Australian and British Military Formations of 1915
Section: eight to 10 men, commanded by a corporal
Platoon: four sections, commanded by a lieutenant
Company: four platoons, perhaps 200 men, commanded by a captain
Battalion: four companies, around 1000 men, commanded by a lieutenant colonel or colonel
Brigade: four battalions, around 4000 men, commanded by a brigadier or brigadier general
Division: three brigades, commanded by a major general
Corps: three or four divisions, commanded by a lieutenant general
Army: four corps, commanded by a general
Light Horse: The Australian Light Horse was organised into regiments and brigades. A regiment was the rough equivalent of a battalion – consisting of four companies – except that its strength was nearer 500 men than 1000.
Turkish formations: The Turkish army at Gallipoli consisted of regiments rather than brigades. A division usually consisted of three regiments, each of three infantry battalions, plus artillery.
Hamilton’s commanders did not like the landing plans but they went along with them. British troops would land on beaches at Cape Helles. The Anzacs would land on what would become known to the British as Brighton Beach, to the north of Gaba Tepe. Then they would stream across the plain beyond. But as we already know, the Anzacs landed in the wrong place.
CHAPTER FOUR
Courage Meets Chaos
Four months after the Gallipoli landing, the Turks captured two New Zealanders and questioned them. You live so far away, they said, why come here to fight? The Kiwis replied that they thought war would be like playing rugby.
Australians went to war with the same reckless spirit. Some Anzacs wrote letters from Egypt depicting battle as a romantic quest, dressing up death in ideas of honour and sacrifice. They brimmed with a pride normally reserved for an Ashes cricket victory. A Sydney Light Horseman admired the men’s composure. ‘The boys are talking like a lot of schoolkids, to see them one would think it was a picnic they were getting ready for,’ he wrote. All this changed at dawn on 25 April.
THE ANZAC FRONT-LINE, 25 APRIL 1915
Dawn, 25 April
The sun rose over the Sari Bair range and lit up a scene of chaos. Hamilton watched ‘wave after wave of the little ants press up and disappear’ from a battleship offshore. His plan was already doomed and the landing would be the smoothest part of the attack. A few hundred Anzacs were killed or wounded in the first hours. At least machine-guns did not cut them down as they waded to shore, as happened to the British at Cape Helles. There, the waves washed red with blood.
The Anzac plan was simple enough. A covering force of 4000 Anzacs would take three landmarks – the bald hill called Chunuk Bair to the north, Scrubby Knoll to the east, and Gaba Tepe to the south. With these positions secured, the main body would advance across the peninsula. The Anzacs were to capture a conical hill known as Mal Tepe and, later, the town of Maidos.
The script was tossed out at 4.29 am, when the Anzacs landed around 1.5 kilometres north of their intended landing site. The Turks expected an invasion, but they didn’t foresee a landing in this untamed country. Had the Anzacs landed as planned, they would have rushed into barbed wire and machine-guns. At Anzac Cove, they stared up at hills that made no sense at all.
There was no pattern to the jagged cliffs and plunging valleys. The country was hopelessly eroded. The Anzacs didn’t know where they were, what they were supposed to be doing, or where the enemy lurked. Their maps didn’t show the quirks of this mad terrain. Steep hills led to sheer drops. Trails led to razorbacks.
The Anzacs’ boats landed in a mixed-up clump rather than being spread over a broad front. Men in the same companies landed hundreds of metres apart. There was no room to untangle battalions. Some soldiers took a week to be reunited with their mates. The Anzacs were supposed to capture the third ridge of hills from the coastline in the first hours. They never did. Not that day. Not for the rest of the campaign.
They spent the first day fending off Turkish attacks here and rushing after Turks there. Most Anzacs were volunteers who had never faced fire. Fear, courage and bravado spilled over in the adrenaline rush. Men went left instead of right and right instead of left.
A Perth civil servant, Major A. H. Darnell, was the second-most senior officer in his battalion. He felt mad, wild and thrilled as he crawled uphill. Men fell around him. Only then did Darnell realise he had not drawn his revolver. Below, some Anzacs fired at the silhouettes of their countrymen on the skyline. They thought they were firing at Turks.
