 "Dire straits")
GALLIPOLI: THE DARDANELLES DISASTER IN SOLDIERS' WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
Author: Richard Van Emden and Stephen Chambers
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 352
Price: Rs 699
The Anzacs are here in their thousands, making the annual pilgrimage down the splendid road along the European shore of the Sea of Marmara to honour ancestors who fought and died on the battlefield of Gelibolu, the Turkish name for Gallipoli, which lends its name to one of the most significant battlefields of World War I.
The air of celebration as the descendants of the Anzac Corp gather at Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove makes it hard to remember that this battle marked the first ignominious defeat of the Allies in the war.
April 25 marked the centenary of the start of that nine-month battle, a ludicrous campaign conceived by Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener and approved by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill (who gamely shouldered the blame later). The objective was to "force the straits" (the Dardanelles), capture Constantinople, as Istanbul was then known, and knock German ally Turkey out of the war.
By this month 100 years ago, talk of retreat had begun. For Kitchener, it was a question of prestige rather than the mounting casualties. "The Muslim man will think he has beaten us," he mused, anxious about its implications elsewhere in the Empire. By January 1916, the "Muslim man" - German-trained and -equipped troops under the command of Mustafa Kemal, "Ataturk", later founder of modern Turkey - had indubitably prevailed and the Allies completed their furtive withdrawal from the three tiny battlefields along that peninsula, boarding ships that carried traumatised troops to the Greek island of Lemnos .
Expectedly, the centenary of World War I, which began last year, has prompted new histories, films and exhibitions. Since history is usually written by the victors, it is the Western Front that occupies most attention. This book, put together by two World War I historians, is an important addition to the relatively sparse literature on the Gallipoli campaign because it provides an up close and personal account of a campaign led by inept generals - most last saw action in the Boer War, one was even called out of retirement as Lieutenant in the Tower of London! - and fought with a brutality and in conditions that far outstripped the Western Front.
The author have set the soldiers' reminiscences against the progress of the battle, so you get a sense of the early euphoria as they train in Cairo among tented camps near the Pyramids and the almost immediate disillusionment once they land on narrow beaches hemmed in by rocky cliffs from which the Turk effortlessly picked them off.
Having quickly cottoned on to the plan, the Turks stalled the campaign at the start by mining the Dardanelles. That meant the Allied soldiers were doomed to fight their way up the peninsula, resupplied only by sea, against a well-equipped enemy entrenched on higher ground .
It was an appallingly unequal contest. "The deepest point of penetration into Gallipoli was little more than three miles," the authors write, "…The Turks were able to land shells almost anywhere they wished." Thus, wrote Captain Albert Mure, 1/5th Royal Scots: "…you were always under fire in every part of the damned peninsula. There was no real cover."
"It is reckoned that Gallipoli is one of the hardest fronts to fight on," wrote Private Thomas Dry. "Unlike France, there are no friendly villages to get a little comfort or food… Nothing but mountains and barren at that… to say nothing of the flies… These pests would be on your face, hands, down your throat and if you were eating biscuits with jam on, it was more like biscuits and flies…." Flies, fleas and lice were one part of the dire conditions in shallow trenches. The troops were wracked by dysentery, jaundice and what is now recognised as severe cases of battle shock and had to wait days to be evacuated to hospital ships.
The special worth of this book is that it includes accounts from Turkish soldiers. Here, for instance, is a description from Lieutenant Ismail Sunata of the 12th Ottoman Division of the capture of British soldiers in the Hellespont. "The British are either really stupid or unprepared. In a strange country, in a streambed, they sat down to have breakfast. Jam, biscuits, sugar, chocolate, butter, cheese, forks and napkins. The napkins are pure cotton…". Sunata also tells us that the Turks called their soldiers who died in battle "martyrs"; the British soldiers they buried were simply known as "stiffs".
The Anzacs were actually a small component of the force at Gallipoli. They monopolise the attention because their 24,000-odd wounded and 10,000 dead constituted a large proportion of the male population of their countries. But British, Indian, French and Senegalese soldiers made up the bulk of the force and the casualties. The written accounts here are mostly British, as a result of which you tend to get the impression that the French, the Africans and Indians were bit players. There are stray references to Indian muleteers kneeling towards Mecca - the only reminder that many Indian Muslims were imprisoned by His Majesty's Government for declining to fight the Caliph, then the global head of Islam.
This deficiency is partly made up by the 130-odd photographs, many of them previously unpublished and significant because they were entirely illegal. As the war that was supposed to end by Christmas 2014 wore on the military authorities banned personal ownership of cameras in all theatres, concerned about the uncensored images that were appearing in the press. "The survival of albums from the period reflects the decision by many men, particularly officers, to take the risk and ignore the ban," the authors write.
Posterity must be grateful for this law-breaking. Some of those photos capture the poignant, desolate landscape of retreat. The Allies abandoned tents, supplies and even constructed dummy soldiers to disguise their withdrawal. And they also left thousands of fallen comrades, new companions to the ghosts of the Trojan War.
