The Dandarnelles Disaster (28 page)

What followed was, in too many places, a classic demonstration of the workings of what is known in polite circles as Murphy's law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. We have already noted that the ANZACs were delivered to the wrong beach. The Bulair feint appeared to be a waste of time and effort, provoking almost no reaction from what appeared to be unmanned defences. One small gun opened fire. In fact the effect was quite useful to the attackers in that Liman von Sanders was prompted to shift a whole division to the purportedly threatened area, and to move his own command post temporarily to a hill overlooking the central portion of the Bulair lines, where he stayed for more than 24 hours. Thus there was only one Turkish battalion at Gaba Tepe to face the ANZACs when they came ashore in the first Allied landing. The leading 1,500 men of the 3rd Australian Brigade were in position aboard three battleships five miles offshore at midnight; the remaining 2,500 troops, completing the covering force for the corps, arrived in six destroyers 90 minutes later. The water was calm and the sky all too clear, lit up by the moon until it set at about three a.m., when the warships crept towards the shore in two echelons, each towing a train of four boats to be released two to three miles offshore. Three more battleships lay further out, ready to provide covering fire. The disadvantages of landing in the dark soon manifested themselves: the naval officers commanding the motorised picket boats escorting the boatloads of troops could not pick out any landmarks and some towlines became entangled. The landing craft drifted too far north as a result.

It was only well after the real landings had taken place far to the south that the German commander accepted that the battleship
Canopus
(Captain Heathcoat Grant, RN) had been leading a dummy run and sent his troops back southward, vacating the area himself.

From Z beach the Australians pushed inland towards their objective, the heights of Chunuk Bair. The few Turkish troops facing them with their
single-shot Mauser rifles began to withdraw when they ran out of ammunition – just as a lieutenant-colonel arrived to spy out the ground. It was Kemal, the divisional commander, who told them to stay put, fix bayonets and lie down facing the enemy. The Australian advance party did the same, halting their advance towards the top of the hill 1,000 yards off, providing the defenders with just enough time to reinforce decisively. Kemal happened to have a regiment on exercise on the far side of the heights and ordered it to advance to the top, leading the first 200 men himself. The main Australian column was now 400 yards away, but the rapid Turkish build-up at the top held them in check as the first Turkish field artillery pieces arrived, Kemal joining in manhandling the guns into place. Three more Turkish regiments were called in, and the Australians, now supported by the New Zealand Brigade, were held in check two-thirds of the way to the crest. The fighting lasted all day in the heat and casualties piled up on both sides in the withering fire of machine-guns. Neither side would yield. General Birdwood asked Hamilton for permission to withdraw his troops but was told to wait for the advance from the southern end of the peninsula the next day.

Down at Cape Helles, however, a machine-gun nest on the cliff overlooking V beach cut great swathes through the three battalions emerging from the beached
River Clyde
as they tottered ashore along their gimcrack, wobbly landing walkways and temporary bridges. Liman's artillery commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Wehrle, had placed one of his mobile batteries in the ruins of the exploded Sedd-ul-Bahr fort, which caused more havoc among the invaders. More were cut down as they came ashore from oar-propelled cutters. Others drowned under their own kit of heavy pack, rifle and ammunition. Landings had to be interrupted until dark, when the
River Clyde
completed its unloading. By that time casualties among the covering force had passed 50 per cent.

At W beach a battalion of Lancashire Fusiliers approached an apparently deserted shore tightly packed in their cutters – only to come under heavy fire at the psychological moment from machine-guns and rifles fired by Turks in hidden slit trenches. Naval shelling had made no impression on the barbed-wire entanglements. Casualties surpassed 57 per cent.

The beaches codenamed S, X and Y were defended hardly or not at all. Troops who landed at S brushed aside a dozen Turks and turned to help the Lancashires at W. All in all, however, sufficient numbers had landed to acquire a solid beachhead across the south-western triangle of the Gallipoli
peninsula. When Turkish prisoners stated that there were only about 1,000 defenders between the landing beaches and the objective, Achi Baba hill, they were not believed, and the British dug in, Western Front-style, instead of advancing northward. By dark on the second day, over 30,000 men had got ashore; but dead and wounded amounted to 20,000 and the beachhead looked like a slaughterhouse. A fleet of hospital ships took the wounded away to Skyros, and eventually Egypt for the worst cases. Liman rushed reinforcements southward against the Cape Helles landings; they formed a defensive line before Achi Baba under the command of Colonel Hans Kannengiesser. Eight machine-gun teams of marines detached from the two German ships arrived in support. British troops could not even get as far as the village of Krithia, half-way between the beachhead and Achi Baba. Within a few days of the landings on 25 April a stalemate had developed at Cape Helles and another at Anzac Cove. During the first landings six sailors and six soldiers won the VC. The French forces had not been badly mauled in their diversionary attack on the Asian shore opposite Gallipoli and were re-embarked to join the British at Cape Helles.

