The year 1915 came in with sleet and mud.
In the brief pause of winter,
the motionless armies of both sides waited.
The British Government surveyed the ruin of the war's early hopes,
and took stock of the future.
Grave doubts now replaced the first bright optimism.
Powerful minds applied themselves to strategy and tactics.
Was the deadlock of the Western Front permanent?
Could it be broken?
Would the French offensive succeed in thrusting the Germans back?
Some doubted. Lord Kitchener was one.
"The German lines in France may be seen as a fortress that cannot be completely invested.
"The lines may be held by an investing force,
"whilst operations go on elsewhere."
Operations elsewhere, but where? The Baltic? The Mediterranean?
In the first days of August 1914,
the German cruiser Breslau and
the new battle cruiser Goeben had been in the Mediterranean.
16 British warships closed in on them.
To escape capture, the German ships raced to Turkey,
a neutral state, but one with pro-German sympathies.
Germany offered the ships to Turkey.
Their commander became a Turkish admiral.
The chief of staff of Turkey's army was German,
with another German in charge of training.
Under a figurehead sultan, Turkey was ruled by Enver Pasha.
His power was absolute, but dependent on German support.
His ambitions were grandiose.
In October 1914, Enver Pasha had committed the Goeben and Breslau
to shell Russian ports in the Black Sea and sink all ships in their way.
By 30th October, Turkey was at war with the Allied powers.
The British War Council considered a naval attack on the Dardanelles.
Here, the prizes of success seemed glittering indeed.
Egypt and the Suez Canal would be secured, Italy and the Balkan states would join the Allies,
and Russia would be able to import munitions
from the Western Allies and America.
And Russia's huge stores of grain,
bottled up in the Black Sea ports, would be released.
It was indeed an attractive project.
On January 14th, 1915, the British War Council's mind was made up.
"The Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February
"to take the Gallipoli peninsula,
"with Constantinople as its target."
The naval attack opened on 18th February, 1915.
For two weeks, the British and French fleet tried to destroy the forts guarding the Dardanelles.
Hampered by bad weather, they still made useful progress.
Marines and bluejackets went ashore, blew up abandoned guns
and wrecked Turkish emplacements.
CANNONS FIRE
They met only light opposition.
The task seemed easy.
"The greatest satisfaction was expressed at the Admiralty.
"I was surrounded by smiling faces."
Unexpected difficulties now arose.
Forts apparently silenced came to life again.
New Turkish guns appeared.
Minefields impeded the Allied battleships.
Unarmed trawlers sweeping for mines were driven off by gunfire.
Doubts about the Navy's ability to finish the job alone began to grow.
In London, Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, said,
"The Dardanelles? Futile without soldiers.
"Someone will have to land at Gallipoli."
But where could soldiers be found?
Lord Kitchener, weighing the needs of the Western Front, faced a difficult decision.
There were troops in Egypt, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps,
Indians, and British territorials.
Half-trained, ill-equipped, they were not yet an army.
Something more had to be added - a regular division.
Only the 29th remained, already promised to the Western Front.
Reluctantly, Kitchener agreed to release the 29th to Gallipoli.
The French government also offered a division, making 70,000 men ready for action.
As commander-in-chief, Kitchener appointed Sir Ian Hamilton,
a general of great distinction for whom the war had not found a role.
Kitchener told him:
"We are sending a military force to support the fleet at the Dardanelles.
"You will command. If the fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall.
"You will have won not a battle, but the war."
On 18th March, Hamilton saw the navy deliver its final assault on the Narrows,
the strip of water eight miles long and less than a mile wide
which was the gateway to Constantinople.
It was early afternoon and all was going well.
Suddenly, the French battleship Bouvet blew up in a huge explosion
and vanished in two minutes, taking with her nearly 700 men.
By the end of the day, three Allied battleships had gone down.
Three more were damaged by gunfire.
The action was called off, and the fleet retired from the Straits.
The Turkish gunners, down to their last rounds of ammunition, waited for the fleet to return.
The Turkish government prepared to abandon the capital.
Then, as days passed and the Allies failed to appear,
a fierce exultation seized the Turks.
Enver Pasha crowed with confidence:
"I shall go down in history as the man who demonstrated
"the vulnerability of the British fleet."
