KRITHIA AGAIN ATTACKED—HEROIC WORK OF "ANZACS"

On April 28, 1915, Sir Ian Hamilton decided to send reenforcements in force to Anzac Cove. Despite the constant landing of fresh troops there the Australians and New Zealanders, because of their heavy losses and the increasing pressure of the Turkish attacks, had been almost continually in the firing line. They had been able to enjoy little or no rest or sleep, and things began to look serious. Accordingly four battalions of the Royal Naval Division were sent to General Birdwood. On the following day two more naval battalions were landed and as well a company of the Motor Maxim Section.

These fresh units moved into the Anzac trenches and held them against renewed Turkish attacks. Meanwhile the Australian and New Zealand battalions were being reorganized behind the line and after three and a half days' rest took their places again in the front-line trenches.

From the evening of the 27th of April until May 1 there was comparative quiet on what might be called the Krithia front, at the tip of the peninsula. Fresh forces were landed by the French and the English, the latter bringing into line the Twenty-ninth Indian Infantry Brigade. Heavy artillery was brought ashore and moved up to positions inland, and the whole organization of the allied force was re-formed and strengthened.

At 10 p. m. on the evening of May 1 opened what is known as the first battle of Krithia. It was elaborately organized by the German staff of the Turkish forces and took the allied troops by surprise. Indeed, the first line of the attacking force, creeping up on its hands and knees, got into the trenches of the Eighty-sixth Brigade and bayoneting most of the defenders opened up what Sir Ian Hamilton subsequently described as "an ugly gap." Thanks to the fine conduct of some territorial units, however, the Turks were not able to press home this temporary advantage and the hole was soon closed.

Along the rest of the British front the attack of the Turks was not serious. Instead they concentrated on the left of the French line, held by a Senegalese brigade. After several attacks the African troops began to give way. Realizing the seriousness of the situation, the two companies of the Worcesters moved across from the British right and saved the day. Some hours later, the extreme French right was hard pressed, and it was necessary to bring up a battalion of the Royal Naval Division from the reserves to strengthen it. The following morning, the allied troops moved out of their trenches in a counterattack. It at first met with great success. As Sir Ian Hamilton wrote in his dispatch to London: "Had it not been for those inventions of the devil—machine guns and barbed wire—which suit the Turkish character and tactics to perfection, we should not have stopped short of the crest of Achi Baba."

By 7.30 in the morning the British left had advanced more than 500 yards, while the center and the right and the French left had also registered promising advances. The rest of the French line, however, was held up by strong Turkish forces posted along the Kereves Dere and the more advanced sections of the British left came under heavy cross-fire. In the end it was necessary to relinquish all the ground gained and to retire to the original trenches.

Although the Turks made night attacks against the French line on May 2 and 3, 1915, and in the end inflicted such heavy losses that it was necessary to shorten the line held by General d'Amade's troops, it was not until May 6, 1915, that heavy fighting occurred again along the whole line. On May 5 the Lancashire Fusilier Brigade of the East Lancashire Territorial Division, which had been training in Egypt, arrived and was placed in reserve, behind the British left.

At this time it was calculated that the British total losses, killed, wounded and missing since the initial operations of the landing, had been just short of 14,000 men. This of course did not include the sick who must have numbered 10,000 or the French losses, which were not revealed. These were heavy and serious and more than counterbalanced the reenforcements that had arrived.

Sir Ian Hamilton decided to make a fresh attempt against Krithia and Achi Baba on May 6, 1915. This battle was important because it marked the turning point in the character of the campaign carried on by the allied troops in Gallipoli. Although an advance was registered none of the main positions of the Ottoman troops were carried or even reached, and it became apparent that the task of reducing the Dardanelles was not one likely to be solved by rush frontal attacks. Rather, as in other fields of the world war, the problem became one of siege tactics, and from the date of the end of this second battle of Krithia the operations in Gallipoli resolved themselves into variations of the methods that were being forced upon the troops of all the belligerent countries in Europe.

