Gallipoli: Making History (Cass Series--Military History and Policy, No. 16.)

GALLIPOLI How does the history of any given event come to be written in a certain way? A story can be told from many p...

Author: Jenny Macleod

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GALLIPOLI

How does the history of any given event come to be written in a certain way? A story can be told from many points of view. The significance that the event is deemed to hold may vary. Subsequent events will throw new light on the past and alter its significance for some. Thus, radically different versions of an event compete for attention. Often, one particular version holds the field, crowding out its rivals. This intellectual hegemony need have no relation to the accuracy of that version of history and alternative, and equally valid versions can sink without trace. The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 serves as an excellent case study through which this process of ‘making history’ can be observed. This edited book traces the disparities in the memory of ‘Gallipoli’ evident among the countries that participated in the campaign. It explores the way in which history is written at the personal, local, professional and, ultimately, the national level. Among the case studies presented here are Martin Gilbert on Churchill, Keith Jeffery on Gallipoli and Ireland, and David Dutton on the French view of a campaign in which they were more heavily involved than the Australians. This book will be of interest to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students of the history and historiography of First World War. Jenny Macleod is a Research Fellow at Edinburgh University. She studied at Edinburgh and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where she was awarded her PhD in 2000.

CASS SERIES: MILITARY HISTORY AND POLICY Series Editors: John Gooch and Brian Holden Reid ISSN: 1465–8488 This series will publish studies on historical and contemporary aspects of land power, spanning the period from the eighteenth century to the present day, and will include national, international and comparative studies. From time to time, the series will publish edited collections of essays and ‘classics’. ALLENBY AND BRITISH STRATEGY IN THE MIDDLE EAST, 1917–1919 Matthew Hughes ALFRED VON SCHLIEFFEN’S MILITARY WRITINGS Robert Foley, ed. and trans. THE BRITISH DEFENCE OF EGYPT, 1935–1940: CONFLICT AND CRISIS IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN Steven Morewood THE JAPANESE AND THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH ARMIES AT WAR, 1941–1945 Tim Moreman TRAINING, TACTICS AND LEADERSHIP IN THE CONFEDERATE ARMY OF TENNESSEE: SEEDS OF FAILURE Andrew Haughton MILITARY TRAINING IN THE BRITISH ARMY 1940–1944: FROM DUNKIRK TO D-DAY Tim Harrison Place THE BOER WAR: DIRECTION, EXPERIENCE AND IMAGE John Gooch (ed.) CAPORETTO 1917: VICTORY OR DEFEAT? Mario Morselli POSTWAR COUNTERINSURGENCY AND THE SAS 1945–1952: A SPECIAL TYPE OF WARFARE Tim Jones THE BRITISH GENERAL STAFF: REFORM AND INNOVATION 1890–1939 David French and Brian Holden Reid (eds) WRITING THE GREAT WAR: SIR JAMES EDMONDS AND THE OFFICIAL HISTORIES, 1915–1948 Andrew Green COMMAND AND CONTROL IN MILITARY CRISIS: DEVIOUS DECISIONS Harald Hoiback LLOYD GEORGE AND THE GENERALS David Woodward MALTA AND BRITISH STRATEGIC POLICY, 1925–1943 Douglas Austin BRITISH ARMOUR IN THE NORMANDY CAMPAIGN 1944 John Buckley GALLIPOLI: MAKING HISTORY Jenny Macleod (ed.)

GALLIPOLI Making history

Edited by

Jenny Macleod School of History and Classics University of Edinburgh

FRANK CASS LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2004 by Frank Cass, an imprint of Taylor & Francis 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. and in the United States of America by Frank Cass 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 2004 Jenny Macleod, editorial material and selection; individual contributors for relevant chapters All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in wirting from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gallipoli : making history / edited by Jenny Macleod. p. cm.—(Cass series—military history and policy, ISSN 1465–8488; 16) Chiefly papers presented at an April, 2001, symposium. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7146–5462–0 1. World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Turkey—Gallipoli Peninsula—Historiography. I. Macleod, Jenny. II. Title. III. Cass series—military history and policy; no. 16. D568.3.G27 2004 940.4 26—dc22 2004001383 ISBN 0-203-48931-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-58216-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS

Series editor’s preface Acknowledgements

vii ix

Introduction

1

JENNY MACLEOD

1 Churchill and Gallipoli

14

MARTIN GILBERT

2 Stories of Anzac

44

CHRISTOPHER PUGSLEY

3 ‘A War Memorial in Celluloid’: The Gallipoli Legend in Australian Cinema, 1940s–1980s

59

STUART WARD

4 The British Heroic-Romantic Myth of Gallipoli

73

JENNY MACLEOD

5 ‘Docile Supernumerary’: A French Perspective on Gallipoli

86

DAVID DUTTON

6 Gallipoli and Ireland

98

KEITH JEFFERY

7 Remembering an Ill-fated Venture: The Fourth Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment at Suvla Bay and its Legacy, 1915–39

110

KEITH GRIEVES

8 Interpreting Unit Histories: Gallipoli and After HELEN MCCARTNEY

v

125

CONTENTS

9 In the Shadow of Gallipoli? Amphibious Warfare in the Inter-War Period

136

IAN SPELLER

10 Gallipoli as Contested Commemorative Space

150

JOHN MCQUILTON

Notes Notes on contributors Index

159 185 187

vi

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The campaign at Gallipoli is now almost a century old, yet fast though it recedes into the past still it stays resolutely with us in the present, alive and kicking in both academic debate and public discourse. The explanation is to be found in the fact that the campaign has two faces – but, unlike Janus, these turn towards and not away from one another. As a military campaign, it is still the focus of controversy, while as a historical event it is the site of past and present contest. The essays collected together here address chiefly the remembrance of Gallipoli, but in this they demonstrate how intimately the two aspects of this great historical event are bound up with one another. Gallipoli commands attention because it is one of the great ‘might have beens’ of history. As Sir Martin Gilbert relays to us, its essence was summed up with casual accuracy by the war-time Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, in one of his many letters to Venetia Stanley: it was ‘a unique opportunity’ to pull off a dramatic strategic and political stroke which would, at a single bound, knock Turkey out of the war, bring relief to Russia, and hammer together a Balkan coalition which would knock the props from underneath the central powers. Its closeness to success – if such indeed was the case – and its complete failure put the career of the Cabinet Minister commonly regarded as chiefly responsible for it, Winston Churchill, in jeopardy and has necessitated the close examinations of his role in the affair which have been such a central feature of its study, and to which Gilbert contributes here. The experience of Gallipoli has been felt and used in very different ways at different times in the United Kingdom and in Australia, and it is this process to which the bulk of the pages that follow is devoted. As Jenny Macleod points out, the ‘Anzac legend’ of a spirited, brave and classless society embodying the values of free men reared to the independent lives of the bush, which its chief progenitor, Charles Bean, did so much to create was born of the contrast between the ‘terrible richness’ of the war on the Gallipoli peninsula and the ‘life of emotional poverty in terms of nationality’ which its protagonists had experienced before they vii

GALLIPOLI: MAKING HISTORY

began their odyssey. Perhaps – to turn on its head a dictum of the late Martin Wight – it also had something to do with a contemporary socialDarwinistic belief that strong independent nation-states were not born in bed but from the fire of war. What followed, as many of the contributions gathered together here show in different ways, was the growth of a national image of self which transmuted over time from being proBritish and pro-imperialist to being nationalist and anti-imperialist. Other transitions are also charted, not the least important of which is the shift of values which has turned the spotlight of heroism from captain Albert Jacka, VC (‘I managed to get the buggers, Sir’) to John Simpson and his donkey. Today, in London and Manchester, postcards can be purchased depicting the latter, but not the former. Australia’s own version of the military virtuosity of its soldiers and their generals was, as Christopher Pugsley resoundingly proves, very largely an agreeable fiction. Antipodean uses of the experience they shared stand in interesting contrast to those of the other Allied participants. For Great Britain – not least, as the editor shows in her own contribution, as a result of the artful literary manoeuvres of the expedition’s Commander-in-Chief, Sir Ian Hamilton – the story became at a national level one of lost opportunity and heroic endeavour. Locally, as Keith Grieves demonstrates, a peculiarly English brand of patriotism which had strong local colourations soon enfolded it. France took a hand in the fighting, for political reasons, but chose to regard it, not entirely accurately, as a side-show foisted on it by its English ally. The Irish troops who took part in some of the bloodiest fighting in April and August 1915 suffered the indignity of being lost to folk memory because, as southern Unionists and ‘castle’ Catholics, they fought on what the Easter Rising of 1916 would politically define as the ‘wrong’ side. Together, the essays collected here show how much relating to Gallipoli was, and is, contested ground. They also contribute to the ongoing process of understanding Gallipoli in its many guises. The message of their work is that the conflicts it embodied – and still embodies – can with patience and careful scholarship be understood and explained. They cannot, however, all be finally resolved, and perhaps it should not be so. For that to happen, one side in every debate would have decisively to vanquish the other. The Turks did that in 1915, but history is thankfully not a form of war; rather, it is an ongoing debate in which there are many parties to be heard and many views to be digested.

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book developed from a symposium that was held at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London in April 2001. The topic was a natural progression from my Ph.D. on the cultural history of the Gallipoli campaign, which I was then developing for publication whilst working at the Centre as the Rydon Fellow in Australian History and Australian Politics. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who helped to organise and host the symposium: Professor Carl Bridge, Dr Duncan Anderson, Dr Stuart Ward, Kirsten McIntyre and Glenn Calderwood. During the day we benefited from the participation of Dr Gary Sheffield, Professor Peter Simkins and Dr Catherine Moriarty who chaired our sessions, and from further discussions with our knowledgeable audience. The work of securing a publisher, editing the book and writing the introduction was undertaken whilst I was a member of the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London at the Joint Services Command College. I am grateful to my colleagues with whom I discussed the project, particularly Dr Niall Barr, Dr Oliver Daddow, Dr Deborah Sanders and Dr Gary Sheffield; Dr Brad West and Dr Keith Grieves also provided invaluable help with the introduction. My final thanks go to the contributors to this book for their cooperation, enthusiasm and commitment.

ix

INTRODUCTION Jenny Macleod

True Tales of Gallipoli, The Tragic Failure of June 4. Where Lancashire Heroes Made Glorious History

This was the headline of a review of Compton Mackenzie’s Gallipoli Memories in the Manchester Evening Chronicle in November 1929.1 Newspapers refer to ‘making history’ to denote events of great significance that will be remembered in the years to come. Implicit within this idea is the assumption that some things are worth remembering and some are not. What is the basis for this selection? For the Manchester Evening Chronicle it was the actions of a local unit during the war when ‘the East Lancashire Territorial division covered itself with glory in that mistaken but stirring exploit in which many thousands of lives were sacrificed’. This book is about the process of selection and interpretation that is apparent in the construction of narratives of the past, or, as it might be put (using the phrase in a slightly different sense), in making history. More specifically, it is concerned with the variety of histories of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 that have been constructed. The decision to write the history of an event, and the nature of the account produced, will be affected by context. Historical accounts are social documents, deeply imbued with the attitudes and agendas of each author and the circumstances in which they are writing. In E.H. Carr’s example, history is like a mountain; it can take on different shapes from different angles of vision (but it cannot be said to have ‘either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes’).2 This book takes one object, the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, and explores the way in which it has been portrayed and remembered from a range of viewpoints. The April 2001 symposium,3 where many of these papers were first presented, explored the reasons for historians’ seemingly endless fascination with the campaign. What is it about Gallipoli that impels reassessment and therefore the publication of so many texts? The result of these discussions is a book of our time that explores the effect of a range of contexts on history writings that ostensibly address the same subject matter. Using Gallipoli as a case study to observe the process of ‘making 1


history’ is thus an opportunity to reflect upon the relationship between war, society and history.

History, myth and memory The idea that history is a selective account of the past is partially obscured for linguistic reasons. As Pierre Nora notes, the English language (and the French) obfuscates this differentiation: ‘there is only one word to denote both lived history and the intellectual operation that makes it intelligible (German, on the other hand, distinguishes between Geschichte and Historie)’.4 History, the process of studying the past, must therefore be differentiated from the past itself entire, and from a chronicle of everything that has ever occurred.5 History is a selection of facts and events from the past with a pattern of meaning and significance imposed upon them.6 What then is the basis for deciding that certain facts and events deserve to be selected? The traditional view of historians’ work is that they are attempting to establish ‘Wie es eigentlich gewesen’: how it essentially was.7 In doing so, tremendous value is placed upon the search for empirical evidence, particularly through archival research. Oppositional accounts of the past tend to be dismissed as myths. Witness, for example, Gary Sheffield examining the current view of the Western Front as futile, or John Terraine discussing a range of stories and ideas such as the Angel of Mons, the Lost Generation and the Donkeys.8 Yet it is interesting to consider why any narrative that diverges from what actually happened should ever be given any credence. John Horne and Alan Kramer’s work on the German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, for example, seeks to discover what happened and to understand why the events were remembered in a different way – why the myths took hold.9 Indeed, the prevalence and longevity of false or incomplete accounts of the past suggests that the purely intellectual pursuit of ‘the truth’ is in some respects less important than the social value of the myth.10 Myths must therefore serve some useful purpose. In containing meaningful messages about the past, myths can serve as a kind of social cement.11 Importantly, myths are rarely entirely unrelated to what actually happened. Perhaps they may be more profitably considered to be simplified versions of events, a particularly selective narrative of past events. In this sense, myths are synonymous with what sociologists call ‘collective memory’.12 Empirical history aspires to objectivity in its reconstruction of the past, whilst collective memory is more subjective and reflects a group’s cultural needs.13 As Nora has written, memory ‘accommodates only those facts that suit it’.14 Yet all these things, empirical history, myth and collective memory are narratives of the past. They are all histories in the lower case. 2

INTRODUCTION

The realisation that historians should not only seek wie es eigentlich gewesen has had a considerable impact. The idea of memory as a subject of historical investigation has enriched the field. In methodological and epistemological terms, the study of the fallibility of individual memory leads to questions about historians’ source material and its reliability.15 The broadening appreciation of the variety of repositories of ideas about the past – of sites of memory16 – affects our view of the archive.17 Furthermore, the gap between academic and public perceptions of the past can force reconsiderations of existing interpretations of historical knowledge, as well as posing sociological questions about the cultural role of the historian in society.18 Finally, the study of memory has had an ontological impact on history in that it has affected the questions that historians pose.19 Yet however fruitful this concept has been, it is not without its difficulties. For historians, collective memory is too amorphous a term to be useful. Winter and Sivan have queried whether it is really possible to investigate rigorously ‘a vague wave of associations which supposedly come over an entire population when a set of past events is mentioned’? Winter and Sivan argue instead for the usefulness of ‘collective remembrance’ as a frame of reference. In doing so, they focus upon the agents of remembrance who create artefacts or ceremonies.20 Although this book is, in the main, about what historians have written about the Gallipoli campaign, it thus also casts its net more widely. In seeking to understand the variety of ways in which the campaign has been remembered, it also explores cinema and commemorative monuments and activities.

Social construction and histories of Gallipoli The definition given here of ‘history’ emphasised both selection and interpretation – the imposition of a pattern of meaning and significance – and that these things depended on the social context. Similarly, the existence of myths was attributed to their social value. Thus a particularly interesting aspect of collective remembrance is the way in which it is socially constructed.21 Each instance of remembrance will be affected by the identity and location (both geographical and temporal) of its author. Thus both the agent and his/her context are key factors in determining what is significant about the past, what is to be remembered and what is forgotten. Two things are important here. First, it involves what E.H. Carr described as a ‘continuous process of interaction’.22 There can be ‘retroactive interference’,23 where subsequent events affect our perceptions of the past – an obvious example is the impact of the outbreak of the Second World War upon the perception of the First as ‘the war to end all wars’. This continuous interaction cuts both ways. The idea that the present defines the past should therefore not obscure the extent to which the past has shaped the present.24 3


This is closely related to the second point to be made: the idea of social construction should not be taken as suggesting that anything goes – there will always be basic facts that cannot be ignored.25 Thus, for example, on 25 April 1915 men from the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) landed before dawn on the Aegean shore of Gallipoli and many of them died. Some elements may be disputed – the exact location of the landing, the exact numbers involved, the exact timing – but that does not deny the central fact that there was a landing. What will vary is the interpretation – why did they land there? Was it an effective action? Shouldn’t it be described as an invasion? The decision as to whether any of these facts or interpretations merit remembering will be affected by the social context. These interpretations and decisions will thus alter over time. Indeed, the subject matter of the first chapter by Martin Gilbert provides a case in point. Winston Churchill’s role in the initiation of the Dardanelles campaign has always been controversial.26 In the wake of his demotion and subsequent resignation from the government in 1915, and then the criticisms of the Dardanelles Commission, Churchill was widely blamed for the failure of the campaign. In 1921, for example, the Australian official historian Charles Bean blamed ‘a Churchill’s excess of imagination, a layman’s ignorance of artillery, and the fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and more cautious brains’ for the ‘tragedy of Gallipoli’.27 Perhaps the strength of his condemnation rests in part on the need to find a cause of defeat that was external to the Australians’ role – that is, the context in which Bean was writing may have affected his interpretation of the available facts. Later, Churchill’s World Crisis 1915 (1923)28 did much to influence opinion in his favour, but it is interesting to speculate whether the Second World War, which established Churchill as a ‘great man’, caused retroactive interference in the post-1945 judgements of Churchill’s actions in 1914–15. Further to this process, Churchill’s biographer, Martin Gilbert, has pieced together the byzantine and disastrous policy-making process that spawned the doomed campaign. In doing so, Gilbert refutes the criticisms of Churchill in relation to Gallipoli. Gilbert shows that the November demonstrations off the peninsula did not prompt the Turks into action, that Churchill repeatedly stressed the need for sufficient ships and a large military force, and argues that there was a ‘curious overlapping unanimity’ in the War Council in February 1915 in favour of Gallipoli. This is classic political narrative history rooted in deep archival research. But, as it will be seen, it is only one of many ways in which the history of Gallipoli can be written. To facilitate understanding of the way in which the story has been shaped and edited elsewhere, it might be useful to recount here what happened in 1915, as it is generally treated.29 Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire on 1 November 1914. The British-led attempt to force a path through the narrow Dardanelles straits which 4

INTRODUCTION

joins the Aegean sea to the Marmora, and hence to the Bosphorous and Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, began on 19 February 1915. But ships alone were not adequate to the job, and belatedly General Sir Ian Hamilton was appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the MEF, in order to assist the naval efforts with a landing force. Hamilton reached the theatre in time to witness the naval bombardment of the Narrows’ defences and to agree on 18 March that the bombardment should cease. Hamilton’s expeditionary force consisted of British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops. It eventually included men from diverse areas of England: east Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Essex, London and elsewhere; Highland and Lowland Scots, Welsh borderers and Irish troops from north and south of the then-undivided island. From further afield came Gurkhas, Indians, Newfoundlanders, Maoris, Senegalese and expatriate Russian Jews. This disparate force fought against soldiers of the Ottoman army, including Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Greeks and Jews, reinforced by German officers. On 25 April 1915, the MEF attack was launched. British regular soldiers from the 29th Division landed at five points (named S, V, W, X and Y beaches) along the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula at Cape Helles. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (who became known as the Anzacs) landed further along the Aegean coast of the peninsula at Z beach, and French forces landed temporarily on the Asiatic coast of the Dardanelles. Further landings were made at Suvla bay on 6 August using untried British troops, in combination with a simultaneous attempted break out by the Anzacs. These various landings and the fighting that followed them did not lead to the capture of Constantinople. Hamilton was removed from his command on 15 October and the MEF was evacuated in two stages in December 1915 and January 1916. In attempting to avoid attaching any significance to these events, all explanation and colour has been removed from the foregoing description. Even so, the choice has been made to emphasise the activities of the attackers rather than the defenders. The description has focused on the strategic and operational level, and so implicitly placed value upon command decisions when it might have focused on an infinite number of topics: the experience of the individual, the technical demands of minesweeping in the straits, the impact on the local population, medical aspects of the campaign, or the destruction of flora and fauna. It could also have ascribed value judgements to the events: Hamilton was an imaginative operational strategist, his plan was misguided or he was a weak leader; the 29th Division were the most effective soldiers on the peninsula, or the Anzacs were; the MEF was defeated, or the campaign was a crucial part of the overall victory in the east. The point is that the decision to include any of these ideas or approaches in an account 5


of the events of 1915 would be loaded with assumptions and priorities. These assumptions and priorities will be shaped by the point of view of the author, his or her purpose, and the society in which he or she is working. Let us, then, work through some of the ways in which the nature of the agent and their context may vary and the impact this can have on the remembrance of war in general, and on Gallipoli in particular. What motives induce agents of remembrance, be they participants, regimental historians, academics, film-makers, or the state when they choose to record or commemorate war? The danger, drama and profound consequences of war for individuals and collectives are such that military history will always be an important subject. The gravity of decisions and events in war determines matters of life and death for individuals, of victory or defeat for armed forces and their states, and therefore demand attention. War generates both sacred and profane motivations for remembrance. In the latter category are commercial reasons.30 The wealth of interesting, exciting or moving stories generated by war is doubtless central to the popularity of the genre with the reading public,31 and consequently make it an attractive subject for authors and film-makers.32 At the most banal end of the scale, ‘boy’s own’ style tales of derring-do are the focus of literature accompanying model kits and strategy games. However, war stories find a market for a variety of other reasons too. These motivate the agents of remembrance as much as those who consume their products. One set of reasons may be grouped as having a social purpose. At the national level, the remembrance of war creates a sense of identity – the enemy, ‘the other’, is clearly identified, and societies can define themselves in opposition to them. This perhaps should be viewed as an echo of the far more powerful impulse to the creation of national identity effected by war itself.33 Nonetheless, it has been suggested that the popular interest in Nazism since the fall of communism is attributable to the need for a contrasting ‘counter-image’.34 Comparable motivations help explain state interest in commemoration in that the process of remembering the collective effort can have a binding effect nationally. Similarly, the remembrance of war can function as a means of linking individual experiences to national ones, whereby family stories can be located in ‘bigger, more universal narratives’.35 The remembrance of the Australian experience of Gallipoli provides a powerful example of the creation of national identity. Indeed, such is the resonance of this history of the campaign that the ‘Anzac Legend’ is the best-known version of the events and their significance.36 Legend, like myth, refers here to a simplified story. The name also suggests, perhaps, the heroic aspect of the story. It describes how the untried Anzacs landed at dawn, hurling themselves against the Turkish foe, and fighting 6

INTRODUCTION

tenaciously on the cliffs of the peninsula. Throughout the campaign they demonstrated their bravery, resourcefulness, disrespect for authority, athleticism, laconic humour and above all their loyalty to their mates. The significant moments in the campaign include the landing, the armistice (which demonstrates the Anzacs’ magnanimity towards the enemy), the vicious fighting at Lone Pine in August, the futile sacrifices at the Nek, and the successful withdrawal achieved through careful Australian planning and ingenuity. The ultimate cause of the failure of the campaign is attributed to the British. It has been widely acknowledged that the key agent of remembrance here was C.E.W. Bean.37 Alistair Thomson argues, ‘Bean’s Anzac legendmaking provides a superb example of the “hegemonic” process whereby a legend was created, not by excluding the varieties and contradictions of digger experience, but by using selection, simplification and generalisation to represent that complexity.’38 Bean was the official correspondent with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and subsequently its official historian. Thus we see the state’s active interest in the remembrance of war. In writing about the AIF’s activities Bean focused on the attributes and achievements of the man in the front line. Bean’s choices in doing so were affected by his selection of evidence, the junior political role of Australia and the intellectual milieu in which he lived.39 Bean felt that his method of collecting evidence by interviewing men in the front line soon after significant events provided the most reliable evidence. This helped to determine the nature of his narrative. Furthermore, since Britain was responsible for strategic decision-making regarding the Empire’s resources, Australia’s most important contribution was its manpower. It was natural, therefore, for the Australian official history to tell The Story of Anzac40 rather than taking a broader view. Bean had also absorbed the prevailing social Darwinist ideas and was deeply interested in the racial characteristics that might be discerned in the Anzacs. He therefore aimed to codify what it was to be an Australian, and asserted that that identity was unique and remarkable. In doing so he differentiated the Australians from the others at Gallipoli – not just the Turks, but the British officers and men too. The creation and perpetuation of a sense of identity through the remembrance of war experiences is also an important means of generating esprit de corps within the armed forces as an institution. This is particularly true of the regimental ethos within the army:41 a sense of tradition and knowledge of past glories generates group cohesion and sets a standard to live up to. Helen McCartney’s chapter on unit histories demonstrates the way in which they expressed unit identity as a means of reinforcing established military traditions. Where battalions or divisions were raised at the outbreak of the war, Gallipoli was regarded as a defining moment to create identity and tradition. The parallels with the Anzac legend here 7


are irresistible. Indeed various themes recur – the location of the cause of failure outside of the fighting troops, the traditional dashing heroism and the inclusive concept of heroic endurance. In addition to the social aspect of remembrance at the state, institutional or individual level, the need to come to terms with the traumatic experience of war encompasses further powerful impulses. Thus the most sacred, spiritual motivations for remembrance require that national ceremonies are primarily concerned with paying respect to the sacrifices made in war, and frequently cite Ecclesiastes, ‘Lest We Forget’; hence also the central role of the church in commemorative activities. Veterans attending ceremonies or visiting cemeteries are keeping faith with their comrades. Similarly, Shirley Williams has described her mother’s autobiography, Testament of Youth, as ‘an elegy for a generation’.42 Psychological motivations account for a further, closely related set of factors. Writing the history of an event is a method of imposing a meaningful pattern upon it. For the individual participant, ordering the chaos in this way can be a means to come to terms with confusing or traumatic events.43 This is true both for authors and their readers. As Samuel Hynes notes, war narratives also confirm the memories of men who fought but did not write about their wars. Confirm, but also perhaps construct; for the order and meaning that written versions give to the incoherence of war must operate on other memories, making sense of the muddle of images that most men bring back from their wars.44 The British heroic-romantic myth identified in Jenny Macleod’s chapter was prompted in part by the need to assuage the pain of defeat. The only significant historiographical competitor to the Anzac legend, it formulates the campaign as a romantic and noble defeat that almost achieved significant results, potentially including the curtailment of the war by two years. The purpose of this version of history is to rescue the campaign’s reputation and it identifies its significance in the strategic and operational decision-making, and the glamour of the campaign. It failed to resonate at a national level, yet worked effectively at lower levels providing solace and ensuring continued interest in the campaign. Thus, Helen McCartney notes the inclusion of some classical imagery and the idea of Gallipoli as a great lost opportunity in the unit histories she studied. Furthermore, as Keith Grieves demonstrates in his chapter on local history, Gallipoli continued to provoke intensely felt memories at an intermediate level. He takes a broader view of sites of memory to include film, reunions and even underlinings in books. These are shown to reflect the variety of purpose behind the remembrance of war: a sense of reverent obligation, 8

INTRODUCTION

of social unity and local patriotism, the reaffirmation of values and as a recruitment tool. Underlying many of these motivations is often a political element. This is true not only of state involvement, such as the aforementioned interest in nation-building through commemoration, or the construction of monuments to make a particular point, but also of individuals. The desire to justify, explain and defend one’s role in warfare has often encouraged politicians and senior officers into print. This was certainly the case with General Sir Ian Hamilton’s Gallipoli Diary (1920) and Winston Churchill’s World Crisis 1915 (1923). Authors may also wish to promote a particular view of war more generally, for example the pacifism promoted by the 1963 Theatre Workshop production of Oh What a Lovely War.45 The didactic element inherent in such a work brings us to a final category. Many of these motivations will also apply to the remembrance of war in schools and universities. Some further educational motivations present themselves regarding the military’s remembrance of war. In addition to setting military history as a subject to be crammed for promotion exams, and in contrast to professional historians in general, the armed forces explicitly look to military history for ‘lessons learned’.46 This is despite the risk pointed out by Clausewitz that ‘superficial, irresponsible handling of history leads to hundreds of wrong ideas and bogus theorizing’.47 Nonetheless, there are good reasons for the continuing reliance on campaign analysis as a teaching tool. Clausewitz acknowledges that historical examples are useful in explaining ideas, showing their application, proving the possibility of some effect or as a means of deducing doctrine.48 Sun Tzu’s call to ‘know your enemy’49 also means that the armed services value history as a means to understand foreign cultures.50 And as Michael Howard (writing during the relative inactivity of the Cold War) noted of the professional soldier, sailor or airman, ‘his profession is almost unique in that he may only have to exercise it once in a lifetime, if indeed that often’.51 This places a premium upon operational history in military staff colleges, whereas university-based military history has focused on cultural and social aspects of war. Another point of divergence is the implicitly Whiggish attitude that the military takes in asserting the progress that has been made in improving doctrine, technology and war-fighting skills since any given case study. As Ian Speller demonstrates in his examination of the development of amphibious warfare doctrine, Gallipoli played a role in the development of institutional memory by being used as a source of practical training. The military’s drive to learn lessons from history is demonstrated by its study of the Mitchell Committee’s investigation of the campaign or the US Naval Institute Press’s publication of the first translation of Liman von Sanders’s memoirs.52 To this day, Gallipoli is used for campaign analysis 9


in the UK’s Joint Services Command and Staff College since it is an early example of joint and combined warfare. These remarks on the differences in the educational remembrance of war between universities and staff colleges highlight the second variable in social construction: context.53 In considering the foregoing, it is apparent that however strongly motivated any given agent of remembrance may be, the resonance of their artefact or ceremony will be determined not just by its intrinsic quality but by the circumstances in which it is created or which subsequently pertain. The first observation to be made, however, acts as a warning postscript to my earlier comments on the motivation arising from coming to terms with trauma.54 Sometimes, conversely, the shame of defeat may impede the process of recovery and so discourage remembrance. W.G. Sebald’s observation of Germany’s reaction to the Second World War suggests that silence was a more common response to the defeat and destruction of war than was soul-searching or commemoration. He describes a train crammed full of people travelling through a devastated area outside of Hamburg in the autumn of 1946. Only a visiting foreign journalist chose to look out. That shared decision to look away from the devastation symbolises a collective decision not to come to terms with the past.55 The defeat at Gallipoli, however, has demonstrably not had this blanket shaming effect. A second negative point does however apply to Gallipoli. In some circumstances, the changing political context can serve to make remembrance uncomfortable and unhelpful. For example, the American loyalists who fought for the British in the American War of Independence are often overlooked. Their story is difficult to incorporate into the larger narrative of the fight against British tyranny. Similarly, Gallipoli did not provide promising material for the development of Irish national mythology. As Keith Jeffery explains, Irish units were extensively involved in the campaign and their Irishness featured prominently in contemporary accounts in Ireland. However, the Gallipoli campaign took place in the year preceding the Easter Rising, and although it marked an important stage in the progressive alienation of nationalist Ireland from the British administration of the island, it was the events in Dublin in 1916 that came to dominate Irish accounts of 1914–18. Participation in war in the service of the British Empire had no place in the nationalist narrative of the making of an independent state. Context is also fundamental in explaining why the Australian Anzac legend resonates far more strongly that its British equivalent. Where Gallipoli was another in a long line of campaigns for the British, Australian involvement there marked the first significant episode in the story of a newly federated nation. Thus Bean’s influence was not due simply to the intrinsic qualities of his writings or his assiduous promotion of his 10

INTRODUCTION

work.56 Rather it is the fact that Bean was helping to create the Anzac legend in only the second decade of Australia’s existence as a federated nation that is most important. Gallipoli was the first time that individuals calling themselves Australians had played a role on the world stage. It was felt at the time that ‘death for one’s country was a potent signifier of nationhood’.57 As L.L. Robson has commented, ‘the soldiers provided a sort of terrible richness to the Australian people in what had been essentially a life of emotional poverty in terms of nationality the war offered the Australian people a blood-sacrifice, ritual and rhetoric to the gods of war’.58 Bean’s history of Gallipoli therefore resonated strongly in the fledgling Australia. This was a dramatic and heroic story to fulfil the role of a binding communal memory in a society too young to have other significant or workable competing myths. The Legend provided ideal exemplars for a country battling against inhospitable terrain and climate, and beginning to assert their independence from the Mother Country. Thus was born and prospered the Anzac legend. Yet there are some curious aspects to its position. The first must be that such a powerful story could be fashioned from what was essentially an embarrassing defeat. Furthermore, the Anzac legend demonstrates that absolute faithfulness to the actual events is not essential for cultural significance to be attained. The most notorious example of this is the false allegation that the British troops at Suvla were drinking tea whilst the Australians were being slaughtered at the Nek. This episode is discussed in chapters by Stuart Ward, Keith Jeffery and Christopher Pugsley. Indeed, Pugsley’s chapter highlights the gaps that can develop between what actually happened on the peninsula and what has been written about it, by exploring the value judgements that have been made about the combat effectiveness of the Anzacs. He argues that the legend has become so powerful and pervasive that the Anzacs’ bravery and prowess has become an article of faith. Yet these were relatively untrained and unskilled men; they made mistakes, as did their inexperienced officers. Examples that do demonstrate success were due less to their innate powers, and more to do with the calibre of a few key officers. Thus some of the key tenets of the legend can be refuted, and yet its power remains intact. Part of the reason for its continuing resonance, is the way in which the Legend has been adapted for its changing social context. Stuart Ward’s consideration of the portrayal of the Anzacs in Australian cinema demonstrates the malleability of historical myths. He shows that the political messages of the two films considered are contradictory. Charles Chauvel’s Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) was made during the Second World War and proudly portrayed its Australian soldiers fighting for the Empire. Yet Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) stoked Australian nationalism by showing its Anzacs to be cannon fodder for the imperial war machine. 11


Such changes have enabled the legend to be renewed and sustained as the site of the ‘birth of a nation’. The insights gained from a longitudinal study such as Ward’s are matched by those of a comparative approach. This confirms that the context in which the histories of Gallipoli developed were far more important than events on the ground. Indeed, the historiographical dominance of the Anzac legend bears no relation to the prominence of the role played by the Anzacs at Gallipoli. To use one crude measure, the casualties suffered by the Anzacs of about 10,000 dead were approximately equalled by the French contingent, substantially outstripped by the 18,000 British. If France’s casualties were comparable to Australia’s, Gallic interest in the campaign is not. David Dutton’s chapter investigates France’s historiographical forgetfulness. It seems that a British-led defeat could not fulfil a useful role in the communal memory of an old country preoccupied with the threat to its soil, and which played a more significant role in other eastern adventures. Furthermore, the Allied casualties were dwarfed by the Turkish death toll, which is estimated at greater than 80,000. But the fact that the campaign is important in Turkey is due not simply to the scale of loss, but to a variety of factors, not least of which is the opportunity it brought to confirm the moral worth of the Turkish nation that was then emerging from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Present-day Australian commemorations of the campaign often align themselves with the Turkish experience, and it is regrettable that plans to include a consideration here of the way in which Gallipoli has been used as a national founding myth in another country have not come to fruition.59 Appropriately, the final chapter of this collection by John McQuilton argues that Gallipoli has never had a single meaning. The quintessential expression of this can be found in the memorials at Chunuk Bair. There, a huge Turkish statue of Mustafa Kemal stands close by New Zealand’s obelisk; both claim the land as significant to themselves and put forward a competing meaning for the site. Indeed, the commemoration of the campaign embodies many of the points made in this collection. France has only one memorial to the campaign, and memorial activities in Britain and Ireland are often prompted by Australian connections. Where they are not, such as the memorial chapel in Eltham, south London, the commemoration signifies a local rather than national importance. Meanwhile, the building of a new Anzac commemorative site to accommodate the huge crowds who visit Gallipoli on the 25 April each year, as well as the new Peace Park on the peninsula, are evidence of the burgeoning interest in and the renewal of the commemoration of the campaign. This collection of chapters on Gallipoli demonstrate a variety of ways of writing the history of the campaign. They range from narrative reconstructions, national interpretations, remembrances based in local communities, 12

INTRODUCTION

military academy case studies, revisionist accounts of earlier perspectives, surveys of particular genres, analyses of commemorative activities and insights from media theory. Together they highlight the plurality of history writing and the way in which the process is as much about mentalité as it is about recognising what happened at the time and why. As such they act as a counterweight to notions of monolithic History in the upper case. It is to be hoped that posing the kinds of questions presented here will help make military history more reflexive.

13

1 CHURCHILL AND GALLIPOLI Martin Gilbert

Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty shortly before his thirty-seventh birthday. He was not yet forty when Europe plunged into war and Turkey hovered on the brink of joining the Central Powers. Before 1914 he felt let down when the Foreign Office twice rebuffed his efforts at closer Anglo-Turkish friendship. In Constantinople, his representative, Rear-Admiral Limpus, who since 1912 had been helping the Turks to build up the Dardanelles defences, was using his influence from the beginning of August 1914 to prevent Turkey succumbing to German blandishments. Limpus wrote to Churchill on 26 August 1914, reporting his efforts to persuade the Turkish authorities as to ‘why Turkey should not join the German Group’. His letter continued: In giving my reasons to the authorities here why Turkey should not join the German Group I have studiously omitted all talk of action that England might take, such as keeping the requisitioned ships without payment, and fomenting Arabian and Persian Gulf troubles against Turkey: or might encourage Greece to take, such as a landing between Smyrna and the Dardanelles, taking the forts on the south side of the Straits, admitting Torpedo Craft to the Marmora, cutting off and starving first the Gallipoli Peninsula, and soon after cutting all communications between Constantinople and the South. But they are each and all things which, methodically undertaken and persistently carried out, would succeed, and would annihilate the remaining power of Turkey.1 The question of ‘action that England might take’ was widely discussed at the Admiralty and War Office. The British Military Attaché in Constantinople, Major Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, in reporting on the ‘question of our Fleet entering the Straits’, considered on 27 August, ‘if mines can be negotiated, there should be little apprehension of difficulty in running past the shore defences and, once off Stamboul, position 14

CHURCHILL AND GALLIPOLI

would be a commanding one, completely paralysing all military movements between European and Asiatic shore’.2 Cunliffe-Owen believed Russian naval and military participation to be essential if the British fleet were to be enabled to remain off Constantinople. But he added that ‘to command situation properly at Dardanelles requires also use of military force and point arises whether substantial enterprise should be attempted in quite a subsidiary theatre of war’. The three main arguments were thus in place at the earliest stage: by Fleet alone or joint military–naval attack; the participation of Russia, the participation of hitherto neutral Balkan states; and the choice of a subsidiary theatre of war. There was never a moment when all the parameters were in place, or when a policy was decided upon. The story of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli is the story of the juxtaposition of differing and changing circumstances; a veritable kaleidoscope of factors. These changed by the week and sometimes by the day, necessitating new discussion, new calculations and new plans. An early factor, even before Turkey entered the war, was the prospect of Greek military participation on the side of the Entente. Churchill put this to the Cabinet on 2 September. Two days later he telegraphed to the British Admiral commanding the Greek Navy, Admiral Mark Kerr: The right and obvious method of attacking Turkey is to strike immediately at the heart. To do this, it would be necessary for a Greek army to seize the Gallipoli Peninsula under superiority of sea predominance, and thus to open the Dardanelles, admitting the Anglo-Greek Fleet to the Sea of Marmora, whence the TurcoGerman ships can be fought and sunk, and where in combination with the Russian Black Sea Fleet and Russian military forces the whole situation can be dominated. Admiralty wish that these conceptions should be immediately examined by the Greek naval and military experts in consultation with you.3 In the event, Greece remained neutral, and this option was lost. Russian participation seemed to be ruled out in a telegram reaching London from the British Ambassador in St Petersburg on 6 September. Churchill wanted Sir Edward Grey to press the Russians to change their minds, and to see the importance, and relative ease, of a military landing. Churchill wrote to Grey that same day: There is no need for British or Russian anxiety about a war with Turkey. Even if the Greek army were paralysed by Bulgarian and Turkish attack, a Russian Army Corps could easily be brought from Archangel, from Vladivastok, or, with Japanese consent, from Port Arthur, round to attack the Gallipoli position. No other military 15


operations are necessary. The price to be paid in taking Gallipoli would no doubt be heavy, but there would be no more war with Turkey. A good army of 50,000 men and sea-power – that is the end of Turkish menace.4 The Russians, like the Greeks, were to decline to participate in a military landing: not entirely for military reasons, but because each wanted to be the ruler of Constantinople should Turkey be defeated. Russian interests and desiderata existed, and were relevant to the Anglo-French side of the Entente, irrespective of Russian participation. On 29 September the Dardanelles waterway was mined by the Turks and closed. Russia lost its only year-long ice-free link with its allies. British military supplies could no longer reach Russia except by the hazardous northern route to Archangel. Russian wheat, on which the Tsarist exchequer depended for so much of its overseas income, could no longer be exported to its world markets. From Chruchill, there were continual cautions. ‘I am very unhappy about getting onto war with Turkey without having Greece as an ally’,5 he wrote to Grey on 23 October. Six days later, on 29 October, the Goeben and Breslau, flying the Turkish flag but commanded by a German admiral, bombarded several Russian Black Sea ports. The reaction of the Prime Minister, Asquith, was emphatic. On 31 October he explained to his friend Venetia Stanley: Few things would give me greater pleasure than to see the Turkish Empire finally disappear from Europe, and Constantinople either become Russian (which I think is its proper destiny) or if that is impossible neutralised and become a free port.6 Churchill had just acquired a new First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir John (Jackie) Fisher. On 1 November, with Fisher’s approval, he telegraphed to the British Admiral in the Eastern Mediterranean, Vice-Admiral Carden: Without risking the ships demonstration is to be made by bombardment on the earliest suitable day by your armoured ships and the two French battleships against the forts at the entrance of the Dardanelles at a range of 14,000 to 12,000 yards. Ships should keep under way approaching as soon after daylight as possible retirements should be made before fire from the forts becomes effective. Ships’ guns should outrange older guns mounted in the forts.7 On 3 November, in accordance with Churchill’s instructions, Carden’s squadron, assisted by two French ships, bombarded the outer forts on 16


either side of the Dardanelles for a period of 10 minutes and at a range of slightly more than 7 miles. A shot that hit the magazine of the fort at Sedd-el-Bahr destroyed almost all its heavy guns. Subsequent critics of this bombardment, including Lloyd George, later declared that it alerted the Turks, and caused them to move their main defences closer to Chanak, in the greater security of the Narrows. But no serious work was done on the Turkish fortifications between this initial bombardment and the Allied attack over four months later. The Dardanelles was so obvious a point of attack for any enemy wishing to crush Turkey that it did not need a brief Allied bombardment to stress the importance of defending this one sea access to Constantinople. The German fortifications experts who had already arrived at the Dardanelles in September and October 1914 had been sent for the specific purpose of strengthening its land defences. They needed no warning from the Allies of where the major attack was likely to come. The principal Turkish problem at the Dardanelles was a severe shortage of guns, mines and ammunition: but even before the Allied bombardment of the outer forts the majority of all supplies reaching Turkey was sent direct to the Dardanelles. The installation of three torpedo tubes at Kilid Bahr was not the result of the bombardment of 3 November, but of a suggestion which Limpus himself had made while head of the naval mission, responsible, among his duties, for advising on the naval defences of the Dardanelles. The effects of the bombardment of 3 November were studied by Admiral Sir Henry Jackson early in the New Year, and used by him to form the basis of plans for a major naval assault. The damage done to the fort at Sedd-elBahr was never repaired. No one at the Admiralty questioned the main implication of the bombardment, which was that naval guns were capable of demolishing land forts. Since the outbreak of war many conventional theories and expectations of war had been challenged. ‘Like most other people’, Churchill told the Dardanelles Commissioners in 1916, I had held the opinion that the days of forcing the Dardanelles were over; and I had even recorded this opinion in a Cabinet paper in 1911. But this war had brought many surprises. We had seen fortresses reputed throughout Europe to be impregnable collapsing after a few days’ attack by field armies without a regular siege.8 Admiral Oliver had also witnessed, and been impressed by, the impact of German guns on the massive forts of Antwerp only a month earlier. Following the Dardanelles bombardment of 3 November, Churchill began discussions with Fisher, Jackson and Oliver on the best method of forcing the Dardanelles, using some of the many old battleships which, while of no value to Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet, could still fire their guns against 17


a static land target, and fight a weak naval power like Turkey, possessing no Dreadnoughts – except those already seized by the British government. At the first meeting of the newly formed War Council on 25 November, Churchill had an opportunity to express his conviction. Grave news had come from Egypt. Military Intelligence reports made it clear that a large Turkish army was indeed moving south through Palestine and would soon be in a position to attack the Suez Canal. Colonel Hankey’s notes recorded in detail the subsequent discussion: Mr Churchill suggested that the ideal method of defending Egypt was by an attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula. This, if successful, would give us control of the Dardanelles, and we could dictate terms at Constantinople. This, however, was a very difficult operation requiring a large force. If it was considered impracticable, it appeared worthwhile to assemble transports and horse boats at Malta or Alexandria, and to make a feint at Gallipoli, conveying the impression that we intended to land there. Our real point of attack might be Haifa, or some point on the Syrian coast. The Committee of Imperial Defence in 1909 had recommended that a serious invasion of Egypt could best be met by a landing at Haifa.9 The discussion turned upon whether sufficient ships were available to assemble a large force, as Churchill wished. Fisher intervened in the discussion to ask ‘whether Greece might not perhaps undertake an attack on Gallipoli on behalf of the Allies’. Grey then explained something of the complexities of Balkan diplomacy. The King of Greece had refused to endorse his Prime Minister’s unconditional offer of 60,000 Greek troops for such an attack. The hostility of Bulgaria and Serbia towards Greece ‘held out’, said Grey, ‘no hopes of an accommodation between the several Balkan States’, and had led him to the conclusion that Britain ought not to count on Greek cooperation.10 The early hopes of Greek participation were clearly illusory. At the War Council, Churchill had stressed the need for a large military force in any operations against the Dardanelles. On 30 November, Oliver suggested that troop transport should be kept in Egypt sufficient to transport a division of troops to the Dardanelles should it become possible to assemble the men in future. Churchill immediately passed on this request to Kitchener with the note: ‘Had we not better keep enough transports congregated for 40,000 men, or shall we disperse them ready to assemble at short (?what) notice?’ Kitchener minuted in reply, ‘I will give Admiralty full notice. I do not think transports need to be detailed in Egypt yet.’11 This was the first, but far from the last time, that Kitchener declined to anticipate a future need by early action. 18


On 7 November a British force had landed at Foa, at the head of the Persian Gulf. The Turkish port of Basra was captured on 22 November, and Kurna, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, on 7 December. There then occurred a tiny but influential episode. Off Alexandretta, on 20 December, under threat of bombardment from the 6-inch guns of a British light cruiser, the Doris, the Turkish authorities agreed to blow up their two railway engines and several military stores. Having no explosives, they asked the Captain, Frank Larken, to send some of his own ashore. Larken agreed, and while the Turks watched, British sailors laid the explosive charges. The Turks then supervised the actual destruction, under the beam of the Doris’ searchlights. Later that evening the Doris sailed away. This incident, with its comic cooperation between attacker and attacked, appeared proof that the Turks were not serious opponents, and encouraged the hope that no great military effort would be needed to force Turkey out of the war. In September 1916 Churchill told the Dardanelles Commissioners: The incident is not without its significance, because it had helped to form the opinion in our mind as to the degree of resistance which might in all circumstances be expected from Turkey. What kind of Turk was this we were fighting? I might say that it was always in my mind that we were not dealing with a thoroughly efficient military power, and that it was quite possible that we could get into parley with them.12 The failure of Greece to produce its 60,000 men brought to an end all ministerial discussions of occupying the Gallipoli Peninsula and capturing Constantinople. Impressed though Churchill had been about the effects of guns on forts, he had no reason to believe that the Dardanelles could be forced by ships alone. Easy though the landings at Alexandretta had been, the number of troops required for a landing of significance, particularly on the Gallipoli Peninsula, remained a matter for speculation and study. Churchill himself had already mentioned three different figures essential for success at Gallipoli, 60,000, 50,000 and 40,000. But throughout December, with no troops at all available, both the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Peninsula were left unmolested. This did not please Churchill. ‘His volatile mind’, Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley on 5 December, ‘is at present set on Turkey and Bulgaria, and he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles: to which I am altogether opposed ’13 On 28 December Lieutenant-Colonel Hankey, whose influence over the War Council, and over the counsels of war, was growing rapidly, proposed striking at Germany through its allies, ‘and particularly through Turkey’. 19


What he advised was to ‘weave a web around Turkey which shall end her career as a European Power’.14 To this end, Hankey proposed a Bulgarian attack on Turkey, in return for Thrace. Greece would be offered southern Albania, Serbia (which had just driven the Austrians from Belgrade) would be offered Bosnia, Herzegovina and northern Albania. Three British army corps would participate. This force, in conjunction with the Greeks and Bulgarians ‘ought to be sufficient to capture Constantinople’. Three months was needed. Success would restore communication with the Black Sea, ‘bringing down at once the price of wheat, and setting free the much needed shipping locked up there’. With Constantinople in the hand of the Entente, Russia, Serbia and Romania would then march simultaneously into Austria-Hungary. Such was Hankey’s plan. Churchill supported it in a letter to Asquith on 31 December. A day later came the Russian Grand Duke’s appeal for a British demonstration against the Turks to relieve the pressure then being put on Russia on the Caucasus Front. Kitchener suggested that ‘The only place that a demonstration might have some effect in stopping reinforcements going east would be at the Dardanelles’, but that Britain would not be ready ‘for anything big’ for some months.15 Churchill then summoned his Admiralty War Group on the morning of 3 January. There was general pessimism, which he shared, about the feasibility of a purely naval attack. Were such an attack to take place it would have to be with old battleships not needed by Jellicoe in the North Sea. Before the war Churchill had allocated some of his Naval Estimates to maintaining these old ships in a fit state to fight, and Parliament had approved of this policy. This gave the War Group confidence that some plan might be worked out for naval action within the next few months, assuming that the commander of the Blockading Squadron at the Dardanelles, Vice-Admiral Carden, felt that the enterprise had some chance of success. Churchill telelgraphed to Carden shortly after midday: Do you consider the forcing of the Dardanelles by ships alone a practicable operation. It is assumed older battleships fitted with minebumpers would be used preceded by colliers or other merchant craft as bumpers and sweepers. Importance of results would justify severe loss. Let me know your views.16 While the Admiralty waited for Carden’s reply about the Dardanelles, Fisher, who had been much impressed by Hankey’s memorandum of 28 December, was evolving his own plan of action in the eastern Mediterranean, ‘i consider the attack on turkey holds the ﬁeld!’,17 he wrote to Churchill on 3 January; ‘But only if it’s immediate.’ Then he outlined what he called ‘the Turkey plan’: 20


I Appoint Sir W. Robertson, the present Quartermaster-General to command the Expeditionary Force. II Immediately replace all Indian and 75,000 seasoned troops from Sir John French’s Command with Territorials, etc., from England (as you yourself suggested), and embark this Turkish Expeditionary force ostensibly for protection of Egypt! with all possible despatch at Marseilles! And land them at Besika Bay direct, with previous feints before they arrive with troops now in Egypt against Haifa and Alexandretta, the latter to be a real occupation because of its inestimable value as regards the oil fields of the Garden of Eden, with which by rail it is in direct communication, and we shove out the Germans now established at Alexandretta with an immense Turkish concession – the last act of that arch-enemy of England, Marschall von Bieberstein. III The Greeks to go for Gallipoli at the same time as we go for Besika, and the Bulgarians for Constantinople, and the Russians, the Servians and Roumanians for Austria (all this you said yourself!). IV Sturdee forces the Dardanelles at the same time with ‘Majestic’ class and ‘Canopus’ class! God bless him! Fisher had outlined eight different military operations. Not only did he want a combined military and naval operation but also a Grand Alliance of the Balkan States. Churchill knew that so grandiose and formidable a scheme as Fisher wanted could never come to pass; Kitchener could not find the men nor Grey the allies. Only the old battleships which Fisher wanted to constitute the British naval contribution were available. Churchill, who had been evolving a detailed plan for an amphibious landing in the north sea, to attack the Germans in either Oldenburg or Schleswig-Holstein, replied with a caution: I think we had better hear what others have to say about the Turkish plans before taking a decided line. I would not grudge 100,000 men because of the great political effects in the Balkan Peninsula: but Germany is the foe, and it is bad war to seek cheaper victories and easier antagonists.18 No amount of correspondence within the confines of Whitehall could resolve the argument. All future plans depended upon the view of the admiral on the spot. When Carden’s reply arrived early on the afternoon of 5 January, it surprised everyone at the Admiralty, including Churchill and Fisher; for Carden declared that he might be able to force the Dardanelles by ships alone. His telegram read: ‘With reference to your telegram of 3rd inst., I do not consider Dardanelles can be rushed. They might be forced by extended operations with a large number of ships.’19 21


The War Council met later that afternoon. The Baltic project was still uppermost in Churchill’s mind. Carden’s telegram, suggesting the possibility of an exclusively naval effort at the Dardanelles, had not deflected Churchill’s overriding belief that it was on the northern sea flank that Germany must be deflected, and that with the seizure of Borkum and the invasion of Schleswig-Holstein all other theatres of war and all other strategic possibilities would lose their urgency. During the War Council many different points of attack were discussed. Asquith had also been in correspondence with Sir John French on this matter, and had spoken that morning to F.E. Smith, who was on leave from the Western Front. At midnight he sent Venetia Stanley a survey of current opinion. ‘We have now a lot of alternative objectives’, he told her: (1) Schleswig (Winston) (2) Salonika or Dalmatia (Ll George – curiously enough, French in his letter to me suggests that we might send a diversion to help the Montenegrians) (3) Gallipoli and Constantinople (Kitchener) (4) Smyrna and Ephesus (F.E. and other – I rather like this).20 Kitchener pressed his colleagues for action at the Dardanelles. Churchill was able to give some support to Kitchener’s appeal by reading out to the War Council the telegram which he had received from Carden an hour before. When Churchill returned to the Admiralty after the War Council he found that the ‘extended operations’ which Carden favoured were supported by both Oliver and Jackson. Jackson, who had been impressed by the effects of the bombardment of 3 November, believed that a systematic bombardment from the sea, fort by fort, would enable ships alone to force the Dardanelles even though the operation might take some time. That night Asquith dined with the Churchills at Admiralty House. The others present were F.E. Smith, Frederick Guest and Sir Archibald Sinclair. F.E. Smith was worried about the severe climatic difficulties which were affecting the permanence of the Indian soldiers in France and was, Asquith told Venetia Stanley ‘keen for sending them with a stiffening of regulars and territorials to Smyrna – to make their way sooner or later to Constantinople’.21 Here again was the mirage of the troops. But Churchill had to work with urgent realities. Kitchener refused to withdraw the Indians from France, arguing that the balance of military forces seemed too precarious even to send away troops who might fight more successfully elsewhere. On the following afternoon, 6 January, supported by the specific enthusiasm of Oliver and Jackson, sustained by the desire of Kitchener and the War Council to follow this slim opportunity, and with Asquith’s eastern interest of the night before clear evidence of the importance of the new 22


scheme, Churchill telegraphed to Carden: ‘Your view is agreed with by high authorities here. Please telegraph in detail what you think could be done by extended operations, what force would be needed, and how you consider it should be used.’22 The exchange of telegrams with Carden was the first tentative move towards a possible naval attack at the Dardanelles. The story then moved to a series of meetings of the War Council. On 8 January it was Lloyd George who dominated the proceedings, arguing in favour of a direct attack on Austria in the Adriatic. Kitchener gave the War Council a brief, deprecatory survey of the different possible points of attack favoured by Lloyd George. Trieste and Fiume, he said without explanation, ‘might be ruled out’. Ragusa ‘was an impossible sea base’. The railway bridges north of Salonika ‘would be liable to attack’ by bandits.23 Kitchener saw only one possible alternative outside the Western Front, and appealed to his colleagues for their support. ‘The Dardanelles’, he said, appeared to be the most suitable objective, as an attack here could be made in co-operation with the Fleet. If successful, it would re-establish communications with Russia; settle the Near Eastern question; draw in Greece and, perhaps, Bulgaria and Roumania; and release wheat and shipping now locked up in the Black Sea. Hankey supported Kitchener, making one of his first interventions in War Council business. Success at the Dardanelles, he asserted, ‘would give us the Danube as a line of communication for an army penetrating into the heart of Austria and bring our sea power to bear in the middle of Europe’. Kitchener tried to make Hankey’s plan seem within the range of possibility by asserting that 150,000 men might be sufficient for the capture of the Gallipoli peninsula. Lloyd George ‘expressed surprise at the lowness of the figure’. Churchill felt that any future Mediterranean operation must be the subject of careful study rather than generalised discussion. His own thoughts were still dominated by the northern theatre. As the minutes recorded: Mr Churchill said he fully agreed in the proposal to study the suggested operations in the Mediterranean. He urged, however, that we should not lose sight of the possibility of action in Northern Europe. As an instance of the attractiveness of such operations, he mentioned that the distance from Emden to Berlin was exactly half the distance from Sir John French’s headquarters to Berlin. Was there no possibility that Holland might enter the war on the side of the Allies? He understood that earlier in the war 23


