Gallipoli: The Landing and the Line

The ANZAC landing on April 25, 1915, marked the opening of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I.

by Jose Campos

Bullets snapped off the shale walls of Shrapnel Gully. Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, stretcher bearer with the 3rd Australian Field Ambulance, led his donkey along the narrow track. A wounded man hung across the animal’s back. Simpson kept moving, singing, under fire coming off the ridgelines. He handed the man to the orderlies at the base, turned without pause, and climbed again to collect another soldier.

He was 22 years old. He had been in the war for six hours.

The Landing

At first light on April 25, 1915, the first waves of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps came ashore on the Ottoman Empire’s Gallipoli peninsula. They had been briefed for a landing on a gradual beach. Current and darkness pushed the boats north. The first waves hit beneath steep and heavily defended cliffs.

Men jumped into chest-deep water and pushed for shore. Machine-gun fire met them at the waterline. Some went down in the shallows. Others reached the sand and moved immediately for the slopes, using whatever cover they could find.

Lieutenant Talbot Smith of the 10th Battalion landed with the first wave.

“Come on, boys,” he called as he hit the beach, “they can’t hit you.” He led his scouts straight up the heights.

The Ground

The plan was meant to open the Black Sea route to Russia, force the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and break the stalemate on the Western Front. On the ground, conditions did not match the plan.

The landing came in beneath near-vertical cliffs rising 300 feet from a strip of sand barely wide enough to lie down on, cut through with ravines and thorn scrub. Movement uphill broke almost immediately into small groups advancing by ground and instinct. Communications failed early. Officers lost contact. Junior NCOs took over fragments of units. Positions formed where men stopped and held.

By nightfall the ANZAC perimeter extended less than a mile inland. Orders came down to dig in and hold.

They dug into the slopes with entrenching tools, mess tins and their bare hands. Lines formed along the ridges and gullies. That ground formed the core of the line for the duration of the campaign.

Wounded men began to stack up along the line. Getting them off the slopes became its own fight. Simpson kept moving through it.

The Runs

The stretcher bearer worked Shrapnel Gully for 24 days. He heldt a steady pattern. He went up empty and came down with a man. When a donkey was hit or exhausted, he found another and continued.

He carried the wounded through “deadly sniping down the valley and the most furious shrapnel fire,” historian Charles Bean later recorded.

He was known along the line for his whistling and singing, a steady sound moving through the gully under fire.

The Line

Lance Corporal Albert Jacka, 14th Battalion, held a trench at Courtney’s Post. The position was overrun. Jacka counterattacked. He cleared the trench with rifle and bayonet, and reestablished the line.

His officer reached him at first light and asked what had happened.

“I managed to get the beggars, Sir,” Jacka said. He later was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Some units pushed inland before realizing they were alone, cut off, flanked, with no clear sense of where the rest of their unit had gone. The terrain was a maze of false crests and gullies that swallowed men. Junior corporals found themselves commanding companies. Eighteen-year-olds made decisions usually left to officers who had trained at length.

The Hold

The perimeter held through repeated attacks, artillery fire and constant exposure along the ridgelines. By the end of the campaign, both sides had taken heavy casualties. The ground changed hands in yards and then stabilized.

The wounded kept coming down off the line. Simpson kept going up.

The singing and whistling stopped on the 24th day. Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick was killed by machine-gun fire on May 19.

Signals

Corporal Cyril Bassett, a New Zealand signalman, kept communications running under direct fire in August. Telephone lines were repeatedly cut by shelling. Each time, he went out to repair them.

Two bullets passed through the fabric of his tunic while he worked. The line stayed in use. He received the Victoria Cross for the action.

“All my mates ever got were wooden crosses,” he said.

The Withdrawal

The evacuation, when it came months later, was carried out in stages and under concealment. Some 140,000 Allied soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing. The Ottomans lost a similar number.

The ANZAC units withdrew from the same beaches where they had landed, leaving the positions behind.

Bean summed up what they did there:

“Reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat.”

Jose Campos writes frequently for Soldier of Fortune.