2.in The National Archives at TNA(PRO)All previous orders regarding the Maps to be used by the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force will be cancelled as from midnight 31st July/1st August.13
The new 1:20,000 contoured sheets were produced in Egypt (as series GSGS 4000), with transliterated names. These eventually covered the whole Peninsula and Asiatic Shore of the Dardanelles. The Krithia, Provisional Edition sheet was followed by a small Krithia Extension (Provisional Edition) sheet to the west, covering Cape Helles. Soon, both these sheets were recast together as one standard sheet in the series, which finally comprised eighteen sheets. A second edition, though not distinguished as such, in a new Dardanelles series (on the same sheetlines), was later produced of five of the sheets (with additional and revised detail, green compass roses, etc). Place names were not standardised on the maps and in orders, and several Force Orders were issued on this topic. Larger-scale trench diagrams, plotted as accurately as possible from uncontrolled air photos, were inaugurated and remained on non-standard scales and sheetlines for the time being. In addition a 1:50,000 ‘orographical map’ (GSGS 4001) was produced in Egypt in two sheets from captured Turkish 1:25,000 sheets.14
Printing and Survey Sections
The History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, which is sometimes misleading and not totally to be relied on, stated:
Early in 1915, a field survey section was got ready for the expedition, but was not eventually taken. As a consequence, operations and particularly artillery co-operation were hampered by the lack of any reliable survey. Fortunately, a moderately good and fairly recent map was found upon a captured Turkish officer. This was promptly reproduced by the Survey of Egypt and distributed. Arrangements were then made with this very efficient department to send Mr Meldrum, with the rank of captain, to undertake original surveys. Later a maps and printing section (corresponding to the 1915 organisation on the Western front) was sent to the Dardanelles from Egypt, under the command of Lieutenant A G Ogilvie (later Professor of Geography at Edinburgh University). This section was, however, independent of the survey section under Captain Meldrum. It is probably true to say that in no other theatre of war were overlapping and lack of touch in survey matters so marked.15
It will be seen that this judgement is largely supported by the contents of this chapter.
The first field survey unit to work with the Gallipoli expedition was the ‘Anzac Printing Section’, which had been formed from civilian personnel and equipment of the Survey of Egypt (including a printer, Mr Cairns, and a Turkish compositor). Birdwood sent a secret message to Maxwell on 6 March 1915 about ‘The sequence of embarkation indicated by the possible employment of the Force leaving Egypt’ which included the following terse statement: ‘Army Corps HQ – including printing and litho sections’. Clearly the Section had not yet been formed, for on the 9th the Anzac Staff noted: ‘Question of Printing Section taken up. AQMG Egypt sent telephone message saying that matter should be arranged by Army Corps with Egyptian Survey Dept.’ Things moved rapidly, for the next day the Anzac Staff noted: ‘Arrangements made with CE [Chief Engineer] and Egyptian Survey Dept for a printing and litho section’, and the day after: ‘Further arrangements made for raising a printing & litho section’. On 1 April the Anzac Corps Staff sent a message to GHQ about the Printing Section, and two days later a further message was sent warning them of its despatch.16
On 7 April the Anzac Printing Section, comprising civilians from the Survey of Egypt equipped with hand-operated letterpress and litho press, embarked on the Arcadian at Alexandria.17 This Section, which was handed over to Hamilton on the latter’s arrival in Egypt, would print many of the panoramas, sketch maps and trench diagrams before the assault and during the operations. The Section’s equipment and personnel were supplied by the Survey of Egypt, and came under the command of Nicholas, Hamilton’s Maps Officer at Imbros. It was used for the lithographic printing of diagrams and tactical intelligence maps before the landings, and topographical and trench maps afterwards. It was therefore rather a misnomer to call it the Anzac Printing Section; as Nicholas emphasised, it was completely manned by civilian litho draughtsmen and letterpress printers from the Survey of Egypt.18 ‘A’ Printing Section RE, brought out from England by Nicholas, was delayed in Egypt for lack of transport, and only joined the Anzac Printing Section at Imbros on 12 May.
