By November, Fasih’s face was wrinkled and his skin was rotting. Turkish troops prodded with bayonets refused to attack and started ‘crying like women’. Fasih was convinced he would die at Gallipoli. ‘Will I ever have a child who will call me “Daddy”? Please, God, allow me to live to see that day . . . !’
Fasih had heard rumours that the Allies would leave. He and fellow officers wondered about the long lulls in enemy firing. Were they foxing or were they leaving?
First came hail, then rain, then sleet, then snow. Lightning lit up the horizon. The Aegean Sea reared black and frothy. Dugouts flooded. Lips turned blue and toes turned black. Wind whistled through the trenches and the Anzacs understood why trees didn’t grow tall at Gallipoli. The winter storms – that’s why. One man died of exposure at Anzac while dozens of British and Turks froze to death. At Suvla, British soldiers drowned in flooded trenches. In late November, the Turks lobbed a note into the Anzac trenches at Lone Pine. ‘We can’t advance,’ the note read, ‘you can’t advance. What are you going to do?’
Hamilton’s replacement, General Sir Charles Monro, believed the war would be won or lost in France. He toured the Gallipoli trenches and asked a few questions. Commanders told him that their troops could launch a 24-hour offensive. But they didn’t know whether troops could survive the winter. That was all Monro needed to know. He recommended an evacuation.
Kitchener schemed to save the campaign. But the politicians had woken up to him. The Gallipoli debacle had begun to expose him as less than a ‘demi-god’, and probably not fit to be running the war. Kitchener arrived at Anzac Cove on 13 November, wielding a walking stick. Bedraggled Anzac troops rushed to cheer him to shore. His was probably the most famous face in the British Empire.
Kitchener was shocked when he saw the crazy landscape. No wonder his troops hadn’t taken the Dardanelles. He toyed with alternatives but he had none. Winter was coming and the Allies would be washed off the peninsula. Kitchener reluctantly recommended an evacuation. London dilly-dallied, as usual. Finally, it was decided. Gallipoli had been a mistake. It was time to go.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Farewell to the Fallen
December
Escaping Gallipoli was going to be just as dangerous as invading it. The challenge was to remove 80 000 men, 5000 animals, 2000 vehicles and 200 guns from Anzac and Suvla. If the Turks found out, tens of thousands of Allied troops could be slaughtered on the beaches.
The soldiers would leave over a number of nights. Boats would creep in, load men, and disappear. Before the dawn mists lifted, the beach had to look the same as it had on the previous day. The Turks needed only to break through at one Anzac point to expose the deception. And we know from Mehmed Fasih’s diary that they suspected something was up.
Allied command estimated losses of between 20 and 50 per cent during evacuation, which would equate to at least 16000 men being killed or captured. The plan was kept from the Anzac troops. Senior commanders feared that the Turks might hear the news. In some places the trenches were so close that the Turks could hear the Anzacs talking. But no orders could stop gossip. Few Anzacs swallowed the official line that troops were being thinned for the winter period.
Some Anzacs relished a potential end to bad food and raging disease. But others now considered Anzac their property, the muddy holes their homes. They had staked their territory and their mates had died defending it. ‘If it were true! God!’ wrote Cyril Lawrence of the rumours on 10 December. ‘I believe that murder and riots would break loose amongst our boys . . . Oh, it couldn’t be; how could we leave this place now after the months of toil and slavery that have gone to the making of it?’
Monash described the news as ‘stupendous and paralysing’. There was talk of disobeying orders to stay in the trenches. The 2nd Brigade was said to beg for one final ‘go’ at breaking the stalemate. Lawrence felt ashamed. ‘Better to struggle and die fighting our way ahead than to sneak off like a thief in the night,’ he wrote.
The evacuation was better planned than any Allied attacks at Gallipoli. Monash issued each 4th Brigade soldier with a card detailing his task, time of departure and route to the beach. Trails marked by salt or flour would guide the men to the beach. The last to leave were to pull across barbed wire behind them.
Tricks were staged to suggest that all was normal. Those silent periods that Fasih wondered about in November? They were ‘silent stunts’, aimed at getting the Turks used to lulls. Most medical staff left early, but their tents remained on the beach. Men were ordered to loaf around and smoke where Turks could see them. On the afternoon of 17 December, Light Horsemen played cricket on Shell Green. A famous photo depicts a soldier belting a front-foot drive while three shrapnel shells burst in the background.
