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The Graveyards of Gallipoli; A Digger History Associate Site |
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A Tribute to the Men of all the Nations that took part in the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 |
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50 years later, 70 years later & the Suvla Plan |
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APRIL 25, 1965 AT DAWN : Fifty years later on Australians and New Zealanders ex-servicemen are about to land ANZAC COVE at dawn on April 25, 1965. |
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APRIL 25, 1965, FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGN. 50 years later, Australians and New Zealanders landing at ANZAC COVE and taking stones as a souvenirs from the beach. |
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APRIL 25, 1965 FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGN: Turkish, Australian, New Zealand, British and French veterans at the service which took place at Lone Pine Cemetery on April 25, 1965. More than two hundred ex-servicemen had joined from Australia and New Zealand for this commemoration. |
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APRIL 25, 1965 FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GALLIPOLI CAMPAIGN: Turkish, Australian and New Zealander veterans at ANZAC COVE When they met 50 years later on, they didn't use their rifle but they embraced and kissed each other, but they were weeping silently. |
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Jim Jolk 88 (Left) from Victoria and a 93 year old Turkish veteran sit shoulder to shoulder at Gaba Tepe. |
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25 APRIL 1985: TURKS WELCOME ANZAC HEROES |
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by Jack Wilkinson |
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GALLIPOLI was invaded again, on April 25, 1985, not by ANZAC and British troops, but by Aussie, Kiwi and British tourists and veterans of the 1915 campaign. The sounds of the rifle fire echoed from the slopes above the beach at Anzac Cove - but this time only from a salute by a Turkish guard of honor. On this day, the 70th anniversary of the ill-fated landing, a series of ceremonies was held, commemorating the event and cementing friendship instead of creating enmity. While a scarlet-coated Turkish bugler played the Last Post, a crowd of about 750 paid silent tribute at the unveiling of a special memorial at Anzac Cove. The memorial bears the words of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk, who, as Mustafa Kemal, was one of the Turkish leaders in the Gallipoli campaign. The day was full of emotion: Australian, British and New Zealand veterans mingled with - and embraced - Turkish veterans. Seventy years ago they had been trying to kill each other - now the stupidity of war was revealed once more as they met as friends. Hobart veteran Merv Spencer, 94, who was featured in POST's April 25 issue, was the oldest. As they grouped in front of the memorial at Anzac Cove, one joked: "Standing here 70 years ago we would have had to keep our eyes peeled for snipers." But 88-year-old 7th Battalion veteran, Jim Colk, from Ormond (V), temporarily found it all too much and the tears came: the memory of moments shared and mates lost. "I was going on to Europe, but I've decided to head home," he said. Tall, erect and looking every inch a soldier, was another 88-year-old, Fred Hocking, from Melbourne. He fought at Lone Pine and returned with his two sons - both World War 2 veterans - and their wives. The day began with an impromptu dawn service at Anzac Cove, attended by about a dozen keen visitors, some of whom had stayed outdoors overnight on this sparsely populated section of the Gallipoli peninsula. Among them were John Rice, from Melbourne, Patrick and Michael McGann, from Sydney, and Andrew Fennell, from Newcastle (NSW), Then came a somewhat more official dawn service with more people and RSL representation. This was presided over by Presbyterian chaplain, the Rev. Alan McLachlan, a mere 85 years old. Though not a Gallipoli veteran himself, he had fought with the Royal Naval Air Service in 1917 and was then in the RAF before becoming chaplain to the 6th Division of the 2nd AIF in Greece in World War 2. Scottish-born, he now lives in Ashfield (NSW). He delivered the ode: "Age shall not weary them, nor the passing years condemn. At the going down of the sun, we will remember them." After the dawn service, ceremonies began at Gaba/Tepe, with Turkish troops and a Turkish military band, and dignitaries from other countries. Official speeches came from Turkish, Australian and New Zealand representatives under the flags of the three countries - and then it was off to Anzac Cove, Lone Pine and the New Zealand memorial at Chunuk Bair. Past humble peaks, ridges and gullies, now signposted with names indelibly inscribed in ANZAC history - names like Walkers Ridge, Quinn's Post, Shrapnel Valley, Shell Green and The Sphinx. POST spoke to a Qantas flight services director, Pat McGann, 