Holland had considered the matter, but had declined. Possibly, however, if given a military guarantee that we could bring a certain force into the field, Holland would change her mind. There were indications that Germany was very anxious about Holland, and Dutch public opinion was only held from declaring for the Allies by fear of the consequences. If Holland could be induced to enter the war the advantages would far outweigh those of the Mediterranean; we could then have an island as a naval base without fighting for it, and our armies, in conjunction with the Dutch, could attach towards Essen. Kitchener, without abandoning his strong advocacy of a Gallipoli landing, said he agreed with Churchill that the effect of a landing in Holland would be ‘decisive’. Grey declared that he was willing ‘to sound the Dutch Government’ as soon as Britain was in a position to guarantee military assistance on a sufficient scale and to satisfy Holland ‘that there was no prospect that she would share the fate of Belgium’. Once again, the northern possibilities were more attractive, and more immediate, than the southern. First Borkum, then Zeebrugge, now Holland, engaged the War Council’s attention and seemed the most realistic means of achieving victory. Fisher still wanted action against the Turks. ‘If the Greeks land 100,000 men on the Gallipoli Peninsula, in concert with a British naval attack at the Dardanelles’ he wrote on 12 January to a friend at the Foreign Office, ‘I think we could count on an easy and quick arrival at Constantinople.’24 A day later the chimera of troops was dispelled by a telegram from Admiral Carden, the crucial telegram in the evolution of a purely naval attack. Carden believed that it might be possible, by ships alone, to force the Dardanelles in about a month. In his telegram, he outlined four phases of action: (A) Total reduction of defences at the entrance. (B) Clear defences inside of the straits up to and including Kephez Point battery No. 8. (C) Reduction of defences at the Narrows Chanak. (D) Clear passage through minefield, advancing through Narrows reducing forts above Narrows and final advance to Marmara.25 Admiral Carden proceeded to describe in detail the method by which he would carry out these steps. He listed the ships that he would require, envisaging, as the end of the operation, a large flotilla, including four battleships, two battlecruisers and 12 destroyers securely inside the Sea of Marmara. 24


The impact of Carden’s plan was immediate, its implications wide. The Navy could achieve by itself a masterstroke of the war. By ships alone the pressure on Russia could be relieved. The British, without recalling troops from the Western Front, would turn the southern and weakest flank of the Central Powers, and make it certain that Greece, Bulgaria and Romania hasten to join the Allied cause. Up to this moment Churchill had doubted the possibility of forcing the Dardanelles without troops. But he had never doubted that once the Dardanelles were forced, naval power alone would suffice to encompass the Turks’ defeat. The force which Admiral Carden proposed to take into the Sea of Marmara would inevitably defeat the puny Turkish Fleet, even with the Goeben and Breslau at its head. Many tantalising prospects followed. If the arrival of the Goeben and Breslau off Constantinople had turned the balance in Germany’s favour at the outbreak of war, it seemed impossible that the Turks could resist the overwhelming strength of Admiral Carden’s armada. Churchill believed that Enver’s followers would abandon the German cause when confronted with so powerful a demonstration of British superiority, and that Enver himself might perhaps take the lead in shaking Turkey from the German grip. The surrender of Turkey did not appear to depend only upon a change of mood among the Turkish leaders. The whole Turkish war-making power was at Constantinople, exposed to attack from the sea. The only shell factory in Turkey was on the shore of the Sea of Marmara, just outside Constantinople. The principal gun and rifle factory was likewise vulnerable to naval attack. The railway linking Constantinople with the important railway junction at Kuleli Burgas, the fortress of Adrianople and the fortified lines of Chatalja ran partly along the shore as far as Kuchuk Chekmeje, 10 miles to the west of the city. On the Asian shore, the railway into Anatolia did likewise. Both could be bombarded easily from ships in the Sea of Marmara. Churchill’s advisers shared his excitement at the one conclusion which could be drawn from Admiral Carden’s telegram: the Royal Navy was in a position to destroy Turkey at a single blow, to relieve Russia, to provide the bait with which to force each Balkan State to turn against the Central Powers, and by the rapid exploitation of victory on the southern flank to bring the whole war to an end. All this could be done, the Admiralty War Group believed, by battleships that were too old to be of use to Sir John Jellicoe in the North Sea, and which were surplus to British naval requirements elsewhere. The ships which the Admiralty War Group had in mind had all been launched before 1906, when the launching of the first of the new Dreadnought class meant that older ships would be a liability in any engagement with a Fleet which also had Dreadnought-class ships. 25


The pre-Dreadnought battleships sent to the Dardanelles by 18 March 1915 were Majestic (launched in 1895), Prince George (1896), Canopus (1899), Ocean (1900), Irresistible and Vengeance (1901), Cornwallis, Swiftsure and Triumph (1904). Also sent were Agamemnon, Inflexible and Lord Nelson (all launched in 1908), all of pre-Dreadnought design. On 12 January the War Group – Fisher, Wilson, Jackson and Oliver, assisted by de Bartholomé – discussed every aspect of Carden’s proposals. Neither Jackson nor Oliver, who subsequently criticised Carden’s plan before the Dardanelles Commission, did so that day. Fisher made no protest. Jackson not merely concurred in the proposals but urged their rapid implementation. Each member of the War Group realised the enormous difficulties involved; each turned his own knowledge and expertise to the search for methods of overcoming the difficulties. The victory at the Falkland Islands six weeks before, by completing the destruction of the German naval power outside German waters, had released large numbers of ships for the new enterprise. Fisher therefore suggested that in addition to the old ships which Carden considered sufficient, the newest and most powerful ship in the fleet, the Queen Elizabeth, should be sent out to the Dardanelles. Its 15-inch guns had not yet been fired but could be tested, Fisher argued, not on dummy targets in the North Sea but on Turkish forts. On 12 January, Fisher wrote to Oliver sticking at the top of his letter a large pink label with the word ‘rush’ in bold gold capitals: I’ve told Crease to find out from Percy Scott and the gunnery Experts if anything to prevent Queen Elizabeth giving all her ammunition at the Dardanelles Forts instead of uselessly into the ocean at Gibraltar and to let you know. If this is practicable she could go straight there, hoist Carden’s flag and go on with her gunnery exercises and free the Indefatigable to go to Malta to refit and allow Inflexible to come straight home from Gibraltar to join the Second Battle Cruiser squadron. Perhaps you’ll think over this 26 ‘This had not occurred to me before’, Churchill told the Dardanelles Commissioners in 1916, ‘but the moment it was mentioned its importance became apparent. We all felt ourselves in the presence of a “new fact”. Moreover the Queen Elizabeth came into the argument with a cumulative effect’.27 Churchill sent copies of Carden’s detailed proposals to Asquith and Kitchener during the early afternoon of 12 January. On the following day, 13 January, the War Council met at noon. The main discussion was on how to help the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force 26


in Flanders, Sir John French, by naval action along the Belgian coast, culminating in the seizure of Zeebrugge. It was not until after sunset that the War Council turned its attention to the Dardanelles, and Churchill outlined the details of Carden’s plan. He explained that the three modern and 12 old battleships that Carden believed necessary could be spared for the task ‘without reducing our strength in the main theatre of war’.28 He described the discussions that had already taken place at the Admiralty, and expressed his belief ‘that a plan could be made for systematically reducing all the forts within a few weeks’. The effects of this action would, he believed, be impressive: ‘Once the forts were reduced, the minefields could be cleared and the Fleet would proceed up to Constantinople and destroy the Goeben.’ Hankey recalled in his memoirs, The Supreme Command, ‘The idea caught on at once The War Council turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a “slogging match” on the Western Front to brighter prospects, as they seemed, in the Mediterranean Even French caught something of the tremendous enthusiasm.’29 According to Hankey’s minutes of the meeting, Lloyd George declared that he ‘liked the plan’, and Kitchener said that he ‘thought it was worth trying’. Kitchener added that if the bombardment were ineffective the attack could always be called off. Discussion then turned to other matters. Grey wanted the Navy to attack the Austrian ports of Cattaro on the Adriatic, in an attempt to influence Italy to join the Allies. Churchill suggested that ‘it would be awkward for the British Fleet to take any action there’ as the French Fleet was already strongly represented in Adriatic waters. Lloyd George raised again the question of a major attack on Austria. He had in mind barges built for a British naval assault up the Danube. The War Council of 13 January had listened to a variety of suggestions. Everyone was agreed that plans must be made to cover new points of attack: the Dardanelles, Holland, Salonika, Cattaro, the Danube, had each come into the discussion. Asquith then drafted the War Council’s conclusions, the second and third of which read: That the Admiralty should consider promptly the possibility of effective action in the Adriatic – at Cattaro, or elsewhere – with the view (inter alia) of bringing pressure on Italy. That the Admiralty should also prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula, with Constantinople as its objective. The War Council then broke up, and Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley: ‘The Council is now over, having arrived harmoniously at 4 conclusions suggested by me which will keep both navy and army busy till March I 27


maintained an almost unbroken silence till the end, when I intervened with my conclusions.’30 Asquith’s conclusion to ‘bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula’ constituted the authority for action. From that point, everything hinged on timetables, methods and combinations. The Admiralty went ahead at once, even designating the code-name ‘Pola’ (a port at the head of the Adriatic) as the cover name for the Dardanelles attack;31 though I have failed to find any evidence that the Adriatic port was ever used again as a codename. In addition to authorising Churchill to plan for an attack at the Dardanelles, the War Council had also instructed him to make plans for an attack on Austrian naval positions in the Adriatic. Churchill discussed the possibility of action in the Adriatic with Fisher and Oliver. Fisher minuted on 14 January that the French Admiralty might be persuaded ‘to be more active than hitherto’.32 Both Fisher and Oliver felt that any British naval involvement in the Adriatic might weaken the chances of success at the Dardanelles. On 14 January Churchill put their objections to Asquith, Grey and Kitchener: We consider that no useful means can be found of effective naval intervention in the Adriatic at the present time. The French have a large superiority of naval force there now, including Dreadnoughts and large numbers of destroyers. Their operations make no progress The attack on the Dardanelles will require practically our whole available margin. If that attack opens prosperously it will very soon attract to itself the whole attention of the Eastern theatre, and if it succeeds it will produce results which will undoubtedly influence every Mediterranean power. In these circumstances we strongly advise that the Adriatic should be left solely to the French and that we should devote ourselves to action in accordance with the third conclusion of the War Council, viz: – the methodical forcing of the Dardanelles.33 On 15 January Asquith told Venetia Stanley that he hoped that what he called ‘our Gallipoli enterprise’ would help to compel to enter the war on the side of the Entente.34 Three days later the French were asked to participate with a naval force. In a letter to the French naval attaché, the Comte de Saint-Seine, Churchill explained it was envisaged that there would be ‘the need of fighting the Turco-German Fleet immediately on entering the Sea of Marmora’.35 The French agreed to play their part. Then Fisher began to express doubts. He wanted Britain to concentrate its naval forces in the North Sea, the French to undertake the naval aspect, and troops to be used at the Dardanelles, calling (in a private letter to Jellicoe) for 200,000 men (twice 28


his earlier highest figure). In a memorandum that he wished to be printed for the War Council, Fisher wrote on 25 January that the Dardanelles partition would impair Britain’s ‘present superiority’ in the North Sea.36 Asquith refused to circulate this. Uppermost in Churchill’s mind was a feature of the Dardanelles naval attack that had appealed to the War Council: that if it failed, the British effort could switch to one of Kitchener’s proposals, an amphibious landing at Alexandretta. As Churchill explained to Kitchener on 20 January: Until the bombardment of the Dardanelles forts has actually begun, we cannot tell how things will go. We must guard against the appearance of a serious rebuff: and we shall therefore at the outset only use the battleships needed for the initial stage, keeping the rest of the fleet spread between Malta, Alexandria and Alexandretta, whence they can concentrate very quickly. It is also very desirable that the Alexandretta operation should be so timed as to be practically simultaneous with the attack on the Dardanelles, so that if we are checked at the Dardanelles we can represent that operation as a mere demonstration to cover the seizure of Alexandretta. I believe this aspect is important from an oriental point of view. Could you therefore arrange this and let me have your Alexandretta dates? We are aiming at the 15th February for opening fire on the Dardanelles.37 Planning for the naval attack continued; on 25 January Vice-Admiral Oliver completed a comprehensive scheme for the rapid concentration of ships at the Dardanelles.38 Canopus had left South America and was nearing Cape St Vincent. Albion had left St Helena, Triumph was taking on supplies at Colombo, Ocean and Swiftsure were in Egypt. Rear-Admiral de Robeck, who had been appointed Carden’s second-in-command, was at Gibraltar, awaiting the arrival of his flagship Inflexible. At British naval stations all over the world ships were likewise being assembled, fitted and supplied. Despite his strong protest of the previous day, it was Fisher himself who suggested adding two further battleships, Lord Nelson and Agamemnon. They too were ordered to proceed to the eastern Mediterranean. During 25 January Churchill sent Asquith, Grey and Kitchener a copy of these naval movements, noting that ‘Arrangements should enable fire to be opened on February 15.’39 Fisher continued to write, to both Asquith and Churchill, of the danger to Britain’s North Sea position if the Dardanelles went ahead. On the morning of 28 January, shortly before the War Council was due to meet at noon, he wrote to Churchill to resign. Asquith asked to see him and Churchill in his study at 10 Downing Street at eleven, and said to both 29


men that if the Zeebrugge and Dardanelles operations were in conflict for naval resources, it was Zeebrugge that should be dropped, and the Dardanelles that should go ahead. The three men then went downstairs to the Cabinet Room, for the War Council. When Fisher tried to leave the room, Kitchener stopped him, pointing out, as Fisher later recorded, ‘that he (Lord Fisher), was the only dissentient, and that the Dardanelles operation had been decided upon by the Prime Minister’.40 Fisher returned to the Cabinet table. Asquith then asked members to say what importance they attached to the Dardanelles operation. The minutes, which were taken by Colonel Hankey, recorded: lord kitchener considered the naval attack to be vitally important. If successful, its effect would be equivalent to that of a successful campaign fought with the new armies. One merit of the scheme was that, if satisfactory progress was not made, the attack could be broken off. Mr Balfour pointed out that a successful attack on the Dardanelles would achieve the following results: It would cut the Turkish army in two; It would give us the advantage of having the Russian wheat, and enable Russia to resume exports; This would restore the Russian exchanges, which were falling owing to her inability to export, and causing great embarrassment; It would also open a passage to the Danube It was difficult to imagine a more helpful operation. Sir Edward Grey then said the attack on the Dardanelles would also finally settle the attitude of Bulgaria and the whole of the Balkans.41 Another, unexpected factor, then intruded upon the course of decisionmaking. That afternoon it became clear in London that the Serbs were again in grave danger. A sub-committee of the War Council, consisting of Kitchener, Lloyd George, Churchill and Balfour, met that same afternoon to discuss how to help Serbia. It was agreed that British troops should be landed as soon as possible at Salonika. At the War Council that evening this view was endorsed. Balfour wanted troops sent to help Serbia immediately. In his evidence a year later to the Dardanelles Commissioners, Churchill reflected on this change of emphasis and need: A landing in force under fire on the Gallipoli Peninsula, now that the Turks were fully awakened, seemed to me to involve a greater 30


stake, though offering a greater expectation, than a naval attack with the old ships as proposed. And the chance of the naval attack succeeding, and producing revolutionary effects at Constantinople and throughout the Balkans, seemed to me to make it worth while to try the naval plan even though, if it failed, a subsequent military operation would be rendered more difficult.42 No longer believing that it was necessary to land troops simultaneously in order for the Dardanelles to succeed, Churchill pressed the War Council to despatch the first available brigade to Salonika. By this means, he asserted, the Greeks could be persuaded to join the Allied cause. If, as Churchill believed, the appearance of no more than 10,000 British soldiers were to result in 180,000 Greek soldiers hurrying into action, Serbia’s survival would be assured. Grey declared that 5,000 men sent to Salonika would convince Bulgaria as well as Greece of the wisdom of joining the Allies. The Bulgarian Army, with its war strength of 300,000 and its record of success against the Turks in 1912, would constitute a grave threat to Turkey’s remaining possessions in Europe, particularly if, in conjunction with a Bulgarian land attack, the Allied fleet were to reach the Sea of Marmara and cut all communication between European and Asiatic Turkey. The Bulgarian Army would provide a more than adequate substitute for the troops which Kitchener could not find, and which both Churchill and Kitchener realised might be needed to follow up any naval success. Serbia’s need ensured that action at the Dardanelles would be by ships alone. With foreign alliance concerns uppermost, Sir Edward Grey pressed for the earliest possible date for the attack. The Austro-German objective now, [he wrote to Churchill on 2 February], is to overawe Roumania and Greece, to attract Bulgaria and to steady the Turks by an offensive against Serbia. If we can succeed in forcing the Straits, or even creating a scare at Constantinople before this offensive can make headway we shall have done much to discourage if not paralyse it.43 ‘I agree with above’, Kitchener noted on 3 February.44 The Prime Minister was also keen on rapid action at the Dardanelles. On 9 February he explained his reasons to Venetia Stanley: The main question of course will be how soon and in what form we are to come to the aid of Serbia I can’t help feeling that the whole situation in the Near East may be vitally transformed, if the bombardment of the Dardanelles by our ships next week (Secret) goes well. It is a great experiment. If it is successful, 31


it will smash up the Turks, and, incidentally, let through all the Russian wheat which is now locked up and so lower the price of bread. But it is full of uncertainties.45 There was a curious overlapping unanimity of opinion among members of the War Council. On 9 February Kitchener told the War Council that the presence of British troops at Salonika might further weaken Turkish morale at the Dardanelles. The 29th Division should therefore be offered to Greece. After the naval success at the Dardanelles, Kitchener added, these troops would be near at hand to follow up the success. Doubts about an exclusively naval attack were expressed by Colonel Hankey on 13 February. ‘I have just been having a talk with Hankey, whose views are always worth hearing’,46 Asquith confided to Venetia Stanley soon after Hankey had left him. ‘He thinks very strongly’, Asquith added, with some vexation: If only these heart-breaking Balkan States could be bribed or goaded into action, the trick would be done with the greatest of ease and with incalculable consequences. It is of much importance that in the course of the next month we should carry through a decisive operation somewhere, and this one would do admirably for the purpose. The Dardanelles was being loaded with much more than the simple defeat of an enemy power. It was to provide both the carrot of territory and the stick of British naval might with which to enlist three states, Greece, Roumania and Bulgaria, into the ranks of the Entente. But on 15 February there was a blow to one third of this hope when the Greek government turned down the proposed Allied expedition to Salonika to help the Serbs. King Constantine would not allow British troops to land at Salonika. Naval opinion at the Admiralty was veering towards the need for men as well as ships: for a military occupation of the Dardanelles as well as a successful naval sweep through the Narrows. ‘Not a grain of wheat will come from the Black Sea’, Fisher wrote to Churchill in the early house of 16 February, ‘unless there is a military occupation of the Dardanelles’.47 Churchill represented this view at an emergency meeting of the War Council on 16 February. It was agreed that the 29th Division, which was to have gone to Salonika, and 50,000 Australian and New Zealand troops, then in Egypt, should be held in readiness for such a landing. Kitchener’s words to Churchill (as reported by Lord Esher) were: ‘You get through! I will find the men.’48 Then, at the War Council on 19 February, Kitchener announced that he would not allow the 29th Division to go. Churchill appealed against 32


this decision, but in vain. Lloyd George, Grey, Balfour and Asquith each supported Churchill, but their arguments were of no avail. Kitchener had the powers of a dictator with regard to the despatch of troops. As the discussion continued a certain optimism entered into it, which the minutes recorded. It arose when Balfour asked ‘what would be the precise political effect of an occupation of the Gallipoli Peninsula combined with naval command of the Sea of Marmara?’:49 Mr Churchill said it ought to give us control of Turkey. Lord Kitchener expected that in this event the Turkish army would evacuate Europe altogether. Mr Balfour asked if we should be bound to afford military protection to the Christian population of Constantinople. Sir Edward Grey said that they would have to take their chance. Although everyone at the War Council was agreed that the battle at the Dardanelles would be of major importance, and that it stood a greater chance of success if troops were available, no final decision was taken on 19 February as to whether or not the 29th Division should be sent to the East. The decision of 16 February was thereby set aside. The only concession to Churchill’s arguments was a formal conclusion that transports should be prepared to convey the Australian and New Zealand troops from Egypt to Lemnos, and to take the 29th Division to the Mediterranean at some unspecified future date, ‘if required’. Churchill still hoped that if Carden succeeded in his first attempt to force the Dardanelles, the Turkish collapse would be swift and the need for troops secondary. But it was no longer possible to plan, as both he and Kitchener had originally done, to call off the naval attack altogether if the operation proved too costly or too difficult. The worsening situation on the Russian Front, where it had suddenly become possible to talk of a German ‘knock-out blow’, intensified the importance of the Dardanelles operation. Were it to fail, the Allied situation, already cursed by stalemate at the Western Front and gloom on the Eastern Front, might prove untenable. Defeat at the Dardanelles would be a grave blow to Allied morale. Success could mark the turning point of Allied fortunes. Without any serious assessment of Britain’s naval or military capabilities, the War Council of 19 February had established the importance of forcing the Dardanelles as a major operation of war. It had also failed to commit to that operation troops of a quality sufficient to make success more certain. The bombardment of the outer forts of the Dardanelles began that morning. ‘If all goes as well as possible’, Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley, ‘the operation of reducing the forts up to Gallipoli will take the best part of a fortnight’.50 The town of Gallipoli was inside the Sea of Marmora. 33


At the War Council on 24 February, Kitchener stated optimistically that ‘if the Fleet succeeded in silencing the forts, the garrison of Gallipoli would probably be withdrawn’.51 If they did not withdraw ‘they would run the risk of being cut off and starved out’. Kitchener then rejected Churchill’s appeal that the decision not to send the 29th Division should be reversed. Churchill’s reasoning for wanting the troops was this: If the fleet got through the Dardanelles, they could be put into Constantinople. Or they could be put into European Turkey towards the Bulgarian frontier; Bulgaria could then be invited to take possession up to the Enos-Media line as a condition of joining the Allies. The Allied forces could then be sent up through Bulgaria to Nish. Another plan would be to send them to Salonika in order to influence the Balkan States. Or they might be sent up the Danube if Roumania joined the Allies. Lloyd George also wanted troops used ‘after the navy had cleared the Dardanelles, to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula or Constantinople’. The troops would not be used, Churchill assured him, if the naval attack failed, ‘but where a military force would just make the difference between failure and success’. Kitchener was emphatic that the navy could defeat the Turks at the Dardanelles without military support, assuring the War Council that as soon as the forts ‘were clearly being silenced one by one’ – the Turkish garrison on the Gallipoli peninsula would evacuate its position, and that ‘the garrison of Constantinople, the Sultan, and not improbably the Turkish army in Thrace, would also decamp to the Asiatic shore’. Victory would be achieved, it seemed, by naval guns alone. With patience and wise negotiation the remaining Turkish forces in Europe ‘would probably surrender’. Why then was it necessary, he asked, to send out to the Dardanelles ‘the large forces contemplated by Mr Churchill’. Before Churchill could answer, Grey spoke in support of Kitchener, emphasising the moral affect of large naval guns. Once success was achieved at the Dardanelles, he said ‘we might have a coup d’état in Constantinople’. This would obviate the need for any military activity against the Turks, who would presumably return to their former neutrality, or even agree to join with the Allies against their German masters. Churchill made one more effort to secure troops. If Britain could offer the Balkan States the prospect of victory against the Turks, he said, it might bring a million Balkan soldiers into the Allied army. Surely, he asked, the presence of 100,000 British troops would be worthwhile if it achieved its objective? He himself, he declared, ‘would be willing to send a quarter of a million men to effect this result, if we had them’. Kitchener could not be convinced. He did not envisage a strong Turkish resistance. 34


When Asquith asked whether the Australians and New Zealanders ‘were good enough’ for an important operation of war, Kitchener replied ‘that they were quite good enough if a cruise in the Sea of Marmara was all that was contemplated’. Kitchener’s obstinacy was decisive. To Churchill’s chagrin, the War Council decided to postpone their decision about the 29th Division until the next meeting. The most that Kitchener would agree to was that those troops already in the eastern Mediterranean should be assembled immediately in Egypt and the Aegean to await the outcome of the naval attack. There were 10,000 of these in all. Neither Asquith nor Churchill believed that they would be adequate. But Kitchener’s opposition was final. Asquith, unwilling to overrule Kitchener, once more confided his inner thoughts to Venetia Stanley. ‘One must take a lot of risks in war’, he wrote to her when the War Council of 24 February was over, ‘and I am strongly of the opinion that the chance of forcing the Dardanelles, & occupying Constantinople, & cutting Turkey in half, and arousing on our side the whole Balkan peninsula, presents such a unique opportunity that we ought to hazard a lot elsewhere rather than forgo it.’52 Churchill continued to press for the 29th Division, hoping to make up a total of 115,000 men, including the Australians and New Zealanders, available at Lemnos. At the War Council on 26 February the minutes record that he appealed again, telling his colleagues: ‘In three weeks time Constantinople might be at our mercy. We should avoid the risk of finding ourselves with a force inadequate to our requirements and face to face with a disaster.’ At the previous meeting Lord Kitchener had asked him what was the use to be made of any large number of troops at Constantinople. His reply was that they were required to occupy Constantinople and to compel a surrender of all Turkish forces remaining in Europe after the fleet had obtained command of the Sea of Marmara. With an army at hand this could be accomplished either by fighting, or by negotiation, or by bribery. The Chatalja lines would be occupied from the reverse side, the flanks being commanded by men-of-war. Subsequently, if Bulgaria joined the Allies, we should be in a position to push the troops up through Bulgaria to Serbia. Or, if Roumania came in, they could be sent up the Danube, or by rail through Roumania. The actual and definite object of the army would be to reap the fruits of the naval success.53 Churchill’s appeal was in vain. Kitchener declined to weaken what he described as ‘the only troops we had available as a reserve to send 35


over to France’ until the Russian situation was more clear. He declared his belief that the naval attack would in itself secure victory. He was convinced, he said, ‘from his knowledge of Constantinople and the East, that the whole situation in Constantinople would change the moment the fleet had secured a passage through the Dardanelles’. Balfour, completely reversing the arguments of his memorandum of the previous day, spoke in Kitchener’s support, optimistic that a naval attack would achieve the War Council’s purpose: Mr Balfour suggested that, if the purely naval operation were carried out, the following results would be attained: the command of the Sea of Marmara would be secured; the Turkish troops remaining in Europe would be cut off; the arsenal and dockyards at Constantinople could be destroyed; the condition of the Turks would become worse every day they held out; the Bosphorous could be opened; a line of supply for war-like stores opened up with Russia, and wheat obtained from the Black Sea. First Hankey, then Lloyd George and finally Asquith supported Churchill. Kitchener said he would not give up the means of reinforcing the Western Front in the event of a Russian collapse on the Eastern Front. Churchill entered a powerful caveat, which the minutes recorded: MR CHURCHILL said that the 29th Division would not make the difference between failure and success in France, but might well make the difference in the East. He wished it to be placed on record that he dissented altogether from the retention of the 29th Division in this country. If a disaster occurred in Turkey owing to the insufficiency of troops, he must disclaim all responsibility. Churchill’s plea failed. The support of Lloyd George, Hankey and even Asquith, had done nothing to help him. The War Council decided to keep the 29th Division in England. Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley: ‘We accepted K’s view as right to the immediate situation, to Winston’s immense and unconcealed dudgeon.’54 Asquith called Churchill to his study at Number Ten and warned him to calm down. That evening Churchill wrote to his brother Jack: ‘The limited fund of life and energy which I possess is not much use to influence these tremendous moments.’55 On 25 February the outer forts were bombarded. The bombardment was a success, making possible the next stage of the naval operation, entry into the Dardanelles and minesweeping up to the Narrows. Plans for this went ahead. As well as the naval aspect, Churchill concerned himself with the military, seeking to accelerate the arrival of a promised French division 36


at Lemnos. He also asked the Grand Duke to be prepared to despatch the Russian Black Sea Fleet to the Bosphorous, together with ‘any Russian troops that could be spared’.56 ‘Although the hardest part of the task is not yet begun’, Churchill told the Grand Duke, progress may be ‘quicker than we expected’. The Grand Duke replied that Russia would attack Constantinople with its Black Sea Fleet, and an army of more than 47,000 men, as soon as the Anglo-French Fleet had penetrated the Sea of Marmora, but no sooner. Churchill and his War Council colleagues had a clear picture in their minds of the possibly imminent victory. On 28 February Churchill turned his mind to the conditions of Turkey’s surrender, writing to Grey: Should we get through Dardanelles, as is now likely, we cannot be content with anything less than the surrender of everything Turkish in Europe. I shall tell the admiral after destroying the Turco-German fleet to push on at once to attack Bosphorous, and thus cut off the retreat of the army. The capitulation is then only a question of time. The terms of an armistice might be considered as follows:1 Surrender as prisoners of war all Turkish forces in Europe. 2 Surrender of all arms, arsenals, armaments, ships, etc in Europe. 3 Surrender of fortress of Adrianople and military positions affecting the control of the Bosphorous. 4 Allies to occupy and administer militarily the Turkish territories in Europe. 5 Bulgaria to occupy the Enos-Midia line by leave of the Allies. 6 Surrender of all German officers and men in Turkey whether in Europe or Asia as prisoners of war. 7 Subject to the above, an armistice for Turkey in Asia. All troops on both sides to advance no further; to retire if convenient; and no hostilities to take place, pending the general settlement. I look forward with much hope to the delivery of Adrianople by the British to the Bulgarian army. But celerity and vigour are indispensable. Remember C’nople is only a means to an end – and the only end is the march of the Balkan States against the Central Powers.57 On 28 February the first of the wavering Balkan States seemed at last determined to take advantage of Britain’s impending triumph. Violet Bonham Carter recalled in Winston Churchill as I Knew Him how, on the evening of 1 March, 37


I was sitting with Clemmie at the Admiralty when Winston came in a state of wild excitement and joy. He showed us, under many pledges of secrecy, a telegram from Venizelos promising help from the Greeks. Our joy knew no bounds. Remembering that the King of Greece had a German wife and German sympathies, Violet Asquith asked whether he was ‘sound’. ‘Yes’, replied Churchill, ‘our Minister and Venizelos had already approached the King and he was in favour of war’. Violet Bonham Carter’s account continued: Winston totted up our combined forces: we now had the Anzac Army Corps on the spot, the Royal Naval Division on the way, the French division, the promise of three Greek divisions, and the Russian Army Corps at Batoum. The 29th was still in the balance. In the background Bulgaria, Roumania and Italy were waiting – ready to pounce – all determined to play a part in the fall of Constantinople. All these tremendous consequences had flowed from our united naval enterprise I went back across the Horse Guards treading on air. Turkey, encircled by a host of enemies, was doomed, the German flank was turned, the Balkans for once united and on our side, the war shortened perhaps by years, and Winston’s vision and persistence vindicated.58 Even without the 29th Division, the military effect of 60,000 Greek troops, with a further 50,000 Russians, would undoubtedly have been overwhelming. ‘Winston was breast high about the Dardanelles’, Asquith wrote that evening to Venetia Stanley.59 On the same day Hankey wrote to his wife that ‘we hear on all hands the sensation in the Near East is colossal’.60 Minesweeping off Kephez Point began on 1 March. On the following day Colonel Hankey set out for the War Council the stages to follow the penetration of the Dardanelles: the Turks to evacuate the Dardanelles and Bosphorous, the Allies to garrison Constantinople. The Turks to sell or hire their rifles and other weapons to the Allies. The Turkish Fleet to be surrendered, bought or borrowed for the rest of the war. The Turkish expeditions in the Caucasus and Mesopotamia ‘to be at once recalled’.61 German officials to be replaced by nominees of the Allies (Hankey suggested the Belgians for this role). Beyond Turkey, an Entente force was to advance against Austria Hungary in the Balkans. On the left flank, Serbian and Greek forces were to penetrate Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the centre and on the right, British forces were to advance along the Danube and turn the German flanks in Roumania and the southern Carpathians. 38


Such was Hankey’s plan. At the War Council of 3 March, Russia, Greece, Bulgaria, Roumania and Italy were each spoken of as territorial beneficiaries of the defeat of Turkey: to persuade the Italians finally to commit themselves to the Entente side, a large segment of western Anatolia was to be an added inducement. The Secretary’s notes record that Churchill stressed the battles still to come: ‘The first thing to be attempted would be the capture or destruction of the Turco-German fleet. A battle might take place either in the Dardanelles or the Sea of Marmora, or the enemy might seek to escape into the Black Sea.’ He hoped in this latter event that its egress would be barred either by mines or by the Russian Fleet. The second step would be the destruction of the defences of the Bosphorous. This was not so easy as appeared at first sight, owing to the difficulty in attacking some of the forts from a distance. As soon as the fleet was through the Dardanelles, the Turkish lines of communication would be cut at Bulair, and the garrison of the Gallipoli Peninsula would be isolated. In addition, it might be possible to cut some of the bridges on the line between Adrianople and Constantinople by means for aircraft. The prize we ought to seek from this action was nothing less than the occupation by the Allies of Turkey in Europe. All must pass into our hands, and we ought to accept nothing less.62 Later in the discussion Churchill told his colleagues that in his view the main importance of the fall of Constantinople was that it would bring the Balkan States into the war against Austria. He did not rule out the possibility of cooperation with Turkey as soon as the Allies had been successful. He even suggested to the War Council ‘that we ought to hire the Turkish army as mercenaries’, and send them against Austria. Lloyd George deprecated such a move. The Turks ‘had never been any use as mercenaries’, he said, and although they fought well in their own country, they were not so good elsewhere. At the Dardanelles, the continuing bombardment of the inner forts was proving more difficult than the outer forts had been. On 7 March the Admiral warned of the problems in locating the Turkish mobile howitzers. Concealed Turkish guns were hitting the British warships. But at the War Council on 10 March it was the prospect of a swift victory that still captivated those present. Lloyd George wanted Britain to acquire Palestine. Kitchener countered that Palestine ‘would be of no value to us whatsoever’ and urged the annexation of Alexandretta.63 Even the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific were on that day’s agenda: the Colonial Secretary, Lewis Harcourt, wanting them to be annexed by Britain. Harcourt also dismissed Kitchener’s desire for Alexandretta, 39


urging instead the importance to Britain of the acquisition of the port of Marmarice, on the Turkish coast opposite Rhodes. Churchill expressed no territorial desiderata (and thought that Palestine might be given to Belgium). Fisher sent his own plan to Churchill on 12 March. It betrayed none of his anxieties, expressed in letters to others about the Dardanelles. Indeed, he saw Admiral Carden as on the eve of a great victory: ‘Carden to press on!’ Fisher wrote, and Kitchener to occupy the deserted Forts at extremity of Gallipoli and mount howitzers there! Invite Bulgaria by telegram (direct from Sir E. Grey) to take Kavalla and Salonica provided she at once attacks Turkey and tell Greece ‘Too late’! and seize the Greek Fleet by a ‘coup’ later on. They would probably join us now if bribed! All the kings are against all the peoples! Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania! What an opportunity for Democracy!64 On the eve of the first naval attempt to break through into the Sea of Marmora, with the despatch by Kitchener of Sir Ian Hamilton to command what was designated the ‘Constantinople Expeditionary Force’, Churchill sought some form of simultaneous military operation by whatever troops were then in the area: 30,000 Australians and 10,000 Royal Naval Division. Hamilton concurred. ‘I don’t see how these concealed howitzers are to be tackled without storming the plateau’, he wrote to Churchill on 14 March (while in the train on his way to Marseilles).65 Kitchener preferred, however, to defer any military action until the 29th Division, which he now agreed should go to the Dardanelles, had arrived. On 13 March, Fisher ordered two further battleships, Queen and Implacable, to strengthen Carden’s Fleet. Two days later, focusing on the imminent defeat of Turkey, Kitchener pressed for the annexation of Aleppo as well as Alexandretta. On 16 March Admiral Carden was taken ill, and replaced by his second in command. This did not seem to matter: the new man, Admiral de Robeck, was prepared to go ahead without delay. On 17 March, news came from Sofia that the Bulgarian Army would shortly move against Turkey ‘to co-operate in the Dardanelles operations’.66 With the naval attack on 18 March, all the speculative hopes were put to the test of naval action. Hamilton watched the attack from on board ship, but without any preparations to put ashore any of the 59,000 men then gathered at Lemnos. When the attack was called off, having stumbled upon the hazards of an undetected minefield, it was intended by those on the spot that further minesweeping, and then a second attack, would be resumed within three or four days. Fisher, still an enthusiast, ordered two 40


more battleships, London and Prince of Wales, to reinforce de Robeck’s fleet. No second attempt was ever made to force the Narrows by ships alone. de Robeck decided that troops must be landed simultaneously with the next attack (as Churchill had wished for 18 March). General Birdwood, the Anzac commander, wanted to do this at once. But Hamilton was under Kitchener’s orders to wait for the 29th Division. Thus no further action took place until the military landings on 25 April. Two weeks later a political crisis, centring around the shortage of shells on the Western Front, and accelerated by Fisher’s sudden decision to leave his post and go into hiding, forced Asquith to bring the Conservatives into his government (they had participated in the War Council discussions about the gains to be made after Turkey’s defeat). The Conservatives had several demands as their price for entering the government. One of them was that Churchill leave the Admiralty. He begged Asquith to allow him, in the House of Commons, to defend his conduct of naval affairs, including the Dardanelles, but Asquith refused to allow this. Later, Asquith was to refuse Churchill’s appeals for the publication of the documents relating to the genesis of the Dardanelles, many of which have been cited here. Churchill, who was never to shake free from the shadow and curse of the Dardanelles, spent five months and several hundred hours preparing his evidence for the Dardanelles Commission. His evidence opened with what he called ‘five distinct truths’ that he believed could be drawn from the factual evidence. They were: 1 2 3 4

That there was full authority. That there was a reasonable prospect of success; That greater interests were not comprised; That all possible care and forethought were exercised in the preparation; 5 That vigour and determination were shown in the execution.67 The evidence Churchill produced to substantiate these points was voluminous; but it was never published. When the inquiry was over the government agreed to publish only a general report. The documents, the submissions and the cross-examination were not made public. Even his friend Lloyd George – Asquith’s successor as Prime Minister – refused to allow full publication. Churchill’s final letter to the Commissioners was thus relegated to the status of a secret document. ‘The enterprise has ended in defeat and failure’, he wrote.68 The Army has been withdrawn. The positions which they had won by so much effort and sacrifice have been yielded to the enemy. 41


The hopes, the legitimate expectations, the chances of battle have vanished away; only the slaughter, the suffering and the waste remains. Nevertheless, Churchill continued, some standard bearing a true relation to the episodes of the Great War should be kept in mind and that in surveying the military operations on the Gallipoli Peninsula and the many horrible and melancholy circumstances connected with them it should not be assumed that elsewhere throughout the theatres of war everything had gone smoothly and well; that other plans have not miscarried; that other battles have been fought without painful incidents, confusion and mischance; that loss of life on the Gallipoli Peninsula was more deplorable and more preventable than loss of life elsewhere; that its suffering and carnage are unparalleled. Churchill then turned to the events on the Western Front, telling the Commission: In the attack of the 1st of July on the German positions North of the Somme nearly 70,000 British troops were killed and wounded and of these nearly half were killed or missing and of the missing – nearly 20,000 – all except a few hundreds perished miserably and by inches where they fell. Except at the Southern end of the line the whole plan of attack failed, and after five months continuous fighting sustained by unprecedented supplies of men and ammunition scarcely any of the original objectives assigned to the first day’s operations had been attained. The sanguine expectations which led on three or four occasions to many thousands of cavalry being brought up to gallop through some gap in the enemy’s line were shown to be utterly out of contact with reality at any point. For the sake of a few miles of ground devoid of strategic significance nearly 600,000 British casualties have been sustained and the efficiency of our Army in the West sensibly and permanently diminished. These operations were based upon a complete and admitted miscalculation of the German reserves, the error amounting to nearly two millions of men. In consequence the Spring campaign of 1917 opens with a greater equality of forces in the West than was the case when the battle of the Somme began. Nevertheless with a good Press sedulously manipulated and employed and the effective support of the governing forces, these operations have been represented as a long series of famous and 42


memorable victories and the initial disaster of the 1st of July has been established in the public mind as a brilliant triumph. A fifth of the resources, the effort, the loyalty, the resolution, the perseverance vainly employed in the battle of the Somme to gain a few shattered villages and a few square miles of devastated ground, would in the Gallipoli Peninsula, used in time, have united the Balkans on our side, joined hands with Russia, and cut Turkey out of the war. The choice was open to us; we have built our own misfortune and no one can tell what its limits will be. Churchill did not expect to be vindicated for some time. His letter ended: Public opinion is unable to measure the true proportion of events. Orthodox military opinion remains united on the local view that victory in 1915 could only be found by pouring out men and munitions in frantic efforts to break the German entrenchments in the West. The passage of a few years will throw a very different light on these events. They will then be seen in a truer proportion and perspective. It will then be understood that the capture of Constantinople and the rallying of the Balkans was the one great and decisive manoeuvre open to the allied armies in 1915. It will then be seen that the ill-support armies struggling on the Gallipoli Peninsula, whose efforts are now viewed with so much prejudice and repugnance were in fact within an ace of succeeding in an enterprise which would have abridged the miseries of the World and proved the salvation of our cause. It will then seem incredible that a dozen old ships, half a dozen divisions, or a few hundred thousand shells were allowed to stand between them and success. Contemporaries have condemned the men who tried to force the Dardanelles – History will condemn those who did not aid them. Churchill never saw the publication which he believed would vindicate him and rebut, by facts, the many and varied accusations that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the Dardanelles, and continue to circulate today. Perhaps Churchill can have the last word. Two months after being removed from the Admiralty, he wrote to a soldier friend: ‘I am hopeful that the truth may be published. But failure and tragedy are all that are left to divide.’69

43

2 STORIES OF ANZAC Christopher Pugsley

Nothing is but thinking makes it so. As Ian Beckett concluded in his review of the military historian and the popular image of the Western Front, ‘when the legend becomes fact print the legend’.1 This has always been the case with the Anzacs and the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. Today in Australia and New Zealand it is difficult to identify the performance of the original Anzacs and the nature of their achievement in the Gallipoli campaign because of the legend that surrounds them. This chapter will review the origins of the Anzac image and assess the nature of their combat effectiveness on Gallipoli, that is, their effectiveness as fighting soldiers and the effectiveness of the Anzac Corps as a fighting formation. In early May 1915 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s despatches trumpeted a legend of Anzac achievement to the world, writing: It has cost us dearly to get astride the Gallipoli peninsula, but there is no finer tale in our history than that of the deeds which were performed on Sunday, 25 April, by Australian, New Zealand and British troops, supported with equal gallantry by the officers and men of the warships.2 While Bartlett would also praise the French contingent, their deeds and those of the British, the two major forces ashore, became a backdrop to the stories of Australian and New Zealand achievement. It was the deeds of the Anzacs of Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood’s Australia and New Zealand Army Corps that caught public imagination as Bartlett’s despatches were published throughout the world.3 This achievement had been eagerly anticipated in Australia and New Zealand. The public in both countries had sent their sons to war and expected them to do well, because they were the best they had. Bartlett’s despatches seemed to confirm that expectations and the battlefield setting with its Homeric connotations, and the growing casualty lists spoke of brave deeds performed in the Empire’s name by the citizen soldiers of two of the Empire’s youngest dominions. His words confirmed the images 44

STORIES OF ANZAC

used in the local press in the Dominions when the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) and the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) were raised for war in the last months of 1914. The editorial from a major New Zealand daily on 1 August 1914 read: The average young New Zealander especially the young New Zealander who lives in the country is half a soldier before he is enrolled. He is physically strong, intellectually keen, anxious to be led though being what he is, he will not brook being driven a single inch. Quick to learn his drill, easily adapting to the conditions of life in camp since camping usually is his pastime and very loyal to his leaders when those leaders know their job.4 The same sentiment was mirrored in the Australian press, and now according to the press it was being confirmed in battle. This image of natural citizen soldiers who had but to put down their tools, pick up their rifles and go to war where they were immediately effective, was consolidated by the writers and correspondents who accompanied the troops, principally John Masefield, the Poet Laureate who visited the peninsula in September 1915, and whose slim volume Gallipoli (1916) popularised the campaign as one fought in the traditions of its classic setting. During the campaign the Australian and New Zealand publics also read the despatches of their own official correspondents, Malcolm Ross for New Zealand and C.E.W. Bean, the Australian official war correspondent, who as an Australian official historian, after the war, would write the mammoth two-volume history, The Story of ANZAC (1921, 1924). By 1916 schoolchildren in Australia and New Zealand were reading of the deeds of the Anzacs in specially printed pamphlets and a publication like A. St John Adcock’s Australasia Triumphant was almost an obligatory award for pupils at each school prize-giving.5 At the time and since, the story of the Anzacs on Gallipoli was one of the high achievement confirming to the public of both dominions what they always wanted to believe about the abilities of their ‘boys’. The public image of war was as it had been traditionally portrayed, a glorious adventure with the heroes dying with a smile on their lips knowing that they had done their bit for Empire. The citizen soldiers struggling ashore on the Gallipoli beaches found that war was nothing like that. Rather it was confusion, chaos, no information and the reality of death all around. All compounded by an enemy they could not see and a consciousness of being constantly afraid. It was this reality that also struck the correspondents who landed with the forces. Bartlett’s first despatch had been written on a battleship offshore, and even he as a veteran war correspondent was unprepared for the grim reality of the campaign as it unfolded. This was even more striking 45


for those seeing it for the first time. There was little that was glorious and the Anzac forces showed that despite their individual potential they were still amateurs at war and paid a high price for their inexperience. This presented the correspondents like Bean with a dilemma of how to portray this reality to the audience at home. On Gallipoli he agonised over what to write in his columns. He had already been strongly criticised from within the AIF for his unvarnished accounts of Australian ill discipline in Cairo over Christmas 1914. On Gallipoli he kept to the plain unvarnished facts but by September 1915 he found that some of the major Australian dailies were dropping his despatches as not being interesting enough, because he was not prepared to write the highly emotive and glorious fiction on the brave deeds of the Anzacs being produced by correspondents who got no closer to the front than Shepherds’ Hotel bar in Cairo. Determinedly Bean wrote of what he saw and of his impressions of the men that he drew from his after-action interviews on Gallipoli. His months there had given him an insight into the reality of how men performed in battle. But he accepted that there was a need to throw a cloak over many of war’s realities and that this, in turn, along with the work of his contemporaries, conditioned the public to think in terms of ‘black and white and nothing between’.6 The public at home had already made its mind up on Anzac achievement and Bean knew that the general reader would not accept any account he wrote that covered a true spectrum of men’s reactions that ranged from acts of bravery to abject fear and flight. In pondering on the question he cited in his diary the example of a typical attack on Gallipoli, during which he assessed that some 20 per cent of those attacking did not wish to go forward before they started, and some 80 per cent once they started did not wish to go forward before they reached their objective. The remaining 20 per cent who keep going forward ‘are going to do the job or die simply because they are the sort of men to whom life is not worth living except on those terms’. He wrote that: ‘I have seen them going up against a rain of fire and the weaker ones retiring through them at the very same time – the two streams going in opposite directions and not taking the faintest notice of one another.’7 Bean believed that the AIF was the finest body of men of its kind and was made up of a greater percentage of those who were prepared to go forward than any other force. He was convinced that this was the key to its strength in battle and it was this image of Australian soldiery that would be the dominant theme in his post-war writing. Yet the reality that its reputation was built on the bravery and willingness of a small percentage of the force was something that could not be declared, and while Bean admitted that he had ‘never written higher praise of Australians’ than with these words, he also knew that, ‘if I were to put it into print to-morrow the tender Australian public which only tolerates flattery and that in its cheapest form would howl me out of existence’. To talk of fearful men 46

STORIES OF ANZAC

not going forward which was the reality of every battle would label the Anzacs as cowards, which he knew the public would not accept. It was a conundrum that Bean would continue to face throughout the war and he resolved it by writing the truth about those who went forward, and not about the ‘weaker ones who retired through them at the same time’.8 In his newspaper columns and in the writing and editing of the 12-volume official history of Australia in the war of 1914–18, Bean’s emphasis is on the achievements of the men. His volumes particularly the two-volume The Story of ANZAC are narrative histories rich in detail of individual and group effort in battle with each man mentioned singled out in footnotes giving his personal biographical details. Bean’s enormous admiration for the Australian soldier shines through on every page. He prided himself on the accuracy of each action and determinedly set out to establish as far as possible the facts relating to each event. His narrative is built up from an exhaustive study of the ground and the cross-referencing of individual accounts, both from notes that he took at the time, and afteraction interviews that continued on in post-war correspondence where he tracked down the principals and interrogated them again on their recollections. In one sense, his history is a series of individual stories linked by a narrative of events, rich in detail but lacking analysis of how effectively these individual efforts melded together in terms of group performance. Praise is given for achievement but any assessment of failure is shielded by his account of individual bravery in adversity. Criticism of Anzac performance is muted at best and in the battles that do not succeed Bean ignores the decisions at Australian brigade and divisional level and does not pass judgement on decisions by Australian commanders. He will not condemn the men he went to war with; he worked alongside them as they evolved into professional soldiers and knew them more intimately in terms of strengths and weaknesses than anyone again in his life. He wrote of them as heroes and in a sense he was a factual equivalent of Henry Lawson telling individual tales of Australians who were beset by problems not of their making. In Bean’s histories any failure was due to causes outside Australian control. He continued a theme already well established in Australian writing and one common in most frontier societies, the cult of the individual as hero, who because of the influence of the bush and his frontier background is already a natural soldier who only has to pick up his rifle to be ready for battle. This cult of the individual as hero has been consolidated in Australian writings ever since; Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years (1974), John Robertson’s Anzac and Empire (1990) and, more recently, Les Carlyon’s Gallipoli (2001) all follow this theme.9 Bean’s individual stories provided a matrix of heroism that came to personify all Australians in battle. Anzac bravery and achievement has become something that one dare not 47


question, not even Bean himself is permitted to criticise. For example, in annotating Bean’s Gallipoli diaries for publication, Kevin Fewster hastened to explain that Bean’s criticisms of Monash’s performance as a brigade commander during the August offensive on Gallipoli was undoubtedly coloured by his having been wounded and not being himself. Otherwise how else could one explain ‘the strongest criticism Bean had levelled against any Australian officer’, particularly Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash whose reputation as commander of the Australian Corps in 1918 placed him above criticism in that pantheon of Anzac heroes.10 There was no such excuse for other historians, and Robert Rhodes James, whose work Gallipoli, published in 1965 is still the outstanding single volume on the campaign, was strongly criticised by Monash’s biographer Geoffrey Serle for quoting Allanson’s account of Monash’s ‘nervous breakdown’ during the August offensive of 1915.11 There is a second theme to this, and that is, if one cannot criticise the heroes then how does one explain heroic failure? The answer is simple, blame anyone but the Anzacs, and this too has become a feature of the Anzac story of Gallipoli, best typified by Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, where in the film’s climax with the charge of the Light Horse at the Nek, brave Australians are seen to be slaughtered in order to assist British soldiers at Suvla who meanwhile have stopped and are drinking tea on the beach. However while one can accept this need for a villain in a fictional feature film, both during and after the campaign excuses were found by the Anzacs to explain away Anzac failure, the convenient target being the ineptness of the British higher command or of flanking British formations. It is only with the publication of the Oxford Companion to Australian Military History that we have essays at last by Australian historians that take a more balanced perspective of Anzac success and failure.12 This balance is also evident in the wide-ranging studies in the Australian Army History series, edited by David Horner, under the Oxford University Press imprint which has examined aspects of Australian military history over a broad range of subjects, including commissioned biographies of divisional and corps commanders in both world wars. This has allowed readers to break through what has previously been the ‘untouchable’ level below that of Monash, the Australian Corps commander in the First World War, and Blamey, the commander of the Australian Imperial Force in the Second, to explore the competence of men such as Gellibrand, Morshead and Elliot, who up until now have been shadowy figures of reputation but without the detail available to judge the substance of their achievements. Yet public perception is still dominated by the Anzac heroic image and it is so inculcated into Australian culture that discerning professional Australian military officers can assess cause and effect and assess responsibility for any campaign except those involving the Anzacs of 1914–18. 48

