Читать книгу Irish Voices from the Great War - Myles Dungan - Страница 12
Оглавление2. GALLIPOLI: THE V BEACH LANDINGS
Where Aegean cliffs with bristling menace front
The Threatening splendour of that isley sea
Lighted by Troy’s last shadow, where the first
Hero kept watch and the last Mystery
Shook with dark thunder, hark the battle brunt!
A nation speaks, old Silences are burst.1
(Francis Ledwidge, ‘The Irish in Gallipoli’)
‘Murphy’s Law’ (‘everything that can go wrong, will’) in all its military applications is wasteful and profligate of human life. When cruel misfortune is allied to human error and incompetence on a vast scale the result is pure tragedy. Such was the confluence of physical and metaphysical forces which resulted in the carnage of Gallipoli, a campaign which could have changed the trend of the war (even of history itself) but whose legacy instead was one of bitterness and recrimination.
The underlying idea was as flawless as the planning and execution were flawed. Force the Dardanelles, draw thousands of German troops from the Western Front to reinforce a tottering Turkish army, take Turkey out of the war and open up a short, warm-weather supply route to your Russian ally. It was worth the commitment of the resources of the Navy and the overstretched army. But like so many of the grand designs of the Great War it was bungled by men inadequate to the prodigious tasks allocated to them. The plan was conceived by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Kitchener was unenthusiastic. The Secretary of State for War was already overcommitted to the Western Front and preparing for a Spring offensive in 1915. He had only one division (the 29th) to spare and his new volunteer troops were not yet adequately trained.
The Gallipoli campaign began as a naval operation. Royal Navy vessels bombarded Turkish forts along the Gallipoli peninsula and Royal Marines even effected a landing. But the element of surprise seemed to apply almost equally to both sides. The Marines withdrew for lack of follow-up support and the Turks, with the aid of German officers, led by Field Marshall Liman von Sanders, began to prepare for the invasion they now knew would come sooner or later. Kitchener, finally succumbing to the notion that the landings were necessary, appointed General Sir Ian Hamilton as commander of what would be known as the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. The forces he had at his disposal – less than half the number required to do the job properly2 – included the 29th Division (a regular Army unit based in India); a Royal Navy division; a French division; and the troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army under General Birdwood, who had expected to be serving in France.
The initial phase of the Helles/Gallipoli campaign was characterized by an Allied arrogance over and above the norm. This was typified by a leaflet issued to British and Australian soldiers as they waited in Egypt to be shipped to the Aegean – it contained the following useful piece of information ‘Turkish soldiers as a rule manifest their desire to surrender by holding their rifle butt upward and by waving clothes or rags of any colour. An actual white flag should be regarded with the utmost suspicion as a Turkish soldier is unlikely to possess anything of that colour.’3 Intelligence work was so bad that some troops went into battle armed with information gleaned from Egyptian travel guides.
The main landings were to take place near the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula at Cape Helles on beaches designated by the initials S,V,W,X,Y and Z. Having established a beachhead the troops would then take the heights of Achi Baba (six miles to the north east of V Beach) and the town of Krithia. Two famous Irish battalions of the 29th Division, the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers (86th Brigade), accompanied by the 2nd Hampshires (of the 88th) were assigned V Beach for their landing. It was overlooked by the quiet coastal village of Sedd el Bahr. The nearby Australian landings, which took place at night, near Ari Burnu, were stalled when the local Turkish commander, an obscure officer named Mustapha Kemal, pushed them back to the beach that became known as Anzac Cove. Kemal later became the far less obscure Kemal Ataturk, the ‘Father of Modern Turkey’.
Hamilton’s intention was to disorientate the Turks with a series of simultaneous landings on 25 April 1915. Some incursions, as it transpired, were virtually unopposed. But the Commander-in-Chief was less than adequately aware of the state of the Turkish defences on individual beaches. Also, with so many separate landings taking place communications became overstretched. As with the future landings at Suvla Bay in August 1915, Hamilton was effectively incommunicado. He was on board ship, out of radio contact with his divisional commanders and, ‘out of the loop’.
The plan for landing the Dublins and Munsters was well thought out. It just didn’t work. It had two essential elements. An old collier River Clyde, with openings cut into her port and starboard bows, was to be run ashore and beached. Troops were then to descend via gangways to barges and walk across these to the shore without getting their feet wet. In addition lighters with the 1st Dublins on board (forty men per boat) would be towed offshore and would row up to the beach before discharging their troops. From offshore the guns of two naval battleships would pound the Turkish defences around the fortress of Sedd-el-Bahr, which dominated the beach. ‘It was surmised that by 8.00 a.m. the ground above the beaches would have been won; by noon we should be in the vicinity of the village of Krithia, and have taken the hill of Achi Baba that night,’4 wrote the CO of the Munsters, Lt Col Tizard. The supposition was outrageously optimistic; in fact by nightfall the Dublins and Munsters had not even secured the beachhead.
