Food and Water
Daily rations for the Anzacs during May included:
Preserved meat 12 ozs Tea 5/8 oz
Biscuits 1 lb 4 ozs Sugar 3 ozs
Bacon 4 ozs Jam ¼ lb
Cheese 3 ozs Salt ½ oz
Onions ½ lb (or potatoes ½ lb, onions ¼ lb) Pepper 1/36 oz
Lime juice was issued if potatoes and onions were not available. From June, the Anzacs received bread every second day if the weather permitted delivery. Fresh beef was obtained from refrigerated ships at Imbros, but it often arrived at Anzac flyblown or ‘off’ due to the heat. Occasionally the men received eggs, dried fruit, tinned stew, tinned milk and rum. The soldiers regularly received tobacco.
Water was always scarce at Anzac. Barges delivered water to storage tanks on the beach, and wells were sunk within hours of the landing. The men rarely received the recommended minimum of one gallon a day. By late July an old steam engine and pumping plant were installed on the beach and water was piped to outlying tanks. More than one hundred men with ropes were needed to haul the tanks into position. When the steam engine broke down, mules were used to carry water.
Turkish Food Rations
The Turks had porridge for breakfast, cheese for lunch, with olives on alternate days. They had white beans for dinner, with the occasional serving of onions and a little meat. A daily ration of a kilo of bread was provided. As the weather turned cold, raisins were sometimes substituted for the cheese. Coffee and tea were both scarce.
In the late afternoon, many Anzacs briefly shut out the din of war. They gazed at the sunset over the jagged peaks of the islands of Imbros and Samothrace. ‘The sea is nearly always like oil and as the crimson path streams across the water the store ships, hospital ships, torpedo boats and mine sweepers stand out jet black,’ Cyril Lawrence wrote. ‘God, it’s just magnificent.’
The Australians brought no dental corps. Rotten and broken teeth caused hundreds of evacuations. Some men had teeth pulled by amateurs with blacksmith’s pliers. Lawrence had a tooth pulled and realised it was the wrong one when the pain persisted a few days later.
The Indian Camp
Phillip Schuler wrote a vivid description of the Indian troops’ camp at Anzac: ‘A mass of rags and tatters it looked, for it was exposed to the fierce sun, and when gay coloured blankets were not shielding the inmates of the dugouts, the newly washed turbans of the Sikhs and Mohammedans were always floating in the idle breeze. Their camp was always busy. They never ceased to cook. Though the wiry Indians could speak little English, they got on well with the Australians, who loved poking about amongst their camps hunting for curios, while the Indians collected what trophies they could from the Australians.’
The most serious health problem was dysentery, the main symptom being chronic diarrhoea. By August, four in five Anzacs were struck down by the ‘Gallipoli Trots’. Three quarters of the 1400 weekly evacuations were for illness rather than wounds. British officers had initially marvelled at the Anzac physique, likening the strapping troops to Greek gods. By July, the Anzacs trudged like walking scarecrows. Their dark skin hung loose on their wasted bodies.
The Anzacs’ battle against weakness sapped them more than enemy fire. ‘It’s absolutely piteous to see great sturdy bushmen and miners almost unable to walk through sheer weakness, caused by chronic diarrhoea, or else one mass of Barcoo rot [skin infection],’ Lawrence wrote. ‘We are all the same, all suffering from sheer physical weakness and yet we can’t get relieved.’
Lawrence despised the ‘damn wasters’ at home who had not enlisted. ‘Surely they won’t ask this crowd to do another advance,’ he wrote in August. ‘Anyhow, I don’t think that they could do it; they are too weak.’
He was wrong. Four days later, the Anzac generals ordered a huge attack. They were going to try to break out of their Turkish jail.
AN ILLUSTRATED PAGE FROM THE ANZAC BOOK
CHAPTER TEN
Best Laid Plans
Breaking the Stalemate
The Anzac triangle had been locked in a stalemate for months. The Anzacs couldn’t break out. The Turks couldn’t break in. Now it was high summer – a blazing sun, gorgeous sunsets, no rain, lots of dust. Life was bearable, just. But the Anzacs knew they couldn’t hang on once winter came. They would freeze in the snowstorms – many no longer owned a pair of long trousers. And rain would flood their trenches. Torrents would rush down the ranges and wash thousands of bodies out of their graves. The Anzacs had to break out now, while the weather was good.
