The Landings
A great fleet of warships, troop transports and freighters had now been assembled in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean to carry the landing force to its various beaches. Time was short and there was little to spare for practice in watermanship for the infantry. Final embarkation took place on the Greek islands made available by Prime Minister Venizelos and as night fell on 24 April the fleet closed in on the Gallipoli peninsula as the Royal Naval Division’s diversionary force, charged with conducting a pretence landing operation, ostentatiously entered the Gulf of Saros where, after dark, an officer, Lt Commander Freyberg, swam ashore pushing a raft of flares which he ignited to cause a diversion and convince Liman von Sanders that the main allied landings were to take place in that area; the deception operation continued after daybreak on the 25th when elaborate demonstrations of boat-lowering and a light bombardment failed to draw any reaction from the enemy ashore.
In the hours before dawn part of
the fleet, carrying the Anzac troops of the covering force charged
with securing a beach-head from which the main body would debouch
onto the Maidos Plain, and establishing themselves firmly on the
Sari Bair ridge, approached the coast in total silence. The
transfer to the tows of boats carrying the first wave ashore was
also made in a highly disciplined silence. All seemed well, until a
strong current began to carry the strings of boats northward.
Instead of landing south of the Ari Burnu headland where a gently
sloping sandy beach awaited them, they were deposited north of the
headland to be confronted, as dawn broke to reveal their
predicament, by a virtual cliff rising from a beach 
only a few yards wide. With the first glimmer of
dawn the defence saw that a large fleet was close inshore and
disembarking troops. The alarm was sounded and shrapnel fire began
to cause casualties. The garrison at Gaba Tepe, a mile to the
south, stood to arms as the Anzacs threw down their packs on the
beach and charged up the steep slopes facing them. The vigour of
this advance was astounding but as it developed, units became
hopelessly intermixed, troops lost contact with their officers and
each other, and chaos set in.
Photograph:
Mustafa Kemal
On the Turkish side, the defence
was in the hands of the 19th Division, commanded by Mustafa Kemal.
Without reference to his superiors he rode at once to the summit of
Chunuk Bair from where he could see the situation at a glance. He
immediately launched one of his three regiments, the 57th, which
was deployed close at hand to charge the oncoming Anzacs who had
almost gained the summit but were blown and hopelessly intermixed .
His orders to the 57th regiment were nothing if not direct: 'I am
ordering you not to attack but to die' - which they duly did,
saving the situation and buying time for further reinforcements to
join the counter attack. The Anzacs were hurled back off the summit
but held on sufficiently to establish a precarious front line which
endured until the end of the campaign. This is where the Anzac
legend was born, in places like Quinn's Post, 'Johnson's Jolly',
'Courtney's', and The Nek.
Whilst the Anzacs were battling
their way up the Sari Bair ridge the landings at Helles were under
way. Beaches selected had been named as 'X', 'Y', 'V', 'W' and 'S'.
Whilst 'S' and 'Y' on the right and left flanks respectively were
only lightly garrisoned and quickly taken, lack of initiative and
the failure of the 29th Division's commander Major General
Hunter-Weston to exploit success resulted in tactical stagnation.
At 'V' and 'W' beaches the picture was very different. Each was
held by little more than a platoon of Turkish infantry but they
exacted a terrible toll on the attackers. At 'W' the Lancashire
Fusiliers were able to fight their way off the heavily wired beach,
gaining six VCs in the process, but at 'V', where the Royal Dublin
Fusiliers in ships' boats and the Munsters and Hampshires aboard
the River Clyde were to land, there was slaughter; a naval pilot
flying overhead thirty minutes into the assault was horrified to
see that the sea was red with blood up to fifty yards from the
shore. For the rest of that day the attacking troops were pinned
down on the shoreline, unable to move.
For Hamilton, cruising offshore
aboard the Queen Elizabeth it was a day of frustration. The command
of the Helles operation was in the hands of Hunter-Weston who had
become focussed, it seems to the exclusion of all else, to the
fortunes of his troops at 'W' and 'V' beaches despite messages from
'Y' and 'S' beaches that opposition was either non-existent of had
been easily overcome. At 'X' beach the landing of the Royal
Fusiliers had been supported by the pre-dreadnought battleship
Implacable whose captain brought her within a few hundred yards of
the shore to engage the small Turkish garrison point-blank with his
12-inch guns, with which he continued to deal with incipient
Turkish counter attacks. Even so, Hunter-Weston's intention of
linking the beach-heads at 'X', 'W' and 'V' beaches by last light
to permit the rest of 29 Division ashore and on to Krithia and Achi
Baba was conclusively and bloodily foiled by mid-day. Hamilton, who
could see clearly what was going wrong, was dissuaded from
interfering by Braithwaite his chief of staff, an admirer of the
great Helmuth von Moltke, creator of the Prussian General Staff,
whose creed was that the commander-in-chief, having once issued his
operational instructions, must stand back and leave the planning to
his staff and the execution thereof to the field commander, who In
this case was Hunter-Weston . Hamilton therefore did no more than
offer a string of suggestions to Hunter-Weston, none of which was
heeded.
Night fell on scenes of despair and
confusion at Helles and Anzac, where Birdwood had been summoned
ashore by his senior officers for what amounted to a council of
war. The narrow beach at Ari Burnu - ever thereafter immortalised
as Anzac Cove, was choked with personnel and equipment as streams
os casualties were carried back off the slopes above. . The
spectacular charge up onto the heights of Sari Bair earlier in the
day had so nearly taken the Anzacs to the vital summits; but
Mustafa Kemal's rapid appreciation and firm direction of the
defence had frustrated the attackers. Men were pouring back to the
beach in search of their units and officers, discarded packs, food,
water and ammunition. Major General Bridges, commanding the 1st
Australian Division, favoured immediate re-embarkation as did
several others, and a signal to that effect was sent to Hamilton on
board the Queen Elizabeth. Woken at midnight with this unwelcome
news he sought the advice of the naval commander who told him that
it could take three days to get the troops off Anzac and would
invite disaster. Hamilton therefore signalled Birdwood to dig
in.
