Gallipoli (31 page)

Intended objectives and actual positions for Anzacs, 25 April 1915, by Jane Macaulay

Kilid Bahr Plateau, by Jane Macaulay

It may even be possible to push right across that backbone of the Peninsula and make it the four miles to the Narrows, but that would be a bonus. The key thing remains to keep the Turks guessing where the main thrust will be, so that the 29th Division on Cape Helles will have the best chance of winning the day. (Once the 29th Division occupies Achi Baba, the Turkish forces on the plateau can be squeezed into submission from the Anzacs to the north and the 29th to the south.)

Will their landing be a surprise? Unlikely. Just a day after General Hamilton and his staff arrive in Mudros Harbour, a German spy plane, a Taube, had flown over them at a great height, clearly examining this large fleet assembling just 60 miles from the Dardanelles, but that can't be helped, what?

As to the local inhabitants of Port Mudros, they include, records Charles Bean, ‘some of the quaintest looking old Turks I ever saw – regular Sinbad-the-sailors; every third man was the pirate of the fairy books and yet they say they are most very kindly good-natured old folk – all the Europeans who live amongst them seem to like the Turks.'
⁵²

What chance that it will be kept from the Turks themselves that just off their shores one of the greatest armadas ever formed is gathering for an invasion?

Buckley's and none …

Particularly when all through Alexandria and Port Said the comings and goings of all the ships and their destinations are covered in the Egyptian press, when all of the procurement of the massive amounts of supplies needed is impossible to keep secret, when, as Hamilton's General Staff Officer, Captain Cecil Aspinall, would later report, ‘one of Sir Ian Hamilton's Staff received an official letter from London, sent through the ordinary post, and addressed to the “Constantinople Field Force”.'
⁵³
It gets worse. Hamilton is ‘somewhat startled'
⁵⁴
in his Cairo hotel to read in the
Egyptian Gazette
over breakfast an article naming the Gallipoli Peninsula as the landing site!

So it would seem, frankly, highly unlikely that the Turks don't know they are coming. All they can do now is hope for the best – and rely on the fact that the Turks won't know specifically where they are to land.

General Birdwood makes his headquarters aboard
Queen
and wastes no time in briefing his two Divisional Commanders. General William Bridges, in turn, is quick to assign the key role of being the first force to storm the beaches to the 3rd Brigade under Colonel MacLagan. Bridges has total faith in MacLagan and his men – even if there are some Turkish trenches providing resistance in parts, they should still be able to penetrate and occupy most of the key high ground on the ridge that descends from Chunuk Bair to Gaba Tepe.

AFTERNOON, 13 APRIL 1915, A FIRST LOOK AT THE FATAL SHORE

It is time to actually have a look at the coast they must storm, and on this sunny morning General Birdwood and Admiral Cecil Thursby – the man charged with getting the Anzacs ashore – are aboard
Queen
, looking closely at the strange shoreline just a mile and a half off their port bow as they steam south. With them is the Commanding Officer of the 3rd Brigade, Colonel MacLagan, and, like them, he is not only disguised in blue dungarees and appropriate headgear to make it appear that they are no more than simple sailors, but he is also peering intently at the coast through his glasses. At one point, the spies can see the white houses and minarets of two villages on the Suvla Plain, but for the most part all they can see are unfriendly hills rising sharply from the shore, covered with dark scrub … but criss-crossed by freshly dug trenches. They can even spy some barbed wire on the shoreline, glistening in the sun.

Colonel Ewen MacLagan (AWM H12187)

After looking at this same area a month earlier, General Hamilton had cabled Lord Kitchener that this place ‘looks a much tougher nut to crack than it did over the map …',
⁵⁵
and they feel much the same now.

Colonel MacLagan examines it closely through his glasses. It is a spot, just north of Gaba Tepe, which they know contains three manned Turkish trenches, although they can see no sign of the soldiers yet. Much worse, though, is the other thing they know from their reconnaissance, which is that there is a huge body of Turks just behind the ridges. All up, it does not take MacLagan long to reach his conclusions.

Certainly it is a supreme honour that it is his 3rd Brigade, judged to be the best of the lot, that has been given the task of hitting the enemy shores first, to provide covering fire for the battalions to follow, but it is MacLagan's strong view from the first, and he says so, that against a heavily entrenched enemy, the task is simply ‘too big for a brigade'.
⁵⁶

Nonsense, Birdwood and Thursby assure him. They have every confidence in the capacity of him and his men. Colonel MacLagan is simply being pessimistic.

But MacLagan is not swayed. Privately he is already forming the view that it will be more advisable to secure tactical points much closer to the beach than the unrealistic objectives further inland on the plan that has been handed down to him from on high.

Once returned from their reconnaissance trip, the key officers get down to tin tacks on the actual specifics of the landing, and the wardroom of
Minnewaska
is soon filled with large vertical maps upon which white discs on pegs (each representing a ship) are moved around. Which ships carrying which things – be they soldiers, artillery, horses, ammunition or supplies – are put in the right order until some rough semblance of organisation is imposed.

