Gallipoli (96 page)

Some men cry. Far on the northern horizon, black clouds are gathering, clouds that will soon unleash torrents upon
torrents
of rain and such howling wind that the piers will be washed away.

The Die Hards stare to the last, gazing back to the sacred shores, so confidently stormed eight months earlier, now drenched in the blood of half a million men, with some 135,000 buried in shallow graves.

For this, too, is the rule in these parts … The Emperors, Sultans, Kings, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Warlords send their soldiers and sailors, the battle breaks out, and the Dardanelles exacts its deadly toll. So it has been for centuries. So it is now.

The tides of war that have flooded them forth to this place are now receding, and the survivors are as relieved as they are surprised to be alive to see the day – while desperately aware of just how many they are leaving behind.

And so they continue to gaze back until, with the fog, the dawn, the distance, the Dardanelles quickly fade from view, gone … but never forgotten.

So successful was the withdrawal from Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay and so dire the winter on the Dardanelles that, on 27 December 1915, the British Cabinet committed to getting out of Cape Helles as well. Using similar methods, Cape Helles was successfully evacuated on the early morning of 8 January 1916.

With that last man off, so ended the whole ill-fated Dardanelles campaign, which extracted a devastating human toll all round:
⁴

 

 

With so many dead – and with such an exotic location for the Allies' campaign, silently gliding in the dark to an unknown shore, gripping the popular imagination – it is not surprising that the first anniversary of the landing was strongly commemorated.

At his camp by the Suez Canal in Egypt, Brigadier-General John Monash declared a special holiday for his troops. They solemnly began the day with a remembrance ceremony of the Gallipoli landing a year earlier, and it finished with most of the 15,000 Diggers, many of them three sheets to the wind, swimming naked in the Canal. (And so began, perhaps, another tradition of the anniversary: reverence followed by revelry.)

In London, no fewer than 2000 Australian and New Zealand troops – referred to in the papers as ‘the knights of Gallipoli'
⁵
– marched through the streets.

In Australia, on what had already officially been named ‘Anzac Day', there was an equal mix of pride for what had been accomplished and grief for those lost, as so many families around the country marked the anniversary of the beginning of the campaign that had taken their loved ones.

One newspaper,
The Queenslander
, captured the mood when it noted, ‘a sob seemed to shake the community on Tuesday as it stepped forward and placed a simple flower on the graves of the gallant men slain on the heights of Gallipoli'.
⁶

The crowds were huge, the tone sanguine. ‘The dominant note,'
The Queenslander
observed, ‘was one of mourning – it could not have been otherwise – but mingled with it, and breaking through like sunlight glinting through the rain clouds which gathered and yielded soft showers during the day, was the feeling of triumph and pride that Australia has such worthy sons.'
⁷
(And, yes, in the afternoon, heavy drinking and two-up were the order of the day.)

In Sydney, a march was held, with thousands of returned soldiers forming up in the Domain and parading down Macquarie Street, as the Governor-General took the salute, and ‘at 9 am, every train and tram was brought to a standstill for one minute, and cheers were given for the King, the Empire, and the Anzacs'.
⁸

Those returned soldiers too ill to march were carried in motor cars, and some of them were cared for by nurses. Many of them would never walk again, but at least on this day they were heartily cheered by the large crowds. A similar commemorative ceremony was held in Sydney for ‘Lone Pine Day' on 8 August. ‘The sight was an impressive one. Many of the men were battle scarred, several had lost limbs, and one man was blind and had to link arms with a comrade. But all marched with heads proudly erect, confident, and satisfied with duty nobly done.'
⁹

It was a tradition that soon grew, most particularly from the mid-1920s onwards, when organised marches and dawn services took hold.

In the years since, Australia as a whole has been extremely proud of the legend of Gallipoli, so proud that our people – characteristically irreverent when it comes to just about everything else – to this day regard Anzac Day with a naturally bowed head.

