Myth 1: The Anzac landing was heavily opposed

The blood-stained beach of Anzac Cove, Australian soldiers scrambling ashore under a hail of machine-gun fire, and bodies littering the shoreline. This has been the popular image of the Anzac landing for 90 years.

The reality was very different. When the first wave of 1500 Australian troops landed on April 25, 1915, fewer than 200 Turkish soldiers defended the shore. Two companies guarded the coast in scattered outposts. They had no continuous trench lines or entanglements and no machine-guns in the immediate area. The coastline was lightly defended to avoid heavy losses from naval gunfire. Three Turkish divisions were quartered inland to be rushed forward to meet any large invasion.

To achieve surprise, the Anzacs landed before dawn and without a preliminary naval bombardment. The 36 boats carrying the first wave landed about 4.30am around a low headland called Ari Burnu. Although few in number, the Turkish defenders were alert and ready. “The first bullets were striking sparks out of the shingle as the first boat loads reached the shore,” wrote official correspondent Charles Bean. The Turkish rifle fire steadily increased in intensity, although Turkish artillery did not begin to fire shrapnel until about an hour later.

Numbers of men were hit as they desperately rowed ashore or leapt from the boats. Australian losses were lighter than expected, however, especially among the initial waves landing before daylight. Within 15 minutes, they had cleared the small posts of Turkish defenders and climbed the first ridge, about 100m high. By then the second wave was landing on a much wider front. The heaviest losses occurred in several boats which came under fire from the foothills as they landed further north.

By about 6am, some 4,000 Anzac troops had landed and by 8am, about 8,000 were ashore. Despite the hazards of concealed Turkish snipers, Anzac Cove was secure. The battle for the beaches had been quickly won.

Meanwhile, the combat moved inland. Both sides brought up reinforcements and struggled for possession of the high ridges. The tortuous terrain favoured the Turkish defenders, whose commanders knew the country well. Australian officers found their maps useless and the terrain daunting.

The main Turkish reserve, the 19th Division commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, was based less than 7km inland. Unluckily for the Australians, Kemal had his finest regiment mustered before dawn for field exercises in the very area of the Anzac’s main objective, Hill 971.

Receiving reports of the landing around Ari Burnu, Kemal quickly deduced this was not a feint. The Australians appeared to be heading for Hill 971, the highest point of the Sari Bair ridge. He realised the key to securing the landing – or to resisting it effectively – lay in possession of the heights. Kemal led his regiment by forced march to intercept the Anzacs and to occupy the crucial ridge lines above Battleship Hill. There he ordered his soldiers to defend their position to the death. By 10.30am, a Turkish force of about 4000 men halted the Anzac forces between Battleship Hill and Chunuk Bair. By mid-morning, the Turks had effectively won the battle for the heights.

Along the lower gullies and ridges, the battle continued to rage. Fighting was furious and continuous for the rest of the day as the front line swayed back and forth. Many of the vital positions on the Second Ridge, taken within hours of the landing, soon came under Turkish counter attack. The pivotal hill, Baby 700, which dominated the eventual Anzac front line, changed hands five times on that first day. It would remain in Turkish hands until the end of the campaign.

More Anzac forces continued to land. By 2pm, despite Royal Navy delays, 12,000 men of the 1st Australian Division were ashore, although the plan had called for all three brigades to be ashore by 8.30am. About 3000 New Zealand soldiers also landed, although fewer than half of them would see action that day. By dusk, almost 16,000 Anzac troops were ashore but the Turks had effectively checked their advance all day with a total force of less than 5000 men. After nightfall, the Turks brought up two additional regiments and the numbers engaged on each side became fairly equal. Any chance of Allied success had passed.

Over the following days the front-line stabilised into roughly the positions it would occupy for the next eight months. The Anzac forces were confined to a narrow enclave less than 3km long and just over 1km deep, hemmed in by a tangle of ridges, ravines and gullies.

Myth 2: The Anzac troops were landed in the wrong place

The most persistent myth of the Gallipoli campaign is that the Anzacs were landed at the wrong place and that this led directly to the failure of their assault.

The Australians were intended to land on a 3000m front at “Z beach”, 1.6km north of Gaba Tepe. When the first troops were towed ashore in darkness, they found themselves landing almost 2km north of this spot.