For his grand attack upon Krithia and Achi Baba, Sir Ian Hamilton brought down from Anzac Cove the Second Australian Infantry Brigade and the New Zealand Brigade. With two brigades of the Royal Naval Reserve he formed them into a reserve division. The Twenty-ninth Division held the British line, and was ordered forward about 11 a. m. of May 6, 1915, with orders to go as far as Krithia if possible, but at all events to seize as much of the ground around that point as possible. At the same time the French corps were to attempt to wrest from the Turks the crest above the Kereves Dere.

The advance was extremely slow. At the end of two hours the Twenty-ninth Division had progressed less than three hundred yards and had not yet come into touch with any of the main Turkish positions. Three hours more of desperate fighting showed many fluctuations but no more progress. Finally they were ordered to intrench where they were for the night.

The French had succeeded in reaching the crest aimed at, but found it by no means a comfortable position. They could not go forward and they dared not go back. Yet they were subject to a raking fire that cost them hundreds of casualties. Time and time again the Senegalese troops were sent against the Turkish trenches and machine gun positions, but each time they were beaten back with cruel losses. To make matters even worse, the French could not, in the heavy fire maintained by the Turks, intrench until after nightfall, and they had to spend hours in the exposed position.

The following morning May 7, 1915, the allied warships opened a furious bombardment of the ground around Krithia. Every few feet of the difficult country was searched out by the destroying lyddite of the Allies' shells, until it seemed that not a living creature could have survived. But when the Lancashire Fusiliers Brigade moved out to the attack a few minutes later it soon became apparent that the naval bombardment had by no means exterminated or demoralized the Turks.

The British troops were greeted by a perfect hurricane of fire from rifles and machine guns. Hundreds of the men went down and, brave as the remainder were, they were compelled to abandon the attempt to cross the open ground that lay between the British front and Krithia. Some progress was made on the right, however, where a clump of fir trees which had been holding up the advance for some time was finally carried by the Fifth Royal Scots. Early in the afternoon the Turks recaptured the firs and such of the ground they had lost and shortly after four o'clock when Sir Ian Hamilton relieved the situation, the British were in the position of being absolutely "stuck." The British commander decided to make another desperate attempt, however, and called upon the French for cooperation. The whole allied line advanced to the attack just as evening was closing in but the Turks by this time had brought up some additional batteries and poured in on the French and the British a smothering fire of deadly shrapnel. So heavy was the punishment of the French that the line literally melted away and General d'Amade was compelled to throw his last reserve into the front line. At nightfall the allied attack subsided.

During the night, word came to Sir Ian Hamilton that heavy Turkish reenforcements were on their way and he decided to make one last attempt to carry Krithia and Achi Baba before they arrived in the morning. Accordingly, the Lancashire Fusiliers Brigade which had been particularly roughly handled was withdrawn from the line, and their places taken by the New Zealand Brigade. After another naval bombardment the New Zealanders were ordered forward shortly after 10 a. m. of May 8, 1915. By 1.30 they were two hundred yards closer to Krithia than any allied troops had been up to that time. There, however, they were heavily checked. Other units were unable to advance, and the French sent word that they were unable to go any farther unless the British line could move. There was a long pause. Finally word was passed along the line that the final desperate effort was to be made—namely to carry Krithia and Achi Baba by a combined bayonet attack. Every man in the line was ordered to fix bayonets and not to stop short of the objectives. At 5.30 in the afternoon came the order to advance, after a bombardment by the fleet. Almost immediately all central control was lost, and each unit was fighting desperately for itself in the hills and gullies of that difficult, almost uncharted, country. Not for many hours afterward, indeed, in some cases not for days, was it possible to piece the story together.

The New Zealand troops got well past the Turkish machine guns without discovering them, with the consequence that their supports were mown down by a hail of fire from unexpected quarters. Nevertheless, they got within a few yards of the Turkish trenches and proceeded to dig themselves in. The Second Australian Infantry Brigade actually won about 400 yards of ground and stuck to it with a tenacity warmly praised by Sir Ian Hamilton. To the left the Eighty-seventh Brigade had suffered terribly from machine-gun fire while the French had been severely handled. The French troops were steady enough, but the Senegalese broke in. At one point General d'Amade rallied the troops in person.