Some men rushed one and a half kilometres inland before daylight. The soldiers at first met little resistance. The 200 or so Turks who fired on the landing boats melted into the holly-like scrub. Some Anzacs thought the day was won by 6 am. Then shrapnel shells began bursting on Plugge’s Plateau.
One battalion advanced towards 400 Plateau, to the right of where they had landed. Two others scaled the heights to the left. Small parties on both fronts crossed the second ridge of hills. Thousands of Turkish reinforcements massed a few kilometres inland. Soon enough, they rolled up in ‘black clouds’ over Scrubby Knoll on the right and down Baby 700 on the left. They screamed ‘Allah’ when they charged.
The air reeked of cordite, wild thyme and lavender. The sun shone, then drizzle fell. The Anzacs fired and dug, advanced and retreated, thirsted for water and the chance to lie down. Officers stood up to find their men, and bullets found them first. The officers were easy targets. Shoulder pips denoting their rank stood out like white spots from afar. From the start, no one was safe in the area that would come to be known simply as Anzac. Because of bursting shrapnel, the beach could be as deadly as the front-line.
Anzac Cove was congested with men, bodies, boats and supplies. Stragglers returned to the beach. New arrivals waited for orders that did not come. The wounded lay in lines. They cursed and groaned and died. Doctors scrambled to find boats to evacuate men to hospital ships. Two doctors tried to treat 850 wounded on one ship. Barges taking off the wounded became slippery with blood. Some ship captains refused to take the wounded because of overcrowding.
By every measure, the plan had failed. At 2 pm, about 4000 Turks fought 12000 Anzacs. The wild terrain and Allied confusion evened the fight. Besides, the Turks had the high ground. The battle turned into a siege. The Anzacs couldn’t get out. The Turks couldn’t get in. It would stay like this for months.
By dark, about 2000 of the 16000 Anzacs landed were dead or wounded. The survivors would never again confuse war with sport. ‘How we prayed for this ghastly day to end,’ an Australian soldier later said.
Today, thousands of Australians gather sand from Anzac Cove to take home. But to understand the origins of the Anzac story, we must scale the hills and peer into the valleys. That’s where most of the killing went on – up on the second ridge. But no one can ever fully understand 25 April. That’s because it was a shambles.
Private Arthur Blackburn, of Adelaide, was twenty-one and just out of law school. He sank under the water three times in struggling ashore. Men fell around him. He fixed his bayonet, then rushed on ‘to drive the beggars away’. He wrote to his brother: ‘The way our chaps went at it was a sight for the gods; no one attempted to fire but we just went straight on up the side of the cliff, pushing our way through thick scrub and often clambering up the steep sides of the cliff on all fours.’
Blackburn reached the top of the first ridge to the right of Anzac Cove and took cover. Turks fired from high ground about 100 metres away. Two men on his left and one on his right fell as daylight dawned. ‘It is an absolute mystery to me how we ever lived through it, for frequently men would fire at us from not more than 10 or 20 yards away,’ he wrote.
However we pushed on, forcing our way through the scrub and clambered and crawled up the second ridge, only to again practically find no enemy in sight. The country suited them beautifully for they could crawl forward in front of u
s through the scrub, firing all the time and we could hardly ever see them.
Blackburn lost contact with his 10th Battalion mates. He had crossed through Shrapnel Gully, which would soon be clogged with Anzac troops. He now stood on 400 Plateau, a heart-shaped plain running roughly half a kilometre from north to south, and wrinkled by the odd gully and depression. Here he met up with Lance Corporal Phil Robin, a South Australian accountant.
Blackburn and Robin raced to the next ridge. A captain ordered them to scout ahead. They trekked south, towards Scrubby Knoll. The pair may have crossed the crest. They may have glimpsed the Dardanelles glistening in the sunlight. But there was no time to stare. Turkish reinforcements, roused from two hours’ sleep, had rushed across the plain from Maidos. They fired at the lonely pair of Australians. Blackburn and Robin hurried back to 400 Plateau, where the Australians had begun to dig in.
Several other small parties trekked ahead on the right, but they too were forced to retreat. It wasn’t yet 8 am. Blackburn and Robin had scrambled to within 5 kilometres or so of the Dardanelles. It was the furthest inland the Anzacs would ever get. The 10th Battalion was supposed to take Scrubby Knoll. But soon the Turks set up headquarters there. Their guns looked over nearly all of Anzac. They could see every movement on 400 Plateau.
