Foolhardy mission

Gallipoli Peter Hart

ONE of the most striking things about the campaign in Gallipoli in 1915 was the conditions of combat. They were horrid. Dysentery was rife. As Peter Hart records in his stirring account of the invasion of the Turkish peninsula, within a few months half of the 100,000 men serving were unfit for duty.

The fighting was fierce and relentless. Corpses in No Man’s Land lay unburied. Others were used, unwittingly, as pillows. Flies were a scourge. Indeed, the war poet Rupert Brooke died during the campaign from an insect bite on the lip.

“I have seen men in the trenches,” recounted a captain in the British army, “making a fire and cooking their bacon close to the corpse of a comrade who had ‘gone west’ not a yard away, not an hour before, and who had shared their last meal with them.”

Hart, as well as authoring several books on the Great War, is also an oral historian at the Imperial War Museum in London. He culled some of the material in Gallipoli from 50 or 60 interviews he conducted in the early 1980s with survivors from the battle. Their voices give the account real vibrancy.

There is, for instance, the prelapsarian innocence of the Allied forces as they land on the peninsula under gunfire: “The outburst was so sudden, that our men were momentarily checked, when a most cheery, very English voice from the bridge called out, ‘Go on lads, get into the boats, these fellows can’t shoot for tawfee!’ A regular laugh went up at the ‘tony’ accent. I looked up and saw the Lieutenant Commander, his arms folded on the bridge, leaning over, smiling, pipe in hand, as if he was looking on at a sports meeting. It was the right note to strike.”

The Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces hadn’t reckoned on the tenacity of the Turkish defences, whose first front-line division was led by Kemal Ataturk, who later founded Turkey’s republic. They were not, after all, a “European enemy”.

“They underestimated them, but it was part of the time, wasn’t it?” says Hart. “People just did think of ‘foreign chappies’. That’s the way they thought of them. There’s no point in looking back and saying, ‘They shouldn’t have done that.’ We’re a world away now. The point is that we just thought they were foreign and that they weren’t as good as us. The French thought the same.

“The Turks were tough, so tough. Life is hard and cruel in Turkey. It’s not that easy there now, is it? They were tough soldiers. They were used to living off not very much, to poor conditions. They didn’t ask for much, and they didn’t get much. And they were patriotic. It’s a fantastic tale of people defending their homeland. It’s just unfortunate for us British and Irish that it was us they were defending against.”

The battle is inextricably linked with the ANZACs, for giving Australia and New Zealand’s armed forces a baptism in international warfare, but, not as widely known is that the Irish made up a sizeable proportion of the invading troops, too.

“Besides the two battalions who landed at V Beach,” says Hart, “you also had a whole division, which is probably the size of the Irish Army now, some 15,000 men of the 10th Irish Division landed at Suvla Bay in August 1915. They were all Irish. They were a Kitchener division raised during the war so they were all volunteers. They volunteered in 1914.”

Not many returned. By the time the Allied forces withdrew ignominiously from their Dardanelles Campaign in January 1915, both sides had endured huge casualties — 205,000 from the British Empire; 47,000 from France; and 251,000 on the Turkish side. Not to mention the number psychologically wounded. Military and political careers lay in tatters as well. General Sir Ian Hamilton, the commanding officer, resigned, incidentally, from his post in October 1915, following a coruscating report circulated to the British cabinet by a young Australian journalist — Keith Murdoch, father of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Winston Churchill, the architect of the invasion, lost his cabinet post and spent a decade in the political wilderness as a result.

“I am very ambivalent about Churchill,” concludes Hart. “I think he was a great man. I think he was a fantastic war leader of civilians in World War II. I think he was an absolutely dreadful general or naval commander. The more he interfered in military affairs, the worse things got. In World War II when he was prime minster he had Alanbrooke, one of our finest generals, sitting on him throughout the war, stopping him when he suggested mad schemes.

“Gallipoli was a mad scheme. I do blame Churchill, but I also blame the others. It wasn’t one man. He was only First Lord of the Admiralty. He wasn’t prime minister at the time. It was a sign of his greatness, his eloquence that he was able to sway a cabinet full of the likes of Kitchener, who was a grim figure, and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord.

“Churchill persuaded them, when they were really not keen. Kitchener was worried about what would happen if we failed fighting a Muslim country. We had the Indian Empire and Egypt to worry about. Fisher was worried about poor old Jellicoe facing the German high seas fleet with not enough ships, but they somehow got swept along with it.

“To the politicians it was an easy option. To them, they had to stand alongside France. The Germans were occupying a good proportion of France, they were threatening the channel coastline, and they were the dominant military force and they had to be beaten, but all that’s forgotten when they take up this romantic, quixotic adventure. Which would you rather go on? I’d rather go to Gallipoli than to the Western Front if I was a general.”