VCs of the First World War Gallipoli

by Stephen Snelling

  Well, some of us got close up to the wire, and we started to cut it with pliers. You might as well try and snip Cloyne Round Tower with a lady’s scissors, and you would not hurt yourself either. The wire was of great strength, strained as tight as a fiddle-string, and so full of spikes or thorns that you could not get the cutters between.

  ‘Heavens,’ said I, ‘we’re done’; a moment later I threw the pliers from me. ‘Pull them up,’ I roared, ‘put your arms round them and pull them out of the ground.’ I dashed at the first one; heaved and strained, and then it came into my arms and same as you’d lift a child. I believe there was wild cheering when they saw what I was at, but I only heard the screech of the bullets and saw dust rising all round from where they hit.

  I could not tell how many I pulled up. I did my best, and the boys that were left with me were every bit as good as myself, and I do wish that they all got some recognition.

  When the wire was down the rest of the lads came on like ‘devils,’ and not withstanding the pulverising fire, they reached the trenches. They met a brave honourable foe in the Turks, and I am sorry that such decent fighting men were brought into the row by such dirty tricksters as the Germans. They gave us great resistance, but we got to their trenches, and won about 200 yards length by 20 yards deep, and 700 yards from the shore …

  A machine gun sent some bullets into me, and strange, I was wounded before I reached the trench, though I did not realise it. When I got to the trench I did my own part, and later collapsed. One of the bullets struck me in the side, and passed clean through me. It struck the left hook of my tunic, then entered my body, took a couple of splinters off my backbone, but of course did not injure the spinal column, and passed out on my right side, knocking off the other belt hook. I was taken up feeling pretty bad, when I came to my senses, and considered seriously wounded. I was removed to Malta Hospital, where there were two operations performed, and the splinters of my backbone removed. I was about 16 stone weight at the Dardanelles, but I am now down in weight, but not too used up …

  Cosgrove’s extraordinary exploit in the face of what appeared to be almost certain death was witnessed by many men, both on shore and aboard the River Clyde. Referring to the courage of ‘an Irish giant’, the ship’s surgeon, Burrowes Kelly, noted in his diary: ‘The manner in which the man worked out in the open will never be forgotten by those who were fortunate to witness it.’

  Four days after the action, 2nd Lt. H.A. Brown, of the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers, reported to the officer commanding W Company, ‘a most conspicuous act of bravery displayed by Corp. Cosgrove’. Brown stated:

  I was ordered by a staff captain to collect all the men of my Battn. that were on the beach as a general advance at all costs had to be made to take hill No. 141. After a great effort I managed to collect about 40 NCOs and men.

  On a given signal I advanced over very exposed ground being under the fire of 2 machine guns and snipers.

  After we had advanced 40 yards from the beach we were held up by about 60 yards of thickly constructed barbed wire entanglement.

  Having only one pair of wire cutters our progress was very slow getting through though Pte Bryant was doing his best to cut a passage through the wire. Corp. Cosgrove seeing our difficulty jumped into the wire and hauled down the heavy wooden stakes to which the wire was attached to a distance of about 30 yds long in quite a short space of time.

  I personally consider he deserves the height of praise for such a courageous act and was much impressed to see him though wounded in the back leading his section shortly before the enemy were driven from their trenches and the fort captured.

  Brown’s report, which differs somewhat from Cosgrove’s version, formed the basis of a recommendation for the Victoria Cross, which was strongly endorsed by Gen. Hunter-Weston (GOC, 29th Division). ‘By this gallantry’, he wrote, ‘he contributed not a little to the success of the all important operation of clearing the heights commanding the beach, an apparently impossible task’.

  Cosgrove’s VC, however, was not gazetted until 23 August, two months after the announcement of the other two V Beach VCs to Doughty-Wylie and Walford. The delay may have been caused by Cosgrove’s recommendation being linked to those for the Lancashire Fusiliers at W Beach which were the subject of so much official debate. His citation read:

  For most conspicuous bravery in the leading of his section with great dash during our attack from the beach to the east of Cape Helles, on the Turkish positions, on the 26th April, 1915.