Blackburn was sent back for reinforcements and never saw Robin again. He won the Victoria Cross in France the following year and survived three years as a Japanese prisoner-of-war in World War Two. He had been at Robin’s marriage to an English nurse, Nellie, just before sailing from Egypt. Robin was killed on 28 April. Nellie was pregnant. She and the baby died during the birth.
Blackburn and Robin were brave men – and their dashes showed up the Anzac muddle. No one followed the pair forward. Their commanders didn’t know where they were. Other groups struck out, never to be seen again. We only know where they died because Australian officials found their remains – skeletons and rags – after the war had ended.
The Anzac commanders tried to advance but they couldn’t establish a front-line. The first day became an exercise in plugging gaps. Troops in one valley did not know what troops in the next were doing. One unit surged and the next shied. Scraps broke out on one hill and all was quiet on the next.
As Major Walter McNicoll’s 6th Battalion advanced, he smelt strange fragrances but ‘no one stayed to botanise’. He ordered two companies, headed by his subordinate, Major Henry Gordon Bennett, forward from Bolton’s Ridge. Soon Bennett’s men were out of sight and McNicoll had a problem. His companies in the rear had been diverted to other emergencies. He had no one to help Bennett.
Shrapnel burst overhead and a pellet ripped the canvas of McNicoll’s ammunition pouch. He found himself commanding a line from the southern edge of Plateau 400 to Bolton’s Ridge. Small groups of soldiers approached him, asking what to do. They needed someone to lead them. Their officers were dead, wounded or plain lost.
‘It was a case of a quick search for a man with “that narsty fightin’ face that all nice people ’ate”,’ McNicoll wrote. ‘A sharp order, “You take charge!” and they were off to join Major Bennett who was with the forward line until his second wound put him out of action for a while.’
400 Plateau, 3.30 pm
The order to dig in on Bolton’s Ridge was given. Charles Bean wrote of five ‘heroic but useless’ Anzac advances on 400 Plateau in the first hours. Bean said the truth could never be fully told because most of the combatants lay dead.
Evacuation of the Wounded at the Landing
Arrangements for the evacuation of wounded during the landing were disastrous. There were not enough doctors or ships to handle the 2000-odd Australian casualties of that day or the many thousands wounded in the following days. Ships outfitted to carry troops and animals were forced to take on wounded. The Galeka prepared for 160 wounded, but took on 600 to 700 injured men. The Lutzow, with 160 horses aboard, had four bedpans for nearly 800 patients, and the only ‘medical officer’ aboard was a veterinary surgeon. The Hindoo was meant to deliver medical staff and equipment to the ships. Through administrative bungling, the ship lay idle off Cape Helles for four days.
Lance Corporal George Mitchell had been locked up for carousing in Egypt. Now he was trapped in a different sort of prison, on 400 Plateau. He lay in the scrub, pinned down by machine-gun fire. His renowned good cheer had deserted him. He could not lift his head, shout for help or dig into the reddish-brown earth. By late-afternoon, he welcomed a call to charge. He was ready to die.
‘We rejoiced as we gripped our rifles,’ he later wrote. ‘The long waiting should be terminated in one last glorious dash, for our last we knew it would be, for no man could live erect in that tornado for many seconds.’ The charge never happened, and Mitchell lived.
Lieutenant Margetts was trapped in skirmishes on and around a hill called Baby 700. The hill looked down on the valleys now teeming with Anzacs. The Australians had taken Baby 700 with few losses early in the morning. Some men smoked and joked while digging trenches at its base. Then Turk reinforcements crept forward. By day’s end, Baby 700 had changed hands five times. Virtually every Anzac officer there, except Margetts, was dead.
On Russell’s Top, below Baby 700, Margetts met Captain Joseph Peter Lalor and Captain Eric Tulloch. Lalor was the grandson of Peter Lalor, who led the gold diggers in the Eureka Stockade rebellion at Ballarat in 1854. He carried a sword and kept a whisky flask close. As a British historian later wrote, Lalor was ‘colourful, even by Australian standards’.