V Beach itself was narrow, crescent-shaped and raked, with, as the Dublins and Munsters would have seen when coming ashore, a sheer ridge to the left, about fifty feet in height, and the old fortress to the right. Beyond the fortress was the village of Sedd-el-Bahr. The beach itself provided little cover for invading troops against machine-gun or rifle fire. The operation was in the hands of a Royal Navy officer, Commander Unwin who had conceived the idea of using the River Clyde for the landings. Over two thousand troops were squashed aboard the boat as it approached V Beach. ‘That night I don’t think anyone slept,’ wrote Tizard. ‘ … When it became light enough the ships began the bombardment of the fort and the village of Sedd el Bahr and the ground adjoining the beach and we slowly steamed in.’5 Each man was well supplied (too well, as it transpired) carrying two hundred rounds of ammunition and three days iron rations as well as a greatcoat and a waterproof sheet. Packs weighed about sixty pounds.
Disaster struck the Dublin Fusiliers first. Initially their boats were towed and then set adrift with sailors manning the oars which would take them to the shore. At first it appeared that the landing would be virtually unopposed. One unidentified officer of the Dublin’s wrote:
The ships’ shells were simply ripping up the ground, and with my field glasses I could see many of the Turks running for their lives. I thought then that we would have no difficulty in landing. Then machine guns galore were played on us from a trench unseen at the bottom of the cliff, not ten yards from us. Shrapnel burst above our heads at the same time and before I knew where I was I was covered with dead men. Not knowing they were dead, I was roaring at them to help me up, for I was drowning . . . We got the dead and wounded off on to the mine-sweeper, and gathered another three boatloads of men to take ashore and face the same thing again.6
Captain A.W. Molony, writing home, told of a ‘perfect tornado of fire, many men were killed and wounded in the boats, and wounded men were knocked over into the water and drowned, but they kept on, and the survivors jumped into the water in some cases up to their necks and got ashore; but the slaughter was terrific. Most of the officers were killed or wounded.’7 The CO of the Dublins, Colonel Rooth, made it to the shore but was shot dead at the edge of the water. Major Fetherstonhaugh, his second-in-command, was mortally wounded in his boat. The litany of death continued with five more officers killed, most before they got as far as the beach. The men fared just as badly. The 1st RDF was, largely, recruited from among the working classes of an impoverished Dublin. The diet of the average Dubliner in the early years of the twentieth century was nutritionally deficient. As a consequence working-class Dubliners were small in stature, averaging around 5’ 4” in height. The water, even quite close to the beach, was more than a fathom deep.
Lt Col Tizard watched the carnage from on board the River Clyde waiting to send his own men into the same shambles.
I saw many cases just then where men who had jumped out of the boats having to wade ashore got hit and fell face downwards in the water; a chum, who had got ashore, seeing this, would come back and pull him out of the water so that he should not be drowned. In nearly every case the men who did this were killed. Men in the boats who were hit tried to get away from the hail of lead by getting out of the boats on the far side in order to keep out of sight, thus getting the boat between them and the shore. There were four or five boats along the shore at intervals broadside on to it, and behind each of them were four or five men who had been hit. Some were holding on to the gunwales and others were hanging on with their arms through the ropes which are looped round the boats so as to prevent themselves sinking in the water which was up to their waists. After a time I noticed these men sank from exhaustion and loss of blood and were drowned. The water by this time all along the shore and especially around the boats was red with blood.8
This could even be seen from the skies, a Royal Navy flier, Lieutenant Commander Sampson, who was monitoring the invasion beaches from the air, flew over V Beach and noticed that the water was a peculiar colour. On closer examination he realised that it was red with blood to a distance of about fifty yards from the shore.
Some did manage to make it to the beach. Lt Maffet of X Company found himself in a boat where most of the sailors fell victim to Turkish shrapnel and small arms. ‘The men had to take over their oars, and as they did not know much about rowing the result was that we often got broadside on to the shore and presented a better target to the enemy.’ Then the boat was hit by incendiary shells. ‘Several of the men who had been wounded fell to the bottom of the boat, and were either drowned there or suffocated by other men falling on top of them; many, to add to their death agonies, were burnt as well.’ Maffet himself was hit in the head by a machine-gun bullet; others tore into his pack. In this instance its bulk certainly saved his life but he was knocked out of the boat. ‘I went under water and came up again and tried to encourage the men to get to the shore and under cover as fast as they could as it was their only chance. I then went under again. Someone caught hold of me and began pulling me ashore.’ Sheltering behind a bank he looked out to sea and saw ‘the remnants of my platoon trying to get to the shore, but they were shot down one after another, and their bodies drifted out to sea or lay immersed a few feet from the shore’.9
Sergeant J. McColgan was in a boat with thirty-two men; only six of whom got out alive. He himself was hit in the leg as he dived overboard. ‘One fellow’s brains were shot into my mouth as I was shouting to them to jump for it. I dived into the sea. Then came the job to swim with my pack, and one leg useless. I managed to pull out the knife and cut the straps and swim ashore. All the time bullets were ripping around me.’10
Lt Henry Desmond O’Hara, the only son of W.J.O’Hara, Resident Magistrate, of Ballincollig, Co. Cork and a nephew of the Bishop of Cashel, was more fortunate than most of his fellow officers. He would play a leading role in the drama that followed the landings, but as he watched his battalion being torn to pieces he was aboard the River Clyde with W Company. ‘Meanwhile,’ he later recalled, ‘our ship, instead of grounding as had been arranged, struck about fifteen yards from the shore, and it was that that saved our lives, as we had to stay where we were.’11 When he came ashore at about midnight he would be forced to assume command of what was left of the battalion. His level-headedness and quiet heroism would help him survive and earn him a DSO, the second most prestigious gallantry award. He was youngest officer at that time to have received the honour. But in the early hours of the morning of 25 April he could only watch with horror as the remnants of the 1st RDF dragged themselves up the shore and took some shelter under cover of a bank.
