VCs of the First World War Gallipoli

by Stephen Snelling

  Such optimism, however, proved shortlived. At 6.30 a.m. the boats carrying the first wave were met by a hurricane of fire. In a matter of a few minutes, the 700-strong landing party from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers were reduced to barely 300 men, many of them wounded and incapable of further action. It was a massacre. Trapped in their boats, weighed down by their equipment, they were sitting targets for the Turkish machine-gunners and riflemen lining the hills above V Beach. Meanwhile, amid the confusion, Unwin’s plan had also gone awry. A loss of speed caused by the late turning manoeuvre to avoid arriving before the first wave meant the River Clyde had run ashore further out than intended. To add to his difficulties, Unwin saw the steam hopper lying grounded on his port side, broadside on to the beach some 10 to 15 yds from the bow of the River Clyde.

  The cause of this fiasco remains a mystery. The strength of the current undoubtedly played a part. Perhaps the Greek crew panicked at the vital moment. Whatever the reasons, Drewry was left a helpless spectator to the destruction wrought among the first wave. In a desperate attempt to rescue the operation, Drewry and Samson began hauling the lighters, connected by a rope to the stern of the hopper, towards the bow of the River Clyde. In his account Unwin stated:

  Seeing what an awful fiasco had occurred I dashed over the side and got hold of the lighters which I had been towing astern and which had shot ahead by their impetus when we took the beach, these I got under the bow and found Williams with me. I had told him the night before to keep with me, and he did so literally.

  We got them connected to the bows and then proceeded to connect to the beach, but we had nothing to secure to so we had to hold on to the rope ourselves, and when we had got the lighters near enough to the shore I sung out to the troops to come out, and they soon began to come out.

  The Turks seemed to concentrate on the lighters more than on the River Clyde, and it was on the lighters and on the reef that the greatest number of dead and wounded lay, of course many fell into the water and were drowned. We were literally standing in blood. For an hour we held on and thinking I could be more use elsewhere I asked Williams if he could hang on without me but he said he was nearly done and couldn’t.

  Just then a 6in shell fell alongside us (I have it in my field at home). Williams said to me ‘what ever is that’. I told him and almost immediately I heard a thud and looked round and Williams said ‘a shell has hit me’. I caught hold of him and, as I couldn’t let him drown, I tried to get him on to the lighter and then, for the first time, I saw Drewry, who with somebody else helped me and I remember no more till I found myself stripped in my cabin in blankets …

  With the hopper stranded and a magnet for Turkish bullets, Drewry had ordered Samson to take cover while he leapt overboard and waded ashore where he met a wounded soldier. The young midshipman wrote:

  I and another soldier from a boat tried to carry him ashore but he was again shot in our arms, his neck in two pieces nearly, so we left him and I ran along the beach towards the spit. I threw away my revolver, coat and hat and waded out to the captain. He was in the water with a man named Williams, wading and towing the lighters towards the spit. I gave a pull for a few minutes and then climbed aboard the lighters and got the brows lowered onto the lighter. The captain sang out for more rope, so I went on board and brought a rope down with the help of a man called Ellard. As we reached the end of the lighters the captain was wading towards us carrying Williams. We pulled him onto the lighters and Ellard carried him on board the ship on his shoulders … Williams was dead however.

  For more than an hour, Williams had stuck bravely to his task. Even as the men from two companies of the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers were falling all around him in their efforts to reach the shore, he continued to hang on to the rope holding the makeshift ‘boat bridge’ in position. He died in Unwin’s arms and his captain later wrote of him: ‘Williams was the man above all others who deserved the VC at the landing.’

  With the surviving Munsters stranded ashore, the disembarkation was halted until the bridge could be restored, a prospect which, in the circumstances, seemed improbable if not impossible. However, Midshipman Drewry had not given up hope. He succeeded in taking a rope from the lighter nearest to the River Clyde to the spit of rocks, and then ‘with difficulty’ hauled the exhausted Unwin onto the lighter. The captain, by then suffering from cold brought on by prolonged immersion in the water, was taken aboard the River Clyde, leaving Drewry alone on the lighter. He later recorded:

  All the time shells were falling all around us and into the ship, one hitting the case of one boiler but doing no further damage. Several men were killed in No 4 hold. I stayed on the lighters and tried to keep the men going ashore but it was murder and soon the first lighter was covered with dead and wounded and the spit was awful, the sea around it for some yards was red. When they got ashore they were little better off for they were picked off many of them before they could dig themselves in.

