Gallipoli

1

Published in T. E. Lawrence to his Biographer — Liddell Hart.

2

Sir Gerard Lowther, who preceded Mallet.

3

The poem which Lord Byron wrote when he himself accomplished this feat in 1810 is well known, but he added to it the following footnote which is seldom printed, and which gives a livelier impression of the Narrows than any statistics can provide.

‘On the 3rd of May, 1810, while the Salsette (Captain Bathurst) was lying in the Dardanelles, Lieutenant Ekenhead of that frigate and the writer of these rhymes swam from the European shore to the Asiatic — by-the-by, from Abydos to Sestos would have been more correct. The whole distance from the place whence we started to our landing on the other side, including the length we were carried by the current, was computed by those on board the frigate at upwards of four English miles; though the actual breadth is barely one. The rapidity of the current is such that no boat can row directly across, and it may in some measure be estimated from the circumstance of the whole distance being accomplished by one of the parties in an hour and five, and by the other in an hour and ten, minutes. The water was extremely cold from the melting of the mountain snows. About 3 weeks before in April, we had made an attempt, but having ridden all the way from the Troad the same morning, and the water being of an icy chilliness, we found it necessary to postpone the completion till the frigate anchored below the castles, when we swam the straits, as just stated; entering a considerable way above the European, and landing below the Asiatic fort. Chevalier says that a young Jew swam the same distance for his mistress; and Oliver mentions it having been done by a Neapolitan; but our consul, Tarragona, remembered neither of these circumstances, and tried to dissuade us from the attempt. A number of the Salsette’s crew were known to have accomplished a greater distance; and the only thing that surprised me was that, as doubts had been entertained of the truth of Leander’s story, no traveller had ever endeavoured to ascertain its practicability.’

4

The Turks in fact were so short of mines that they had been collecting those the Russians had been floating down the Bosphorus from the Black Sea in the hope of destroying the Goeben and the Breslau. In Constantinople these mines had been picked up, transhipped to the Dardanelles, and put into the minefields there.

5

It was left to the Navy to supply aircraft for the operation.

6

Actually the first transports had just reached Malta, where that day the officers were being entertained at a special performance of the opera Faust.

7

Enver reversed this opinion after March 18. Some time later, when it was safe to do so, he admitted: ‘If the English had only had the courage to rush more ships through the Dardanelles they could have got to Constantinople.’

8

A phrase of Desmond McCarthy’s in a preface to Ben Kendim by Aubrey Herbert.

9

ANZAC: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The word bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Turkish ‘ANSAC’ which means ‘almost’.

10

One of them was subsequently torpedoed by a U-boat near Malta, and must have occasioned some surprise to the Germans. As the ship settled her wooden turrets and her 12-inch guns floated away on the tide.

11

The D.S.O. It was in the following year that Freyberg was awarded the V.C. in France.

12

Not to be confused with the Queen Elizabeth.

13

The following verse written by Jack Churchill, Winston Churchill’s brother, appeared later in an Army broadsheet:

14

The French actually forced the Turkish garrison at Kum Kale to surrender that night and when they were taken off on the following day they brought 450 Turkish prisoners with them.

15

Chanak.

16

A reference to the Arabian Nights tale in which a series of empty dishes is served to a hungry man.

17

Or ‘Eggs-a-cook’, an expression used by the Egyptian vendors when they sold eggs to the Anzac troops during their stay in Egypt.

18

Gas was never used at Gallipoli.

19

These engagements may be summarized:

June 4: Allied attack in the centre. Gain 250–500 yards on a one-mile front. Allies’ casualties 6,500, Turkish 9,000.

June 21 and following days: French attack on the right. Gain of about 200 yards. French casualties 2,500, Turkish 6,000.

June 28: British attack on the left. Gain of half a mile. British casualties 3,800, Turkish unknown.

July 5: Turkish attack along the whole line. Nothing gained. Casualties, Turks 16,000, Allies negligible.