Apart from topographical maps printed in Cairo, all other lithographed maps (trench diagrams and intelligence maps) were printed on the hand presses at GHQ on Imbros, where conditions for map reproduction were not ideal. A manuscript note, probably by Nicholas, on a 1:6,000 scale map (dated 26 June 1915) of the Turkish trenches stated that it:
… includes position northwards from the Straits up Kereves Dere through the French zone towards Krithia. The [litho] draughtsman received this map at 9pm. Drawing was finished at 4am and 50 copies pulled ready for despatch by 7.30am. Light very bad for drawing and sand and dust everywhere.19
Nicholas supervised the joint Printing Section until 10 August 1915, when Lt Alan Ogilvie RFA (T), from 1912 to 1914 a junior demonstrator in geography at Oxford (he joined the Territorial Army as a gunner in 1911), who subsequently served in Macedonia, took over its command.20 Nicholas was retained at Imbros as Maps Officer until the evacuation in January 1916. He worked in Egypt until mid-May mapping sand dunes in the Suez Canal area, and was then sent on leave to England, arriving at the end of May. He persuaded Hedley to let him take a Printing Section from Southampton to France for the new 5th Field Survey Company RE, attached to Reserve Army (later Fifth Army), to which he was posted as Maps Officer. Nicholas’s Gallipoli experience was invaluable when it came to plotting trenches, rectifying air-photos, and deducing the relief on Reserve Army’s 1:5,000 trench maps; he had done precisely this for the 1:6,000 trench diagrams of the Turkish area.21
Conditions were not easy back in plague-ridden Egypt. On 29 June Lawrence wrote to George Lloyd at Hamilton’s HQ, noting among other things that more captured maps of the Asiatic side were required, that individual captured maps could be sent back to Egypt for reproduction rather than waiting for sets to be put together, and that the Survey of Egypt printer, Cairns, was required by Dowson to return to Egypt, owing to deaths among the printers, draughtsmen and photographers there.22 The Printing Section remained at Imbros until after the evacuation, when it was transferred to Salonika. At some stage, probably after moving to Salonika, the GHQ Printing Section’s light printing equipment (hand-presses) was entirely replaced from Egypt by letterpress platen presses and a flat-bed litho machine and heavy hand-presses, thus greatly increasing output, and much use was made of the ‘vandyke’ process for transferring map drawings by transmitted light to sensitised printing plates.23
Together with Ogilvie, Nicholas compiled a valuable set of notes on reading relief, and related points, from air photos, studying shadows on photos taken at different times of the day. This practice of deriving terrain forms from shadows appears to have begun with the French. Captain J H Cole and Lt W M Hayes from the Survey of Egypt also helped with the Gallipoli mapping at Imbros, notably with map drawing and plotting from air photos.
Map and trench diagram production in the field
With printing facilities available at Imbros in the form of the combined Anzac and British Printing Sections under Nicholas, it was possible for tactical maps to be printed with defence information. Once it was realised that a rapid breakthrough of the Turkish defences was not imminent, it was considered necessary to create large-scale trench diagrams (the planimetry could not initially be made accurate enough to dignify them with the name of maps or plans). The first step was to produce a reasonably accurate large-scale topographical map onto which trenches could be plotted from air photographs.
Trench mapping in the Gallipoli Peninsula began before any Allied triangulation or control framework had been started. It arose through the requirement for a detailed and relatively accurate artillery map, and immediately pointed up the necessity of a r
igorous trigonometric control. There was a great need to improve the accuracy of artillery work on the Peninsula; thus far targets which could not be identified in the difficult terrain on the 1:40,000 sheets were being shelled ineffectually – a terrible waste of scarce ammunition. It was the ‘shell shortage’ in France which had led to artillery survey being introduced on the Western Front, to save wastage of ammunition in ranging – every shell had to be ‘fired for effect’. However, although new British 1:25,000, 1:20,000 and 1:10,000 sheets from captured Turkish originals soon came into use, positions and aiming points could not always be identified on these with sufficient accuracy.
