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
