On 25 April 1915, a day of gas and demoralisation for British and French alike on the Western Front, the Anglo-French military landings, from which the Allies expected so much, took place on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Like the naval attack on the Narrows five weeks earlier, the troop landings were carried out in the hope of a swift victory. No victory, however, either swift or slow, resulted. As with the naval attack, there were moments when it seemed that success was within grasp. Opportunities for success existed, but were cast away by mistakes and mischance.
Two separate landing areas were chosen on the Gallipoli Peninsula, one at Cape Helles, at the southern tip of the peninsula, and one further north, opposite the town of Maidos. It was intended that the advance from the southern landings would push the Turks back to the northern landing, trapping them between the two forces. The first landing took place on the northern beach, codenamed Z Beach, shortly before dawn. Two months earlier the low British estimate of Turkish fighting abilities had led Kitchener to comment caustically that Australian and New Zealand troops would be quite adequate for the task of what he called ‘a cruise in the Marmara’. It was therefore Australians and New Zealanders, who had reached Egypt on their way to the Western Front and been diverted for the quick and easy battle against the Turks, who were put ashore on Z beach. Possibly because of a navigational error, they were put ashore not at their original landing place, Gaba Tepe, from where they might have advanced on almost level ground across the central part of the peninsula at its narrowest point, but at Ari Burnu, a smaller cape further north, below the precipitous heights of Chunuk Bair. ‘Tell the Colonel,’ Commander Dix, in charge of the rst landing, called out, ‘that the damn fools have landed us a mile too far north!’
The landing itself was virtually unopposed. Shortly before midday a Turkish battery near Gaba Tepe began to shell the soldiers on the landing beach. Many men pushed inland, where the Turks began to inflict heavier casualties. Still, the Australians pushed forward, up a steep terrain, towards the high ground. In the late afternoon, the company of Turkish troops holding the crest of Chunuk Bair ran out of ammunition and began to withdraw. As a small group of Australians approached the crest, the commander of one of the six Turkish divisions on the peninsula, Mustafa Kemal, who was at that moment reconnoitering the area ahead of the main body of his troops, reached the men who were pulling out. In his memoirs he recalled the dialogue that followed: ‘Why are you running away?’ ‘The enemy, sir.’ ‘Where?’ ‘There.’
Kemal looked across to the hill. The Australians had just reached it. Unless something stopped them, they could quickly move on to the higher ground. ‘One doesn’t run away from the enemy,’ Kemal told his retreating troops. ‘We have no ammunition,’ they replied. ‘If you haven’t any ammunition, at least you have your bayonets.’ Kemal then ordered the Turkish detachment to halt, x bayonets and lie down facing the enemy. ‘As soon as the men lay down, so did the enemy,’ he later recalled. ‘This was the moment of time that we gained.’ One of the Australians, Captain Tulloch, later recalled a Turkish officer standing under a tree less than a thousand yards away, giving orders. Tulloch fired at the officer, who did not move.
Kemal’s own best regiment was at that very moment engaged in routine practise manoeuvres on the eastern slopes of Chunuk Bair. Ordering it forward, he took two hundred men and led them to the crest. He reached it ahead of most of them, and saw, four hundred yards below, an Australian column advancing. Pushing his men forward, he organised each group as it arrived, keeping the Australians from the crest. A battery of guns arrived. Wheeling the rst gun into position himself, and under fire, Kemal knew that if the crest was not held the whole position on the peninsula could be lost.
An Australian scout, returning from the high ground, found a group of Australians sitting in the sun ‘smoking and eating as if on a picnic’. When he told them that the Turks were coming on ‘in thousands’, the officer in charge replied, ‘I didn’t dream they’d come back.’ The Turkish line of retreat along the Bulair Peninsula was denuded of men in order to reinforce the counter-attack. One more Turkish and two Arab regiments were thrown in. Throughout the day the fighting continued. The Australians were held two-thirds of the way up the slope.
Successive waves of Turks, hurling themselves on their adversary, were killed by machine-gun fire as they clambered over the bodies of the previous wave. More and more Australian wounded were falling back to the narrow breach. ‘There was no rest, no lull,’ one Australian soldier wrote, ‘while the rotting dead lay all around us, never a pause in the whole of that long day that started at the crack of dawn. How we longed for nightfall! How we prayed for this ghastly day to end! How we yearned for the sight of the first dark shadow!’
By nightfall both the Australians and the Turks were exhausted. The two Arab regiments were at the end of their ability to fight on. Throughout the night Kemal tried to get his tired soldiers to drive the Australians into the sea. The Australians held on to the western slopes of Chunuk Bair and could not be dislodged. Many, however, were falling back from the front line, ‘and cannot be collected in this difficult country’, their commanding officer, General Birdwood, reported. Birdwood added that the New Zealand Brigade, which had lost heavily during the day, ‘is to some extent demoralised’. He wanted to evacuate the beachhead. When this request was conveyed by ship to the Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, whose original orders had been confidently headed ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force’, he replied: ‘Your news is indeed serious. But there is nothing for it but to dig yourselves right in and stick it out.’ Hamilton added that the southern force would be advancing the next morning, ‘which should divert pressure from you’. This was a remarkably over-optimistic assessment of what would be possible in the south, as the events there during April 25 had made clear.
~~The First World War- A Complete History -by- Martin Gilbert
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