Three battles were fought at Krithia village, on 28 April, 6 May and 4 June, as the Allies tried to break out of their southern beachhead towards Achi Baba. A few hundred yards of territory were the only gains; the losses on both sides were out of all proportion.

Several bloody battles having failed to change the strategic situation at Cape Helles or at Anzac Cove in three months, Hamilton decided to land IX Corps at Suvla Bay, to the north of the latter, on 6 August 1915. The objective was to link up with the ANZAC beachhead and drive the Turks off Chunuk Bair and beyond. First to go ashore was the 11th Division, soon followed by the 10th. On 7 August 20,000 British troops were ashore in the blazing heat, many having landed in the wrong places, with no shelter, no water and no artillery. The next day, as desperate efforts were made to keep the troops supplied, General Hamilton actually set foot on shore for a change, to urge on his generals.

As a diversion the Australians had launched an attack across the extremely rough ground north of Anzac Cove, penetrating the Turkish defences at the Battle of Lone Pine, one of the worst engagements of a brutal campaign. At some points the opposed trenches were only metres apart; grenades thrown by one side were actually caught and thrown back before they went off (the record was reportedly four throws with the same grenade!); local museums are full of pairs of spent bullets which fused with
each other in the lethal hail of shots from both sides. Seven Australian soldiers won the VC.

At Suvla Bay the invaders initially made good progress until the Turks arrived to oppose them in strength. The Allied commanders, brought up on the Western Front, could not believe that they had gained half a mile without serious opposition and called a halt. This and other unnecessary pauses gave the Turks just enough time to rush reinforcements northward, both to Lone Pine and then to cover the high ground to the east. On 8 August a New Zealand battalion reached the top of Chunuk Bair briefly but barely had time to enjoy the view of the straits before the troops came under heavy fire from adjacent high ground. The next day a small force of British and Gurkha troops got to the top of the ridge and engaged in hand-to-hand fighting and bayonet charges, but they too were driven off – by mistimed British naval gunfire. The New Zealanders hung on and counter-attacked a Turkish force sent to dislodge them. But on 9 August Liman von Sanders gave Kemal the 12th Turkish Division as a reinforcement. The counter-attack by his corps on 10 August proved decisive: he personally led them over the top. By that time the New Zealanders had been relieved by two unblooded British battalions: six Turkish battalions put one of them to flight and killed every man in the other with their bayonets – nearly 1,000 men. Both sides were exhausted and the survivors pulled back, the Turks to the heights and the Allies towards the coast. Kemal, having saved the day in the struggle for Gallipoli for a second time, was raised to general rank with the Ottoman title of Pasha.

Liman von Sanders and the British official military historian alike concluded that the surprise achieved by the Suvla landing had been frittered away by unnecessary delays on the part of poorly trained troops led by poor commanders – donkeys led by donkeys. Kitchener sacked one corps and two divisional commanders (a third resigned). The root of the problem, complete lack of initiative, was a fatal by-product of trench warfare as learned on the Western Front. The possibility of a war of movement, of marching across open country unopposed to reach a position further forward or to turn the flank of the enemy were now alien concepts, especially for the men of the New Armies, and outside the experience of all but the oldest officers. The same had applied to the ANZACs, but they were healthier, with better physique and higher morale, unaccustomed to blind obedience. A third beachhead brought a third stalemate, as costly as the first two. Another landing was planned none the less, for which the French offered a whole army and the British earmarked two more divisions. It was
postponed until November, by which time opinion in London had changed fundamentally.