Then it was the turn of the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers who had been witnessing the slaughter with rising apprehension from on board the River Clyde. Unlike the Dublins who had, at least, been caught by surprise, the Munsters now knew what to expect. While they waited, bodies of dead and drowned Dublin Fusiliers floated by. As with many of the regular Irish battalions the Munsters, though overwhelmingly Irish among the NCOs and other ranks, were, in the main, led by English officers. A number of these have left accounts behind, most notably the CO, Lt Col Tizard, Capt Geddes, who commanded X Company, and Lt Guy Nightingale, who, like Henry Desmond O’Hara, found himself, briefly, in effective charge of his battalion on the beach. Their narratives, relatively free of military humbug and bombast, provide a blood-curdling account of the slaughter of the Irishmen under their command.
The plan for the Munster’s landing went wrong from the start. The River Clyde beached too far from the shore, as indicated by O’Hara, and the barges which were to have formed the gangway from the vessel to the beach, instead of going straight ahead went wide of the collier and had to be pulled back under a hail of murderous fire by crew members and Fusiliers. Unwin and one of his midshipmen won VC’s for this action, awards which, though well-deserved were in marked contrast to the treatment of the unsung heroes of the two Irish regiments who actually landed at V Beach.
With the barges in position Tizard gave the order to disembark. Captain Henderson was in position with Z Company on the starboard side and Captain Geddes was to lead X Company down the gangway on the port side. The gangway on the port side jammed and briefly delayed X Company. Once again the barges let the Munsters down. Strong currents caused the barge on the port side closest to the beach to break adrift into deep water.
Capt Geddes leading his men jumped over the side and had to swim about tweny yards before he could wade ashore. A good many who followed him sank owing to the weight of their equipment and were drowned. The crew again went out to try and get the barges straight. These barges were filled with dead and wounded, very few of the men from the two companies had got ashore. Those who had were taking cover behind a bank about 8 feet high that ran along the beach 10 yards from the water’s edge. In front of this bank was a line of barbed wire entanglements about 25 yards distant.12
Geddes made it to the shore by swimming, but many of the men of his company, unable to swim or weighed down by their huge packs, drowned in the treacherous currents. ‘We got it like anything,’ Geddes later wrote; ‘man after man behind me was shot down but they never wavered. Lt Watts who was wounded in five places and lying on the gangway cheered the men on with cries of “Follow the Captain”. Captain French of the Dublins told me afterwards that he counted the first 48 men to follow me and they all fell.’13 The first of the Munsters to actually make the beach was Sergeant Patrick Ryan who swam ashore in his full kit. He subsequently received the DCM for some risky reconaissance work.
Meanwhile Henderson’s company, on the starboard side of the ‘River Clyde’ was faring no better. One of his platoon commanders, Captain Lane, survived to write an account of the nightmarish assault on the beach.
All the way down the side of the ship bullets crashed against the sides but beyond a few splinters I was not hit. On reaching the first barge I found some of the men had collected and were firing. I mistrusted the second barge and the track to the shore so I led them over the side, the water nearly up to our shoulders. However, none of us were hit and we gained the bank. There I found Henderson badly hit and heaps of wounded. Any man who put his head up for an instant was shot dead, and we were rather mixed up with the Dublins. Nearly all the NCOs were hit.14
Of the first 200 men down the gangway 149 were killed outright and 30 were wounded. Private Timothy Buckley of the Munsters, a native of Macroom, Co. Cork, counted 26 men down the gangway before him: ‘I stood counting them as they were going through. It was then I thought of peaceful Macroom, and wondered if I should ever see it again.’ Instead of running down the gangway he jumped over the rope and straight onto the pontoon. Two more followed suit and lay flat on the pontoon bridge. ‘. . . the shrapnel was bursting all around. I was talking to the chap on my left, and saw a lump of lead enter his temple. I turned to the chap on my right. His name was Fitzgerald. He was from Cork, but soon he was over the border.’15
A safe distance (or so he thought) from the massacre on V Beach on board a Royal Navy support vessel was seventeen-year-old Thomas Leavy from Dublin. He was well acquainted with a number of the 1st Dublins, some of whom were boys close to his own age. He watched with sickened dismay as they went to their deaths. His ship was maintaining a constant covering fire. ‘After things settled down we were out in a boat pulling the dead bodies onto an island there called Rabbit Island … it was terrible to see it, we couldn’t do anything, all we could do was fire over their heads with our two 14” guns.’ Almost sixty years after the landings he still believed that ‘the undertaking was all wrong … it was a blunder. There wasn’t a hope in hell of taking the place.’16 Also watching from naval vessels offshore were a number of newspaper war correspondents. One of the more naive members of the group, watching through field glasses noticed the the men lying on the beach and was heard to ask ‘Why are our men resting?’ It was pointed out to him by the veteran correspondent H.W. Nevinson that they were not resting but dead.