  They stopped coming and I ran on board into No 1 hold and saw an awful sight, dead and dying lay around the ports where their curiosity had led them. I went up to the saloon and saw the captain being rubbed down. He murmured something about the third lighter so I went down again and in a few minutes a picket boat came along the starboard side and gave the reserve lighter a push that sent it as far as the hopper …

  Drewry had gone aboard the third lighter together with Lt. Tony Morse, who had arrived with the third tow of boats carrying troops towards V Beach from the fleet waiting offshore. Morse was the senior member of a 38-strong party from HMS Cornwallis, whose task was to ferry reinforcements ashore. They were divided among four boats, towed in shore by a steam pinnace from HMS Albion. Having helped unload the dead and wounded from the boats which succeeded in making the return trip from the first and second waves, they were under no illusions about the strength of the Turkish defences. To follow their progress, and the next stage of the gallant attempt to restore the bridge crucial to the landing operation, we must turn to the account of 18-year-old Midshipman Wilfrid St Aubyn Malleson. One of the Cornwallis’ party, he was in the second of the four boats as it approached V Beach around 7.00 a.m. He later wrote:

  We arrived starboard side of the River Clyde. In coming in we only sustained about 4 or 6 casualties all due to stray rifle fire. Even in getting out of the boat we got off very lightly. It was in the act of getting out of the boat that Mid Hardiman was fatally wounded. This was about the nearest escape I had, as I was standing about 2ft away from him. Sub Lieut Waller and Mr Spillane (Bosun) stayed in the boat with the crew and took her round to the stern of the River Clyde. We lost sight of them.

  Our remnant of the Beach Party was now on its face in the lighter. Nothing very much was possible as bullets were whistling over our heads and the lighters were all isolated and swaying backwards and forwards on account of the current. After about an hour of inaction, during which time occupants of the lighter sustained about one casualty every ten minutes, I observed a lighter on the starboard side, manned by Lieut Morse and Mid Drewry, being pushed from behind by our 2nd picket boat (Mid Voelcher). This lighter was pushed into place between my lighter and the next, a very skilful performance, owing to the numerous shoals, constant rifle fire and general unwieldiness of the lighter.

  The fore end of the new lighter was secured, but the near end began to drift away owing to the current.

  Just as the lighter reached the steam hopper, still lying broadside on to the beach, Drewry, who had borne a charmed life until now, was felled by a shrapnel wound to the head. Within seconds, however, the young officer was back on his feet. With blood streaming down his face, he helped secure the lighter to the hopper. Then, while he went below in the hopper’s engine-room to have his wound bandaged, Lt. Morse attempted to make the lighter fast with the help of Midshipman Lloyd, another member of the Cornwallis’ party who had been forced to seek shelter aboard the steam hopper. They eventually succeeded, but at the cost of a third wound to Lloyd.

  Drewry,
his wound dressed, returned and set about the job of joining together the remaining lighters. Scorning cover himself, he urged one young midshipman who was lying on the bullet-riddled hopper to go below as he was in a ‘somewhat dangerous place’, and then dived over the side with a rope with the intention of linking the lighters. Malleson, who was able to see Drewry from his prone position on the lighter, recorded that ‘Owing to the fact that he had to swim against the current, and his rope was too short, he got into difficulties. I therefore got together some rope and, getting a soldier [Munster, name not known] to pay it out, managed to get it across.’ What the young midshipman neglected to mention was that the only rope he could find was the one which had originally kept the bridge of lighters connected to the spit of rocks on the starboard side. To retrieve it, he had to stand up, in full view of the Turkish positions, and haul it in. By the time he had finished, Drewry, his strength ebbing away, had drifted away on the current. It was left to Malleson to make the connection, swimming across the gap churned by Turkish fire. His account continues:

  I was a bit done, so Lieut Morse made it fast. The new lighter had by now drifted to seaward of the hopper. I therefore swam to the hopper and managed to get a rope from it and started to tow one end back. However [the] rope was too short, and feeling exhausted, I scrambled aboard the lighter again. Lieut Morse told me to get a dry change so I crawled into the River Clyde where I remained till the evening.

