GURKHAS AT GALLIPOLI - PART THREE
GURKHAS AT GALLIPOLI – PART THREE
On the 14 May Hamilton’s pleas were answered in part when he was informed that the two Punjabi battalions would be withdrawn to be replaced by the First Battalion the 5th Gurkha Rifles and the Second Battalion the 10th Gurkha Rifles, both from Egypt. However, as the Punjabis would be withdrawn on 15 May and the two Gurkha battalions would not arrive until 2 June, the brigade had two British battalions temporarily attached [*].
The reason for the withdrawal of the two Punjabi battalions has been given as fear of a potential conflict of loyalties if Moslem troops were required to fight enemy soldiers of their own faith. While Christian Englishmen having no difficulty in fighting Christian Germans is not a fair analogy, Punjabi Mussalman soldiers had already been in action against Turkish soldiers on the Suez Canal, and the Germans on the Western Front had expended considerable propaganda effort to persuade Moslem soldiers that they should not be fighting the allies of the Caliph, to little avail. It is quite clear from the records of the Censor of Indian Mails that very few Moslem soldiers were affected in the slightest by German propaganda [†]. There were a few – very few – desertions to the Germans by Pathans on the Western Front but Pathans were known to have a propensity for desertion, always a temptation in India when a rifle was worth three years’ pay in the unpoliced tribal territories, or further away in Afghanistan. Overall, the commitment of Moslem soldiers was not in doubt, and the removal of the two battalions is far more likely to be the result of a perfectly normal military procedure: two battalions were being sent out so two battalions to replace them should return – and in any case only fifty percent of the 69th were Moslem and but three eights of the 89th.
The Third Battle of Krithia began with an artillery bombardment on 4 June, and at first all seemed to go well. Soon, however, the tide turned and although 14th Sikhs did manage to force a way through the Turkish wire, undamaged despite the weight of artillery fire directed at it, an attempt by 1/6th Gurkhas to emulate their action at Gurkha Bluff by outflanking the Turkish positions by way of the beach failed when they ran out of ‘bombs’ (grenades) and were unable to withstand a Turkish counter-attack, having to withdraw with one BO and 20 GOR killed. A further attempt by 1/5th Gurkhas later in the day was even more disastrous. The battalion had only twenty-five bombs to begin with and the Turks were fully alert after the attempt by 1/6th. The death toll of 1/5th Gurkhas was even more severe: four British and two Gurkha officers and twenty-seven GORs killed, and three British and three Gurkha officers and ninety GOR wounded. Unlike British battalions, with an establishment of around thirty-two British officers, Indian and Gurkha battalions had only eleven BOs plus the medical officer. Unlike British battalions where the replacement of officers was relatively easy, with no requirement to learn a language or a different culture, the Indian army in the First World War had a real problem finding BOs to replace losses, so to have seven BOs taken out in one action was a very serious matter indeed. Operationally the Indian and Gurkha officers, commissioned from the ranks after long service, were more than capable of commanding a subunit in action, but most had no command of the English language, which made liaison with British and ANZAC units difficult, and in any case Indian and Gurkha soldiers then very much looked to the BOs for leadership and inspiration.
At the end of the Third Krithia the gains were a paltry few hundred yards over a frontage of about three miles, and while there were huge Turkish casualties and about 400 Turkish prisoners taken, the British and French between them lost around 7,000 in killed, wounded and missing.
The next major action, the Battle of Gully Ravine, from 28 June to 5 July was rather more successful: the British lines were pushed forward about 1000 yards and five lines of Turkish trenches captured. 29 Division, which included 29 Indian Brigade, alone calculated that they had accounted for 16,000 Turkish casualties, of which 10,000 were dead. The Gurkha loses were considerable, however. 2/10th Gurkha Rifles, in its first major action at Gallipoli, had eighty-nine men killed and 224 wounded; 1/5th lost thirty killed and sixty-five wounded while the bill for 1/6th was forty-eight killed and 165 wounded. This scale of casualties could not be sustained without replacements, and on 9 July the brigade was withdrawn to Imbros, to recuperate and receive reinforcements.
