Spirit of Gallipoli by Patrick Lindsay

Author:Patrick Lindsay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
ISBN: 9781740663885
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2010-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Gallipoli Stalemate

While the Anzacs fought for their lives, General Hamilton watched anxiously from his flagship as he received confused reports from the other landings.

From the start, the operation was hamstrung by several factors that combined to diminish its effectiveness and, ultimately, doom it to failure. The split command structure was inefficient at best and counter-productive at worst. Communications were unreliable; the navy’s bombardment was inaccurate; and many of Hamilton’s subordinate commanders were simply not up to the task.

In the tradition of the British Army at the time, Hamilton handed executive command to Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston (known to the troops as Hunter-Bunter), Commanding Officer of the British 29th Division, while Hamilton and his staff waited offshore. To add to the communications problems, Hunter-Weston also established his command centre onboard a ship.

The men of the 29th Division landed at S, V, W, X and Y Beaches around the heel of Cape Helles and Krithia, starting about half an hour after the Anzacs first wave had hit the shore.

They met with mixed receptions. Those who landed at Y Beach, adjacent to Krithia, were unopposed and S and X Beaches were secured with minimal casualties.

That was the good news.

From then on, everything went bad. At W Beach, the Lancashire Fusiliers faced barbed-wire entanglements and unyielding defenders who savaged them with machine-gun fire as they landed. In the chaotic fighting that ensued, the Lancashires won their now famous ‘six VCs before breakfast’ but suffered devastating losses – 533 casualties out of 950 in less than an hour.

Nevertheless, they did manage to establish a beachhead and, supported by some accurate naval gunnery, forced the Turks back.

The losses at V Beach, near the old fort at Seddulbahir, were just as bad. An old collier, The River Clyde, had been converted as a landing craft and carried 2000 men from the Munster and Hampshire Regiments. It landed at V Beach and unloaded its troops into a hailstorm of lead from the well-entrenched and well-armed defenders. The Allies were caught in the open and had little chance of survival.

Hunter-Weston watched the events unfold from his ship off Cape Helles. Reports were confused and contradictory and he apparently did not know or understand the opportunity that Y Beach offered to push inland to the high ground. Rather than land his reserves there unopposed, he poured them into the bloodbath at V Beach. When Hamilton eventually heard of the situation at Y Beach, he offered trawlers to Hunter-Weston to land reserves there but was rebuffed.

British Brigadier-General CF Aspinall-Oglander later wrote:

‘It is as certain as anything can be in war that a bold advance from Y on morning of the twenty-fifth of April must have freed the southern beaches that morning and ensured a decisive victory for the 29th Division.’

Any chance of success at Cape Helles was squandered. Despite their massive losses, the British outnumbered the defenders but their inability to break out of V Beach, where The River Clyde initiative turned to disaster, saw the landings degenerate into yet another stalemate.

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