All went well at first. Men and supplies and mules left each night. Some Anzacs may have grumbled but they co-operated with their orders. At least they’d enjoyed decent food, wine and clothing from the stores opened up on the beach. The weather stayed calm and the Turks tried no surprises. On the last two nights, only 20000 men defended Anzac. Now for the tricky part.
The front-line trenches were the last to be evacuated. Trench floors were ploughed or laid with blankets to silence footfalls. Lance Corporal W. C. Scurry, of the 7th Battalion, invented a self-firing rifle to give departing soldiers a head start. A kerosene tin was punctured so that it dripped water into a tin below. After about twenty minutes the lower tin overbalanced, tripping a piece of twine that triggered the rifle to fire.
After dark on 18 December, half the remaining men left on a smooth sea. The situation grew more tense. If the Turks attacked now, they would break through. Men tidied the graves of their mates and bade them farewell. An Australian nodded towards a cemetery and told Birdwood: ‘I hope they won’t hear us marching back to the beach.’ Some smashed what they couldn’t take, so that the Turks couldn’t use anything.
One soldier set a table for four, with jam, bully beef, biscuits, cheese and tobacco. He left a note. ‘There are no booby traps in this dugout’, he wrote. This was not quite true. He had opened some rifle shells, poured out the black gun powder, and mixed it into the packets of ready-rubbed tobacco. Another soldier left a note telling the Turks, ‘You didn’t push us off, Jacko, we just left.’
By 11 pm on 19 December, less than 2000 men held the entire Anzac line. Sergeant Cliff Pinnock had survived the Nek charges on 7 August. Now he was among the last to leave Gallipoli. Pinnock was set to leave the front-line for the beach in a few hours. The moon shone and the temperature dropped. Pinnock’s feet froze. He didn’t think twenty pairs of socks could warm them. ‘The last day was simply awful,’ he wrote. ‘I never in all my life want to go through such another day.’
Pinnock had been instructed not to fire unless he was certain he saw a Turk. The problem was that he thought he saw Turks everywhere. ‘My God, I would have given anything in the world to have been able to open up and let go a hundred or so rounds just to ease my nerves,’ he wrote. ‘At 12 o’clock I was in that state that I dared not look at any object for more than a few seconds, if so I could clearly imagine I saw a man rise and place his rifle to his shoulder.’
At 2.15 am, Pinnock was ordered to march the 4 kilometres to the waiting boats. There had been 36 000 Anzacs here a few weeks earlier. Now there were a few hundred. Some were so exhausted from the nervous strain that they had to be prodded to stay awake. No one spoke as Pinnock’s group trudged to the beach. The men had rigged rifles to fire when trench candles burned down. As they walked, they heard the guns going off. The Turks opposite returned fire.
Men from the 24th Battalion stayed at Lone Pine until the end. The last group was about to leave, at 2.40 am, when an officer found a man on the parapet taking ‘just one more pot at them’. The officer heard explosions and found an Australian throwing the new Mills bombs. ‘It’s a pity not to use them,’ the Anzac said. ‘They’re great.’ An officer thought he saw two Turks emerging from a tunnel, until one man said: �
��A bonzer night. It’ll be a pity to leave the old joint.’
Pinnock clambered into a boat that moved off for Lemnos as spent bullets plopped into the sea all around. A few hours later, he bribed a ship steward and had his first bath in months. He soaped off his lice and threw his stinking clothes out the porthole.
The last boat left Anzac at 4.10 am. Private F. Pollack, of the 13th Battalion, was nearly left behind. He awoke in a dugout to find the area deserted. He raced to the beach. It was deserted. He rushed to North Beach and caught one of the last boats.
Underground explosions, set off at 3.30 am, killed seventy Turks at the Nek, and prompted Turkish fire right across the line. The Turks did not discover the evacuation until after dawn. Only two men were wounded in the Anzac evacuation, including one hit in the arm by a spent bullet as he left the beach. At Suvla, and later Helles, there were virtually no casualties.