54, from Sydney, who summed up why a number of uninvolved Aussies and Kiwis made this pilgrimage. "ANZAC is something special to Australians, and to be here on the 70th anniversary is something very special indeed." Pat organised a 10-day visit to Greece and Turkey with Anzac Day as the focal point. The day before, he and his son, Det. Constable Michael McGann, 29, and Andrew Fennell, 22, from Newcastle (NSW), had staged their own campaign by scaling the heights at Anzac Cove. "I was an idiot to do it at my age," said Pat McGann. But here was a twinkle in his eye as he added: "But 1 wouldn't have missed it for anything. "There were times when I thought I was going to slide right back down the slopes. But I kept thinking of the original ANZACs and those 88 lb, packs· and pushed on. "Michael waded into the water and picked up some spent cartridges from the sea - bed and he also found some bullets and a rusty old periscope." Pat McGann's father was a World War 2 veteran - but it wasn't a case of having to have a relative at ANZAC, or even any military connection. As area supervisor of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Ken Harris told POST: "Many visitors these days are teenagers or young tourists without special connections." The director of Troy/ANZAC tours in nearby Canakkale Huseyin Uluaslan, said: "The film Gallipoli seems to have created an awareness among the younger generation of what went on here 70 years ago." Many people suggest that the Australian nation came of age at Gallipoli and there is no doubt that the Turkish victory helped to forge the new Turkey which became a republic under Ataturk in 1923. But in 1985 - unlike 1915 - the signs in Turkey now say "Hosgeldin" or "Welcome".
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 There's 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 LEON GELLERT |
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ANZAC COVE IN 1915 : The base at Anzac Cove a few weeks after the landing, piers had been made and nine great dumps of stores and ammunition were packed against the cliffs for protection. The beach was shelled almost daily. |
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THE SUVLA PLAN AUGUST -1915 |
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Thus on the evening of August 8. forty-eight hours after the offensive had begun. the Allies had reached none of their main objectives. The Suvla plan, which was a good plan, had failed because the wrong commanders and soldiers had been employed, and at Anzac the best officers and men were employed upon a plan that would not work. And both attacks had been be-devilled at the outset by the difficulties of advancing through a strange country in the night. Even at Helles the battle had gone wrong. for the British there had launched their diversionary attack against Krithia at the very moment when the Turks were also massing for an assault. And so the Allies were thrown back to their own trenches with heavy casualties and apparently no gain. Major Allanson, on his eyrie on the ridge, had made contact with the main body of the British during the night and had obtained a reinforcement of Lancashire troops for the new attack - a total of about 450 men in all. He had his orders direct from General Godley: he was to keep his head down until the bombardment was over and then he was to rush the Turkish trenches on the ridge. "I had only fifteen minutes left," Allanson wrote in the report he made two days later. "The roar of the artillery preparation was enormous; the hill, which was almost perpendicular, seemed to leap underneath one. I recognized that if we flew up the hill the moment is stopped, we ought to get to the top. I put the three (Lancashire) companies into the trenches among my men, and said that the moment they saw me go forward carrying a red flag, everyone was to start. I had my watch out, 5.15. I never saw such artillery preparation; the trenches were being torn to pieces; the accuracy was marvellous, as we were only just below. At 5.18 it had not stopped, and I wondered if my watch wrong. 5.20 silence. I waited three minutes to be certain great as the risk was. Then off we dashed, all hand in hand, a most perfect advance, and a wonderful sight ... At the top we met the Turks; Le Marchand was down, a bayonet through the heart. I got one through the leg, and then for about what appeared to be ten minutes, we fought hand to hand, we bit and fisted, and used rifles and pistols. They saw that Allanson, on reaching the summit, had caught the Turks in the open as they were running back to their trenches after the bombardment. They saw the hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet, and at the end of it they saw the excited and triumphant figures of the Gurkhas and the British waving on the skyline. Then as they disappeared over the other side the thunderclap occurred, but it was impossible to know the direction from which the shells had come or who had fired them. Yet the incident was not absolutely disastrous. Allanson was still on the top, and although wounded was prepared to hold on there until reinforcements