The War Council had spawned a Dardanelles Committee which met for the first time on 7 June. Churchill was a member: on 19 August, obviously having lost faith in the enterprise he had initiated, he suggested trying for a separate peace with Turkey, but was told that the Russians would never consent. Criticism of the conduct of the campaign mounted in the London press and (especially) in Australia. General Hamilton, who hardly ever left his command ship, was finally recalled in October 1915, to be replaced initially by Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro from France, who promptly advised Kitchener to withdraw the army from the peninsula. Monro was diverted to the Salonica front shortly afterwards, leaving General Sir William Birdwood in command; on 23 November Monro was appointed commander-in-chief in the eastern Mediterranean while Bird-wood was named commander at Gallipoli. Around this time, when Keyes went to London to press yet again for another naval assault on the Dardanelles, he saw Kitchener, who decided to go and see for himself. At the end of November another kind of disaster struck the hapless Mediterranean Expeditionary Force: the worst and most prolonged snowstorm in living memory reduced Allied strength by 10 per cent in a few days. Kitchener accepted Monro's advice and made one of his oracular pronouncements: nobody would die in the withdrawal.

The War Council in London decided to evacuate the Gallipoli peninsula on 7 December 1915. Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay were evacuated in stages by de Robeck's fleet without loss by 20 December, to the astonishment of Liman and his Turkish troops (and no doubt of their opponents, who had predicted losses as high as 50 per cent). Just 3 men were wounded as 83,000 troops were taken off the beaches in less than two weeks – without alerting the Turks. A quarter of them were taken off on the last two nights. The extraordinarily successful evacuation was led by Commodore Keyes, using 37 of the new motor lighters (‘beetles') ordered as landing craft in Churchill's days at the Admiralty. Thus encouraged, the Dardanelles Committee decided on 27 December to clear Cape Helles as well.

Some 35,000 men of four divisions were still dug in; the French Expeditionary Force was withdrawn without loss on New Year's Day 1916, leaving 19,000 British. Men of the gallant 29th Division were moved by boat to plug the gap left by the French in the last landing of the Gallipoli campaign. Liman ordered an attack on 7 January; fortunately for the British Kemal was ill, and the attack was beaten off with such a hail of fire that no
Turk reached the attenuated British line, where the British Army's famed musketry skills enabled the veterans of the 29th to give the impression that their numbers were much greater than was the case. Finally, on the night of 8–9 January, the rump of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force was withdrawn by the Royal Navy, again without loss. The last to go left rifles on the parapets of their trenches and planted helmets on sticks to give the impression that the abandoned positions were still occupied. The last man to leave was probably Major-General F. S. Maude, who had also been at the Suvla evacuation: he had forgotten his valise and just made the last boat out from W beach.

The vain struggle for the accursed peninsula had gone on for 259 days, involving a total of a million men, half of whom became casualties – dead, wounded or sick. Twenty Turkish divisions were released for other fronts; the Allies had to find another million men to fight the Turks and Central Powers in campaigns in the Balkans and the Middle East consequent on the failure in 1915 to knock Turkey out of the war.

The Royal Navy and its French ally did not confine their operations in the Aegean to supporting the troops with landings, supply, medical care and shore bombardments. Submarines featured prominently in Allied naval activity in the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara, while German U-boats scored several spectacular successes in the Aegean. When the
E15
was grounded in mid-April, her sister boat
E14
got through into the Marmara at the same time, to lurk until the end of the month. The first submarine of the Royal Australian Navy,
AE2
, was however the first to score there, sinking a Turkish gunboat on 25 April as the landings were proceeding. On the same day Lieutenant-Commander Hersing, IGN, took the first German oceangoing submarine,
U21
, out of Wilhelmshaven to begin an adventurous voyage to the eastern Mediterranean. Two days later
E14
struck at last, sinking a Turkish gunboat and a transport; but also on the 27th
AE2
was damaged by a Turkish torpedo-boat and forced to scuttle: her crew of 32 went into captivity. But submarine successes forced the Turks to stop sending troops by sea on the hitherto safe internal route to Gallipoli: for a while they were forced to march over the unhelpful ground of the peninsula, especially when the
Queen Elizabeth
sent a transport to the bottom at the Narrows with four shells fired from seven miles off. On 1 May
E14
sank another transport with 6,000 Turkish troops aboard in the Marmara. But on the same day the French, much less lucky in this form of warfare, lost their submarine
Joule
to a mine with all hands.