Hamilton and Birdwood knew this. They also knew it would be easier to break out of Anzac than out of the British beachhead at Cape Helles. True, the British had advanced around 5 kilometres inland at Helles. But they still couldn’t take that sullen-looking hill called Achi Baba. The stalemate was probably worse than at Anzac. There were no flanks that Lieutenant General Hunter-Weston, the commander at Helles, could work around.
Anyway, Hunter-Weston had shown himself to be a poor tactician. He really had only one tactic – the frontal attack in daylight. Hamilton had just about given up on frontal assaults by June, but he still allowed Hunter-Weston to waste more troops in useless charges. Hamilton was too polite to be a good commander. English teenagers sprang into their first day of battle and died in fields of wild flowers. Someone called the survivors the ‘ghosts of Gallipoli’.
Hunter-Weston was a fox-hunting man whose manner was at once cheery and brutal. When a new division came out of its first battle with a frightful casualty list, Hunter-Weston said he was glad the ‘pups had been blooded’. He kept running up casualties through June and July, when things were relatively quiet at Anzac. Corpses poked out of the Helles wheatfields, their fingers pointing to the sky.
Then Hunter-Weston suddenly left Gallipoli. Hamilton talked about him having a ‘breakdown’ but didn’t say whether it was physical or mental. Hunter-Weston had been relieved of his command on the Western Front the previous year for reputedly ‘going off his head’.
His ‘pups’ were as young as fifteen. Today, in Skew Bridge Cemetery, you can visit the grave of Drummer J. A. Townsend of the East Lancashire Regiment. He was the youngest Briton to die here. In a nearby Turkish cemetery lies Hasanoglu Ahmet, also fifteen years old when he died, and the youngest fallen Turk. We know little about him except that he was from Lapseki, in the Canakkale province.
Kitchener continued to refuse Hamilton the necessary supply of heavy guns, shells and hand grenades to even up the fight. To be fair, Kitchener wasn’t getting the whole story. Hamilton sent messages brimming with optimism. He did not want to upset Kitchener, whom he called the ‘demi-God’. He asked for more artillery, but his requests read like apologies.
Hamilton needed a win. British leaders did not properly understand the battles at Gallipoli, but they knew Hamilton was losing. So now his career virtually hinged on a plan Birdwood had been working on since May. Birdwood knew that he couldn’t break out of Anzac with frontal charges. He suggested an advance from the northern flank of Anzac. It would take the shape of a great left hook.
Birdwood and his staff came up with the scheme after New Zealand scouts found a path through wild country to the unguarded Chunuk Bair. If the Allies captured Chunuk Bair, troops could stream back down Battleship Hill and Baby 700 and rout the Turks from behind. Reinforced with four brigades – 16000 men – the Anzacs could take the third ridge of hills and march into Maidos.
Hamilton toyed with Birdwood’s idea. Then London offered him an extra 60000 men. He had to work them into Birdwood’s plan. The chief virtue of Birdwood’s original plan had been its simplicity. Now it would have to be expanded to include the fresh troops and a new landing north of Anzac. Things suddenly looked complicated.
It was decided that the Anzacs would launch three major attacks. On 6 August, the Australian 1st Brigade would charge the Turkish trenches at Lone Pine. This would distract the Turks from the attack on the heights. A similar feint would be carried out at Helles.
That night, while the battle raged at Lone Pine, Monash’s brigade, alongside British, Indian and Gurkha troops, would scout untamed country to the north of the Anzac triangle, overrun Turk outposts in the foothills and take the highest point on the peninsula, Hill 971.
The orders were basic enough: trudge over and under and around a series of uncharted spurs radiating like fingers from Hill 971. Scale cliffs. Skirt ridges. And don’t get lost.
New Zealanders would take Chunuk Bair, as in Birdwood’s first plan. Hill 971 and Chunuk Bair were to be captured by dawn. At this time, the Australians would charge uphill at the enemy – from Russell’s Top, the Nek, Pope’s and Quinn’s. The Turks would be fighting off Anzacs from above and below.