Over the years, there has been much speculation as to why the Anzacs were landed at “the wrong place”. The theories involve uncharted currents, defective naval navigation, and even a late change of plans by the Anzac commander, General William Birdwood, and a subsequent cover-up. None is convincing. The most likely explanation is simply that the landing boats lost direction in the dark and, lacking familiar landmarks, veered northwards.

In fact, the original operation orders were vague, stating simply that the Anzac force was to land between Gaba Tepe and a point known as Fisherman’s Hut, 5km to the north. The actual landing site at Ari Burnu was virtually in the centre of that line. The first troops were landed on a front of just 800m, with units bunched up and intermixed, and confronted by a steep range of hills, rather than the open country they had expected. Their assault was fragmented from the outset.

Despite these problems, the intended landing site of Z Beach was never a feasible option. It was heavily defended by barbed wire and obstructions, two Turkish companies entrenched in well-sited positions and equipped with machine-guns, and a number of nearby gun emplacements, ideally positioned to cover the beach and approaches with artillery fire. Any landing against the well-prepared defences of Z Beach would surely have resulted in slaughter.

Ari Burnu, on the other hand, offered several advantages which outweighed the disadvantages of the harsh terrain. The Turks had not heavily defended the area as they considered the country there too difficult for a landing. Troops landing there were also closer to their intended line of ascent to the main range. Most importantly, the natural features around the landing beach, soon known as Anzac Cove, provided the only protected bay on a long, exposed coastline.

The headlands at either end, and the heights behind, shielded most of the beach from Turkish observation. Anzac Cove became the vital base for the landing and storage of supplies and reinforcements and for the evacuation of the wounded. Without the tiny cove, the entire Anzac position would have proved untenable.

Myth 3: The Anzac commanders displayed superior ability to the British commanders

Some British commanders on Gallipoli seemed to personify military incompetence, most notably General Sir Ian Hamilton, through his ineffectual command of the combined British armies; Lieutenant General Aylmer Hunter-Weston in his callous squandering of the 29th Division; and the doddering Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford, who oversaw the debacle at Suvla. But criticism of British commanders has obscured poor command decisions and failures of command at all levels in the Australian force. Some were apparent from the first hours of the landing.

Colonel Ewen Sinclair-MacLagan, who commanded the 3rd Australian Brigade, the first wave to land, made a crucial decision which thwarted the entire Anzac operation. About 9am on the morning of the landing, MacLagan unaccountably halted the advance of his main force on the Second Ridge, just 1km short of their objective. In an apparent loss of nerve, he diverted the newly arrived 2nd Brigade troops to reinforce his southern flank rather than adhering to the original plan and assaulting the heights to the north.

The heights were still open to the assaulting force but the momentum was lost and never regained. Major General William Bridges, commander of the 1st Australian Division, failed to intervene. His inaction confirmed the disintegration of the assault. Bridges was an administrator whose limitations as a field commander quickly emerged on April 25. He refused to land the desperately needed artillery, sending the guns back to the ships. One gunnery officer later remarked caustically: “The safety of guns was surely secondary to the proper supporting of the troops already committed.” After much vacillation, Bridges allowed just one 18-pounder field gun to land and it went into action at dusk.

As night fell, Bridges was pessimistic. The Anzac forces had not attained even their primary objectives. They held a barely secure beachhead and less than a third of the ground they had sought; they had suffered 2000 casualties, including 620 Australians dead; and they were being pressed by the Turks all along their perimeter.

In a decision which smacked of panic, Bridges and the corps commander, General Birdwood, proposed the force re-embark. Even if the required shipping had been available, a night evacuation under enemy attack might well have become a rout. Hamilton ordered the Anzac commanders to do the only thing possible: dig in and consolidate their beachhead.

The test of battle also exposed weaknesses in some Australian battalion commanders. The commanding officer of the 9th Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Lee, went back to the beach soon after landing, leaving his men scattered and leaderless. He was evacuated with a sprained ankle and did not return to his battalion on Gallipoli until July 19, only to be evacuated again two days later.

The Anzac landing did not fail solely because of poor command decisions or the inadequacies of some officers, however. The main cause of failure lay in the landing plan and its ambitious objectives. The Anzac force had too few troops to capture and hold a defensive line 10km long in rough and hilly terrain; and to cross the peninsula and secure an objective over exposed lines of communication, 6km from their beachhead. That such a task was given to a force of less than two divisions reveals a serious underestimation of the capabilities of the Turkish forces.

