Tracing Your Great War Ancestors
First published in Great Britain in 2015
P E N & S W O R D F A M I L Y H I S T O R Y
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Copyright © Simon Fowler, 2015
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CONTENTS
Preface
Dardanelles or Gallipoli?
Chapter 1
Gallipoli – an Overview
ANZAC LANDING
Chapter 2
Soldiers’ Lives
SCIMITAR HILL
Chapter 3
Getting Started
DEATH AND THE FLIES
Chapter 4
Researching British Soldiers and Sailors
LANDING ON GALLIPOLI
Chapter 5
Researching Units
WAR DIARY, 2ND BATTALION, SOUTH WALES BORDERERS, 24–5 APRIL 1915
Chapter 6
The Royal Navy
Chapter 7
Researching Dominion and Indian Troops
Chapter 8
Visiting Gallipoli
Bibliography
PREFACE
There is no other way to put it. Gallipoli was a disaster from beginning to end. On paper at least, the campaign should have been winnable, but in the event the only thing that went well was the final evacuation. The reasons why it was such a disaster have long been debated by historians, and include poor commanding officers, insufficient training and preparation, a lack of resources – ammunition, hospital beds and even water – and also a lack of will to succeed. There were also many missed opportunities and a lot of bad luck.
Overall, the campaign showed how the British and, to an extent, their French allies had failed to grasp the realities of modern warfare. The landings at Anzac Cove and V Beach on 25 April and the attempts to break out from Anzac in early August were undoubtedly heroic but, without adequate artillery fire to destroy Turkish positions, flexible leadership by junior officers and proper preparation, they proved extremely costly in lives and materiel and ultimately they failed. It took two more years of bitter losses on the Western Front before the Allied commanders worked out a way to win.
Whichever way you look at the campaign, the heroism and the fortitude of the Anzac and the Tommy on the ground, who endured dysentery, drought and disaster with remarkable fortitude and great humour, are undeniable. Conditions here were every bit as bad as anywhere on the Western Front, and sometimes even worse.
This short book is designed to help people researching the men and the units who fought at Gallipoli. It does not go into detail about the battles or the strategies of the commanders, as there are numerous books that do this to a greater or lesser degree. A list is given in the bibliography. Instead, this book is arranged by sections offering guidance on researching the service personnel, the units and the actions themselves. There is considerable overlap between the sections, so readers may need to study them all to obtain a full picture. In addition, there are sections concerning life in the trenches and offering guidance for tourists, describing the key cemeteries, museums and other important attractions.
An Australian field gun battery taking a break. British plans were severely hampered by the lack of artillery to destroy Turkish positions.
If possible, readers should really visit the Dardanelles to see at first hand where the fighting took place. Here, perhaps even more than on the Western Front, the sacrifices made by the British, the Australians and all the other men on both sides can be better appreciated.
DARDANELLES OR GALLIPOLI?
The campaign at Gallipoli is sometimes referred to as the Dardanelles campaign. Although there is some overlap, ‘Gallipoli’ can be taken to refer to those events that took place on land, and ‘Dardanelles’ to the less well known events at sea. This is how I use these terms in this book. However, contemporary papers often refer only to the Dardanelles, so in searching for material you may need to look under both terms. A minor further complication is that the Allied forces were part of a Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF), and occasionally records may be found under this heading. By end of 1915 the MEF had also become responsible for the Allied forces in Salonika and, later, around the Suez Canal. Initially Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, wanted the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force to be called the Constantinople Expeditionary Force, until Sir Ian Hamilton, the Force commander, pointed out that the name was too much of a give-away, noting in his diary ‘I begged him to alter this to avert Fate’s evil eye.’
The Turks describe the whole sorry farrago as the Battle of Çanakkale or the Çanakkale Savași.
Chapter 1
GALLIPOLI – AN OVERVIEW
From the start the campaign in Gallipoli was a mistake. It was launched in haste and with insufficient preparation: it took barely a month to plan and arrange the most ambitious amphibious landing in British history since the equally ill-fated Crimean Expedition of 1854. And the Turks were well very aware that an invasion was imminent. This meant that the Allied commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, rarely had the advantage of surprise and formulated his plans on scant information. The latest maps available, for example, dated from the 1890s and gave no real idea of the lie of the land. Most information about the landing beaches came from observation by officers on board Royal Navy ships several miles away. Admiralty documents at The National Archives contain many drawings made by officers.