  Corporal Cosgrove on this occasion pulled down the posts of the enemy’s high wire entanglements single-handed, notwithstanding a terrific fire from both front and flanks, thereby greatly contributing to the successful clearing of the heights.

  At the time of the announcement, Cosgrove, who had been invalided home, was still recuperating in an army camp, near his home village of Aghada in southern Ireland.

  William Cosgrove, later to be fêted as the ‘East Cork giant’, was born on 1 October 1888 at Ballinookera, near the little fishing hamlet of Aghada, County Cork, one of five sons to farmer Michael Cosgrove and Mary (née Morrissey).

  A sister, Mary Catherine, died aged thirteen, from tuberculosis. Life was harsh for the Cosgrove family, as it was for many others living in the rural communities of southern Ireland in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Thousands were driven to seek a better life in the United States and Australia. Among the emigrants was Cosgrove’s father who, leaving behind his wife and children, journeyed to Australia.

  Mary Cosgrove and her six small children moved to a cottage in nearby Peafield. William attended the local school at Ballinrostig where his academic career was undistinguished. As soon as he was old enough he left to become an apprentice butcher, working in Whitegate, a neighbouring village on the edge of Cork Harbour. At around this time, William’s father returned from Australia and the reunited family moved to Ballinookera. It was from here that three of William’s brothers, Dan, Ned and David, joined the exodus of young Irishmen to the United States; one to become a racehorse breeder, another to join the police force and the other to become a high-ranking official in the postal service. Only William and his youngest brother, Joseph, who would later become a farmer, remained. William, however, was seeking out fresh horizons of his own. As an apprentice butcher, he regularly delivered meat to Fort Carlisle army camp. A popular, if shy, youngster, he frequently returned from these errands with a cart full of singing children. As the years passed, his thoughts turned increasingly towards the Army as a career, and in 1910 he took the plunge, enlisting in the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers.

  William Cosgrove served four years with the unit in India and Burma. The outbreak of war found the battalion quartered in Rangoon, where they spent the monsoon occupying a string of outposts along the river estuary. In November 1914 they were ordered back to England, arriving in the following January. Two months later, the Munsters left their billets in Coventry bound for the Dardanelles where, during the two-day battle for V Beach, they sustained approximately 600 casualties.

  Cosgrove was one of those evacuated to Malta, before being sent home to Ireland. The announcement of his VC made him the centre of attention wherever he went. Promoted sergeant, he remained for a while in his native land, the military authorities being anxious to exploit the celebrity status of a hero in their midst. Such diversions from real soldiering, however, were not to Cosgrove’s liking. At one garden party, organised by local dignatories, the regimental band struck up a waltz, but the hero of the hour was nowhere to be seen. A villager recalled: ‘Cosgrove remained outside the gate, near the lodge where I lived and played with us children. He was a very shy man, who hated to be fussed over.’

  After the war, Cosgrove soldiered on with the Munsters, and when the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 brought about the disbandment of his regiment, he decided to transfer to a British Army unit, the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. Six years later, he transferred to the 6th (Burma) Battalion, Uni
versity Training Corps, based in Rangoon. By then in his forties, Cosgrove was still a powerfully built man, who was well-known for his disinclination to discuss his exploits at Cape Helles.

  An expert shot, he helped the Rangoon UTC achieve third place in the Imperial Universities’ Shoot two years in succession. In 1934, Staff Sergeant Instructor Cosgrove retired from the Army which had been his way of life for so long. Shortly afterwards, his health, apparently so strong despite his wartime injuries, began to fail. It was discovered that splinters of shrapnel, which surgeons had failed to detect during the operations on his back wound in Malta, were slowly but relentlessly killing him. His Gallipoli wounds caused a drastic muscle shrinkage and regular treatment at Millbank military hospital, London, slowed but could not halt his decline.

  On 14 July 1936, after a ten-month battle against ill health, William Cosgrove died at Millbank Hospital, his brother Joseph by his side. During his final months of suffering, his services were recognised by two further awards, the Meritorious Service Medal and the King George V Jubilee Medal. Three days after his death, his remains were brought into Cork Harbour aboard the SS Innisfallen. At the dockside, 300 members of the Munster Comrades Association formed a guard of honour. Later that afternoon, veterans from the disbanded regiment shouldered their comrade’s coffin to the family burial ground in Upper Aghada. As villagers and old soldiers stood in silence, a bugler played the Last Post. Among the many wreaths was one from the Leinster Regiment OCA. The inscription on it read: ‘In Loving Remembrance of a great Irish soldier.’