By the time he got to the shore Geddes felt badly in need of a rest.
[I] was completely exhausted and lay on the beach until I was able to crawl up to the slender cover the Dublins were holding – ten yards from the water’s edge . . 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.17
Movement on the beach was practically impossible. As Captain Lane discovered, any man who worked himself into an exposed position was inviting instant death. He was hit running for cover. ‘The bullet went through my right ankle and carried on sideways smashing my left leg to bits. One of my platoon then came out very pluckily and pulled me into safety. I had only been on the beach five minutes and never saw a Turk.’18
Tizard, watching from the River Clyde realised that it was impossible to carry out the original plan of attack which had been devised by Brigadier General Hare, Commander of the 86th Brigade.
Nothing could live on the ground about the beach. Men who left the cover of the bank for an instant were killed and five men of the R.M. Fusiliers who had been sent forward to cut the wire had all been killed within ten yards after leaving cover. The concentrated fire from the beach on to the one point of landing from the vessel, and also on to the gangways and exits was so heavy and accurate our losses had already been very severe. More than half of those who had left the vessel were either killed or wounded.19
There were also fatalities on board the ship. The Munster’s Second in Command, Major Monck-Mason was wounded there, as was the battalion’s adjutant while the CO of the Hampshires was killed on the ship’s bridge.
Various efforts were made to reinforce the survivors who reached the shore. Some of the Dublins who were fortunate enough not to have been allocated seats in the lighters that had turned into death traps were despatched down the makeshift pontoon bridge to the beach. Men from W Company of the 1st RDF, among them Sgt C. McCann (later promoted to Lieutenant), were met with the same Turkish fusilade which greeted everything that moved off the River Clyde.
[We] reached the two barges that formed the landing stage when we came under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire again. We threw ourselves flat on the barges and lay still for some time; I was between two men of the Munster Fusiliers who were dead, but I did not realise this until I asked one of them to make more room, and as he did not move I pushed him with my hand, and then found that his head was blown away.20
On shore Geddes, who estimated that he had lost about 70 per cent of his Company, was trying to extricate what was left of the Munsters and the leaderless Dublins from their exposed position. Breaking for shelter near the old fort, along with half a dozen others, he too was wounded. ‘However we got across and later picked up 14 stragglers from the [Dublins]. This little party attempted to get a lodgement inside the Fort but we couldn’t do it so we dug in as well as we could with our entrenching tools.’21 Geddes continued in command until he was evacuated from the beach after dark. Gradually he had worked the vestiges of the two Irish regiments into a more defensible position and into place for a possible counter-attack against the well-protected Turks.
The River Clyde was now a distinctly uncomfortable place to be, well within range of the Turkish artillery and machine-guns; filling up with wounded who had been evacuated from the beach or from among the heaps of bodies in the barges. At about 9.00 a.m. the Turkish firing abated and Tizard decided to try and get some more men ashore. Major Jarret and some of Y Company were despatched.
A ship’s cutter had been put into position and with the two barges and a gang plank formed a way from the vessel towards a spit of rock that jutted out from the beach on the right of where the ‘Clyde’ was beached. This spit of rock was thickly covered with dead, and the enemy had got the range of this spot to a nicety making it a veritable death trap.22
Elsewhere, in accordance with the lottery of war, the landings had been more successful. In some cases they were virtually unopposed. At W Beach, where the 29th’s Divisional commander had concentrated his own attentions to the exclusion of all other landings, there had been stiff opposition but it had been overcome. A flanking movement from that beach could have caught the Turks at V Beach in the rear. During the afternoon Tizard spotted, from the River Clyde a party of men on the cliffs to the left of the bay but a message he sent to the 29th Division HQ asking that they be used to outflank the Turks was ignored. Also at W Beach the 86th Brigade’s CO, Brig.-Gen. Hare had been wounded so Tizard was obliged to take command of the Brigade. The CO of the 88th Brigade, General Napier, then came aboard the River Clyde along with a platoon from the Worcester Regiment. Instructions came from 29th Division HQ that the landings must continue so, reluctantly, Tizard sent out another company of the Hampshires. Once again the barge closest to the shore had broken away and, unable to move forward, the Hampshires began to crowd back into the boat. Seeing this General Napier and his Brigade Major went to investigate. Both were killed by Turkish shellfire. Lt Guy Nightingale watched Napier die.