STORIES OF ANZAC

The reality of Anzac performance on Gallipoli could never live up to the legend. There is no questioning the calibre or the potential of the personnel or the outstanding examples of individual bravery and unit performance, but this was their first time in battle. It was a traumatic learning experience, and mirrored that of the newly formed and expanding British armies on the Western Front. Commanders at every level learnt the difficulties of commanding men in battle in conditions of modern warfare where attempts to manoeuvre large bodies of men on foot foundered and were driven to ground by the impact of massed magazine-fed rifle fire, machine guns and artillery. Like their counterparts on the Western Front the Anzacs learnt the trade of soldiering by trial and error and at tremendous cost. Anzac mistakes were many and in some cases were of such magnitude that the commanders who committed them may not have remained in command had they occurred in the spotlight of the Western Front. The Anzacs of April 1915 were as raw and in some cases as ineffective as the Kitchener New Army divisions whom they would look upon with scorn and pity when they arrived to serve alongside the now veteran Anzac units in August 1915. However, the lack of officers, the relative isolation of the Anzac area, the accolades with which the news of the landing was received, and its significance to Australia and New Zealand, served to protect reputations of individuals who in some cases later redeemed themselves in France, Monash being the notable Australian example. As we know, the landing of the Anzac Corps at what is now Anzac Cove failed to achieve its objectives. Instead of a rapid advance inland, the Anzacs found themselves clinging to a tiny foothold on the Gallipoli peninsula. There are many reasons to explain this lack of success. The landings took place a mile further north than intended, against one of the most difficult hinterlands on the peninsula. Why this happened is still debated. Denis Winter makes a persuasive case to show that it was not a mistake but rather a last-minute change of plan, and that right beach or not, he considers that it had no tangible impact on the eventual outcome of the day.13 I disagree. I think that if there had been a last-minute change of plan, the leading brigade commander ashore, Colonel Sinclair MacLagan, a British regular officer seconded to the Australian Imperial Force, would have known of it. Clearly, from his actions on 25 April he did not. It was his individual decisions, as much as the performance of his troops, that determined the extent of the Anzac perimeter and, one could argue, the eventual outcome of the campaign. Before dawn on 25 April the leading elements of MacLagan’s 3rd Australian Infantry Brigade stormed the heights above Anzac Cove against two weak companies of Turkish defenders and moved inland to seize Third or Gun Ridge in order to provide protection to the landing of the rest of the Anzac Corps. MacLagan had expressed reservations to his 49


divisional commander about the role of his brigade and, after landing, these were confirmed by his observation of the broken ground inland from Anzac Cove. He decided that his brigade could not hold the intended perimeter and while it was impossible to stop all the elements now moving inland, he ordered his battalions to consolidate on Second Ridge. More critically, he directed that M’Cay’s 2nd Brigade which was next to land change its area of consolidation from the high ground to the north, on the left of the perimeter, to the area of 400 Plateau, now known as Lone Pine, to the south, which covered the approach from Maidos where MacLagan assumed the most likely Turkish counter-attack would be mounted. He was wrong. Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal commanded 19th Division, the Turkish reserve on the peninsula. He immediately set out at the head of his leading regiment to secure the high ground of Chunuk Bair knowing that this was the key to holding the coastal ridge. Having secured the ridge, Kemal pushed his battalions down the ridge to seize Baby 700 and drive the invaders back into the sea. As anyone knows who has walked inland over Plugge’s Plateau from Anzac Cove and has tried to get to Baby 700 and the stepped ridge that climbs from it north to Chunuk Bair, it is more difficult than it appears. The nature of the ground, and in particular the razor-back ridge between Plugge’s Plateau and Russell’s Top, pushes one south off the high ground back down into the valley between First and Second Ridges. This was the fate of the Australians on Anzac Day. Having redirected M’Cay’s 2nd Brigade towards 400 Plateau, MacLagan found it impossible to correct this and reinforce his northern flank once it became evident that the Turkish thrust against the Anzac perimeter was being mounted down the axis of the high ground onto the heights of Baby 700, at the junction of First and Second Ridges. This is why the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, which landed mid-morning, were ordered to reinforce the left, or north, of the Australian line. Like the Australians before them, they moved up over Plugge’s, then being unable to cross the razor-back ridge and move directly onto Russell’s Top and along it onto Baby 700 they were forced back down into what was to become known as Shrapnel Valley, which then becomes Monash Gully, and had to contour along its length before reaching the lower slopes of Baby 700. They found that as they proceeded along the valley their strength was siphoned off to reinforce and assist the Australian line that ran along the ridgeline above them. As a result, only a fraction of the New Zealanders reached the critical ground of Baby 700 where the battle for the Anzac landing was being decided. In battle, ground dictates and on 25 April MacLagan’s decision to redirect the next brigade ashore to head south instead of north meant that the Australian Division, which far outnumbered the Turkish defenders, was critically weak on their northern perimeter which led to the heights of Chunuk Bair, down which was the axis of the principal Turkish counter-attack. 50

STORIES OF ANZAC

From the evening of 25 April the New Zealand Infantry Brigade together with Monash’s 4th Australian Brigade of Major-General Sir Alexander Godley’s New Zealand and Australian Division found themselves holding the left of the line around the base of Baby 700. This was the critical front and if the Anzac bridgehead ashore was to be expanded it required that the high ground of Chunuk Bair be seized before any further advance inland. Inevitably this dictated that it was the performance of the brigades on this northern flank that determined Anzac success or failure. MacLagan’s decision to redirect the 2nd brigade towards 400 Plateau resulted in the weaker New Zealand and Australian Division consisting of two infantry brigades holding this critical sector. It meant that the stronger 1st Australian Division numbering three infantry brigades held the continuation of the line along Second Ridge to the south. The nature of the ground meant that there was nothing that the Australians could do in their sector to effect a major advance. Any success would be determined by what happened on the high ground to the north. It is ironic that MacLagan’s decision on 25 April 1915 meant that the 1st Australian Division would be compelled to play a supporting role at Anzac for the rest of the nine-month campaign with the primary role in the critical offensives being accorded to the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. The security of the Australian line was determined by how effectively the composite New Zealand and Australia Division held the critical ground facing Baby 700 on Russell’s Top at the Nek and at Popes and Quinn’s Post. The epic of Anzac and the bravery of the Australians were always of secondary importance to the goals given to the junior partner in the Anzac team. It was what happened in Godley’s New Zealand and Australia Division’s sector that determined success or failure at Anzac. The attacks such as those at the Nek and at Lone Pine during the August fighting that have forged the Australian perspective of the ‘Anzac legend’ were subsidiary attacks to what were primarily New Zealand offensives. This aspect of having the minor role to their junior partner in their first major campaign has never been examined. From the outset, the quality of leadership determined the course of battle. There was no questioning the potential or the enthusiasm of the citizen soldiers. However both they and the majority of the officers who led them lacked both the experience and training to cope with the situation that they faced on 25 April 1915. The units of the Anzac Corps were all formed from August 1914. Little training of note took place in Australia and New Zealand and six weeks were spent in transit to Egypt. It was mid-December before all the units of the 1st Australian Division assembled in Cairo, and Monash’s 4th Infantry Brigade did not arrive until early February 1915. The New Zealanders at least were formed from their peacetime Territorial battalions, but the entire Anzac force was a raw 51


amateur formation held together by the discipline of enthusiasm which rapidly waned with the tedium of a long voyage and whilst training in Egypt. The quality of training that the units received was determined by the drive of individual commanding officers and company commanders. This also determined how effectively they fought on the peninsula. It was the Light Horse and the units of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force that most equated to the bushman ethos that Bean extols in his histories. The regimental structure of the Australian Light Horse replicated the social hierarchy of Australian rural society, and there was a formality between ranks that we would not recognise as egalitarian today. Officers of both the AIF and NZEF were selected because of their militia or territorial experience, the balance were recruited because of their occupation and social position. In this they mirrored the officering of Kitchener’s New Army divisions in Britain. There was an enormous gulf between officers and men in most of the Australian infantry battalions. As Lloyd Robson’s research shows, initial recruiting in Australia was concentrated in the major population centres. This determined that the majority of personnel in the infantry battalions of 1st and 2nd Brigades were drawn from Sydney and Melbourne.14 There was as great a gulf between the rank and file and their officers in these Australian battalions as existed in any of Kitchener’s New Army battalions. Soldiers, largely drawn from the inner working-class suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney, had little in common and, unlike British battalions, little respect for their officers drawn from professional and middle classes. The strength of the trade union movement and the nature of industrial relations in Australia coloured relationships between officers and men. The untrained men were not prepared to accept the inevitable errors and mistakes of their equally untrained and inexperienced officers and this resulted in a breakdown in the discipline of the more weakly commanded units during training in Egypt. In hindsight this larrikinism is seen as proof of the independent spirit of the Australian soldier who would shortly show his mettle in battle on the peninsula. The reality was something else. The devil-may-care insolence which became the badge of Anzac soldiers on leave in Cairo was simply the ill-discipline of untrained men who might ape and sneer at British officers but who also would not obey their own officers and non-commissioned officers. Provincial boundaries determined that the New Zealand Infantry Brigade was largely recruited from rural and small town New Zealand and where a hierarchy related to class and background existed. The one exception was the 3rd Auckland Company of the Auckland Infantry Battalion which was drawn from the working-class suburbs of Auckland and nicknamed the ‘wharfies’, with a reputation for ill-discipline in Egypt, which it shared with its Australian infantry counterparts. 52

STORIES OF ANZAC

Contrary to legend this ill-disciplined confidence did not automatically translate into excellence in battle. When they sailed for the Dardanelles in early April, the Anzac Corps was still a raw amateur force with a fragile veneer of military training. They willingly went forward on 25 April 1915 but lacked the soldier skills and leadership to translate that willingness into tangible gain. Once halted along Second Ridge, it was here that Anzac inexperience showed, and little attempt was made to consolidate or dig in. Mustafa Kemal’s counter-attack caught the Australians by surprise on the slopes of Baby 700 at the point where MacLagan’s decision determined that they were at their weakest. Soldiers, who reflected on the heavy losses that day, put it ‘down to not digging enough cover and drawing fire by moving and talking too much’.15 The Australian and New Zealand press printed letters from the front throughout the campaign and a study of them reveals the spectrum of experience that Bean was reluctant to include in his own despatches. The soldiers of both nations wrote home giving their impressions of the landing and revealed the chaos, disorganisation and individual fear of the soldiers. However, the reading public had no understanding of the realities of war to place these accounts into a context, and so they remained ‘thrilling stories’ of their boys’ endeavours rather than insights into a bloody reality. By nightfall of 25 April 1915 a debacle threatened. The exhausted and disorganised Anzac Corps had lost the critical heights of Baby 700 at the apex of First and Second Ridge. It was now that certain individuals made the difference between holding on and disaster. Lieutenant-Colonel Braund of the 2nd Battalion on Walker’s Ridge, Lieutenant-Colonel H. Pope of the 16th Battalion at the head of Monash Gully, Major T. Dawson of the Auckland Battalion at Quinn’s Post, would hold together a mix of Australians and New Zealanders in posts that would become keys to holding the Anzac perimeter. Things looked much more precarious at the Australian Division’s headquarters in a gully above Anzac Cove. Here the Australian divisional commander, Major-General W.T. Bridges who commanded all the troops ashore on Anzac Day was joined by his counterpart, Major-General Sir A.J. Godley, who commanded the New Zealand and Australian Division and who had placed his two brigades under Bridges’ command. The beach below them was crowded with men separated from their units and those who decided they no longer wished to be in the front line. It was these ‘stragglers’, and the knowledge that Baby 700 appeared to be in Turkish hands, that convinced Bridges, with Godley’s support, to recommend immediate evacuation of the Anzac Corps. Birdwood reluctantly accepted this recommendation, and forwarded it to Hamilton who, after finding out from his naval counterpart that evacuation was impossible, directed that there was nothing for the Anzacs to do but dig in and ‘stick it out’.16 Alistair Thomson has written on how Aspinall-Oglander’s 53


first account of the chaos at Anzac Cove was deleted from the British official histories after formal protests from the Australian government. It was not because it did not happen, but more because post-war relationships between Australia and Great Britain made it diplomatically more acceptable to leave it out.17 To charge forward was all that the untrained Anzacs knew how to do but it was translating the ground gained into ground held that was much more difficult. As the survivors soon learnt, the picks and shovels, which had been left on the beach with their packs, were as valuable as their rifles. However, history repeatedly shows that driving tired men to dig in and reorganise under fire is no easy task even for trained men in experienced battalions. It was generally beyond the capabilities of the inexperienced officers and NCOs of those disorganised units of the Anzac Corps in April 1915. On Gallipoli, Birdwood would note with concern that the Australians were ‘A-1 in attack but curiously callow and negligent in the defence’.18 This simply reflects the skills of untrained soldiers who knew how to charge but did not have the discipline and training to dig in and hold onto what they had won. To attack for the first time was easy compared to the difficulties of holding the ground won. It took a drive and understanding that most Anzacs simply did not have. You had to have the steel of a Malone to insist that men dig in, when to raise a pick or shovel was to draw Turkish fire. Among the hundreds who passively held the line it was a handful that determined success or failure. Men such as the engineer corporal digging the defensive line on Walker’s Ridge who having lost four men to snipers put in a fifth on the same stretch of trench: ‘He was a towny of mine and I was sure I was sending him to his death, and so was he, but it was his turn.’19 From the outset, Anzac was a state of siege. Heavy losses particularly among the officers saw a collapse of morale and discipline in many of the battalions. Developing defences and then establishing the routine of defence did not come naturally. It was only achieved by hard work and drive by commanders bloody-minded enough to see it done. It was something that the professional soldiers of the Turkish Army were good at and that the Anzacs had to aspire to. In the first days ashore the 400 Plateau, which is more familiarly known as Lone Pine from the bedraggled tree that reminded viewers of the song ‘Lonesome Pine’, was lost through sheer amateurism and lack of digging by its Australian defenders. Gradually, as Bean’s history tells us, each outpost was starved out and forced to withdraw. Had the plateau been held it would have transformed the situation that the Anzacs faced on Second Ridge by forcing the Turks back across the intervening gully to establish a defensive line based on Third or Gun Ridge. It would have forced Birdwood to readjust his defence to face north and address how to seize the high ground, but this did not happen, 54

STORIES OF ANZAC

Turkish engineering skills preoccupied the Anzac defenders and initially the Anzacs were out-thought and out-fought all along Second Ridge. In May 1915 Colonel John Monash, the engineer who prided himself on his practical knowledge of men, and who Serle so vigorously defends for his performance on Anzac, showed no sign of these talents in manmanagement and application of engineering skills to the business of war that would become his hallmark in France. Instead there was a growing concern at the poor state of defences in his brigade sector. In Anzac parlance he was known to be a ‘dugout king’ rarely if ever visiting his front line.20 This led to a growing isolation and tensions between Monash and his commanding officers and the low morale of 4th Australian Brigade reflected this. It was in these critical first weeks that the calibre of a few key individuals determined the survival of the Anzac perimeter and the fate of the Anzac reputation; commanders such as Brigadier-General Harold ‘Hooky’ Walker who would command in turn the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, 1st Australian Infantry Brigade and then, after Bridge’s death, the 1st Australian Division. If one man forged the professional standards of the AIF in the First World War, it was this British Regular officer. He provided the ruthlessness and drive that Bridges lacked, and matched it with a tactical skill and an understanding of the men he commanded. There was a small percentage of others like him, some Regular and others who were citizen soldiers, but all totally professional in their approach to soldiering, and it was this professionalism that was key to improving Anzac performance. Lieutenant-Colonel H. Pope of 16th Battalion held and developed the critical cork in the bottle at the head of Monash Gully. It was he more than his brigade commander, Monash, who determined the holding of this critical sector of the front throughout May 1915. He was matched by Major H. Quinn of 15th Battalion at Quinn’s Post, and by Captains J. Wallingford and J.M. Rose, two former British musketry instructors, who as machine-gun officers with the New Zealand Infantry and 4th Australian Infantry Brigades, established the network of mutually supporting Maxim guns that destroyed the Turkish counter-attack on 19 May. Perhaps the most outstanding battalion commander on Gallipoli was Lieutenant-Colonel W.G. Malone of the Wellington Battalion. A citizen soldier, he was exacting in the training and discipline that he demanded from his battalion in Egypt, who repaid him for it with its performance on the peninsula. Malone’s favourite saying was that: ‘The art of warfare is the cultivation of domestic virtues.’21 He put this into practice on Gallipoli, first in consolidating the defence of Walker’s Ridge in early May and then in turn transforming the defensive situation at Courtney and Quinn’s Posts in June. Attempts to break out of the Anzac perimeter by the New Zealand and Australia Division at the beginning of May foundered on the strength of 55


the Turkish defences and demonstrated a lack of staff experience and planning at Godley’s headquarters. The committal of battalions of the Royal Marine Light Infantry Brigade (RMLI) in daylight to a battle already lost, simply increased the casualties, and saw the Marines blamed for the failure, RMLI being from then on translated as ‘Run My Lads Imshi [be off]’. The ineptly launched attacks showed the lack of skill that existed at both division and brigade within the New Zealand and Australia Division. It was not something that would demonstrably improve during Godley’s period of command. On Gallipoli he demonstrated that his undoubted skills as an administrator and trainer did not translate into the tactical handling of men in battle. Birdwood shared this lack of ability, but cushioned its effect by his outward bonhomie. Godley was not as demonstrative and outgoing with his men and so bore the brunt of Anzac anger at the evident high command ineptitude. There were similar failures under British command at Helles on 8 May that destroyed the combat effectiveness of the New Zealand and 2nd Australian Infantry Brigades. It demonstrated that the willingness of troops to go forward was not matched by British and Anzac commanders at brigade and divisional level being able to adapt their thinking on how to overcome the strength and complexity of trenches that the Turks were constructing. Bravery alone was seen as sufficient and there was little evidence of planning. The Turkish counter-attack at Anzac on 19 May was equally foolhardy, leaving thousands of dead between the lines, yet Birdwood’s planning for the August offensive committed the same mistakes, attacking over the same ground where the Turks had failed, with equally disastrous results. The New Zealand scouting parties who roamed the foothills below Chunuk Bair in the months before August gave him the information he needed on what routes were available to the summit. However, his plan of attack does not show any comprehension of the difficulties entailed or how the seizing of the crest would then be exploited. By August it was evident that despite endemic dysentery and sickness, it was the veteran formations that could best handle the conditions on the peninsula. Despite this, and over Walker’s objections, the strength of the 1st Australian Division was dissipated in a series of feint attacks along Second Ridge that were cut down by Turkish fire. Even the carefully planned feint at Lone Pine failed in its intent by drawing in Turkish reinforcements that were then redirected to repulse the New Zealand attack on Chunuk Bair. Indeed the award of seven VCs in this battle should not blind us from seeing the Lone Pine battle as the Hougomont of Anzac. A brave but fruitless attack that destroyed veteran formations that should have been replaced by the raw New Army formations allowing the Australians to be used to reinforce the main offensive onto the high ground. Birdwood’s staff planning shows no awareness 56

STORIES OF ANZAC

of this. The inflexibility of these attacks demonstrated Birdwood’s lack of tactical grasp and understanding of the ground. Godley demonstrated the same deficiencies with his handling of the assault on to the Sari Bair Range. Indeed the accounts that survive from both Birdwood’s and Godley’s headquarters indicate that both were overwhelmed by the coordination and detail required in this their first major offensive. Godley should have moved forward to be in a position to exploit the New Zealand advance on Chunuk Bair but he allowed himself to be distracted by the problems besetting a lost and by now overwrought Monash, who had been committed to a hopeless enterprise with the left assaulting column. During the August offensive the feint attacks mounted at Quinn’s, Courtney’s and the Nek were doomed from the outset. That of the Nek was compounded by the planning and coordination deficiencies within the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade. Peter Burness’s study of the attack at the Nek reveals the infighting, agitation and amateurish nature of the brigade, which could not be rectified by the bravery of its men who attacked and died. This has been immortalised in Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli. However, Weir makes it clear that the fault lies with the British at Suvla who got ashore but who stopped for tea, instead of moving on to assist the Anzacs. This act has become an integral part of the legend of Anzac betrayal and whilst they were still alive was adopted into their oral memory by centenarian Anzacs who spoke of seeing this from the heights, something that a visit to the ground dispels immediately as impossible. Nothing could be further from the truth. The British landings at Suvla were never intended to be coordinated with the Anzac assault on Chunuk Bair but were a separate exercise to seize a suitable harbour on that inhospitable coast that would allow Hamilton’s army to be resupplied during the storms over the winter months. In Weir’s film, if one freezes frame on the video or looks very closely indeed at that implacable and unyielding staff officer who insists that the attacks be continued, one can recognise the rising sun collar dogs on his jacket that identifies him as an Australian staff officer. However, most viewers watching the film have by then been conditioned by events and accent to believe that he is a British officer sending Australians to their deaths. Weir abets this allowing the viewer’s emotional response to confirm the legend, whilst being able to claim historical accuracy in his depiction of the principal characters. The carefully planned and coordinated seizure of the foothills on the night of 6/7 May by Russell’s New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade was a rare example of careful planning to good effect, but both Johnston and Monash who led the assault columns were not up to the task. Both earned Bean’s private criticism, but this was muted in the official histories, with 57


Monash in particular being allowed to deflect criticism onto others, whilst inflating his own performance. The August offensive demonstrated the growing unit tactical ability of the Anzacs, but showed that this was not matched by similar capabilities at brigade and divisional level. Once again it was the comparatively poor performance of the Kitchener New Army Divisions that deflected criticism from that of the Anzacs. But here too, it was staff work and leadership that was at fault. Their willingness and enthusiasm matched the Anzacs. Indeed one could argue that their inexperience simply mirrored that of the Anzacs three months before. There were many individual acts of bravery among the Kitchener divisions at Suvla but no Bean to chronicle them into an epic. The arrival of the 2nd Australian Division after August simply increased the number of Anzacs at a time when the campaign itself had become a stalemate. Like their predecessors they showed the same lack of training in both officers and men, and were perhaps fortunate that this was never tested. The 2nd Australian Division simply doubled the number of Australians who were entitled to call themselves ‘Anzacs’ but their experience on Gallipoli in no way equated to what had gone before in the critical months between April and August. Critically they lacked the opportunity to forge the skills necessary to act as a division. After Gallipoli they classed themselves as veterans but as the Battle of the Somme of 1916 would show, had only bravery and self-belief to show for this experience, and lacked the expertise and the necessary teamwork to expend it to good effect. In December the Gallipoli campaign ended with a brilliant withdrawal which tends to be seen as a uniquely Anzac achievement, but which was replicated under equally difficult circumstances at Suvla and at Helles. It showed that at command and staff level, lessons were at last being learnt. For Australian and New Zealand publics the Anzac experience was one of epic achievement. It boosted recruiting and ensured an ongoing commitment to the struggle on the Western Front. The reality of illdisciplined amateurs who found themselves over-matched was one that the public never had to grapple with, because they simply were never made aware of it. To the soldiers, Anzac was a learning experience where the skills of leadership and administration of large bodies of men were honed in the most difficult of schools. It showed that no matter how much potential the citizen recruits may display, it is only of value if they are well trained and equally well led. Anzac demonstrated how little the Australian and New Zealanders knew about the business of war, and they learnt from this experience. This was done to such effect that by 1917 the two Anzac Corps on the Western Front could be said to have equalled if not bettered the legend, but that is another story. 58

3 ‘A WAR MEMORIAL IN CELLULOID’: THE GALLIPOLI LEGEND IN AUSTRALIAN CINEMA, 1940s–1980s Stuart Ward

Recent decades have witnessed an extraordinary resurgence in the popular observance of Anzac Day in Australia. The anniversary of the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915 has become so prominent in Australia’s commemorative calendar that it is easy to forget how close the entire occasion came to extinction. As recently as the 1960s, the commemoration of Anzac experienced a marked decline both in terms of public awareness and official promotion – so much so that Ken Inglis predicted the ultimate demise of Anzac Day, together with ‘the decline and eventual disappearance of the RSL [Returned Services League]’.1 Within a few years, this view was receiving widespread attention in the Australian press, as each passing Anzac Day raised further doubts about its long-term viability.2 A common criticism was that the entire occasion had become a tired, halfhearted hurrah for the glories of war, but there were also concerns that Anzac was far too narrow in its constituency to embody a truly national occasion. Just as Empire Day had faded into the imperial sunset, so too Anzac Day seemed ready to be put to rest along with the generation of servicemen it commemorated. As the Sydney Mirror speculated in 1965: ‘Will Anzac Day be as meaningless to future generations as Trafalgar and Waterloo, once so cataclysmic, have become today?’3 By the 1990s, however, Anzac Day had made an impressive comeback, signalled by a series of innovations in the formal rituals marking the occasion. The 75th anniversary in 1990 was a major media event, featuring a mass pilgrimage to Anzac Cove led by Prime Minister Bob Hawke. The entombment of Australia’s unknown soldier at the Australian War Memorial in 1993 provided a further opportunity to emphasise the contemporary relevance of the legend. On that occasion, Prime Minister Paul Keating declared that Anzac was not about asserting one segment of 59


the Australian community over others, but rather about celebrating the democratic traditions uniting all Australians.4 And the state funeral for the last original Anzac, Ted Mathews, in December 1997, clearly indicated that the Gallipoli legend would indeed survive the men who served there. As Australia’s Governor-General, Sir William Deane affirmed in his eulogy for Mathews: [although] his passing marks a final break in a living thread that united us Australians with the complete Anzac epic the legacies of valour and of national sentiment left by him and his companions outlive them and will outlive us all.5 Most striking of all is the way this Anzac revival has taken root among younger Australians, best illustrated by the steady flow of backpackers who make the pilgrimage to the Gallipoli peninsula in their thousands each year.6 A key feature in this process has been the popular rendering of the Anzac legend in the cinema and on television screens. From the early 1980s, a string of productions from Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant in 1980 to Simon Wincer’s The Lighthorsemen (1987), together with television mini-series such as 1915 (1982) and Anzacs (1985), helped to re-ignite public interest in the Australian experience of war. Above all, Peter Weir’s celebrated film Gallipoli (1981) brought renewed focus to the meaning of Anzac for contemporary Australians. The wave of publicity surrounding the launch of the film made it clear that this was no ordinary movie. One media release promised an authentic portrayal of nothing less than ‘the birth of our nation’, while Weir himself described the film as a ‘war memorial in celluloid’.7 The impact of the film was immediate, and wide ranging. Reviewers and film critics heralded an event of profound national significance. For Philip Adams, writing in the Age, Weir had produced a film that ‘gives us back our history. This is what having a film industry is all about.’8 Gallipoli won every Australian film award worth winning, and launched the international careers of Weir and Mel Gibson. The Australian War Memorial recorded a 50 per cent increase in public attendance in the year of the film’s release,9 and schools were issued with education packs for studying the film in the classroom.10 But Gallipoli was by no means the first film to influence popular perceptions of the meaning and significance of Anzac Day. Some 40 years earlier, Charles Chauvel’s epic Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) was greeted with rapturous acclaim for its vivid depiction of the Australian achievement in the Great War. The Sydney Morning Herald described it as the ‘first really great Australian picture’, which would undoubtedly ‘thrill every Australian who sees it’.11 Like Weir, Chauvel set out to convey to audiences the enduring legacies of Australia’s wartime experience, 60

‘A WAR MEMORIAL IN CELLULOID’

and to reassert the importance of the Anzac legend to a new generation of Australians. And like Gallipoli, Forty Thousand Horsemen was seen as somehow transcending the realm of mere entertainment, providing Australians with a much needed wartime tonic ‘at the right psychological moment’.12 Both film-makers acknowledged their debt to the founding father of the Anzac legend, C.E.W. Bean, and both incorporated many of the familiar elements of the Bean legend into their scripts. Both productions received official backing from the Australian government (Chauvel from the Australian Army, Weir from the Australian Film Commission), and both went to unusual lengths to achieve historical authenticity. Yet the two films convey quite different, even contradictory interpretations of the significance of Gallipoli in Australian history. The differences are far more than mere superficial changes in cinematic technique and narrative style – rather they go to the very heart of the dominant meanings and symbols associated with the Gallipoli experience. A comparison of these two highly influential films thus offers a useful means of understanding the dramatic upsurge in public interest in the Anzac myth since the 1960s. The Anzac revival has generally been explained in terms of structural innovations in the way the occasion is commemorated – Gallipoli pilgrimages, education programmes, an Anzac publishing boom and frequent dramatisations for mass media consumption, have all enhanced the public profile of Anzac Day, and invested it with a more contemporary feel. But more attention needs to be paid to the underlying ideological changes in the composition of the legend itself. As one contributor to a Sydney Morning Herald panel discussion in 1965 predicted, ‘If Anzac Day is to be used [in the future], then it is certainly going to be changed from its present state.’13 And this is precisely what has occurred. Understanding how Anzac Day was overhauled from the 1950s to the 1970s provides the key to understanding why it still holds pride of place on the Australian commemorative calendar. And comparing the divergent meanings of two immensely popular Anzac films situated at opposite ends of this remodelling process provides valuable insights into how the legend has been altered and why.

Forty Thousand Horsemen Strictly speaking, Charles Chauvel’s Forty Thousand Horsemen is not a film about Gallipoli at all, but deals instead with the charge of the Australian Light Horse on Beersheeba in October 1917 some two years after the evacuation of Anzac Cove. But the film emphatically situates the achievements of the Australian Light Horse within the context of Gallipoli and the Anzac legend. There are constant references to Gallipoli in the film, most commonly in the dialogue between Turkish and German 61


officers. The German commander, Von Hausen, is dismissive of the threat posed by ‘these Australian sheepherders’, but his Turkish counterparts, having encountered the Anzac troops in action, are reduced to trembling by so much as the mention of the dreaded Australians. As one Turkish officer implores his complacent German superior: ‘It took two of our armies to hold the Australians at Gallipoli – we will never underestimate them again!’ The film conveys all of the central elements of the Bean legend: the extraordinary fighting qualities of the Australian soldier; the rugged, bush-bred informality that made the Anzacs so effective in combat; the importance of the bond of mateship in reinforcing the collective tenacity of the Anzac troops, and so on. The laconic, practical, good-humoured digger is embodied in the character Jim, played by Australian film icon Chips Rafferty in his screen debut. It is appropriately Rafferty who articulates the egalitarian strains in the Anzac legend in the following exchange: Come to think of it, what the hell is it all about? What’re we fightin’ for? J I M: I s’pose it’s for the right to stand up on a soapbox in the domain; the right to tell the boss what he can do with his job if we don’t like it; and the right to start off as a rouseabout and finish up as prime minister: that’s what we’re fightin’ for. L A R R Y: And a pretty good reason too, Jim. R E D:

The film also includes the obligatory scenes in Cairo where the Australian troops engage in assorted mischief prior to being sent into battle. The celebration of the Australians’ lack of discipline is central to the legend, because these attributes were said to underpin the reckless bravery of the Anzacs when thrown in to the front line. But the Chauvel Legend of Anzac, although concerned with Australian distinctiveness, is not a self-sufficient, self-contained national myth. On the contrary, the wider sense of identification with Great Britain and the Empire is ever-present throughout the film. We see this, for example, in the Australians’ instinctive reaction to the news that the British regiments are under attack: J I M: R E D:

They’re fightin’ Red, we’re in it! The Tommy’s Fight’s our fight. Come on boys let’s get into it!

For Chauvel there was no inconsistency in depicting the distinctive valour of the Australian troops within a wider celebration of the British cause. On the contrary, in another scene where the troops reflect philosophically on the significance of their deeds, they imagine that they are carrying on the tradition of ‘Blenheim, Waterloo and Balaclava’, and 62


express hope that they might secure a few pages for themselves in ‘that great history book of England’s’. This was typical of popular understandings of the Anzac legend at the time. In 1926, for example, the Melbourne Age announced that Australia emerged ‘into full bloom of nationhood’ at Gallipoli, while at the same time affirming that the Anzacs had ‘proved themselves worthy of the highest traditions of the British race’.14 C.J. Dennis’ Sentimental Bloke referred to the first AIF as ‘Britons of the Southern Breed’, while the widely circulated Anzac Book, compiled by Bean in 1915,15 featured an Australian soldier on the cover set against the backdrop of a battle-worn Union Jack. The Chauvel version of the Anzac legend was one which sought to highlight a distinctiveness of Australian character and outlook, but which was firmly situated within a wider imperial framework. This was a typical feature of many self-consciously ‘Australian’ films of the time. Chauvel’s contemporary, Ken G. Hall, employed this same duality in his 1937 comedy It Isn’t Done, where an Australian wheat farmer moves to England to inherit an English title and manor. Throughout the film, the main English protagonist, Lord Denvee, tries to discredit the Australian’s claim to a peerage by exposing his lack of sophistication and unpolished manners. Like so many films of its kind, the humour is structured around the comic differences between Australians and the English, and takes every opportunity to exaggerate those differences. But, significantly, the climax of the film sees the two protagonists, English and Australian, at a memorial service for the soldiers killed on the Somme. It transpires that both men lost a son on the same day in the Great War, and their differences melt away in the common act of mourning. The Englishman extends a gesture of reconciliation by offering to share his umbrella, and confesses that he was wrong all along: ‘After all’, he says, ‘we have something in common, something that goes much deeper than the ordinary things in life’. Later in the day the Australian offers a toast to ‘the land of my forefathers, the land I shall always love but sometimes find hard to understand: to Mother England’.16 In other words, the film, like Chauvel’s, articulates the idea of community in diversity that lay at the heart of the myth of ‘Greater Britain’. While acknowledging the particular habits, outlook and characteristics of the various British countries of the world, at a much deeper level there prevailed the supreme principle of the racial unity of all British peoples. But Chauvel also had more pragmatic reasons for emphasising Australia’s organic community with Britain. The film was made in the early months of 1940, at a time of widespread concern for the security of France in the face of an impending German onslaught. It therefore had an important propaganda role in generating popular support for the cause. The idea of the second AIF carrying on the mantle of the Anzacs was a typical recruiting technique in the early stages of the war,16 and not 63


surprisingly it appeared prominently in Chauvel’s film. The introductory titles pointedly state: with pride, their own sons are saying today: The torch you threw to us we caught And now our hands will hold it high Its glorious light will never die Chauvel also wrote in the part of a French mademoiselle in Palestine, Juliet Rouget, whose father is brutally murdered by the Nazis in the opening scenes of the film. She becomes the love interest for the central Australian character Red Gallagher, but she also doubles as an allegory for the vulnerable predicament of France in 1940. Chauvel chose the story of the Light Horse as a vehicle for the Anzac legend rather than Gallipoli itself, because it allowed him greater scope for these kinds of embellishments, but more importantly it gave him the opportunity to portray an unambiguous Australian victory. The triumph of the 4th Light Horse Brigade at Beersheeba seemed more appropriate to a recruiting drive than the more ambiguous triumph in defeat that lies at the heart of the Gallipoli legend. Indeed, Chauvel portrays the Australian triumph in Palestine in such glowing terms that audiences could have been forgiven for seeing the entire war as a struggle between Germany and Australia. No mention is made of the fact that the Australian light horse regiments fought alongside New Zealand, British and Indian troops as part of the Desert Mounted Corps. Nor is it entirely irrelevant to Chauvel’s choice of subject matter that it was his own uncle, General Harry Chauvel, who commanded the desert mounted troops, and that his own father served in that force. There is an element of family history in the film, despite the fact that General Chauvel himself doesn’t make an appearance. It was very much Charles Bean’s influence that led Chauvel to focus on the bravery and heroism of the ordinary troops, rather than the strategic genius of the commanders. Chauvel openly acknowledged that he had based his script on Bean’s official war history,17 and the film is thus peppered with references to the notion that the Anzacs were, to use Bean’s phrase, ‘bushmen in disguise’.

Gallipoli The name of C.E.W. Bean was equally prominent in the wave of publicity surrounding the release of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli in 1981. Once again, the debt to the architect of the Anzac legend was acknowledged in the film’s credits, and Weir spoke freely of his inspiration from Bean’s official history and other writings. In many respects, the film is a faithful replication of the original Bean legend. In its preoccupation with ‘character’ rather than the details of the campaign itself, it reflects Bean’s emphasis on the peculiar 64


qualities of the idealised Anzacs. The two main protagonists, Archy (Mark Lee) and Frank (Mel Gibson) are both presented as variants of the typical soldier of the AIF. Archy displays the qualities of the legendary bushman – a noble frontiersman, resourceful, a skilled horseman, with the added ingredient of youthful innocence. Frank, by contrast, is the city larrikin – undisciplined, laconic, sceptical of authority. Both are first-rate athletes – an idea Weir picked up from Bean’s account in the Official History.18 More than half of the film is concerned with the evolving friendship between the two – from their initial encounter as rivals on the track, to their inseparability on the shores of Anzac Cove. The theme of self-sacrifice in the name of mateship emerges prominently in the film, especially in the climactic battle scenes where Archy volunteers to take Frank’s place in the suicidal bayonet charge on the Nek, while Frank reciprocates by exposing himself to enemy machine-gun fire in a desperate dash to headquarters to have the attack called off. A whole range of Bean stereotypes are fondly portrayed: the soldiers are a disrespectful, undisciplined rabble during training exercises in Egypt, but a highly committed, courageous and resourceful outfit when thrown into the heat of battle. Australian officers show a genuine concern for their troops and lead by example, in contrast to the remote, authoritarian methods of their British counterparts, and so on. Weir’s Gallipoli seemed so uncritical of the central tenets of the Anzac legend that it was roundly condemned by some commentators for reinforcing a static, outdated and deeply conservative folk myth. Sylvia Lawson, for example, compared Gallipoli to the 1915 propaganda film Hero of the Dardanelles and concluded: ‘There are sixty-six years of history between these two immensely mythic pieces; there is almost no ideological space between them at all.’19 In a similar vein, Livio and Pat Dobrez bemoaned the fact that Australians seemed destined ‘to retell the self-same story, with the self-same moral’.20 But despite Weir’s obvious indebtedness to the historical legend, this criticism somehow fails to ring true. It is hard to believe that a traditional folk tale designed for an earlier generation of Australians, and which was widely thought to have lost its relevance by the 1960s, could emerge in such a popular guise in the 1980s without some kind of alteration or revision. And this is precisely what Weir and his co-screenwriter David Williamson set out to do, employing subtle shifts of meaning and emphasis to produce a film quite different from the legend inspired by Bean in 1915 and retold by Charles Chauvel in 1940. The film represents a clear departure from the traditional legend in a number of important respects. Fighting qualities The film shies away from the original essence of Anzac – namely, the extraordinary performance of the Australian troops in combat. As Joan 65


Beaumont reminds us, the central element of the legend ‘was the assertion that the Australian soldier was naturally and unusually competent’.21 According to Bean, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and a host of subsequent accounts, the Australians at Gallipoli had proven themselves (and hence the nation) primarily in terms of their spectacular martial display. Bean described the Anzacs as ‘the most effective of all the forces on the side of the allies’,22 and this central notion provided the foundation on which all other elements of the legend rested. The embodiment of this fighting spirit was Captain Albert Jacka, who won Australia’s first Victoria Cross at Gallipoli, and went on to become something of a folk hero in interwar Australia. His military exploits earned him pride of place on wartime recruiting posters, and his eagerness to inflict casualties on the enemy was legion. He was best remembered for his wry remark upon receiving his VC: ‘I managed to get the buggers, Sir.’ At his funeral in 1932 he was lauded as ‘Australia’s greatest front-line soldier.’23 Without the Albert Jackas of the AIF, there could be no Anzac legend – all other aspects of the myth went in some way towards explaining this singular phenomenon, whether it be the bush origins of the Anzac troops (which ‘bred them to the habit of decision’), their egalitarianism and mateship (which was said to be their very motivation for fighting so fiercely), even their lack of formal discipline (which enabled greater creativity and independent action in the heat of battle). Yet Jacka is now all but forgotten. In contrast to his contemporary John Simpson (and donkey) whose legend has been nurtured and retold ever since, the deadly exploits of Albert Jacka have all but passed into obscurity. In Peter Weir’s version of the Gallipoli myth, Jacka and his ilk have been erased entirely. Although the film conveys the courage of the Anzac troops in the face of certain death during the disastrous attack on the Nek, it portrays nothing that speaks to the myth of the Australians’ fighting qualities. On the contrary, the scenes at the Cairo training camp are more reminiscent of Dad’s Army, depicting an amiable rabble entirely uninterested in the war or their impending role in it. Neither Archy nor Frank fires a single shot at Gallipoli, let alone kills anybody, nor do any of the characters express any desire to inflict harm on the Turk (not a single dead Turk is depicted in the entire film, and only the occasional live one). The only shots fired by Australian troops turn out to be in jest – an innocent game of target practice with their friendly Turkish neighbours. The only trace of the militarist strain in the legend is when Frank’s dying mate Snow reports in the aftermath of the battle of Lone Pine: ‘We got there Frank – we took their bloody trenches.’ Frank’s reply (‘Yeah, I heard you were a bloody hero’) is deliberately touched with a heavy irony, framing both characters as naïve innocents unable to comprehend their tragic fate. Ken Inglis has suggested that the valorisation of Australian fighting prowess was already becoming faintly problematic by the late 1930s (in 66


the light of pacifist sentiment, and debates over appeasement). But it posed no problem whatsoever for Charles Chauvel, who found all kinds of creative ways to kill off the Turkish foe (along with the odd stray German). In Forty Thousand Horsemen, all of the Australian characters are seen to get a piece of the action. In one scene, the lanky Jim complains that he ‘can’t get a clear shot at the buggers’, and recklessly runs out from cover to clear a few obstacles in his line of sight. When later he receives a fatal wound, his dying wish to his mate Red is that he should ‘get on with it, and get a couple for us’, to which Red replies: ‘I’ll get the lot’! Red promptly despatches a dozen or so enemy troops with his bayonet, before being captured and taken prisoner. It was precisely this ‘sustained battle action’ and ‘dramatic realism’ that earned the film such critical acclaim. The Sydney Morning Herald positively revelled in the ‘spectacle of charging horsemen finally reaching their objective with fierce hand-to-hand combat’, and heaped endless praise on Chauvel for his vivid depiction of ‘those epic desert battles which brought everlasting glory to the Australian Light Horse’.24 In post-Vietnam Australia, however, these qualities had become distinctly dubious. Simon Wincer’s 1987 remake of the Beersheeba story, The Lighthorsemen, offers the most vivid illustration of this. Here the central drama unfolds when one of the horsemen, Dave, discovers that he has no desire to fight the enemy. Instead he becomes a stretcherbearer (in the mould of John Simpson), and strikes up a romance with the leading lady behind enemy lines. Peter Weir’s version is more subtle, but he is equally concerned with burying the martial dimension of the Anzac myth. It is significant that in the final dramatic moments of the film Archy is seen sprinting towards the enemy trenches completely unarmed, until the final freeze frame where he is cut down. Weir adopted this image in order to return the film to its opening motif of the youthful Australian athlete hurtling towards his destiny. But by stripping Archy of his rifle and bayonet, Weir also detached the Anzacs from their primary function. In this interpretation, Australians did not serve on Gallipoli for the purpose of killing Turkish infantry, but rather to provide cannon fodder for the imperial war machine. Clearly, then, the film is preoccupied with issues at variance with the original Anzac legend. By focusing on the single most disastrous incident of the entire campaign – the suicidal assault on the Nek where some 300-odd Anzacs perished in a matter of minutes – the film leaves a lasting impression of wasteful slaughter. In this regard, Gallipoli sits uneasily within the framework of the Bean legend, and has been described as ‘one of the greatest anti-war movies of all time’, in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957) and Oh What a Lovely War (1969).25 But unlike so many other films conveying the futile and barbaric nature of war, Gallipoli remains an intensely nationalist 67


film. Rather than celebrate Australia’s heroic baptism of fire, however, the film instead identifies Australia with images of innocent youth, doomed by sinister higher forces. This element of Weir’s interpretation is closely linked to a further major revision of the Anzac legend that is worth discussing. The rejection of Britishness From the early 1960s, the incorporation of the Anzac legend into a wider British imperial context became increasingly problematic. The dissolution of the British Empire is one obvious reason for this, but the material foundations of Australia’s sentimental ties to Britain were also fast unravelling. Dwindling trade and defence ties, together with Britain’s entry into the EEC in the early 1970s, signalled the irrelevance of Britishness as a genuine object of civic identification in Australia. What emerged in its place from the late 1960s was a new brand of Australian nationalism that had little to do with loyalty to Britain. As Geoffrey Serle observed in 1968: ‘the young Australian now has no sense of conflict in his loyalties the knocking away of the props of the imperial association between Britain and Australia – defense and the economic nexus – have seemingly led to a swift withering away of sentiment’.26 Australia’s ‘new nationalism’ – a phrase coined by Donald Horne in 1968 – represented an attempt to redefine the core of Australian civic culture and identity in the fading light of Empire. It found expression in a variety of avenues – from the political rhetoric of Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton, who declared his commitment ‘to foster a feeling of real nationalism’ in Australia,27 to the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts as a response to the widespread claim that Australia was singularly lacking in distinctive artistic and cultural traditions. These sentiments were equally manifest in the growing demand for an overhaul of the key symbols of Australian nationhood. The Australian flag, monarchy, national anthem, honours system – even Australian passports – all dated from the era of British race patriotism, and all came under discussion for their dubious relevance in post-imperial Australia. The essence of the new nationalism was to find new, more exclusive ways of conceiving Australian nationhood, in place of the outdated notion of Australia as a ‘British country’.28 Or as Australian Governor-General Paul Hasluck put it in his 1972 Australia Day address, Australians were striving to find new ways of expressing their patriotism – ‘patriotism for the Australia of today – the Australia that exists – not to an Australia of a different kind that no longer exists’.29 Australian cinema production played a prominent role in this protracted search for new ways of making sense of the nation. The establishment of the Australian Film Commission and other film subsidy programmes in 68


the late 1960s provided a massive boost to film production in Australia – a fact that, in itself, shows how governments were giving increasing priority to the need to project a new national image both at home and abroad. But this was easier said than done – the fundamental problem was how Australia’s new nationalism should be defined and articulated. The celebration of Australia’s British origins, imperial progress and racial patriotism had so dominated the rituals of social self-worship over so many generations that it was difficult to imagine how Australia might alternatively be conceived. As Adam Watson commented in The Spectator in June 1973, ‘while it was easy to say what Australia no longer was, it was hard for Australians to say what they were, or who they wanted to be’.30 The obvious way around this – and the one adopted by countless Australian films in the 1970s – was to focus on the easier question of what Australia was not. And, in the 1970s, what Australia was most determined not to be was a British outpost. The irony in this is that Britishness remained more important than ever in the Australian mental landscape, only now it had become a cultural marker against which Australians could define themselves. This technique was employed repeatedly by Australian film-makers throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in films as diverse as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, again by Peter Weir), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1979), and Breaker Morant (1980, an important precursor to Gallipoli), as well as in television mini-series such as Bodyline, and The Last Bastion in the early 1980s. In all of these productions, the Australian characters are contrasted favourably with their pompous, hidebound, class-conscious British counterparts. As Peter Weir reflected at the end of the decade, ‘The films now being made in Australia are giving Australians a view of themselves they’ve never had before, a feeling of context and of special separateness’ (read: ‘not British’).31 It was within this ideological climate that the Anzac legend experienced its remarkable renaissance. In the hands of historians such as Bill Gammage and Gavin Souter, the story of Australia in the First World War was deftly reworked so as to play down the element of Empire loyalty, and to emphasise any evidence of Australian resentment towards British regiments, and particularly the British officer caste. As Gammage succinctly put it, ‘Bloody war and bitter experience weakened the affections of Empire. Australians met the English during the struggle, and the acquaintance lifted the veils of distance and ignorance, and qualified their old enthusiasms.’32 In this account, it was the experience of dispute and disillusionment with the British high command, rather than the heroic encounter with the Turks on the rugged slopes of Anzac Cove, that underpinned the myth of Gallipoli as the ‘birth of Australian nationhood’. It is as though Australians were retrospectively imagining the national liberation movement they never had, seeking to invent a robust assertion of Australian independence in the face of an exploitative colonial master. 69


In an interview shortly after the release of Gallipoli, Peter Weir articulated a view of the significance of Gallipoli that bore a striking resemblance to that of Gammage: Prior to August, 1915 the [AIF] had a dual nationality. One the one hand they were Australian, and, on the other, they were members of the British Empire, going off to help Mother England. But after August, 1915 that view was not so widely held, and, in fact, was rarely heard. From that experience emerged a feeling of being different, of being a separate entity altogether, and an entity quite capable of being used.33 Like Gammage, Weir was essentially predating Australia’s newfound ‘feeling of separateness’ to the First World War. And this is borne out fully in his film. Any feelings of loyalty to the Mother Country are notably absent in the motivations of the lead characters. As an Irish-Australian, Frank is at pains to emphasise that he is ‘not going to fight for the British Empire’. And Archy’s reasons for joining up appear as a confused mixture of youthful adventurism, and the naïve concern that ‘if we don’t stop them over there, they could end up here’. In only a single brief exchange does the film confront the dilemma of Empire loyalty: It’s not our war! What do you mean it’s not our war? F R A N K: It’s an English war! A R C H Y: You know what you are – you’re a bloody coward. F R A N K:

A R C H Y:

Archy’s feeble response ensures that neither of the two characters is in any way implicated in the imperial mindset. Although he is incapable of comprehending Frank’s more robust nationalist viewpoint, Archy is equally unable to mount any credible defence of the imperial rationale behind Australia’s involvement in the war. He is, in short, utterly and improbably naïve – a fact which is vital to securing audience sympathy for his plight. Viewers are invited to admire Archy’s quiet determination to fight for his country, without interrogating his political or philosophical reasons for doing so. Thus like Archy himself, the film evades the problem of why Australians flocked in droves to the assistance of the Motherland. As the story unfolds, no opportunity is missed to cast the British in a negative light. The scenes in Egypt depicting the Anzacs’ insolent mockery of ludicrously stereotyped British officers remain a great favourite of Australian audiences. As Frank and his mates mount donkeys and join in a mock chorus of: ‘If England Needs a Hand then Here it Is’, the film deftly evades the issue of why such songs were popular among Australians in the first place (it was, after all, a quintessentially Australian 70


song, which could only make sense from a non-English standpoint). Again this contrasts sharply with Chauvel’s Horsemen where there are similar scenes of Australian misbehaviour in Cairo – also involving donkeys – but without recourse to denigrating the British officer caste. On the contrary, the antics of Jim, Red and Larry invite mutterings of approval from a group of elderly English ladies as they pass by (and apologies to the ladies from the Anzacs’ commanding officer). It is towards the end of Gallipoli that this ambivalence turns into outright antipathy. In Weir’s account, it transpires that the real enemy at Gallipoli was not the never-present Turk, but the despicable British field officers who bungled the entire campaign. Weir has insisted that it was not the anti-British element that interested him, but the ‘proAustralian viewpoint’.34 But this merely underlined how the two sentiments had become so intertwined. The embodiment of British evil is the fictitious Colonel Robinson, who insists on persevering with the disastrous Australian assault on the Nek despite the obvious futility of the exercise. He is impervious to the pleas of the Australian, Major Barton, who implores him to call off the ‘cold blooded murder’ of the attack. Meanwhile, amid the most graphic scenes of senseless slaughter, the audience is told that the British forces at nearby Suvla Bay are ‘sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea’. A clear picture of British duplicity emerges, in which colonial troops are sacrificed in order to preserve the privileged status of brutal, ambitious British officers. Naturally enough, this jaundiced view of the British did not pass unnoticed, and the film sparked a lively debate about its historical accuracy. The London Times regarded the film as a ‘monstrous travesty of what actually happened’, and commissioned Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert to write a feature article entitled: ‘Gallipoli: is the film fair to the British?’35 As Gilbert was quick to point out, the attack at the Nek depicted in the film was not intended to provide cover for the British tea-drinkers at Suvla Bay, but rather was conceived in conjunction with the New Zealand offensive on Chunuk Bair.36 Equally questionable was the depiction of Colonel Robinson as an English villain wilfully sending colonial troops to their doom. While the assault on the Nek was undeniably the most tragic moment of the Anzac campaign, it was an unambiguously Australian calamity caused (as far as anyone can gather) by Australian ineptitude.37 Interestingly, at no stage does the film explicitly identify Robinson as an Englishman (on the contrary, he appears earlier in the film with an AIF badge on his hat for those with an eye to spot it). Yet audiences in Australia and elsewhere overwhelmingly gained the impression of British duplicity and deceit. Robinson’s speech differs slightly from the other Australian officers, but more important in framing his apparent Englishness are his aloof manners, rigid countenance, condescending tone, and his stubborn determination to see the attack carried out regardless of the cost to his 71


men. All of these are anything but typical Anzac qualities, and Weir has thus relied on the audience’s familiarity with the central tenets of the legend to depict Robinson as axiomatically un-Australian. Far more interesting than the factual inaccuracies is the way the film takes familiar elements of the Bean legend and rearranges them so as to convey a revised, updated version of the meaning of Anzac. Weir’s Gallipoli provides Australian audiences with a more comfortable framework for understanding the history of Australian involvement in a host of morally dubious imperial adventures. It is an interpretation that allows Australians to reflect on themselves as the innocent historical objects of British imperialism, rather than active, enthusiastic and self-interested participants in the imperial enterprise. A recent study of the career of Peter Weir encapsulated the now popular conception of the meaning of the Anzac legend: Gallipoli represents several things to Australians: a sense of pride in the courage of the troops who died in the carnage, the forging of a sense of Australian-ness in the face of British imperialist attitudes and hence a focus of resentment at British duplicity and exploitation. Perhaps the tragedy of Gallipoli could be said to have undermined forever the trust Australians had in the fairness of the mother country The colonial nation had rounded on Britain and made a statement of its independence.38 This conception of Anzac would have been barely recognisable to Charles Chauvel and his contemporaries, and would probably have come as a surprise to those commentators reflecting on the future of Anzac day in the 1960s. In the 40 years that elapsed between Forty Thousand Horsemen and Gallipoli, the Anzac legend continued to embody the idea of the birth of Australian nationhood. But in order to sustain this central national myth, the legend itself had to be reborn. The revival of Anzac Day in the 1980s was not due merely to fortuitous factors extraneous to the legend itself. On the contrary, it is the self-conscious recasting of Anzac for a new, post-imperial generation that has ensured its survival. As the comparison of these two films so vividly demonstrates, the Anzac legend performed the extraordinary feat of disassociating itself from the fundamental achievement of the original Anzacs (putting up a good fight), as well as the cause for which they fought (empire and Britishness). There could be no clearer example of the extraordinary malleability of historical myths to serve the needs of changing times. Peter Weir’s achievement illustrates the formidable power of the cinema as a means of repackaging our most treasured national stories, and serving them up in our own image.