Meanwhile, at Suvla Bay, two fresh British divisions, about 20000 men, would land, secure the surrounding hills, then try to link up with the Anzac position a few kilometres south. In his 5 August diary entry, Hamilton likened his pre-battle jitters to those of a patient about to undergo surgery. Failure would lead to fresh calls to evacuate Gallipoli. But Hamilton thought every possibility was covered. ‘Nothing; not a nosebag nor a bicycle has been left to chance,’ he wrote.
Hamilton hadn’t thought about the terrain. The landscape north of Anzac is the roughest on the peninsula, a tangle of gullies and ravines, and waterless. The Anzacs who had to fight there were coming down with illness, mainly dysentery. The August offensive, as it would be called, was the biggest military operation at Gallipoli. Yet Hamilton, as always, was letting his heart rule his head.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Of all the Bastard Places
6 August, Battle of Lone Pine
The battle of Lone Pine was the most stunning Australian success at Gallipoli. The main Turkish trenches were taken within half an hour. About 2200 Australians were killed or wounded in the Turkish trenches. The fighting was so savage that just about everyone who survived it was haunted for the rest of their lives.
The Anzacs threw bombs, some continuing even after a hand or an eye had been blown away, back and forth, with Turks only a few metres away. They thrust their bayonets at the enemy. They fought with their fists and feet. About 7000 Turks were killed or wounded. Seven Australians won a Victoria Cross and maybe a dozen more should have.
Brigadier General Harold Walker, the Australian 1st Division commander, was appalled by the plan. He didn’t want his men wasted on a pointless charge over 100 metres of flat country. Walker admired his troops and they respected him, even if he was British brass. ‘Absolutely buggered,’ some had said, when he enquired after their health. Walker argued with Birdwood and won a few concessions.
Birdwood needed the Turks to treat the Lone Pine attack as a serious threat. Their reinforcements had to be kept from the heights. Walker plotted the charge carefully. A barrage of shells would destroy Turkish barbed-wire entanglements. Troops would then rush from the front-line, as well as from tunnels extending 28 to 37 metres out into no-man’s-land. Other tunnels would be blown up to provide cover. The men would charge following a naval barrage at 5.30 pm on 6 August.
The veterans of the April landing were no longer happy adventurers. Grim self-respect drove them, wrote Bean, not a desire for glory. The newly arrived Anzacs were gung-ho. Some offered £5 bribes for front-line positions and fights broke out. Those to rush first wore white patches on their backs so that the warships did not fire on them.
5.30–6.00 pm
The Turks shelled the overcrowded Anzac lines just before the charge. Men dropped. The fumes were stifling. This is hell waiting here, thought Private Cecil McAnulty. Whistles blew in three short bursts. Two lines ran from the tunnel openings, two from the Anzac front-line trench. Palls of dust and yellow smoke hung in the sunlight. ‘The fire was simply hellish, shell, rifle and machine-gun fire and I’m hanged if I know how we got across . . .’ wrote a 2nd Battalion soldier. ‘Every bush seemed to be literally ripped with bullets . . . our luck was right in.’
Few Anzacs were wounded in the charge itself. Many scrambled to the Turkish trenches, then halted, not knowing how to break in. Troops bunched up behind them. The Turkish trenches to the south were covered with pine logs. Some Anzacs found gaps in the roofing and jumped into the darkness below. It was in these trenches, in a clamour of shrieks and curses, that the battle of Lone Pine became a byword for hell. ‘We was like a mob of ferrets in a rabbit hole,’ said an Anzac, James Croker. ‘It was one long grave, only some of us was still alive in it.’
Hundreds of one-on-one struggles broke out in the underground maze. According to one historian, Turks killed Turks and Australians killed Australians in the confusion. Bean wrote:
Many were killed within a few minutes of entering, since it was easy for a single Turk, at bay beyond a bend and warned by a bayonet coming around it, to shoot one man after another. In several places, Australians lay dead four or five deep . . . sometimes with a heap of Turks similarly killed a few yards distant from them.
