GURKHAS AT GALLIPOLI - PART TWO - FIRST BLOOD
GURKHAS AT GALLIPOLI – PART TWO – FIRST BLOOD
In hindsight having failed to force the narrows by the navies, the operation should have been abandoned at that point, but now began what in modern military parlance is described as ‘mission creep’. It had already been accepted that once the forts had been knocked out troops would have to land to occupy them, and one brigade of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC Corps) training in Egypt, was reluctantly accepted as being available, along with Naval landing parties and Royal Marines. Now, however, Churchill wanted a major assault on the peninsula by the army which would knock out the forts from the landward side and allow the navy to push on up to Constantinople. Churchill, supported by others including the Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George, was convinced and continued to be convinced that the already large casualties on the Western Front were unnecessary and that Britain should seek to attack the ‘soft underbelly’ by ‘knocking away the props’, the props being Austria, Turkey and, eventually, Bulgaria. That Germany was the prop, without whose money, industrial base and expertise the Austrians, Turks and Bulgars could not wage war, passed Churchill by. The generals were aghast: no troops could be spared from the Western Front, for the only way to win the war was by defeating the main enemy – Germany – in the main theatre – the Western Front.
Against his better judgement Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, acquiesced in what was now a political decision: the army would invade the Gallipoli Peninsula, and the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) consisting of the whole of the ANZAC corps, the Royal Naval Division and the British 29th Division was hastily cobbled together. The ANZAC corps was barely trained and inexperienced. The Royal Naval Division, consisting of Royal Marines who did know what they were doing and matelots converted into infantrymen who did not, was a Churchillian invention created when the Royal Navy, the biggest in the world, found that once it had mobilised its reserves it had more sailors than it had hammocks. Men who had expected to spend the war shovelling coal, picking oakum and dancing the hornpipe found themselves given a rifle and bayonet and told they were going to fight the Germans on land. The 29th Division was, it is true, composed of regular soldiers, but it was made up of battalions that had come home from a variety of overseas stations and had never operated or trained together as a division. The whole force was short of artillery, medical support and supplies of all kinds.
General Sir Ian Hamilton was selected to command the force, probably as much because he was available (he commanded Home Forces in UK, responsible for the defence of the homeland and the training of Territorial Force and New Army battalions for the Western Front) and because he was well known to Kitchener. Hamilton was a very experienced and competent soldier, whose high reputation in both civil and military worlds was to be shattered by the coming campaign. Originally commissioned into the Suffolk Regiment he transferred into the Gordon Highlanders and served in the Second Afghan War, the First Boer War, the Gordon Relief Expedition, the Third Burma War, the Chitral and Tirah expeditions and the Second Boer War, followed by an attachment as an observer to the Japanese army in the Russo Japanese War of 1904. Very much a moderniser and a protégé of Roberts and Kitchener, he had progressed rapidly (for the time) up the promotion ladder and by 1907 was a full general. With extensive command experience on active service he had also filled a number of demanding staff appointments including that of the Military Secretary and Quartermaster General in the War Office in London. Prior to assuming the UK command he had been Commander in Chief Mediterranean and Inspector General Overseas Forces. Despite being aged sixty-two in 1915 he was lean and physically fit. He was warned for the job on 12 March 1915 and arrived off Lemnos – an island 20 miles from the Gallipoli Peninsula, formerly Turkish but Greek since 1912 – from where the operation was to be mounted on 17 March. When examining the troops available to him Hamilton was not unnaturally concerned, particularly when his staff alerted him to the paucity of administrative support he could expect from Egypt, where the garrison under General Sir John Maxwell had its own problems, including the defence of the Suez Canal against determined Turkish attacks.
Maxwell was doing his best. But he rather dug his heels in when Hamilton asked for a brigade of Gurkhas. Hamilton was well acquainted with Gurkhas from his time in India and thought that they, being mountain men, would be ideally suited to the terrain, especially if, as he suspected, the land operation metamorphosed from being in support of further naval attacks into the main effort. The Indian army only had twenty regular battalions of Gurkhas. Six of these were on the Western Front and could not be spared. Of the others in early 1915 one was about to be deployed to Mesopotamia, four were in Egypt and the rest were spread between Persia, the Northwest Frontier and being prepared for Salonika. There were, of course, extra battalions raised for the war, but they were largely being used as battle casualty replacements for the Western Front. Hamilton was told that there was no all-Gurkha brigade in Egypt, but that he could have 29 Indian Infantry Brigade, which had one Gurkha battalion, but at this stage there was no effort made to replace the non-Gurkha battalions with Gurkhas.