72

4 THE BRITISH HEROIC-ROMANTIC MYTH OF GALLIPOLI Jenny Macleod

One of the most notable focuses of interest in Gallipoli in Britain is Holy Trinity Church in Eltham in south-east London. Its lady chapel is dedicated to the campaign, and a memorial service or lecture1 has been held there annually. The connection between Eltham and Gallipoli comes from the Reverend Henry Hall who was chaplain of the 29th Division during the campaign and returned to his position as Vicar of Holy Trinity after he was invalided and demobilised in 1916. Hall was so moved by his experiences at Gallipoli that he resolved to establish a memorial to the men of his division. The St Agnes Chapel at Holy Trinity was transformed into the Gallipoli Memorial Chapel and dedicated as a permanent memorial to the 29th Division. It was unveiled as such by General Sir Ian Hamilton on 25 April 1917.2 It was Hall who sparked off my interest in Gallipoli through a letter he wrote to General Sir Ian Hamilton in April 1920. Hall had read Hamilton’s Gallipoli Diary, and felt moved to write to the general, Anyhow your book gave me an illustration in last evening’s sermon for ‘the right spirit’. I told my people of the [illegible] glory and sadness of your book – and that we who served under you loved and honoured you chiefly for your ‘spirit’, your chivalry.3 Reading his letter, I was intrigued by the gap between Hall’s sentiments and what I understood to be the realities of the Gallipoli campaign – a defeat caused by confusion and indecision at the highest levels, hasty preparation and inept leadership; a campaign marked by foul living conditions and widespread sickness, that ended in ignominious withdrawal. This chapter explores Hamilton’s romanticised portrayal of the campaign in his Gallipoli Diary, the ways in which he exemplifies the British reaction to Gallipoli, the contrast with the Australian Anzac legend 73


that he presents, and the subsequent impact that the British and Australian versions of Gallipoli have had. At the outbreak of the First World War, Ian Hamilton was a widely experienced and decorated soldier. He had acted as Kitchener’s Chief of Staff during the Boer War and had been briefly mooted as a replacement for French as commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France. On 13 March 1915 he was appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and hastily despatched to the Dardanelles. After his dismissal seven months later, he never again held an important command, but he remained a public figure throughout his long retirement, working extensively for the British Legion, unveiling war memorials, attending commemorative dinners and writing books and prefaces.4 Hamilton was an unusual soldier for the period: intellectual, loquacious and left-leaning politically. He published 20 books ranging from military theory to poetry, and it is therefore not surprising that Hamilton wrote on the Gallipoli campaign. Moreover, in this instance, there were more compelling reasons than usual for putting pen to paper. The campaign had been the greatest event of his career and its greatest failure. It had ruined him and tarnished his reputation. From the Dardanelles Commission onwards,5 Hamilton worked assiduously to clear his name and that of the campaign with which he was most closely associated. Gallipoli Diary was the continuation and the peak of his attempts to influence perceptions of the campaign.6 This was a good opportunity to achieve such influence: not only were there relatively few competing accounts of the campaign available in 1920, but Hamilton’s would have the additional authority resulting from his position as the campaign’s Commander-in-Chief. Before discussing some aspects of its contents, let us consider why Hamilton chose to present his recollections as a diary. Gallipoli Diary is not a faithful reproduction of a diary written in the midst of the campaign.7 Hamilton used the diary format to defend his narrative as the truth as he saw it. It enabled him to privilege his opinions and defend himself from criticism and accusations of hindsight, since he was presenting the campaign as if seeing it at the time. A diary also enabled unfettered self-expression – it was the perfect format for explanation and so for self-justification, and for the expression of a romantic temperament. Hamilton’s Diary was probably based on an appointment diary kept by his personal clerk at Gallipoli, Sergeant-Major H.G. Stuart. Comparison of this typescript and the published version shows that certain alterations were made before publication.8 These were not merely inconsequential changes to grammar or syntax. The changes included the editing and modification of criticisms of individuals and tended to temper the tone of the writing. Hamilton inserted battle descriptions, and more importantly, 74

THE BRITISH HEROIC-ROMANTIC MYTH OF GALLIPOLI

the text of many of his cables. Such is their quantity that they account approximately for more than one quarter of the two volumes. It will be seen that these cables were a vital part of Hamilton’s self-justification. The purpose of Hamilton’s Diary was to demonstrate that the campaign had not been a disaster and that he was not primarily responsible for its failure. He therefore constructed a narrative that portrayed the campaign in the best possible light. This entailed the fullest demonstration of what I have called the heroic-romantic myth of Gallipoli, a simplified and benign shared understanding of the campaign. This is the British equivalent of the Anzac legend, and its traces may be found in much of the British writing on the Gallipoli campaign produced inter-war. There are three strands to this heroic-romantic myth. The first is a romantic view of warfare and of this campaign in particular. The second is an emphasis on the heroism of the participants in the campaign, which is used to defend them from criticisms of failure, and the third is a distinctively British emphasis on the strategy of the campaign. Despite its quixotic elements, however, the myth is melancholy in tone. This is understandable given the ultimate failure of the campaign, the terrible living conditions on the peninsula and the constant presence of death – not just the perpetual risk of death, but wounded and decaying bodies all around. How, then, did Hamilton create this heroic-romantic myth of Gallipoli in his Diary? The romantic and glamorous strand is derived from an idealised view of warfare and the campaign’s particular setting. It is reinforced by a careful suppression of the more horrific elements of warfare. Hamilton’s written style was perfectly suited to building a heroic-romantic portrait of Gallipoli – his prose is ornate and littered with classical allusions. And of course, Gallipoli, divided from Troy by the Hellespont, provided a perfect location. Here, for example, is a comment supposedly provoked by the Turks shelling V beach on 30 April: ‘So, once upon a time, did Paris shoot forth his arrows over that selfsame ground and plug proud Achilles in the heel – and never surely was any fabulous tendon more vulnerable than are our Southern beaches from Asia.’9 Hamilton’s references to the days of Troy invest his attempt to capture Constantinople with an air of grand adventure and heroic struggle. Descriptions of the beauty of the peninsula rising out of the clear blue sea under bright sunshine, with its sprinkling of wild flowers, also provide a powerful contrast to images in other works of the muddy bleakness of the Western Front. Such references are the most obvious touches, but perhaps the most important element of this romantic strand is Hamilton’s subtle and continuous project to minimise the horrors of warfare on the peninsula. He avoided explicit descriptions of suffering and killing, and he avoided bald casualty statistics. References to the tough living conditions of the 75


men are infrequent, as are mentions of major irritations such as the heat or the swarms of flies. The following example, where he did describe conditions in detail, is reduced in impact by subsequent assertions as to the men’s morale. It also includes a typical reference to earlier noble warriors. Having inspected the 29th Division on 12 May, Hamilton wrote: Spent over an hour chatting to groups of Officers and men who looked like earth to earth, caked as they were with mud, haggard with lack of sleep, pale as the dead, many of them slightly wounded and bandaged, hand or head, their clothes blood-stained, their eyes blood-shot This sounds horrible but the hearty welcome extended to us by all ranks and the pride they took in their achievements was a sublime triumph of mind over matter. Our voluntary service regulars are the last descendants of those rulers of the ancient world, the Roman Legionaries.10 Against this romantic backdrop, Hamilton portrayed the honour and heroism of his men. This is the second strand of the heroic-romantic myth. He detailed their best attributes, their morale and their motives. When describing units or individuals he strove to characterise them as positively as possible. For example, in recounting General D’Amade’s departure, Hamilton chose to discard his manuscript description of a man on the verge of breaking point, but retained a tribute to D’Amade as ‘a most charming, chivalrous and loyal soldier’.11 In addition to describing his comrades in a positive light, Hamilton presented a virtuous image of himself. It is clear from the text that he was an honourable, chivalrous, imaginative and inspiring general who bore his fate with grace and stoicism. He was above all an optimist. That such a strong sense of the man can be derived is in part a function of the diary format, which encourages introspection and comment, but is also a tribute to Hamilton’s literary skills. This assertion of the honour and gallantry of his men rested in part on the idea that the failure of the campaign was not the fault of those who fought on Gallipoli. This leads us to the third strand, which concerns strategy and politics, particularly the suggestion that failure resulted from the mistakes of the politicians in London, and of Kitchener especially. This subtext ran throughout the Diary. Such implicit criticism of Kitchener was daring given the popularity and indeed the awe in which the public held Kitchener. Yet it was the most important of the three strands for Hamilton in that it was crucial to vindicating the commander and his campaign. There are two other arguments that are part of this third strand of the heroic-romantic myth. First, that the campaign was based on a sound strategy; and second, that it was very nearly successful. In combination with the political explanation of failure, these assertions make the defeat 76


at Gallipoli more poignant. They highlight the tantalising opportunity lost in defeat: the chance to foreshorten the war. Hamilton implants this idea from the very beginning by quoting Kitchener’s final words to him: ‘If the Fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war.’12 This sanguine view of the campaign reflects Hamilton’s essential characteristic. He seems to have found the positive in every situation: the Turks lost more, we seized prisoners, we took a certain number of trenches. He always had a relatively palatable explanation for set-backs: we only had to fall back because of fatigue, lack of high explosives, shrapnel and so on. Such explanations did not denigrate the honour of his men but quietly and continually pushed the idea that London had failed them. Hamilton’s optimism is an important element in the myth of Gallipoli; it was also an important element in his leadership style and in the maintenance of morale. But it was a double-edged sword: it simultaneously damaged the campaign as a whole, since Hamilton’s cables lulled the politicians into a false impression of developments at Gallipoli. If the heroic and romantic strands of the myth were Hamilton’s opportunity to ameliorate the failure at Gallipoli, the third strand provided the chance to explain it. Yet Hamilton was constrained from doing so, not only by the high regard in which Kitchener was held, but also by his chivalrous nature – he probably felt some loyalty to his former chief. Hamilton’s solution came in two parts. First, he published a very full description of his preparations for the landing, which amounted to approximately one fifth of the Diary’s length. This demonstrated how difficult was the task of landing on the peninsula, how inadequate were the War Office preparations and how hastily he was expected to depart from London. In the course of this description of his preparations, Hamilton did not explicitly criticise Kitchener, but he did express regret that sufficient planning, which could have much improved the situation, had not been possible. This section establishes the idea that the campaign was ill-served by the War Office and that the very achievement of landing on the peninsula was extraordinary. The second of Hamilton’s solutions to explaining failure without explicit criticism was to insert the text of many of the cables and letters that passed between Hamilton and London. Hamilton allowed the cables to tell their own story. They provided copious evidence of his attempts to secure further men and armaments. They are supplemented by two appendices on the artillery situation, which confirm his criticisms. The result was the creation of the impression that Hamilton was continuously being rebuffed by a short-sighted War Office, without the need to complain with ill-grace and at length in the text of the Diary. Gallipoli Diary was published in May 1920 and was widely reviewed.13 Whilst some reviewers criticised Hamilton’s conduct, most accepted his 77


basic argument that he was ill-served by the government. The essential aspects of his portrayal were also repeated in other books on Gallipoli by participants in the campaign. Thus the heroic-romantic myth of Gallipoli can be traced through other British narratives. The romance of Gallipoli, and of warfare in general, saturate the sickly schoolboy heroics of Ernest Raymond’s Tell England (1922) which was a bestseller inter-war.14 Raymond was a chaplain attached to the 42nd Division’s East Lancashire Territorials and his novel makes unusually extensive use of crusading and religious imagery. The boys’ sentiments as they approach Gallipoli late in the campaign are described thus: It would be a wonderful trip, skirting by daylight the coastline of the Peninsula, till we rounded the point and looked upon the Helles Beaches, the sacred site of the first and most marvellous battle of the Dardanelles campaign. It was a pilgrimage to a shrine that stretched before us on the morrow. The pilgrim’s route was a path in the blue Ægean from Suvla to Helles Point; and the shrine the immortal battleground.15 A further example of the pervasiveness of the heroic-romantic myth is to be found in the British official history (1929 and 1932),16 a genre usually noted for its measured style. Yet the author of the volumes on Gallipoli, Brigadier-General Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, who had been a staff officer during the campaign, managed to insert classical references into its epilogue. He quotes from Aeschylus and argues that ‘The drama of the Dardanelles campaign, by reason of the beauty of its setting, the grandeur of its theme and the unhappiness of its ending, will always rank amongst the world’s classic tragedies.’17 More importantly, Aspinall also fought strenuously with the director of the Historical Section, Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds, to be allowed to comment on the strategic value of the campaign and the mistakes made in London in failing to fully support the campaign.18 In this battle, Aspinall was assisted by Winston Churchill, who had himself, of course, made a stout defence of his strategic vision in typically Churchillian prose in The World Crisis 1915 (1923)19 and at the Dardanelles Commission. Even the work of one of Hamilton’s fiercest critics, the journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, reflects the heroic-romantic myth. Ashmead-Bartlett worked for the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association to represent the London press during the campaign, but after a series of clashes with the censors as he became increasingly critical of its conduct, he was sent home. Ashmead-Bartlett had attracted attention by despatching the first article to describe the Anzac landings, and therefore played a vital role in making the Anzac legend.20 Thereafter, his descriptions of the campaign demonstrated a tendency to romanticise and exaggerate in some respects. 78


For example, in describing the brief capture of Hill 70 by the dismounted British Yeomanry on 23 August, Ashmead-Bartlett wrote: It was now almost dark, and the attack seemed to hang fire when suddenly the Yeomanry leapt to their feet, and, as a single man, charged right up the hill. It was a stirring sight, watched by thousands in the ever-gathering gloom. From a thousand lips a shout went up that Hill 70 was won.21 Yet despite occasional rhetorical flourishes such as this, Ashmead-Bartlett privately became an outspoken critic of Hamilton’s conduct of the campaign. Thwarted by censorship during the war, despite various attempts to circumvent it,22 he waited until 1929 to publish The Uncensored Dardanelles (1928). Even then, he replicated key elements of the heroic-romantic myth, contending that the strategy of capturing Constantinople was brilliant and celebrating the heroism of the men, whilst arguing that Hamilton made fundamental mistakes.23 To some extent, this was self-serving. Ashmead-Bartlett had long-standing financial problems and was no doubt interested in maximising sales of his book. It was therefore advisable not to denigrate the campaign strategy and its participants, and to explain its failure by pinpointing a scapegoat. Perhaps the outstanding example of the British heroic-romantic myth of Gallipoli, however, is John Masefield’s Gallipoli (1916).24 Significantly, his book was conceived as a work of propaganda. It was very successful and within a year of its publication seven impressions had been printed.25 Indeed, such was its effectiveness that Masefield was asked to write a similar volume on the Battle of the Somme.26 Masefield had visited Gallipoli only briefly during the campaign. He worked on a British Red Cross Society mission to supply equipment for the motor-boat ambulance service which shuttled between the peninsula and Mudros bay. He probably spent only a week in late September there. It was a less than romantic experience. He later wrote to his brother: Gallipoli was a crowded and disappointing time, and I got dysentery there, which lost me about a stone I was at Anzac with the Australians, and had in a brief time a full experience of war: lice, fleas, dysentery, shells, bombs, shrapnel, sniping and a chase by submarine.27 The origins of his work as a propagandist for Gallipoli lay in a lecture tour conducted immediately after the end of the campaign. Masefield had become famous as a poet in 1912, and at the suggestion of a New York firm he went on a lecture tour of America in January 1916. Masefield used the tour as an opportunity to present a British view of the war to a 79


neutral country whose sympathy was important to the war effort. It was also a chance to observe American public opinion, and Masefield found that he was frequently challenged about the failure at Gallipoli. Upon his return to Britain, he proposed to the Foreign Office that he should write an article to correct their enemy-inspired perceptions.28 Masefield wrote Gallipoli between April and July 1916, and it was published that September. In attempting to answer swiftly the campaign’s critics, Masefield faced a difficult task: ‘it was not easy to decide what could be done. A history was plainly impossible: the information was not there; and even if it had been, the passions raised by the campaign were running too high, among those concerned, for calm statement’.29 He was given access to some Brigade and Battalion Diaries by Major Daniel30 and Captain Atkinson of the Foreign Office. Masefield wrote of the process of writing the book and its end result, ‘I knew, as I wrote, that the book would be a sketch, faulty, full of little errors, from the difficulties in the obtaining of knowledge or criticism, but that the main lines of it would be true, as they are.’31 Masefield looked upon Gallipoli ‘not as a tragedy, nor as a mistake, but as a great human effort’.32 He emphasises the effort and the nature of the soldiers themselves rather than the fact of victory or defeat, whilst discussing the campaign’s strategy and achievements and describing the crucial battles more briefly. In doing so, Masefield does not stint in detailing the seamier details of life on the peninsula. Yet the manner in which the future poet laureate does so explains much about the overall effect of the book. Speaking of the ordinary soldier, Masefield wrote: Let him think, too, that never for an instant, in all that time, has he been free or even partly free from the peril of death in its most sudden and savage forms, and that hourly in all that time he has seen his friends blown to pieces at his side, or dismembered, or drowned, or driven mad, or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a handful of dynamite in a beef-tin, till their blood is caked upon his clothes and thick upon his face, and that he knows, as he stares at the hill, that in a few moments, more of that dwindling band, already too few, God knows how many too few, for the task to be done, will be gone the same way, and that he himself may reckon that he has done with life, tasted and spoken and loved his last, and that in a few minutes more he may be blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub, with perhaps his face gone and a leg and an arm broken, unable to move but still alive, unable to drive away the flies or screen the ever-dropping rain, in a place where none will find him, or be able to help him and then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain is shaking in his head, let him pull himself 80


together with his friends, and clamber up out of the trench, to go forward against an invisible enemy, safe in some unseen trench expecting him.33 Masefield’s war is horrible, but compelling. The rhythm of the language in this passage draws the reader on to the point where the individual overcomes his fear and moves onwards. It is not only through such battle scenes that Masefield makes his men heroic. His atavistic descriptions reinforce the impression of the campaign’s grandeur. He describes the men thus: ‘For physical beauty and nobility of bearing they surpassed any men I have ever seen; they walked and looked like the kings in old poems.’34 He makes allusions to the classical associations of the area referring to Gallipoli as Thracian Chersonese and the Dardanelles as the Hellespont. He paints a scene which appears to be ancient and unchanged as he writes ‘Samothrace and Euboea were stretched out in the sunset like giants watching the chess, waiting, it seemed, almost like human things, as they had waited for the fall of Troy and the bale-fires of Agamemnon.’35 Perhaps most effectively Masefield draws acute comparisons with The Song of Roland. Each chapter is preceded by a quotation from this poem which dates approximately from the time of the First Crusade and describes Charlemagne’s men fighting the Saracens.36 For example, Hamilton’s requests for reinforcements and their belated despatch is juxtaposed with the ruinous delay that results when Roland has to sound his horn three times before help is sent.37 Peter Vansittart has commented on Masefield’s defence of the campaign, He could romanticise men’s courage, ardour, endurance, and relate them to the gallantry of Roland at Roncevalles, but not their sufferings. He knew, in his own blood and bones, that pain, disease, gangrene and rot and wastage are vile and cannot be disguised by literature.38 But the vividness of these vile aspects served to underline the endurance and achievement of the men who were there. Therefore, despite Masefield’s personal experience of Gallipoli, the overall effect of his considerable literary talents coupled with his propagandist purpose served to produce ‘an intensely romantic book’39 that was hailed in a contemporary review as ‘an epic of heroism and endeavor’.40 Lord Esher privately wrote approvingly of Gallipoli, ‘It is on a level with Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”, only it is in prose.’41 Hamilton’s wife, Jean, wrote to Masefield with fulsome expressions of joy at his work: I have just read your wonderful book & you seem to me as The Angel who willed back the storm from the Sepulchre – and the 81


glory that shines forth from Gallipoli is dazzling. The Song of Roland with which your grand story is interwoven is just right – Must lift even an earth worm on to heights when he will be able to read mark and inwardly digest. Your wondrous epic – you have threaded your burning rubies on a thread of pure gold. It is the greatest comfort and relief to us that you have landed this glorious record on the world.42 Masefield’s work constitutes the high watermark of the British heroicromantic myth of Gallipoli. It gives the fullest possible expression to many important themes associated with the campaign: the classical associations of the area, notions of chivalry and heroism, the beauty of the location, the glorious achievements of men in war, patriotism. Masefield is frequently cited in other works on Gallipoli and these ideas surface time and again, but nowhere else do they have such power. Something of the pervasiveness of the heroic-romantic myth and its warm reception has thus been sketched out, but the reasons for this phenomenon remain to be explored. The British ability and readiness to couch the campaign in heroic-romantic terms had several sources. There is the cult of chivalry that idealised the knight of the Middle Ages, and the muscular Christianity that developed in the nineteenth century. Thus the generation of men who fought at Gallipoli had been brought up on martial stories that they were ready to compare to their own experiences. These were stories such as Hector and Achilles, Richard the Lionheart, the charge of the Light Brigade, Ivanhoe and so on.43 Crucially, such stories idealised heroic failures as often as victories. Other possible contributory sources of the heroic-romantic myth include late Victorian Britain’s glorification of death, and Romanticism’s obsession with death and decay. And to this list must be added the Hellenism that was central to an English public school education of this period. But it must also be asked, why was it possible to romanticise Gallipoli in this way and why did its participants choose to do so? Simply to point to the romantic frame of mind with which these men began their campaign is not a sufficient explanation of the continuing desire to romanticise Gallipoli. Various reasons may be suggested. Perhaps, oddly, the fact that Gallipoli was a defeat meant that it could provide an inclusive myth that all can celebrate, from ardent militarists to pacifists. Gallipoli’s physical separation from France and Flanders, its decisively different topology and climate are potent factors. Also of significance is the way in which it was fought: the extraordinary achievement of the initial amphibious attack, and the subsequent contrast with the anonymous, industrial killing of the Western Front made Gallipoli seem to some extent to be war as it should 82


be: noble, daring, imaginative, chivalrous and tragic. But perhaps it is its cost and timing that are most important here. As terrible as Gallipoli’s casualty figures are, these are dwarfed by those for the Western Front. In particular, in Britain, Gallipoli is overshadowed by the experience of the Battle of the Somme – July 1916 was a watershed, and all that came after it was tainted. But, conversely, the battles that came before – particularly Gallipoli – retain something of the sense of romance and excitement that characterised the earliest days of the war. As to the question, why did the participants of Gallipoli choose to romanticise it? The way in which Gallipoli has been portrayed may be compared to the middlebrow fiction studied by Rosa Maria Bracco, the authors of which continued to ascribe meaning to their experience and attempted to establish a sense of continuity with the past.44 Alternatively, it has already been seen that John Masefield romanticised the campaign as a propaganda exercise to distract the United States from the shame and disappointment of Britain’s defeat. Similarly, for many of the most prominent figures of the campaign, their portrayals of Gallipoli can be viewed as a personal exercise in saving face. If Gallipoli was nearly successful in foreshortening the war and the failure to do so was someone else’s fault, it makes that failure more palatable. This thought must be borne in mind in considering the writings of the men involved in its planning such as Hamilton, Churchill and Aspinall-Oglander. The British heroic-romantic myth may be briefly compared with the more familiar Australian (and New Zealand) Anzac legend. The basic outline of the legend is as follows. In landing at Anzac Cove and pushing recklessly up the steep gullies and ridges of the peninsula these ‘Anzacs’ demonstrated tremendous courage and initiative. This was their first major appearance as a nation on the world stage. It was the Australian’s ‘baptism of fire’, the ‘birth of a nation’. A sense of national identity was uncovered, combining courage and self-reliance, athleticism, fierce loyalty to mates, relaxed discipline, egalitarianism, dry humour and a wild streak – ingredients which made them formidable soldiers. In its own idiosyncratic way, the Anzac legend is a romantic war myth too. This understanding of the Australian Anzacs was created in large measure by Charles Bean. In his official history, for example, he set out not just to record facts and events dispassionately, but to commemorate the deeds of the Australian men who fought in the campaign. He idealised the Anzacs. He focused on the individual in order to demonstrate the heroism of the ordinary Australian, and in doing so, he argued that their particular attributes were something peculiar to Australia and its society.45 There is, of course, some overlap between the myth and the legend. Both emphasise the heroism of the men who fought at Gallipoli. The 83


Anzac legend also makes comparisons with ancient warriors – how often do books and articles on the Anzacs make use of Compton Mackenzie’s ringing phrases of how their beauty should be ‘celebrated in hexameters not headlines’?46 But whilst these references are made to ennoble the men of Anzac, the British purpose seems more often to be to ennoble the campaign itself. This distinction can be seen in the discussion of strategy. The Anzac legend scarcely discusses strategy; it is not important to its portrayal of a nation of heroic men. As the junior partners in an enterprise in which they proved themselves to be a formidable and resourceful fighting force, the Australians disclaim responsibility for failure and instead blame another: the British. But the British, the instigators and their defenders, must justify themselves, hence the preoccupation with strategy. The patterns of emphases suggested by the myth and the legend were established in the 1920s and 1930s in the published portrayals of men associated with the Gallipoli campaign. Furthermore, the myth and the legend continue to influence the way in which Gallipoli is portrayed and remembered. The influence of the Anzac legend on the post-1945 Australian historiography of Gallipoli is particularly clear. Charles Bean wrote about the individual man and his characteristics. Not only has Charles Bean himself attracted close attention from historians as a vital cultural figure, but often historians writing about Gallipoli from the Australian point of view have continued to focus on individuals – see, for example, Alistair Thomson’s oral histories, or Bill Gammage’s influential book, The Broken Years.47 In the British historiography of Gallipoli, the grandiloquent romantic language has died away with changing taste, but a romantic aura still surrounds the campaign and above all, the strategic aspects of Gallipoli continue to fascinate. Historians of the British at Gallipoli tend to write about questions of leadership, tactics and strategy. Of course, one can point to Steel’s and Hart’s Defeat at Gallipoli as a British history of the campaign which concentrates on the individual’s experience or Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Hell’s Foundations as a cultural history to be compared with Australian work on the memory of Gallipoli;48 but these are exceptions that prove the rule. The influence of the myth and the legend on broader perceptions of Gallipoli may also be discerned. The romance that they attach to the campaign goes some way to explaining why Gallipoli retains its interest – why is there a Gallipoli Association, but not a Mesopotamia or a Palestine Association?49 Is it significant that the renewed interest in the First World War of the 1960s was preceded by Alan Moorehead’s 1956 book on Gallipoli? However, the influence of the myth and the legend are somewhat uneven. The Anzac legend is far more powerful than the British version 84


of the campaign. This is because the Anzac legend elevates the story of Gallipoli – it transforms it from being a particularly interesting campaign of the First World War to become a myth of nationhood for Australia. The Anzac spirit has come to encapsulate what it is to be an Australian. The same cannot be said of the heroic-romantic myth of Gallipoli in Britain – here the greater part of the population remains untouched and largely ignorant of the campaign. This difference can be demonstrated through a comparison of the commemoration of Gallipoli in Australia and Britain. In Australia, Anzac Day is the most important day in the national calendar, it witnesses dawn services, marches and ceremonies attended by tens of thousands in towns and cities across the country.50 These are watched by millions more on TV. In Britain, there will be perhaps 21 wreath-laying ceremonies to commemorate the campaign this year, but at least four of them were inspired by an Australian or New Zealand connection. This is not the case, of course, with the ceremony at Eltham where this chapter began. The memorial lectures held there between 1985 and 2000 exemplify the different type of interest in Gallipoli in Britain. The lectures retained a loyal, committed and very knowledgeable following, but the audience was mostly people with a specific interest in Gallipoli – members of the Gallipoli Association, those with a link to the armed forces or to Australia and New Zealand, or those with a family connection. The highest attendance at the lectures was 350. This cannot be compared with the thousands who attend Anzac Day ceremonies in Australia and around the world – thousands make the journey to the peninsula each year, many of them young Australian backpackers. That Gallipoli retains its fascination for many is testament to the resonance of the heroic-romantic myth. This is an understanding of a campaign that has its roots in the popular militarism and Hellenism of pre-1914 Britain. It was set before the public via the literary talents of an unusually gifted group of men who happened to be involved in the campaign. They did so in order to defend their reputation and that of their campaign. Their efforts cannot compare with the nation-building power of the Anzac legend, yet together the legend and the myth have ensured that Gallipoli is not forgotten.

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5 ‘DOCILE SUPERNUMERARY’: A FRENCH PERSPECTIVE ON GALLIPOLI David Dutton

It is necessary to begin this chapter on a negative note. The Gallipoli campaign does not figure prominently in French perceptions of or historical studies about the First World War, certainly when compared with the never-ending fascination that the campaign has engendered among so many British writers. Even though one of the key themes of First World War historiography over the last couple of decades has been the importance of alliance politics for an understanding of war strategy,1 it remains possible to read some recent English language accounts of the campaign which make only passing reference to the fact that France participated both in the initial naval bombardment and the later amphibious operations.2 But it is not just the Anglo-Saxon world that has played down the French contribution. The French themselves have also been slow and reluctant to emphasise their role. The expedition was dutifully chronicled in the official French history of the war, but has otherwise been the victim of a studied neglect.3 It is perhaps indicative that there is only one monument in France – in Marseilles, the port of embarkation – dedicated specifically to the memory of the French soldiers who lost their lives in the campaign.4 Gallipoli survivors were not even represented in the victory march past held on 14 July 1918.5 Some belated recognition came in April 1930 with the naming of the rue des Dardanelles in Paris’s fashionable 17th arrondissement, but in general French campaign veterans, rather like British survivors of the Far-Eastern war a generation later, were left with the feeling that their efforts and sacrifices had not been recognised or appreciated. This in turn led to an especially close bond among the anciens combattants of the Gallipoli and Salonika expeditions, grouped together in two organisations, the Association nationale d’anciens combattants des Dardanelles and the Association des Poilus d’Orient, and to various attempts in the decades that followed to maintain their own 86

‘DOCILE SUPERNUMERARY’

distinctive ceremonies of commemoration. The most important of these was a campaign to mark 29 September, the date in 1918 when Bulgaria signed an armistice and the first obvious crack appeared in the unity of the Central Powers, as a date of equal importance to 11 November.6 Of course there are good and obvious reasons why the French can be forgiven for neglecting the side-shows of the Great War. These go back to their actual experience of warfare. Edmond Delage defined French priorities in a way which it is difficult to contradict: The national soil was invaded, ravaged; it must be liberated. Everything else was negligible or useless. Outside France and on the far seas the initiative was left to the English. France was neither able nor anxious to figure there in any capacity but that of loyal collaborator or mere supernumerary.7 Jacques Mordal concurs: ‘France, for obvious reasons, had no wish to get involved in this matter, overwhelmed as she was with concerns about the unfolding of military operations on her own territory.’8 Marc Ferro makes the same point more succinctly: ‘the British were less hectic, since their own territory had not been invaded’.9 At the very moment when the British proposed a diversion in the Eastern Mediterranean, the French were expecting a major German offensive on the Western Front to be launched in the near future. The dissipation of resources made no sense. But there are also good reasons why the French contribution to Gallipoli cannot be forgotten. French participation in all aspects of the campaign has already been mentioned. Four French battleships with a total of 14 12-inch guns took part in the bombardment of the outer forts on 19 February 1915. In the attempt to force the Dardanelles a month later four French battleships, the Gaulois, Charlemagne, Bouvet and Suffren took a prominent part. Of these, the Bouvet suffered an explosion as it was retiring. Observers believed that a shell had burst in its magazine. The ship sank in less than 2 minutes and more than 600 crewmen lost their lives. At the same time the Gaulois was badly damaged. French troops were to the fore when landings were attempted on 25 April. They made a brief diversion on the Asiatic side of the straits with a feint landing at Besika Bay, followed by a real one at Kum Kale. Varying casualty figures have been put forward for the campaign as a whole, but it seems unlikely that the figure of French deaths was less than 14,000. Perhaps four times this number were wounded. ‘Only one poilu out of three came back unscathed from the Dardanelles.’10 Only the enormity of concurrent losses on the Western Front makes these figures seem in any sense small. The figure of 10,000 dead Anzacs sets the French contribution to the campaign into some sort of comparative context. And, in the diplomatic field, the campaign clearly marked a watershed for France. The failure 87


to open up contact with Russia signalled the beginning of the end for what had been the mainstay of France’s alliance system since as long ago as the 1890s. So why has the campaign suffered such historiographical neglect? We need to consider two separate but interrelated ideas which for the sake of brevity may be described as ‘failure’ and ‘ownership’. First ‘failure’: in French writing Gallipoli has been presented as an unmitigated and, more importantly, an inevitable disaster. Little time has been spent considering the question which dominates much British historiography of whether the project, rather than being intrinsically flawed, was actually strategically sound, but let down by poor generalship and/or insufficient resources. The Gallic imagination has not on the whole been fired by the underlying possibilities, the lost opportunities, the might-have-beens, which captivated even the normally staid official British historian, Brigadier-General C.F. Aspinall-Oglander. As the latter wrote, ‘there is little doubt today that the idea of forcing the Straits with a view to helping Russia, eliminating Turkey from the war and rallying the Balkan states to the side of the entente, was one of the few great strategical conceptions of the World War’.11 French commentators, on the whole, have not been seduced by the idea that the indirect approach offered a profitable alternative to concentration on the Western Front. ‘I had always objected’, recalled General Joffre, French commander on the Western Front, ‘to our forces being wasted on exterior theatres.’12 ‘If the nation’s memory is deficient’, concluded Jean-Charles Jauffret, ‘it is because the sufferings on the Gallipoli peninsula do seem pointless. The expedition was characterised by a lack of preparation and a whole series of errors.’13 Writing of what he called ‘useless diversions’ Philippe Bernard concluded: above all, operations of this type necessitated reductions in men and material on the main front. Furthermore, in the circumstances of the time the map of the war favoured the Central Powers, who were well placed to respond to attacks on the periphery and whose geographical coherence meant that they did not have to overextend their lines, while the allies encountered very severe logistical problems.14 If the Allies really wanted to turn Turkey against Germany, concurred Edmond Delage, a decisive victory at Artois or in Champagne would have had a much bigger impact than operations at Gallipoli. Indeed, ‘the offensives of Artois and Champagne would possibly have been successful with the help of the 300,000 men who had already been sacrificed to the Dardanelles Expedition’.15 88


As regards ‘ownership’, French writers have been at pains to emphasise that Gallipoli was in conception and execution, faulty conception and faulty execution, a British operation. This was despite the fact that by a convention signed in London on 6 August 1914 it had been agreed that the French fleet should assume general direction of allied naval operations in the Mediterranean. As a result, Admiral Boué de Lapeyrère had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-French fleets. But on 26 January 1915 the French Navy Minister, Victor Augagneur, gave up his country’s right to control the attack on the Dardanelles and agreed that France should participate in a subsidiary role. Later Kitchener used the argument that the operation was primarily naval in character to justify British claims to the overall command of the land forces, an idea to which his French opposite number acceded. Here, of course, is the link between the two themes identified above, for France might have become somewhat more possessive about the campaign had it proved a success. Some features of France’s lack of ownership are obvious. The French were always in a state of numerical inferiority in the campaign – four French capital ships compared with 15 British in the initial bombardment of the outer forts and two French divisions against the British seven in the military operations. And there is no obvious French champion of the expedition, no French Churchill ready to proclaim Gallipoli as an operation of glittering strategic promise unfulfilled. Those Frenchmen, such as Clemenceau and Foch, who emerged from the war with the strongest reputations were, of course, committed ‘westerners’. But the lack of ownership goes deeper than this. One cannot read French accounts without a feeling that an attempt is being made positively to disown the whole thing. Lack of ownership was clear in the memoirs of leading French political and military figures as they were published in the decade after the end of the war. The memoirs of the President of the Republic, Raymond Poincaré, based on his contemporary diary, present a picture of France innocently going along with a British venture, but soon becoming increasingly disillusioned with the whole affair. On 21 January 1915, Alexandre Millerand, the French Minister of War and very much the political mouthpiece of General Joffre, visited London and tried to persuade the British to give up their projected sideshow. The British, however, and particularly Churchill, were not to be thwarted. On 23 January Poincaré writes: Augagneur informs us that the British admiralty is organising, independently of ourselves, an operation to the Dardanelles It is decided that the Minister of Marine shall go to London in a day or two to discuss with Mr Winston Churchill a proposal which must be closely studied before being accepted.16 89


Augagneur appears to have told Churchill that, according to reports supplied by French Naval Intelligence, nothing would be achieved by a naval attempt to force the Dardanelles which was not backed up by substantial military support. A week later Poincaré recorded: Mr. Churchill has been emphatic as to France associating herself in some degree with the operations which the Admiralty are diligently planning against the Dardanelles The thing is going to be thoroughly done, but there is considerable risk and no great certainty of success Augagneur, who has no great faith in the scheme, did not think it was his business to do anything to dissuade England, as it is England who is taking almost all the risks.17 Securing greater British participation in the forthcoming Champagne offensive as a quid pro quo may also have been a factor in this initial French response. But by mid-February the President had adopted a different tone: ‘The Dardanelles adventure, which Mr Winston Churchill has conceived, will become a mirage in which the Allies will think they detect victory.’18 A month later he had become even more critical. ‘The whole scheme is faulty, having been insufficiently thought out in London. It was a conception of the Admiralty too rapidly put into effect without due regard for military difficulties or diplomatic repercussions.’19 In the summer of 1915 Lord Bertie of Thame, the British Ambassador in Paris, commented on the extent to which the campaign was regarded as a British brain-child: The French are very sore on the subject of the Dardanelles Expedition. They say that the proposal was started by Mr Churchill without proper consideration by the Military Authorities; that he obtained the concurrence of the French Ministry of Marine by flattery The French also feel that the French and British military forces sent to the Dardanelles might, more usefully to France, have been directed to the fighting lines in Flanders. The Dardanelles Expedition is regarded by ordinary Frenchmen as undertaken in the interests of Russia materially, and of England politically, to secure her position in India and Egypt.20 By September General Joffre was using the issue of ownership as he tried to resist the sending of reinforcements to the faltering campaign: It was the English who led us to the Dardanelles. Today the abandonment of the attack would be an English defeat. Tomorrow, if we were to send reinforcements, and to claim the chief command, we should be faced, in case of failure, by a French disaster.21 90


Only in a limited sense, in fact, may the Gallipoli campaign be seen as a truly allied endeavour. If the British government has been heavily criticised for the lack of adequate planning and preparation that went into the expedition, particularly in advance of the crucial meeting of the War Council on 13 January 1915, it is scarcely surprising that no prior Anglo-French consultation took place. Hankey’s often quoted account well captures the manner in which the British reached their decision: The idea caught on at once. The whole atmosphere changed. Fatigue was forgotten. The War Council turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a ‘slogging match’ on the Western Front to brighter prospects, as they seemed in the Mediterranean. The Navy, in whom everyone had implicit confidence and whose opportunities had so far been few and far between, was to come into the front line.22 In such a situation the securing of French concurrence appears to have played no part. Little had changed by the time of the ill-fated naval assault of 18 March. As Paul Cambon later noted: I have received an interesting letter from [General Albert] d’Amade [commander of the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient]. I had asked him whether, as was said here, the ill-advised operation of 18 March which cost us the Bouvet had been discussed in a council of war. He replied that he had arrived at the Dardanelles on the 17th and that while visiting the English admiral on the same day he met General Ian Hamilton who came with instructions from London saying that land operations should not be attempted until naval action had been recognised as insufficient. That came from Winston Churchill who was still dreaming of forcing the straits without the help of a land army.23 This all reflected the reality of the allied coalition at this early stage of the war. In strict diplomatic terms an alliance only came formally into existence on 5 September 1914 when Britain, France and Russia signed the Pact of Paris, agreeing thereby not to conclude a separate peace with the enemy nor to define peace terms unilaterally. Yet no formal machinery existed within the alliance for devising diplomatic policy or military strategy. As Cambon commented of the decision-making processes in the allied capitals, ‘frivolity reigns in the councils of Paris and London and everything is decided on the spur of the moment’.24 Personal contacts did something to fill this void, but the first meeting of the heads of the British and French governments did not take place until 6 July 1915, by 91


which date of course the key decisions which gave birth to and shaped the Gallipoli campaign had already been taken. There were, moreover, good reasons why the British should have been keen to see this campaign as their project rather than as a possible testing ground for closer AngloFrench cooperation. A successful naval venture in the Eastern Mediterranean offered Britain the possibility of reasserting its traditional role in warfare as the principal sea power, while acting primarily as the paymaster of a continental coalition. Indeed, the assertion of naval supremacy would make it easier for Britain to break away from the sort of French domination of the coalition which was inevitable while hostilities remained largely restricted to military operations in France and Flanders. French writers are inclined to see matters in an exactly opposite sense. ‘Les Principes de Guerre published by General Foch in 1903’, writes Jean-Charles Jauffret, ‘advocating good intelligence, single-mindedness in action, economy of force, freedom of action and concentration of means were scrupulously applied by the Turko-Germans.’25 At the front itself the British and French forces seem to have cooperated reasonably amicably. The memoirs of the French naval commander, ViceAdmiral Guépratte, for example, are at pains to emphasise the close and friendly coordination which existed between the two navies. Guépratte wrote of the ‘spirit of loyal and confident comradeship’ which characterised relations between officers of the two nations.26 The official British historian paid tribute to the way in which the French accepted a loyal but subsidiary role: Having agreed for the sake of unity of command, and because of the superior strength of the British force, to place the French contingent under the supreme command of the British general, the French Government adhered most loyally to that arrangement. From first to last, too, the various commanders of the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient co-operated with the British Commander-in-Chief with unswerving loyalty; and it can here be acknowledged with warm gratitude that, thanks to their untiring efforts through the nine arduous months spent in the peninsula, there was never a single instance of friction.27 Such harmony, however, did not long survive the ending of the campaign, at least as far as the French were concerned. As early as August 1916 the historian Ernest Lavisse advised the Revue de Paris to turn down an article on the Dardanelles which contained a serious critique of Britain’s management of the campaign.28 In a study carried out in 1925 for the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre, Commandant Desmazes noted the constraints imposed by London but also stressed the tactical mistakes 92


made by the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir Ian Hamilton.29 By the time of Edmond Delage’s study of the campaign published in 1931 little remained of Anglo-French amity. ‘Never’, he concluded, were operations of such scope embarked on with such levity. There was no plan, either military or naval A few English politicians, seated round a table, carried away by the eloquence of the most brilliant of their number [Churchill], despatched hundreds of thousands of soldiers to storm an impregnable bastion, protected by the sea, by forts, by entrenchments, and by field artillery Thousands of men perished to no purpose. France only played – but played it gloriously – the role of a docile supernumerary.30 After reading Delage’s account and invited, somewhat inappropriately, to provide a preface to its English edition, Sir Ian Hamilton commented with thinly veiled irony: deep down lies the idée fixe that English soldiers were made to be used up by French Generals and that the more vividly the ineptitude of the Dardanelles is made to stand out against those other masterly performances in France and Salonika the less chance will there be of England ever again imagining she can play an independent part in war on European soil.31 Jacques Mordal took up Delage’s theme and wrote of a ‘total lack of imagination, not to say good sense’ on the part of the British Command.32 In the inter-war period the memory of the campaign’s failure was strong enough to deter French strategists from the notion that naval warfare was ever likely to be decisive and to preclude consideration of combined naval-military operations from French strategic planning. In the wake of Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940, when British forces attacked French warships leaving nearly 1,300 French dead, Anglo-French relations reached a new low point, and the propaganda of the Vichy regime made much retrospective use of the idea of French blood liberally shed by the British at the Dardanelles.33 Far from being an example of wartime cooperation and coordination, the campaign now stood as one more illustration of the treachery of perfidious Albion. Hamilton’s reference to the campaign at Salonika is interesting since it serves to remind us that, of the two eastern Mediterranean side-shows of the Great War, that in Macedonia enjoys the higher profile in the French scheme of things. Very roughly, in fact, British and French perceptions of Gallipoli and Salonika are the reverse of one another. This 93


was true at the time and, notwithstanding the general French scepticism about the strategy of indirect attack, has had some impact on later historiography. For the diplomatic historian, Albert Pingaud, for example, Salonika and not the Dardanelles was the great ‘might have been’ of the First World War.34 The question of ownership is again important. Salonika was as much a French enterprise as Gallipoli was British. Salonika had its champions among contemporary French politicians, most notably Aristide Briand and Paul Painlevé, in a way that Gallipoli did not. Indeed, the French response to the urgent Russian appeal for diversionary action made by their Commander-in-Chief, the Grand Duke Nicholas, in December 1914 focused on the possibility of an operation based on Salonika, and not the straits, with the ultimate aim of attacking the AustroHungarian Empire from the south. Such plans did not materialise for nearly a year, but when they did it was clearly France which led the way. As Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador in London, noted for the benefit of his brother Jules at the Quai d’Orsay, just as the French had been rushed into the Dardanelles operation without adequate study and investigation, so too Britain was led by France to Salonika without having time to consider the full implications of what it was doing.35 As the French were quick to recognise, if a further front was to be opened up in the Balkans that at Gallipoli had to be closed down. Resources were not sufficient to maintain both. ‘It is high time’, noted Poincaré at the beginning of October 1915, ‘to decide between Gallipoli, where the British cabinet took us, and Salonika where, so far, they have not favoured our landing.’36 Once the Salonika expedition got underway the fate of the Gallipoli campaign was sealed, even though the last allied troops were not finally withdrawn until January 1916. Indeed, the sudden enthusiasm in Paris for mounting an expedition to Salonika was in part a reflection of a complete loss of confidence in the effectiveness of the Dardanelles adventure. Scratching around for some positive achievements to be attributed to the whole sorry Gallipoli story, Jacques Mordal cites the inception of the Salonika venture – ‘a by-product if I dare say it of the Dardanelles campaign’ – and draws attention to the breakthrough finally achieved on that front in the late summer of 1918 as a significant factor in the Allies’ ultimate victory, and a contrast with the barren record of the Gallipoli adventure.37 That final victory, germinating in the Balkans, offered some sort of compensation for the Dardanelles disaster. With the collapse of Bulgaria and then Turkey, writes Jean-Charles Jauffret, the way to Vienna was opened, and only the armistice of 11 November checked the triumphant march of the Armée d’Orient, an army in rags but whose irresistible impetus had taken it nearly 700 km. in less than five weeks, a march unequalled by any other 94


Allied army in the war. On 13 November 1918, a Franco-British squadron lay off Constantinople; the bloodbath of Gallipoli had been avenged.38 Finally, it is worthy of note that in the autumn of 1939 it was to a landing at Salonika rather than a renewed attempt to force the straits that the French government gave serious consideration as a way to break the apparent stalemate of the Phoney War.39 Against this background it is probably not surprising that the single most important piece of revisionist writing on the French contribution to the Gallipoli campaign should have come from the pen of a nonFrench writer. George Cassar’s book The French and the Dardanelles was published 30 years ago, one of the first works on the First World War to make use of the then newly opened French archives for this period. In it he suggested that France played a more active and conscious role than that of a ‘docile supernumerary’. France may have been a reluctant participant at Gallipoli but its decision to take part was well grounded in French political and strategic considerations rather than just a magnanimous gesture to support Britain, ‘sans pensée propre’ to use Jacques Mordal’s phrase.40 Cassar shows that while Churchill did not object to French participation in the original naval assault, he did not actively seek it either. As the First Lord wrote to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey on 24 January 1915, ‘We are quite capable of conducting the Dardanelles operation without any assistance and I only suggested French co-operation out of loyalty and politeness.’41 Similarly, once it was realised that the Navy on its own could not secure the required breakthrough, French military cooperation was not invited, nor was it particularly desired. ‘I hope we shall not be saddled with a French contingent for the Dardanelles’, confided Kitchener.42 The British probably believed that they had no need of French assistance in securing their military objectives. The Turks were seen to occupy a much lower plane of existence than Britain’s other enemies and it would not require any major military effort to defeat them. The Ottoman Empire would probably disintegrate into internal revolution under the impact of minimal British pressure. As Grey told his colleagues at the War Council on 28 January, ‘the Turks would be paralysed with fear when they heard that the forts were being destroyed one by one’.43 Granted such beliefs, however misplaced, a French presence was more likely to complicate than to simplify matters from a British point of view. It was, Cassar argues, the French themselves who believed that, notwithstanding the severity of the military crisis in France itself, they could not afford to let the British proceed on their own. Cassar shows that the French feared that the collapse of the Turkish Empire would reduce the relative strength of France in the Near East. The lack of a French presence in the expedition would allow Britain to establish itself in the 95


Levant and provide a base for a post-war rival in an area where France believed it should enjoy cultural and economic primacy. ‘In case Turkey was dismembered the rulers of the Third Republic hoped to plant the tricolour on Alexandretta, Palestine, Syria and Cilicia.’44 French suspicions about its Ally’s intentions must have been aroused by the way in which Britain announced the annexation of Cyprus and Egypt, hitherto formally parts of the Ottoman Empire, in November 1914. The British decision the following March to promise Constantinople to Russia in the post-war settlement, a decision to which the French only reluctantly acceded, can only have exacerbated the situation. Thus Paris was much more interested in the political than the military aspects of the campaign. Few in France believed that it would contribute significantly to the ultimate outcome of the war. As Navy Minister Augagneur explained to a parliamentary commission in 1917: Not to take part in the operation would have been, in the event that it succeeded, to witness the appearance of the English fleet alone before Constantinople. For us French who are deeply engaged in the Orient, as you are aware, it would have been a very painful renunciation of our national pride and perilous to our interests.45 But France’s commitment to the campaign remained fragile and was always subject, especially as far as Joffre was concerned, to the changing situation on the Western Front. When reports came in that the Russian front was crumbling and that large numbers of German troops might soon be transferred to the West, it was not long before Paul Cambon was begging the British government not to divert the 29th Division from its original intended destination in France. Now it is true that the French attitude did change and that France appeared to become more enthusiastic about the expedition, on military grounds, just at the time that most British opinion was turning away from it. Cassar shows that, at a meeting of the French Cabinet on 22 July, the apparent impossibility of securing a breakthrough on the Western Front converted ministers to an indirect strategy and led to a decision to send large-scale reinforcements to the east. Russian manpower would ultimately be the only way to secure numerical superiority over the enemy in the main theatres, so the Gallipoli operations, by reopening communication with Russia, could now be seen as supportive of, rather than detrimental to, a Western Front strategy. But winning the war was never the whole story. René Viviani’s relatively fragile government was also anxious to seek gainful employment in a far-away theatre for the politically influential General Maurice Sarrail, whose continued presence on French soil posed a clear threat to Joffre’s 96


ascendancy. Indeed, the speed with which this French enthusiasm for a reinforced Gallipoli expedition was transferred during the course of September 1915, under the impact of a renewed threat to Serbia, to the idea of a new front based on the Greek port of Salonika showed the continuing priority of political considerations. Either campaign would serve the purpose of getting Sarrail out of France. But an expedition to Macedonia under French command and representing a specifically French initiative would be better able to pursue French ambitions in the Near East than the British-dominated Gallipoli campaign.46 An entry in Maurice Hankey’s diary for 30 September well captures the way in which the substitution of Salonika for the straits also marked the return of the initiative to the French within the wartime alliance: ‘Just before the meeting [of the Dardanelles Committee] we heard that the French had actually ordered a division to leave the Dardanelles [for Salonika] – so eventually it was decided that our division should conform its movements to the French.’47 In conclusion, the French role at Gallipoli was far more important than is implied in Delage’s dismissive phrase ‘docile supernumerary’. That importance has, however, as yet received insufficient recognition in French historiography. Further studies are needed to produce an integrated approach to the military, political and diplomatic history of the campaign. Such research will come up against the problems which confront all investigations into the political and diplomatic history of France during the Great War – the difficulty of tracing the decision-making process at the highest level of the French government and the destruction of Foreign Ministry archives. No minutes of the French cabinet were taken during the lifetime of the Third Republic, while during the war itself Quai d’Orsay documents were divided from the outset into two basic categories, those concerned with the prosecution of the war and those relating to war aims and the future peace. Approximately 80 per cent of the second category, which may well have contained material relevant to French involvement at Gallipoli, appears to have been destroyed during the Second World War. The effort, however, may yet pay dividends. Certainly, much further archival material, particularly in terms of private papers, has become available since the publication of Professor Cassar’s pioneering work.