Reinforcements of soldiers were obtained, mainly from the sister battalions in India or recruits from regimental depots, but requests for BOs from Indian battalions in Egypt were turned down flat, Maxwell instead asking for the return of 29 Indian Brigade – refused by Kitchener. Instead, replacement BOs came from battalions in India, but not necessarily from battalions of the same race of soldier. Thus while 2/10th Gurkhas managed to replace their loses with officers from their First Battalion, 1/6th Gurkhas got a captain from the 56th Rifles while 1/5th got a captain from 53rd Sikhs and two subalterns from the 92nd Punjabis. The lingua franca of the Indian Army was Urdu, a language of Persian and Arabic origin, which all BOs had to learn and pass an examination in before going on to master the language of the regiment into which they were commissioned. Similarly, all Viceroy Commissioned Officers (VCOs) – colloquially Indian Officers (IOs) or Gurkha Officers (GOs) – had to qualify in Urdu before being commissioned. Thus, while the new officers knew no Gurkhali they could communicate with the troops through the VCOs, although inevitably this did slow things down somewhat.
It was now clear to the War Office in London that if anything at all was to be salvaged from the Gallipoli operation then massive reinforcement, over and above that already supplied, was essential. Kitchener agreed that the newly formed IX Corps, of three New Army and, ultimately, two TF divisions would be made available. Hamilton’s plan was for IX Corps to land at Suvla Bay, five miles north of the ANZAC held coastal strip and drive inland against what was thought to be minimal opposition and turn the Turks’ right flank. At the same time, partly as a diversion from Suvla Bay but also as a major operation in its own right, an attack would be made out of the ANZAC area with the aim of capturing the Sari Bair ridge, with Hill 971 and Chanuk Bair, a first day objective back in April which was never achieved. If the ridge could be taken and held, and the Suvla Bay landings were successful, then the whole nature of the campaign would change, the army would dominate the land along the narrows and the navy might, after all, be able to penetrate to the Sea of Marmora. A further, diversionary, attack would be made in the Cape Helles area.
On the night of 5/6 August 29 Indian Brigade was shipped from Imbros back to ANZAC cove, and despite the landing being shelled the brigade was all ashore by mid-morning on 6 August and ready to be briefed for the forthcoming operation. The Indian brigade was to be part of the attack on the Sari Bair Ridge, which was to be assaulted from the west by two columns. The right hand (southern) column was to be formed of the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, supported by two sections (four guns) of 26th (Jacob’s) Indian Mountain Battery and a field company of New Zealand engineers. The left hand, northern column, would be composed of 4th Australian Brigade (commanded by Brigadier General Monash, who would later command the Australian Corps on the Western Front), 29 Indian Brigade, two sections of 21st (Kohat) Indian Mountain Battery and a field company of New Zealand engineers. The column commander would be the commander 29 Indian Brigade, Major General Cox. In essence the plan was a simple one: both columns would push north from ANZAC Cove, then turn right (east), assault the Sari Bair Ridge and be in position by first light on 7 August when the Suvla Bay landings would have taken place and the surrounding hills taken.
The Left-Hand column, which had farthest to go, set off at 2200 hrs, with the Australian Brigade leading, followed by General Cox and his headquarters and then 1/5th Gurkhas, 2/10th Gurkhas, 1/6th Gurkhas, the engineers, the guns and 14th Sikhs in rear. Having passed through the Turkish outpost line, which had been neutralised by New Zealand infantry shortly after last light, the column crept along the beach for about 1000 yards before turning inland. Now they were faced with a maze of ravines, spurs and re-entrants with only very rough sketch maps to guide them. Some of the men of the Australian brigade became exhausted in struggling through the knee-high scrub and thorns and the whole column had to stop and wait while they rested. In hindsight it might have been better for the Indian Brigade to have pressed on without them, but in the dark in unfamiliar territory no one was prepared to take that risk. The column moved on, but movement was far slower than expected and by first light both columns were at the foot of the ridge with no possibility of getting any further in daylight. In the morning a bayonet charge by the New Zealanders, a company of 1/5th Gurkhas and one of 2/10th Gurkhas almost got onto Chanuk Bair, on the south of the ridge, but were stopped short of the summit. For the rest of that day and the next the brigade tried time and again to get up onto the crest, but with no success. Between 200 and 500 yards below it, any movement drew instant retaliation from the Turkish defenders, and the only occurrence of note was the arrival in the 1/6th Gurkhas’ area of a small party of the Warwickshire Regiment commanded by one Captain WJ Slim, who was so impressed by what he saw that he transferred to the 6th Gurkhas after the war, commanded a battalion of the 7th Gurkhas and eventually became a field marshal.