Nightfall came and still Krithia and Achi Baba were far away. Thus ended the second battle of Krithia, the supreme attempt of the allied troops to carry the Turkish positions by a maneuver battle. Some little ground had been gained, but the losses had been all out of proportion to the advantage wrested from the brave and tenacious Ottoman troops. The only consolation found in the situation by the higher commands was in the assurance that the enemy had suffered equally heavy losses, but as they were largely on the defensive this statement is open to a very large measure of doubt.

While all this fighting was going on at the tip of the peninsula, the Anzacs, or that part of them left on the cliffs overlooking the cove, were having a hard time to maintain their positions. The Turks were aware of the withdrawal of the two brigades to assist in the second battle of Krithia, and they made a heavy demonstration to prevent the departure of any further troops. To understand how vital a matter this was one has only to read the dispatches of the period. Indeed, it has often since been pointed out by military writers that, had the troops landed from first to last at Anzac Cove been available at the tip of the peninsula, Krithia and Achi Baba would undoubtedly have been carried in the early days of the fighting, thus altering the whole course of the campaign. This dispersal of forces would appear to have been one of the major blunders of the Dardanelles campaign.

For five days, beginning May 6, 1915, the Anzacs were in almost constant action. The fortunes fluctuated, gains were made by both forces, but in the end, aside from heavy losses by both, there was practically no change in the relative positions. The allied troops still held a strip of land on the top of the cliffs, of a radius of about 1,100 yards. As illustrating the intense character of the combat at this period, it was calculated that during one bombardment no less than 1,400 Turkish shells fell on this small strip of land in one hour.

It has been said that the task of the Anzacs at this period was to keep open this door to the vitals of the Turkish army and to hold as many of the Turks as possible, and thus relieve the pressure on the Krithia front. It can be said with equal force that the task of the Turks arrayed against them was to hold as many of the Anzacs on this front as possible. Judged from these angles, both Turks and Britons were successful.

In the following week both the British and the French received substantial reenforcements. On May 14 General d'Amade, in command of the French forces at the Dardanelles, was relieved by General Gouraud, who, at the age of 47, was the youngest officer of his rank in the French army. He had enjoyed conspicuous success in northern France, and had been nicknamed by his soldiers, the "Lion of the Argonne." It was believed that his experience in the country of the Argonne and the style of fighting that had developed there would make him especially valuable to Sir Ian Hamilton, who, of course, had had no previous experience with the new style of warfare.

On May 18, 1915, began the second battle of Anzac. Elaborate preparations were made by General Liman von Sanders, the German commander in chief of the Ottoman forces. Fully 30,000 troops are said to have been gathered for the attack upon the Colonial troops. The latter were fully prepared, warned of the concentration by the observers on the warships and the aerial scouts.

About midnight of that day the attack began. After a preliminary bombardment of the British positions, successive infantry attacks in massed formation were launched against the trenches. For six hours the battle waged, but the Anzacs' positions were not shaken. In the end the ground in front of the trenches was literally covered with the dead and wounded. An actual observer wrote of the scene:

"The ground presents an extraordinary sight when viewed through the trench periscopes. Two hundred yards away, and even closer in some places, are the Turkish trenches, and between them and our lines the dead lie in hundreds. There are groups of twenty or thirty massed together, as if for mutual protection, some lying on their faces, some killed in the act of firing; others hung up in the barbed wire. In one place a small group actually reached our parapet, and now lie dead on it, shot at point-blank range or bayoneted. Hundreds of others lie just outside their own trenches, where they were caught by rifle or shrapnel when trying to regain them. Hundreds of wounded must have perished between the lines."

There was a lull after this terrible slaughter, during which the Turks made unsuccessful overtures to obtain an armistice to bury their dead. On May 20, 1915, toward evening, the Turks again attacked, concentrating on Quinn's Point, a strong Anzac redoubt at the outer edge of the Australian trenches. No results were obtained and finally, out of sheer necessity for reasons of health, an opportunity was given the Turks to bury their slain.