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6 GALLIPOLI AND IRELAND Keith Jeffery

The late John O’Brien, Irishman and historian of Australia, used to assert that proportionately more Irishmen died at Gallipoli than Australians. Naturally he said this in a deliberate effort to stir up discussion, which it generally did, but the provocatively challenging nature of the allegation tells us something about the relative historical – and, no doubt, emotional – significance of Gallipoli to Australia and Ireland. The assertion, in fact, is not true, though the proportional difference between Irish and Australian fatalities is rather less than might be expected. For the Australians (whose statistics are more reliably recorded than those of the Irish), some 8,141 officers and men died serving in the Dardanelles theatre of operations. Allowing that there were 59,330 deaths among those serving in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War, the proportion of Gallipoli deaths to total war fatalities is 1:7.1 Tom Johnstone has calculated that 3,411 Irishmen were killed in action or died of wounds at Gallipoli.2 Assuming 30,216 men of Irish birth fell serving with the British forces,3 the Irish ratio of Gallipoli dead to total dead is 1:8. While statistics like these are quite unreliable, and certainly susceptible to all sorts of analysis, the fact remains that, for reasons largely unconnected with the campaign itself, Gallipoli is disproportionately well remembered in Australia, and disproportionately poorly remembered in Ireland. Direct Irish military involvement with Gallipoli falls into two distinct parts: first, that of Regular British Army units and, second, concerning those Irishmen who had volunteered since August 1914 for service in the 10th (Irish) Division, one of Kitchener’s ‘New Armies’.4 Among the regular units serving with the British 29th Division, two Irish battalions, the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers, took part in the landings at V Beach, just east of Cape Helles, on Sunday, 25 April 1915, while a third battalion, the 1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, landed at X Beach, to the north-west of the Cape. The mixed experiences of these units matched that of the British (and, of course, British Empire) invasion forces as a whole. While the Inniskillings landed ‘without a casualty’,5 their southern Irish colleagues suffered devastating losses. 98

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Four companies of the Munsters and one of the Dublins, along with two companies of the 1st Hampshire Regiment and some other troops, were positioned in the ex-collier River Clyde, which was run onto the beach at the start of the landing, the men disembarking from holes cut into the side of the vessel. The remaining companies of the Dublins landed directly onto the shore from open boats. Among the most dramatic eyewitness accounts of the landings are those of two Munster Fusiliers’ company commanders: Guy Nightingale and G.W. Geddes. Writing to his mother on 1 May, Nightingale recounted that ‘ourselves and the Dublins got most awfully badly mauled’: At 7-30 a.m. the Dublins set off in open boats to their landing place which was the same as ours. As each boat got near the shore, snipers shot down the oarsmen. The boats began to drift, and machine gun fire was turned on to them. You could see the men dropping everywhere, and of the first boat-load of 40 men only 3 reached the shore, all wounded.6 Geddes reflected on the comparison between Gallipoli and the Western Front. ‘Men who were at Mons and La Bassé’, he reported, ‘say it was sheer child’s play to what we’ve gone through here’. His account described the difficulties the Munsters had getting ashore from the River Clyde, which was not close enough for the men to wade in: We were shot down like flies, and, as it then meant swimming ashore, many of my men were drowned, as the weight of the packs we had to carry was staggering, 200 rounds of ammunition, 3 days’ rations, overcoats and mackintosh sheets. It was the most ghastly Hell you can imagine, and you might just as well have walked the plank. You can form no idea of the horror of the undertaking – two splendid regiments practically wiped out.7 So great were the losses of the Munsters and the Dublins – ‘we both left England 1,000 strong and together we are 8 officers and 770 men!’8 – that the two units were temporarily combined into a composite battalion named the ‘Dubsters’. Nightingale’s narrative reflects both the horror and the exhilaration of the operation. Writing to his sister on 4 May, he took up the story of the landing to the point where his soldiers were clearing the village of Sedd-el-Bahr on 26 April. Having spent most of the day lying exposed to sniper fire in the blazing sun, the men were, he claimed, pleased to be ordered to advance on Hill 141 above the village. ‘At 4.30 we were ordered to fix bayonets and take the hill’, he wrote. 99


My company led the attack with the Dublins and we had a great time. We saw the enemy which was the chief thing and the men all shouted and enjoyed it tremendously. It was a relief after all that appalling sniping.9 Having helped consolidate the British position, during the night of 1/2 May the Dubsters had to help repel a strong Turkish counter-attack: When dawn broke, we saw them in hundreds retiring and simply mowed them down. We took 300 prisoners and could have taken 3,000 but we preferred shooting them. All the streams were simply running blood and the heaps of dead were a grand sight. Everyone [Nightingale informed his sister] is very cheery and well but desperately tired and exhausted.10 Nightingale echoed Geddes’ view that service in Gallipoli was much worse than France. ‘Lots of fellows are going off their heads out here’, he wrote at the beginning of June, after he had enjoyed a week on a hospital ship convalescing from malaria, ‘but personally I’ve never felt better in my life. I eat and sleep like a pig and feel most awfully cheery.’11 Back on the peninsula he noted the arrival of replacement Territorial officers, who knew ‘nothing about soldiering’, but were ‘very keen’. With that combination of cheery reportage and gruesome eye for detail which makes his family correspondence so gripping, he told his mother that one of these new officers ‘was hit last night during dinner and fell into the soup, upsetting the whole table, and bled into the tea-pot making an awful mess of everything, and’, he complained, ‘we finally didn’t get dinner till after dark’.12 Nightingale’s account surely reflects the very common ostentatious devil-may-care attitude cultivated by many junior officers, especially Regulars.13 Himself an Englishman, with a pukka public school (Rugby) and Sandhurst background, there is little to indicate anything specifically Irish about his or his men’s experience. At one point he thanked his mother for sending him news of the Munsters’ 2nd battalion, at the battle for Aubers Ridge in France, 6–9 May 1915, when it lost 19 officers, including the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel V.G.H. Rickard, and 374 men in one afternoon.14 ‘It was’, he wrote, ‘awful seeing Rickard’s name as killed’, adding, ‘they did splendidly and it’s a great thing to be in an Irish regiment’.15 National identity seems even more elusive for the Dublin Fusiliers. Following the ‘V’ Beach landings, their Divisional commander, Major-General Aylmer Hunter Weston, congratulated the survivors on the terrific achievement of their success. ‘It was’, he affirmed (as reported in the regimental history), ‘done by men of real and true British fighting blood. Well done, the Dubs!’16 Elsewhere in 100


the 29th Division, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, had more of a readily identifiable Irish identity. Their brigade, in which they were joined with a Welsh, a Scottish and an English battalion, was accordingly known as the ‘Union brigade’.17 The Turks, moreover, appear to have taken their ethnic measure. On the night of 1 May, they ‘attacked with determination and in great force, shouting as they rushed up to our trenches, “Eeneeskeeling, Eeneeskeeling, do not fire”’. Naturally the Irish soldiers ignored the call: ‘rapid fire did dire execution at a range of from twenty to thirty yards. In the morning the ground in front of our trench was piled high with the dead’.18 The Irishness of the 10th (Irish) Division, which took part in the landings at Suvla Bay in August 1915, was less easily ignored. Three New Army divisions were raised in Ireland: the 10th, the 16th (Irish) and the 36th (Ulster) Divisions. Of these, the latter two were the most explicitly ‘political’, with the 16th generally being seen as representing Catholic nationalist volunteers, and the 36th comprising Ulster unionists, most of whom had served already in the Ulster Volunteer Force, a local militia raised to resist by force the imposition of ‘Home Rule’ on the Protestant north-east of Ireland.19 In the polarised Ireland of 1914, when even common enlistment to the British war effort was influenced by political considerations, the 10th Division had a slightly ambiguous status.20 The first of the Irish New Army Divisions to be formed (it was authorised with other K1 divisions on 14 August 1914), in recruiting terms it seems to have suffered from having ‘no political colour or complexion’.21 Although some recruits actually chose to enlist in the division because it was the first formed,22 by the end of August 1914 it was by a long way the weakest of the six K1 divisions. After the Irish nationalist leader John Redmond threw himself behind recruiting in September 1914, the 16th Division began to fill up quite satisfactorily, so much so, that in June 1915 1,200 of its recruits were transferred to the 10th Division to help bring it up to strength. Most of these men were nationalists from the north of Ireland, and Redmond thenceforward began to take a close interest in the division. He remarked that the formation was ‘the first definitely Irish Division that ever existed in the British Army’, and its creation marked ‘a turning point in the history of the relations between Ireland and the Empire’.23 In addition to the men from the 16th (Irish) Divison, some drafts from England were used to fill up the division. Nevertheless, the formation’s historian, Bryan Cooper, calculated that 70 per cent of the men and 90 per cent of the officers were Irish.24 The division began training in Ireland, but at the end of May 1915 it left for England. Reporting on its march through Dublin, the Irish Times (a unionist newspaper) observed that it had drawn men ‘from all classes of the community and from all quarters of the city, from the fashionable centres and from the slums’.25 One part of the division, ‘D’ Company, of the 7th Royal Dublin 101


Fusiliers, became especially celebrated. Initially raised by F.H. Browning, President of the Irish Rugby Football Union, and nick-named ‘the Footballers’, this was a ‘Pals’ company ‘consisting of young men of the upper and middle classes, including among them barristers, solicitors, and engineers’, men, concluded the division historian, of ‘breeding and education’.26 Confirming the view of the Irish Times, however, another company in the same battalion was composed of Dublin dockers, many of them ‘Larkinites’, after the charismatic trade union leader, James Larkin.27 In July 1915 the 10th Division sailed from England to Egypt. At Malta one local produce pedlar ‘recognised us as the Irish Division, and shouted – “Irish! Irish! My father Irish – from Dundee!”’28 By dawn on 7 August the division was in ships lying off Suvla Bay. The experience of the 31st Infantry Brigade, comprising two battalions of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and two of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, seems typical of the muddle and disorganisation that accompanied the whole Gallipoli operation. On arrival at Suvla Bay, the Brigade GOC, Brigadier-General F.F. Hill, boarded HMS Jonquil to report to the Corps Commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford. As laconically related in the brigade war diary, Stopford ‘seemed surprised to hear the GOC had received no operation orders’.29 In an account prepared for the official historian of the Gallipoli campaign some dozen years later, Hill recalled Stopford as having ‘originally intended to land my troops at “A” Beach, but that owing to the Lighters grounding off shore at that spot, they were now to be landed at “C” Beach – that I was if possible to get into touch with GOC XIth Div. and act on his orders. He could not tell me the position of HQ XIth Div’.30 Based on this highly unsatisfactory briefing, Hill had to see to the deployment of some 3,000 men, in action for the very first time and wholly untrained for amphibious landings, under hostile rifle and shrapnel fire, in line with orders from an identified but unlocated divisional commander. That he managed all this with only minor casualties, testifies to the excellence of his own staff work and the resolve of his troops. Hill’s orders from the GOC XI Division, Major-General Frederick Hammersley, were to take Chocolate Hill, a mile or so inland. Joined by some units from the 30th Brigade, including the 7th Dublins, and after some delays, Hill’s troops, along with some from the 11th Division, eventually took the hill in the early evening. Hill was unstinting in his praise for the raw 10th Division troops: landed straight into action and under fire for the first time, in an unknown country to them, in the hottest season of the year, and after but a rapid and elementary training of under a year, heavily loaded and short of water, officers and men behaved throughout the day magnificently.31 102


At one point ‘the Footballers’ had dashed forward ‘for all the world like a wild forward rush at Lansdowne Road’, but the Dublin Pals also lost 22 men, including Lieutentant Ernest L. Julian, Reid Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin, who died of wounds the following day.32 Fighting a week later to take the high Kiretch Tepe Sirt ridge to the north of the landing ground, the Pals suffered heavier casualties. In a bayonet charge against Turkish bombers ‘almost everyone in the charge was killed or wounded’. At roll-call on 16 August only one officer (Lieutenant Ernest Hamilton a Trinity College Dublin medical student) from ‘D’ Company was present, and he was wounded in the foot.33 Reflecting on these losses within a year of the evacuation of Gallipoli, Bryan Cooper, who himself served on the peninsula with the 5th Connaught Rangers, observed that ‘the 10th Division had been shattered, the work of a year had been destroyed in a week, and nothing material had been gained. Yet all was not in vain. It is’, he continued in an understandably gloomy tone, ‘no new thing for the sons of Ireland to perish in a forlorn hope and a fruitless struggle; they go forth to battle only to fall, yet there springs from their graves a glorious memory for the example of future generations’. The battle at Kiretch Tepe Sirt ‘was a little-known fight in an unlucky campaign, but if the young soldiers of the 10th Division who died there added a single leaf to Ireland’s crown of cypress and laurel, their death was not in vain’.34 Elsewhere on Gallipoli, Cooper’s own unit, and the other battalions of the 29th Brigade, were detached from the 10th Division and deployed alongside the New Zealand and Australian Division, under the command of Major-General Sir Alexander Godley, an Irishman who had originally been commissioned into the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.35 In one of the last big Gallipoli attacks, the eventually unsuccessful effort to capture Hill 60, from 21 to 29 August, the 5th Connaught Rangers distinguished themselves by gaining their first objective of the Kabak Kuyu wells at the foot of the hill, and later briefly, at great cost, holding part of the crest itself. Before the battle, Godley urged them on with an appeal to their Irishness. He looked to the Rangers to take the wells ‘in a fashion that was known to all, by the cold steel and accompanied by an Irish yell. His words’, reported the battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel H.F.N. Jourdain, ‘appealed to the gallant Irish soldiers to whom they were addressed’.36 After the battle, Godley again remarked on the Irish qualities of the Connaughts. Congratulating the survivors, he said, ‘Personally, as an Irishman who has served in two Irish Regiments, it gives me the greatest pride and pleasure that the Regiment should have performed such gallant deeds under my command’.37 While to Colonel Jourdain’s indignation, the overall commander at Gallipoli, Sir Ian Hamilton, ignored the Connaughts’ work and credited their achievements solely to the 29th Indian Brigade,38 there seems at least 103


to have been some appreciation of them among Anzacs. In his painstaking account of the 5th Battalion, Jourdain reports that in November 1915 a party of convalescing Australian soldiers visited the House of Commons, where they were introduced to John Redmond. Redmond asked them if they had seen anything of the 10th Division, and they replied that indeed they had, for a portion of the 10th was attached to their division for a time, and they went on to express the highest admiration for the fighting qualities of the Irish soldiers. One charge by the Connaught Rangers was, they said, the finest thing they had seen in the war.39 Whatever the views of either Hamilton or any Anzac soldiers, the exploits of Irish troops at Gallipoli were abundantly celebrated in a number of contemporaneous accounts, written by participants, journalists and others. Henry Hanna’s labour-of-love account of the Dublin Pals, completed in October 1916, stood as a memorial to his social and professional friends and colleagues.40 In 1916 a popular account of Irish participation in the war, What the Irish Regiments Have Done, by S. Parnell Kerr, was published: 40 of the book’s 200 pages were devoted to Gallipoli, with separate sections on the landings at ‘V’ Beach and Suvla Bay. Observing that ‘with the possible exception of W beach’, where the Lancashire Fusiliers were badly knocked about, Kerr wrote that ‘V’ Beach was ‘the most difficult of all the landings’. It followed, therefore, that ‘all men and women of the Irish race must be proud to think that it was the Dublins and the Munsters – the gallant lads of Dublin and the South of Ireland – who were chosen by Sir Ian Hamilton for this desperate enterprise’.41 Kerr went on to argue that the subsequent performance of the Irish soldiers would powerfully influence their overall reputation. If it ever happened, he said, that ‘detractors of the Irish soldiers of the Empire’ spoke ‘slightingly of the services Irish soldiers have rendered to the Empire in this great crisis of her fate, let the sacrifice of the Dublins and the Munsters on V Beach on this spring morning of 1915 be their answer, and shame them for ever into silence’.42 While the V Beach exploits had been achieved by professional soldiers, moving on to Suvla, Kerr asked how would the New Army respond to the challenges? ‘Would’, he asked, ‘the undergraduates, the merchants, and the many thousand of Irish lads from other ranks of Irish life emerge from the dreadful ordeal of courage which a modern battlefield imposes with as much success and honour as their comrades of the old professional battalions? That’, he affirmed confidently, ‘was the question which trembled on the lips of Irishmen and Irishwomen when they heard that the 10th Division had been ordered to the Dardanelles’.43 His answer (as perhaps might be predicted) resoundingly celebrated the Irish martial prowess of these citizen soldiers, who 104


‘won immortal glory for the New Army of Ireland’. When he read ‘the broken records of the glorious achievements of the 10th Division in those terrible days’, Kerr felt ‘the poignant tragedy of it all’, and he was ‘proud to be of the race which produces such heroes’.44 Another journalist, Michael MacDonagh, who wrote two propagandist accounts of Irish involvement in the war,45 narrated the same events in very similar vein, again emphasising the special Irish qualities of the soldiers. During the landings at V Beach, MacDonagh mused whether the ‘hitherto gay and irresponsible young Munsters’, now serious, were ‘sad for their shattered dreams of a safe return to Ireland’. But an officer passed among them saying, ‘our time has come, boys, and we must not falter. Remember we are Munsters; and, above all, remember Ireland.’46 Turning to the 10th Division, MacDonagh, having described their losses during the capture of Chocolate Hill, asserted that ‘the immediate inspiration of their bravery was love of Ireland’.47 The alleged special verve of Irish soldiers is a common theme in accounts of the fighting. S. Parnell Kerr asserted that the Dublins and the Munsters were chosen for V Beach precisely ‘because it has been proved over and over again that the Irish soldier, with his high courage and contempt for danger, his dash and initiative, is peculiarly fitted for work of this kind’.48 The New Army men were, apparently, no different. Reflecting on the 7th Dublins’ advance under the heights of Sari Bair, MacDonagh reported that an Australian soldier had observed that while English battalions would cautiously advance in a series of rushes, ‘the Dublins made their way over the uneven, hillocky ground at a run. To move slowly, with proper caution’, added MacDonagh, ‘would be torture to their Irish nature, impatient and ardent, in such circumstances’.49 The regimental historian of the Leinster Regiment, Lieutenant-Colonel F.E. Whitton, Irishman and graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, identified the Leinsters’ response to a Turkish attack on Rhododenron Spur on 11 August as typical of their ‘race’: ‘With a ringing yell the line of bayonets surged forwards against the foe, to prove once again that to attack is not only the best defensive policy, but is that best suited to the Irish temperament’.50 The patriotic celebration of Irish military prowess in the works of Kerr, MacDonagh and others contrasts with the perceived neglect of Irish exploits in official reports from Gallipoli. There was, for example, no specific mention of the Dublins or Munsters in the despatches concerning the 29th Division landings. In December 1916 John Redmond complained that there had been a ‘systematic suppression’ of the service of Irish troops, which had in turn discouraged Irish recruitment. Speaking in the parliamentary debates about conscription in Britain, Irish nationalist MPs spoke of Irish lives needlessly being thrown away at Gallipoli by hopeless British generals.51 In September 1915, after Redmond received 105


a report describing how the 10th Division had been sent to their landing inadequately prepared and equipped, and had suffered grave casualties as a result, he wrote to Kitchener ‘to see that our Irish soldiers receive fair play and proper recognition’.52 Redmond was only expressing privately a widely – and passionately – held belief in Ireland that Irish soldiers had been ill-used in Gallipoli. It was, indeed, not unlike some contemporary Australian reactions to the losses sustained by Anzac units. Back home in nationalist Ireland (at least) the impact of Gallipoli seems to have marked the beginning of a progressive public disillusionment with the war. In her memoirs, the popular novelist Katharine Tynan recalled ‘Suvla Bay, when blow after blow fell day after day on one’s heart. So many of our friends had gone out in the 10th Division to perish at Suvla. For the first time’, she continued, ‘came bitterness, for we felt that their lives had been thrown away and that their heroism had gone unrecognised.’ She said that ‘Dublin was full of mourning, and on the faces one met there was a hard brightness of pain as though the people’s hearts burnt in the fire and were not consumed’.53 Eimar O’Duffy identified a similar impact among the Catholic middle class in his 1919 novel, The Wasted Island. When Bernard Lascelles returns to Dublin towards the end of August 1915, ‘Suvla Bay had been fought and won, and that strip of sun-baked beach had cost the quenching of laughter in thousands of Irish homes. Half the people he knew were in mourning.’54 In his semi-autobiographical novel, Changing Winds, principally set in Ireland during the war (and first published in 1917), St John Ervine has a couple of characters discuss the despatch of Admiral Sir John de Robeck, the British naval commander at Gallipoli, and an Irish unionist.55 John Marsh (a committed nationalist) produced a despatch written by a British admiral in which was narrated the story of the landing at Suvla Bay and the beaches about Gallipoli: ‘He mentioned the name of every regiment that took part in the landing, except the two Irish regiments that did the hardest work and suffered the most deaths. I suppose that was an accident, Henry, a little oversight!’ ‘You don’t think he left them out on purpose, do you?’ ‘I do. So does every man in Ireland, Unionist or Nationalist. You see, we know this man in Ireland he’s a well-known Unionist a bigot and there isn’t a person in Ireland who doesn’t believe that he deliberately left the names of Dublins and the Munsters out of his despatch ’56 In contrast to this evident neglect, Michael MacDonagh himself was confident that the events at Suvla and elsewhere would always be remembered in Ireland. ‘That dread Peninsula ’, he wrote, ‘like a fearful 106


monster, had devoured the young men of Ireland’. But ‘because of those dead Gallipoli will ever be to the Irish race a place of glorious pride and sorrow’.57 Bryan Cooper believed that ‘Ireland will not easily forget the deeds of the 10th Division’.58 Yet it seems Ireland did precisely that. The ‘memory’ of the Great War, particularly in nationalist Ireland, while well served by commemorations throughout Ireland up to 1939, faded extremely rapidly after 1945, so much so, that one scholar in the mid-1960s wrote of there being a ‘national amnesia’ concerning not just Gallipoli but the whole First World War.59 The republican Easter Rising of 1916 came to dominate the Irish history of the Great War years, and the political revolution, which the Rising precipitated, swept away or, worse, made irrelevant, the very people – southern unionists, pro-British, so-called ‘Castle’60 Catholics, and even Redmondite nationalists – who might have sustained the public memory of the Irish at Gallipoli. What the campaign did produce includes a few references in Irish prose and poetry of the war and the odd ‘Gallipoli’ carved on Great War memorials. Looking back in February 1917, Francis Ledwidge, who had served at Kiretch Tepe Sirt with the Inniskillings (‘I would not have missed it for worlds’, he declared.61 ), wrote a poem, ‘The Irish in Gallipoli’, which stressed the decent impulses which had propelled himself and men like him to the ‘Aegean cliffs’: ’Tis not for lust of glory, no new throne This thunder and this lightning of our power Wakens up frantic echoes, not for these Our Cross with England’s mingles, to be blown At Mammon’s threshold. We but war when war Serves Liberty and Keeps a world at peace.62 In 1921 G.C. Duggan, a civil servant by profession, published a slim volume of lyrical verse, The Watchers on Gallipoli, dedicated ‘To my brothers George and Jack, 10th (Irish) Division, killed at Suvla, 16th August, 1915 – This Memorial’. In the final poem, ‘The Rearguard’ – ‘March away, my brothers, softly march away, / Lest our dead will hear us, softly take your way’ – Duggan drew together brothers from ‘the wide plains of Southland’, from the Sussex hills and Scottish Highlands, and ‘brothers from the West’, scented with the gorse from ‘soft Irish hills’ and who ‘loved your Island’s honour best’. March away, my brothers; softly march away; The waves are hissing round us, the East is turning grey. The coast, the cliffs are silent. Gone are we all, but they Watch ever in the stillness that falls o’er Suvla Bay.63 107


But not all Irish people thought of Gallipoli in such elegaic terms. Some, indeed, believed that there was nothing at all to celebrate about either the campaign or any Irish part in it. Dora Sigerson Shorter, a passionate Irish republican, slipped a reference to Gallipoli into a poem, ‘Loud shout the flaming tongues of war’, written during the war, in which she celebrated the Irish dead of the 1916 Easter Rising and excoriated those who had fallen under the spell of ‘the Lion’ – England – and misguidedly gone to fight in the Great War. In the poem the martyrs of the 1916 Rising are mourned by ‘Grannia Wael’ (Granuaile) – Grace O’Malley – a legendary late sixteenth-century pirate captain and prototype Irish patriot. Ah, Grannia Wael, thy stricken head Is bowed in sorrow o’er thy dead, Thy dead who died for love of thee, Not for some foreign liberty. Shall we betray when hope is near, Our Motherland whom we hold dear, To go to fight on foreign strand, For foreign rights and foreign land?64 Thus Suvla Bay is dismissed as no more than a ‘foreign strand’, while the ‘rights of small nations’, ‘gallant little Belgium’ and so on are merely ‘foreign rights and foreign land’. The notion of the First World War being simply a futile and costly imperial conflict, in which Irish lives (among others) were needlessly wasted, is one that remains fresh in Irish republican circles. Specific mention of Gallipoli sometimes occurs, as, for example, in a recent song, ‘Gallipoli’, sung by a folk-group called The Irish Brigade. A couple of sample verses will suffice: You were all that we had, your Mammy and me, As you marched head erect, oh you were proud as could be, And it killed your poor Ma, and it’s slowly killing me ’Cause you were blown to Kingdom Come on the shores of Gallipoli. You fought for the wrong country, you died for the wrong cause And your Ma often said, it was Ireland’s great loss, All those fine young men who marched off to war on foreign shores, When the greatest war of all was at home.65 But beyond sporadic references such as this, the ‘memory’ of any Irish engagement with Gallipoli has been virtually air-brushed from history, nowhere more so than in Peter Weir’s celebrated film, Gallipoli (1981), near the end of which there is a memorable exchange between an Australian radio operator and General Gardner, as the Anzacs are being 108


slaughtered up on the Nek. The radio man tells Gardner that ‘the British are ashore at Suvla’. Gardner asks if they are meeting heavy opposition. ‘None sir’, comes the reply. ‘Apparently they’re just sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea.’66 But the radio operator was wrong. It was not just ‘the British’ on the beach at Suvla Bay, but the British and the Irish, who comprised perhaps half of the troops who landed that day. Drinking tea, or dying, at Suvla Bay, the Irish at Gallipoli deserve more from history than to be forgotten.

109

7 REMEMBERING AN ILL-FATED VENTURE: THE FOURTH BATTALION, ROYAL SUSSEX REGIMENT AT SUVLA BAY AND ITS LEGACY, 1915–39 Keith Grieves

In Hell’s Foundations Geoffrey Moorhouse movingly examined the relationship between the Lancashire Fusiliers and Bury during the Gallipoli campaign and its aftermath. More generally, he asked, ‘What influence did it have on the subsequent history of places that were affected by the events of 1915.’1 His richly textured book drew attention to the contribution which the regimental depot, ex-servicemen, paternalistic leaders, churches and the grammar school made to the civic commemoration of the landings of 25 April 1915 during the inter-war years and beyond. He explored how individual experiences of the landings were shared in Bury and the meanings that were attached to the relationship between the town and its battalions and the courageous exploits of 1915 in the ensuing decades of living memory. Robert Rhodes James commended the work of Moorhouse and wondered whether further studies should be undertaken of other British regiments, so that we might consider whether service at Gallipoli had any enduring significance in urban and rural communities after the war.2 After 1919 the emergence of Armistice Day commemorations invited remembrance of the war as a whole and on a national scale. However, privately and in small groups, memories of particular moments in the wartime record of units, with specific local affiliations, were evoked long after individual battles and campaigns were subsumed by the grand national narratives of the war. As the war moves beyond living memory it is important to consider why and how locally meaningful memories of total war were kept alive and to what end? 110

REMEMBERING AN ILL-FATED VENTURE

The effects of Gallipoli can be enumerated with rich applications of postmodern discourse. In the debates surrounding the formation of a post-colonial national identity in Australia, the Gallipoli campaign can be presented as a starting point in the long process of cultural decolonisation and a crucible in the emergence of a shared non-British past. Indeed, the landscape of the peninsula has been given meaning as a mirror of home. Roadless, waterless cliffs and gullies in Gallipoli have assumed the mythical status of early pastoral wanderings by migrants to Australia. Landscape and war converged to create processes which were not of the Old World in the forging of a collective identity for modern Australia.3 Further, Jay Winter has noted that in Australia 25 April is ‘framed within a narrative of liberty being purchased through the shedding of blood’.4 It is endorsed within a state-sponsored commemorative process, allowing a politically approved re-birth after a specifically national (rather than imperial) catastrophe. Keith Jeffery offered some parallels in the Australian and Irish responses to Gallipoli from the study of the ‘pals’ formations which endured Suvla Bay. Memorial records commemorated much sacrifice to no great effect and profound bitterness was evident in pre-rebellion Dublin.5 In particular, remembering 7th Battalion, The Royal Dublin Fusiliers, as early volunteers, stood outside the nationalist narrative of an independent Ireland. Consequently, official acknowledgement of a community’s loss has been absent until more recent initiatives of according respect and endeavouring to reconcile different traditions in Ireland. Below the level of state endorsement or state antipathy to the commemoration of the Gallipoli landings, as powerful sites of memory and sacrifice, there were discernible ‘backward gazes’.6 These were not necessarily expressions of identity politics or emergent counter histories, which confronted dominant values and their modes of expression. Between the state and the family, intermediate commemorations and living histories were organised by subsidiary elites, which gave voice to specifically local meanings of the war and allowed the sharing of private, solitary remembrances. These social actions, especially at reunions, of well-defined groups of survivors broke the silence in purposeful localised contexts.7 Robert Runcie wrote: The scale of Gallipoli, the romantic dreams, the losses, the suffering, the extraordinary conditions the men met with, had their own special impact on those who survived. It was, it seemed, more searing than Flanders for those who returned there and more memorable than Egypt for those who fought thereafter in the Near East.8 Ernest Tulley, of Hurstpierpoint, might have agreed. On the nineteenth anniversary of landing at Suvla Bay, he wrote, ‘No doubt a good many 111


survivors in Mid-Sussex, like myself, visualize that night of the 8th [August]! A scheme is afloat to try to keep those Gallipoli boys, within reach of their local area, to meet once a year at dinner.’9 He served throughout the war in the 4th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, and instigated plans for a meeting of B Company war veterans, which would recover a collectivity, named ‘Gallipoli boys’, long after the event and without having had any formalised contact in the intervening years. In west Sussex former members of the 4th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, attached much importance to the night of the 8/9th August 1915. It marked the battalion’s first experience of active service, or ‘baptism of fire’, and the moment of its greatest affinity, in wartime, to its territorial origins in the wealden and downland villages and market towns of Sussex. This enquiry will seek to explore how a particular group of veterans in civil society remembered the event and the way that a popular historical discourse of their experiences was generated, in close proximity to their unit, and in the absence of a published battalion history.10 Memories of the peninsula as another place and time were expressed in fragmentary ways. Moreover, at the heart of the memory lay an ‘ill-fated venture’, especially in relation to the battalion’s subsequent war record, which encompassed the battles of Gaza, the Beersheba operations, the advance through Bethelehem, Jerusalem and Jericho, the battle of Soissons on the Western Front and the reoccupation of the Wytschaete Ridge. Nonetheless, there appeared to be compelling reasons for renewing and expressing memories of the unit’s role at Gallipoli. In the immediate pre-war years the 4th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, exemplified confident gentlemanly use of its residual military functions of raising forces through the county Territorial Force Association. The Duke of Norfolk, Lord Lieutenant, had a paternalistic association with the battalion and its predecessor (2nd Volunteer Battalion) for 42 years until 1913.11 His land agent, Captain E.H. Mostyn, held an appointment in the Arundel and Storrington (‘F’) Company. The East Grinstead and Crawley (‘C’) Company was commanded by Captain Sydney Beale who served in the South African war. He lived at Standen, where his wife, Margaret Beale, ensured that gifts from East Grinstead and neighbourhood were forwarded to the battalion’s comfort fund ‘depot’.12 At Danny, near Hassocks, Mrs Campion, wife of the commanding officer, sent small gifts, such as carbolic soap, insect powders, jellies, cigarettes and chocolate to the men in Gallipoli from well-wishers and friends of the battalion. This quasi-feudal paternalistic infrastructure was redolent of the stillsurviving social hierarchy in close downland villages and reinforced by the arrival of plutocrats in some wealden parishes in the late Victorian era.13 The 4th (Territorial) Battalion expressed military and civic pride in almost equal measure and deployed local patronage, at company level, as if changeless social relationships would organically structure rural 112


communities for all time. For example, at Leonardslee, near Horsham, Robert Loder obtained an appointment as a second lieutenant in 1911. The Secretary of the Sussex Territorial Force Association noted, ‘The Officer Commanding the 4 R[oyal] S[usse]x Reg[imen]t states that Mr Robert Egerton Loder is specially eligible as he resides in the neighbourhood of the Company to which he would be posted, and is influential in the district.’14 Ian Beckett has drawn attention to the processes of social control ‘through participation and example’ which remained a vital constituent element of the amateur military tradition in Britain into the twentieth century.15 The battalion was mobilised in defence of the port of Newhaven in August 1914. Its efficiency suffered from the constant loss of trained men to other Territorial battalions, for service in France, during the early months of 1915. It formed part of the newly constituted 160 Brigade, which was hastily embodied as part of 53rd (Welsh) Division, attached to IX Corps. Ian Beckett described the condition of these Territorial units as ‘sucked oranges’ and voluntary enlistment to maintain the territorial affinity of these battalions ceased in December 1915.16 On the evening of 16 July 1915 the battalion embarked at Devonport on the 14,000-ton Blue Funnel liner S.S. Ulysses. The last barge left the ship for ‘C’ Beach at Suvla Bay at 11.45 p.m. on 8 August. The battalion was held in reserve at Lala Bala, crossed Salt Lake and was ordered to attack Chocolate Hill. It had suffered 80 casualties by the end of 9 August and on the next day went into exposed trenches to hold the line under the surrounding hills.17 Subsequently, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford reflected that the attack on Anafarta Ridge on 10 August was in ‘very difficult country and it was a high trial for troops who had never been in action before, with no regular troops to set them a standard, and with very inadequate artillery support’.18 The divisional commander, Major-General Lindley, was replaced by Major-General de Lisle on 15 August, who noted ‘Nothing I saw in France, even the Retreat a year ago, is equal to the physical and mental strain of this work, and the number of senior officers who get invalided is the best proof.’19 But for General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, ‘We were within an ace of achieving a grand coup.’20 The shock of the landing and the ensuing stalemate went undisguised in letters home, including those which were printed in local newspapers in September 1915. Wounded men in hospitals were interviewed by local journalists. Their reports also reflected the dismaying experiences which unfolded on the peninsula in the weeks which followed the landings. Inevitably, the rhetoric of fulfilling expectations was to the fore. On 28 August 1915 the West Sussex County Times noted ‘All accounts agree that the men of the 4th Sussex, hardly any of whom had seen warfare before, behaved in their baptism of fire as quietly and coolly as in a field day 113


at home.’21 There were plenty of references to the line never wavering and the commanding officer’s testimony was prominently recorded in the Sussex Daily News on 14 September 1915: ‘The men have, I think, done quite well; at least, I am very proud of them. They are very steady and quite cheerful, and always ready to have a “go” when it is wanted. Sussex men are the right stuff after all.’22 However, men wrote grimly of wading ashore, enduring artillery fire while crossing Salt Lake, snipers, thirst, sunstroke and dysentery. Among the published accounts, Private Harry Potter wrote ‘I cannot tell you how I felt, I never want to see such a sight again.’ Private Sturt pleaded ‘please don’t let Tom come out here for my sake’.23 At the Second Southern General Hospital in Bristol, Corporal Vinall described the first two days including the failure to secure the Anafarta ridge. He concluded, ‘You will know that my stay in Gallipoli was of short duration. However, I was there long enough to realise the horrors of war.’ Private Mansbridge succinctly stated, ‘It’s rougher here than in France I might tell you.’24 In December 1915 the Horsham roll of honour contained 54 names of whom ten had died in Gallipoli in defence of king, country and Sussex by the Sea. These wartime letters were stark rejoinders to any romantic anticipation which might be unleashed at home by the battalion’s departure for the Dardanelles in S.S. Ulysses, but W.E. Harker’s representation in verse of the unit’s wartime history was replete with ‘Big Words’ which framed and expressed his ‘sincere transcripts of personal experience’.25 He served in the battalion and Sussex: at Peace and War, published in 1918, was dedicated to his regiment. His volume included ‘Sussex Territorials Landing at Suvla (The “Old Fourth”): Down through the darkness silently filing, Boarding the small craft breasting the tide– Flirting their first to Chance’s beguiling, Downsmen-at-arms leave their vessel’s dark side. Slowly the barges make for the far beach, Softly they ground when the shallows deny– Swiftly each man leaps into the dark reach, Breasting the waters that lap shoulder-high. Gaining the shore, they wait for the daybreak, (Aye! For the glory that ever will ring!) Breathing awhile that last final intake– Cubs of Great England that crouch for their spring.26 In presenting his interpretation of shared events to his comrades, Harker used the idiom of local patriotism and did not write of the derangements, fractures and the new realities of trench warfare, which 114


Samuel Hynes found in verse in the third and fourth years of the war.27 Harker employed high diction, traditional moral action and the propinquity of landscape, especially in the form of sustaining allegiances to ‘south country’.28 This soldier-poet juxtaposed poems of recollected landscapes in peace, largely near Shoreham, with images of the downsmen-at-arms in war. They were far from their annual muster camps, ‘Round the ancient mossy chalk tracks / Winding through the Southland glades’, which, as Frederick Wood noted, were ‘a part of Sussex much more in the hearts of Sussex men than any town could ever be – our breezy, rolling South Downs’.29 The clearly defined hill range and scarpfoot area generated sturdy, shrewd, staunch downsmen, sometimes with slow, shambling gait, in the topographical literature of the region in the early twentieth century. They knew of springy turf, clumps of thicket, chalk pits, dewponds and bosses of beech trees. This literature neglected to mention rheumatic labourers from damp cottages and rapidly enlarging Edwardian resorts or ‘Londons by the sea’.30 Mention of home reaffirmed the values of the men who fought, died and were known for their sacrifice for others.31 In ‘A Son of Sussex’, Harker offered a meditation on the death of Corporal Philip Dutch, who enlisted at Broadwater, near Worthing, and died on 10 August 1915, aged 26 years. The poet noted that he ‘Assisted a number of wounded to shelter, and conducted their defence at great odds until the little garrison was relieved, at which moment he fell.’ In the second of two stanzas, Harker wrote: Then learnt we too late, who the error had cherished– How noblest conceptions endure to the end– When on those grim slopes of far Suvla he perished, A HERO!’ Midst those whom he died to defend.32 In this volume of regionally specific poems, which drew on lived prewar experience of the South Downs, rather than a generic idealised ‘south country’, patriotism was expressed at the level of county as it was in many volumes of minor verse. It is far from fanciful to suggest that ‘A Son of Sussex’ was a prime example of the way that, as Jay Winter noted, ‘many writers used verse to keep the voices of the fallen alive, by speaking for them, to them, about them’.33 Of the ‘grim slopes of far Suvla’, Harker’s verse was sad, unironic, traditional, authentic and companionable and allowed necessary remembrance, among survivors, of fallen comrades. This stoical and, sometimes, lyrical volume of verse was published in Brighton and the extent of its circulation is unknown. It fulfilled Lord Crewe’s expectation that ‘the soldier who is also a writer is as likely to 115


set his mind on green fields and spring flowers as on the bloody drama in which he is an actor’.34 If ‘county’ genre poetry ministered to the living, when confronted by their memories, so did hearty cheering and impromptu concerts. On 8 August 1919, the battalion commemorated the fourth anniversary of the landings by holding a dinner for its 55 survivors who remained with the unit in Germany.35 The battalion issued souvenir greetings cards containing its wartime record, which were quickly transposed to the ‘new’ 4th Battalion on its reconstitution in 1920. Wartime members of the battalion were urged to re-enlist and Suvla Bay appears to have been remembered at annual brigade camps, which often coincided with the anniversary. On the evening of the eighth anniversary the sergeants entertained the officers at camp in Arundel Park, ‘There was a steep slope leading from the Sergeants’ Mess tent which was early christened Chocolate Hill after that at Gallipoli’.36 On the middle Sunday of the brigade camp parties of old members of the battalion usually received hospitality.37 The wartime record was an important defining feature of battalion life in the 1920s and the continuities of membership included a very stable core of long-serving officers and senior NCOs. Inevitably, it diminished over time and reports of farewell occasions usually drew attention to the significance of service at Gallipoli in the living history of the battalion. In 1927 Sergeant Richardson, Master Cook and known as ‘Lardy’, retired after 28 years’ service and was commended for having ‘joked his way through the difficulties of campaigning in Gallipoli, Palestine, France and Germany’.38 In 1931 The Rousillon Gazette noted that CSM Payne would be leaving the Worthing camp: ‘ “Nelson” was one of the “old” 4th Battalion, and there are very few pre-war members left, while he also belongs to the even more select band of survivors of the Battalion who landed at Gallipoli.’39 Much earlier, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Campion, commanding officer at Gallipoli, spent his last camp with the battalion in 1923. He was central to the institutional memory of war, and particularly of Gallipoli, and his attendance at reunions in the 1930s was vital. He was the eldest son of a Crimean war veteran, who held the honorary colonelcy of the battalion before the war, a Member of Parliament for Lewes, 1910–24, of gentry family from the Elizabethan mansion Danny, near Hassocks, and had 35 years with the battalion, including as captain of the Cuckfield Volunteers in the 1890s, and commanding officer for the years 1915–16 and 1918–23. He personified the paternalism which existed in the ‘family’ identity of the Territorial battalion.40 Campion was appointed Governor of Western Australia in 1924 and held the post until 1931. In parenthesis, his appointment generated Anglo-Australian military associations, which occurred in the shadow of Gallipoli. In 1924 the War Office actively encouraged the creation of 116


alliances with Dominion regiments and the commanding officer of the 4th Battalion was informed, ‘With Sir William Campion now Governor of Western Australia it might be to the advantage of the Royal Sussex Regiment to contract an alliance with a Regiment belonging to that Dominion.’41 The 11th Battalion, Australian Infantry (Perth Regiment), becoming the 11/16 Battalion (City of Perth) Regiment in 1930, joined in alliance with the Royal Sussex Regiment in November 1925. Campion was the catalyst of an association of two battalions which served at Gallipoli. On the laying up of the old colours of the 11th Battalion in 1930, Campion took the royal salute, but spoke at the event as a past Colonel of the Royal Sussex Regiment. On his departure from Government House, Perth, the 11th Battalion supplied a guard of honour.42 The alliance was suggestive of a common military inheritance from the Great War. Campion also unveiled the memorial plaque in Perth Cathedral on ANZAC day in 1931. In a personal letter to J.H. Thomas, Colonial Secretary, in November 1930 he noted, ‘Anzac day celebrates the birth of Australia as a Nation and we look forward to a United Australia with a population of not 6 or 7 million, but of upwards of 20 millions.’43 He appeared to recognise the significance of Australian participation in the Gallipoli campaign. Campion warily sought a path through the turbulent period of secessionist demands in Western Australia, in the context of an adverse trading relationship within the Commonwealth of Australia. He hoped that the constitution would be revised on more equitable terms for the ‘pastoralists’. However, he opposed secession on the grounds that the contribution of Western Australia to the war effort of the Commonwealth was an irreversible part of emerging nationhood.44 As the representative of the crown in the state, Campion supported the large schemes of migration envisaged for the British settlement in the years before its 100th anniversary, especially in the departure of ex-servicemen from the Old Country. Indeed, he relished his encounters with ‘farmers of the right sort’, who originated from Sussex, and also regular visits to agricultural shows.45 Campion’s correspondence conveyed the message that he knew Western Australia and its agrarian economy and regarded his military and political roles in Sussex before 1924 as wholly relevant to his appointment. Similar links were made by the Sussex Daily News in 1937 when Lord Wakehurst, formerly Captain John Loder of the 4th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, was appointed Governor of New South Wales. It noted that Lord Wakehurst ‘having seen them in war and play at Gallipoli and Port Said knows something of Australians and their special temperament’.46 In Campion’s absence, personal and collective remembrances of the landings at Suvla Bay were expressed beyond the institutional life of the 4th Battalion. Major J.M. Hulton, adjutant of the battalion at Gallipoli, responded to Brigadier-General C.F. Aspinall-Oglander’s request for 117


comments on his draft of the Official History. The draft narrative of the ‘sorry adventure’ encouraged Hulton to reflect on the causes of the failure to advance on 9–10 August 1915. He wrote, ‘It was a very great change from the comforts of a ship, this jump into a “war”, and I have always felt (apart from the lack of all orders, maps etc.) that this sudden change of surroundings had a lot to do with the “lost” feeling that undoubtedly existed.’ He concluded, ‘I don’t think anyone can realise the hopeless feeling that existed.’47 Sixteen years after the event, he remembered asking where the line was, but no one knew, and he was pointed to a column of smoke, caused by burning bracken, and told to proceed in that direction. This comment was incorporated into the text.48 Hulton’s letter was a personal response to an official request for information, but it contrived to represent the compelling moments of landing, lacking water and entering the line to advance on Chocolate Hill which, seemingly, defined the battalion’s relationship to the war as a whole. After 1927, talk of ‘the old days’, for Warrant Officers, NCOs and men who had left the battalion, focused on the Royal Sussex Club, which was founded as the only meeting place in Horsham with a ‘military atmosphere’.49 The two billiard rooms, large hall, sports field and club bar provided a site of comradeship and in 1937 there were 129 members, who were mainly ex-members of the 4th battalion. The annual regimental reunion, instituted in 1923, at the Dome in Brighton, drew small parties of past members of the Territorial battalions. However the farewell occasions for long-serving members, the new social and recreational ‘headquarters’ and the animated response to the ‘graphic narrative’ of the Official History pointed towards the need for special occasions so that memories of the war could be shared in civil society. The opportunity arose in October 1931, when the all-talking film Tell England was shown at the Capitol Picture Theatre, Horsham. Eighty original members of the ‘E’ (Horsham and Crawley) Company reported that the film was ‘amazingly realistic’. The Sussex Daily News noted, ‘Vivid memories were revived by the story of the landings on the beaches under a hail of shot and shell.’50 Tell England (1930) was directed by Anthony Asquith and based on the book by Ernest Raymond. It was presented as the best national epic that Britain had produced, which might obtain greater success than the screen version of Journey’s End. In the West Sussex County Times the review noted the gripping realism, thrilling scale and wrote ‘Certainly the director casts no false glamour on a single aspect of modern warfare.’51 English graves are shown as a dominant legacy of the campaign. The film depicted the friendship and military service of two public schoolboys at home and in Gallipoli. It was not dissimilar to Journey’s End in its rendition of officer–men relations, romantic enthusiasms, gallant actions and late-Victorian moral truths. Nonetheless, it also contained, as Jeffery Richards noted, ‘uncompromisingly graphic imagery’, 118


comprising opposed landings, trench conditions, mortar and artillery fire, and stoic uniformed men, which ‘convey the same sense of futility and helplessness’ that was evident in All Quiet on the Western Front.52 The veterans were invited to the Capitol Theatre by Major Rupert Middleton MC, who had served in the Gallipoli campaign and was adjutant of the 4th Battalion, 1920–24. He was also a driving force behind the Blue Flash Cinema Company, which was formed to maintain contact with the demobilised men of the 4th Battalion and to provide permanent employment for the bandsmen. Fifteen men were initially employed in the orchestra. The Capitol Theatre was built in 1923 and the directors of the company were all serving officers including Lieutenant-Colonel Campion, who was present at the opening and appeared before the curtain with his wife.53 They were thanked for their work in leading the fund-raising effort. The architect was Major C.R.B. Godman, who became commanding officer in 1924. During the years 1927–35, all three picture houses in Horsham were owned by the Blue Flash Cinema Company.54 After Tell England was shown, a reunion dinner took place in the Capitol Café, which was adorned with company and battalion emblems. Well-known songs, marches and choruses were played by the orchestra. A ‘reminiscent’ menu, full of evocative and poignant references to the illfated sojourn in a faraway landscape, provided the centrepiece of a ‘fine muster’. Sulajek soup was followed by Anafarta beef, Salt Lake potatoes, Chocolate Hill sprouts, Suvla pudding and Lala Baba trifles. Afterwards A beach beer, Bijuk cigars and Kuchuk cigarettes were available in an imaginative culinary reconstruction of the campaign.55 Campion was sent a message of greetings and in 1932 he became president of the 4th Royal Sussex Regiment (Horsham and Crawley) Gallipoli Association. Membership was confined to those who embarked on S.S. Ulysses, landed on 9 August 1915 and lived within 10 miles of Horsham. The reunion in November 1932, again at the Capitol Café, drew 70 men.56 The success of these ‘E’ Company functions provided the inspiration for a full battalion reunion, which took place on the 21st anniversary, almost to the hour that disembarkation from S.S. Ulysses took place. Parties arrived from all parts of the county, numbering 180 in all. At this reunion the former battalion medical officer, Dr Macarthur, described the visit he made to the peninsula, with Colonel Godman, in 1934. Lantern slides were shown, which illustrated how little the old line and sites of original dressing stations had changed in the intervening years.57 They participated in the pilgrimage, in which every unit was represented, conveyed by the Canadian Pacific ship Duchess of Richmond. In three days ashore they placed wreaths of Haig poppies on nearly all the graves of the men of the Royal Sussex Regiment. In his open letter, essentially a report for the bereaved, Lieutenant-Colonel Godman reflected that ‘there must be many who would like to hear that the cemeteries there are 119


very well looked after and beautifully sited’.58 In a largely unchanged landscape, he observed iris, phlox, rosemary shrubs, laburnum trees and paths of scented herbs. After this pilgrimage, E. Thornton Cook wrote in the Cornhill Magazine, ‘We passed on over sun-baked land carrying wreaths we brought to lay in quiet cemeteries.’ Rusted milk cans, bully beef tins and abandoned, ruined guns were seen and men forgot the intervening years, ‘Twenty years ago? Nonsense, it all happened yesterday!’59 As David Lloyd has noted, many accounts, offering solace, were published of the inter-war pilgrimages to the Gallipoli peninsula.60 Nineteen years after the landings the pilgrims endeavoured to fulfil a sense of reverent obligation to comrades of the original number who did not return from the Gallipoli campaign to rural communities in Sussex. The lantern slides facilitated homage to fallen comrades and direct shared engagement with a landscape which would not be revisited by men who might, had it been more accessible, been drawn to Suvla Bay in search of their past. Two years before he revisited the Dardanelles, Liententant-Colonel Godman handed his operational maps to the regimental museum.61 Although he might have used them to walk the old front line, it is significant that by 1932 they were, primarily, historical artefacts which should be preserved beyond the living memory of the participants. Reunions in mid-Sussex in the 1930s brought specific recollections in precisely defined company where the wartime identity of the 4th Battalion could be expressed. The ‘historic but tragic’ landings of August 1915 were remembered as the first time that the battalion went into action, and the memories were ‘bitter-sweet’. More importance was attached to the events of August 1915 than to its other major and costly engagements: the first battle of Gaza, the battle of Quelfi Wells and the battle of Soissons.62 Precise statements on entitlement to attend reunions mattered. In 1931 the large number of men who served in Egypt, Palestine and France were excluded and they were also absent from the 21st anniversary event. In 1937 the formation of the East Grinstead and district ‘Ulysses’ Gallipoli Association, under the presidency of Major Beale, was so precisely defined that, one year later, it had to enlarge the membership by admitting men who were unable to sail with the rest of the draft. Fifty-seven of 71 possible survivors from ‘C’ Company (East Grinstead), who sailed on S.S. Ulysses, were traced by the organising committee, of whom 46 became members of the association.63 The first annual dinner was attended by 30 veterans. Again, it was the recollections of the comradeship and sense of local patriotism, in the early months of the war, that stimulated the need for further social gatherings after the battalion dinner in 1936. At all the reunions there was the commemoration of the dead, in the ‘Last Post’, the silence and reports of the pilgrimage. There was also gratitude for survival, indeed, thankfulness for deliverance in the wartime 120


songs, the regimental marches and the evocative menus. Speeches were kept short so that there was plenty of time to renew old friendships. Adrian Gregory has highlighted the dualism of solemnity and celebration, of sorrow and joy, at commemorative reunions in the inter-war years.64 The essences of fortitude, tradition and honour were evident at reunions in mid-Sussex, which, inevitably, looked back, recaptured ‘premodern’ values and happily forsook contemporaneity.65 By the 1930s the passage of time had allowed the necessary ‘establishment of distance from the remembered self’, but that did not mean that the dominant values of 1914–15 were questioned.66 Indeed, the reunion dinners were invigorated by the restoration of a social hierarchy, for one night only, as landowning paternalism ebbed in the 1930s. At the 21st anniversary dinner, Colonel Campion was again ‘in command’. At the same event Captain Mostyn, or ‘Good old Eddie’, noted that he would never forget the reception given to officers that evening. He deployed the classless rhetoric of organic harmony by describing the assembled company as ‘just a happy band of brothers’.67 At functions in East Grinstead, Major Beale was essential to recapturing the sense of social unity of officers and men, despite having moved to Chichester. These social dynamics were, more generally, captured by Edmund Blunden, who knew Sussex well and regularly attended his battalion reunions. He noted that reconstructing a battalion’s spirit, as it was known, required ‘a voluntary, sweet and accomplished courtesy’ between officers and men and a sense of divinity around the Colonel. Unlike many other senior officers, Campion was not removed from his command after the failure of the advance on 10th August. He remained with his battalion until he was evacuated with dysentery. Blunden also suggested that the notion of a battalion as an entity, surviving the ‘desolations of battle upon battle’, was problematic, for each man knew a unit that was far from identical with another man’s.68 Perhaps Suvla Bay provided the greatest point of conjuncture for the men who set out to war together, returned and needed to structure and understand the history of which they were a part. This quest for shared understanding, especially amid shifting perspectives in the complex historiography of the war by the 1930s, required familiar faces, reactivated military rituals, subdued retrospection and the signing of menus by ‘Gallipoli Boys’. In some ways such individuals might be ‘years behind the present’.69 However, men who remembered in close proximity to a unit with a continuing existence were also invited to observe how the utility of the past had relevance to meet the challenges of the present. In the shadow of another war, memories of the Great War became usable as the 4th Battalion struggled to gain its full establishment and military efficiency. At the reunion in 1932, Major Wraight, with 28 years service, said that ‘present members of the Battalion were quite as good in every respect 121


as those who went to Gallipoli and present members were carrying on faithfully the traditions of the battalion and regiment’.70 Affiliations were reaffirmed to ‘Our own county regiment’, often by renditions of ‘Sussex by the sea’, and news of a regular battalion’s exploits on the Libyan border in 1936. In particular, the histories of Territorial battalions in the Great War were used as object lessons in maintaining peace by encouraging preparations for national defence after 1936, so that the problems encountered in training forces, 1914–15, might not be repeated. However, the Territorial Army of the late 1930s was not an immediate or obvious beneficary of new attempts to mobilise local patriotism. In 1937 East Grinstead veterans were informed that at 450 men the 4th Battalion was still short of 150 men. Lieutenant-Colonel G.V. Herez-Smith, commanding officer, ‘greatly regretted that East Grinstead and district could only provide 18 men out of a population of 10,000! (“Shame”)’.71 In April 1938 the number of men obtained from the town for the battalion had only risen to 25. The expansion programme expressed its purpose as ‘Carrying on a Great Tradition’. In effect, homage was paid to the war record of the battalion by endeavouring to overcome the serious problem of undermanning in the years 1937–39. Despite poor recruiting returns the East Grinstead Observer assured its readership that ‘The 4th Battalion is still embued with the same spirit and its ranks are filled with the same type of Sussex man as in those days.’72 But how could that be in a market town subject to profound change ‘where the dissolution of the Sackville Estates saw row after row of commuter housing appear on the outskirts’?73 These shortages of men reflected a widespread phenomenon, which was amply evident in Geoffrey Moorhouse’s discussion of the 5th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers in the 1930s. Furthermore, recruiting officers underestimated the abiding private anguish which existed as a legacy of war, alongside the lists of battle honours used in recruiting speeches in the late 1930s.74 There is much that is not here and cannot be easily told. For example, stories of quiet despair, fragile health and shortened lives, or of the role of artefacts, such as souvenirs on mantelpieces, which prompted recollections of the war as a normative aspect of everyday life. Also, what of the books bought during and after the war to substantiate experiences and develop wider meanings of moments of war where pencilled underlinings provided an intersection between history and memory. For example, a copy of Masefield’s Gallipoli, formerly in the library of Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) Warren of Handcross, highlighted two aspects of the Suvla Bay landings and their aftermath. The underlinings were, seemingly, in agreement, ‘All through the hard and bloody day of the 9th of August ’ and, later, ‘This attack took place on the 21st of August in intense heat, across an open plain without cover of any kind, blazing throughout nearly all its length with scrub fires.’75 122


The night of 8/9 August 1915 had much significance to the wartime members of the 4th Battalion and there is evidence that the landings were remembered by survivors who remained with the unit in the 1920s. The date did not become part of the regimental calendar and it was not discussed in any issues of the Roussillon Gazette in the inter-war years, except in relation to short reports on reunions. Meetings of veterans in the 1930s largely took place in spaces which were associated with the battalion, such as the Capitol Theatre and the Drill Hall. Initially, they arose at company level (and thus in specific towns and their surrounding districts). Commemorations do not appear to have taken demonstrably public form, such as in church services and parades along processional routes, and do not appear to have referred to other units, for example, the 1/4 Queen’s Regiment, with whom many experiences in the line were shared including, ultimately, the creation of a composite battalion.76 The showing of ‘Tell England’ provided a considerable impetus, after several failed attempts to hold a meeting, and the timing, October 1931, was apposite. The battalion was no longer a repository of wartime memories and the film connected the men to influential depictions and historical perspectives of the campaign, in the era of the ‘disenchanted’ war books. Moreover, the paternalistic military structures in rural mid- and west Sussex remained sufficiently intact for meetings to be held which re-animated the battalion as it once was in near recognisable form. Tributes to fallen comrades became necessary in the 1930s, and also to deliverance, and meetings were accompanied by precise definitions of membership, territorial affinity and customary practices. The contrast between the manoeuvres at Patcham, near Brighton on the South Downs, in 1913 and the landing at Suvla Bay, as an introduction to modern war, was and remains shocking. In 1913 the Duke of Norfolk bid farewell to his battalion after a near lifetime’s involvement in the leadership of the amateur military tradition in Sussex. Harker wrote of his final inspection of the regiment in the fourth verse of ‘Norfolk (The Last Salute)’: Long, on those slopes where rears his stately home, Tramping each vale and rich, secluded glen, At earliest dawn, before the Sun upclomb, In arts of War had versed his faithful men.77 In Harker’s words these ‘Knights’ might have been ‘accountred and prepared’, but musters on the slopes of the South Downs were no preparation for the ‘grim slopes of far Suvla’. Despite the infusion of local patriotism in Harker’s wartime verse and the meanings which might have been attached to sailing in the Ulysses, from Devonport in July 1915, John Masefield’s allusions to classical imagery and romance found no resonance in 123


this unit’s remembrance and history-making of Gallipoli. Maybe there was some sentimentality in the quest to reactivate comradeship in the 1930s, using the pageantry and ritual of military life. However, these redemptive occasions also employed grimly ironic menu cards, wartime songs and lantern-slides of dressing stations to recollect that other landscape. The intensely felt memories of 8–9 August 1915 and their expression, which remained living history for the participants, reminds us that the legacies of total war take time to unfold and produced local as well as national traumas. They were often shared at an intermediate level, between the state and the family, between Armistice day events and parlour conversations, and if mediated locally took richly textured form. In attaching the ‘Gallipoli boys’ to recruiting for Territorial units after 1936, there was identity politics of a sort. No suggestion of exceptionality is made in discussing the sequence of events which comprised the aftermath of this battalion’s role in the Gallipoli campaign. Further micro studies might be undertaken, despite the methodological problems of doing so, to generate points of similarity and difference across communities and regions which were touched by this searing experience of war. It is difficult for histories of Gallipoli to escape presentist bias, especially in relation to the existence and counter-existence of frameworks of national catastrophe and in reassessing the sanctioned memories of the nation-state. However, the important, diverse meanings which the Gallipoli campaign had in families, among ‘pals’ and in small communities in towns and villages long into the years of ‘peace’, and on the eve of another war, needs consideration. In this way we might reclaim from past definitive judgements and grand narratives the multivocal, often quite localised, understandings of the legacies of war.