Captain Walter Vivian Nugent RFA, who had sailed from England on the Staff of 29th Divisional Artillery, had previously worked on boundary commissions and in MO4, and on arrival in the theatre immediately began to gather topographical intelligence. On 5 April in Alexandria, he had compiled sufficient information, some of it vitally important for the movement of artillery and other transport, to present a report on the Peninsula to 29th Division HQ. At Gallipoli, like other army and naval gunners, he found the squared 1:40,000 map useless for the direction and control of fire. This led him first, in May, to compile from some good near-vertical air photos taken by Butler, a map of the area of his own batteries. The planimetry of this experimental map was crudely drawn, without any control framework, by tracing the outline of the main features and trenches from a photo-mosaic onto drawing paper with the point of a steel aeroplane flêchette, or anti-personnel dart, and pencilling in the scored lines before inking them up to form the trench diagram. The scale had to be carefully calculated from the height at which the photos were taken (about 6,000 feet), obtained from aneroid readings, checked by known distances on the ground whenever possible.
When tested by the gunners in action, this diagram proved an enormous advance on existing maps; for the first time a detailed picture of the ground was available, showing the main features and the relative positions of the Turkish trenches. If the gunner observer now saw shells burst on the edge of a poppy field, he could find the position of that field on the map; it was not only thus localised, but also relatively accurately located, and its shape and distance and bearing to the target could be closely determined. This was a great boon to both ground and air observers.
From Nugent’s 29th Division batteries in May, the use of the new trench diagrams spread first to VIII Corps (formed on 24 May) and then to the whole Helles front. They were first lithographed for use in offensive operations, corrected to 1 June, in the Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June. More significantly, the question of the lack of a reliable ruling triangulation had arisen, and it was recognised at the highest level that this was vital for accurate artillery work and as a control for the trench diagrams – a major step towards the construction of an accurate map. By the time (July) that Ernest Dowson, of the Survey of Egypt, visited Hamilton’s GHQ to see what further help Egypt could give on survey and mapping questions (Appendix vii), Nugent had been appointed to GHQ as GSO3 in charge of an embryonic Survey and Maps Section.24
On 12 June Nicholas wrote to Hedley that the:
… reproductions of the Turkish maps, though far better than the 1/40,000, had been found to be inaccurate in many respects, and the almost complete absence of fixed points upon them makes the location of trenches and taking of bearings a highly difficult task. Numerous aeroplane photographs have been taken and with their aid highly detailed trench plans constructed. The greatest difficulty is experienced in placing these in their proper position on the map, and the results have differed so considerably that suspicions are entertained as to the correct placing of even the few fixed points which the original Turkish map does show.
Nicholas went on to explain how this situation led to the creation of an artillery survey section under Nugent:
Representations to this effect were made from those on shore, particularly from the 29th Division and Artillery, to G.H.Q., and a request made that a proper Survey Section should be obtained from home. Capt. Nugent, who was on the 29th Division Staff, was sent for by the G.O.C., as being an expert, and after a consultation, a cable was despatched to the War Office (Troopers), asking for a Survey Section to be sent out, and that Capt. Nugent should be appointed to I.C., to supervise the sub-section. He would be required more specifically to superintend and co-ordinate the numerous small pieces of survey work which were being started both by the British and French.25
The cable (No. M101) was sent by GHQ MEF to the War Office, London, on 31 May, and gave as a reason for needing a survey section the need ‘to carry out the triangulation and correction of our present map, which is hopelessly inaccurate?’.
From the end of May, the trench diagrams were continually extended and improved, both by the development of the trigonometrical control framework, and by a sequential process of progressive approximations, by which detail was refined, augmented and placed ever more precisely relative to the fixed control points. During July Dowson, in collaboration with Nugent, whom he had known from the pre-war Sinai survey, developed encouragingly successful methods of utilising air photos. These, however, were not taken to any survey specification, and did not meet the rigorous requirements for making accurate maps.