Now, Turkish blood was up. The Turks turned in fury of revenge
on the aliens in their midst, the Armenians.
There were two million Armenians in Turkey, Christians in a Muslim land,
and Christians whose homeland lay partly in Turkey, partly in Russia.
Potential traitors, in Turkish eyes, and tribal enemies for centuries.
In the weeks that followed, three quarters of a million Armenians
were savagely exterminated.
Said Turkish minister, Talat Bey:
"The place we have sent them to is nowhere.
"No Armenian can be our friend after what we have done to them."
While this killing went on, reports of an Allied military expedition in Egypt poured into Constantinople.
Enver Pasha handed command of the Gallipoli peninsula to the German, Liman von Sanders.
Von Sanders had six Turkish divisions,
not enough to cover the whole coastline,
but he placed them to concentrate against any dangerous landing.
A crash programme of training and defence works followed.
Time was precious. The Turks worked and waited.
But no-one came.
In Egypt, the expeditionary force struggled against disorganisation.
Everything had to be improvised.
SHIP HORN BLOWS
In the intervals of work and training, Egypt offered diversions.
Spirits were high. The war was young and new for these warriors.
Hamilton decided to confront von Sanders with six landings at once.
At the same time, two diversions would add to the Turks' confusion.
The French would land on the Asiatic shore and then withdraw.
And a mock assault would be made
on the neck of the peninsula at Bulair by the Navy.
The moment drew near.
The excitement of the adventure ahead seized men's minds.
Rupert Brooke, the poet turned soldier, expressed the feeling:
"I suddenly realised that my life's ambition
"has been to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.
"Oh, God, I've never been so happy. Like a stream flowing to one end."
But Brooke fell sick, and died before the expedition sailed.
As the great armada pulled away amid cheering from the troop ships
to the battlefields of classical antiquity and the Golden Horn,
Sir Ian Hamilton wrote in his diary:
"Almighty God, watchman of the Milky Way,
"shepherd of the golden stars, have mercy upon us,
"smallest of the heavenly shiners.
"Our star burns dim as a corpse light.
"The huge black chasm of space closes in.
"If only by blood, thy will be done.
"En avant, at all costs, en avant!"
The first landings were at Gaba Tepe,
where the peninsula narrowed to a bare four miles.
At 4am on April 25th,
the boats cast off from warships and troop ships,
bearing their loads of soldiers towards the dark and hostile shore.
For these men, this was a culminating moment.
These were Anzacs, entering their first battle, determined to make a name.
From the gentle pastures of New Zealand,
the turmoil of Sydney, the dignity of Melbourne
and the wide spaces of Queensland, they came not just to fight Turks,
but to lodge their youthful nations in the great affairs of the world.
'It was pitch dark.
'Then suddenly, a dim outline of the coast loomed up.'
As we got closer, we were all getting tensed up and nervous,
wondering what would happen, as everything was so quiet.
Then a single shot rang out,
and a yellowish light flared up.
From then, everything was let loose.
Machine-gun and rifle fire came direct at the boats.
They cast us off, the multiple oarsmen took up the row,
and we were rowed ashore.
As soon as the boats grounded, it was every man for himself.
As we scrambled ashore, those that were lucky enough to get there,
we found what cover under the cliff we could.
As we lay there for a few moments, gathering our wind,
we slipped off our back, fixed our bayonets,
and someone in the crowd said, there was no-one in charge,
the order was, "Right, lads. After the bastards!"
RAPID GUNFIRE
At five o'clock that morning, Liman von Sanders was roused with a series of alarming reports.
The Allies had arrived.
Von Sanders galloped off to Bulair.
There he remained all day, waiting for the landing that never came.
The first diversion was a complete success.
So was the second.
The French landed easily on the Asiatic coast and took 500 prisoners before they withdrew.
Opposite the French at S beach, the landing was also successful.
At Y beach, on the further flank, 2,000 men went ashore without a casualty.
But they did not press inland.
At W beach the Lancashire Fusiliers fought their way ashore
through dense barbed wire, under murderous fire,
giving their name to this battlefield - Lancashire Landing.
MACHINE-GUN FIRE
By evening, they had linked up with the men at X beach, further north.