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8 INTERPRETING UNIT HISTORIES: GALLIPOLI AND AFTER Helen McCartney

I began my research for this chapter with the aim of examining the ways in which military units viewed the experience of the Gallipoli campaign in the aftermath of the Great War. I wanted to establish whether Gallipoli was just another name on the regimental or divisional list of battle honours or whether unit experiences on the peninsula were elevated above subsequent actions undertaken in other theatres. Geoffrey Moorhouse’s book, Hell’s Foundations was one of my starting points. He suggests that Gallipoli became an integral part of the psyche of the Lancashire Fusiliers, to the extent that the stories of their bravery and valour on the peninsula have helped to create a myth of the Gallipoli campaign. This myth was so potent that it overshadowed all subsequent activities of the Lancashire Fusiliers and endures to this day through memorials and ceremony in the regimental town of Bury.1 Obviously, given the time-consuming work involved in a project such as Hell’s Foundations, it is not possible to examine a broad cross-section of individual units in the same way that Moorhouse was able to investigate a single regiment. The ways in which myth is propagated within the home community is a fascinating topic, but one that is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I have chosen a narrower focus, looking at the ways in which a number of different units viewed their war service through examining a specific genre of war literature: the unit history.

Unit histories and unit identity Keith Grieves has suggested that the type of units, the bias of the author and the date at which a unit history was written all had an impact on the style and content of the final work.2 Thus, to ensure a fair investigation, a broad cross-section of unit histories that incorporate a section on Gallipoli have been chosen for examination. They include histories with a range of publication dates from 1919 to 1949, a broad selection of regional units, a 125


variety of authors and a number of different types of unit. Regular, Service and Territorial as well as regimental, divisional and battalion publications are all represented.3 However, whilst accepting Grieves’ premise that post-war concerns and influences had an important affect on what was written in the unit history, a survey of the books used in this chapter suggests that they all have one element in common. Each book is an expression of unit identity and tradition. By describing a unit’s reaction to adversity, its spirit, its values, its teamwork and its achievements, unit histories performed a variety of functions in the post-war world. For example, descriptions of unit tradition in the Great War were often used by Regular formations to reinforce their established military traditions. Battle honours and traditions of fighting prowess were the lifeblood of an inherently competitive regimental system, and both battalion and regimental histories were written as educative tools to inculcate regimental values in newly commissioned officers.4 Moreover, for Regular, as well as Territorial units that survived the war, there was also an interest in stressing the usefulness of past achievements of their particular formation. A unit with strong, distinctive, successful traditions was more likely to survive in an era of financial austerity that saw military budgets cut and units disbanded.5 Units raised only for wartime duty had different reasons for producing their war history. As the history of the 42nd East Lancashire Division explained, these unit histories were intended to provide ‘gratification to the survivors and solace to the relatives of the fallen’.6 Grieves argues that some histories can be seen as part of an attempt to come to terms with the experience of the Great War.7 The prefaces to the histories are often preoccupied with the need to record their participation in a ‘great episode of history’ so that their achievement and sacrifice will never be forgotten.8 In this context, a book describing a unit’s traditions, values and achievements could be seen as both providing a memorial for the dead and collective recognition of the actions of all those who fought. In the aftermath of the war, both the soldiers and those who had lost their family and friends needed to believe their contribution had been distinctive and significant and wanted it written down for posterity. Authors were another variant that could influence the style and content of a unit history. At one extreme were the independent, professional writers, who had no emotional connection with the unit and had pretensions to objectivity. Authors such as Everard Wyrall relied almost exclusively on official war diaries and incorporated only the material that supported the main actions of the battalions, or illuminated the bare bones of cause and effect in battle. In these histories evaluation of unit achievements and social commentary was largely absent.9 However, Wyrall and his followers confined themselves mainly to regimental histories 126

INTERPRETING UNIT HISTORIES

where space for elaboration was limited due to the large numbers of battalions that had to be included in a Great War history, and for many commissioning committees this was an adequate expression of unit achievements.10 Unit commissioning committees took their choice of author very seriously. As the Scots Guards discovered, ‘men able to do the sort of work required are not available on every corner’.11 And the committees often went to great lengths to seek out an author who understood the traditions and spirit of the unit. For this reason the favoured authors were often eyewitnesses who had fought with the unit and were able to incorporate contemporary accounts and reminiscences covering all aspects of life in wartime.12 Such authors often went to great lengths to confirm the veracity of their facts and affirm that their views corresponded with those of their old comrades. A.M. McGilchrist, for example, circulated his manuscript amongst former officers and men of his old battalion with the aim of gauging opinion and gathering corrections before publication.13 Other histories were produced by committee, with different sections being written by various former soldiers of the unit in an attempt to produce a truly rounded version of the life of a battalion or regiment.14 The result was a history that reflected how the unit, or at least a certain section of the unit, remembered their war service and the esprit de corps of their formation. The writing of post-war histories was undoubtedly a complex process, with each book being influenced by a variety of competing agendas. Nevertheless, whatever the motive behind its commissioning, whether it was for the purpose of motivating future soldiers, securing the survival of a unit, or helping veterans come to terms with their war experience, each history was an expression of unit identity. It described the way in which the unit viewed itself, and the way in which it wished to be viewed by others. Those events and actions that were important to the way the unit wanted to be remembered were given prominence within a history, or described in a different tone or manner to the remainder of the narrative. The portrayal of the Gallipoli experience in each history should therefore provide an indication of the importance of the campaign to the units in the aftermath of the Great War.

Images of Gallipoli in unit histories The most consistent themes that emerge from the unit histories are the portrayal of Gallipoli as a tragedy of lost opportunity and as the scene of heroic endeavour. F.P. Gibbon highlights these first themes well in his description of the 42nd East Lancashire Division leaving the Gallipoli peninsula. He explained: 127


The men were not sorry to see the last of Krithia and Achi Baba Nullahs, of the Vineyard and other scenes of carnage. Yet names conjure up other memories not wholly painful – of heroic attempt and gallant performance, of courage, self-sacrifice and devotion to duty of great pride in the comrades who had fallen, whose graves, marked by biscuit tin crosses lay thick in the Krithia Nullah these were seen for the last time, but the memories that cluster about them will never be wiped out.15 By adopting the subjects of heroism and tragedy the authors of the unit histories were echoing the early wartime writings of men such as Granville Fortescue or John Masefield, who concentrated on the heroism of the soldier and the tragedy of the campaign in an attempt to influence the United States and lure it into the war.16 The post-war unit histories contained similar themes, indeed some incorporated quotations from Masefield, but the themes sprang from altogether different motives.17

The lost opportunity The tragedy of the campaign was highlighted by the many ‘if only’ stories that were connected with Gallipoli, and the theme was to recur in two separate areas of the histories. For some it featured prominently in the preface or foreword, whilst for others it emerged in the chapters describing events on the peninsula. For example, the 1st Battalion of the Essex Regiment chose General Sir Ian Hamilton to write the preface to their volume. They employed a man who could be relied upon to reinforce the idea of the lost opportunity in the interests of defending his own reputation, and, true to form, Hamilton wasted no time in describing the campaign as ‘a failure that might so easily have been translated into success’.18 Alternatively, a number of authors concentrated on specific actions that they believed had been the key to victory. Some highlighted the failure of the attack at Chunuk Bair as a lost opportunity.19 Lancashire soldiers and their Gurkha comrades had captured a Turkish position vital to the enemy defence and, according to Whalley Kelley in his history of the Prince of Wales Volunteers, ‘For a brief period a wonderful panorama of the Dardanelles and the broken country in the rear of the Turkish line lay before these intrepid soldiers.’ Unfortunately, success was snatched from them through a lack of reserves and a friendly fire incident.20 Other criticisms of an individual action came from a brigade major who served on Gallipoli and subsequently described the experiences of the 4th and 7th Battalions of the Cheshire Regiment as they landed at Suvla Bay in August 1915. According to the author, his men were not given enough time to orientate themselves before being sent off across the salt lake to 128


attack on Chocolate Hill. ‘They headed off under shrapnel fire through streams of men retiring, suffering some casualties and grumbling that they had been given better orders for a Saturday afternoon bun struggle in Birkenhead park ’ The Cheshire Battalions were described as keeping their heads and were ‘as steady and calm as ever in spite of the handling they had experienced’, but the well-planned attack, which the author believed was the last chance of success on the peninsula, did not take place.21 Many unit histories continued in a similar vein, supporting the idea that the campaign had potential for success.22 This interpretation of the Gallipoli campaign is unsurprising. Units fighting on the Gallipoli peninsula had a vested interest in elevating the importance of their early contributions to the war. Certainly, for a number of units that had been languishing on garrison duty in Egypt since November 1914, Gallipoli was viewed as a welcome opportunity to prove themselves. The 42nd East Lancashire Division, for example, felt they had been penalised for being the first Territorial division to become efficient. They believed that they had been shunted into the backwater for the first months of the war and were concerned that they were missing out on the real fighting being conducted on the Western Front.23 The Division, therefore, wanted to believe that their efforts on the peninsula were as important and as potentially significant as the battles in which their fellow units were participating in France and Flanders. The desire for recognition and the need to believe that their first sacrifice was worthwhile helps to explain why so many unit histories accepted the glittering potential of the strategic concept. The failure of the campaign could be explained away easily as a result of the lack of support and bungling of resources by those in charge at home, or as a consequence of poor staff work in theatre. The lost opportunity theme was thus an important theme to include in a unit history as it enabled blame for failure to be located at a higher level than the battalion or even the division and helped to maintain an unsullied unit reputation. Few histories testified to a lack of tactical skill, and their detailed descriptions of the successful, almost bloodless, withdrawal from the peninsula are included to underscore the abilities of the units involved. The evacuation was described variously as ‘one of the most masterly achievements in the long annals of military history’,24 and as ‘one of the finest and most wonderful achievements of this or any other war’.25 The message the unit histories were sending was clear. Gallipoli may have been a failure, but it was a failure that could never be attributed to the fighting troops.

Heroic attack The second theme of heroic endeavour was also universal throughout all the unit histories. Heroic performance was the basis of regimental 129


reputations and histories naturally placed the gallantry and courage of their men as a core theme. In Gallipoli two distinct types of heroism were identified. The first was the heroism displayed in an attack, be it an opposed landing at the beginning of the campaign or at Suvla Bay, or one of the numerous attempts to wrest the high ground on the peninsula from the Turks. This was the dashing type of heroism, beloved of the Regular units and one which captured newspaper headlines and the public imagination of the time. For regimental histories, pushed for space, and working to a Regular army agenda, it was individual, brief examples of courage, culled from such actions, that punctuated the brief narrative of the Gallipoli story. This description of self-sacrifice and bravery on the peninsula, from the history of the Lincolnshire Regiment, is a typical example: No sooner had the Lincolnshires reached their new line than Captain P.H. Hamsen, the Adjutant, calling for volunteers to assist him, dashed back through clouds of smoke into the burning scrub, which by now gave off a terrific heat. He did this to save wounded men from being burned alive. Six times he went 300 yards into that inferno and rescued six men from a most horrible death. He was awarded the VC.26 Such stories, bearing remarkable similarities to accounts of previous actions in preceding chapters, were recounted to remind new recruits that the battalions of the regiment had continued to uphold their good name and chivalrous traditions in the most extreme circumstances and, most importantly, that the brave actions of the individual officer and soldier could directly contribute to the maintenance of those traditions.27 For the histories of individual formations the theme of heroic attack was even more significant. For those units that had been raised or formed on the outbreak of war, the Gallipoli campaign represented their first blooding. It was the first clear test of each formation and used thereafter as proof of their fighting ability. Just as the first taste of warfare makes an indelible impression on the mind of the individual soldier, so a unit’s baptism of fire often imprinted itself on the collective psyche and contributed to its sense of self-worth and identity. The courage and dedication shown in the first engagement became a benchmark by which all other actions were measured and thus the Gallipoli campaign came to play a prominent role in the unit histories of these formations. The history of the Regular 29th Division was no exception. The Division, a new formation in 1914, had languished in Egypt for 6 months with its constituent parts isolated from each other. It used the Gallipoli landings as a way of forming its reputation. The divisional historian, Captain Gillon, remembered the first emergence of a divisional spirit when the Division 130


landed on the peninsula on 28 April 1915. He claimed that the spirit which pervaded the Division thereafter ‘was closely paralleled by the feeling which the Australians had for Australia They took the pride in their country that the members of the 29th Division took in the Division’.28 The 5th Battalion of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment underwent a similar process on 15 August 1915 when attacking Kidney Hill. This too was their first experience of an attack and, according to their historian F.A.M. Webster, ‘after the first attempt had failed, the whole line went at it again and this wave of brave, intrepid and well disciplined men, only too anxious to blood their steel, soon cleared the position at the point of a bayonet’. They then advanced over open ground for a quarter of a mile, which earned them the nickname, the yellow devils, in reference to the triangular amber flash on their sleeve. A staff officer watching the progress of the attack through his field glasses was impressed by their advance and is said to have announced, ‘By Jove! If we had only one or two more battalions of those Yellow Devils we should be across the peninsula tomorrow.’29 The nickname was subsequently adopted as a badge of honour. The battalion lost more than 300 men killed and wounded, but according to Webster ‘the 1/5th Bedfords had made good and had won undying honour for themselves and their county’.30 This is an important comment which explains the portrayal of a bloody, unsuccessful action as a glorious attack, which, given the scale of the casualties, could easily have been recounted in the language of revulsion and horror. The high casualties did not signify military incompetence or futile waste of life to the battalion, rather they were seen as evidence of unit bravery and were justified by the fact that they had gained a reputation at Gallipoli and initiated a tradition of which those at home could be proud.

Heroic endurance The second type of heroism that featured in the unit histories was connected with endurance. This kind of heroism was described most fully in the histories of citizen formations in which the authors had the space to include the mundane and grinding features of life on the peninsula. An author of a Territorial formation described the distinction between the two types of heroism eloquently: They had done many splendid things in the heat and excitement of a well fought action, the splendour of the most heroic deed of that day pales almost into insignificance beside the heroism of the men who carried on – digging trenches in torrential rain, performing the normal fatigues of trench life or wandering in the bitter cold of a Gallipoli night in search for dead comrades. And 131


let it not be forgotten that the men who did these things were so rotten with dysentery that for many of them every hour that passed was a separate living hell.31 Gallipoli, as with all trench warfare, was an experience that had to be endured. But few other campaigns could boast the extreme conditions of the peninsula, and this was consistently highlighted in the unit histories. The intense heat in the summer, accompanied by a lack of water, swarming flies and the consequent dysentery and jaundice, was contrasted with the freezing, stormy weather suffered in the winter when men died from exposure.32 Unit survival under such varied and inhospitable conditions was deemed truly heroic. The heroism of endurance was an extremely important ingredient of all unit histories. Many hundreds or thousands of men might pass through a unit during a campaign, but only a small percentage of those who served would have experienced the ‘splendour’ of the heroic attack that formed the basis of the public reputation. Most would, however, have been familiar with the many hardships presented by trench warfare, and by describing life in the trenches in detail the unit history became a more inclusive book with which most former members could identify.

Classical imagery Finally, a less consistent theme permeating some of the histories was the use of classical and crusading imagery to describe the landscape and experience of Gallipoli. Only a minority of unit histories reflected this theme, which appeared to depend on the style of the author, and again, it was evident only in the individual unit histories with the space to indulge in analogies between the Gallipoli campaign on the one hand and Greek myths and the ancient crusade against the Turk on the other.33 The 29th Division, for example, was described as taking a part in one of the ‘grand heroic Homeric episodes of world history’.34 Whilst the author of the 42nd East Lancashire Division’s history wrote of the formation being ‘bound for the Aegean Sea, the very source and well-spring of adventure, whose shores and islands were the playgrounds of heroes’.35 This type of analogy helped to ascribe significance to the fighting on the peninsula and mark it out as one of the ‘great episodes of history’. It also helped to differentiate the Gallipoli campaign from the war being waged on the Western Front. As John North was to claim in his book, Gallipoli: The Fading Vision, ‘There was no magic in the soil of France for the men who fought there.’ Gallipoli, on the other hand, because of its setting and its tragedy lent itself to ‘retrospective sentimentality’.36 This is certainly the impression conveyed in General Sir Ian Hamilton’s preface to the East Lancashire’s divisional history when he wrote: 132


In the regions of time and space, the Dardanelles enterprise forms only a trifling part of the record of this famous Division, but in the sphere of the imagination, that part will be reckoned by Lancastrians yet unborn as the most precious heirloom bequeathed to them by the generation that fought in the Great War.37 There is little doubt that Gallipoli was important to units that fought there, but was the Gallipoli experience one that stood alone in capturing the imagination of units? Were the themes of lost opportunity, heroic attack, heroic endurance and classical allusion reserved only for narratives about Gallipoli, or did they recur throughout the whole of the unit histories? To answer these questions the post Gallipoli history of the units must be examined.

After Gallipoli Descriptions of warfare after Gallipoli contained many of the same themes to be found in the first part of the histories. The notion of the lost opportunity, so prevalent in the writings about Gallipoli, rarely surfaced in descriptions of actions in other theatres. Perhaps this was because the experiment at Gallipoli, unlike the war in other theatres, was an ultimate failure, and units needed to place the blame for failure at government or army level. The remainder of the themes to be found in the Gallipoli chapters, however, recurred throughout the histories. Heroic attack and heroic endurance continued to be the staple themes of the regimental histories that described the subsequent campaigns, undertaken by their constituent battalions, in a similar fashion to Gallipoli. In the majority of these histories there was no room for favouritism or the elevation of the achievements of an individual battalion above others. The tone and style of the histories remained constant throughout. In histories designed to educate new officers in the traditions of the regiment a continuous stream of brave exploits and examples of heroic fighting were what was required. By illustrating the strength and constancy of their traditions the regiments hoped to reinforce the obligation of new recruits to continue those traditions that had been maintained, unbroken, throughout the Great War.38 In the single unit histories, and those rare examples of regimental works that organise the history by battalion rather than chronologically, there was also a continuity of themes. However, there were subtle differences in the way in which the themes were presented and emphasised. After Gallipoli, the theme of heroic endurance took on a greater significance. Many of the units were described as disillusioned on their arrival in other theatres of war and a greater sense of discontent was communicated in some histories.39 Indeed, for the first years following the Gallipoli 133


campaign there was less emphasis on glorious attacks and a greater concentration on their ability to endure the terrible casualties, the squalor of the living conditions and the boredom generated by the mundane tedium of life in the trenches. This is particularly true for those units that found themselves transferred to the Western Front. This did not, however, mean that the theme of heroic attack disappeared from the histories. It was revived, albeit in a different form, to describe significant actions in 1917 and 1918. The description of heroic attack on the Gallipoli peninsula rarely attested to the military skill of the soldiers. It was their capacity to die honourably after bayoneting a few of the enemy that was celebrated. After 1915, those operations that were highlighted within histories were both offensive and defensive, and crucially, characterised by success rather than by futile assaults. Whilst casualty figures and glorious descriptions of heroic deeds were still a prominent feature of the account, new elements were added. Technical proficiency and unit organisation were themes that were increasingly incorporated as part of the description of an action deemed important by the unit. This can be seen clearly in the history of the 42nd East Lancashire Division which celebrated the success of their divisional organisation and mutual trust between units in holding a German attack north of Bapaume in March 1918. The 6th Service Battalion of the Prince of Wales Volunteers dwelt at length on the success of their mobile operations in Mesopotamia during March and April 1917, the 4th Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers eulogised the fall of Gaza and the Battle of Mughar in 1917, and the 5th Bedfordshire and Hertfordshires chose their proficient raids on Umbrella Hill (1917) to celebrate.40 In a minority of histories the use of ancient myths to highlight the importance of an action or campaign was revived. Once Gallipoli had been described, classical allusions faded from the few works that had utilised them, but they were replaced by references to biblical, crusading and mystical fables, particularly in the histories of units which had served in Palestine and Mesopotamia. According to F.A.M. Webster, the land across which the Bedfords fought their successful battles for Gaza in 1917 was ‘hallowed by the greatest events of history. It (was) the birthplace of Christ and the very cradle of civilization the soldiers had left England to save’.41 And for the Prince of Wales Volunteers, whose triumph in 1917 was the capture of Baghdad, the city conjured up memories of the tales of 1001 nights as it ‘loomed thought the mirage, its palm groves obscured by the choking dust clouds’.42 Significantly, these myths were used to highlight their most successful actions later in the war. The units wanted to use their histories to celebrate and highlight their successes in wartime as well as their initial bravery. For some it justified their continuing existence in the post-war world, but for many it was simply necessary to contribute to the self-image of their unit. A unit 134


needed to prove that its soldiers had done more than be mown down in No Mans Land. The first attack was a watershed for a unit, attracting recognition for their bravery, but there could be only one eulogy to futile bloodletting. Thereafter, units selected successful actions for commemoration.

Conclusion: Gallipoli and unit identity In the aftermath of the war, Gallipoli performed two roles in unit histories. For regimental and regular unit histories expressing unit identities founded on traditions that could be traced back hundreds of years, Gallipoli was but one glorious event in a long line of glorious moments. The histories simply needed to reiterate ancient traditions supported by new examples from the Great War, and Gallipoli provided one illustration among many. By contrast, for those battalions and divisions raised on the outbreak of war, Gallipoli was viewed as their first major action where they earned the beginnings of a military reputation. They had few pre-war traditions on which to draw and thus the campaign appeared in their histories as an important defining moment in the construction of their collective identities. Not surprisingly this influenced the way in which Gallipoli was portrayed in these histories. In some books, the special significance of Gallipoli was communicated by the liberal use of classical imagery; in others, it was the disproportionate space devoted to descriptions of the campaign. Moreover, in all histories, the theme of heroic attack played a central role in Gallipoli chapters, for it was their first attacks and the high casualties that accompanied them that first proved the units’ capacity for bravery and brought public acclaim at home. Indeed, it was this wider public recognition of their efforts and the fact that units believed they had first proved their worth on the beaches and in the trenches of the peninsula that guaranteed the name of Gallipoli would be forever associated with feats of great heroism in their histories. However, in the aftermath of the war it was not only the bloody attacks that units wished to be recorded in their histories. They were certainly keen to remind survivors, their families and the wider public of the birth of a unit’s reputation and their capacity for bravery, but later, more spectacular and successful campaigns also became a vital part of unit identity. Whether the motive was to bolster a military reputation to avoid disbandment or to derive meaning and comfort from the bloodshed of the war, units wanted to be associated with success as well as failure, however tragic and glorious that failure may have been. So, for the majority of units, Gallipoli remained a unique and important experience in their history, but unlike Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Lancashire Fusiliers, they did not create a myth of Gallipoli that overshadowed all that came after. 135

9 IN THE SHADOW OF GALLIPOLI? AMPHIBIOUS WARFARE IN THE INTER-WAR PERIOD Ian Speller

Within the field of popular history there is a general acceptance that the losses incurred by the landing forces at Gallipoli convinced most military officers in the inter-war period that opposed amphibious landings were not possible in conditions of modern war. This view is usually accompanied by statements congratulating either the US Marine Corps or the Japanese armed forces for refusing to accept this assessment and for developing the equipment and doctrine required to overcome enemy defences at the beach thereby spearheading the development of amphibious warfare as a modern military capability. Typical of such views are the following: This dismal experience [at Gallipoli] made a profound impression on military thinking the general conclusion was that large scale amphibious operations against a defended shore, especially conducted in daylight, were almost certain to be suicidal.1 Although some American marine and naval officers viewed the operation differently, the disaster at Gallipoli caused a general belief among all military planners that massed amphibious assaults were impossible.2 For many years such ideas were accepted as established fact and are often considered sufficient explanation for the lack of a significant amphibious capability in Britain at the outbreak of war in 1939. This view is reflected in the work of both Arthur J. Marder and Stephen Roskill, two of the most respected naval historians of the last century.3 As recently as November 2000, Robert O’Neill stated that Britain ‘abandoned amphibious operations after the Gallipoli debacle’.4 Other writers, such as David MacGregor, have argued that although Gallipoli did not entirely discredit amphibious operations it neverthe136

IN THE SHADOW OF GALLIPOLI

less had a profound effect on thinking about such operations. Indeed, MacGregor claims that, rather than thinking too little about amphibious warfare in the inter-war period, the British thought too much about it and in doing so they were led into unwarranted pessimism. He concludes that British planners assumed that opposed landings in daylight were extremely hazardous and that, as a result, amphibious operations would have to be kept small and simple and would take place only in the dark or at dawn in order to secure tactical surprise. This, he explains, is why the British were so poorly prepared for the large-scale opposed landings that were conducted in the Second World War.5 There is an element of truth in this. Amphibious operations were certainly neglected in Britain between the wars and great strides were made in both the United States and Japan. However, more recent research has demonstrated that significant progress was also made in Britain despite the shadow of Gallipoli.6 By the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 the British had developed the basic doctrine and equipment that they would need in the difficult years that followed. That this is often overlooked is a reflection of the fact that amphibious operations received a lower priority in Britain than in either the United States or Japan. However, this had less to do with Gallipoli than with assumptions about the nature of future conflict and likely opponents. Whereas both Japan and the United States could postulate convincing scenarios where amphibious forces might prove vital this was not the case in Britain before 1940.

Amphibious Warfare and the British 1918–39 Much of the traditional literature devoted to this topic suggests that the British abandoned amphibious warfare after their chastening experience at Gallipoli and did not seriously study amphibious operations until the outbreak of the Second World War. In large part this reflects a reliance on the work of Fergusson and Maund both of whom were closely involved with amphibious warfare during the war.7 Fergusson had been an officer in the Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ) while Maund was a founder member of the Inter-Services Training and Development Centre (ISTDC). The ISTDC and COHQ, established in 1938 and 1940 respectively, laid much of the essential groundwork for the successful employment of amphibious warfare by British forces in the Second World War. Both Maund and Fergusson were in an advantageous position to offer insight into this process. Fergusson’s book, The Watery Maze is an unofficial staff history of COHQ and he was given access to all of their files during his research. The Watery Maze and Maund’s book, Assault from the Sea, are valuable sources but both tend to underplay the amount of progress that had been made prior to 1938 and in doing so they provide 137


a false impression of views towards amphibious warfare in the inter-war period and of the impact of Gallipoli. In particular, Maund’s book lays a great emphasis on his own achievements, causing one observer to entitle a book review, ‘Sic Transit Gloria Maundi’.8 More recent research has demonstrated that the British made great strides in the development of amphibious warfare despite their experiences at Gallipoli. Research by Donald Bittner, David MacGregor and Kenneth Clifford has shed new light on this period although all have been criticised for drawing inappropriate comparisons between the British and the US experience.9 One source of this criticism has been David Massam, whose own study of British approaches to amphibious warfare in the period between 1900 and 1940 currently provides the best analysis of this topic.10 Massam demonstrates that, contrary to accepted opinion, Gallipoli neither distorted nor discouraged British thinking about amphibious warfare. Indeed, if anything, despite the losses incurred at V Beach and elsewhere on 25 April 1915, the experience of Gallipoli encouraged the military to accept that opposed landings were tactically viable, something that was doubted prior to this time. Massam argues that Gallipoli was a positive experience for the British, resulting in improved relations between the services. The operation also proved that major amphibious operations were possible. The best illustration of this was the serious preparations undertaken for a ‘Great Landing’ on the coast of Belgium in 1916–17. This landing was designed to outflank the German trenches in Flanders, posing a threat to their rear areas and facilitating a breakout that the land forces had been unable to achieve alone. By contributing to the seizure of the U-boat bases at Ostend, Bruges and Zeebrugge the landing could also make an important contribution to the war at sea. In Massam’s own words: The history of the Belgian coastal plans throughout 1916– 1917 makes it clear that there was no determined backlash against amphibious operations in the immediate aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign. Schemes involving the landing of between one and three divisions of infantry later supplemented with artillery and tanks, were repeatedly approved by the Admiralty and General Staff: by the naval and military commanders from whose commands the forces would be drawn: and by the commanders entrusted with the operation.11 One scheme called for the landing of a division in three brigade-sized columns on a 3-mile front between Nieuport and Ostend. The landing would be in conjunction with a land offensive from the Allied lines southeast of Dunkirk. The columns would land from three specially constructed pontoons measuring 540 ft by 30 ft. These pontoons would be pushed 138


by pairs of Prince Rupert-class monitors armed with 12-inch guns, with an additional 14-inch gun monitor in reserve. A 100-ft-long wooden raft would be secured to the front of each pontoon with the aim of achieving a dry landing for the troops. Each pontoon would also carry three tanks, artillery, wagons, hand-carts and bicycles. The emphasis on transport showed that commanders appreciated that securing the beach was only the first stage of the operation prior to exploitation inland. The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service would provide air cover and the maritime force would provide gunfire support. The monitors were particularly well suited for this role. Motor launches would provide smoke cover for the assaulting force and arrangements for accurate navigation were worked out. Trials with the landing pontoon were carried out in England and showed that a speed of 6 knots could be achieved in ideal conditions. However, these trials were conducted in calm weather. It is doubtful whether the bulky and cumbersome combination of monitor– pontoon–raft could have affected a safe landing in any kind of seaway or under fire from German shore batteries.12 Despite this, the failure to undertake the operation owed more to the conservatism of Douglas Haig than to reservations about its tactical viability. Haig believed that the allocated forces could be used more effectively on the land in a conventional manner and was reluctant to open up a new front in Belgium. As a result, plans for the landing remained tied to an advance on the land that, in the event, never took place. It is possible to present this as a major lost opportunity. However, the primitive means of landing the assault wave, the heavy fortifications and defences on the Belgium coast and the presence of German reserves all suggest that the operation would have encountered significant opposition and may not have achieved all of its objectives.13 Nevertheless, provisions for landing a balanced military force with support from maritime and air assets show that many of the problems of Gallipoli had already been identified, unfortunately technology had not yet provided all of the solutions. After the war there was considerable interest in amphibious operations. Writers such as Charles Callwell, George Aston and Julian Corbett all reaffirmed their pre-war view that amphibious operations were an important and valuable strategic tool. The chastening experience of Gallipoli did not discourage such interest. In a reaction to the stalemate and carnage on the Western Front a number of writers sought to identify a different approach to warfare, emphasising a more indirect approach that included the use of maritime and amphibious forces. The most noteworthy of these was Basil Liddell Hart who developed the idea of the Indirect Approach and the notion that there has been a particular British Way in Warfare.14 Despite this, Liddell Hart did not write about amphibious warfare in any detail until after 1945. Few writers actually examined the detailed tactical problems of future amphibious operations. One of the few who did 139


was J.F.C. Fuller.15 Unfortunately, Fuller’s work was visionary rather than practical, envisaging an independent and decisive role for amphibious tanks that remains beyond the bounds of technology today. After the war the Dardanelles Committee was established, with Commodore F.H. Mitchell as its president, to investigate the Attacks Delivered on and the Enemy Defences of the Dardanelles Straits. The report of the committee, submitted in October 1919, drew a number of conclusions of relevance to future amphibious operations. It emphasised that, while the 1913 Manual of Combined Naval and Military Operations proved of great value in preparing the plans for the landings, the operation was undermined by the lack of an organisation with responsibility for providing the personnel and material required to carry out the operation. There was clearly insufficient understanding of the principles outlined in the Manual and the operation was favourably or adversely affected according to the degree to which they were observed or neglected. In its conclusions, the Mitchell Report noted the value of specialist landing craft, the need for secrecy at all levels, the requirement for tactical loading of the landing force and the importance of air power. The weakness of naval gunfire support at Gallipoli was noted, and the committee recommended that the matter should be the subject of experimental and development work to improve future performance.16 The military lessons of the Gallipoli landings were therefore identified at an early stage. Key areas of interest and concern were identified and recommendations for future study were made. In the years that followed, this work would be built upon in a series of theoretical and practical studies and exercises that would continue to identify problems and begin to formulate solutions. An example of the investigative work of the Mitchell Committee can be provided by their investigation of command relationships. There had been considerable debate over the desirability of unified command (i.e., a single commander) or joint command (i.e., co-equal naval and military commander) in combined operations.17 There had been some speculation that the existence of a unified command at Gallipoli might have led to the more effective coordination of the naval and military effort. The Committee investigated the issue and concluded: A close study of the campaign fails to reveal any instances to lead to the conclusion that the course of events would have been materially altered or more favourable results achieved had the control of sea, land and air forces been vested in one commander. Recognising that the issue was an extremely complex one, the Committee recommended that it should be subject to further study. Indeed, they recommended that the three services should receive a common groundwork in staff training in order to provide the best basis 140


for arriving at a solution to ‘this complex issue’. This was typical of the work of the Mitchell Committee. The Gallipoli campaign was examined for the lessons that could be learnt and in order to identify areas where further study was required. By identifying issues such as command relations, specialist equipment and the coordination of inter-service assets the Committee successfully identified the key areas requiring further study and in doing so they laid the essential foundations for the development work that was to follow. Building on the work of the Mitchell Committee the requirements for successful amphibious operations were examined by the Staff Colleges who joined forces each year to complete a joint theoretical combined exercise where, according to one commentator, ‘they used much ink and consumed much gin’.18 The Gallipoli landings provided an obvious source of information and experience and many officers at these discussions were veterans of that campaign. The lessons derived from these discussions were incorporated in an updated version of the pre-war Manual of Combined Naval and Military Operations, 1913. On the suggestion of the War Office, a committee was set up to complete a draft chapter on combined operations based on a report of the 1919 joint staff college exercises. This committee first met in June 1920 and published the revised chapter in 1922. In 1925 an official Manual of Combined Operations was published, and revised and updated editions were published in 1931 and 1938.19 The 1938 edition of the Manual was completed by an inter-service Drafting Committee appointed in 1936 and responsible to the Deputy Chiefs of Staff.20 The study of the problems of modern amphibious operations was not entirely theoretical and was not confined to the Staff Colleges. Although the British did not conduct regular and coordinated amphibious fleet exercises comparable to those undertaken in the United States in the late 1930s, numerous joint exercises were conducted in Home Waters, the Mediterranean and off the coast of India.21 These exercises were often limited in scope and the result of ad hoc local arrangements. However, the Admiralty encouraged the use of such exercises as a practical means of examining problems and initiated a number themselves. The reports from these exercises contributed greatly towards the general accumulation of knowledge and made an important contribution to the evolution of doctrine and equipment. One specific area where progress was made was within the field of naval gunfire support. Experience during the Gallipoli campaign had made the Admiralty aware that they needed to improve the efficiency of their shore bombardment.22 Thus, naval gunfire support was practised at a number of bombardment ranges. Firing practice was conducted with the fall of shot corrected by forward observers and by aircraft. A Bombardment Manual was produced and issued to the three services. According to Admiral Sir 141


Frederick Dreyer, this preparation paid good dividends, leading to the successful employment of HM ships in this role in the Second World War.23 As Vice-Admiral commanding the Battle Cruiser Squadron, Dreyer had conducted amphibious exercises on an annual basis. In one such exercise, troops from the 2nd battalion, Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, were landed in the Moray Firth in ships’ boats from the battle cruisers HMS Hood, Renown and Repulse and from four accompanying destroyers. Once their military load had been disembarked the warships provided gunfire support in accordance with a pre-arranged plan.24 One of the most important lessons of the Gallipoli landings was the requirement for modern landing craft to land the assault wave.25 A number of large purpose-built ‘X Lighters’ had been developed by the Navy in the First World War and these contributed to the landings at Suvla Bay in 1915. The search for a more suitable landing craft continued after the war and this requirement was consistently emphasised in exercise reports. In the 1920s an inter-service Landing Craft Committee was established to study the design and number of craft required to conduct a landing on a hostile shore.26 Their first attempt at a landing craft was the Motor Landing Craft (MLC(1)) completed in 1926.27 This craft was not a success and was followed in 1928 by the MLC(10). The MLC(10) was a flat-bottomed craft powered by a water jet. It could embark 100 troops or a 12-ton tank, discharging them directly onto the beach via a steep bow ramp. The water jet gave it a relatively slow speed of only 5 knots and the boat’s flat bottom and bow ramp made it rather unseaworthy, handicaps that are common in modern amphibious craft. By 1934 the MLC had been thoroughly tested in a series of exercises and the design proved satisfactory. Two more vessels were procured and these were joined by six more, ordered as a result of the 1936 Abyssinian crisis.28 It is clear that the British did not abandon the study of amphibious operations after Gallipoli. Indeed, the problems and difficulties identified at Gallipoli provided the starting point for the examination of possible solutions. As noted above, some authors have suggested that this distorted British approaches to amphibious warfare leading to the rejection of major opposed landings such as those conducted in 1915. British approaches have been criticised for concentrating on the difficulties of opposed landings and for having a consequent emphasis on speed, surprise and night landings in order to reduce resistance at the beach. This is often assumed to be a reaction to the losses incurred at Gallipoli. In reality this is not a fair representation of the doctrine laid out in the Manual of Combined Operations. An examination of the 1938 Manual demonstrates that rather than being distorted by the experience of Gallipoli, it was actually a wellfounded document. Like its counterpart in the United States, the British Manual of Combined Operations provided a remarkably good guide to 142


the type of amphibious operations that would be conducted between 1939 and 1945. The Manual certainly noted the difficulty of conducting opposed landings and recommended landing where there was limited opposition. To suggest otherwise would have been foolish. However, it also noted that in certain circumstances opposed landings may be necessary and that only in ‘exceptional circumstances’ could an operation be planned in the certain knowledge that the landing would be unopposed. The Manual’s suggestions for overcoming opposition on the beach; heavy naval gunfire support, close air support and the coordinated employment of infantry, tanks and artillery in the assault wave mirrors exactly that which was employed to good effect in Europe between 1943 and 1944. Similarly, the Manual accurately predicted that small-scale or lightly opposed landings might secure tactical surprise by landing at night, but that landings in the face of serious opposition would have to be conducted in daylight in order to coordinate the full range of supporting arms to best effect.29 It is clear that while Gallipoli provided a useful source of practical evidence and acted as a starting point for the study of amphibious operations, the output of such studies did not lead to the conclusion that opposed landings were impossible. Rather, the British attempted to find ways of making such landings less difficult and less costly than was the case in 1915. The key difference between the United States and Britain at this time was the question of priority. The development of an amphibious capability in the United States was driven by the recognition that amphibious operations would be necessary in any future war against their most likely major opponent. The same circumstances did not apply to Britain. Prior to 1940 it was difficult to devise any scenario where major amphibious forces would be required for a future conflict in Europe. The British Army was expected to fight alongside the French in France while the German coast remained a deeply uninviting area for any kind of amphibious operation. The requirement for amphibious operations on the scale of the 1944 Normandy landings could not have been foreseen before the war. In the 1920s the Admiralty did consider an offensive strategy for war against Japan, using amphibious forces to take forward bases or to re-take Hong Kong. Neither of the other two services were keen on this approach. In the face of their opposition, and with new threats emerging in Europe, the Admiralty abandoned the forward strategy in the 1930s in favour of a defensive approach based on the reinforcement of a fortified base at Singapore.30 Consequently, during the inter-war years there appeared to be little immediate requirement for amphibious capabilities. Another significant brake on the development of amphibious capabilities in Britain was the lack of any organisation with an institutional imperative to develop them. The Army was largely concerned with Imperial policing duties and the requirement of modern land warfare. Likewise, 143


the RAF was intent on developing an independent air arm and showed relatively little interest in inter-service cooperation. The primary concern of the Navy was the maintenance of an effective battle fleet and the struggle for control of the Fleet Air Arm. Budgetary pressure and institutional preference meant that the Navy concentrated on maintaining its core capability, that of securing sea control, over other, secondary, tasks such as amphibious operations. The Royal Marines, one organisation that might have had a desire to support amphibious operations, did not receive responsibility for this mode of warfare until after the Second World War. In any case, as an integral part of the Royal Navy administered by the Board of Admiralty, the institutional position of the Royal Marines was relatively weak and was not equivalent to that of the US Marine Corps. Despite repeated calls for the creation of a permanent Royal Marines (amphibious) Striking Force, and the occasional employment of marines in this roll on exercises, no such force was maintained. The study of amphibious warfare was placed on a firmer footing by the establishment of the Inter-Services Training and Development Centre (ISTDC) at Eastney in 1938. The Centre was established in response to proposals that originated from the Royal Naval Staff College at Greenwich. Although originally tasked with studying the problems of all inter-service operations the ISTDC concentrated on amphibious warfare and in 1940 it came under command of the newly created Directorate of Combined Operations. Building on the solid work already completed in this field, the ISTDC studied the practical and theoretical problems of amphibious operations, refining doctrine and promoting the development of landing craft. Under their guidance prototype landing craft were developed that could land infantry (LCA) and tanks (LCM), and a support landing craft (LCS) was built to provide assaulting forces with close support in the final run-in to the beach.31 In addition to this, large 10,000-ton Glen-class passenger carrying cargo ships were identified as suitable for conversion to Landing Ship, Infantry (LSI) and they were earmarked for this role should war break out.32 Unfortunately, the ISTDC could only examine and advise. It pushed for the construction of a purpose-built landing craft carrier vessel, but the project came to nought due to the reluctance of the Admiralty to divert scarce resources to what was seen as a low priority. In June 1939 the centre reported that without increased resources the British would be unable to land a brigade-sized force on a hostile shore within six months. This prompted the purchase of 18 LCA, 12 LCM and 2 LCS but it did not lead to a general reversal of policy.33 It would take a dramatic and unforeseen change in strategic circumstances (the fall of France) to bring this about. By 1939 Britain had developed an appropriate theory of amphibious operations and this was enshrined in the Manual of Combined Operations. They had prototype landing craft whose design was in advance of 144


any overseas equivalent. These craft were specifically designed to support the conduct of opposed landings. The LCA was fitted with light armour precisely for this role and the LCS was designed to provide supporting fire for the assault wave. Merchant ships had been earmarked for conversion as carrier vessels should the need arise and many of these vessels were to provide sterling service later in the war. The only major shortcoming was the lack of a specialist landing force trained and equipped for amphibious operations and available at short notice. It is hard to avoid the fact that on the basis of the strategic assumptions that prevailed in 1939 Britain did not need a large standing amphibious force. On this basis Massam claims that the British policy was inherently rational. They developed doctrine and prototype equipment in order to be ready to generate standing forces in the future should the requirement ever arise. The only key failing was the failure to fully appreciate the role that air power would play in future operations. This was reflected throughout the Army and Navy and was thus general within those services and not specific to amphibious operations. Nevertheless, with the advantage of hindsight, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that for a country whose main strategic advantage lay in the possession of a powerful navy, the absence of a dedicated amphibious force able to respond quickly to unforeseen circumstances does appear misguided.

Amphibious Warfare in the United States and Japan The armed forces in both the United States and Japan made significant progress in the field of amphibious warfare between the two world wars. These two countries approached amphibious warfare from different starting points and developed different capabilities at different paces. The Japanese built upon a history of successful amphibious operations in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and in the First World War against German possessions in China (Tsingtao) and the central Pacific. Their capabilities were developed between the wars and by 1939 the Japanese had the most modern and effective amphibious capability in the world. The United States had conducted expeditionary operations against Spanish forces in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. In 1914 it conducted a minor landing at Vera Cruz, Mexico as part of a pacification operation but it did not undertake any amphibious operations during the First World War. Despite this, in the 20 years after the war the Americans developed the embryo of what would become the most powerful and most successful amphibious force that the world has ever seen. In both cases the legacy of Gallipoli appears to have been a spur to development rather than a hindrance. The Gallipoli campaign was studied extensively in the United States, notably at the Marine Corps School at Quantico. It is an indication of US 145


interest in the amphibious operation at Gallipoli that the US Naval Institute Press published the first English translation of Liman von Sanders’ memoirs in 1927.34 Problems were examined and solutions sought.35 In particular, the Marines identified the value of accurate and heavy gunfire support; the need for a naval air arm to support the landings; the necessity for detailed, flexible and coordinated planning; the importance of combat loading in order to achieve the rapid landing and build-up of military supplies, including artillery; and the need to land the initial assault quickly and on a broad front. The Marines also examined German landing operations against the Russian-held Oesel and Dago Islands in the Gulf of Riga in 1917, and these studies reiterated the need for speed, vigour and resourcefulness when conducting amphibious operations.36 The Japanese also studied the Gallipoli landings; indeed it would be strange if they had not.37 Prior to 1922 they may have received information under the Anglo-Japanese Treaty but even if this were not the case they, like the Americans, would have had access to the various official histories, memoirs and articles devoted to this topic that proliferated in Britain and elsewhere after the war. Significantly, Gallipoli appears to have been used as an indication of the potential utility of amphibious forces rather than a sign of their supposed impossibility. Despite this, the ‘lessons’ of Gallipoli were not the fundamental driving force behind the development and maintenance of capabilities and doctrine. The key factor was the appreciation by both countries that they would probably need to conduct amphibious operations in any future war and this was the driving force behind the development of both capability and doctrine. By the end of the First World War both Japan and the United States had identified each other as likely future adversaries. Geography dictated that any war between these countries would involve a significant maritime element and that amphibious operations would be required. The Japanese would need to conduct amphibious operations in order to seize US islands and facilities in the western and central Pacific, including the Philippines. Later plans included the requirement to seize European colonies in southeast Asia in operations spearheaded by amphibious forces. Planning proceeded on this basis. Conversely, planners within the United States soon appreciated that in any future war against Japan amphibious forces would be required to re-take lost territories and to seize forward bases for naval and air forces. The stipulation in the 1922 Five Power Treaty forbidding the fortification of naval bases in the western Pacific made US facilities in the Philippines and elsewhere vulnerable to seizure by the Japanese, and Japanese possession of the former German territories in the central Pacific brought an apparent requirement to neutralise their facilities there.38 This was recognised in appreciations of future requirements, most famously in Major Pete Ellis’s 146


Operational Plan 712 Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia which was approved as the basis for future planning by the US Marine Corps (USMC) in 1921.39 In the USMC the United States had an organisation with both an interest in and an ability to promote the cause of amphibious warfare. Prior to 1914 the USMC had established an Advanced Base Force (ABF) for the defence of advanced naval bases. The ABF, however, did not include any element designed to seize bases or to conduct opposed landings. After 1918 some senior officers within the Corps, notably the Marine Corps Commandant, General John Lejeune, pressed for the adoption of an amphibious role at least partially in order that the USMC should have its own unique role distinct from that of the US Army.40 This role was not universally accepted but, despite numerous difficulties, by 1927 the USMC had formally assumed responsibility for ‘land operations in support of the fleet for the initial seizure and defense of advanced bases’ and in 1931 the Navy General Board recommended that the primary role of the Marines was ‘assisting the fleet in the seizure and initial defence of advanced bases’.41 The concentration of the USMC on this role not only provided the United States with a dedicated landing force with the creation of the Fleet Marine Force (FMF) in 1933 but it also provided for greater focus and more continuity in this field than might otherwise have been the case. Amphibious warfare was carefully studied at the Marine Corps Schools and major fleet exercises were conducted with the US Navy, initially and rather falteringly in the 1920s, and then by the late 1930s on a large scale and on an annual basis. As a result, in 1934 the first Tentative Manual for Landing Operations was issued and this was revised and updated before being published in its final pre-war form in 1938 as Fleet Training Publication No. 167 (FTP 167). The doctrine outlined in FTP 167 was adopted by the Army and the Navy and was employed successfully throughout the Second World War. The Japanese did not have an organisation equivalent to the USMC. The Navy had its own marine force organised into reinforced battalion sized Naval Landing Forces but the Army retained primary responsibility for amphibious warfare. Unfortunately, there was little inter-service cooperation at the strategic level.42 The Army remained more interested in mainland Asia while the Navy concentrated on the requirements of major fleet action. At the tactical level there was more cooperation and the 1924 Landing and Landing Defence Operations Manual was updated in 1933 and 1941 and was issued to both the Army and Navy in its revised forms. Despite this the Navy did not begin to seriously prepare for amphibious operations in support of the existing national strategy until late 1940.43 In contrast to both the British and Americans, the requirement to support operations against mainland China meant that the Japanese 147


armed forces actually conducted a number of landings, notably at Shanghai in 1932 and 1937. These operations provided a spur to the development of equipment and techniques and influenced Japanese approaches in a more profound fashion than did Gallipoli. For example, as a result of the unsatisfactory operation at Shanghai in 1932 the Japanese Army ordered the Shinshu Maru, an 8,000-ton landing ship that, when it entered service in 1935, represented the first truly modern amphibious ship of the twentieth century.44 Likewise, experience in China suggested to the Japanese that it would be possible to secure unopposed landings when operating against mainland Asia or large islands such as the Philippines. In addition to the poor performance ashore of troops trained primarily for amphibious operations, this led the Army to emphasise the achievement of unopposed landings and to discontinue the practice, begun in the 1920s, of routinely training specially designated divisions in amphibious warfare.45 It was not a supposed lesson of Gallipoli that led the Japanese to neglect to prepare for strongly opposed landings, it was a reflection of recent experience and perceived requirements. By 1939 both the Japanese and the Americans had made considerable strides towards the development of a modern amphibious capability. Japanese capabilities were in advance of their contemporaries, largely due to the employment of amphibious forces in the war against China. The United States had an appropriate doctrine and a dedicated landing force. They had also identified civilian boats and vehicles suitable for conversion into landing craft.46 As such it had the embryo of an amphibious force. It would, however, be a number of years before this potential was realised. In 1939 the FMF was at only a third of its supposed wartime strength and while prototype modern landing craft had been identified, they had not yet entered operational service.47 The experience of Gallipoli played a role in the development of these capabilities, but was not the most important driving force. As in Britain, the operation was studied and lessons were learnt but this alone did not bring a need for amphibious capabilities. The clear requirement to conduct amphibious operations in any future war against their most likely opponent drove both countries to develop their capabilities. These capabilities would have been required whether or not the landings at Gallipoli had taken place.

Conclusion An examination of the period 1918–39 demonstrates that the three main maritime powers, the United States, Britain and Japan, all made considerable progress in the development of their amphibious capabilities. Gallipoli offered a mine of information and was closely studied. However, the experience at Gallipoli was only one factor in the development of 148


amphibious capabilities. It provided an illustration of some of the tactical problems that could be encountered but did not fundamentally influence policy decisions about amphibious requirements. Much more important were assumptions about the nature of future conflict and the existence, or otherwise, of a dedicated body responsible for the development of amphibious capabilities. Both Japan and the United States could postulate convincing scenarios where amphibious landings would be required in a future conflict, Britain could not. Inevitably this had an impact on the level of preparation. Moreover, whereas in the United States the USMC had an obvious interest in promoting amphibious preparedness, no equivalent organisation existed in Britain or Japan. In Japan the existing services retained responsibility for amphibious warfare and this approach served their purposes well until 1942. In Britain those who advocated the establishment of some form of amphibious striking force were thwarted by a general lack of priority allied to a scarcity of resources. By 1939 the British had developed the doctrine and equipment that would be required for future amphibious operations. The validity of both was proven in a series of successful operations. The establishment of the ISTDC and later of COHQ put the development of amphibious capabilities on a firmer footing and ensured that the British remained at the forefront of amphibious warfare. The first Landing Craft Tank and Landing Ship Tank were designed and built by the British. The British conducted the first major landing to seize enemy territory, Operation Ironclad, the seizure of Vichy French Madagascar in 1942. British forces played a vital part in the Allied landings in North Africa, Sicily and Italy and the majority of the forces landed from the sea at Normandy on 6 June 1944 were either British or Commonwealth troops and the majority of landing craft were operated by British personnel. The ‘shadow of Gallipoli’ did not play the part in British policy that it has commonly been ascribed. Amphibious warfare was not discredited and it was not ignored. However, the failure at Gallipoli may have had an important impact on popular perceptions and these in turn may have reinforced the factors that limited the development of amphibious capabilities. As Christopher Bell has noted, Gallipoli contributed to the ‘low esteem’ of amphibious operations during this period.48 It is hard to quantify such an intangible effect but it is possible that in such a climate it was relatively easy to overlook the requirement for greater resources to be devoted to amphibious capabilities. In this way popular perceptions may have reinforced existing priorities. An Allied victory at Gallipoli may have fostered an entirely different view and this in turn may have reinforced calls for greater priority to be accorder to amphibious operations. This is a subject that would benefit from further study.