He was hit in the stomach on the barge between our ship and the beach. He lay for half an hour on the barge and then tried to get some water to drink but the moment he moved the Turks began firing at him again and whether he was hit again or not I do not know, but he died very soon afterwards, and when I went ashore for the second time, I turned him over and he was quite dead.23
Nightingale, who had served with the Munsters in India, was sent to join the remains of Major Jarret’s company trapped behind a bank on the beach. ‘We jumped into the sea and got ashore somehow with a rain of bullets all round us. I found Jarret and a lot of men but very few not hit.’24 Nightingale was sent back to the River Clyde by Jarret to advise Tizard not to attempt to send any more men ashore in daylight. Wisely Tizard heeded this advice and chose to ignore orders from Division to press ahead. These, he rationalised, had been despatched in ignorance of the true situation at V Beach. Nightingale returned to the beach.
[I] lay all day in the blazing sun and the groans and cries of the wounded and dying were awful. The swines of Turks were picking off the wounded as they tried to crawl up the sand to us. At dusk Jarret, and I got together about 40 men who had not been hit and we pushed up a little and formed what we could of an outpost line with sentries so that we would have some sort of warning if we were rushed. Geddes was too bad to do much and finally had to be taken away. Just as it was dusk Jarret came up to me to have a look at the sentries I had put out and, as he was talking to me, he was hit in the throat. He died in a few minutes. That left me the only officer.25
Nightingale, who despite his youth and relative inexperience, was now the effective commander of the force on shore – later temporarily combined, because of the huge losses, into one unit, the ‘Dubsters’ – passed an anxious and miserable night, soaked to the skin like the rest of his men who had waded ashore; lashed by a heavy shower of rain; and expecting the Turks to counter-attack and try and push his small force off the beach. Captain Lane, lying helpless and wounded behind a bank, was almost resigned to the inevitable. ‘That night the Turks came so close that on one occasion we could hear them talking and I feared it was all up.’26 Lane became one of the long-term victims of the war. He was finally evacuated and taken to Malta where surgeons were forced to amputate his leg.
Capt Geddes was also evacuated. Some years later he reflected on the ghastly experience he had been through.
Hell it has been, with a vengeance, and the men who were at Mons and La Bassée say it was sheer child’s play to what we’ve gone through here … As I write we have only six officers and just over 300 men left, out of 28 officers and 900 men. The Dublins have one officer and just over 200 men, the two regiments are now amalgamated into one. The Turks are killing, torturing and burning the wounded – this is reported on every side. They outsavage the worst savages. Flanders is a picnic to this and its the most inhuman show that has ever been known – its simply downright murder!27
His allegations concerning the Turkish treatment of the wounded are, if they have any substance at all, greatly exagerrated.
Overnight the remaining troops from the River Clyde came ashore. Groups of them worked their way across to the fortress on the right hand side of the bay. That night the Turks set fire to some of the houses in Seddel-Bahr, probably to create more open sight-lines or ‘fields of fire’ for their snipers than were afforded by the narrow streets of the village. Tizard, as he surveyed the bay from the River Clyde, described his situation on the morning of 26 April in the following terms.
The enemy were still holding their position. On my left Lieut Nightingale with about ten men had dug themselves in under the cliff on the left. A small party of men were a little way up the nulla from the shore and there was a connecting party at the shore end. They were apparently held up. On the right under the fort and amongst the ruins on the shore were the greater part of the force.28
A staff officer, Capt Stoney of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, offered to go ashore and take command of a detachment of the almost officerless and hopelessly mixed-up troops.
At dawn British ships began pounding the enemy positions. Nightingale assisted in the burial of Major Jarret on the beach and at 7.00 a.m., in the early morning light of 26 April, the survivors of three companies of the Munsters, two of the Dublins and one of the Hampshires took the Sedd-el-Bahr fortress with a bayonet charge and moved into the village beyond where they were held up by well-concealed Turkish snipers. Guy Nightingale described their predicament in a detailed letter to his sister:
The village was an awful snag. Every house and corner was full of snipers and you only had to show yourself in the streets to have a bullet at your head. We spent from 9 a.m. till 2.30 before we finally cleared them all out, we lost a lot of men and officers in it. It was rotten fighting, nothing to be seen of the enemy but fellows being knocked over everywhere. I got one swine of a Turk with my revolver when searching a house for snipers but he nearly had me first.29
Once the village had been cleared of snipers by the force now led by the delightfully-named staff officer Lt Col Doughty-Wylie, the next target was the hill beyond, Hill 141. The hastily improvised plan was to take it from two sides. When Doughty-Wylie’s troops were ready, those led by Stoney emerged from their shelters and both forces stormed the hill with supporting fire from offshore from HMS. Albion. Though Nightingale claims this assault didn’t take place until nearly 4.00 p.m. Tizard puts the time much earlier.