  Almost forty years later, Cosgrove’s gallantry was headline news again when his VC, together with his other medals (1914–15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal with Oak Leaf Mention in Dispatches, Army Long Service and Good Conduct Medal and Meritorious Service Medal), was sold at auction for the then world record price of £2,300. The medals now form part of the Lord Ashcroft collection being displayed at the Imperial War Museum, having been purchased at auction in September 2006 for £180,000.

  William Cosgrove’s courageous actions were not forgotten in his own country. Two years after his death a public appeal raised sufficient funds to place an impressive memorial over his grave. Today the tall Celtic cross bears eloquent testimony to the pride felt by the people of Cork for the soldier they called the ‘Irish giant’.

  W.R. PARKER

  400 Plateau, Anzac sector, 30 April–2 May 1915

  L/Cpl. W. Parker

  Rain fell in torrents from a black sky as the lines of Royal Marines trudged uncertainly through the maze of gullies and hills that formed the precarious beachhead at Anzac Cove. The landing of the Portsmouth and Chatham Battalions of the RM Brigade, the first stage in the relief of the exhausted remnants of the 1st and 3rd Australian Brigades, had started at 4.00 p.m. on Wednesday 28 April.

  So parlous was the state of many Australian units that the Marines were led straight to the frontline. There was no time to carry out a reconnaissance of the positions or the ground ahead of them and no time to learn from the hard-earned experience of the men they were replacing. In the rain-sodden darkness the inevitable tension was compounded by confusion as guides lost their way. Expecting to take over established trenches, the Marines found instead shallow, isolated burrows which more closely resembled pot-holes. These inadequate scrapes in the parched ground above Anzac beach represented the straggling, disconnected perimeter stretching across McLaurin’s Hill and the northern sector of Lone Pine Plateau. Among the key positions taken over by the Marines were Courtney’s Post and Steele’s Post. But such was the chaos that they had little idea of the positions on their flanks, nor of the proximity of the Turkish posts in front of them. What they heard, however, was unnerving enough; the crack of rifle bullets from hidden snipers, the rattle of machine-guns playing on the parapets and the distant sound of Turkish bugle calls.

  Sketch map showing the location of all the VCs won in the Anzac Beach sector

  For their part, the Australians were surprised by the appearance of the Marines, who they had expected to be seasoned fighting men. Instead, they found them, in the words of their Official Historian, ‘strangely young and slender’. In fact, the two RMLI battalions consisted largely of raw recruits; volunteers who had answered Lord Kitchener’s call to arms the previous autumn. Of their number, reservists accounted for 20 per cent while regulars made up only an estimated 5 per cent. Of the remainder, many of them lads of seventeen and eighteen, few had received more than basic training.

  Typical of the Marines, in terms of inexperience if not age, was L/Cpl. Walter Parker. A 33-year-old iron moulder from Stapleford in Nottinghamshire, he had enlisted on 9 September 1914. His training with the Portsmouth Division had been unspectacular. One report, in December, described him as a ‘moderate’ recruit. Of deeper concern, however, was one serious physical defect – bad eyesight. In normal circumstances, it seems unlikely that he would have progressed beyond the entrance to the recruiting office. However, on 28 April 1915, he found himself on Anzac beach, as a member of the Portsmouth Battalion’s medical team commanded by Surgeon Basil Playne.

  While Parker and his comrades settled in, advance units from the two Marine battalions discovered just how weak their position was. According to Brig. Gen. C.N. Trotman (GOC, Marine Brigade) the ill-prepared defences were little more than 30 to 50 yds away from the Turkish positions. One Marine officer later complained: ‘The trenches were quite isolated with 30 or 40 yards of open ground between them, under an accurate and close range fire’. One of the most exposed of these posts was manned by two platoons from the Portsmouth Battalion’s C Company, under the command of Lt. R.W.H.M. Empson and Lt. A.B.F. Alcock. The sixty men making up the garrison had taken over the trench during their first twenty-four hours on the peninsula. Lying in front of the Chatham Battalion’s main positions on the extreme left of the Marine Brigade’s sector, the post was separated from the nearest friendly position by about 400 yds of bare ground. To reach them in daylight entailed a perilous dash across the open in full view of the nearest Turkish posts. Only at night was there any realistic hope of resupply and relief.