arrived. And it was indeed a wonderful view, the best that any Allied soldier had ever had on Gallipoli. After three and a half months of the bitterest fighting the Turks were now displaced from the heights, and in effect their army was cut in half. "Koja Chemen Tepe not yet," Hamilton wrote in his diary. "But Chunuk Bair will do: with that, we win." A new command was created embracing the whole battle area from Chunuk Bair to Suvla, and it was given to Mustafa Kemal ATATURK. In his account of the campaign Liman gives no explanation of why his choice fell on Kemal. He simply says, "That evening I gave command of all the troops in the Anafarta section to Colonel Mustafa Kemal. .. I had full confidence in his energy." Yet it was a surprising appointment to make. One can only conclude that Liman had long since divined Kemal's abilities, but had been prevented by Enver from promoting him. But now in this extreme crisis he could afford to ignore Enver. Kemal had been in the heaviest of the fighting on the Anzac front from the beginning. His 19th Division had met the first shock of the New Zealand advance; it had demolished the Australian Light Horse on August 7 and it had been fighting night and day ever since. In Kemal's view the Turkish position had, by then, become «extremely delicate», and he told Liman's chief-of-staff so over the telephone on August 8. Unless something was quickly done to straighten out the tangle on Chunuk Bair, he said, they might be forced to evacuate the whole ridge. A unified command on the front was essential. "There is no other course," he went on, "but to put all the available troops under my command ."
"It will be too few," Kemal replied. So now, after he had been awake for two nights at Anzac and continually in the front line, Kemal suddenly found himself in charge of the battle. He seems to have been not at all dismayed. Having calmly given orders to his successor in command of the 19th Division on Battleship Hill, he got on his horse and rode across the dark hills to Suvla. One has a vivid picture of him on this solitary midnight ride. Physically he was quite worn out, and his divisional doctor was giving him doses to keep him going. He had grown very thin, his eyes |
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SOME DIARIES FROM GALLIPOLI |
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I have burnt about six cases of papers and will destroy anything of value I cannot take, even to putting a pick through my water-tin I did however leave this note: "To Johnny Turk: we hand over to you the entire contents of our humble abode. Anything which may benefit you individually you are quite welcome to. You are a fair fighter and deserve all you get. We appreciate the way you have respected the Red Cross. We have always treated your prisoners and wounded well and trust you have shown the same consideration for ours". Signed: J. R. Hall and C. D. Purdie. On the 28th, when we turned out, we were greatly surprised to see about two inches of snow everywhere with cold wind and a temperature of 27 degrees F (-5 degrees C) (sic) of frost, and only a sheet for a roof. There is a snapshot by me of our A & NZ Division HO under snow. Slush and snow continued for several days. Everything is frozen and under these sloppy conditions living is very uncomfortable. The Gurkhas and Indians on our left front are suffering severely from frostbite, and hundreds are being sent to casualty clearing, with their feet in bandages trench-foot and frostbite, The muddy saps are causing great trouble for the stretcher bearers. While rendering medical aid to some wounded under fire, he left his own shelter when there were wounded lying helpless, under a hail of shrapnel. He died a soldier's death, fully conscious of the risk he was running. He was just twenty-one years old and a student at Hawkesbury Agricultural College, New South Wales. His death is deeply mourned in the unit, his unselfishness and splendid disposition gained him admiration wherever he went. We buried him where he fell; with a neatly inscribed cross. An Anzac Intelligence Bulletin issued about 1 July, deals with a report of an interview with a captured Turkish prisoner: In the attack on us two nights ago, our machine guns did great execution. One prisoner states that in the attack two battalions were almost annihilated ... I tried to return to my own comrades and was fired on by both sides. I got to about ten yards of your trenches and crawled among the heaps of dead and pretended to be dead also. When it was daylight I saw one of your men looking at me through a periscope and heard someone calling in Turkish: "Anyone alive there?" Then someone threw a stone and I realised they knew I was not dead and I answered: "I am afraid of you and I cannot walk." Then someone threw me a rope which I caught and was pulled in. I was lying on a steep place. Thanks be to God that I am with you in safety. We have to fight, as it is a Jehad, but we long for peace. |
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THE DARDANELLES: Looking from the slopes of European coast to Leander's Passage. |