By about 1.30 p.m. Capt Stoney had collected the men and the attack started and it was now that Cpl Cosgrove R.M.Fusiliers, greatly distinguished himself in clearing a way through the wire entanglements and leading a charge after Sgt Major Bennett had been killed. For this he was awarded the V.C.30
Tizard’s typically military and stylistically laconic account does scant justice to William Cosgrove’s courage. Cosgrove, a huge man for that era, 6’ 5” in height, from Aghada in Co. Cork, had enlisted in the Munster Fusiliers in 1910. Finding the wire in front of the Turkish positions was still intact, despite the bombardment, the attackers took cover. Cosgrove rushed forward, with some others, to attempt to dismantle the wire, right under the noses of the Turk defenders, who opened fire. The wire, however, could not be cut with the equipment available, so, instead Cosgrove grabbed one of the poles buried in the ground which bore the wire and heaved. He managed to uproot it and one or two others, creating a gap through which the Munsters poured on their way to taking the Turkish trenches.
A rather florid description of the incident is ascribed to Cosgrove himself as he recovered from wounds on his family’s farm in Cork:
Some of us having got up to the wires we started to cut them with the pliers, but you might as well try to cut the round tower at Cloyne with a pair of lady’s scissors. The wire was of great strength, strained like fiddle strings, and so full of spikes that you could not get the pliers between. Heavens! I thought we were done; I threw the pliers from me. ‘Pull them up!’ I roared to the fellows; and I dashed at one of the upright posts, put my arms around it, and heaved and strained at it until it came up in my arms, the same as you would lift a child … We met a brave, honourable foe in the Turks, and I am sorry that such decent fighting men were brought into the row by such dirty tricksters as the Germans.31
Cosgrove’s action, being entirely voluntary (he was not acting under orders) qualified him for the Victoria Cross, which he was duly awarded. Later, in a bayonet charge which took the trenches at the top of the hill, he was hit in the spine by a bullet and invalided home.
On the other side of the village the attack led by Doughty-Wylie (who wielded nothing but a cane throughout) was also successful in scattering the Turks from Hill 141. He did so with troops who, as Lt Henry Desmond O’Hara pointed out had ‘had no food for about 36 hours after landing, as we were fighting incessantly.’32 Guy Nightingale, having survived the snipers in Sedd-el-Bahr experienced a rush of adrenalin as he raced to the top of the hill.
My company led the attack with the Dublins and we had a great time. We saw the enemy, which was the chief thing and all the men shouted and enjoyed it tremendously. It was a relief after all that appalling sniping. We rushed straight to the top and turned 2,000 Turks off the redoubt and poured lead into them at about 10 yards range. Nearly all the officers had been killed or wounded by now. A Colonel Doughty-Wylie who led the whole attack was killed at my side. I wrote in about him to the staff and he has been recommended for a VC. I buried him that evening and got our Padre to read the service over him.33
There were a couple of attempts that night by the Turks to retake the hill but the depleted 86th Brigade held on. A force of almost two thousand men had now dwindled to a bare 700 and O’Hara was the only officer of the 1st Dublin Fusiliers who was not a casualty. The Brigade Major of the 86th, Major Farmer wrote of O’Hara, that he ‘rose to every occasion with the greatest coolness and competence, from commanding a platoon at the terrible landing from the River Clyde to the command of a company the next day, and after 28 April to commanding the Battalion.’34 In the days that followed he would be obliged to exhibit all his considerable composure as the Turks counter-attacked mercilessly.
The following morning (27 April) at 7.00 a.m. two thousand French troops arrived to relieve the Dublins and Munsters who returned to site of their virtual annihilation two days before. ‘We went back to Beach V where we had landed, had breakfast and tried to sleep. It was very hot. The dead lying on the beach wasn’t a pleasant sight. There were hundreds of them … No one can understand how we ever affected a landing when we see the strength of the position. There were 9000 Turks up against us.’35 The next day the advance began on the town of Krithia with the 29th Division and the newly arrived French working in concert. The Dublins and Munsters had to traverse V Beach on their way to take up reserve positions. Now a safe two miles from the nearest enemy machine-gun it was an altogether different place.
The French were already quite at home on Beach V where we had landed and it looked very different with camp ovens and tents in the place of corpses and dying men. The sea was beautiful and the colour was no longer red with blood as it was the day we saw it last.36
At the last moment the ‘Dubsters’ were sent forward as the advance began to falter. But it made no difference, the Turks managed to hold on to Krithia and (though this was not apparent at the time) little further progress would be made by the Entente forces. Bar a further attack on Krithia two months later the duties of the British and French troops were, from that point onwards, of a holding or defensive nature.
Lt Guy Nightingale’s diary entry for the night of 1 May, 1915 conveys something of the extremities to which the men who had come through V Beach were further exposed when the Turks attacked in huge numbers, often egged on (sometimes savagely) by German officers. The night was cold and Nightingale was resting under a makeshift canvas tent which he had managed to scrounge from the body of a French officer.
