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.
3. THE 10TH DIVISION AT SUVLA BAY
‘Twas better to die ‘neath an Irish sky,
Than at Suvla or Sedd el Bahr.’1
(From The Foggy Dew, Canon Charles O’Neill)
The separatist sentiments which provide the context for those lines from the folk song ‘The Foggy Dew’ might not have had much philosophic appeal to the Irish troops at Gallipoli but by the time of their final evacuation from that morass of incompetence, petulance and shortsightedness most would have agreed with the bald statement as expressed. The landings at Suvla Bay in August 1915 wrote the first page in another military-Gothic horror story, and like most such tales the ending was not a happy one.
By August 1915 the first of Kitchener’s New Army troops were ready to test their Byronic notions about war. The initial attacks on the Dardanelles in April had been a failure and like the gambler who throws good money after bad, General Sir Ian Hamilton was determined to turn the situation around by becoming ever more deeply embroiled in the peninsula he once described as ‘shaped like a badly worn boot’. Kitchener’s saplings were expected to extricate the British from the folly of Gallipoli when what was needed was a host of battering rams
Suvla Bay lies on the western (Aegean) side of the Gallipoli Peninsula some twenty miles due north of Cape Helles and a mere five miles from Anzac Cove, where the troops from Australia and New Zealand, who had joined to fight a war in Europe, had gained a toehold . The notion of landing troops there was not a bad one in itself. The beaches were long, wide and inviting. The area was lightly defended: three Turkish battalions were all that was left to hold Suvla after the troops of the two divisions defending the plain beyond were withdrawn to Helles and Anzac. The possibility of a repetition of V Beach was remote once the element of surprise was maintained.
The strategy was that as the Suvla force (IX Corps, under General Stopford) broke out of its beachhead the Australian and New Zealanders at Anzac Cove would do likewise and between them the two Corps would drive a wedge across the peninsula. To do this the 10th, 11th and 13th Divisions which were to form the IX Corps were required to occupy the heights around Suvla within twenty-four hours of landing and link up with the Anzacs who would be assaulting the Sari Bair ridge, which rose to almost a thousand feet, and which, with its heavily scored sides had defied their attacks and overshadowed their beachhead since the April landings, However, the plan was compromised straightaway when the 13th Division and the 29th Brigade of the 10th (Irish) Division were separated from IX Corps and sent to assist the Anzacs instead.
The 10th (Irish) Division, bar one battalion – the 10th Hampshires – was overwhelmingly Irish, a product of the recruiting frenzy of 1914. It was the first distinctly Irish division in the British Army. It had a native-born Divisional commander in Lieutenant General Sir Bryan Mahon. Mahon, a Galwayman, had been a career soldier since joining the 8th (Royal Irish) Hussars in 1883. His chief claim to military celebrity was his leadership of the column which had relieved Mafeking during the Boer War.
At the time he took over the 10th Division he was fifty-two years of age. His service in Egypt and India had bronzed his face and sown grey in his hair, but his figure and his seat on a horse were those of a subaltern. He scorned display, and only the ribbons on his breast told of the service he had seen.2
So wrote Major Bryan Cooper, rather overfondly, of his commanding officer. Mahon may well, habitually, have disguised his rank but he was, nonetheless, highly conscious of it, and of his own dignity and importance. Many would judge harshly what they were to perceive as the placing of his innate sense of self-worth and pride over the well-being of his soldiers in one of the sorriest chapters of Irish military history, the defence of Kiretch Tepe Sirt on the night of 15 August 1915. John Hargrave, who was a Sergeant in a Royal Army Medical Corps unit attached to the 10th Division offers a more colourful description of a Mahon,
with large aggressively out-jutting ears, and full lips enfolding a secret smile half hidden under a trim but strangely piebald grey-and-(startlingly)-saltwhite moustache. Without doubt one of the ‘Black Celts to the West of the Shannon’, with deepset, heavy-browed, sullen-brooding eyes, as fiercely ‘dead’ and gloomy as a Fitful Head stormcloud stagnant over Inisheer.3
The 10th brought with it to Suvla Bay its own, unofficial, historians. It is one of the most exhaustively chronicled campaigns in which Irish soldiers played a major role in the Great War. Chief among them was Bryan Cooper. Cooper had been a Unionist MP for South Dublin until 1910, one of the last to be elected to a southern constituency (bar Edward Carson who as MP for Trinity was an exceptional case, and Maurice Dockrell, elected in Rathmines in 1918). He would later serve as an Independent TD for Dublin County before throwing in his lot with Cumann na nGaedhael in the 1920s (sometime after he had helped save that government in a crucial division, by, reportedly getting the ‘tiebreak’ TD drunk and putting him on the train back to Sligo before the vote). When he died, in 1930, the symbolism at his funeral might have served as an appropriate metaphor for so many of Ireland’s World War 1 veterans, his coffin was draped in both the Tricolour and the Union Jack. A clue to his temperament is provided by Professor Joe Lee, who describes him as ‘a respected ex-Unionist –respected not least for his formidable capacity for alcohol’.4
After seven months of training in Dublin, at the Curragh and in Basingstoke in England the men of the 10th were eager for action. After a few days at Gallipoli the romantic gloss of war, so typical of that era, would wear off quickly. One of the most celebrated units of the 10th Division, D Company of the 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, would suffer more than most. It consisted of footballers (mostly rugby players) who had responded to a call to enlist as a ‘Pals’ unit and had done so at Lansdowne Rd. Thirty five year old Frank Laird, a member of D company, had joined out of a combination