16 APRIL 1915, PORT MUDROS, JUST TO SEE HER ONCE

Like many of the men, Captain Gordon Carter of the 1st Battalion is excited and a bit fearful all at once.

‘Your object,' Birdwood has told him and his men directly a few days ago, ‘is first to force a landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula and help the navy to force the Dardanelles, after which our mission is Constantinople and then perhaps on to the German flank through Austria.'

‘Sounds very nice but will take some doing,' Carter had sagely noted in his diary afterwards.
⁵⁷
Over the last few days, he has been training his men hard in getting from ship to boat to shore with themselves and their gear intact – ‘the oarsmen were rather crude at first but soon settled down to it'
⁵⁸
– including doing night drill. In the course of it, he had even met General Sir Ian Hamilton, ‘who spoke very nicely and encouragingly'.
⁵⁹

What he most wants to do now, however, before the attack begins, is to see Nurse King, who has sent him a lovely note via a launch from her newly arrived hospital ship SS
Sicilia
, which he can see over yonder, about two miles away. Unfortunately, by the time he manages to get permission to leave his own ship and hitch a ride to hers, he has missed her – she and other nurses had been invited for a tour of the
Agamemnon
. Devastated, he returns to his own ship. If only he could see her,
once.

Lydia King feels the same, upon her return.

17 APRIL 1915, BY THE DARDANELLES, FROM OUT OF THE CLOUDS

Lieutenant-Commander Charles Brodie has never felt worse.

His friend Lieutenant-Commander Dacre Stoker had suggested to Commodore Roger Keyes that the Dardanelles could be forced – and the Sea of Marmara exploited – by a courageous Commander in a submarine. Such an attempt had been made the previous night by the only available Commander courageous enough to try: Brodie's identical twin brother Theodore in his sub
E15
. There has been no communication since, and now Charles Brodie is on a reconnaissance flight in a Farman two-seater biplane above the Dardanelles, looking for a sign … with a terrible sense of foreboding. He and Theodore have always had an almost telepathic sense of how the other is faring, and he strongly senses disaster before …

He sees something!

Just inside the mouth of the Dardanelles, he sees on the Asian shore at Kephez Point what appears to be a grey straw lying at right angles to a small beach, with a curious black line … Oh God, no, it is billowing black
smoke …
It is, of course, the
E15
, and it has been beached. His twin brother is surely dead, just as he had felt. (And, in fact, after the war, he would learn that Theodore had indeed been lying dead in the conning tower, cut in half by a Turkish shell.)

God.

Following Stoker's plan, Theodore had taken the
E15
as far as possible in the darkness before diving. Somehow, however, when surfacing again, the
E15
had been caught by the treacherous currents, causing it to beach right 'neath the guns of Fort Dardanos, which had finished it off – and Theodore Brodie with it. Six of his crew have also been killed.

Oh
God.

(Lieutenant-Commander Dacre Stoker hears the news on the day the
AE2
is to set sail from Malta, where the submarine is undergoing repairs after losing an argument with a large ship. He is shattered.)

17 APRIL 1915, GALLIPOLI PENINSULA, DEAR MOTHER, I DO NOT NEED NEW UNDERWEAR

The soldiers of the Ottoman 19th Division, stationed in reserve at Boghali on the Gallipoli Peninsula, have been training and conducting endless manoeuvres under their severe commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal. Though they are weary, their morale is high, and the men often take time to enjoy the beautiful spring days and the crops of yellow and pink wildflowers that are springing up by the slowly trickling streams that mark the depth of the gullies.

On this day, a bright, young soldier, Hasan Ethem, who has left his last year of law school in Constantinople to fulfil his duty to country and Allah, writes a letter to his beloved mother.

18 APRIL 1915, LEMNOS, MOVEMENT IN THE HARBOUR

Something is going on, and there are eyes everywhere, watching.

The local residents of Mudros Harbour are not told what, but their port is busy as never before. Hour after hour, day after day, more troopships arrive, filled with soldiers, and the ships have no sooner dropped anchor than the training begins.

Time and again, a whistle blows and then the soldiers are seen – in full kit, carrying their rifles – swarming down the ships' sides on wildly swinging rope ladders and then rowing to the shore and scrambling out. Others do the same, while also bringing artillery and horses.

And again. And again. And
again.

One keen observer is General Hamilton, who, after watching the Australians in action, is quick to record his thoughts.

‘These Australians,' he writes, ‘are shaping into Marines in double-quick time and Cairo hijinks are wild oats sown and buried.'
⁶¹

The men are so good that General Hamilton gives the order for the training to stop.

With good weather, allowing all the supply boats to get about their business in the harbour, they can leave within two days. True, medical arrangements to get wounded men back off the beaches have not yet been organised, but his staff will hopefully be getting to that shortly.