During the night of 25-26 April the
attackers were faced with almost unimaginable scenes of confusion
and apparent disaster. At Anzac, where rain had set in, the beach
was filling up with hundreds of wounded, brought down from the
summits, and stragglers seeking to regain their original units.
Stores of every type were piling up on the narrow strip of beach,
and Turkish artillery was now bringing down accurate shrapnel fire
to inflict further casualties on the beach parties and incoming
boats. Despite this, however, the engineers were accomplishing
wonders; within 48 hours their bore-holes just above the beach were
producing tens of thousands of gallons of drinkable water and
condensers were being brought ashore to augment the supply. On the
ridge barely a thousand yards above the beach the infantry were
digging frantically to establish some sort of front line against
mounting Turkish counter attacks. Innumerable deeds of heroism took
place, notably involving the evacuation of wounded to the beach;
within days one medical orderly in particular had secured his place
in Australian mythology:Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, serving
as Simpson, commandeered a donkey with which he conveyed wounded
men down to the beach until killed himself. Turkish snipers
demonstrated their skill and courage for several weeks until
finally cleared out of the beach-head; their principal victim was
General Bridges, mortally wounded on 15 May.
The first great crisis at Anzac
came on the night of 2 May when the Turks charged in mass formation
against the precariously held Anzac posts on the ridge above the
beach. The attack was repelled with enormous loss to the attackers.
Some four thousand Turkish dead were left in the open in front of
the Anzac front line and so dreadful was the mounting stench that
an armistice was arranged during which both sides emerged from
their trances to bury the dead. Until August, when the next great
offensive was mounted in an effort to break the deadlock, the Anzac
line held on, its garrison in places less than twenty yards from
their opponents , with whom a curious relationship developed, born
of mutual respect. Nearly a century later this persists.
At Helles, as night fell on 25
April, it was possible to succour the surviving wounded on the
shoreline and the troops who had been cooped up aboard the River
Clyde were able to get ashore, to be greeted by the appalling sight
of the Dublins and Munsters lying dead on the sand and in the
shallows. On the morning of the 26th, Colonel Doughty-Wylie, one of
Hamilton's staff officers, led an ad hoc body of troops up into
Sedd el Bahr village, clearing it of numerous snipers, dying
himself at the moment of victory at the top of the hill overlooking
the bloodied beach. There followed two days of consolidation as the
battle-shocked units sorted themselves out. The remnants of the
Dublins, who had lost over five hundred officers and men,
amalgamated with those of the Munsters to form a scratch battalion,
the 'Dubsters', for the next phase of the battle. This was to be
the capture of Krithia village, optimistically chosen as the first
day's objective. What became known as the 'First Battle of Krithia'
was predictably a hopeless failure; the troops were still mostly in
a state of shock, poorly briefed and unrehearsed. The subsequent
two battles for Krithia, lasting well into the high summer, were
equal failures. One of the great tragedies of the campaign occurred
during the 3rd battle on 4 June when the newly arrived and
inexperienced Collingwood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division was
destroyed within an hour of going into battle for the first time.
Reinforcements were arriving, led by the 42nd East Lancashire
Division from Egypt and then the 52nd Lowland Division from the
United Kingdom. Both were Territorial units; the Lancashire
Division was in superb condition following its robust training in
Egypt but the Lowlanders, employed hitherto in guarding ammunition
dumps along the Firth of Forth, arrived on the peninsula unprepared
for what awaited them. They were pitched piecemeal into battle and
suffered grievously. (They had already lost half a battalion of the
Royal Scots in the Gretna Green rail disaster) .
By mid-June it was apparent that
stalemate, comparable to that on the western front, had set in at
Gallipoli. In London, Fisher and Churchill had finally fallen out
and the old admiral had resigned despite a note from the Prime
Minister ordering him back to his post '…in the King's name'.
Churchill's days at the Admiralty were then numbered. Hamilton's
pleas for more reinforcements were met by the offer of an
additional army corps, with which he could execute the plan drawn
up by his staffs: a landing in Suvla Bay to the north of Anzac to
coincide with a grand assault on the Sari Bair ridge and a
diversionary attack at Helles. The commander of the new corps - the
IXth - was to be Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford. As with
many of the other generals involved in the subsequent operation he
had been brought out of retirement. He was placed in command of no
less than five infantry divisions, two of which were Territorials
(the 53rd Welsh and 54th East Anglian) and the rest from
Kitchener's 'New Armies'. The territorial divisions had already
been milked of their more experienced personnel as reinforcements
for the western front and many units were well below their full war
establishment. The Kitchener troops in the 10th (Irish), 11th
(Northern) and 13th(Western) divisions were typical of the new
Armies: patriotic, enthusiastic, partly trained for trench war on
the western front but totally unprepared for the open warfare and
climatic conditions awaiting them at Suvla, and led by officers at
all levels who did their best but whose experience was wholly
without relevance to the task in hand. It is worth noting that the
battalions of the 10th (Irish) Division had to made up to war
establishment by large drafts of surplus recruits from (mainly)
Yorkshire and Lancashire as Kitchener's appeal of 1914 was out of
tune with the prevalent movement for Irish Home Rule, and thus
greeted with something less than unqualified enthusiasm.