At last, on the morning of 9th August, after a twenty-minute naval bombardment, 1/6th Gurkhas and a small party of the 6th Lancashire Fusiliers actually got onto the summit of Sari Bair. It was a furious battle, with bayonets, kukris and rifle butts, but the Turks fled down the western slope, pursued by Gurkhas whose blood was up and who were in no mood to take prisoners. From the top the men could see the Straits and both sides of the Peninsula, and as they dug in and waited for the New Army brigade that was to reinforce them, they must have felt that at long last the tide of war was turning in their favour. It was not to be. The New Army brigade got lost and never appeared, and suddenly shellfire exploded all along the ridge. The 6th Gurkhas believed then (and still do) that this was the Royal Navy, who had mistaken the Gurkhas for Turks, but having walked the ground in detail including examining the remains of British type temporary trenches, this author is of the view that the shelling came from Turkish guns on the Asiatic side [‡]. In any event the Gurkhas were forced off the ridge and now clung grimly on to the western slopes, supported by the other battalions of the brigade. The Commanding Officer, Major Allanson, was the only combatant BO who almost got to the summit, being wounded just short of the ridge, all the other BOs being either killed or wounded, and when the officer sent up to take command – a captain of the 53rd Sikhs – was killed, command devolved upon the Subedar Major, Gambirsing Pun, assisted as an English interpreter by the medical officer, Captain Phipson. On 10 August 1/6th Gurkhas, the only troops to actually tread on the summit of Sari Bair were ordered to withdraw from their exposed position short of the crest, and the last chance to turn the Gallipoli operation had gone, although not all saw that at the time.
Meanwhile Hamilton, seeing what the Gurkhas had achieved at Sari Bair, and realising what they might have achieved had they been reinforced and had the Suvla landings been the hoped-for success, asked for yet another Gurkha battalion. Surprisingly, perhaps, he got it, and the First Battalion 4th Gurkha Rifles was withdrawn from the line in France, embarked at Marseilles at a strength of fourteen BOs, 20 GOs and 990 GOR, including drafts from the depot in India and the all-Gurkha Burma Military Police (actually an infantry regiment whose role was keeping the peace in Burma), delivered to Imbros on 30 August and was landed on the Peninsula between then and 13 September.
By this time 29 Indian Brigade had been in support for the attack on Hill 10, an attempt to push out the perimeter of the Suvla landings and which saw the British line advance no farther than the southern slopes of that hill, where it was to remain for the rest of the campaign. From the end of August onwards the campaign degenerated into trench warfare – siege warfare – with 29 Indian Brigade taking its turn in the trenches and defending against determined Turkish attempts to dislodge them. With Bulgaria in the war and Romania out of it, German supplies to Turkey were more easily delivered, and this was quickly evident in the increase in Turkish artillery ammunition fired at the British lines. Then the heat, the thirst, the flies and the dysentery of the summer were replaced by the rain, the snow, the sleet, the gales and the frostbite of the Turkish winter. On occasions flash floods forced the evacuation of trenches and 1/4th Gurkhas had a particularly difficult role in mining and counter mining, not normally a Gurkha speciality but something of which they had some experience while on the Western Front. Men suffered terribly from frostbite and trench foot: some could only crawl and yet refused to report sick until given a direct order to do so. Gurkhas going to sleep found that on waking their Gurkha hats had frozen to their heads.
On 14 October Sir Ian Hamilton was relieved of his command and replaced by General Sir Charles Monro. While Hamilton could perhaps be criticised for not driving his subordinate generals hard enough, and for not insisting that his advice should be treated as orders, to do so was not the way the British army operated at that time. It is questionable whether any other commander would have done any better. The simple fact is that Britain was then in no position to prosecute the war in two major theatres at the same time, and the Western Front took – and had to take – priority. The Gallipoli front lacked depth, was overlooked by strong Turkish positions, and even if fresh divisions had been available – which they were not – there was insufficient room to deploy them. This was the conclusion that Monro quickly came to, and when Kitchener arrived to see for himself on 9 November, initially unutterably opposed to any thought of abandonment, he too agreed that evacuation was the only possible solution. It was the one feature of the campaign that was effected with complete success.