Author: Richard Van Emden and Stephen Chambers
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 352
Price: Rs 699
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The Anzacs are here in their thousands, making the annual pilgrimage down the splendid road along the European shore of the Sea of Marmara to honour ancestors who fought and died on the battlefield of Gelibolu, the Turkish name for Gallipoli, which lends its name to one of the most significant battlefields of World War I.
The air of celebration as the descendants of the Anzac Corp gather at Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove makes it hard to remember that this battle marked the first ignominious defeat of the Allies in the war.
April 25 marked the centenary of the start of that nine-month battle, a ludicrous campaign conceived by Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener and approved by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill (who gamely shouldered the blame later). The objective was to "force the straits" (the Dardanelles), capture Constantinople, as Istanbul was then known, and knock German ally Turkey out of the war.
By this month 100 years ago, talk of retreat had begun. For Kitchener, it was a question of prestige rather than the mounting casualties. "The Muslim man will think he has beaten us," he mused, anxious about its implications elsewhere in the Empire. By January 1916, the "Muslim man" - German-trained and -equipped troops under the command of Mustafa Kemal, "Ataturk", later founder of modern Turkey - had indubitably prevailed and the Allies completed their furtive withdrawal from the three tiny battlefields along that peninsula, boarding ships that carried traumatised troops to the Greek island of Lemnos .
Expectedly, the centenary of World War I, which began last year, has prompted new histories, films and exhibitions. Since history is usually written by the victors, it is the Western Front that occupies most attention. This book, put together by two World War I historians, is an important addition to the relatively sparse literature on the Gallipoli campaign because it provides an up close and personal account of a campaign led by inept generals - most last saw action in the Boer War, one was even called out of retirement as Lieutenant in the Tower of London! - and fought with a brutality and in conditions that far outstripped the Western Front.
The author have set the soldiers' reminiscences against the progress of the battle, so you get a sense of the early euphoria as they train in Cairo among tented camps near the Pyramids and the almost immediate disillusionment once they land on narrow beaches hemmed in by rocky cliffs from which the Turk effortlessly picked them off.
Having quickly cottoned on to the plan, the Turks stalled the campaign at the start by mining the Dardanelles. That meant the Allied soldiers were doomed to fight their way up the peninsula, resupplied only by sea, against a well-equipped enemy entrenched on higher ground .
It was an appallingly unequal contest. "The deepest point of penetration into Gallipoli was little more than three miles," the authors write, "…The Turks were able to land shells almost anywhere they wished." Thus, wrote Captain Albert Mure, 1/5th Royal Scots: "…you were always under fire in every part of the damned peninsula. There was no real cover."
"It is reckoned that Gallipoli is one of the hardest fronts to fight on," wrote Private Thomas Dry. "Unlike France, there are no friendly villages to get a little comfort or food… Nothing but mountains and barren at that… to say nothing of the flies… These pests would be on your face, hands, down your throat and if you were eating biscuits with jam on, it was more like biscuits and flies…." Flies, fleas and lice were one part of the dire conditions in shallow trenches. The troops were wracked by dysentery, jaundice and what is now recognised as severe cases of battle shock and had to wait days to be evacuated to hospital ships.
The special worth of this book is that it includes accounts from Turkish soldiers. Here, for instance, is a description from Lieutenant Ismail Sunata of the 12th Ottoman Division of the capture of British soldiers in the Hellespont. "The British are either really stupid or unprepared. In a strange country, in a streambed, they sat down to have breakfast. Jam, biscuits, sugar, chocolate, butter, cheese, forks and napkins. The napkins are pure cotton…". Sunata also tells us that the Turks called their soldiers who died in battle "martyrs"; the British soldiers they buried were simply known as "stiffs".
The Anzacs were actually a small component of the force at Gallipoli. They monopolise the attention because their 24,000-odd wounded and 10,000 dead constituted a large proportion of the male population of their countries. But British, Indian, French and Senegalese soldiers made up the bulk of the force and the casualties. The written accounts here are mostly British, as a result of which you tend to get the impression that the French, the Africans and Indians were bit players. There are stray references to Indian muleteers kneeling towards Mecca - the only reminder that many Indian Muslims were imprisoned by His Majesty's Government for declining to fight the Caliph, then the global head of Islam.
This deficiency is partly made up by the 130-odd photographs, many of them previously unpublished and significant because they were entirely illegal. As the war that was supposed to end by Christmas 2014 wore on the military authorities banned personal ownership of cameras in all theatres, concerned about the uncensored images that were appearing in the press. "The survival of albums from the period reflects the decision by many men, particularly officers, to take the risk and ignore the ban," the authors write.
Posterity must be grateful for this law-breaking. Some of those photos capture the poignant, desolate landscape of retreat. The Allies abandoned tents, supplies and even constructed dummy soldiers to disguise their withdrawal. And they also left thousands of fallen comrades, new companions to the ghosts of the Trojan War.