July 12/13: Allied attack on a one-mile front. Gain of 400 yards. Casualties, Allies 4,000, Turks 10,000.

20

Dysentery was nothing new on the Gallipoli peninsula. Xerxes’ soldiers were infected with it on their return march from Greece to the Hellespont in the fifth century B.C.

21

Perhaps because of its isolation and its strangeness, perhaps because of the lack of other entertainment, the Gallipoli campaign produced an extraordinary number of diaries. Every other man seems to have kept one, and no doubt the notebooks still exist in tens of thousands of homes. It was customary to illustrate them with sketches and photographs, and perhaps some wild flower, a bird’s feather, a souvenir like a captured Turkish badge, pressed between the leaves.

22

Except once at Anzac when some barrels of wine were washed ashore from the wreck of the Triumph.

23

The men were issued, with a green active service envelope on which was printed, ‘I certify on my honour that the contents of this envelope refer to nothing but family matters.’ This meant that the letter was censored at the base and. not in the regiment.

For the laconic there was also a card with the printed words:

One simply struck out the words that did not apply.

24

There were 24 British divisions in France at this time and only 4 in Gallipoli. The remainder of Hamilton’s force was made up of 2 French and 2 Anzac divisions — a total of 8 divisions.

25

Lone Pine had its name from the fact that the Turks, though supplied with charcoal for their cooking, had cut down for firewood all but a single tree on the ridge. It so happened that on the very morning of the attack this last tree was also felled.

26

Brilliant crimson oleanders, mistaken by the British for rhododendrons, were flowering there.

27

Field Marshal Sir William Slim, who subsequently became Governor-General of Australia, was one of the few young officers who, though severely wounded, survived the assault.

28

Carson resigned soon afterwards over the failure of the Government to send adequate help to Serbia. ‘The Dardanelles operations,’ he told the House of Commons, ‘hang like a millstone round our necks, and have brought upon us the most vast disaster that has happened in the course of the war.’

29

Hamilton had made a visit to Australia shortly before the war.

30

The proprietor of Ashmead-Bartlett’s newspaper the Daily Telegraph.

31

Churchill saw them off at dawn in London on October 22. As the train was drawing out of the station he threw a bundle of papers into Monro’s compartment and declared, ‘Remember that a withdrawal from Gallipoli would be as great a disaster as Corunna.’

32

Keyes had mentioned the scheme to Admiral Guépratte before he came to London, and Guépratte had said, ‘I think always of Nasmith. I think always of Boyle; if (thumping his chest) I were permitted to do this, I would think also of myself, moi, Guépratte.’

33

When this message arrived at Imbros at 2 a.m. the following morning the signals officer on duty began to decode it in the usual way. He stopped however, at the words ‘Decipher yourself’ and took the message to Colonel Aspinall. Aspinall then began decoding but baulked at the words ‘Tell no one’ and woke Birdwood. Birdwood, however, was unable to handle the cipher and Aspinall having been pledged to secrecy, finished the message for him by the light of a hurricane lamp.

34

Thousands of ducks were shot down, and it was said after the campaign was over, with how much truth one cannot know, that several years went by before the migrating birds settled again on Gallipoli.

35

A certain amount of winter clothing had been landed on the peninsula but it had been taken off again in view of the plans for evacuation.

36

Several ships were sunk to form breakwaters at this time, and on Imbros Admiral Wemyss even proposed to use an old battleship in this way. Eventually, however, he requisitioned a collier which had just steamed in from England with 1,500 tons of coal on board. The captain protested but down the ship went to the bottom. The vessel was pumped out after the evacuation and sailed away apparently none the worse for her immersion.

37

The incident inspired the exasperated embarkation officer to compose the following lines:

38

According to Liman von Sanders the booty at Cape Helles was enormous and took two years to gather up. Whole shiploads of conserves, flour and timber were sent to Constantinople.

39

On June 5, 1916, he sailed in the Hampshire on an official visit to Russia, and was drowned when the ship struck a mine off the Orkneys.

40

The official figures were: