even though its owner was long gone.
Finally only forty Allies were left on the Gallipoli shore, with a Victorian Boer War VC winner, Leslie Maygar, in charge. They, too, hurried through the darkness to safety, with their feet wrapped in scraps of blanket to muffle their steps.
When the Turks peered into the silent trenches the next morning they were empty.
33,000 Allies had been killed.
78,000 were wounded.
8,000 were missing.
There were about 7,600 dead and 13,855 wounded and missing Australians.
And for New Zealand there were about 2,450 dead and about 5,150 wounded and missing.
Officially 86,692 Turks were killed and 164,617 wounded, but there may have been as many as 300,000 true casualties.
By then the war correspondents had sent back stories to people waiting for news across the world. They wrote about the Anzac troops, the ‘diggers’ who shared their last bite with a friend, who advanced no matter what the danger, who refused to salute officers, and who died with a smile and a joke.
By the e
nd of the Gallipoli campaign legends had been born. And one of them was about a man and a donkey.
Notes
Anzac: ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. In 1917, the word ‘Anzac’ meant someone who had fought at Gallipoli. It later came to mean any Australian or New Zealander who had fought or served in World War I.
Anzac Day: Australians and New Zealanders commemorate Anzac Day on 25 April, the date of the landing at Gallipoli. Anzac Day was officially named in 1916, exactly a year after the landing. There were ceremonies, marches and services in Australia, and more than 2,000 Australian and New Zealand troops marched through the streets of London. In Sydney, wounded veterans participated in the march in cars and wheelchairs.
Anzac Day was celebrated for the rest of the war in Australia as a patriotic rally, designed to encourage more men to enlist and more donations of food, bandages and other supplies for the soldiers overseas. By the 1920s Anzac Day had changed to a national day of commemoration for the 60,000 Australians who died during the war. By 1927 it was a public holiday in all of Australia and by the mid-1930s most of the traditions of Anzac Day were in place: dawn vigils and later marches, memorial services and reunions.
By the middle of World War II Anzac Day also commemorated those who died or served in that war and not much later it came to officially cover those who have died in all wars in which Australians have fought. Increasingly Anzac Day has also provided a time of reflection on all those who suffer in war, both soldiers and civilians.
There is a memorial of some sort—a statue or a set of gates or an obelisk—in just about every town or village in Australia, as well as very large and grand commemorative fountains and buildings in all major cities. Many of these record the names of the local lads who died or were wounded in war, and serve as the focal point for Anzac Day services.
Anzac Day is also the only day that two-up, a game where you gamble on whether heads or tails will come up on a pair of thrown pennies, is legal, to commemorate one of the few games that could be played in the trenches.
It’s traditional in Australia to wear a sprig of rosemary for remembrance on Anzac Day, though these days fewer Australians do so—possibly because many no longer have the rosemary bushes that once grew in most gardens to cook with the Sunday roast leg of lamb. Many schools have Anzac Day services in the week before Anzac Day, and that week too is filled with articles, radio and TV shows discussing wars and their legacies.
Anzac Day in New Zealand: The first New Zealand dawn service was held in London in 1916. The first official dawn service held in New Zealand was in 1921. The early services began with the dawn parade, church services and wreath laying. Then in the afternoon the men engaged in sports tournaments, as a commemoration of the comrade-ship and the games they played in the forces. As the men grew older the celebrations increasingly became reunions in Returned and Services’ Association (RSA) clubs or pubs.
Many New Zealanders wear red poppies on Anzac Day, although in Australia and the UK these are worn on Armistice Day, 11 November, to commemorate the day World War I ended in 1918. Back then it was called the ‘war to end all wars’.
The first red poppies were imitations of those that grew naturally on former battlefields in France. They were made out of cloth by French war widows, and shipped out by boat in 1921 for the first commemoration of Armistice Day. The boat reached Australia in time for Armistice Day, but the one bound for New Zealand arrived too late. The cloth poppies were saved and distributed instead to returned servicemen all around the country to wear on the following Anzac Day. And New Zealanders have been wearing poppies on Anzac Day ever since.
All shops in New Zealand are closed until 1 pm on Anzac Day. Almost every town, village and city in New Zealand has its war memorial—often the memorial gate to the local sports field, with names of the fallen on columns on either side.
Anzac biscuits: According to one legend these were made by the Anzacs at Anzac Cove in their pannikins.
They weren’t. The army rations were limited—mostly biscuit and bully beef, certainly not coconut and butter—and there were no ovens to cook them.
Instead the biscuits got their name because they were made by women at home during World War I and sold to raise money to buy ‘comforts’ for soldiers serving overseas—things like soap, pencils, books and lollies.