Tulloch gathered about sixty men to capture Chunuk Bair, one of the main Anzac objectives. The men scampered over Baby 700 and towards the next rise, Battleship Hill. About ten men fell as a machine-gun opened up from the right. They ran, then crawled, up Battleship Hill. Bullets chopped up the scrub around them. Twigs lodged under their collars and scratched down their backs. They faced fire from ahead, the left and right. Tulloch withdrew, but not before firing at a Turkish officer standing by a lone tree.
The officer did not move. We can’t know for sure, but he was probably a divisional commander named Mustafa Kemal. Today, every Turkish banknote carries his image. Every village has a statue of him. To speak ill of his memory is against the law. Kemal survived the war to become Turkey’s first president. He would be known as Atatürk, ‘father of Turkey’. Kemal quashed the Anzac advances in the heights on the first day. His strategy was simple. Hurl the invaders into the sea.
It is said Kemal was woken early on 25 April and rode his horse towards the rattle of guns with a map and compass in his hand. He knew the Anzac country no better than the Australians. But Kemal recognised at once that to lose the heights was to lose the war. He gave his famous order: ‘I do not order you to attack; I order you to die.’
Kemal’s 57th Regiment blasted Margetts and his men off Baby 700. The Anzacs recaptured the hill. The Turks crept around the seaward flanks of the hill and sniped until the Australians again backed off. But Margetts wasn’t finished. At around 3.15 that afternoon, he led twenty men in a charge to take back the ground. His men lay in scrub so thick they couldn’t see each other.
Most were killed or wounded. Those who survived baked in the heat and dreamt of a sip of water. Private R. L. Donkin, twenty-two, from the Hunter Valley, was shot twice in his left leg. A bullet pierced his hat and cut his hair. Another ripped his left sleeve. Three hit his ammunition pouches and blew up the bullets within. ‘I know it’s right and proper that a man should go back and fight again, but Sunday’s battle and the horror of the trenches Sunday night . . . have unnerved me completely,’ he wrote home.
Margetts survived. Exhausted but willing, he was about to chance his life in a fourth charge on Baby 700 when Lalor told him to return to the beach for stretcher-bearers. He was sniped at all the way and fell knee-deep in mud. Margetts lay down, ‘utterly finished’. Lalor stood to rally his troops. ‘Now then Twelfth Battalion –’ he began. A bullet killed him in mid-sentence.
Tulloch’s band had ventured
about 3 kilometres from the beach. No Anzac would climb higher for more than three months. Baby 700 was lost.
To the right, on the rim of Monash Valley, Australians retreated to exposed spurs later named Pope’s Hill, Quinn’s Post and Courtney’s Post.
The Turks rushed at the outposts again and again. Quinn’s Post was at the apex of the Anzac triangle of land, and the key to the siege. The Turks attacked it from the front, its flanks, and from behind. Few thought the position could be held for more than a few days. The Anzacs there dug for their lives. They had nowhere to run to. Behind them were drops, some of them almost sheer, to the valley floor. This was the miracle performed by the Anzacs – holding onto positions as impossible as Quinn’s.
CHAPTER FIVE
Digging In
The First Three Days
Kemal did not flinch when his 57th Regiment was wiped out on 25 April. He could find more martyrs. His men glimpsed the makeshift Anzac bases in Monash Valley and Shrapnel Gully from their perches at the Nek, and on Baby 700 above. They picked off water-carriers. They lobbed shells on troops waiting for orders. Turkish snipers camouflaged themselves and sneaked behind the Anzac lines. They would shoot hundreds over the next few weeks.
But Kemal demanded more. He wanted the invaders thrown back into the sea. If he tossed the Australians off Russell’s Top, Pope’s Hill and Quinn’s Post, the Turks could then massacre the Anzacs near the beach. ‘I must remind all of you that to seek rest or comfort now is to deprive the nation of its rest and comfort forever,’ Kemal wrote to his troops.
THE DIFFICULT TERRAIN OF ANZAC
The commander of the Australian 1st Division, General William Bridges, was slow to recognise Kemal’s push on the left. Bridges had come ashore at 7.20 am on 25 April as shrapnel burst overhead. No one could explain to him what was happening. Bridges was forced to run an attack that he could not see or understand. Men, mules and supplies crammed the beach around his headquarters. Anzac Cove was clogged because it was smaller than the beach they were meant to land on.
The Gallipoli Story Page 3