The second and third waves of men stumbled over bodies. They tried to avoid treading on their faces. Private Jack Gammage leapt into the front trench and landed on a wounded Turk. ‘We had no time to think of our wounded,’ he wrote. ‘. . . their pleas for mercy were not heeded . . . some poor fellows lay for 30 hours waiting for help and many died still waiting’.
Some Turks ran away. A Turkish Battalion commander rushed down a gully yelling, ‘We’re lost! We’re lost!’ By 6 pm, the Australians held both flanks of the Turkish lines and seven or eight isolated outposts in between. Some outposts were no more than a few men and sandbags. Turkish reinforcements rushed forward with ‘cricket ball’ bombs.
The Australians threw jam-tin bombs. They smothered unexploded Turkish bombs with half-filled sandbags and anything else they could find. Many of the Turkish bombs were set to an eight-second fuse. They were lobbed back and forth up to three times until they exploded. ‘For God’s sake send bombs,’ read a message from one of the outposts, just before it was engulfed.
Private McAnulty wrote about the charge a few days later: I remember dropping down when we reached their trenches, looked around and saw Frank and three more men alongside me . . . I yelled out to the other four chaps, ‘This is only suicide boys. I’m going to make a jump for it.’ I thought they said all right we’ll follow. I sprang to my feet in one jump . . .
McAnulty’s entry finished there. Official records say he died between August 7 and 12. He was twenty-six.
7 August
Sergeant Cyril Lawrence worked in a Lone Pine communications trench on 7 August. He came across Australians crouched and wounded in a Turkish tunnel. They didn’t say a word. Some had fallen asleep, including a man wounded in the head. Blood bubbled and frothed from his mouth. ‘Yet all one gave him was simply a casual glance, more of curiosity than anything else,’ Lawrence wrote. ‘At ordinary times these sights would have turned one sick but now they have not the slightest effect.’
Lawrence gazed back at no-man’s-land to see ‘one mass of dead bodies, bags of bombs, bales of sandbags, rifles, shovels and all the hundred and one things that had to be rushed across to the enemy trenches’. Within five metres of him lay fourteen Anzac dead. ‘Thank God that their loved ones cannot see them now,’ he wrote.
Captain Ivor Margetts had been promoted since his brave charges on Baby 700 on the first day. He took over a section of a Lone Pine trench on 7 August. His men wore respirators to block out the deathly smell. The floor was spongy from lightly buried bodies. ‘In the trench I counted 79653821650773982 flies who walked first on the perspiring live men and then, so as to cool their feet, they walked on the dead ones,’ he wrote.
A month later Ion Idriess went up to Lone Pine. ‘Of all the bastards of places this is the greatest bastard in the world,’ he wrote. ‘The roof of this dashed possy is intermixed with dead men who were chucked up on the parapet to give the living a chance from the bullets while the trench was being dug. What ho, for the Glories of War!’
9 August
The Au
stralian VC winners at Lone Pine all fought in bombing contests. Two of them, Captain Alfred Shout and Corporal Alexander Burton, died of their wounds. Burton was hit by a bomb. He was said to smile quietly as he died. Shout, a New Zealand carpenter who lived in Sydney, ended up as the most decorated Anzac of the campaign. There’s a photo of him at Gallipoli. He leans against the wall of a trench, all mischievous eyes and enquiring smile.
Shout fought in the opening-day battles at Baby 700. He carried a dozen men out of the firing line a few days later, despite being wounded, and earned a Military Cross. At Lone Pine, on 9 August, the day after his thirty-third birthday, he lit bombs and charged at Turks hidden around the next bend. He urged on his men all the way. Shout eventually lit three bombs at once. He threw one. One or both of the others exploded in his hand.
His hands were pulped. His left eye was blown out, his cheek gashed and his chest and one leg burnt. Yet his cheerful spirit was still intact. He sat up to drink tea as he was carted off to the beach. He assured all he would recover, but he died a few days later on a hospital ship.
Captain Frederick Tubb, Corporal William Dunstan and Burton fought a losing bomb exchange for hours on 9 August. There were ten men in their trench when the Turks counterattacked. The Turks lobbed bombs and the Anzacs died one by one. Corporal F. Wright was killed when a bomb blew up in his face. Corporal H. Webb, an orphan, had both hands blown off when he tried to catch a bomb.
The Gallipoli Story Page 7