  By 9.00 a.m. a new bridge, linking the River Clyde to the stranded steam hopper, had been established. Drewry, like Malleson, had succeeded in returning to the River Clyde, where Surgeon Paul Burrowes Kelly treated his wound and rubbed him down. ‘I was awfully cold’, Drewry recounted. ‘He would not let me get up and I had to lay down and listen to the din.’ What he heard was almost certainly the renewed attempt to get men ashore from the River Clyde. So heavy were the losses among a third company of the Munsters that the disembarkation was once again suspended. Orders were issued to the troops to ‘hold on and wait’. In truth, there was little else they could do.

  Unwin, however, refused to admit defeat. Ignoring his doctor’s protestations, he made his way back on to the hopper ‘to see if I could do any good’. From his bed aboard the River Clyde, Drewry heard a cheer go up, and, peering from a porthole, he ‘saw the captain standing on the hopper in white clothes. A line had been carried away and, by himself, he had fixed it.’ In fact, accourding to Unwin, he had been helped by an ‘old merchant seaman’ who ‘looked at least 70’ and ‘a boy’, though he admitted later their efforts were probably in vain as he doubted if the line was ever used.

  While on board the hopper, Unwin was struck in the face and neck by fragments from a bullet that richocheted off a stanchion. ‘As I was doing no good there and I couldn’t see a live man I ran up the inclined staging in through the foremost port,’ he wrote, adding: ‘They told me that the man who helped me in was shot through the lungs in doing so …’.

  On the direct orders of Maj.-Gen. Aylmer Hunter-Weston (GOC, 29th Division), a third had been made to land more troops from the River Clyde. But the rush made around 9.30 a.m. by a company of the 2nd Hampshires went the way of the others and was soon abandoned. Arriving back aboard, Unwin added his weight to those urging delay. Finding the senior army officer, Lt. Col. Hubert Carrington-Smith, he bluntly told him ‘it was no good trying to land any more men as it was certain death crossing the lighters’. Shortly afterwards, while observing the beach from the ship’s lower bridge, Carrington-Smith was shot and killed by a bullet through the head. Command devolved on the Munsters’ CO, Lt. Col. H.E. Tizard, a small and uninspiring leader in Unwin’s estimation, who spent much of his time ‘running about with a papier mache megaphone in his hands … doing nothing’. Seemingly unable to affect the operation, Unwin stood on the upper bridge, staring at the beach strewn with British dead. Once, thinking he had seen a Turk, he took aim with a rifle only to see a vulture flutter out of a tree. Another time, he saw six men rise above the beach camber, apparently set on cutting a path through the wire. Five were shot within 10yds and the other darted back to the beach, leaving one man rolling around and looking ‘imploringly’ towards the River Clyde until, eventually, he fell still. Unwin admitted feeling ‘a brute in not going to his assistance’.

  The impasse at V Beach had been only briefly broken shortly after 10 a.m. by the arrival of Brig. Gen. H. E. Napier, commanding 88th Brigade. Realising the futility of a renewed landing from open boats, an officer aboard the River Clyde hailed the brigadier’s tows to come alongside. But even as his men were filing aboard the collier, Napier, followed by his brigade major, was seen to leap onto the nearest lighter before, inexplicably, making a dash for the steam hopper where both men were shot and killed. According to Unwin, their misplaced courage served no purpose. He later wrote: ‘Their lives were absolutely thrown away.’