On this subject, Christopher Bantick wrote a fascinating piece for
The Australian
in 2010, noting that while ‘there were astounding feats of bravery at the Gallipoli landing in 1915 … the legend that arose from them is indeed mythical … Why Australia craved such a legend of its own lies in its lack of foundation myths. There was no battle for independence, as in the US, no civil war as there had been in England and no revolution as in France.'
¹⁰

And woe betide any who would not treat the saga with the same veneration.

A case in point is what happened in 1926 when Brigadier-General Cecil Aspinall, the British staff officer turned historian,
¹¹
sent his first draft chapters about the Gallipoli landing – set to be published as part of the British Official History – to Australia for comment. Counter to the stories of bravery and daring that had sparked the growing legend of Anzac Day in Australia, the Englishman wrote that, on the day of the first landing at Gallipoli, many Australians had displayed outright cowardice: ‘For many the breaking point had now been passed, and numbers of unwounded men were filtering back to the beach [in an] endless stream … the gullies in the rear were choked with stragglers and men who had lost their way …'
¹²

Aspinall maintained that, after a relatively easy landing, ‘confusion amongst the Australian forces prevented a coordinated attack “which could scarcely have failed” to win the day'.
¹³

Now, no matter that in his diary entry on the day Charles Bean himself had noted that the number of
stragglers … began to reach
serious
fair proportions
¹⁴
and in his post-war account he had allowed that some of the Australian soldiers of ‘weaker fibre'
¹⁵
had indeed found shelter in the gullies. Bean, upon reading the draft chapters, could not abide Aspinall's rendition of the Australians' performance on that day.

As documented by Thomson, it was Bean who blew the shrill and angry whistle. Immediately, he circulated Aspinall's account among former AIF Commanders, ‘one of whom feared that the manuscript would persuade civilian leaders that “most of the leaders were inept daunted men and that a large proportion of the glory of Anzac is mere propaganda”'.
¹⁶

It
must
be removed!

But Aspinall would not back off, and on first hearing the news that it even
might
be deleted, he wrote in a memo, ‘This chapter was a difficult one to write because the truth about the Australians has never yet been told and in its absence a myth has sprung up that the Anzac troops did magnificently against amazing odds. If this is omitted there is nothing of the truth left …'
¹⁷

Australia most certainly did not see it that way. Getting wind of Aspinall's claims of ‘stragglers and shirkers', not heroes and warriors born, Sydney's
Daily Guardian
exploded in outrage, referring to the allegation as ‘The Vilest Libel of the War'.
¹⁸
And Prime Minister Billy Hughes was equally appalled, personally and on behalf of the nation, fulminating to the press, ‘Australia's sons acquitted themselves like heroes and with heroism unsurpassed in the history of the world.'
¹⁹

Hughes went on, telling
The Brisbane Courier
, ‘I can only say that the man who wrote them has been guilty of an infamous libel on men, the glory of whose deeds will live forever … Why the British Government chose such a one to write the story of the war passes human comprehension.

‘One thing is certain, that the man who said eight thousand Australians were skulking on the beach, was not on that beach … Certainly when this immortal exploit was taking place, he was probably in a very safe place, miles and miles away.'
²⁰

(A fairly accurate assessment, as it turned out, as on the day Aspinall had been secure aboard
Queen Elizabeth
, on Hamilton's staff, helping to preside over the whole catastrophe. And of the sources cited by him for the claim, the only person actually there at the time was Colonel Ewen MacLagan, who was flat out on the Second Ridge for most of the day, and nowhere near the safe gullies.)

Prime Minister Hughes went on, giving fair warning, ‘If these infamous statements are published under the authority of the British Government, how can Australians listen patiently to talking about standing shoulder to shoulder with men who slandered them in this fashion?'
²¹

Not surprisingly, with threats like that, and with agitation by both Prime Minister Hughes and Charles Bean, the offending passages were dropped from the final publication.