An illustration from the Graphic showing the Gallipoli peninsula as seen from the air. The ridged nature of the terrain is immediately apparent.
A relief map of the Gallipoli peninsula. The terrain heavily influenced the nature of the fighting.
Equally importantly, in both London and Paris the campaign was treated as a sideshow and kept short of men and armaments. This was not helped by Hamilton’s deferential and optimistic nature, which meant that he did not press hard enough for what was needed.
Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, then aged 62, had had a long and distinguished career in army service during the Boer War and in India. But he proved a disappointment in the realities
of modern warfare, and the failings of the Gallipoli campaign can in large measure be placed on his shoulders. According to George H. Cassar’s biography of Hamilton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
He had personal charm, integrity, more experience of war than any of his contemporaries, intellectual detachment, and physical courage. His flaws were not as visible but they proved fatal. He lacked mental toughness, basic common sense, and sufficient ruthlessness to dismiss an incompetent subordinate. He underestimated the enemy, a cardinal sin in war, and his excessive optimism frequently crossed into the realm of wishful thinking. While it was theoretically sound to refrain from interfering in field operations once in progress, it was unwise to adhere to that principle when subordinates were unproven or inadequate. The plain truth was that throughout the Gallipoli campaign he never acted like a commander-in-chief.
In the end the only thing that went to plan was the evacuation in the early days of January 1916, which was brilliantly executed.
General Sir Ian Hamilton, who led the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force for much of the campaign. There is still considerable debate about how effective he was as the force’s commander.
But why Gallipoli? Even at the time it seemed a puzzling choice. The reason lay hundreds of miles away on the Western Front, where the war had settled down to a bloody stalemate. The British were attracted by the idea that by opening another front the Germans would be forced to divert resources away from the Western Front.
At the start of 1915 Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, persuaded the Cabinet to send a fleet to force a passage through the Dardanelles with the object of compelling Turkey’s surrender and thus helping beleaguered Serbia and Russia. Turkey had joined the war on Germany’s side in November 1914. The War Office soon came under heavy political pressure to send troops to assist the fleet. Lord Kitchener, the British Minister of War, asked Hamilton to command the military force, explaining that the Admiralty was confident that its ships could get through the waterway unaided, in which case he thought it likely that Constantinople would surrender. He expected the army’s role would be limited to landing parties to destroy any hidden guns that might impede progress to a successful occupation of Constantinople. But he made it clear that if the navy encountered unforeseen obstacles, Hamilton was to throw his full force into clearing the way. ‘Having entered on the project of forcing the Straits,’ Kitchener remarked, ‘there can be no idea of abandoning the scheme.’ Kitchener’s parting words summed up the reasons for the operation: ‘If the fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won not a battle, but the war.’
On paper the omens looked good. The Turkish army was not highly rated: it had recently been beaten in two short wars in the Balkans and had just lost a major battle against the Russians in Eastern Anatolia in January 1915. British troops in Egypt were told that: ‘Turkish soldiers as a rule manifest their desire to surrender by holding their rifle butt upwards 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.’ The fighting skills and resourcefulness of ‘Johnnie Turk’ would come as a shock.
Yet, taking the Dardanelles was still a challenge. The Straits are protected by the hilly Gallipoli peninsula to the north, and by the shores of Asia Minor to the south. In 1915 fortresses well positioned on the cliff-tops guarded the shipping lanes. As visitors to Gallipoli will testify, the peninsula itself is hardly an ideal place either to land on or to fight over. Beyond the narrow bays and escarpments at Cape Helles, where the Dardanelles meet the Aegean Sea, a low plain rises behind the seashore village of Sedd-el-Bahr and stretches north to the inland village of Krithia (now Alçitepe). Beyond it crouches Achi Baba, a deceptively unimposing hill with a broad-breasted summit just high enough to command a view of both the Aegean and the Dardanelles. Further north on the western coastline the land takes on a wilder aspect. Sheer cliffs scarred with deep gullies and ravines sweep down almost to the water’s edge and tower up to rugged heights of formidable grandeur. Inland there are deep gullies (called nullahs by the British) – dried-up watercourses that become torrents after rain – and narrow razor-edged ridges. Much of the vegetation is thorny, impenetrable scrub, although to the British observers on naval ships in 1915 it had looked lush and green. Describing the hills northeast of Anzac Cove, the location of Australian, New Zealand and British attacks in early August, the British official history notes:
No account of the operations … can hope to convey any adequate idea of the extreme difficulties of the undertaking if the reader does not first try to visualise the bewildering nature of the country through the troops were to march. The spurs and gullies are so contorted, so rugged and steep, and so thickly covered with dense prickly scrub, that their passage is difficult enough in peacetime … But in August 1915 the only available maps were very inadequate and those arduous routes had to be traversed at night by heavily laden men who were harassed by an invisible enemy and led by guides who themselves had very little real knowledge of the ground.