149

10 GALLIPOLI AS CONTESTED COMMEMORATIVE SPACE John McQuilton

As Jenny Macleod noted in her Introduction, there is little doubt that the historiography of Anzac overshadows the role the Australians played in the Gallipoli Campaign.1 There is also little doubt that Gallipoli overshadows Australian military history. Les Carlyon’s book on the campaign, for example, headed the best seller lists in Australia after its publication in 2001.2 More significantly, Gallipoli is still a major touchstone when it comes to notions of national identity in Australia. Although both New Zealand and Turkey also see the campaign as pivotal events in the emergence of their modern nation-states, the emphasis in Australia is far more marked.3 Parochial it may well be, but its power remains. Why Gallipoli rather than other campaigns in which the Australians fought during the First World War? It certainly matches the more traditional nation-building myths where war, death and sacrifice are seen as key elements in the creation of a national identity.4 But other reasons lie behind its persistence. Gallipoli marked the first time Australians fought as a recognisable military unit in their own right. The exploits of the digger earned extravagant praise from many British observers, including the journalist Ashmead-Bartlett. Unlike the campaigns that were to follow on the Western Front, Gallipoli has a strong sense of closure. It had a beginning, a middle and an end located in a specific geographical location. To the lay mind, it was easier to comprehend when set beside the enormity of loss and the complexity of the Western Front. The official war historian, C.E.W. Bean, ensured that Gallipoli would remain at the forefront of Australian military history. The importance he placed on Gallipoli is clearly reflected in the fact that two volumes of the official history were devoted to the peninsula, and also in his later work, Gallipoli Mission.5 And there remains that indefinable emotional element surrounding the delivery of the first telegrams with their terse indication of place, date and time which became a form of collective memory. 150

GALLIPOLI AS CONTESTED COMMEMORATIVE SPACE

Despite the protestations of some and the vain hopes of others, Gallipoli has never had a single meaning. What for some was an example of bravery, self-sacrifice and heroism was for others a masculinist, racist and sexist ideology. Gallipoli has always been contested space. This chapter seeks to examine that aspect of Gallipoli from a commemorative perspective. The first is Gallipoli as contested national commemorative space within a geographical area, the peninsula itself. The second is Gallipoli as contested space in terms of what people bring to it in the phenomenon of battlefield tours. The third is the suggestion that the First World War memorials, ubiquitous in the Australian landscape, are also contested commemorative spaces. There is little doubt that most Australians and New Zealanders see Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli peninsula as ‘theirs’. The peninsula may well be in a foreign country but ‘ownership’ was somehow conferred by the loss of Australian and New Zealand lives. In the immediate post-war years, the Imperial War Graves Commission and the governments of Australia and New Zealand built memorials and cemeteries commemorating their dead, reflecting a belief that this was sacred soil. Under the command of Lieutenant Cyril Hughes, a Gallipoli veteran, they were completed in 1926, following the blueprint set down by Sir John Burnet who was responsible for the designs of all the memorials except the New Zealand memorial at Chunuk Bair which was designed by a New Zealander (Hurst Seager).6 The memorials are austere and almost classical in their design and iconography. For years, the Allies’ memorials dominated the peninsula from Cape Helles to Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair, reinforcing the notion that this was ‘Anzac’ space. They are also often faintly familiar to Australians, a reflection of the fact that major memorials built in Australia after the war were modelled along similar lines. It is a visual link that strengthens the notion of ownership. Of the 31 cemeteries on the peninsula, 21 lie in the Anzac sector. They have a mesmerising quality. It may have something to do with their simple design. There are no headstones like those found on the Western Front, rather the graves are marked by stone-faced pedestals. It may have something to do with their setting. They are surrounded by the ridges and gullies where the campaign was fought and they are beautifully maintained. In a curious way, they represent order in an untamed landscape. They also boast a rough egalitarianism that is not found in other memorials like the French Mausoleum near Morto Bay where place of burial reflects rank. In the Australian cemeteries, officers, NCOs and privates lie side by side. Many of the pedestals are inscribed, reflecting the complexity of personal responses to death in war. Some are formally appropriate, using words like ‘King’, ‘Country’ and ‘Empire’. Others are quirky, praising a fallen officer as a mate. Some seem to leap out of history, like John Simpson Kirkpatrick’s. Others are highly personal, like one inscription 151


in the Shrapnel Gully: ‘A mother’s heart is buried with her dear soldier son.’7 Perhaps more telling are the plaques attached to the walls of the cemeteries at places like Quinn’s, the Nek and Lone Pine: these list the names of the dead who could not be identified and given an individual grave. The cemeteries, with their walled crosses, are memorials in their own right and powerfully support notions of ownership. Much of the literature devoted to the Gallipoli peninsula published in Australia reflects the parochial nature of Gallipoli’s place in Australian popular culture.8 Many Australians who visit the peninsula, then, are disconcerted to discover that the Turks have also built memorials to honour their dead and their successful resistance of foreign invasion. They find the Turkish memorials intrusive and often feel that they should not be there. The Turkish memorials, however, bring home the simple fact that there is another side to the Gallipoli story. The Turkish memorials had always been there. Bean noted that the Turks had built memorials at Lone Pine and at the Nek, for example, to commemorate their victories and their dead.9 In fact, most Australian visitors to the Nek are not even aware that within 200 metres of the Australian cemetery at the Nek a Turkish memorial stands discreetly behind a ring of trees. But the Turkish memorials were hardly the dominant landscape feature that the Allied memorials would become. Considering the postwar turmoil in Turkey after 1919 and the treaties signed by the Turks at the war’s end where the Allies’ right to build memorials was a specific provision, it was hardly surprising. They were muted, non-contesting, almost a reflection of a defeated nation. The irony, of course, is obvious. The Allies were building memorials and cemeteries on the site of a defeat for their arms. No matter how it is couched in the literature, Gallipoli was a Turkish victory.10 After the Second World War, however, Turkey began to build memorials on a much larger scale to commemorate their dead and the successful defence of the homeland from invaders. The Monument to the Martyrs was begun in 1954 and was finished in 1960 (although additional work would continue until 1999). A substantial part of its cost was provided by funds raised through a national appeal. In design, it reflects the austerity of the Allies’ memorials. It is a stone baldachin and the complex includes a symbolic cemetery where representative graves commemorate the Turkish soldiers who died during the campaign. It is also 40 metres high and it dominates the southern end of the peninsula. It is here that the Turks hold their own commemorative services on 25 April, attended by representatives from those countries who were part of the invasion force in 1915.11 In the 1960s, a private society began to build memorials.12 Turkey had begun to reclaim the peninsula as its own national space. The 70th and 75th anniversaries of the landing at Gallipoli produced a new spate of monument building activity along the peninsula. Many 152


of the memorials matched the commemorative element that had been dominant up to that time. The Comkbayiri Mehmetçik Memorial is one example. It consists of five stone pillars representing a hand upturned to God in supplication and prayer. Another is the monument built on the northern headland of Anzac Cove where Ataturk’s’ moving tribute to a fallen foe, first penned in 1934, is chiselled in stone.13 But there were departures. A monument was erected in 1962 to honour Yahya Çavu¸s, a sergeant who had displayed conspicuous bravery during the British landing at V Beach. Its iconography is very different to those that were already in place on the peninsula. It shows two soldiers charging into the fray, bayonets at the ready; it is a larger than life sculpture reflecting elements that were once called Social Realism. The monument was renovated in 1992 and, in the same year, three new memorials were dedicated that reflected the spirit of the sergeant’s memorial.14 One was the Mehmetçik monument showing a Turkish soldier carrying a wounded British officer to the safety of the Allied lines.15 The second was the memorial celebrating the 57th Infantry Regiment, the men who bore the brunt of the April offensives mounted from the Anzac sector. It is symbolic of a mosque and, like the Monument to the Martyrs, has a symbolic cemetery. At its entrance is a large bronze sculpture of Turkey’s oldest surviving veteran from the Canakkale campaign. Beside him is a child. The veteran honours the war dead but his stance is celebratory rather than commemorative. Opposite to the cemetery is a huge statue of a mehmet, again honouring the Turkish dead. Standing at Lone Pine and looking towards Chunuk Bair, two things become obvious. The first is the adherence to the protocol that insists that the location of memorials should reflect the trenches and lines as they existed in August 1915. The other is the dominance of the Turkish memorials along the ridgeline looking towards Chunuk Bair, especially the memorial built to honour the 57th. The peninsula is clearly contested commemorative space. On 25 April, the Anzac sector of the peninsula is crowded. The numbers of Australians and New Zealanders attending the various services held on that day has grown from mere hundreds 30 years ago to tens of thousands today. Again, many are surprised to find that the peninsula is also crowded with Turkish visitors. Like their Australian and New Zealand counterparts, they too are visiting the area to commemorate, to remember and to express a sense of national identity. As noted earlier, Gallipoli marked the emergence of the man who would shape modern Turkey, Colonel Mustafa Kemal who would later take the name Ataturk. Some of the Turkish visitors attend Anzac ceremonies, especially the Dawn Service at Anzac Cove, but the majority attend their own services in different locations at different times. Separation, distance and respect mark the day. Yet the notion of contested commemorative space is evident and it finds its quintessential expression at Chunuk Bair. 153


For a brief two days during the August offensive in 1915, the New Zealanders occupied Chunuk Bair. Over 800 men lost their lives in the assault. At war’s end, the New Zealanders chose Chunuk Bair as the site for their memorial. It is a stone monument in the form of a Greek Cross, standing on the highest ground the Allies would command in the sector during the war. But Chunuk Bair was also important in Turkey’s military history on the peninsula. Mustafa Kemal drove the British, who had replaced the New Zealanders, from Chunuk Bair on 10 August, a victory that some see as the turning point in the war in the Anzac sector. For a long time, the New Zealand memorial was the sole memorial on Chunuk Bair. Then the Turkish government decided to build a bronze statue of Mustafa Kemal. The New Zealand government demurred but to no avail. The two now stand separated by a matter of metres, one austerely commemorative, the other a celebration of a major victory. Crowd reactions to the two are mixed. New Zealanders photograph their monument without including Kemal. The Turks photograph Kemal with little reference to the New Zealand memorial. This sensitivity has even spilled over into the guide booklets issued by Turkey’s Office of National Parks and Wildlife who are responsible for the peninsula’s sites. Its photograph of the New Zealand memorial is not taken from the front but rather from the rear. The statue of Kemal cannot be seen from the angle from which the photograph is taken. It is screened by trees but the discerning eye can spot the pedestal.16 It is not only the geography of the Anzac sector that remains contested space. Gallipoli has acquired myriad layers of meaning and the thousands of Australians who now visit the peninsula bring these with them. Anzac Day has undergone a remarkable sea change in Australia. By the 1970s, it had become something of a museum piece. The crowds attending had dwindled as had the men and women who marched. The reasons were varied. The Vietnam conflict was a major factor. So, too, was the fact that Anzac had become the province of the Right in Australian society. Many veterans were disgruntled either by the politics of the organisation that claimed to speak for returned service personnel or by the fact that the conflicts in which they had fought were not recognised. That began to change in the 1980s and gathered strength during the 1990s. The reasons offered by historians and social observers are diverse but the main reason probably lies in the burgeoning of family history and oral historical research in Australia and, perhaps, in the publication of Bill Gammage’s book, The Broken Years, which collected and reflected the views of Australian soldiers during the First World War. The formalised notions of Anzac and the digger were given a new, even personal perspective. Anzac Day services are now well attended, drawing participants from across the broad section of Australian society.17 This change flowed over into the number of Australians and New Zealanders visiting the peninsula. 154


By 2003 the number attending the Dawn Service at Anzac Cove had reached some 14,000. Perhaps the ordinary men and women of Australia had begun to reappropriate one of the central elements that is used to define Australian nationalism. The literature that examines the growth in what has been dubbed ‘battlefield tourism’ is growing. The works of Jay Winter and David Lloyd spring readily to mind, among others.18 Bruce Scates has applied the issues raised in the literature specifically to Australia.19 His work is a superb evocation of the powerful hold Gallipoli has on many Australians which reaches across generations and gender. The trips made by Australians to the Gallipoli peninsula reflect loss, bereavement, a sense of waste, commemoration, pride, reconciliation, rites of passage and pilgrimage. These themes are often interwoven, acting as complementary facets of the responses to Gallipoli. Only once does he acknowledge the contested aspects that those travelling to the battlefields can bring with them. Private Rae lies buried near Villers-Bretonneux. A note was left on his grave by a family member describing his death as a waste. Members of the 24th Air Training Corps took issue: on a small cross it retorted that he ‘died the most proudest and honourable death a man can possibly die’.20 It represents one aspect of Gallipoli that is now rarely acknowledged: the glorification of death in war. During 1999, I was part of a group that toured the battlefields of the peninsula. It was a mixed group, including veterans from the Second World War and those seeking the graves of their family forebears. But for some members of the group, Gallipoli was a symbol and nostalgic reaffirmation of an older Australia, white, British and Protestant. They had no doubts that the peninsula represented the birth place of the nation and that the men buried in the cemeteries had died a glorious death. They were affronted by the Turkish memorials. They also felt that their sacrifice had been betrayed by the changes in Australia after 1945. The evidence is admittedly sketchy but it does suggest a further dimension to the uses made of Gallipoli. By war’s end, Australians frequently used Gallipoli as a short-hand way of describing the war and the rise of Anzac as a nation-building myth. There is often an assumption of a commonly shared sense of meaning in the language; yet as early as 1919 it was clear that this was not the case. Three sermons delivered on Anzac Day make the point. In an Anglican church, the Reverend Watt delivered a sermon that stressed imperial loyalty and he urged his congregation to follow the example of the diggers whose sacrifice had brought them a brotherhood and redemption free of sectarian strife. In a Catholic church, Father Mullins deplored war but saw 25 April as opening a new chapter in Australia’s history. Not once did he mention King or Empire: the diggers had shown what it meant to 155


be Australian. In a Presbyterian church, the Reverend Miles lambasted the working class for failing in its patriotic and imperial duty; the working class survived because their betters had paid the supreme sacrifice. (Miles’s speech did not go down well with his congregation who were primarily drawn from the very class Miles attacked.)21 There is now a growing body of literature devoted to the building of war memorials after the First World War. As Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan pithily remarked, ‘[a]rtefacts matter’.22 The literature reflects the complex and diverse meanings that are attached to memorials, the assumptions made as to their purpose and the contradictory elements inherent in what is, in essence, a form of public commemoration. Memorials have political and national meanings, they can be seen as object lessons illustrating the futility of war, as a place of mourning and separation, as a means of resolving personal trauma, as a reflection of the need both to remember and to forget. Within the Australian context, these took on extra meaning, partly because the vast majority of Australians in 1920 knew that they would never be able to visit the graves of the men they had lost. Thousands of war memorials were built at war’s end.23 The communities that built them may have vanished, even the local pub may have closed, but the memorials endure. They carry a certain authority. Here, it is often assumed, is an example of communities coming together in a common cause after the divisions of the war. But such a view may well be misleading. As Alex King has demonstrated in his study of Britain’s memorials, the building of memorials was often accompanied by tension, controversy and sometimes hostility.24 There may have been a general consensus in communities that memorials should be built but there was often little agreement as to whose war these memorials were to commemorate. Two case studies drawn from North Eastern Victoria make the point.25 In 1920, the Yackandandah branch of the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) brought rather desultory plans for building a local memorial to a head. They approached the shire council with a plan to purchase a vacant block in the main street. Council voted some funds to the memorial and then called a public meeting to discuss the type of memorial that might be built. A committee was formed to develop the proposals raised at the meeting. Plans to build Yackandandah’s memorial were dogged by disputes, controversy and rancour from the very start. The first argument was simply over what sort of memorial should be built. The committee finally decided on a park with memorial gates although the choice of the site for the park was a cause for concern for some; a pub had once stood on the block of land where the park would now be created. Then the matter of funding reared its head. Yackandandah was a rural shire and members of the ridings opposed spending council money on a memorial that would be of benefit only to the town, especially 156


since many of the ridings’ communities had already built their memorial halls. But these were minor irritants when set beside what was to come. From the start, the veterans’ body, the RSSILA, played a prominent part in the controversies. Originally, the local branch members felt that the matter should be left entirely to them. They felt that ‘civilians’ (their term) had no place on any committee set up to oversee the building of the memorial. Overridden by the Council, the RSSILA then strongly objected to two of the ‘civilians’ appointed to the committee because they had sent no family members to the war. The two resigned. The RSSILA also forced the withdrawal of a contract to begin work on the memorial that had been awarded to a civilian and insisted that returned men be given the job. The hostility between the general community and the RSSILA surfaced in print in the local paper. Civilians accused the RSSILA of ‘looking for too much’. The RSSILA retorted that the digger did not get much of a go in Yackandandah and agreed with the Beechworth branch of the RSSILA, embroiled in its own controversy, that ‘they should fight through this little lot as they did the other’. The nadir was reached when it came to whose names should appear on the memorial gates. The RSSILA flatly declared that no returned man wanted his name on the honour roll; only the dead should be so honoured. It was a clear claim to ownership of the district’s war effort. This provoked angry opposition from the men and women who had been active on the home front and the parents of some returned men. One family suggested that if only the dead were to be named they would prefer that their dead son’s name not be listed because it was an insult to his brother who had returned. The matter was finally referred to the Council for a decision. The Council decided that the names of all who had served should be listed; the names of the dead would be placed on two central marble rolls flanked by the names of the men and women who had returned. Those who had returned symbolically represented the community’s war effort. The memorial park was opened in 1924. A few kilometres away in Rutherglen, the disputes had begun even before war’s end. During the war, some men in the town had raised patriotic funds by staging concerts. They called themselves the Mugs. In August 1918, the Mugs announced they would hold a series of concerts to raise money to build a memorial commemorating Rutherglen’s dead when the war ended. The proposal was savaged by three women dominant in the town’s patriotic effort. For too long, they argued, the concert party had hidden men who were eligible to serve but had stayed at home. Far better, they argued, that they fill the gaps left by ‘our gallant lads’. They also found it insulting that men who had not served should have anything to do with a memorial that would honour the fallen. The women involved 157


commanded some social authority in the town – two had husbands or sons serving overseas, one was a war widow. The ill-will carried over into the post-war period. A formal committee to plan the memorial was not formed until August 1919. Like Yackandandah’s committee it represented the community and included representatives from the RSSILA and representatives from the Mugs. By December, the committee was deeply divided. No agreement could be reached on the form the memorial was to take, nor whether the memorial, whatever its form, should list the names of those who served or only the names of the dead. Some members of the committee stopped attending meetings. The committee’s chair refused to attend the public meeting in January 1920 when the various proposals were put to the citizens of the town. The meeting itself was poorly attended by the public. A curious alliance had sprung up in the committee between the representatives of the RSSLIA and the Mugs. Both parties agreed that the memorial should honour the soldiers’ war rather than the community’s war. They wanted an obelisk that would only name those who had ‘paid the supreme sacrifice’. By January 1920, these two groups were, in effect, the committee and their proposal carried the day. Yet even after the decision had been taken, the controversy continued. Who was to pay for a memorial that would cost £700? The local council refused to make any contribution towards defraying the cost of a memorial that was clearly the property of the returned men. They spoke for the community whose war effort had now been effectively marginalised. Let the money be raised on a voluntary basis, reflecting the voluntary nature of enlistments during the war. The memorial was finally unveiled in 1921. The building of the memorials in Yackandandah and Rutherglen do reflect Alex King’s basic argument that memorials can also be seen as monuments to contested notions of ownership of the war and the myriad meanings those planning them brought to the project. From Lone Pine on the peninsula to the memorials in country districts, a simple phrase appears on all the memorials built after the First World War: ‘Lest We Forget’. These words are powerful and evocative. They are also deeply ambiguous, lending themselves to conflicting interpretations, reflecting the simple fact that Gallipoli is contested commemorative space.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1 Manchester Evening Chronicle, 16 November 1929; Hamilton papers 17/52, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, London. 2 E.H. Carr, What is History? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001 [1961]), p. 21. 3 ‘Histories of Gallipoli’, symposium held at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London, 20 April 2001. 4 Pierre Nora, ‘General Introduction: Between Memory and History’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 2. R.J.B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 1945–1990 (London: Routledge, 1993, 1998), p. 4. 5 The distinction between ‘history’ and ‘the past’ is discussed in Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 6–10. 6 The apparently simple question, ‘What Is History?’ has spawned a substantial literature. To list only some of those directly related to Carr’s work: Keith Jenkins, On What Is History (London: Routledge, 1995); Michael Cox (ed.), E.H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (London: Palgrave, 2000); D. Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (London: Palgrave, 2002). 7 For a discussion of the Rankean view of historical scholarship see Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta Books, 1997), pp. 16–23. 8 John Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War 1861–1945 (London: Leo Cooper, 1980) and Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War, Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001). 9 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 10 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 11 William H. McNeill, ‘Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians’, American Historical Review, 91, 1 (February 1986), p. 3. 12 Samuel Hynes, ‘Personal Narratives and Commemoration’, in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 207. 13 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. trans. and intro. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Philip Smith and Brad West, ‘Cultural Studies’, Encyclopedia of Nationalism, Vol. I, pp. 81–99 (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001). 14 Nora, Between Memory and History, p. 3.

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15 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘Epilogue: What Is History Now?’, in Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 156; Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, ‘Introduction’, in Winter and Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1999]), pp. 10–17. Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 225–39. 16 Pierre Nora’s project, Lieux de mémoire, published in English as Realms of Memory (n. 4) was groundbreaking in this respect. 17 See, for example, Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 18 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 141–71. 19 David Cannadine has identified a ‘shift away from the search for causation to the search for meaning’, ‘Preface’, in Cannadine (ed.), What Is History Now?, p. ix. 20 Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance, pp. 9–10. 21 Ludmilla Jordanova defines social construction(ism) as ‘theories that emphasise the socially created nature of collective life; the idea that human existence is made up not of natural givens but of social products or constructs’, Jordanova, History in Practice, p. 215. 22 Carr, What Is History?, p. 29. See also, Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz, p. 28. 23 Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance, p. 34. 24 Michael Schudson, ‘The Present in the Past versus the Past in the Present’, Communication (1989), 11, pp. 105–13; Barry Schwartz, ‘Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington’, American Sociological Review, 56 (1991), pp. 221–36. 25 Jenkins, Rethinking History, pp. 32–3. 26 Edward Spiers, ‘Gallipoli’, in Brian Bond, The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 165–88, charts the historiographical shifts in the verdicts on Churchill. 27 C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac from the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign, May 4, 1915, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Vol. I (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1981 [1921]), p. 201. 28 Winston Churchill, The World Crisis 1915 (London: Butterworth, 1923). 29 General histories of the campaign include Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956); Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli (London: B.T. Batsford, 1965); Michael Hickey, Gallipoli (London: John Murray, 1995); Tim Travers, Gallipoli 1915 (Stroud, Gloucs.: Tempus, 2001); Les Carlyon, Gallipoli (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2001). 30 Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance, pp. 30, 36. 31 As suggested, for example, by the bestseller charts compiled by the internetbased booksellers, Amazon. In their ‘hot 30 history books’ on 20 May 2003, nine books related to war (www.amazon.co.uk). Other samples of this list suggest that the proportion of war books remains fairly steady. 32 Recent successful examples include Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad (London: Viking, 1998) and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (London: Viking, 2002), Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers (London: Simon & Schuster, 1992) and the television mini-series of the same name, the Oscar-winning Saving Private Ryan (1998), and various television programmes, including War Walks, presented by Richard Holmes with accompanying books. Gallipoli specific film and TV productions include Peter Weir’s 1981 film, Gallipoli (discussed here in Stuart Ward’s chapter), the Australian mini-series Anzacs

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33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

47

(1985), the Channel Five documentary, WW1: Disaster at Gallipoli (2003) and a forthcoming BBC Timewatch documentary on the campaign. An argument made powerfully in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992). Richard J. Evans, ‘Prologue: What Is History? – Now’ in David Cannadine (ed.), What Is History Now (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 12. Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance, pp. 2–3. The most insightful work on the legend is that of Ken Inglis. His articles have been collected in John Lack (ed.), ANZAC Remembered: Selected Writings of K.S. Inglis (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998) and Craig Wilcox (ed.), Observing Australia 1959 to 1999. K.S. Inglis (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999). See also, K.S. Inglis, ‘The Australians at Gallipoli – I’, Historical Studies, 14, 54 (April 1970), pp. 219–30 and K.S. Inglis, ‘The Australians at Gallipoli – II’, Historical Studies, 14, 55 (October 1970), pp. 361–75. K.S. Inglis, ‘C.E.W. Bean, Australian Historian’, in Lack, ANZAC Remembered; Peter Stanley, ‘Reflections on Bean’s Last Paragraph’, Sabretache, 24, 3 (July–September 1983), pp. 4–11; Kevin Fewster (ed.), Gallipoli Correspondent: The Frontline Diary of C.E.W. Bean (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983); D.A. Kent, ‘The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C.E.W. Bean as Editor and Image-Maker’, Historical Studies, 21, 84 (April 1985), pp. 376–90; John Barrett, ‘No Straw Man: C.E.W. Bean and Some Critics’, Australian Historical Studies, 23, 89 (April 1988), pp. 102–14; Alistair Thomson, ‘ “Steadfast Until Death?” C.E.W. Bean and the Representation of Australian Military Manhood’, Australian Historical Studies, 23, 93 (October 1989), pp. 462–77. See also, Kevin Fewster, ‘Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and the Making of the Anzac Legend’, Journal of Australian Studies, 10 (June 1982), pp. 17–30. Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 47. For further discussion, see Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), ch. 2. C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac from the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign, May 4, 1915, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Vol. I (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1981 [1921]); C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac from 4 May, 1915 to the Evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, II (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1981 [1924]). Richard Holmes, Firing Line (London: Cape, 1985), p. 315. Shirley Williams, ‘Preface’ to Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Virago, 1977 [1933]). Beverley Southgate, Why Bother with History? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Motivations (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 51–6. Samuel Hynes, ‘Personal Narratives and Commemoration’, in Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance, p. 207. See also, Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 8. Derek Paget, ‘Popularising Popular History: “Oh What a Lovely War” and the Sixties’, Critical Survey (1990), pp. 117–27. Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 1–20. Similarly, John Tosh suggests politicians read political biographies for practical lessons in public affairs. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (Harlow: Longman, 1984), p. 9. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 203.

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48 Clausewitz, On War, pp. 200–1. Book Two, Chapter Six, ‘Historical Examples’ discusses these ideas further. 49 Sun Tzu, The Art of War (London: HarperCollins, 1994). 50 Paul Kennedy, ‘The Fall and Rise of Military History’, MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History, 3, 2 (Winter 1991), p. 11. 51 Michael Howard, ‘The Use and Abuse of Military History’, RUSI Journal (February 1993), p. 28 (reprinted lecture of 1961). 52 Liman von Sanders, Five Years in Turkey (Annapolis, Maryland: United States Naval Institute, 1927 [1920]). 53 See also, Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance, pp. 29–39. 54 Ibid., p. 32; Martin Jay, ‘Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn’, in Winter and Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance, pp. 221–39. 55 W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003; 1st edn in German, 1999), pp. viii, 31. 56 See D.A. Kent’s description of his efforts to promote The Anzac Book (Kent, ‘The Anzac Book’). 57 Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 41. 58 L.L. Robson, quoted in Wendy M. Mansfield, ‘The Importance of Gallipoli: The Growth of an Australian Folklore’, Queensland Historical Review, 6, 2 (1977), p. 50. 59 This collection was to have included a chapter on the Turkish historiography of Gallipoli, but unfortunately the contributor’s ill-health made this impossible. In recent years, two scholars have published work that utilises Turkish sources to examine the campaign: Edward Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000) and Tim Travers, Gallipoli 1915 (Stroud: Tempus, 2001). 1 CHURCHILL AND GALLIPOLI 1 Rear-Admiral Limpus to Winston S. Churchill, 26 August 1914, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. III, Companion Volume of Documents, Part 1, July 1914 to April 1915 (London: Heinemann, 1972). 2 Major Cunliffe-Owen to the Foreign Office, 27 August 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 61. 3 Churchill to Rear-Admiral Kerr, 4 September 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 83. 4 Churchill to Sir Edward Grey, 6 September 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 95. 5 Churchill to Grey, 23 October 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 214. 6 H.H. Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 31 October 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 238. 7 Churchill to Vice-Admiral Carden, 1 November 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 243. 8 Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, p. 220. 9 War Council Meeting, Secretary’s notes, 25 November 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 276–80. 10 Ibid., p. 279. 11 Vice-Admiral Oliver to Churchill, notes by Churchill to Lord Kitchener, and Kitchener to Churchill, 30 November 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 283. 12 Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, p. 222.

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13 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 5 December 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 297. 14 Lieutenant-Colonel Hankey, memorandum, 28 December 1914, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 337–43. 15 Kitchener to Churchill, 2 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 360–1. 16 Churchill to Vice-Admiral Carden, telegram, 3 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 367. 17 Lord Fisher to Churchill, 3 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 367–8. 18 Churchill to Fisher, 4 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 371. 19 Carden to Churchill, telegram, 5 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 380. 20 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 5 January 1915, in Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith. Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 360. 21 Ibid. 22 Churchill to Carden, telegram, 6 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 381. 23 Meeting of the War Council, extract from Secretary’s notes, 8 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 391–6. 24 Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, p. 247. 25 Carden to Churchill, telegram, 11 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 405. 26 Fisher to Vice-Admiral Oliver, 12 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 406. 27 Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, p. 250. 28 Meeting of the War Council, extract from Secretary’s notes, 13 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 407–11. 29 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918, Vol. I (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961), pp. 265–6 30 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 13 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 412. 31 Churchill to Fisher and Oliver, 13 January 1915, quoted in ibid. 32 Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, p. 255. 33 Churchill to Asquith, Grey and Kitchener, 14 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 414–5. 34 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 15 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 419. 35 Churchill to the Comte de Saint-Seine, 16 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 421. 36 Fisher, memorandum, 25 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 452–4. 37 Churchill to Kitchener, 20 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 433. 38 Vice-Admiral Oliver, memorandum, 25 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 450–1. 39 Churchill to Asquith, Kitchener and Sir Edward Grey, 25 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 450. 40 Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, p. 271, quoting John Fisher, Memories (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919).

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41 Meeting of the War Council, extract from Secretary’s notes, 28 January 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 463–5. 42 Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, p. 274, quoting Winston Churchill, The World Crisis 1915 (London: Butterworth, 1923). 43 Grey to Churchill, 2 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 480–1. 44 Quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 481. 45 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 9 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 498–9. 46 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 13 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 512–3. 47 Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part I, p. 287. 48 Lord Esher, diary, 16 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 516. 49 Meeting of the War Council, Secretary’s notes, 19 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 527–34. 50 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 20 February 1915, in Brock and Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith, p. 441. 51 Meeting of the War Council, extract from Secretary’s notes, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 555–61. 52 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 24 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 554. 53 Meeting of the War Council, Sectretary’s notes, 26 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 567–77. 54 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 26 February, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 577–8. 55 Winston S. Churchill to John Churchill, 26 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 580–1. 56 Churchill to the Grand Duke Nicholas, telegram, 27 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 584. 57 Churchill to Grey, 28 February 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 591–2. 58 Violet Bonham-Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (London : Eyre and Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), pp. 368–9. 59 Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 1 March 1965, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 604. 60 Letter from Hankey to his wife, 1 March 1915, Hankey papers. 61 Hankey, memorandum, 1 March 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 593–602. 62 Meeting of the War Council, extract from Secretary’s notes, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 610–8. 63 Meeting of the War Council, secretary’s notes, 10 March 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 663–73. 64 Fisher to Churchill, 12 March 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 680. 65 Sir Ian Hamilton to Churchill, 14 March 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, p. 696. 66 Sir Arthur Paget to Kitchener, telegram, 17 March 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 1, pp. 704–5. 67 Churchill, statement to the Dardanelles Commission, 28 September 1916, quoted in Gilbert, Churchill, Vol. III, Part 2, p. 1570. 68 Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. IV, pp. 9–11. 69 Letter from Churchill to Sir Archibald Sinclair, 5 July 1915, Sinclair papers.

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2 STORIES OF ANZAC 1 Ian Beckett, ‘The Military Historian and the Popular Image of the Western Front, 1914–1918’, The Historian, 53 (Spring 1997), pp. 11–4. 2 E. Ashmead-Bartlett, Ashmead-Bartlett’s Despatches from the Dardanelles (London: George Newnes, 1915), p. 100. 3 At Gallipoli 410,000 British and 79,000 French forces landed; British casualties including sick totalled 205,000, French, 47,000. Brigadier-General C.F. Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations, Gallipoli, Vol. II (London: William Heinemann, 1932), pp. 483–4. The total number of Australians who served on Gallipoli is difficult to establish, Australian casualties totalled 26,111 of whom 8,141 were killed. Peter Dennis et al., Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 261. On Gallipoli 8,556 New Zealanders served: casualties totalled 7,473 including 2,721 dead. Christopher Pugsley, Gallipoli The New Zealand Story (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984), p. 360. 4 A.A. Grace, ‘Our Little Army’, NZ Herald, 1 August 1914. 5 John Masefield, Gallipoli (London: Heinemann, 1916); C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac from the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign, May 4, 1915, The Official History of Australia in the war of 1914–18, Vol. I (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1981 [1921]); C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac from 4 May, 1915 to the Evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Vol. II (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1981 [1924]). A. St John Adcock, Australasia Triumphant (London: Simkin, Marshall and Hamilton, 1916). 6 Sunday, 26 September [1915]. (Bean added additional comments to his diaries throughout the war so the date of entry is indicative only.) K. Fewster (ed.), Gallipoli Correspondent: The Frontline Diary of C.E.W. Bean (North Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 156–9. 7 Ibid 8 Ibid 9 Bill Gammage, The Broken Years (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974); John Robertson, Anzac and Empire: The Tragedy and Glory of Gallipoli (Richmond, Vic.: Hamlyn, 1990); Les Carlyon, Gallipoli (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2001). 10 Sunday, 6 August [1915]. Fewster, Gallipoli Correspondent, pp. 148, 206–7. 11 Geoffrey Serle, Monash (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1982), pp. 534–5; Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli (London: B.T. Batsford, 1965). 12 Peter Dennis, Jeffrey Grey, Ewan Morris, Robin Prior, with John Connor, The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995). 13 Denis Winter, 25 April 1915 (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1994). 14 Lloyd L. Robson, The First AIF: A Study of Its Recruitment 1914–1918 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970). 15 Major C.B. Brereton, Tales of Three Campaigns (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1926), pp. 74–6. 16 Brigadier-General C.F. Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations, Gallipoli, Vol. I (London: William Heinemann, 1929), pp. 269–70. 17 Alistair Thomson, ‘ “The Vilest Libel of the War”: Imperial Politics and the Official Histories of Gallipoli’, Australian Historical Studies, 25, 101 (October 1993), pp. 628–36. 18 Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli (London: Batsford, 1965), p. 184.

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19 C.W. Saunders quoted in Christopher Pugsley, Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story (Auckland: Reed, 1998), p. 173. 20 Brigadier G.N. Johnston RA to Major-General Sir Andrew Russell in post-war correspondence, Russell family papers. 21 Sunday 8 July [1915]; Fewster, Gallipoli Correspondent, p. 139. 3 ‘A WAR MEMORIAL IN CELLULOID’: THE GALLIPOLI LEGEND IN AUSTRALIAN CINEMA, 1940S–1980S 1 As Inglis reasoned, ‘In fifty years, hardly anybody at present eligible for membership will be alive.’ ‘Anzac: The Substitute Religion’, Nation, 23 April 1960, reprinted in K. Inglis, Australia Observed, 1959 to 1999 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 70. 2 Jenny Macleod, ‘The Fall and Rise of Anzac Day: 1965 and 1990 Compared’, War and Society, 20, 1 (May 2002), pp. 149–68. 3 Quoted in ibid., p. 151. 4 See Joan Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War, 1914–1918 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995), p. 176. 5 Press Office, Governor General of Australia, December 1997. 6 See Brad West, ‘Independent Travel and International Civil Religious Pilgrimage: Backpackers at the Gallipoli Battlefields’, in Brad West (ed.), Down the Road: Exploring and Independent Travel (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004). 7 Quoted in Inglis, Observing Australia, p. 80. 8 Adams, The Age, 22 August 1981, cited in Jane Freebury, ‘Screening Australia: Gallipoli – A Study of Nationalism on Film’, Media Information Australia, 43 (February 1987), p. 6. 9 Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 193. 10 Macleod, ‘The Fall and Rise of Anzac Day’, pp. 165–6. 11 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1940. 12 Ibid. 13 Quoted in Macleod, ‘The Fall and Rise of Anzac Day’, p. 152. 14 Quoted in Peter Dennis et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 45. 15 C.E.W. Bean (ed.), The ANZAC Book (London: Cassell, 1916). 16 Bruce Molloy, Before the Interval: Australian Mythology and Feature Films, 1930–1960 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1990), p. 92. See Joan Beaumont, Australia’s War, 1939–45 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), p. xxii. 17 Sydney Morning Herald, 14 March 1940. 18 Interview with Peter Weir in Cineaste, 11, 4 (1982), pp. 41–2. 19 Sylvia Lawson, ‘Gallipoli: You Are Being Told What You Are to Remember’, Film News (November/December 1981), p. 11. 20 Livio Dobrez and Pat Dobrez, ‘Old Myths and New Delusions: Peter Weir’s Australia’, Kunapipi, 4, 2 (1982), p. 70. 21 Joan Beaumont, ‘The Anzac Legend’, in Beaumont, Australia’s War, 1914–1918, p. 152. 22 Quoted in ibid. 23 See Ian Grant, Jacka, VC: Australia’s Finest Fighting Soldier (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1999). 24 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1940.

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25 Kenneth T. Jackson, ‘Gallipoli’, in Ted Mico et al. (eds), Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (London: Cassell, 1995), p. 185. 26 Geoffrey Serle, ‘Australia and Britain’, in Richard Preston (ed.), Contemporary Australia: Studies in History, Politics, and Economics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969), pp. 18–9. 27 Gorton, Henty by-election speech quoted in The Bulletin, 28 September 1968. 28 See Stuart Ward, Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001). 29 National Library of Australia, Hasluck papers, MS5274, Box 38, Vice-Regal Speeches, 1969–74, ‘Patriotism and Loyalty’, Australia Day Address, 26 January 1973. 30 Paraphrased in Frank Crowley, Tough Times: Australia in the Seventies (Richmond, Vic: William Heinemann, 1986), p. 265. 31 Weir in Cineaste, p. 42. 32 Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975); See also similar claims made by Gavin Souter, Lion and Kangaroo: The Initiation of Australia, 2nd edn (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1992 [1976]). 33 Weir in Cineaste, p. 42. 34 Ibid. 35 Times, 18 December 1981. See also Freebury, ‘Screening Australia’, p. 7. 36 See also Robin Prior, ‘The Suvla Bay Tea-Party: A Reassessment’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 7 (October 1985), pp. 25–34. 37 John Robertson, Anzac and Empire: The Tragedy and Glory of Gallipoli (London: Cooper, 1990). 39 Don Shiach, The Films of Peter Weir (London: Charles Letts, 1993), p. 83. 4 THE BRITISH HEROIC-ROMANTIC MYTH OF GALLIPOLI This chapter is based on my doctoral thesis, ‘The Gallipoli Campaign as Assessed by Some British and Australian Participants 1915–1939’ (University of Cambridge, 2000). It has been published as Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 1 From 1985 to 2000 there was an annual memorial lecture featuring such distinguished speakers as the Duke of Edinburgh, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie and the Chichele Professor of the History of War, Professor Robert O’Neill. These lectures have been collected and published as Martin Gilbert (intro.), The Straits of War: Gallipoli Remembered (Stroud: Gloucs., 2000). 2 Pat Caffarey and Anthea Gent, Holy Trinity Church, Southend Crescent, Eltham: A Brief History and Guide (pamphlet available from Holy Trinity Church). 3 Henry A. Hall to Hamilton, 24 May 1920 (King’s College, London, Liddle Hart Centre for Military Archives, Hamilton papers, 7/10/2). 4 See John Lee’s sympathetic biography, A Soldier’s Life: General Sir Ian Hamilton 1853–1947 (London: Macmillan, 2000). 5 Jenny Macleod, ‘General Sir Ian Hamilton and the Dardanelles Commission’, War in History, 8, 4 (2001), pp. 418–41 describes Hamilton’s attempts to influence the findings of the commission. 6 Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary. 2 vols. (London: Arnold, 1920).

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7 Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill (London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 299. 8 ‘Part II, Diary of Sir Ian Hamilton’ covers 5 May to 30 July 1915 (Hamilton papers, 7/10/3). 9 Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, Vol. I, p. 181. 10 Ibid., Vol. II, p .6. 11 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 222 and Hamilton papers, 7/10/3, p. 266a. 12 Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, Vol. I, p. 16. 13 A book of press cuttings concerning Gallipoli Diary is to be found in Hamilton’s papers, file 33/2. 14 Ernest Raymond, Tell England: A Study in a Generation (London: Cassell & Co., 1922). 15 Ibid., p. 259. 16 Brigadier-General C.F. Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations, Gallipoli. Vol. I: Inception of the Campaign to May 1915, History of the Great War based on Official Documents (London: Imperial War Museum, 1992 [1929]); Brigadier-General C.F. Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations, Gallipoli. Vol. II: May 1915 to the Evacuation, History of the Great War based on Official Documents (London: Imperial War Museum, 1992 [1932]). 17 Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations, Gallipoli, vol. II, p. 479. 18 The issue was discussed at a meeting of the Sub-Committee for the Control of the Official Histories in March 1928 (London, Public Record Office, CAB 16/53, Proceedings of Meeting C.O.H.5, 9 March 1928). 19 W.S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1915 (London: Butterworth, 1923). 20 Kevin Fewster, ‘Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and the Making of the Anzac Legend’, Journal of Australian Studies, 10 (June 1982), pp. 17–30. 21 E. Ashmead-Bartlett (the Dardanelles, 23 August), ‘The Battles in the Dardanelles. Action of Aug. 21. Splendid Attacks on Turkish Positions. Great British Charges. Heroic Conduct of the Yeomanry Division. Special Cablegram’, Daily Telegraph, 4 September 1915. In his diary, Bean strongly criticised the exaggerations evident here and elsewhere in Ashmead-Bartlett’s work. 22 Nicholas Hiley, ‘ “Enough Glory For All”: Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Sir Ian Hamilton at the Dardanelles’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 16, 2 (June 1993), pp. 240–64. For discussion of Ashmead-Bartlett’s attempt to use Keith Murdoch to smuggle a critical letter to Asquith, see Desmond Zwar, In Search of Keith Murdoch (London: Macmillan, 1980) and John Avieson, ‘The Correspondent who Stopped the War’, Australian Journalism Review, 8 (1986), pp. 64–71. 23 E. Ashmead-Bartlett, The Uncensored Dardanelles (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1928). 24 John Masefield, Gallipoli (London: Heinemann, 1916). 25 D.A. Kent, ‘The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C.E.W. Bean as Editor and Image-Maker’, Historical Studies, 21, 84 (April 1985), p. 377. 26 John Masefield, The Battle of the Somme (London: Heinemann, 1919); Constance Babington Smith, John Masefield: a Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 159. In the Second World War, Masefield returned again to the theme of glorious defeat in The Nine Days Wonder (London: Heinemann, 1941) his work on the evacuation of Dunkirk. 27 Babington Smith, Masefield, p. 132. 28 Ibid., p. 158. 29 Manuscript of Preface written for the 1923 re-issue of Gallipoli (typed carbon copy), John Masefield papers (Harry Ranson Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin).

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30 This was presumably Colonel E.Y. Daniel, an officer of the Royal Marines, who was secretary of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence. 31 Manuscript of Preface written for the 1923 re-issue of Gallipoli (typed carbon copy), Masefield papers. 32 Masefield, Gallipoli, p. 3. 33 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 34 Ibid., p. 19. 35 Ibid., p. 82. 36 The Song of Roland translated with an introduction by C.H. Sisson (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983), p. 8. Evelyn Cobley has discussed the effect of David Jones’ references to The Song of Roland and Welsh legend in In Parenthesis. She argues, Linking a legendary Welsh figure with soldiers on the Western Front, Jones is able to suggest a redemptive interpretation of the war without having to say so on the level of realistic depiction. There can be no doubt that associations with archetypal events elicit “from the reader a depth of feeling that realism by itself cannot arouse”.

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

46 47

48

(Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 115.) Masefield, Gallipoli, p. 115. Peter Vansittart (ed.), John Masefield’s Letters from the Front 1915–1917 (London: Constable, 1984), p. 46. Babington Smith, Masefield, p. 158. E.R. Turner, ‘Some Books About the War’, Sewanee Review, 25 (1917), p. 497. Esher to John Charteris, 16 October 1916, quoted in A.D. Harvey, A Muse of Fire (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), p. 79. Jean Hamilton to John Masefield, 16 September (no year given, but presumably 1916), John Masefield papers. Catalogue lists letter as being written by Sir Ian Hamilton. See Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000). Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993). C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac from the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign, May 4, 1915, the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, I (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981 [1921]); C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac from 4 May, 1915 to the Evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Vol. II (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981 [1924]). Compton Mackenzie, Gallipoli Memories (London: Cassell, 1929), p. 80. Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Defeat at Gallipoli (London: Macmillan, 1994); Geoffrey Moorhouse, Hell’s Foundations: A Town, its Myths and Gallipoli (London: Sceptre, 1992).

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49 At the Histories of Gallipoli symposium it emerged that the Salonika Association has recently been reestablished. 50 See Jenny Macleod, ‘The Fall and Rise of Anzac Day: 1965 and 1990 Compared’, War and Society, 20, 1 (May 2002), pp. 149–68. 5 ‘DOCILE SUPERNUMERARY’: A FRENCH PERSPECTIVE ON GALLIPOLI 1 See, in particular, D. French, British Strategy and War Aims 1914–1916 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); K. Neilson, Strategy and Supply: the AngloRussian Alliance, 1914–17 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984); and D. Dutton, The Politics of Diplomacy: Britain and France in the Balkans in the First World War (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998). 2 G. Penn, Fisher, Churchill and the Dardanelles (London: Leo Coopet, 1999) and J.D. Wallin, By Ships Alone: Churchill and the Dardanelles (Durham, NC: North Carolina Press, 1981) are among works which make only cursory reference to French participation in the campaign. 3 Ministère de la Guerre, Etat-Major de l’armée, Service historique, Les Armées françaises dans la grande guerre, tome 8, Vols I–II (Paris, 1924). 4 J.-C. Jauffret, ‘Gallipoli: A French Perspective’, p. 137 in The Straits of War: Gallipoli Remembered (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000). Jauffret offers a concise narrative of the campaign from a specifically French point of view. 5 F. Roussanne-Saint-Ramond, ‘L’Armée d’Orient dans la Grande Guerre: une mémoire occultée?’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 192 (1998), p. 42. 6 Ibid., pp. 32–3. 7 E. Delage, The Tragedy of the Dardanelles (London: John Lane, 1932), p. 23. 8 J. Mordal, ‘L’Expédition des Dardanelles, 3 novembre 1914–9 janvier 1916’, Revue Historique des Armées, 2 (1965), p. 34. 9 M. Ferro, The Great War 1914–1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 64. 10 Jauffret, ‘Gallipoli’, p. 147. 11 C.F. Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations: Gallipoli, Vol. II (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 479. 12 J. Joffre, Personal Memoirs, Vol. I (New York: Harper, 1932), p. 384. 13 Jauffret, ‘Gallipoli’, p. 137. 14 P. Bernard, La fin d’un monde, 1914–1929 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), p. 26. 15 Delage, Tragedy, pp. 254–5. 16 R. Poincaré, Memoirs of Raymond Poincaré 1915 (London: Heinemann, 1930), p. 18. 17 Ibid., pp. 21–2. 18 Ibid., p. 41. 19 Ibid., p. 71. 20 Public Record Office [PRO], Kew, London: FO 800/181, note by Bertie 5 July 1915. 21 Joffre to Millerand, 1 September 1915, cited in Armées françaises, Tome 8, Vol. I, Annexe no. 336; emphasis added. 22 M. Hankey, The Supreme Command, 1914–1918, Vol. I (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961), pp. 265–6. 23 P. Cambon, Correspondance 1870–1924, Vol. III (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1946), p. 78. 24 Ibid., p. 90.

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NOTES

25 Jauffret, ‘Gallipoli’ p. 149. 26 P.E Guépratte, L’Expédition des Dardanelles, 1914–1915 (Paris, 1935), p. 30. 27 Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations, Vol. I (London: Heinemann, 1929), p. 92 28 Jauffret, ‘Gallipoli’, p. 149. 29 Ibid. 30 Delage, Tragedy, p. 251. 31 Ibid., p. x. 32 Mordal, ‘L’Expédition’, p. 48. 33 Jauffret, ‘Gallipoli’, p. 149. 34 A. Pingaud, Histoire Diplomatique de la France pendant la Grande Guerre, Vol. I (Paris: Editions Alsatia, 1937), p. 215. 35 Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris, Jules Cambon MSS, P. Cambon to J. Cambon, 6 December 1915. 36 Poincaré, Memoirs 1915, p. 247. 37 Mordal, ‘L’Expédition’, p. 48. 38 Jauffret, ‘Gallipoli’, p. 148. 39 E. Gates, End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1939–40 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 37. 40 Mordal, ‘L’Expédition’, p. 34. 41 PRO, FO 800/88, Churchill to Grey, 24 January 1915. 42 Wallin, Ships Alone, p. 118. 43 PRO, CAB 42/1/25, War Council 28 January 1915; D. French, ‘The Origins of the Dardanelles Campaign Reconsidered’, History, 68, 223 (1983), pp. 210–24. 44 G. Cassar, Kitchener: Architect of Victory (London: Kimber, 1977), pp. 290– 1. 45 G. Cassar, The French and the Dardanelles (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), p. 60. 46 For a detailed consideration of French war aims and the Salonika campaign, see Dutton, Politics of Diplomacy, pp. 143–66. 47 S. Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, Vol. I (London: Collins, 1970), p. 222. 6 GALLIPOLI AND IRELAND 1 Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War 1914–1920 (London: HMSO, 1922), p. 237. This calculation does not take into account Australians who died serving in units outwith the AIF. 2 Tom Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki: the Story of the Irish Regiments in the Great War, 1914–18 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1992), p. 152. This figure is made up of ‘10th Division, 2017; 1st Inniskillings, 428; 1st Munsters, 397; and 1st Dublins, 569’. It does not allow for non-Irish soldiers in these formations, nor does it include Irish-born soldiers serving with other units (for example, the AIF). 3 A figure calculated by Patrick J. Casey in ‘Irish Casualties in the First World War’, Irish Sword, 20 (1997), pp. 193–206. This does not include Irishmen ‘from the ranks of the armies of the British colonies and the United States of America’. 4 There is a good, general account of operations involving Irish units at Gallipoli in Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki, pp. 100–52. For Gallipoli generally, unless specifically noted below, I have drawn on Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Defeat at Gallipoli (London: Macmillan, 1994). 5 Sir Frank Fox, The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in the World War (London: Constable and Co., 1928), p. 181.

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6 1 May 1915, Nightingale to his mother (Imperial War Museum (IWM), London, Nightingale papers, p. 216: 1915 Letters). 7 ‘Gallipoli landing from the “River Clyde” at V. Beach, April 25th 1915’ (IWM, Colonel G.W. Geddes papers 66/112/1). There is another copy of Geddes’ narrative with the 1st Battalion Royal Munster Fusiliers War Diary, Jan. 1915–Feb. 1916 (Public Record Office, Kew (PRO), WO 95/4310). 8 1 May 1915, Nightingale to his mother (IWM, Nightingale papers, P. 216: 1915 Letters). 9 4 May 1915, Nightingale to Meta Nightingale (ibid.). 10 Ibid. 11 4 June 1915, Nightingale to Meta Nightingale (ibid.). 12 9 June 1915, Nightingale to mother (ibid.). 13 Nightingale, however, who came through Gallipoli with barely a scratch, later brooded on his particular good fortune, and the cheery tone of his letters seems to have masked a depressive tendency. On 25 April 1935, Anzac day, he killed himself with his service revolver (see Myles Dungan, Irish Voices from the Great War (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), p. 48). 14 Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki, pp. 82–3. 15 4 June 1915, Nightingale to his mother (IWM, Nightingale papers, P. 216: 1915 Letters). 16 H.C. Wylly, Neill’s ‘Blue Caps’, Vol. III, 1914–1922 (Aldershot: Gale & Polden, n.d. [1923]), p. 42. 17 Fox, The Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, p. 177. 18 Ibid., p. 182. 19 For the UVF, see A.T.Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (London: Faber, 1967). 20 There is an excellent account of the formation of the division in Terry Denman, ‘The 10th (Irish) Division 1914–15: A Study in Military and Political Interaction’, Irish Sword, 17 (1987), pp. 16–25, from which general information about the Division in the following text is drawn. 21 S.L. Gwynn, ‘Irish Regiments’, in Felix Lavery (ed.), Great Irishmen in War and Politics (London: Andrew Melrose Ltd, 1920), p. 172. 22 See, for example, Leslie Falls, whose brother and father waited to join the 36th Division (Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 39). 23 Bryan Cooper, The Tenth (Irish) Division in Gallipoli (London: H. Jenkins, 1918), p. viii (Foreword by Redmond). 24 Ibid., p. 13. Cooper excluded the one purely ‘English’ battalion in the division, the 10th Hampshires, from this calculation. 25 1 May 1915 (quoted in Henry Hanna, The Pals at Suvla Bay: Being the Record of ‘D’ Company of the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers (Dublin: E. Ponsonby, 1917), p. 29. 26 Cooper, Tenth (Irish) Division, p. 15. 27 Hervey De Montmorency, Sword and Stirrup: Memories of an Adventurous Life (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1936), p. 245. 28 John Hargrave, At Suvla Bay (London: Constable & Co., 1916), p. 39. 29 7 August 1915, 31 Infantry Brigade War Diary, July 1915–September 1916 (PRO WO 95/4296). 30 Report by Brigadier-General F.F. Hill Cmmdg. 31st Infantry Brigade of 10th Division and attached troops at Suvla Bay, prepared c. Aug. 1928 (PRO WO 45/242). 31 Ibid. 32 Hanna, The Pals at Suvla Bay, pp. 76, 202. 33 Ibid., pp. 106–7, 113.

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34 Cooper, The Tenth (Irish) Division, pp. 179–80. 35 See Godley’s memoirs: Sir Alexander Godley, Life of an Irish Soldier (London: John Murray, 1939). 36 H.F.N. Jourdain, Record of the 5th (Service) Battalion, the Connaught Rangers from 19th August 1914, to 17th January 1916 (privately published, 1916), pp. 64–5. 37 Ibid., p. 96. 38 See Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki, pp. 148–9. 39 Jourdain, Record of the 5th (Service) Battalion, p. 72. 40 Hanna was a Dublin barrister. 41 S. Parnell Kerr, What the Irish Regiments Have Done (London: T. Fishet Unwin, 1916), p. 135. 42 Ibid., p. 144. 43 Ibid., pp. 150–1. 44 Ibid., p. 156. 45 MacDonagh’s books include: The Irish at the Front (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916), and The Irish on the Somme (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917). A copy of the former in the Armagh Public Library was presented to the library by the Department of Recruiting for Ireland, April 1916. 46 MacDonagh, The Irish at the Front, pp. 63–4. 47 Ibid., p. 83. 48 Kerr, What the Irish Regiments Have Done, p. 135. 49 MacDonagh, The Irish at the Front, p. 99. 50 Frederick Ernest Whitton, The History of the Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment (Royal Canadians), Part II, The Great War and the Disbandment of the Regiment (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, n.d. [1924]), p. 193. In a penetrating exploration of how Irish soldiers were stereotyped during the war, Terence Denman has concluded that in their actions and responses they were actually not very different from English or Scottish troops (see Terence Denman, ‘The Catholic Irish Soldier in the First World War: The “Racial Environment”’, Irish Historical Studies, 27 (1991), pp. 352–65). 51 Denman, ‘The 10th (Irish) Division’, p. 24. 52 Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1932), p. 439. 53 Katharine Tynan, The Years of the Shadow (London: Constable & Co., 1919), p. 178. 54 Eimar O’Duffy, The Wasted Island (Dublin: Martin Lester, n.d. [1919]), p. 388. 55 De Roebeck’s family home was in County Kildare. For his unionist sympathies see Ian F.W. Beckett and Keith Jeffery, ‘The Royal Navy and the Curragh Incident’, Historical Research, 62 (1989), p. 62. 56 St John G. Ervine, Changing Winds (American edn, New York: Macmillan, 1920), p. 499. 57 MacDonagh, The Irish at the Front, p. 102. 58 Cooper, The 10th (Irish) Division, p. 256. 59 F.X. Martin, ‘1916 – Myth, Fact and Mystery’, Studia Hibernica, 7 (1967), p. 68. 60 After Dublin Castle, the centre of the British administration in Ireland. 61 Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge: A Life of the Poet (London: Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe, 1972), p. 127. 62 Cooper, The 10th (Irish) Division, p. xxvi. 63 G.C. Duggan, The Watchers on Gallipoli (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1921), pp. 36–8.