For what it's worth, my own view is that, however many men might have given in to civilian sanity and sought shelter on the first day – as I frankly suspect I might have, had I been present – there can be no doubt that the overall effort of the Australians as part of the Anzacs in Gallipoli, from the first day to the last, really was an extraordinary one.

Beyond debate regarding its enduring legend and legacy, however, there were many important lessons for the Australian military to come from Gallipoli. The most important one was best enunciated by Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Blamey, when, in the Second World War, before the battle of Tobruk, he strongly cautioned against plans to put Australian troops again under British command: ‘Past experience has taught me to look with misgiving on a situation where British leaders have control of considerable bodies of first-class Dominion troops while Dominion commanders are excluded from all responsibility in control, planning and policy.'
²²
Never again would Australia cede control of its army or navy to Great Britain.

Many other lessons were elucidated by subsequent inquiries into just how the whole Dardanelles campaign had gone so wrong. On 23 August 1916 in London, a Royal Commission into the Dardanelles began. No fewer than 200 witnesses were called to give sworn testimony over the ensuing 12 months.

They included all of the leading political, military and even journalistic figures of the day who had either played a significant role in the Dardanelles campaign or been able to observe it closely. All of Herbert Asquith, Winston Churchill, Sir Ian Hamilton, John de Robeck, Roger Keyes, Sir Frederick Stopford and Sir John Fisher gave their considered accounts, together with the likes of Keith Murdoch and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.

The Commission's two reports were scathing in their conclusions:

• … sufficient consideration was not given to the measures necessary to carry out such an expedition with success.
  ²³
  
• … the difficulties of the operations were much underestimated. At the outset all decisions were taken and all provisions based on the assumption, that, if a landing were effected, the resistance would be slight and the advance rapid.
  ²⁴
  
• … the plan of attack from Anzac and Suvla in the beginning of August was open to criticism.
  ²⁵
  
• There was no meeting of the War Council between March 19th and May 14th. Meanwhile important land operations were undertaken. We think that before such operations were commenced the War Council should have carefully reconsidered the whole position. In our opinion the Prime Minister ought to have summoned a meeting of the War Council for that purpose.
  ²⁶
  

The most staggering thing about the whole outcome of the findings of the Dardanelles Commission? Despite the fact that it had comprehensively demonstrated that the plan to force the Dardanelles was fraught from the first, that the Turks had shown beyond doubt that when their minefields were intact, their batteries manned and their ammunition supplies strong, it was close to impossible for even a powerful fleet to force its way through the Straits,
still
in late 1918 there were those in the highest echelons of the British military establishment who were intent on giving it another go.

They were led by the completely unstoppable and recently promoted Rear-Admiral Roger Keyes, who by this time was in command of the Dover Patrol, responsible for keeping the English Channel clear of German naval vessels. And he was strongly backed by his great supporter, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, who had become First Sea Lord in December 1917.

Extraordinarily, at the time the Turks surrendered – on 30 October 1918 at a signing in Mudros Harbour, just 12 days before the Armistice with Germany – the Cabinet had approved the plans of Keyes and Wemyss to attack the Dardanelles again!

Mercifully, under the terms of the Treaty of Mudros, the Dardanelles was placed under international control with the Turkish affirmation, under the later Treaty of Sèvres, that the Dardanelles would remain open ‘both in peace and war, to every vessel of commerce or of war and to military and commercial aircraft, without distinction of flag'.
²⁷
On 12 November 1918, a squadron of British destroyers sailed through on their way to Constantinople, the guns of the forts lying mute and impotent above them.

As to many of the major players in the campaign, the virtues or otherwise of their roles at Gallipoli – for good or bad – would stay with them for a long time, including well beyond death.

Lord Kitchener's reputation never recovered from the shambles of an operation that he had overseen from the start. After his return from the Dardanelles in late November 1915, ‘Lord K.' was forced to succumb to the humiliation of having one Major-General Sir William Robertson imposed upon him as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, effectively to oversee his every move. No more could Kitchener behave like an aristocrat who was answerable to no one, least of all the Cabinet.