  With the landing at a standstill, there was nothing for those aboard the River Clyde to do but listen, helplessly, to the incessant cries and moans of the wounded drifting across from the spit of rocks. Eventually, around 2 p.m., Unwin could stand it no more and decided to take matters into his own hands for a third time. In his version of what followed, he wrote:

  I got a boat under the starboard quarter as far from the enemy as I could get and, taking a spare coil of rope with me, I got some hands to pay out a rope fast to the stern of the pinnace I was in and paddled and punted her into the beach, eventually grounding alongside the wounded. They were all soaking wet and very heavy but I cut off their accoutrements with their bayonets or knives and carried two or three into the pinnace, but as her side was rather high out of the water I’m afraid they were not too gingerly put on board. But still, they were very grateful. I could not pick up any more so I got on my hands and knees and they got on to my back and I crawled along to the pinnace. Four more I managed like this and then I found a man in his trousers only alongside me. He had swum ashore to help me …

  This was Petty Officer John Russell, a member of the Royal Naval Armoured Car Squadron who had volunteered as machine-gunners aboard the River Clyde. Together, they carried one man off the rocks before Russell was seriously wounded in the stomach. Both men feigned death until the Turkish fire subsided sufficiently for Unwin to bandage his companion’s wound with his own shirt before hoisting him into the boat. By then, Unwin was feeling ‘a bit dicky’. In fact, he was on the brink of collapse and, clambering aboard the bullet-spattered pinnace, he called out to the men on the River Clyde to haul them back. ‘On the way across somebody came alongside in the water and wanted to know why I was going back. I replied because I could do no more, and I really couldn’t …’.

  Sketch map showing the location of all the VCs won in the Helles sector

  Unwin’s part in the rescue effort was over, but the work he so gallantly began was taken up by others. Most prominent among them was the man he had seen in the water, a young officer from the Royal Naval Division detachment aboard the River Clyde, who had witnessed Unwin’s selfless valour. Sub-Lt Arthur Tisdall, a 24-year-old Cambridge scholar and poet of promise, was the only RND officer aboard the converted collier, a fact which subsequently led to difficulty in recognising his bravery. His unit, 13 Platoon, D Company, Anson Battalion, was assigned to the landing force as a beach-carrying party. They had lost three men killed, when a shell burst in No. 4 hold. At some point during the morning Tisdall made his way up on deck. There, he was seen by Lt. Cdr. Wedgewood setting off in a boat for the shore, accompanied by two men, one of them a member of the RNAS Armoured Car Squadron. Petty Officer William Perring, of 13 Platoon, recalled seeing Tisdall ‘out in the water assisting Commander Unwin [sic] and a few ratings to get the wounded men out of the water into the boats’.

  Perring made a call for volunteers among the Anson men below decks to help their officer. It was answered by Leading Seaman Fred Curtis, Leading Seaman James Malia and Leading Seaman James Parkinson. Together with Petty Officer Mechanic Geoffrey Rumming, of Wedgewood’s Ar
moured Car Squadron, they joined Tisdall in numerous journeys to and from the spit of rocks. In all, it would appear that Tisdall made four or five trips, pushing and towing a lifeboat filled with wounded. Each of his companions took part in at least two of these hazardous journeys.

  Rumming, who at the time did not know the officer’s identity, later recalled:

  There were four men in the boat, the late Sub-Lt. A.W. St Clair Tisdall, a black bearded 1st class Petty Officer [sic], a seaman with no badges or stripes on his sleeves whatever, and myself … We got three wounded in the boat the first trip and four men the second trip.

  Beyond getting a few bullet holes in the boat above the waterline, the first trip was quite successful. On the second trip Sub-Lt. Tisdall and myself clambered over a spit of rock, to get the men lying higher up. We got shot at, lay down for a time. As we were lifting the last wounded man into the boat I got hit again in the back.

  We had taken the boat a little further ashore, and when we went to push off again, we found her grounded. When we did eventually succeed in getting off Lt. Tisdall and myself were unable to climb into the boat and so we hung on to the side as the two men, keeping as low as possible, rowed us back to the River Clyde.

  Unfortunately, on the way back Lt. Tisdall got some wooden splinters off the boat driven into his wrist by a bullet, and the black bearded PO got hit just between the fingers.

  The latter may well have been Leading Seaman Malia, the first of the Anson platoon to join Tisdall. He recorded that while ‘going out for another boat of wounded the oar was broken between my hands with a bullet and I had to jump into the water for shelter from the exceedingly heavy fire to which I was exposed’.