Woke up at 10.30 p.m. to the sound of firing from a dense mass of Turks advancing on the line, silhouetted against the moon which was rising. They were on the other side of the nullah but on our side they had crept up through the gorse and bayonetted most of the men in their sleep and swept on. Whatever remained of our co[mpan]y retired. I ran up the line shouting to them to get back and on joining my Dublin co[mpan]y which was on the left of my own co[mpan]y found a great scrap going on so joined in myself and stuck a Turk with my bayonet. We drove them back. I spent the remainder of the night with O’Hara and my Dublins. We fought for 5 hours driving back charge after charge of the Turks. At dawn they were in full retreat and we slaughtered them.37
Henry Desmond O’Hara was told that as many as 20,000 Turks had been involved in the night attack. The 360 men who remained of the 1st RDF between them fired 150,000 rounds of ammunition. The fight began at 10.30 p.m. when Nightingale was awoken, and continued until 5.00 a.m. the following morning. ‘The Turks were simply driven on to the barbed wire in front of the trenches by their German officers, and shot down by the score,’ wrote O’Hara.
At one point they actually got into the trenches, but were driven out by the bayonet. They must have lost thousands. The fighting is of the most desperate kind – very little quarter asked on either side. The men are absolutely mad to get at them, as they mutilate our wounded when they catch them. For the first three nights I did not have a wink of sleep, and actually fell asleep during the big night attack.38
Writing to his sister about the attack Guy Nightingale does not bother to spare her feelings. His tone is that of a man who has already been utterly desensitised by his experiences.
The Turks attacked again and again shouting Allah ! Allah !. It was most exciting hearing them collecting in a dip in the hill about 40 yards away waiting for their next charge. We mowed them down and only once did they get so close that we were able to bayonet them. When dawn broke, we saw them in hundreds retiring and simply mowed them down. We took 300 prisoners and could have taken 3000 but we preferred shooting them. All the streams were simply running blood and the heaps of dead were a grand sight.39
Elsewhere the 1st Inniskillings, of the 87th Brigade, who had come ashore unopposed on 25 April at X Beach (north of where the Dublins and Munsters met their nemesis) were getting and giving similar treatment. They were defending a position guarded only by a single stand of barbed wire and with long grass in front of their lines which afforded some cover against detection to the attacking Turks. ‘We heard the swish swish of the Turks’ feet as they advanced towards us and the voices of their officers as they gave orders. Somebody sent up a Very light, and they were advancing in a solid mass towards us.’ The Inniskillings let loose a murderous fire against the full frontal assault of the Turks. ‘The effect was deadly. We could hear the shrieks of their wounded and the shouts of their officers as they urged them on; but they never reached our line.’40
A sort of torpor now settled on both sides and the fighting became sporadic and episodic. The troops of two armies were crushed into an area of a few square miles and the corpses of the dead of both forces were ubiquitous. Nightingale, sent forward for a night attack with a contingent of Munsters, found himself sharing an entrenchment with the bodies of men from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers which had lain in the same spot since the landings of 25 April.
These bodies were still lying there highly decomposed and the stench was awful. In the dark we kept tumbling over the bodies and treading on them. When it was light I found I had dug in next to the remains of an officer in the KOSBs whom I had last seen at the Opera at Malta and had spent a most jolly evening with. There were ten KOSBs and seven South Wales Borderers lying there but I only recognised a few.41
It was not until the middle of May that a four-day truce designed for the purpose allowed both sides to bury their dead. By then, ironically, the campaign had become a carbon copy of the stasis of the Western Front.
It was only in retrospect that the full enormity of the losses at V Beach and on other parts of the Gallipoli peninsula became apparent. It took some time for the name ‘Gallipoli’ to acquire the connotations of military disaster and incompetence which it eventually did. The casualty figures were manipulated to give an erroneous impression of the success of the landings themselves. Nightingale noticed this when he was sent a copy of the Times in May.
I see they are breaking the casualties gently to you at home. Out of the 14 officers of ours hit on Sunday April 25th the Times of the 2nd of May only gives Major Jarret killed and five wounded. A lot of the regiments like the Lancashire Fusiliers who lost 20 officers the first day are not mentioned at all ! I think the Dublins are the only complete list. I suppose they’ll try and make out it’s been nothing at all out here, just a scrap with the Turks whereas its been hell and frightfully mismanaged.42
Such were the losses that when an officer like Capt G.W. Geddes returned from having his wounds treated he did so not as a mere Company commander but as CO of the battalion. But he was a much changed man.
Geddes is a ripping commanding officer to work with but he is frightfully worried and his hair is nearly white! I’ve never seen fellows get old so quickly. This morning I saw a fellow called O’Hara in the Dublins whom I hadn’t seen for about a fortnight and I hardly recognised him.43
The constant and vicious fighting of the early days of the campaign had taken their toll. ‘Simply tons of fellows are going off their heads from strain and worry – mostly fellows who have been wounded and come back but there are very few now who have gone through from the beginning and are not the worse for it.’44 One such victim of the fatalism induced by war was Henry Desmond O’Hara. He wrote to his fiancée that he didn’t think he would survive the campaign. His assumption was correct but a vacation in Alexandria seems to have restored at least some of his shattered spirit.
