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