The area around Cape Helles at the tip of Gallipoli, showing the beaches where many of the landings took place on 25 April 1915.
A larger-scale map showing V and W beaches and the positions in the days after the landings on 25 April.
A plan showing how British units would land on the beaches around Cape Helles. (TNA WO 95/4311)
During February and March several attempts were made by the British and French navies to force the Straits. The first attack took place on 19 February. Despite pounding the outer fortresses, poor Allied gunnery meant that the British and French attack proved ineffective in the face of an efficient Turkish defensive system, although more damage was done than the Allies realised. A renewed bombardment the following week was similarly unsuccessful. In particular, the Allied guns could not effectively silence the Turkish mobile batteries that poured down shellfire from the heights. Almost a month later, on 18 March, naval forces attempted to force their way through the 2-mile-wide Narrows between Gallipoli and Asia Minor, but had to abandon the attempt when three ships were lost in a previously unknown minefield. The disaster was observed by Hamilton, who concluded that the navy could not get through without the army’s help.
Intensive preparations were made to land troops at Cape Helles on the tip of the peninsula, and further up as a diversionary feint. Vast numbers of ships were purchased in harbours across the Middle East and fresh troops arrived in Egypt, including men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who were actually on their way to France.
In the meantime the Turks naturally also made preparations. As a measure of the extent of German influence over Turkish policy, regional command was placed in the hands of General Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission in Constantinople. Liman sent German and Turkish troops to strategic locations around Gallipoli. The British observed the Turkish preparations. Tell-tale streaks of newly turned earth showed that they were digging trenches, and banks of new barbed wire caught the sun. After one reconnoitring trip, Hamilton ruefully wrote to Lord Kitchener that ‘Gallipoli looks a much tougher nut to crack than it did over the map in your office’.
The first British troops landed on the peninsula just before dawn on 25 April 1915. The Allied Expeditionary Force consisted of eighty-four ships in total, carrying 75,056 men (including 30,638 Australians and New Zealanders under the command of General William Birdwood), together with the men of a French division, 16,481 horses and mules, and 3,104 vehicles.
Turkish shells landing off W Beach a few days after the Allied landings.
The previous night the Royal Naval Division had mounted a diversionary attack at Bulair at the northern end of the peninsula; a flat area, and much closer to Constantinople, it looked like a natural place for any invasion to take place. Liman von Sanders was convinced that this was where the British would land in strength and it took a day for
him to realise his mistake. It was, in the words of Lyn Macdonald, his ‘first and only gaffe of the campaign’.
The main thrust of the attack focused on five beaches (named S, V, W, X and Y) along Helles Point and was carried out by men of the 29th Division, who were ferried from Royal Navy ships positioned a mile or so off the coast. Some two thousand men were killed during the first day. Further down the peninsula troops were streaming ashore on the beaches around Cape Helles. Here, at V Beach, the Turks were well dug in in the cliffs above the beach and only opened fire as the armada of small vessels carrying the British troops drew close to the beach. As the British landed, they were mown down by Turkish fire. Colonel Williams, who was supervising the landing, noted in his war diary: ‘9am. Very little directed fire against the ship, but fire immediately concentrates on any attempt to land. The Turk’s fire discipline is really wonderful. Fear we will not land today.’
Turkish shells landing among British ships off Cape Helles.
Brigadier General Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, the official historian of the Gallipoli campaign, described the landing on V Beach:
When the boats were only a few yards from the shore, Hell was suddenly let loose. A tornado of fire swept over the incoming boats, lashing the calm waters of the bay as with a thousand whips. Devastating casualties were suffered in the first few seconds. Some of the boats drifted helplessly away with every man in them killed. Many more of the Dubliners [Royal Dublin Fusiliers] were killed as they waded ashore. Other, badly wounded, stumbling in the waters, were drowned.