But the biscuits were also sent overseas to soldiers. Anzac biscuits, like the other great favourite, fruit cake, wouldn’t collapse in the post and would last for months. They’d be fresh and solid enough to get to ‘the boys’ safely. Many men, almost starving in the trenches, only survived because of parcels of food sent from Australia and New Zealand.
The Anzacs were called ‘soldiers’ biscuits’ at first. It seems that only after the war, or perhaps near the end of it, as the word ‘Anzac’ was increasingly used with enormous pride to refer to all Australians and New Zealanders serving overseas, did the biscuits get the name ‘Anzacs’.
This recipe is one my grandmother, then Thelma Sheldon, later Mrs Thelma Edwards, wrote down in her handwritten cookery book towards the end of World War I. (The man she would later meet and marry enlisted as soon as he graduated as a doctor—along with his entire year of fellow graduates.)
An Anzac is one of the best biscuits you can eat—delicious and long-lasting—and this recipe makes the best Anzacs that I know.
Soldiers’ Biscuits
1 tablespoon golden syrup
2 tablespoons very hot water
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
half cup butter
1 cup plain flour
2 cups rolled oats
half cup sugar
1 cup dried grated coconut (make sure it smells fresh)
Melt the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan. Take off the heat. Add the water and bicarbonate of soda and let it froth up. Add flour, oats and coconut; mix quickly.
Now leave the mix to cool. This is important—somehow the resting softens the oats, thickens the flour and makes the biscuits that much better.
Place small spoonfuls on a greased tray and bake at 120°C for about 10–15 minutes or until a very pale brown. Don’t let them get too dark! Lift biscuits off the tray carefully and place on a wire rack. They’ll get crisp as they cool. Store them in an airtight container. They’ll stay crisp for weeks or even months if you don’t open the container too often.
Army biscuits (World War I): The biscuits that the army ate at Gallipoli were hard, dry and very tough. Many men had poor teeth or badly fitted false teeth and couldn’t eat them. They nearly starved when there wasn’t enough clean water to soak the biscuits in. (And there was never enough water to drink, cook with or wash in at Gallipoli.) But there wasn’t much else to eat, except ‘bully beef’—canned beef: gluggy, fatty and stringy.
Cobber, cob: Friend.
Coconut shy: A sideshow game in which you have to knock coconuts off stands by throwing balls at them.
Coo-ee: Traditional Australian call.
Diggers: The men who’d mined for gold back in the gold rush had called themselves ‘diggers’. Now those who dug the trenches at Gallipoli and then on the Western Front in France called themselves ‘diggers’, too. By 1916 Aussie soldiers would be known as ‘diggers’, and even call each other ‘dig’.
Donkeys of Lemnos: Many years ago I wandered through the Greek islands. I loved the people, the friendliness, the mountains and wildflowers and the sea. I talked with women grinding flour in small querns on their doorsteps, was shown how the grain was threshed at the stones—and watched scarred, patient donkeys labour under loads that made them stagger. There is no reason to expect that donkeys were treated any better in 1915.
Drawers: Underpants.
Drongo: Fool, idiot.
Freo: Affectionate nickname for Fremantle, in Western Australia.
Gob (as in ‘chomp your gob on that’): Slang for ‘mouth’.
Hurdy-gurdy: Large music machine, often very ornate and loud.
Punch and Judy: A traditional puppet show. Mr Punch bashes his wife, Judy, steals the baby and the sausages, and escapes from the policeman—and everyone laughs.
Queen Elizabeth: ‘Simpson’ would have named his donkey after Queen Elizabeth I. Queen Elizabeth II hadn’t even been born back then.
Quern: Small stone bowl for grinding wheat. You place some grains of wheat in the bowl, then use a rounded stone or longer ‘pestle’ to crush and grind the wheat into flour. Quern-ground flour usually tastes wonderful, but can sometimes be gritty with bits of stone, too.
Richard Henderson: Henderson was known as ‘Dick’. These days, though, the nickname has other meanings, so I have used his full name instead. There is a statue of Henderson and the donkey beside the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Wellington, New Zealand.
Sandbags: Hessian bags filled with sand that could be used to build a wall to shelter from bullets and shrapnel, or line a dugout.
Shrapnel: Bits of flying exploded bomb or shells. Often shrapnel was more of a danger than bullets.
Sniper: A soldier, usually a superb shot, whose job is to shoot individuals. There was a trench above ‘Shrapnel Gully’ where Turkish snipers were positioned to shoot the enemy below.
Uniforms: Most ANZAC troops thought of themselves as British as well as Australian or New Zealanders. Most wore British-issue caps at Gallipoli, but after the war, when George Lambert and other official war artists were commissioned to paint Gallipoli scenes, they were instructed to show the Australians with slouch hats, and the New Zealanders in the then-familiar ‘lemon squeezer’ hats.