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64 Dora Sigerson Shorter, The Tricolour (Cork: C.F.N., 1976), p. 22. 65 About Time, The Irish Brigade, Vol. VI (n.d., c. 1990). I am most grateful to Dr Patrick Maume of Queen’s University, Belfast, for drawing my attention to this song. 66 David Williamson, ‘The Screenplay’, in Bill Gammage, The Story of Gallipoli: the Film About the Men Who Made a Legend (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1981), p. 144. 7 REMEMBERING AN ILL-FATED VENTURE: THE FOURTH BATTALION, ROYAL SUSSEX REGIMENT AT SUVLA BAY AND ITS LEGACY, 1915–39 I wish to thank participants of the symposium ‘Histories of Gallipoli’ at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London, for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am grateful to the County Archivist and the Royal Sussex Regimental Trust for permission to use quotations from manuscript material in the regimental archive at West Sussex Record Office. 1 G. Moorhouse, Hell’s Foundations. A Town, its Myths and Gallipoli (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992; Sceptre edn, 1993), p. 13. 2 R. Rhodes James, Gallipoli (London: Pimlico, 1999 [1965]), p. xii. 3 P.H. Hoffenberg, ‘Landscape, Memory and the Australian War Experience, 1915–18’, Journal of Contemporary History, 36, 1, pp. 114,122,126–7. 4 J. Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the “Memory Boom”, in Contemporary Historical Studies’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 27 (Fall 2000), p. 71. 5 K. Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 44, 53. 6 J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 223. 7 For alternative anniversary markers at the local level as part of rethinking modernist interpretations of war see N.F. Gullace, ‘Memory, Memorials and the Postwar Literary Experience: Traditional Values and the Legacy of World War I’, Twentieth Century British History, 10, 2 (1999), p. 234. Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory’, p. 72; Winter Sites of Memory, p. 225. 8 R.A.K. Runcie, ‘The God of Battles and the Fight for Faith’, in M. Gilbert (intro.) The Straits of War. Gallipoli Remembered (Stroud, Gloucs.: Sutton Publishing, 2000), p. 40. 9 Mid-Sussex Times, 30 August 1934. 10 There is a short unpublished account of the battalion for the years 1908–40 and a greetings card from 1919 which contained a listing or ‘Short History’ for the war years. 11 Sussex: Historical, Biographical and Pictorial (London: Allan North, 1907); Walford’s County Families of the United Kingdom (London: Spottiswoode, 1912). On gifts provided for the 4th Battalion at the end of a recruiting march at Arundel see West Sussex County Times, 14 November 1914. 12 Major S.W.P. Beale (1897–1919). The indicated dates of service are taken from West Sussex Record Office (hereafter WSRO) Acc. 3909, Photographic album of officers of 4th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment. See also Who’s Who in Sussex (Worcester: Ebenezer Bayliss and Son, 1935), pp. 16–7; East Grinstead Observer, 30 July 1915 and 6 February 1937.

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13 P. Brandon and B. Short, The South East from AD 1000 (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 317–8. The pre-war eight company structure, reorganised to four in January 1915, focused on Haywards Heath, Hurstpierpoint, East Grinstead, Petworth, Horsham, Arundel, Chichester and Worthing, Sussex Daily News, 23 July 1915. 14 PRO WO374/42095, army service record, Robert Egerton Loder, letter from secretary of the Sussex Territorial Force Association, 12 December 1911. 15 I.F.W. Beckett, ‘The Amateur Military Tradition in Britain’, War and Society (Australia), 4, 2 (1986), pp. 11–2; I.F.W. Beckett, ‘The Amateur Military Tradition’, in D. Chandler (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 397. 16 I. Beckett, ‘The Territorial Force’, in I.F.W. Beckett and K. Simpson (eds), A Nation in Arms. A Social Study of the British Army in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 137, 146–7. 17 Of 53rd Division the official historian wrote ‘most of the troops had been badly shaken by the experiences of their first day ashore’, Official History of the Great War. Military Operations. Gallipoli, Vol. II, p. 297; see also pp. 286–92. ‘Suvla was the modern battlefield, where nothing can be done quickly except the firing of a machine gun’, J. Masefield, Gallipoli (London: Heinemann, 1917), p. 148. WSRO RSR MS 4/107, Account of the 4 Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment from 1908 to 1940, J.F. Ainsworth, n.d. 18 PRO WO106/707, Report on operations at Suvla Bay, 6–15 August 1915, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, 26 October 1918. 19 PRO WO106/707, Major-General Beauvoir de Lisle, 29 August 1915. He took command of 53 Division on 15 August 1915. On the movements of 53 Division see The Dardanelles Commission Report, Part II, 1915–16 (1917) (London: Stationery Office, reprint 2000), pp. 138–9. 20 PRO WO106/707, General Sir Ian Hamilton to Lord Kitchener, 11 August 1915. On Suvla Bay as a ‘crowning effort’ see S.L.A. Marshall, ‘Suvla Bay’, Military Review, 42, 11 (1963), pp. 60–8; R. Prior, ‘The Suvla Bay Tea-party’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial (October 1985), pp. 25–34. 21 West Sussex County Times, 28 August 1915. 22 Sussex Daily News, 14 September 1915. 23 West Sussex County Times, 4 September 1915. 24 West Sussex County Times, 25 September 1915 and 2 October 1915. The Roll of Honour was in West Sussex County Times, 4 December 1915. 25 G.H. Clarke (ed.), A Treasury of War Poetry. British and American Poems of the World War 1914–1919 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919), p. 40. 26 W.E. Harker, Sussex: at Peace and War (Brighton: Southern Publishing Co., 1918), p. 13. 27 S. Hynes, A War Imagined. The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), p. 189. 28 P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1975]), p. 23; A. Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in R. Colls and P. Dodd (eds), Englishness. Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 73–5. 29 F. Wood, Round about Sussex Downs (London: Duckworth, 1925), p. 11; W.E. Harker, ‘Preparation 1913 (The 4th Royal Sussex Regiment, Patcham)’, Sussex: At Peace and War, p. 7. 30 A. Beckett, The Spirit of the Downs (London: Methuen, 1923 (3rd edn) [1909]), pp. 5, 19; K. Grieves, ‘ “Lowther’s Lambs”: Rural Paternalism and

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

Voluntary Recruitment in the First World War’, Rural History, 4, 1 (1993), pp. 62–3. A. Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, pp. 80–1; E.V. Lucas, ‘Introduction’ in A.B. Norman, Ditchling Beacon (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1918), p. 5. W.E. Harker, Sussex: At Peace and War, p. 9; West Sussex County Times, 11 September 1915. Winter, Sites of Memory, pp. 204–5, 221–2. Lord Crewe quoted in G.H. Clarke (ed.), A Treasury of War Poetry, p. 36. Sussex Daily News, 14 August 1919. WSRO RSR MS 4/107, Account of the 4 Battalion, J.F. Ainsworth, n.d. WSRO RSR LIB 2/17, The Roussillon Gazette, 18, 1 (May 1930), p. 37. WSRO RSR MS4/93, scrapbook of cuttings, 4 Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, Sussex Daily News, 27 June 1927. WSRO RSR LIB 2/17, The Roussillon Gazette, 18, 3 (May 1931), pp. 48–9. Sussex Daily News, 23 July 1915 and 26 February 1929; West Sussex County Times, 18 August 1923; WSRO Acc. 3909, Photograph album; WSRO RSR MS 4/107, Account of the 4 Battalion, J.F. Ainsworth, n.d.; Who’s Who (London: Black, 1917); Who’s Who in Sussex (London: Ebenezer Bayliss and Son, 1935), p. 42. WSRO RSR MS 4/93, scrapbook of cuttings, Secretary, War Office to Colonel Godman, 22 October 1924; WSRO RSR LIB 2/17, The Roussillon Gazette, 21, 2 (November 1934), p. 4. WSRO RSR LIB 2/17, The Roussillon Gazette, 17, 4 (November 1929), pp. 35–6 and 18, 2 (November 1930), p. 65. PRO DO35/422/9, W. Campion to J.H. Thomas (10 September 1930). PRO DO35/359/14, Western Australia Secret Quarterly Report, Campion, 28 March 1930 and DO35/360/1, Western Australia Secret Quarterly Report, Campion, 30 March 1931. Campion quoted as a guest of the Royal Colonial Institute at the Hotel Victoria, London, The Times, 25 September 1924 and PRO DO35/359/14, Western Australia Secret Quarterly Reports, Campion, for 30 December 1929 and 26 June 1930. WSRO RSR MS 4/95, scrapbook of cuttings, Sussex Daily News, n.d [1937]. PRO WO 95/4322, J.M. Hulton to Brigadier-General C.F. Aspinall-Oglander, n.d. [letter received 22 January 1931]. The anecdote was presented in the text as if it was told by the battalion commander, Official History of the Great War. Military Operations. Gallipoli, Vol. II, p. 292. WSRO RSR 4/95, scrapbook of cuttings, Sussex Daily News, 14 December 1937; WSRO RSR LIB 2/17, The Roussillon Gazette, 17, 4 (November 1929), p. 41 and 18, 1 (May 1930), p. 33. Sussex Daily News, 26 October 1931; West Sussex County Times, 30 October 1931. Review in the West Sussex County Times, 16 October 1931. This film, or ‘cinematisation’ of literature, conveyed a disenchantment through the final sequences of attack, casualties and graves which much diminished the romance so evident in the novel. On the work of Ernest Raymond see R. Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope. British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993), pp. 55, 67, 76; Hynes, A War Imagined, pp. 329–36. The film was viewed at a public showing at the Imperial War Museum on 24 April 2001.

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52 J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace. Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939 (London: Routledge, 1989 [1984]), p. 290. On the relationship between the production and consumption of film, see J. Richards and A. Aldgate, Best of British. Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 1–10. 53 Major R.C.G. Middleton (1914–28), West Sussex County Times, 28 July 1923 and 10 November 1923; A. Northcott, Popular Entertainment in Horsham 1880–1930 (privately published, 1988), pp. 55–64; WSRO RSR MS 4/107, Account of the 4 Battalion, J.F. Ainsworth, n.d. 54 A. Eyles, F. Gray and A. Readman, Cinema West Sussex. The First Hundred Years (Chichester: Phillimore, 1996), p. 143. 55 WSRO RSR MS 4/93, scrapbook of cuttings, Sussex Daily News, 26 October 1931. 56 WSRO RSR MS 4/93, scrapbook of cuttings, Sussex Daily News, 10 November 1932; West Sussex County Times, 18 November 1932; WSRO RSR LIB 2/17, The Roussillon Gazette, 20, 1 (May 1933), p. 41. 57 West Sussex County Times, 14 August 1936. 58 Lieutenant-Colonel C.R.B. Godman (1903–28). His letter is dated 6 June 1934, WSRO RSR MS 4/93, scrapbook of cuttings, published letter, n.d [1934]. 59 E. Thornton Cook, ‘Gallipoli: Twenty Years After’, The Cornhill Magazine, 151, 903 (March 1935), pp. 257–63. 60 D.W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism. Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1998), pp. 97, 100, 153, 162–3. 61 WSRO RSR LIB 2/17, The Roussillon Gazette, 20, 1 (May 1933), p. 41. 62 The battalion was ‘fortunate so many came home’ from Gallipoli, West Sussex County Times, 30 October 1931. The battalion suffered higher casualty rates during the first battle of Gaza (26 March 1917) and the advance south of Soissons (20 July–1 August 1918) when compared to the three-week period following the landing at Suvla Bay, WSRO RSR MS 12/6, Soldiers Died in the Great War. Part 40. The Royal Sussex Regiment 1914–1919. 63 East Grinstead Observer, 6 February 1937. 64 A. Gregory, The Silence of Memory. Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994), pp. 68–9. 65 E. Blunden, ‘Fall In, Ghosts. An Essay on a Battalion Reunion’, in S. Norman (ed.), Contemporary Essays (London: The White Owl Press, 1932), pp. 17, 29; Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, pp. 177–8; Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, p. 225. On individual memories in a shared context see N. Gedi and Y. Elam, ‘Collective Memory – What Is it?’, History and Memory, 8, 1 (1996), pp. 3–35. 66 S. Hynes, ‘Personal Narratives and Commemoration’, in J. Winter and E. Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 212; Gregory, The Silence of Memory, pp. 86, 120. There was much ‘cultural continuity in the face of grief’, N.F. Gullace ‘Memory, Memorials and the Postwar Literary Experience’, p. 236. 67 West Sussex County Times, 14 August 1936; Who’s Who in Sussex (1935), p. 209. 68 Blunden, ‘Fall In, Ghosts’, pp. 13–4, 20. 69 Ibid., p. 29. 70 Major Wraight (1908–32) was commissioned during the war, WSRO RSR MS 4/93, scrapbook of cuttings, Sussex Daily News, 12 November 1932.

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71 WSRO RSR MS 4/95, scrapbook of cuttings, Sussex Daily News, 1 February 1937. 72 East Grinstead Observer, 29 April 1939. 73 J. Lowerson, A Short History of Sussex (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), p. 165; S.P.B. Mais, Sussex (London: Richards, n.d.), p. 198. 74 Moorhouse, Hell’s Foundations, pp. 194, 196–7. 75 Lieutenant-Colonel J.R. Warren (1907–32); Who’s Who in Sussex, pp. 299–300. Acquired in a second-hand bookshop in Horsham in 1998, this copy of Masefield’s Gallipoli contains underlinings which highlight the grim challenge which confronted 53 Division. 76 1/4th Royal Sussex Regiment and 2/4 Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment), part of 160 Brigade, were temporarily amalgamated on 21 October 1915, R. Westlake, British Regiments at Gallipoli (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), p. 135. 77 Harker, Sussex: At Peace and War, pp. 8–9. 8 INTERPRETING UNIT HISTORIES: GALLIPOLI AND AFTER I would like to thank Dr Robert T. Foley for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 G. Moorhouse, Hell’s Foundations. A Town, its Myths and Gallipoli (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), passim. 2 K. Grieves, ‘Making Sense of the Great War: Regimental Histories 1918–23’, Journal for the Society of Military History, 69 (Spring 1991), p. 6. 3 Regimental histories: A. Crookenden, The History of the Cheshire Regiment in the Great War (Chester: W.H. Evans, 1935); C.R. Simpson (ed.), The History of the Lincolnshire Regiment 1914–1918 (London: The Medici Society, 1932); H. Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’: the Prince of Wales’s Volunteers (South Lancashire) 1914–1934 (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1935). Divisional histories: F.P. Gibbon, The 42nd (East Lancashire) Division, 1914– 1918 (London: Country Life, 1920); S. Gillon, The Story of the 29th Division, a Record of Gallant Deeds (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1925). Battalion histories: J.M. Burrows, The Essex Regiment, 1st Battalion (44th) (Southend on Sea: J.H. Burrows and Sons, 1923); D. Jerrold, The Hawke Battalion, Some Personal Records of Four Years, 1914–1918 (London: Ernest Benn, 1925); W. Sorley Brown, War Record of 4th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers and Lothians and Border Horse (Galashiels: John McQueen, 1920); F.A.M. Webster, The History of the Fifth Battalion the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment (T.A.) (London: Frederick Warne, 1930). 4 See, for example, Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’, p. vii. Regimental histories were most commonly commissioned by regular units and so reflected regular preoccupations. 5 Grieves, ‘Making Sense of the Great War’, pp. 6–7. 6 Gibbon, 42nd East Lancashire Division, p. iv. 7 Grieves, ‘Making Sense of the Great War’, p. 10. 8 M. Kinkaid-Smith, The 25th Division in France and Flanders (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919), p. 3; J. Milne, Footprints of the 1/4th Leicestershire Regiment, August 1914 to November 1918 (Leicester: Edgar Backus, 1935), p. vii; O. Rutter (ed.), History of the Seventh (Service) Battalion, the Royal Sussex Regiment, 1914–1919 (London: The Times Publishing Company,

178

NOTES

9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35

1934), p. vii; Sorley Brown, War Record, p. 7; Webster, History of the Fifth Battalion, p. viii. E. Wyrall, ‘On the Writing of “Unit” War Histories’, Army Quarterly, 6, 2 (July 1923), pp. 386–90 and Grieves, ‘Making Sense of the Great War’, p. 14. From the end of the war to 1939 Wyrall wrote seven regimental and four divisional histories. See Grieves, ‘Making Sense of the Great War’, p. 12. See F. Lorriane Petre, Wilfrid Ewart and Cecil Lowther, The Scots Guards in the Great War 1914–1918 (London: John Murray, 1925), p. vii, for an account describing finding a suitable author. Histories written by participant authors include: Gillon, Story of the 29th Division; Jerrold, The Hawke Battalion; Kincaid-Smith, 25th Division; Milne, Footprints of the 1/4th Leicestershire Regiment; J. Shakespear, The 34th Division, 1915–1919 (London: H.H.F., and G. Witherby, 1921); Sorley Brown, War Record; Webster, 5th Battalion, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. R.A.S. Macfie to A.M. McGilchrist, 11th December 1928, Liverpool, Liverpool Scottish Regimental Museum, Miscellaneous File M. See, for example, Crookenden, History of the Cheshire Regiment, pp. v–vi. Gibbon, The 42nd (East Lancashire) Division, p. 49. J. Masefield, Gallipoli (London: Heinemann, 1916), pp. 5–9; G. Fortescue, What of the Dardanelles: An Analysis (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), pp. 27, 49. Sorley Brown, 4th Battalion, Kings Own Scottish Borderers, pp. 54–7. Burrows, Essex Regiment, p. v. The 42nd East Lancashire Division also had Sir Ian Hamilton as a contributor to the Preface of their unit history. Gibbon, 42nd East Lancashire Division, p. 45; Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’, p. 153. Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’, p. 153 Crookenden, Cheshire Regiment, pp. 173–9. Over half the histories surveyed supported this theme. See Burrows, Essex Regiment, p. v; Crookenden, Cheshire Regiment, pp. 173–9; Gibbon, 42nd East Lancashire Division, p. 59; Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’, p. 155; Simpson, Lincolnshire Regiment 1914–1918, p. 148. Gibbon, The 42nd East Lancashire Division, p. 15. Webster, 5th Battalion, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, p. 119. Gibbon, 42nd East Lancashire Division, p. 56. See also Gillon, 29th Division, pp. 70–1 and Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’, pp. 156–7. Simpson, Lincolnshire Regiment 1914–1918, p. 150. Crookenden, Cheshire Regiment, pp. 173–9; Simpson, Lincolnshire Regiment, pp. 141–54. Gillon, 29th Division, pp. viii–ix. Webster, 5th Battalion, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, pp. 99–100. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 119. See Gibbon, 42nd East Lancashire Division, p. 47; Gillon, 29th Division, pp. 40–1; Webster, 5th Battalion, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, pp. 112–4; Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’, pp. 150, 155. See Gibbon, 42nd East Lancashire Division; Gillon, 29th Division. Gillon, 29th Division, p. vii. Gibbon, 42nd East Lancashire Division, p.19.

179


36 John North, Gallipoli: The Fading Vision (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), quoted in E. Spiers, ‘Gallipoli’, in B. Bond (ed.), The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 166. 37 Gibbon, 42nd (East Lancashire) Division, p. vi. 38 See Crookenden, Cheshire Regiment; Simpson, Lincolnshire Regiment. Keith Grieves also makes this point in ‘Making Sense of the Great War’, p. 7. 39 See, for example, Jerrold, The Hawke Battalion, pp. 126, 139. 40 Gibbon, 42nd East Lancashire Division, pp. 128–41; Sorley Brown, 4th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers, p. 103; Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’, pp. 168–70; Webster, 5th Battalion, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, pp. 164–208. 41 Webster, 5th Battalion, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, pp. 147–8. 42 Whalley-Kelley, ‘Ich Dien’, p. 168. 9 IN THE SHADOW OF GALLIPOLI? AMPHIBIOUS WARFARE IN THE INTER-WAR PERIOD 1 P.A. Crowl, and J.A. Isley, The US Marines and Amphibious War – Its Theory, and its Practice in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 20. 2 J.A. Lorelli, To Foreign Shores: US Amphibious Operations in World War II (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 9. 3 A.J. Marder, From the Dardanelles to Oran. Studies of the Royal Navy in War and Peace, 1915–1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 52. S. Roskill, Naval Policy Between the Wars, Vol. I (London: Collins, 1968), pp. 539–40. 4 Robert O’Neill, ‘The Development of Amphibious Warfare’, The Hudson Lecture, Oxford University, 16 November 2000. 5 D. MacGregor, ‘The Use, Miss-Use and Non-Use of History: The Royal Navy and the Operational Lessons of the First World War’, Journal of Military History, 56 (October 1992). 6 See Richard Harding, ‘Learning from the War: The Development of British Amphibious Capability, 1919–29’, Mariner’s Mirror, 86, 2 (May 2000), pp. 173–85 and D. Massam, ‘British Maritime Strategy and Amphibious Capability 1900–1940’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University, 1995). 7 L.E.H. Maund, Assault from the Sea (London: Methuen, 1949), B. Fergusson, The Watery Maze – The Story of Combined Operations (London: Collins, 1961). 8 Fergusson, Watery Maze, p. 39. 9 D.F. Bittner, ‘Britannia’s Sheathed Sword. The Royal Marines and Amphibious Warfare in the Inter-War Years – A Passive Response’, Journal of Military History, 55 (July 1991). K.J. Clifford, Amphibious Warfare Development in Britain and America from 1920–1940 (New York: Edgewood, 1983). MacGregor, ‘Use, Miss-Use and Non-Use of History’. 10 Massam, ‘British Maritime Strategy’. 11 Ibid., p. 75. 12 B. Friend, ‘Landing Craft Through the Ages – Part II’, Warship, 46 (April 1988), pp. 32–47. 13 For details of German defensive preparations on the Belgian coast see Public Records Office, Kew, London (henceforth PRO): ADM 239/27.

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NOTES

14 Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber & Faber, 1929); Basil Liddell Hart, The British Way in Warfare (London: Faber and Faber, 1932). 15 J.F.C. Fuller, ‘The Development of Sea Warfare on Land and its Influence on Future Naval Operations’, RUSI Journal, 65 (1920), pp. 281–98. J.F.C. Fuller, On Future Warfare (London: S. Praed, 1928). 16 PRO: AIR 1/2323, Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Attacks Delivered on and the Enemy Defences of the Dardanelles Straits (Mitchell Report). 17 Prior to 1951 the British military referred to amphibious operations as ‘combined operations’. 18 Fergusson, Watery Maze, p. 36. 19 PRO: ADM 186/117, The Manual of Combined Operations 1938. 20 I. Speller, The Role of Amphibious Warfare in British Defence Policy, 1945–1956 (London: Palgrave, 2001), ch. 1, PRO: DEFE 2/782A. 21 For example, see PRO: ADM 203/89, Combined Naval and Military Landing Operations. PRO: ADM 203/74, Combined Exercise, Kasid Beach 1925; Report on Combined Operations, Malta 1935; Report on Combined Operations, Singapore 1934; and Report on Combined Operations, Hong Kong 1938, all held in the Joint Services Command and Staff College library. 22 PRO: AIR 1/2323, Mitchell Report. 23 Admiral Sir F. Dreyer, The Sea Heritage. A Study of Maritime Warfare (London: Museum Press, 1955), p. 263 24 PRO: ADM 203/89. 25 PRO: AIR 1/2323, Mitchell Report. 26 PRO: ADM 203/73, Requirement for Landing Craft. 27 This craft was also known as the Beach Motor Boat. 28 D.K. Brown, The Design and Construction of British Warships 1939–1945. The Official Record. Amphibious Warfare Vessels and Auxiliaries (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1996), pp. 40–1. 29 PRO: ADM 186/177, The Manual of Combined Operations, pp. 134, 141–58. 30 Christopher M. Bell. The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), ch. 3. 31 Landing Craft, Assault (LCA), Landing Craft, Mechanised (LCM) and Landing Craft, Support (LCS). 32 PRO: ADM 239/242, ADM 239/357. 33 PRO: DEFE 2/1773, History of the Combined Operations Organisation. Fergusson, Watery Maze, pp. 42–3. 34 Liman von Sanders, Five Years in Turkey (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1927). 35 For an examination of US amphibious forces during this period see A.R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps (New York: The Free Press, 1991); K.J. Clifford, Amphibious Warfare Development in Britain and America from 1920–1940 (New York: Edgewood, 1983); H.M. Smith, The Development of Amphibious Tactics in the US Navy (Washington, DC: History and Museums Division, HQ USMC, 1992); P.A. Crowl and J.A. Isely, The US Marines and Amphibious War: its Theory and its Practice in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951). 36 H.H. Smith, The Development of Amphibious Tactics, p. 20. The archives of the Marine Corps University at Quantico have numerous boxes containing reports and studies dating from the 1920s and 1930s examining Gallipoli and the Baltic landings.

181


37 For an examination of Japanese amphibious forces during this period, see Allan Millet, ‘Assault From the Sea. The Development of Amphibious Warfare Between the Wars’, in Williamson Murray and Allan Millett (eds), Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and M.J. Grove, ‘The Development of Japanese Amphibious Warfare, 1874 to 1942’, Strategic Studies Combat Institute Occasional Papers, No. 31 (October 1997). 38 Japan was also bound by the restrictions imposed by the Five Power Treaty but suspicion arose almost immediately that it was fortifying its possessions in the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall island groups. 39 D.A. Ballendorf and M.L. Bartlett, Pete Ellis. An Amphibious Warfare Prophet, 1880–1923 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997). Millet, Semper Fidelis, pp. 326–30. 40 Millett, Semper Fidelis, p. 325. 41 Ibid., pp. 328–30. 42 Arthur J. Marder, Old Friends and New Enemies. The Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy. Strategic Illusions, 1936–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 289–92. 43 Ibid., pp. 327–8; Grove, ‘Japanese Amphibious Warfare’. pp. 35–7. 44 N. Polmar and P.B. Mersky, Amphibious Warfare. An Illustrated History (London: Blandford Press, 1988), ch. 3. 45 In 1926 the Japanese Army General Staff had identified three divisions as ‘especially designated’ for use in landings in the Philippines and these had received special instruction in amphibious operations. One of these, the 11th Division, performed poorly ashore near Shanghai in 1937. Millett, ‘Assault from the Sea’, pp. 67–9. 46 The Higgin’s Boat that became the ubiquitous LCVP and the Roebling amphibious tractor that became the LVT. 47 The planned wartime strength of the FMF was 25,000, almost 6,000 more personnel than existed in the USMC at that time. Millett, Semper Fidelis, p. 336. 48 Bell, The Royal Navy, p. 128. 10 G A L L I P O L I A S C O N T E S T E D C O M M E M O R A T I V E SPACE 1 As anyone familiar with the study of the Gallipoli campaign knows, place names are contested. For the Turks, Gallipoli was never the name of the peninsula. It was Gelibolu. Nor was the campaign the Gallipoli campaign. For the Turks, it was the Canakkale campaign, reflecting the defence of the Dardenelles in early 1915. Nor did Anzac Cove exist as a place name until the Turks officially gazetted its name change after the 75th anniversary of the invasion. However, for the sake of convenience, it seems appropriate to use the names familiar to English-speaking audiences. 2 L. Carlyon, Gallipoli (Sydney: Macmillan, 2001). 3 See, for example, B. Gammage, ‘Anzac’s Influence on Turkey and Australia, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 18 (1991), pp. 13–19 and K. Celik (ed.), The Gallipoli Campaign. International Perspectives 85 Years On; Conference Proceedings, Ataturk and Gallipoli Campaign Research Centre (Canakkale, 2002). For the Turks, of course, the campaign is known as the Canakkale campaign.

182

NOTES

4 There is only one other nation-building legend that challenges Gallipoli, often to the consternation of Australia’s moral guardians, the legend of one Ned Kelly. See J. McQuilton, ‘King or Country: Recruitment in Kelly Country, 1914–1918’, in D. Headon (ed.), Nation Building Yarns (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, forthcoming). 5 C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Mission (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1948). 6 http://www.lusanhotel.com/peninsula.htm 7 After the war, the families of men who had been killed were offered the opportunity to have inscriptions placed on the headstones of their loved ones for a modest fee. The fee could provoke some angst. See V. Caldwell, ‘Illawarra at War’ (Honours thesis, University of Wollongong, 1999). 8 For example, Ashley Ekins compiled a superb guide to the cemeteries and memorials on the peninsula, yet only mentions a limited number of the Turkish memorials. See A Guide to the Battlefields, Cemeteries and Memorials of the Gallipoli Peninsula (Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 1998). 9 Bean, Gallipoli Mission, pp. 46–9. 10 I am aware that many of the more traditional texts attribute the successful defence of the peninsula to von Sanders and the German officers. This ignores the role of Ataturk and in the end it was mainly Turkish soldiers who fought the battles. 11 Forestry Ministry, Office of National Parks and Wildlife, Gallipoli Peninsula Historical National Park (2001); S. Yilmaz and T. Yilmaz, Gallipoli (Canakkale, 2nd edn, 1990). 12 Gammage, ‘Anzac’s Influence’, p. 15. 13 A reciprocal monument was built in Canberra in 1985 honouring Ataturk and contains the same tribute. 14 Forestry Ministry, p. 10. 15 Ibid, pp. 10–11. 16 Ibid, p. 12. 17 See B. Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975); J. Macleod, ‘The Rise and Fall of Anzac Day, 1965 and 1990 Compared’, War and Society (UNSW), 20 (2002), pp. 149–68; B. Scates, ‘In Gallipoli’s Shadow: Pilgrimage, Memory, Mourning and the Great War’, Historical Studies, 33, 119 (2002), pp. 1–21; A. Seymour and R. Nile (eds), Anzac: Meaning, Memory and Myth (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994). 18 P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); K.S. Inglis, ‘Gallipoli Pilgrimage 1965’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 18 (1991), pp. 20–7; D.W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada (Oxford: Berg, 1998); J.M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 19 Scates, ‘In Gallipoli’s Shadow’. 20 Ibid, p. 19. 21 Alpine Observer, 2 May 1919; Rutherglen Sun, 2 May 1919; Upper Murray and Mitta Herald, 29 April 1920. 22 J. Winter and E. Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 37. 23 K.S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton: Miegunyah Press at Melbourne University Press, 1998); D.N. Jeans, ‘The First World War Memorials in New South Wales: Centres of Meaning

183


in the Landscape’, Australian Geographer, 19, 2 (1988), pp. 259–67; M. McKernan, Here Is Their Spirit: A History of the Australian War Memorial, 1917–1990 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1991); B. Stegmann, ‘ “We Will Remember Them”: The Significance of First World War Memorials in South-Eastern New South Wales’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 4 (1984), pp. 23–30. 24 A. King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg, 1998). 25 J. McQuilton, ‘A Shire at War’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 13 (1987), pp. 3–13 and J. McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2001), pp. 4–6, 118–8, 210–3.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

David Dutton is Professor of History at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Politics of Diplomacy: Britain and France in the Balkans in the First World War (1998) and contributed to Anglo-French Relations in the Twentieth Century: Rivalry and Cooperation (2000). Martin Gilbert is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. In addition to succeeding Randolph Churchill as official biographer of Sir Winston, where he was personally responsible for Volume III, which covers the Gallipoli campaign, he has written comprehensively on various aspects of both world wars, on the Holocaust and on the Arab–Israeli conflict. Keith Grieves is Director of Research in the School of Education at Kingston University. He is the author of The Politics of Manpower 1914–1918 (1988) and is working on a history of Sussex during the Great War. Keith Jeffery is Professor of Modern History, University of Ulster at Jordanstown. He is co-author of Northern Ireland since 1968 (with Paul Arthur), A Military History of Ireland (1996) (with Thomas Bartlett) and author of Ireland and the Great War (2000). Jenny Macleod is a Research Fellow in the School of History and Classics, University of Edinburgh. She previously worked as Lecturer in Defence Studies, King’s College London at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. Her monograph, Reconsidering Gallipoli is published by Manchester University Press. Helen McCartney is Lecturer in Defence Studies, King’s College London, based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. She is currently completing her first book on the British citizen soldier in the First World War and has contributed to a major study on the symptomatology of war syndromes from the Boer War to the Gulf. John McQuilton is Associate Professor in the School of History and Politics at the University of Wollongong. He is the author of Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (2001). Christopher Pugsley is a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He is the author of Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story (1984), and ‘On the Fringe of Hell’: New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War (1991). His most recent work, From Emergency to Confrontation: The New Zealand Armed Forces in Malaya and Borneo 1949– 1966 is a volume in the series of New Zealand official histories and is published by Oxford University Press (2003).

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Ian Speller lectures in the Department of Modern History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies, King’s College London at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. His publications include The Role of Amphibious Warfare in British Defence Policy, 1945–56 (2001). Stuart Ward is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal (2001) and the editor of British Culture and the End of Empire (2001).

186

INDEX

1915

60

Adcock, A. St John 45 Australasia Triumphant 45 Age 63 Albania 20 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 67, 119 American War of Independence 10 Anzac Book 63 Anzac Day (25 April) 50, 53, 59, 61, 72, 85, 111, 152, 153, 154, 155 Anzac Legend 6–7, 10–11, 12, 51, 61, 62, 73, 75, 78, 83–5 Anzacs (1985) 60 Armistice Day 110 Ashmead-Bartlett, Ellis 44–5, 66, 78–9, 150 The Uncensored Dardanelles (1928) 79 Aspinall-Oglander, Brigadier-General Cecil 53–4, 83, 88, 117 Military Operations: Gallipoli (1929 and 1932) British official history 54, 78, 118 Asquith, Anthony 118 Asquith, H.H. 16, 22, 26, 29, 33, 35, 41 opposes attack on Dardanelles 19 supports attack on Dardanelles 27, 28, 32, 36, Asquith, Violet 38 Association des Poilus d’Orient 86 Association nationale d’anciens combatants des Dardanelles 86 Aston, George 139 Augagneur, Victor 89, 90, 96 Australia 10, 11, 12, 111

Melbourne 52 New South Wales 117 Perth 117 Rutherglen, Victoria 157–8 Sydney 52 Western Australia 117 Yackandandah, Victoria 156–8 Australia Council for the Arts 68 Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs) 5, 11, 44–58 see also Australian Imperial Force (AIF) Australian Army 61 Australian Film Commission 61, 68 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) 7, 45 11th Battalion 117 15th Battalion 55 16th Battalion 53, 55 1st Australian Brigade 52 1st Australian Division 51, 55, 56 2nd Australian Brigade 50, 52, 56 2nd Australian Division 58 2nd Battalion 53 3rd Australian Brigade 49–50 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade 57 4th Australian Brigade 51, 55 Australian Light Horse 48, 52, 61, 64, 67 Desert Mounted Corps 64 New Zealand and Australian Division 51, 55, 56 Australian War Memorial 59 Austria-Hungary 20, 21, 23, 38, 39 backpackers 60 Balfour, Arthur 30, 33, 36 Beale, Captain Sydney 112

187

INDEX

Beale, Margaret 112 Bean, Charles 64, 84, 152 and Anzac legend 7, 10–11, 46–7, 52, 61, 62, 66, 67, 72, 83, Gallipoli Mission (1948) 150 journalism 46–7, 53 The Story of Anzac (1921 and 1924) Australian official history 5, 7, 45, 47, 57–8, 64–5, 150 Beaumont, Joan 66 Beckett, Ian 44, 113 Belgium 24, 40 Bell, Christopher 149 Beresford, Bruce 60 Bernard, Philippe 88 Bertie, Lord 90 Birdwood, Lieutenant-General Sir William 41, 44, 53, 54, 56–7 Bittner, Donald 138 Blamey, Major Thomas 48 Blue Flash Cinema Company 119 Blunden, Edmund 121 Bodyline (1984) 69 Boer War 74 Bonham Carter, Violet 37–8 Bosnia 20, 38 Boué de Lapeyrère, Admiral A. 89 Bracco, Rosa Maria 83 Braund, Lieutenant-Colonel 53 Breaker Morant (1980) 60, 69 Briand, Aristide 94 Bridges, Major-General W.T. 53, 55 Britain 4, 5, 8, 12, 14–43, 62, 73–85, 110–24, 137–45, 149 British Army 1/4 Queen’s Regiment 123 10th (Irish) Division 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107 11th Division 102 16th (Irish) Division 101 1st Battalion, Essex Regiment 128 1st Hampshire Regiment 99 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers 98, 99, 100 1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 98, 101 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers 98, 99 29th Division 5, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41, 73, 76, 105, 130–1, 132 29th Indian Brigade 103 36th (Ulster) Division 101

42nd East Lancashire Division 1, 78, 126, 127–8, 129, 132, 134 4th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment 128 4th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers 134 4th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment 110–24 53rd (Welsh) Division 113 5th Battalion, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment 131, 134 7th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment 128 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers 101–2, 105, 111 British Yeomanry 79 Connaught Rangers 103, 104 Gurkhas 128 Kitchener New Army 52, 58, 98, 101, 105 Lancashire Fusiliers 110, 122, 125, 135 Lancashire soldiers 128 Lincolnshire Regiment 130 Prince of Wales Volunteers 128, 134 Royal Dublin Fusiliers 103 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers 102 Royal Irish Fusiliers 102 Royal Marine Light Infantry Brigade (RMLI) 56 Royal Naval Division 38, 40 Scots Guards 127 Territorials 129 British Legion 74 British ships Agamemnon 26, 29 Albion 29 Canopus 26, 29 Cornwallis 26 Doris 19 Implacable 40 Inflexible 26, 29 Irresistible 26 London 41 Lord Nelson 26, 29 Majestic 26 Ocean 26, 29 Prince George 26 Prince of Wales 41 Queen 40

188

INDEX

Queen Elizabeth 26 River Clyde 99 Swiftsure 26, 29 Triumph 26, 29 Vengeance 26 Browning, F.H. 102 Bulgaria 19, 30, 34, 35, 87 British assessments of hostility to Greece 15, 18 British hopes of Bulgarian participation 21, 23, 25, 31, 32, 37, 40 potential territorial beneficiary 39 Burness, Peter 57 Burnet, Sir John 151 Bury 110, 125 Cairo 46, 52, 62, 71 see also Egypt Callwell, Charles 139 Cambon, Paul 91, 94, 96 Campion, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William 116–17, 119, 120, 121 Campion, Mrs 112 Capitol Picture Theatre, Horsham 118–19, 123 Carden, Vice-Admiral 16–17, 20–7, 33, 40 Carlyon, Les Gallipoli (2001) 47, 150 Carr, E.H. 1, 3 Cassar, George 97 The French and the Dardanelles (1971) 95 casualty figures 12, 83, 87, 98, 165n(2) Cavus, Yahya 153 Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The (1979) 69 Charlemagne 81 Chauvel, Charles 11, 65 Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) 60–4, 67, 71, 72 Chauvel, General Harry 64 China 145, 147–8 Churchill, Jack 36 Churchill, Winston 4, 14–43, 83, 89–90, 91, 95 World Crisis 1915 (1923) 4, 9, 78 Clausewitz, Carl von 9 Clemenceau, Georges 89 Clifford, Kenneth 138 Cold War 9

Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ) 137, 149 Constantine, King of Greece 18, 32, 38 Cooper, Bryan 101, 103, 107 Corbett, Julian 139 Cornhill Magazine 120 Crewe, Lord 115 Cuba 145 Cunliffe-Owen, Major Frederick 14–15 D’Amade, General Albert 76, 91 Daniel, Major E.Y. 80, 169n Dardanelles Commission 4, 17, 19, 30, 41–3, 74, 78 Dawson, Major T. 53 De Bartholomé, Commodore Charles 26 De Lisle, Major-General B. 113 De Robeck, Admiral Sir John 29, 40, 41, 106 Deane, Sir William 60 Delage, Edmond 87, 88, 93, 97 Dennis, C.J. 63 Desmazes, Commandant 92 Dobrez, Livio and Pat, 65 Dreyer, Admiral Sir Frederick 141–2 Duggan, G.C. The Watchers on Gallipoli (1921) 107 Dutch, Corporal Philip 115 East Grinstead Observer 122 Easter Rising 10, 107, 108 Edmonds, Brigadier-General Sir James 78 EEC (European Economic Community) 68 Egypt base for troops 32, 33, 51–2, 55, 129, 130 defence of 18, 21 Elliott, Brigadier-General H.E. 48 Ellis, Major Pete 146 Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia (1921) 147 Eltham 12, 73, 85 Empire Day 59 Enver Pasha 25 Ervine, St John 106 Changing Winds (1917) 106 Esher, Lord 32, 81

189

INDEX

Falkland Islands 26 Fergusson, Bernard 137 The Watery Maze (1961) 137 Ferro, Marc 87 Fewster, Kevin 48 First Sino-Japanese War 145 Fisher, Admiral Sir John (Jackie) 16, 17, 32 advocates attack on Turkey 20–1, 24–5, 26, 28, 40–1 expresses doubts 28–30, 41 Fleet Training Publication No. 167 (1938) 147 Foch, Marshall Ferdinand 89 Les Principes de Guerre (1903) 92 Fortescue, Granville 128 France 4, 12, 28, 44, 86–97 Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient 92 French, Sir John 21, 22, 23, 27, 74 Fuller, J.F.C. 140 Gallipoli Association 84, 85 Gallipoli locations 400 Plateau 51, 54 Achi Baba 128 Anzac Cove (Z beach) 50, 59, 69, 151, 153, 154 Baby 700 50, 51, 53 Besika Bay 21, 87 Cape Helles (S, V, W, X, and Y beaches) 5, 56, 78, 98–9, 104, 105, 138, 151 Chocolate Hill 102, 105, 116, 118, 119, 129 Chunuk Bair 50, 51, 56, 57, 71, 128 memorials 12, 151, 153–4 Courtney’s Post 55, 57 Gun Ridge 54 Hill 141 99 Hill 70 79 Kabak Kuyu 103 Kidney Hill 131 Kilid Bahr 17 Kiretch Tepe Sirt 103, 107 Krithia 128 Kum Kale 87 Lone Pine 50, 51, 54, 56, 66 memorial 151, 152, 153, 158 Monash Gully 50, 53, 55 Morto Bay 151 Nek 11, 51, 152 portrayed by Peter Weir 48, 57, 65, 66, 67, 71, 108–9

Plugge’s Plateau 50 Pope’s Post 51 Quinn’s Post 51, 53, 55, 57, 152 Russell’s Top 50, 51 Sari Bair 57, 105 Second Ridge 50, 51, 53, 54–5, 56 Sedd-el-Bahr 17, 99 Shrapnel Valley 50, 152 Suvla Bay 5, 58, 101–3, 106, 113, 128, 142 coordination with August offensive at Anzac 57 meaning of 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122 poems concerning 107, 114 tea-drinking allegation 11, 71, 108–9 Walker’s Ridge 53, 54, 55 Gallipoli’s classical associations 8, 75, 78, 81, 132–3, 135 Gammage, Bill 69, 70, 154 The Broken Years (1974) 47, 84 Geddes, G.W. 99–100 Gellibrand, Major J. 48 German officers 61 German/Turkish ships: Breslau 16, 25 Goeben 16, 25, 27 Germany 21, 22, 24 Gibbon, F.P. 127–8 Gibson, Mel 65 Gilbert, Martin 71 Gillon, Captain Stair 130–1 Godley, Major General Sir Alexander 51, 53, 56, 57, 103 Godman, Major C.R.B. 119, 120 Gorton, John 68 Greece British plans for Greek participation 15–16, 20, 21, 23, 25, 31, 40 potential territorial benefits 39 promises assistance 38 refuses assistance 15–16, 18, 19, 32 Gregory, Adrian 121 Grey, Sir Edward 15, 16, 28, 29, 37, 40 advocates attack on Austria 27 discusses Balkan politics 18, 30 views on likely impact of naval assault 31, 33, 34, 95 Grieves, Keith 125–6 Guépratte, Vice-Admiral P.E. 92 Guest, Fredrick 22

190

INDEX

Haig, Douglas 139 Hall, Ken G. It Isn’t Done (1937) 63 Hall, Reverend Henry 73 Hamilton, General Sir Ian 5, 40, 53, 57, 83, 93, 104 criticisms of 79, 93 Gallipoli Diary (1920) 9, 73–8 ordered to wait before launching campaign 41, 91 praises campaign & its participants 103, 113, 128, 132–3 Hamilton, Jean, Lady 81–2 Hamilton, Lieutenant Ernest 103 Hammersley, Major-General Frederick 102 Hamsen, Captain P.H. 130 Hankey, Colonel Maurice 18, 30, 32, 38–9, 91, 97 advocates attack on Turkey 19–20, 23, 27, 36, Hanna, Henry 104 Harcourt, Lewis 39–40 Harker, W.E. 123 Sussex: at Peace and War (1918) 114–15 Hart, Peter 84 Hasluck, Paul 68 Hawke, Bob 59 Herez-Smith, Lieutenant-Colonel G.V. 122 Hero of the Dardanelles (1915) 65 Herzegovina 20 Hill, Brigadier-General F.F. 102 Holland 23–4, 27 Horne, Donald 68 Horne, John 2 Horner, David 48 Howard, Michael 9 Hughes, Lieutenant Cyril 151 Hulton, Major J.M. 117–18 Hunter Weston, Major-General Aylmer 100 Hynes, Samuel 8, 115 Imperial War Graves Commission 151 Inglis, Ken 59, 66 Ireland 10, 12, 98–109 Irish Rugby Football Union 102 Irish Times 101, 102 Italy 27, 38, 39

Jacka, Captain Albert 66 Jackson, Admiral Sir Henry 17, 22, 26 Japan 15, 136, 137, 145–9 Landing and Landing Defence Operations Manual (1924) 147 Jauffret, Jean-Charles 88, 92, 94 Jeffery, Keith 111 Jellicoe, Admiral Sir John 17, 20, 25, 28–9 Joffre, General Joseph 88, 89, 90, 96 Johnston, Brigadier-General F.E. 57 Johnstone, Tom 98 Jourdain, Lieutenant-Colonel H.F.N. 103 Journey’s End (1929) 118 Julian, Lieutenant Ernest L. 103 Keating, Paul 59 Kelly, Whalley 128 Kemal, Mustafa 50, 53, 153–4 Kerr, Admiral Mark 15 Kerr, S. Parnell 104–5 What the Irish Regiments Have Done (1916) 104 King, Alex 156, 158 Kitchener, Field Marshal Lord H.H. 18, 26, 28, 39, 89, 95, 106 advocates attack at Dardanelles 20, 22, 23, 27, 31, 34 decisions regarding use of 29th Division 32, 35, 36, 40, 41 expectation that naval attack can be called off 29, 30, 33 and Hamilton 74, 76, 77 Kramer, Alan 2 Larken, Frank 19 Larkin, James 102 Lavisse, Ernest 92 Lawson, Henry 47 Lawson, Sylvia 65 Ledwidge, Francis 107 Lee, Mark 65 Lejeune, General John 147 Liddell Hart, Basil 139 The British Way in Warfare (1932) 139 The Indirect Approach (1929) 139 Liman von Sanders, General Otto 9, 146 Limpus, Rear-Admiral Arthur 14, 17

191

INDEX

Lindley, Major-General the Hon. John 113 Lloyd George, David 17, 27, 33, 34, 36, 39, 41 advocates attack on Salonika 22, 23, 30 Lloyd, David 120, 155 Loder, Captain John (Lord Wakehurst) 117 Loder, Robert 113 Macarthur, Dr 119 MacDonagh, Michael 105, 106 McGilchrist, A.M. 127 MacGregor, David 136–7, 138 Mackenzie, Compton 84 Gallipoli Memories (1929) 1 MacLagan, Colonel Sinclair 49–50, 51, 53 Macleod, Jenny 150 Malone, Lieutenant-Colonel W.G. 54, 55 Manchester Evening Chronicle 1 Mansbridge, Private 114 Manual of Combined Naval and Military Operations (1913) 140, 141 Manual of Combined Operations (1925) 141, 142–3, 144 Marder, Arthur J. 136 Marsh, John 106 Masefield, John Gallipoli (1916) 45, 79–82, 83, 122, 123–4, 128 Massam, David 138 Mathews, Ted 60 Maund, L.E.H. Assault from the Sea (1949) 137–8 M’Cay, Colonel J.W. 50 Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) 4, 5, 74 international nature of 5 see also Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs); British Army; France, Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient Mesopotamia 84, 134 Mexico 145 Middleton, Major Rupert 119 Miles, Reverend 156 military training institutions Ecole Supérieure de Guerre 92

Inter-Services Training and Development Centre (ISTDC) 137, 144, 149 Joint Services Command and Staff College 10 US Marine Corps School, Quantico 145 Millerand, Alexandre 89 Mitchell Committee 9, 140–1 Mitchell Report 140 Mitchell, Commodore F.H. 140 Monash, Lieutenant-General Sir John 48, 49, 51, 55, 57–8 Moorehead, Alan 84 Moorhouse, Geoffrey Hell’s Foundations (1992) 84, 110, 122, 125, 135 Mordal, Jacques 87, 93, 94, 95 Morshead, Lieutenant-General Leslie 48 Mostyn, Captain E.H. 112, 121 Mullins, Father 155 New Zealand 12, 64 New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) 45, 51, 52 Auckland Battalion 52, 53 New Zealand and Australian Division 51, 55, 56 New Zealand Infantry Brigade 50, 51, 55, 56 New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade 57 Wellington Battalion 55 see also Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs); Australian Imperial Force (AIF), Desert Mounted Corps Nicholas, Grand Duke (of Russia) 20, 37, 94 Nightingale, Guy 99–100 Nora, Pierre 2 Norfolk, Duke of 112, 123 North, John Gallipoli: The Fading Vision 132 O’Brien, John 98 O’Duffy, Eimar The Wasted Island (1919) 106 Oh What a Lovely War (film) 67 Oh What a Lovely War (play) 9 Oliver, Vice-Admiral Henry 17, 22, 26, 28, 29

192

INDEX

Gallipoli as means to relieve pressure on 20, 23, 25, 30, 32, 33, 43 Russo-Japanese War 145

O’Malley, Grace 108 O’Neill, Robert 136 Ottoman Empire 4, 5, 12 see also Turkey Oxford Companion to Australian Military History 48 Painlevé, Paul 94 Palestine 84, 134 Beersheba 61, 64, 67 Paths of Glory (1957) 67 Payne, CSM 116 Philippines 145, 146 Poincaré, Raymond 89, 90 Pope, Lieutenant-Colonel H. Potter, Private Harry 114 Quinn, Major H.

53, 55

55

Rae, Private 155 Rafferty, Chips 62 Raymond, Ernest 118 Tell England (novel) (1922) 78 see also Tell England (film) (1930) Redmond, John 101, 104, 105–6 Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) 156–8 Returned Services League (RSL) 59 Revue de Paris 92 Rhodes James, Robert 110 Gallipoli (1965) 48 Richards, Jeffrey 118 Richardson, Sergeant 116 Rickard, Lieutenant-Colonel V.G.H. 100 Robertson, John Anzac and Empire (1990) 47 Robertson, Sir William 21 Robson, L.L. 11, 52 Romania 31, 32, 38 British assessment of 23, 25 British plans for 20, 21, 34, 35, 38, 39 Rose, Captain J.M. 55 Roskill, Stephen 136 Ross, Malcolm 45 Rousillon Gazette, The 116, 123 Runcie, Robert 111 Russell, Major-General Sir A.H. 57 Russia 36, 88, 90 British ideas of Russian participation 15–16, 21, 38, 39

Saint-Seine, Jean, Comte de 28 Salonika 22, 23, 27, 30–2, 34 France and 86, 93–5, 97 Sarrail, General Maurice 96 Scates, Bruce 155 Seager, Hurst 151 Sebald, W.G. 10 Second World War 10, 95, 97, 137, 142, 143, 149, 152 alters perception of First World War 3, 4, 93 Serbia British assessment of 18, 31 British plans for 20, 21, 30, 31, 32, 35, 38 Serle, Geoffrey 55, 68 Sheffield, Gary 2 Shorter, Dora Sigerson 108 Simpson Kirkpatrick, John 66, 67, 151 Sinclair, Sir Archibald 22 Sivan, Emmanuel 3, 156 Smith, F.E. 22 Song of Roland, The 81, 82 Souter, Gavin 69 Spectator, The 69 Stanley, Venetia 16, 19, 22, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38 Steel, Nigel Defeat at Gallipoli (1994) 84 Stopford, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick 102, 113 Stuart, Sergeant-Major H.G. 74 Sturt, Private 114 Sun Tzu 9 Sussex Daily News 114, 117, 118 Sydney Mirror 59 Sydney Morning Herald 60, 61, 67 Tell England (film) (1930) 118, 119, 123 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Charge of the Light Brigade 81 Tentative Manual for Landing Operations (1934) 147 Terraine, John 2 Testament of Youth (1933) 8 Thomson, Alistair 7, 53, 84 Thornton Cook, E. 120

193

INDEX

Times, The 71 Tulley, Ernest 111–12 Turkey 12, 17, 150, 152–3 British assessments of 14–16, 18–21, 25, 30–9, 43 Turkish forces 54, 55, 56, 100 19th Division 50 57th Infantry Regiment 153 see also German/Turkish ships; Kemal, Mustafa Tynan, Katharine 106 United States of America 79–80, 83, 128, 143 Fleet Marine Force (FMF) 147, 148 US Army 147 US Marine Corps (USMC) 136, 143, 147, 149 US Navy 147 Vansittart, Peter 81 Vietnam 154 Vinall, Corporal 114 Viviani, René 96 Von Bieberstein, Marschall

21

Walker, Brigadier-General Harold ‘Hooky’ 55, 56 Wallingford, Captain J. 55

Warren, Captain 122 Watson, Adam 69 Watt, Reverend 155 Webster, F.A.M. 131, 134 Weir, Peter Gallipoli (1981) 11, 48, 57, 60–1, 64–72, 108–9 Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) 69 West Sussex County Times 113, 118 Western Front 23, 25, 36, 41, 44, 49, 129, 134 Aubers Ridge 100 contrast to Gallipoli 27, 42–3, 75, 82–3, 99, 132, 150 Somme 58, 79, 83 Whitton, Lieutenant-Colonel F.E. 105 Williams, Shirley 8 Williamson, David 65 Last Bastion, The (1984) 69 Wilson, Admiral Sir Arthur 26 Wincer, Simon Lighthorsemen, The (1987) 60, 67 Winter, Denis 49 Winter, Jay 3, 111, 115, 155, 156 Wraight, Major 121 Wyrall, Everard 126–7 Zeebrugge

194

24, 30

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