There was some additional fighting on this line during the remaining days of May, but nothing of real importance occurred. It was calculated, at the end of the month, that the total British losses, killed, wounded and missing and not including sick, was just short of 40,000 men. The figures for the sick were not given out, but reports made later make it tolerably certain that they must have numbered between 30,000 and 35,000 additional. The intensity of the struggle at the Dardanelles will be realized when it is pointed out that the total British casualties in the three years of the South African War were only 38,156.

During the last two weeks of May the British and French troops on the Krithia fronts made elaborate preparations for an attack upon the Turkish lines. Miners had been brought out from England and France, and mining and sapping had been conducted on a large scale. On June 4, 1915, Sir Ian Hamilton ordered the attack. It was preceded by the usual heavy naval and artillery bombardment. Finally, at noon, the mines were exploded, and the troops advanced along the whole line with fixed bayonets.

It is calculated that the British had no less than 24,000 men on a front of less than 4,000 yards. Their attack was delivered with tremendous power and was brilliantly successful. At one point, however, where the French line linked up with the British, the Turks discovered a weak spot. By noon about a third of a mile had been gained over a front of four miles, but soon afterward the French began to weaken and subsequently were compelled to retreat. This exposed the right wing of the British, which was enfiladed by the Turkish riflemen and machine gun batteries and suffered terrible losses. The Collingwood battalion of the Royal Naval Reserve, according to Sir Ian Hamilton, having gone forward in support when the right wing was hard pressed, was practically wiped out.

The attack slackened in the afternoon and nightfall found almost all the gains of the morning lost to the heavy Turkish counterattacks. So exhausted were the British and French troops that it was impossible to renew the battle on the following day.

On June 21, 1915, the French force fought probably its most successful action since the landing. About noon of that day, the Second Division stormed two lines of Turkish trenches and captured what had been called the "Haricot" redoubt, a strong Turkish position which had twice changed hands. On the right, the First Division was unable to make corresponding progress until General Gouraud made a last inspiring appeal. Before night the whole of the Turkish first line trenches above Kereves Dere were in the hands of the French troops. The cost had been terrible, no less than 2,500 soldiers of the Republic falling in the assault. More important still, General Gouraud was so seriously injured that he had to return to France. On the way his right arm was amputated. He was succeeded in command of the French Expeditionary force by General Bailloud.

A week of comparative inaction was followed by an action on the British right, which became known as the battle of the Gully Ravine. This was a successful attempt to capture the ground originally included in Sir Ian Hamilton's instructions for the second day of the Battle of the Landings, near Beach Y, where the Turks had maintained themselves in force, on June 28, by a strong British force, including the overworked Twenty-ninth Division, which at this time had but few of the officers who commanded at the landing on April 25, 1915, the 156th Brigade of the Lowland Division, and the Indian Brigade. Several of the Turkish trenches could be easily enfiladed from the sea and H.M.S. Talbot, guarded by a ring of destroyers against the German submarines which had given effective evidence of their presence in the Gulf of Saros, did terrible execution and played a large part in the success of the British attack.

By nightfall, five lines of Turkish trenches along the coast had been captured, 200 prisoners had been taken and several guns and much ammunition had fallen to the British troops. The Turks made counterattacks on the two succeeding nights but never regained the ground they had lost.

While this was going on, Enver Pasha directed in person a determined attack upon the troops at Anzac Cove. On the night of June 29, 1915, after artillery preparation, two unsuccessful attempts were made by the Ottoman troops to carry the British lines. On July 4, 1915, the Turks launched another attack, starting from the neighborhood of Achi Baba, against the whole allied front, concentrating on the point where the French and British lines joined up. They had a momentary success when they penetrated into one of the British trenches, but in the end they were driven out.

On July 12, 1915, Sir Ian Hamilton ordered an attack which won about 400 yards in the direction of Achi Baba, but at heavy loss to one of the Territorial Brigades, which broke through a couple of the Turkish trench lines, but was unable to establish a connection with the French on their right. Finally some local points and a few trenches were carried, but as the Turks had something like fifty miles of trenches in Gallipoli, it became apparent that at this rate the allied troops would be wiped out long before they came within sight of the Narrows.[Back to Contents]