The landing was just the first day in an eight-month campaign that would claim almost 9000 Australian lives. The long agony on the peninsula became the most common shared experience of Australian soldiers on Gallipoli. Men hung on through the months of siege warfare in the trenches and tunnels, continuously under fire, exposed to the harsh climate, subsisting on inadequate rations and weakened by disease. From their experience emerged the Anzac legend – celebrating the bravery and sacrifice, endurance, resourcefulness, and humour in adversity of ordinary men – and a story worthy of telling accurately.

Myth 4: The Australians overran their objectives

Many soldiers later believed they lost all chance of victory because, in their eagerness, they overran their objectives and pushed too far inland. Some senior officers even used this to explain the failure of the landing. The Australian units consisted largely of hastily prepared volunteers, trained and equipped for open warfare. Their enthusiasm, inexperience and their orders to advance at all costs drove many small groups to advance far from their main units. Several groups got further inland than any Australians would for the rest of the campaign, although they did not hold their positions beyond that first day. Some men reached Scrubby Knoll on Third Ridge – their initial objective. Others climbed the slopes of Baby 700 and Battleship Hill but were either cut off or forced to pull back. The remains of some were still there in 1919 after the war. But these men were few in number. By the 1930s the official historian had discovered most of their names. They were not representative of the Anzacs as a whole. No Australians went beyond the objective set for the landing force and comparatively few even reached it.

Myth 5: The Anzac soldiers displayed superior fighting spirit to the British soldiers

The bravery of the majority of Australian troops on the first day is unquestioned. A New Zealand soldier who witnessed the Australians on April 25 wrote that they displayed “no orders, no proper military ‘team work’, no instructions, just absolute heroism”.

But there had been doubts about the untested Anzacs. British Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, considered them “good enough if all that is contemplated is a cruise around the Sea of Marmora”.

Because of their inexperience, the Australians were allocated a subsidiary landing operation. The main landings were made by British regular soldiers of the veteran 29th Division at five beaches around the toe of the peninsula.

At two landing sites, the British met heavy opposition. With great bravery and suffering losses of more than 50%, British units fought their way ashore. At the other landing sites, however, the British failed to press their attacks although they greatly outnumbered the Turks, and the assaults foundered.

Most Australians fought as well as the best of the British regulars. But not all were up to the test. As the day wore on and the fighting intensified above Ari Burnu, some Australians wavered under Turkish artillery fire. Men began to leave the firing line and wander back down to the beach.

A British officer later claimed the Anzac rear areas on the afternoon of the landing were crowded by an “endless stream” of Australian stragglers, many of them unwounded men who had shirked the front-line under the strain of their first experience of battle.

This claim was an exaggeration. By the late afternoon, however, there were up to 1000 stragglers among the hundreds of wounded lying on the beach awaiting evacuation. A further 1000 stragglers were in the gullies. Most were not shirking the front-line. They were inexperienced soldiers who had lost their officers or their units and who had returned to the beach to get orders. Many rejoined units in the line.

Through inexperience, Australian soldiers made mistakes. Some had to be restrained from shooting wildly at other Australians up on the heights; others leapt from cover to charge Turkish soldiers, only to be caught when the Turks dropped to the ground to allow their machine-guns to fire over them and into the Australians.

Gallipoli was a hard school. By the end of the campaign, the survivors were consummate professionals. On April 25, British and Australian soldiers (as many as a third of whom were British-born themselves) performed comparably. It was claimed of both that no soldiers could have done better and few could have done as well.

As the campaign dragged on, Australian soldiers grew increasingly critical of the British soldiers serving alongside them. Colonel John Monash (later commander of the Australian Corps in France) commanded the Australian 4th Brigade during the hapless night assault on Hill 971 in August 1915. Although Monash’s own abilities were questioned, he later wrote: “The real cause of our failure is the poor quality of British troops ... they can’t soldier for sour apples. They have no grit, no gumption, and they muddle along and allow themselves to be shot down because they don’t know how to take cover.”

Whether deserved or not, this became a common perception among Australian soldiers and part of their story of Gallipoli.

04/21/2004

Ashley Ekins is a senior historian with the Australian War Memorial, where he is writing the official history of the Australian Army in the Vietnam War. He has led the memorial’s battlefield tours to Gallipoli for nine years, assisting Australians to understand the events of 1915.