But the high drama of the day was elsewhere.
At 6am on 25th April, naval bombardment lifted over V beach,
and a floating Trojan horse neared the tip of Cape Helles.
In broad daylight, the collier SS River Clyde,
with 2,000 troops aboard, grounded herself gently offshore.
Doors opened in her side, ramps came down,
Dublin and Munster Fusiliers poured forth.
Seconds later, 20 boats loaded with more fusiliers, scraped the sand.
It was very quiet.
But the Turks were ready.
They opened up on the shore and there was firing -
not only machine guns - rifle fire.
They had these nice little pom-pom shells, all nice painted colours.
Beautiful things.
They was hitting off the side of the ship and ripping...
..people to pieces.
Even the bullets, if they missed you, was hitting the ship...
..tearing pieces out of them.
Three-and-a-half hours later, barely 200 men were ashore.
These were trapped in a small area of safety beneath a low sandbank.
The brigadier was dead.
The survivors crouched behind the plates of the River Clyde and waited for nightfall.
Flying overhead, an Allied airman looked down and reported the water was absolutely red with blood.
V beach had been a catastrophe.
Not until the following day, after bitter fighting, did the British capture this beach.
To the north, the dawn of the first day found isolated groups of Anzacs chasing a fleeing enemy.
By eight o'clock time, we were well advanced.
I should say somewhere between a mile, a mile and a half.
And later in the morning, we got well across to the peninsula -
we could see the coast of the Narrows.
But now, a Turkish colonel arrived on the slopes of Sari Bair.
His name was Mustafa Kemal. Kemal realised at once
that this ridge was the key to the southern half of the peninsula
and the enemy must be driven off it.
He rallied the retreating Turks and sent for reinforcements.
His orders were uncompromising.
'I don't order you to attack. I order you to die.'
The Anzacs were forced off the ridge.
By the end of the day, 15,000 men were crowding into the Anzac bridgehead - two miles long.
On a narrow beach, barely 1,000 yards long and 30 yards wide,
supplies and equipment piled up.
From the cliffs came the wounded, choking the incoming traffic.
It was the most precarious position a bloke could find himself in.
You sort of made up your mind -
"Well, we're here and the only way he can get us off is by carrying us off feet first."
Altogether, there were 30,000 men ashore on Gallipoli.
Casualties had been heavy but that was expected.
More serious was the fact that none of the main landings had achieved their objectives.
Now everyone stood by for the Turkish counterattacks against those frail footholds of the Allies.
At Gallipoli, the battle flared up again.
On 18th May the Turks, outnumbering the dominion troops by three to one,
tried to wipe out the Anzac bridgehead.
In great hulking mass - they were rather big men, the Turks - a fine body of men.
As they came over in two great waves,
they were shouting and blowing their trumpets
and whistling and shouting like schoolboys.
As they got closer, within nice rifle range,
we had the order to fire.
We opened fire with rapid fire and brought them down in hundreds.
Hundreds of them fell.
In front of our trench, when the attack was over,
there would be up to 3,000 dead and dying in front of our brigade.
They were lying there for about three or four days.
The smell got so awful.
We prayed that the wind would blow in from the sea and take the stench
of the dead over into the Turkish trenches instead of our own
as the stench got so awful at that time.
For both sides, infection and disease were now the dangers.
A front-line armistice was arranged.
Anzacs and Turks worked together to bury the dead in large, communal graves.
I wasn't one of those burying the dead, but I sat on the parapet
and afterwards, I walked over and offered bully beef to one Turk
and he smiled and seemed very pleased
and passed me a whole string, two strings of dates, I think it was.
Three weeks after the landings,
Hamilton launched a major attack to take the first day's objectives -
the village of Krithia and the high ridge of Achi Baba.
RAPID MACHINE GUN FIRE
The attack failed.
By the end of May, Hamilton's British casualties alone totalled 38,000 men,
and he cabled London for more troops, more ammunition.
Touring the Anzac bridgehead at that time, Hamilton saw...
"Men staggering under huge sides of frozen beef.
"Men struggling up cliffs with kerosene tins full of water.
"Men digging, men cooking.
"Men card-playing in small dens scooped out from the banks of yellow clay.
