Introduction

In Melbourne Australia, Turkish army veterans have had their own RSL sub-branch since 1996 and every year lead a Turkish contingent in the annual Anzac Day parade. When Turkish Consul-General Hasan Asan marched with them in 2002, Premier Steve Bracks and other dignitaries stood in their honour.
"Once the RSL refused to let us march, now we are like brothers," says Turkish RSL branch president Ramazan Altintas. "I have six kids. They are all Australians. We have to share the good and the bad of our history."
Ambassador Okandan says: "There are hardly any wars which the past belligerent parties jointly commemorate. Gallipoli serves as a message of peace to the whole world." There, at least, is something to celebrate.

AWM text. Early in the campaign, burying Australian soldiers and recording the burials at ANZAC was haphazard, but the situation improved with the establishment of permanent cemeteries and the appointment of Chaplain Walter Dexter to organise the maintenance and recording of the cemeteries.

Dexter supervised the surveyors who made plans of the major cemeteries, Shrapnel Valley, Ari Burnu, the Beach, Brown’s Dip, and Shell Green. Some of the smaller cemeteries were also surveyed, such as at Plugge’s Plateau and Victoria Gully. When it was decided to evacuate ANZAC and Suvla in December 1915, they did not know what would happen to the graves.

Before the evacuation, Dexter and his team completed the maintenance and surveying of the cemeteries. Dexter kept the burial records up to date and took the bearings of the isolated graves so that accurate and useful records would exist should they return to Gallipoli.

It is with some amazement that the student of war discovers that in 1915 the British Royal Navy and Army deliberately chose the Gallipoli Peninsular for the first ever truly amphibious landing on defended beachheads in the history of the British Army.

Gallipoli Quotations (from the panels at Anzac)

A good army of 50,000 men and sea power - that is the end of the Turkish menace.
- Winston Churchill 1915
You have got through the difficult business, now you dig, dig, dig, until you are safe.
- General Sir Ian Hamilton British Commander-in-Chief, Gallipoli, 25 April 1915, late in the day.
Sir, this is a sheer waste of good men.
- Joseph Gasparich, a New Zealand soldier Krithia, 8 May 1915
Countless dead, countless! It was impossible to count.
- Memish Bayraktir, a Turkish soldier
After the terrible punishment inflicted upon the brave but futile assaults all bitterness faded … The Turks displayed an admirable manliness … From that morning onwards the attitude of the Anzac troops towards the individual Turks was rather that of opponents in a friendly game.
- C E W Bean, the Australian official historian
They lived with death, dined with disease.
- Anon.
There is hell waiting here.
- C.A. McAnulty, an Australian soldier killed in action at Lone Pine.
I am prepared for death and hope that God will have forgiven me all my sins.
- Lieutenant Colonel William Malone NZEF in a letter to his wife before he was killed defending the position his battalion had seized on the summit of Chunuk Bair.
I hope our poor pals who lie all around us sleep soundly, and do not stir in discontent as we go filing away from them forever.
- A New Zealand soldier at the evacuation of Gallipoli
Their duty was to come here and invade, ours was to defend.
- Adil Shahin, a Turkish veteran.
Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat.
- C.E.W. Bean, the Australian official historian

I thought I was justified in being proud of being an Australian and after that night I had no fear as to the result of our operations eventually. Give me Australians as comrades and I will go anywhere duty calls, and I hope to be pardoned for saying so, being one myself. Private Roy Denning, 1st Field Company, Australian Engineers July 1915

Anzac Cove.

There's a lonely stretch of hillocks;

There's a beach asleep and drear,

There's a battered broken fort beside the sea.

There are sunken trampled graves;

And a little rotting pier;

And winding paths that wind unceasingly.

There's a torn and silent valley;

There's a tiny rivulet

With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.

There are lines of buried bones;

There's an unpaid waiting debt;

There's a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.

From "Songs of a Campaign" Leon Gellert 1916

On 25th April 1915, starting from before dawn, men from Britain, France, New Zealand and Australia were sent ashore on the narrow beaches of the Gallipoli Peninsular, Turkey.

They were soon to be joined by Gurkhas and men from India, Zion (Israel) and Newfoundland (now part of Canada). They were opposed by the German trained Turkish Army. At that stage Turkey was the centre of the Ottoman Empire.

What followed over the next 8 months was the most ferocious, bloody, bitter, personal, hand to hand fighting seen in the modern world to that date.

It is true that the events on the Western Front later made the casualty lists from Gallipoli pale by comparison it is also true that for Australia who had promised Britain an army of 20,000 the death of over 8,000 and the wounding (often very severely) of another 17,000 was a mind shattering introduction to modern war.

Memorial to a Turkish soldier helping a wounded British soldier.

Gallipoli Casualties KIA, Wounded.				A TRIBUTE
Turkey	86,692	not available		This site is intended as a tribute to all those men, from all of those nations. They were heroes, every one.
Britain	21,255	99,000	approx
France	9,798	17,000	approx
Australia	8,709	17,000	approx
New Zealand	2,701	5,000	approx
India	1,358	not available
Newfoundland	49	not available