  During their first day the Marines were subjected to a few Turkish probing attacks which were all beaten off. In the evening the arrival of the Deal and Nelson Battalions brought the Marine Brigade up to full strength. But any hopes of a lull were soon to be cruelly shattered. In the late afternoon of 30 April Mustafa Kemal, the aggressive Turkish commander at Anzac, having extended his trenches and brought up five fresh battalions, set in motion his counter-offensive designed at hurling the invaders into the sea. As a prelude to the general attack, riflemen began sniping the perimeter posts at around 4.00 p.m. The pressure quickly intensified on the outlying Marine positions from Courtney’s southwards. At 5.00 p.m. some trenches occupied by men of the Chatham Battalion opposite Wire Gully were overrun. Counter-attacks recovered some of the lost posts. Others, found to be untenable, were evacuated. Around midnight reports came in of a Turkish breakthrough at the southern end of McLaurin’s Hill, while to the north, the plight of Lt. Empson’s post grew desperate.

  With casualties mounting steadily and his supply of water and ammunition dwindling, Empson sent a runner back with an urgent message calling for assistance, including medical aid. On receiving the note, his company commander, Capt. A.E. Syson, immediately detailed a party of NCOs and men to deliver the stores. Then he ran down to the medical post. Surgeon Playne was already busy tending the wounded in the frontline, and Syson later recalled: ‘I called for a volunteer and immediately L/Cpl. Parker offered to go’. Parker, who had already distinguished himself by his consistent bravery in command of the battalion’s stretcher bearers, joined a relief party of ten men under the command of Sgt. M.W. Minter. Setting off under cover of darkness, they came under heavy and accurate fire as soon as they emerged from the trench nearest to Lt. Empson’s post. Almost immediately one man was hit and Parker, as the only medic in the party, stayed by him until a stretcher party could take
him out. By then he was separated from the rest of Sgt. Minter’s party. More disturbingly, it was broad daylight. To attempt to reach the isolated fire trench without the cover of darkness seemed tantamount to committing suicide. And lest there was any doubt in his mind, Parker could see a trail of dead Australians lying in the open between him and Lt. Empson’s post.

  Parker later recorded how an Australian officer had threatened to shoot him if he did not turn back. But his mind was made up. Disregarding the threat, he leapt over the parapet and sprinted down the slope towards Empson’s cut-off trench. The 400 yds of scrub-covered hill was raked by rifle and machine-gun fire. Wounded twice, Parker half-ran, half-stumbled through a rain-filled hollow before plunging into the trench to the cheers of his disbelieving comrades. Only then did he discover that no one else from the relief party had succeeded in getting through. The rest of the ten-strong detachment were either dead or wounded, and Sgt. Minter had abandoned his efforts only after three attempts had ended in failure. Ignoring his own painful injuries, Parker set about treating the wounded in the trench. At dawn, the Turkish pressure had developed into a full-scale attack and in the fierce fighting which followed Lt. Empson was killed. But the Marines, under the command of Lt. Alcock, held on throughout a scorching day in which their number was reduced to around forty unwounded men.

  On 2 May, after a gallant defence lasting four nights and three days, the survivors, who were by then down to their last fifteen rounds, were compelled to withdraw and run the gauntlet of Turkish fire. Once again, Parker proved to be a tower of strength, helping all the wounded men to safety. In so doing he was wounded again, this time more seriously. Hit in the groin and right thigh, and with injuries to his right knee, his shin and chest, he was forced to crawl the final few yards up the slope to the Marines’ position. He was on the point of collapse when stretcher bearers from his own battalion reached him. The struggle for Empson’s post was over, but the efforts to recognise the gallantry of the Marine medic would take many months more.