Almost every major event had got away from the Allied commanders since 25 April. Only in the leaving of Gallipoli could they claim a triumph. Monash watched from a ship as the Nek exploded like a volcano of dust. He felt that the evacuation was ‘a most brilliant conception, brilliantly organised, and brilliantly executed – and will, I am sure, rank as the greatest joke in the whole range of military history.’
Casualties
Casualty numbers include those killed, wounded, missing, sick or taken prisoner. About one million men, from both sides, were involved in the Gallipoli campaign. Between 50 000 and 60 000 Australians served on the Peninsula. About 64 000 Australian cases of sickness were reported, and seventy Australians were taken prisoner.
Below are the numbers of dead and wounded at Gallipoli.
Country Died Wounded Total
AUSTRALIA 8709 19 441 28 150
NEW ZEALAND 2701 4852 7553
BRITAIN 21 255 52 230 73 485
FRANCE (est) 10 000 17 000 27 000
INDIA 1358 3421 4779
TOTAL ALLIES 44 023 96 944 140 967
TURKEY c.86 000 c.128 000 213 882
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Judgment
The Gallipoli legend bloomed in Australia before the Anzacs left the Turkish peninsula. Heroes had been anointed and a few villains cast. The heroes were ordinary men who had done extraordinary things. Blokes like John Simpson and Albert Jacka and the bomb-throwers from Lone Pine and Hill 60. Australians accepted that their first major campaign had ended in military defeat. But this wasn’t the point. Gallipoli was a triumph of the Australian spirit. The Australians had hung on. Gallipoli was about mateship and fatalism and rough humour. Gallipoli had honour. It gave a new nation a sense of the worth of its people. Nearly nine decades on, this judgment still holds up.
The cast of villains has changed over the years. Winston Churchill was promptly blamed, in both England and Australia, for much of the failure of the Dardanelles campaign. It was said that his soaring vision had clouded older and wiser minds. Churchill went on to bigger things. His belligerent faith steered Britain through desperate times in World War Two. Australia was never high in Churchill’s priorities. When Singapore fell in 1942 and Australia looked vulnerable to Japanese invasion, Churchill did little to help. He travelled extensively over his lifetime but never visited Australia.
The Australian troops of 1915 blamed the British volunteers who landed at Suvla for the failure of the August offensive. This is not entirely fair. The inexperienced troops were asked to do too much. They were also badly led.
The reputations of the Gallipoli generals took a long time to crumble, but crumble they did. One cannot blame them for failing to understand the new warfare of the industrial age, with its reliance on artillery rather than horses and bayonets. But one can blame generals such as Hunter-Weston and Godley for being arrogant and careless.
And Ian Hamilton? It is fair to say that his temperament was wrong for a command like the Dardanelles campaign. Gallipoli destroyed Hamilton’s career but not his spirit. Hamilton opened war memorials and wrote books until his death, aged ninety-four, in 1947. Hamilton stayed true to character until the end. He never blamed Kitchener or others for the Gallipoli failure.
Kitchener escaped public roastings – but only because he drowned in 1916, when his ship struck a mine on the way to Russia.
William Birdwood commanded the Anzacs until 1918. He was so fond of Australians that he hoped to become Australia’s governor-general in the 1930s. He missed out when Australia, in a sign of growing maturity, decided that an Australian should finally have the posting.
Harold Walker, the best-liked British general at Gallipoli, commanded an Australian division until 1918, despite being badly wounded at Gallipoli in October 1915. John Monash went on to become Australia’s most famous military commander. He led 150 000 Anzacs to victories in France in 1918. Monash died in 1931, aged sixty-six, and 250000 turned out on Melbourne streets for his funeral. Godley and Hunter-Weston both went on to command corps in France.
So quickly did the Gallipoli legend grow that Australian politicians and newspapers in 1916 opposed a British government inquiry into the Dardanelles campaign. There was a fear that the facts would damage the legend. The inquiry’s findings in 1919 were predictable enough. Kitchener had taken on too much work and been too secretive. Hamilton hadn’t given Kitchener enough information during the campaign. The Turks’ strengths had been under-estimated, and the plans for the August offensive had been impractical.