"Everyone wore a bank holiday air.
"Evidently the wranglings and worryings of mankind,
"miseries and concerns of the spirit, had fled the precincts of the valley.
"The boss, the bill, the girl, envy, malice, hunger, hatred,
"had scooted away to the Antipodes."
But there was another side to the picture and Hamilton saw that too.
"All the time, from that fiery crest line,
"there comes a constant trickle of wounded.
"Some dragging themselves painfully, others being carried on stretchers.
"Bomb wounds all. A ceaseless, silent stream of bandages and blood.
"Yet three out of four of the boys have grit left for a gay smile or a cheery nod to their comrades,
"waiting for their turn as they pass, pass, pass, down on their way to the sea."
The ding-dong struggle continued all through June and July.
By 1st August, each side had lost 57,000 - killed and wounded.
Each battle held its nightmare of shadeless heat and dust and death.
EXPLOSIONS AND GUN FIRE
Soon a cynical prayer was passed along the front line -
"Please, God, send us a victory, but not in our sector."
The smell of death thickened in the blinding sun,
and the strain of living day to day under enemy eyes took its effect.
During the day we could see the vultures heading down towards the bodies.
Both Turks and their own men, and occasionally, we would take a pot shot at them to keep them off,
particularly if we thought there was somebody wounded out in front.
But we couldn't fire too much for fear of giving away our own position.
The Turks had very good observation posts
and could see practically everything that we did.
Water was very scarce and when the summer came,
it brought the disease and the flies with it.
The rations were nothing - only bully beef and apricot jam.
And when we did get the summer, the jam was a regular issue -
nothing else but apricot.
When you opened that, it was almost like water -
you had to pour it onto your biscuit.
Before you could get that to your mouth, it was literally covered with flies.
You held the biscuit in one hand and waving flies off with the other.
Lethargy settled over the beaches between the battles.
1,000 men a week went down with dysentery.
It was a very weakening thing. We walked about like skeletons,
finding it difficult even to move at times.
And, of course, if anyone was out of the line,
there were heavy things to lift,
er...on fatigue,
water-carrying and helping to dig roads.
It was as much as we could do to lift the tool or whatever it was that we were carrying.
In faraway London, the ripples of Gallipoli made themselves felt.
Lord Fisher resigned and the Conservatives insisted Churchill should go too.
The shell shortage persisted.
The Liberal Government fell.
Gallipoli drew in more troops, more ammunition needed on the Western Front.
The War Council agreed Hamilton could have five more divisions ready for action by the end of July.
But by then, the equivalent of ten new Turkish divisions had dug in and were waiting.
The ripples of Gallipoli touched more than politics,
they touched the hearts of men
and worked their changes on human nature itself.
To the Allied soldiers fighting on the peninsula,
the Turks displayed not only fanatical bravery, but chivalry too.
The half-affectionate nickname Johnny Turk was born.
The Turkish soldier was very highly regarded
by me and all the men in our...on our side.
He was a clean fighter and one of the most courageous men in the world.
When they came, there was no beating about the bush.
They faced up to the heaviest rifle fire that you could put up
and nothing would stop them, they were almost fanatical.
We came to the conclusion that he was a very good bloke indeed.
We had lot of time for him.
The British virtues also revealed themselves - the extraordinary talent for improvisation.
For making a harbour on an open shore.
Making bombs out of jam tins.
Turning a hole in the gully into a little bit of a home.
Making a barrage without enough guns or shells.
The British also revealed their traditional stubbornness in defeat.
But there was a sense of sickening disappointment. The failure of the Navy could not be disguised.
When German submarines sunk two battleships in the Mediterranean,
the rest of these great vessels scurried to safety to their harbours.
As they steamed away, they took most of the hope that was left.
The glittering prize of Constantinople began to fade away.
Ian Hamilton had one last shot in his locker.
One more flanking attack up the peninsula - another landing.
More reinforcements arrived, including three divisions of Kitchener's new army,
who had the virtues and faults of this great volunteer force,
its eagerness, its devotion, its lack of training.
Its ardent young soldiers...
..and its elderly generals.
On August 6th,
the new Army divisions landed at Suvla Bay by a dry salt lake.
It was a complete surprise.