Between 18 and 20 December the Gurkhas and the Sikhs of 29 Indian Infantry Brigade, their boots covered with socks to muffle any sound and with strings of firecrackers to emulate desultory firing left behind in their trenches, with one BO and twenty-five men of 1/5th Gurkhas as rearguard, crept away from the firing line and made their way to Anzac Cove from where they were evacuated. The battle casualties of the Gurkha battalion that had been in the Peninsula longest – 1/6th Gurkhas – were seven BOs killed and fourteen wounded (161% of establishment), three GOs killed and eleven wounded (77 %) and 169 GOR killed and 643 wounded (110 %). The figures for the other battalions were in proportion. On 7 January 1916 the last Allied troops left the Peninsula. The withdrawal was conducted in complete secrecy in a brilliant example of the Royal Navy carrying out one of its traditional roles – removing a beaten army to be used somewhere else.
The Indian army elements that took part in the Gallipoli Campaign – and while this essay has concentrated on the Gurkha contingent, the Sikhs, the Punjabis, the 7th Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade (regiment in modern terms), the Indian medical units and the Indian Mule Corps were there too – all performed in the way that one would expect from long service professional soldiers.
In January 1918 General Sir Ian Hamilton’s secretary wrote to the commanding Officer of 1/6th Gurkha Rifles:
‘…it is Sir Ian Hamilton’s most cherished conviction that had he been given more Gurkhas at the Dardanelles he would never have been held up by the Turks.’[§]
Of course, had two or three divisions of Gurkhas been available in April things would have been very different – but had two or three divisions of regular, trained and experienced troops been available, whether British, Indian or Gurkha, things would have been very different. The facts were that they were not, and the sadness of the Gallipoli campaign is that what at first seemed a practicable undertaking, that might well have achieved great things, degenerated into failure and disaster due to over optimism and the lack of the wherewithal to properly mount and support it.
Withal, the Indian Army, and particularly the Gurkhas, came out of Gallipoli with heads held high and reputations enhanced, albeit at terrible cost.
SOURCES
War Diaries 1/4 GR, 1/5 GR, 1/6 GR, 2/10 GR all in The Gurkha Museum, Winchester (also in TNA WO 95)
MacDonnell, Ranald & Macaulay, Marcus, A History of the Fourth Gurkha Rifles 1857 – 1937, Vol I, Wm Blackwood & Sons, London 1940
Regimental Committee, History of the Fifth Royal Gurkha Rifles (Frontier Force) 1858 - 1928, Gale and Polden, Aldershot, 1930
Ryan, DJA,Strahan, GC & Jones JK, Historical Record of the 6th Gurkha Rifles, Gale and Polden, Aldershot 1925
Mullaly, BR, Bugle and Kukri, the Story of 10th Princess Mary’s Own Gurkha Rifles, Wm Blackwood, London, 1957
Lee, John, A Soldier’s Life, General Sir Ian Hamilton 1853 – 1947, MacMillan, London, 2000
Aspinall Oglander, CF, Official History of the Great War: Military operations – Gallipoli, Two Vols, Wm Heinemann. London, 1929 and 1932
Authors Interviews 1970 – 1973 (as most Gurkhas falsify their age to enlist, most of the interviewees were only in their early seventies)
[*] Both Punjabi battalions later performed very creditably on the Western Front
[†] British Library India and Oriental Section, Report of the Censor of Indian Mails France 1914-18 Vol I, L/MIL/5/825 and Printed Reports Censor of Indian Mails France Dec 1914 – June 1918, L/MIL/5/828.
[‡] The flat trajectories of the guns of the ships, firing from the south and the west of the Peninsula, would not easily – if at all – have reached the eastern slopes where the bulk of the Gurkhas were. In any case the Gurkhas wore white armbands and had reflective tin panels fixed to their backs so that the navy could distinguish friendly from enemy troops. The Navy were highly offended by the accusation at the time.
[§] Quoted in Captain DJA Ryan DSO [Adjutant 1/6th Gurkhas at Gallipoli], Major GC Strahan OBE, Captain JK Jones, Historical Record of the 6th Gurkha Rifles, Gale and Polden, Aldershot 1925