Journalist Charles Bean followed the Anzacs to France and Belgium, then devoted his life to writing the official Australian history of the Great War. It makes for heavy reading but Bean’s knowledge of the detail of battles was unmatched. Always humble, he refused a knighthood.
One Woman at Gallipoli
Only one British woman is believed to have landed at Gallipoli. To this day the true circumstances of her visit are steeped in mystery. On 17 November 1915 the woman came ashore at V Beach, and laid a wreath at the lone grave of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie, VC, who had been killed at that spot on 26 April.
Doughty-Wylie was an intelligence officer on Sir Ian Hamilton’s staff. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, for leading a successful attack.
One report says that the woman spoke to no one. She may have been Doughty-Wylie’s wife, Lillian, who was nursing in France. But she may have been Gertrude Bell, the English writer and explorer, who was Doughty-Wylie’s lover.
Perhaps Turkish women visited troops at Gallipoli. But their story is yet to be told.
The Gallipoli legend is so ingrained that separating facts from myths can be difficult. We all learn about the Anzacs when growing up. We are taught that Simpson was brave and that the British got it wrong. Both statements are true enough, but the most powerful tales of Gallipoli are about men you don’t often hear about any more. Alfred Shout and Bill Dunstan throwing bombs at Lone Pine. Alexander White leading the charge at the Nek. Jack Gammage overcoming his nerves and Oliver Cumberland grieving for his brother.
Sometimes we bathe Gallipoli in a romantic glow. We talk about the Anzac spirit and mateship and good humour. The Australians at Gallipoli had all these qualities. But they also had dysentery and toothaches to think about. They stank of dirt and death and wondered whether they could go on. They crawled out of holes to dig more holes, fetch water, or if they were lucky, take a quick dip before the next shrapnel storm. They dreamed of a bath or a piece of steak.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander White didn’t come home from Gallipoli. He bubbled with enthusiasm when he enlisted. ‘Dear little wife and kiddie,’ he wrote, not long before dying in the first wave at the Nek. ‘I seem so far away from you all; I do not want to speak about the war; it’s horrible. If I let myself think too much about it my nerves would go. Have seen things and done things I want to forget.’
Many of the Anzacs came home and couldn’t forget. Yet they couldn’t talk about Gallipoli either. Lieutenant Hugo ‘Jim’ Throssell, who won a VC at Hill 60, was never the same. He had been renowned for being the f
irst with the funny line when he landed at Gallipoli. He changed when his brother died in battle, in 1917. Throssell shot himself dead in 1933. In his will, he wrote: ‘I have never recovered from my 1914–18 experiences.’
Many Australians think Gallipoli was solely an Anzac war. This wasn’t so. Some 8700 Australians died on the peninsula. About one million men on the two sides served at Gallipoli, and between one third and one half were killed or wounded. More than 86000 Turks died. The British lost 21255 men, the French lost 10000, and 2701 New Zealanders died.
For decades no one much visited the Gallipoli cemeteries. In 1984, about 300 people attended the 25 April dawn service at Ari Burnu, and many of them were Gallipoli veterans returning for the first time. Some thought Anzac Day would fade away. Then something happened that no one can easily explain. Young people wanted to find out more about Gallipoli. Teenagers began asking about their great-great uncle’s death at Lone Pine. Perhaps the distance of time softened the grisly truths of Gallipoli. Young people cast their imaginations back to 1915 and marvelled at how different Australians were then. How reckless they were. How generous. Gallipoli is now a destination for Australian pilgrims, most of them young people.
The last surviving Gallipoli veterans were honoured as ‘living monuments’ in the 1990s. Alec Campbell received more media attention when he died in 2002 than a former prime minister who died soon afterwards. Campbell spent less than six weeks at Gallipoli and saw no major fighting. This didn’t matter. His death severed our last link with the legend. Campbell had lied about his age, gone to Gallipoli, and then lived to be 103 years old. This made him a grand figure, whether he chose to be or not.
Pre-dawn, 25 April 2000
Up to 15000 Australians have rugged up against the Aegean Sea breeze. They are here for the Gallipoli dawn service. Young people drink slabs of beer before the dignitaries arrive. They break out into ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and wonder if they will stay awake. A long day of larking stretches ahead. Once they’ve paid their respects, of course.
The Gallipoli Story Page 11