The Glorious Madness – Tales of the Irish and the Great War by Turtle Bunbury

Author:Turtle Bunbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan
Published: 2015-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

THE INVASION OF SUVLA BAY

On the last day of April 1915, the 7th Battalion marched down the quays to the North Wall — once again ‘lustily cheered’ all the way — and boarded a troopship bound for Holyhead. From Wales, they made their way to Basingstoke in southern England, where the bulk of the 10th (Irish) Division was by then concentrated. They would remain in Basingstoke for the next ten weeks, engaging in still more training exercises.

On 10 July, the 7th Battalion steamed out of Devonport on the transport ship Alaunia and headed south. Captain Arthur Rostron, the Alaunia’s skipper, had won widespread praise three years earlier when, as master of the ocean liner Carpathia, he led the rescue effort for the survivors of the Titanic disaster.

During the two-week voyage, as Douglas Gunning later recalled, the battalion was ‘stuck at the bottom of the boat, but good food, salt water baths and sea air had already combined to make us feel fit’. For Gunning, the highlights included swimming races, majestic sunsets, ice-cold oranges from a refrigerator and porpoises gliding in the moonlight. At Alexandria, they stopped for long enough to march around the old harbour and entertain the Egyptians with a loud rendition of ‘Tipperary’. Five days later, on 25 July, they disembarked on the island of Lemnos where thousands of Allied soldiers were now gathering in advance of a major new offensive on Gallipoli.

Three months had passed since the costly battle of Seddelbahr had left over 1,000 Irishmen dead or wounded. Cape Helles may have been captured, but the campaign was not going well and the Allies were pinned down at both Cape Helles and Anzac Cove. As General Godley, commander of the New Zealand and Australian Division, put it in a letter to his cousin in County Leitrim, ‘I do not suppose in history, that anything so utterly mismanaged by the British Government will ever be recorded.’75 Put simply, the Allies had completely underestimated the terrain and climate of the Gallipoli peninsula, as well as the tenacity of the Turkish soldiers who defended it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.