The way across the peninsula was open.
CRASH AND RUMBLE OF EXPLOSIONS
MACHINE GUN FIRE
But the untrained soldiers, and their bewildered leaders, failed to push on.
Hundreds brewed tea and bathed while vital hours slipped away.
On their right, the Anzacs were waging their bitterest battle -
Lone Pine.
The fighting went on for two days.
At the end, the Turks still held the commanding heights of Sari Bair.
This meant the British new army divisions could not advance either,
even when they found out what to do and where to go.
Muddle and missed chance had prevailed again.
The expedition was still blocked.
This was the end of hope.
Ian Hamilton wrote,
"An ugly dream came to me last night. I was being drowned,
"held violently under the Hellespont.
"For hours afterwards, I was haunted by the thought that the Dardanelles were fatal -
"that something sinister was afoot - that we, all of us, were pre-doomed."
Yet for weary months, the armies stayed.
It was trench warfare now -
barbed wire, snipers, machine guns, boredom.
Like France, yet not like France.
Gallipoli was further away.
No-one who went there ever came home on leave.
From Dover to Calais - 22 miles.
From Dover to Cape Helles - 3,000 miles.
On Gallipoli, in 37 weeks, 31,000 Allied soldiers were killed,
73,000 were wounded, 93,000 went sick.
For the wounded and sick, there were the flyblown casualty clearing stations.
bathing in the sea became an inexpressible joy.
To get away from the flies, wash off the dirt and dust,
to feel cool again.
One said, "In some ways, it was a curiously happy time."
In October, Ian Hamilton was recalled and his successor,
General Monroe, arriving from the Western Front, toured the beaches and came to a swift decision.
The peninsula must be evacuated.
Winston Churchill said,
"He came, he saw, he capitulated."
But there was no escaping facts.
Kitchener went to Gallipoli to see for himself. His conclusion was...
"Well, I've seen the place.
"It's an awful place and you'll never get through."
So the bitter decision was reached.
Evacuation.
But Gallipoli had one last extraordinary trick to play on the defeated Allies.
After all the miseries of heat and flies and diarrhoea,
a blizzard in November put 15,000 men out of action with frostbite.
It was the worst storm for 40 years.
And now they came to the last act on Gallipoli.
120,000 men, thousands of animals, hundreds of guns.
What would become of them all?
The evacuation plan was a masterpiece.
Ironic success in the midst of utter failure.
Every ruse was employed to persuade the Turks that things were normal.
Troops bathed and played games,
reliefs and ration parties went on with empty boxes.
Automatic devices fired rifles sporadically along the emptying trenches.
With sacking around their boots to dull the sound, the soldiers left.
The Australian, General Monash described their departure:
"Down dozens of little gullies leading back from the front lines
"came groups of six to a dozen men,
"the last closing the gully with barbed wire.
"All these columns kept joining up,
"like rivulets flowing into the main stream.
"At last they coalesced into four continuous lines.
"There was no check, no halting, no haste or running,
"just a steady, silent tramp in single file,
"without any lights or smoking.
"And every yard brought us nearer safety."
83,000 men were taken off from Suvla and Anzac in December, without a casualty.
In January, the whole performance was repeated at Cape Helles.
The tears streamed down my cheeks.
I just couldn't restrain 'em.
My eyes smarted. I walked the rest of the way with my eyes closed.
I knew it so well and I couldn't go short, I was in a trench.
As we got further from the line, near Backhouse Post,
I remember the advance we had on May 6th,
when more of my pals,
Petty Officer Warren and young Yeats.
I could even hear young Orton crying for his mother as he died.
I remember Colonel Coulter. Great big chap, legs thin as a poker,
guards officer.
I remember him leading the advance and going to his death
armed with a huge walking stick.
He told us before he landed, when we were on the boat,
that the eyes of the world would be upon us.
The eyes of the Turks certainly were
and so were their rifles.
But the world has forgotten us.
Another said, as he set off towards the boats,
"I hope they won't hear us going down to the beaches."
On the beaches, the last stores blazed, the ammunition exploded.
The great adventure was over.
The war went on, mounting to new ferocity.
No rest for the gaunt survivors.
Rest only for the unforgotten dead.