They also inaugurated a trigonometrical framework, extending into enemy territory, as a control for the air photographs, and Dowson sent to the Survey of Egypt for a ‘Bahel’-pattern reducing and correcting apparatus which had been used for reconciling old maps of government land with contemporary topography. This was found invaluable for correcting air photos for scale variations and tilt distortion; the photographs were projected by lantern onto a ground-glass sheet in their correct map position, traced onto tracing cloth and reproduced using the vandyke process. Using this method, 1:6,000 scale trench diagrams could be supplied to the troops the day after the photos had been taken.26
The further stages that remained to be carried out were the addition of accurate heights and contours, integration with the Anglo-French Survey and the 1:20,000 map derived from captured Turkish sheets, and the extension over the whole Peninsula in a regular series of sheets. The evacuation occurred before all this was achieved.
From trench diagram to Anglo-French survey
The MEF was fortunate in having two expert regular army surveyors to put artillery survey on a proper footing – the gunner, Captain (later Major) Nugent, and the sapper, Major Stewart Francis (‘Skinface’) Newcombe RE, an experienced survey officer who had also worked on the Sinai survey, and on the southern Palestine survey with Lawrence and Woolley just before the war, who was with an Anzac Corps Field Company. Neither was at first used on the Peninsula in his expert survey role, but the need for accurate ranging and control of artillery fire and the insufficiency of the existing maps for trench warfare soon changed their tasks. Nugent, as related above, was the first to revert to survey work.
It seems probable that part of the impetus behind GHQ’s request for a survey section was the imminent despatch by Churchill of a 15-inch howitzer, which it was hoped would be able to deliver carefully surveyed plunging fire onto the Kilid Bahr forts. Hitherto the heaviest British guns on the Peninsula were 60-pounders and old 6-inch howitzers, whereas the Navy provided every calibre up to the 15-inch guns of Queen Elizabeth.
It was very significant that, according to Hedley of MO4, the initial request for a Survey Section for the Gallipoli expedition was refused when the MEF was first mooted (as we have seen from the aeroplane episode, Kitchener was extremely reluctant to allocate resources for Gallipoli), but was later sent when wired for.27 The response in England to the MEF’s request was extremely rapid, the No. 2 Ranging & Survey Section RE (the 1st Ranging Section RE had been formed in England in late October 1914) being formed early in June at the Ordnance Survey from regular RE personnel, and embarked on 8 June for the Dardanelles, just over a week after receiving the request.
No. 1 Section in France had originally been tasked with locating enemy batteries by cross-
observation onto signals dropped by aircraft, but as wireless signalling replaced the former role, the artillery survey and mapping role took over. As soon as it arrived later in June, No. 2 Section set to work on topographical surveys under Nugent, who in June was appointed General Staff Officer (GSO3) at GHQ, MEF (Maps and Survey Officer). He conducted trig survey work at Cape Helles (and later at Suvla), and trench surveys at Anzac, and in November was promoted GSO2.28 He was therefore the key British survey figure in the theatre, and the point of liaison with the French for their joint survey. Newcombe, as we shall see, became involved in mapping at Anzac, but his prime responsibility remained the command of a field company. Later in the war he worked closely with Lawrence, whom he already knew from their southern Palestine survey days, in Arabia, and he was captured by the Turks in Palestine in 1917 while serving with Allenby.
At Imbros, Nugent worked with Nicholas to develop further ways of accurately mapping the topography and Turkish trenches using air photos taken by Butler’s successor, Flight Lieutenant Thomson RNAS. As no trig data were yet available, there was no control (apart from the Turkish 1:25,000 map which showed very few identifiable points, whose precise values were not known) on which the air photos could be hung. Dowson visited them from Egypt in July and spent a month trying to get the Gallipoli survey and mapping onto a sound footing (Appendix VII), later sending Captains Cole and Meldrum and Lt Hayes from the Survey of Egypt to assist. Dowson, later in 1915, wrote a ‘Secret’ paper, ‘Notes on mapping from aeroplane photographs in the Gallipoli Peninsula’, which he issued at the end of September 1915 (see Appendix VI).29
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