‘You would hardly believe him for the same person,’ wrote Nightingale of O’Hara in his diary, ‘he looks so much better for it. He’s an awfully decent fellow and very amusing.’45 Sometime between his leave and the subsequent transfer of his division O’Hara was hit. Towards the end of August the 29th Division was moved to Suvla for the attack on Scimitar Hill but O’Hara was not with them. He had been evacuated to Gibraltar where he died of his wounds on 29 August.
Nightingale, in his letters home, while commenting on the fragile psyche of his brother officers is consistent in his assertions that he himself was suffering no ill effects. He continued to eat heartily, draw (he was a talented artist) and take lots of photographs, like a curious if heavily-armed tourist. But the sub-text of his letters belied his claims of pscyhologicial vigour. He spared his family no details of the horrors of the conflict and the tone of the letters suggests a man who has become so personally inured to what he has witnesssed that he can no longer grasp the difference between normality and extremity. He exhibited a callousness that became more pronounced as his letters became more graphic.
We are a very small lot of the original officers now … All the rest are Territorial Officers and absolute strangers. They know nothing about soldiering and are nearly all senior to me being Captains and Majors! However, they are very keen and are rapidly getting thinned out. One 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 we finally didn’t get dinner till after dark.46
The revelation of the extent of Nightingale’s personal frailty came twenty years later when he killed himself with his service revolver. The date on which he chose to end his life was significant, 25 April 1935, the twentieth anniversary of the V Beach landing. Some wounds endure!
From mid May until their move to Suvla in late August (with the exception of the attempt to take Krithia in late June) the 29th Division settled back into a dreary round of mundane trench warfare. Death was everywhere. It was, quite literally, in the very air itself as hundreds of decomposing, unburied bodies left a stench which men could still recall three quarters of a century later. It was carried, afresh, through the air in the form of shells or bullets which wreaked haphazard havoc on both sides. This daily round of boredom and terror was enlivened occasionally by events such as one described by Geddes.
A divisional signal wagon with four horses came over the ridge about 400 yds from Pink Farm from the direction of the beaches, with field telegraph poles; it appeared to be a gun. The Turks concentrated their shelling on the wagon; the men in charge left the wagon, the horses, so petrified with fear, never moved. Two horses, having charmed lives, survived. Suddenly, two figures were seen cutting the horses loose – Serjeant [sic] Slattery and Private Twomey – who, jumping on their backs amid a hail of shell, galloped the horses out of danger into safety amidst the cheers of their comrades. Bearing charmed lives, they escaped being hit – a miracle. No military decorations could be given for this gallant exploit, but they were awarded a very beautiful medal by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.47
There were few enough awards for gallantry for the Dublins and the Munsters on 25 April. This generated considerable bitterness. It was suggested that the Dublins, in particular, were not in favour with the Divisional commander (Gen. Hunter Weston) The 1st RDF received only 14 awards for gallantry of which the highest was that given to O’Hara, although they suffered more than 2,000 casualties through the entire Gallipoli campaign and nearly 600 deaths. Of course the awarding of medals is not an exact science. For essentially the same action on the night of 1 May 1915 O’Hara got the DSO and Nightingale was merely mentioned in despatches. Nightingale wrote in his diary:
I think the reason there were so few awards to the Dublins and ourselves or to all the landing party, was because there were no senior officers left to report on what happened. It was rather amusing that O’Hara got his award for the same thing I was recommended for, but at the same time it must be remembered that he would have got a D.S.O. anyway for commanding his Bn which he did awfully well considering he was such a young officer to suddenly have to take command.48
Spare a thought also for the 57th Regiment of the Turkish Army which fought to virtually the last man in the defence of V Beach. They had received clear instructions from Kemal. ‘I do not order you to fight, I order you to die.’49 And they duly obliged, in their hundreds. Having inflicted horrendous casualties on the invading force they ran out of ammunition and were forced to resort to bayonets to defend their positions. In recognition of the sacrifice they made in defence of their homeland there is no 57th Regiment in the modern Turkish Army.
The attempt to relieve the static trench warfare on the Western Front had ended in stalemate and in a situation which was a virtual facsimile of the fighting in Flanders and Picardy. What was meant to be the opening act in a new work turned out to be merely the overture. The next act in the opera would take place at Suvla Bay. As the ranks of the regular army were thinning this would feature a cast of ingenues, from Kitchener’s ‘First 100,000’. Suvla was to have traumatic consequences for the Irish nation. But it would be no more effective than anything which had gone before. The strategists had become like a man lost in a convoluted maze, just as he thinks he has found a way out his path leads him to another dead end, exactly similar to the ones which have already barred his exit.