Hamilton’s plan was for the Royal Naval Division to demonstrate against Bulair, at the top of the Peninsula on the Aegean side, while the French – who, suspicious of British imperial ambitions in a vital area, had agreed to join in with a four-brigade division – would mount a diversionary attack on Kum Kale, on the Asian side. At the same time the 29th Division would land on five beaches at Cape Helles, at the tip of the Peninsula and push five miles inland to capture the village of Krithia and Achhi Baba, a feature that dominated the south of the Peninsula. Simultaneously the ANZAC Corps would land twelve miles up the west coast of the Peninsula and capture the Sari Bair ridge, three miles inland and dominating the narrows. Those two objectives achieved, the Turkish defenders would be trapped between the two British formations and could be mopped up. The forts could then be dealt with from the landward side and the navy could sail up into the sea of Marmora. During April the mounting units were shipped from Egypt and the UK to Lemnos, and on 25 April the landings began.
It did not go as planned. Some of the 29 Division beaches were only lightly defended whereas at others resistance was fierce. By nightfall the division was ashore and held the beachhead but was far from being able to assault Achhi Baba. Due to the currents the ANZAC units had landed a mile north of where they should have done, and with the men carried away with enthusiasm control was lost, with subunits and individuals plunging inland. It was unfortunate for the attackers that the Turkish division looking after the north of the Peninsula was that commanded by Mustafa Kemal Bey[*] who was in the process of conducting an anti-invasion exercise, and by the end of the day the ANZAC corps was clinging onto a narrow ridge just off the beach.
Now began a slow, and expensive in casualties, advance from Cape Helles with the intention of taking Krithia as a prelude to capturing Achhi Baba – originally a first day objective. After the complete failure in the First Battle of Krithia from 28 April, mission began to creep again, and Kitchener agreed reinforcement by the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade followed by the East Lancashire Territorial Division.
The 29th Indian Brigade landed on V Beach on Cape Helles on 1 May. Unlike the 25 April landings which resulted in huge casualties, the Indians were met with only desultory shelling from the Asian side of the Straits. The brigade was commanded by Major General Herbert Vaughan Cox and consisted of the 14th (Ferozopore) Sikhs, 69th Punjabis (Cox’s old regiment), 89th Punjabis and the 1st Battalion 6th Gurkha Rifles. Cox was 55 in 1915 and because brigade commanders in India were usually district commanders too, they often held, as did Cox, a rank higher than would be justified by command of a brigade. 14th Sikhs was a class regiment consisting entirely of Sikhs, and the Gurkha battalion consisted entirely of Gurkhas, mainly Gurungs and Magars from West Nepal, although the exigencies of war had necessitated the enlistment of some clans (notably Lohars) not normally considered martial material. The composition of the two Punjabi battalions was less straightforward. 69th Punjabis was a class company battalion consisting of two companies of Punjabi Mussalmans, one of Sikhs and one of Punjabi Hindus, while in an even more complicated symbiosis 89th Punjabis had one and a half companies of Sikhs, one and a half companies of Punjabi Mussalmans, half a company of Rajputs and half a company of Brahmins. Operationally the Brahmins and the Rajputs formed one company between them, while the half company of Sikhs and half company of Mussalmans formed another[†].
To begin with the Indian brigade marched hither and thither to act in support of areas considered vulnerable and were also employed in building piers so that stores need no longer be unloaded over open beaches. Casualties during this period were not great, but there was a steady trickle caused by Turkish shelling and patrolling. The experience of 1/6 Gurkha Rifles was typical when in the thirty-six hours after landing they had one British Officer (BO) wounded, one Gurkha Other Rank (GOR) killed and thirteen wounded, mainly minor wounds caused by shelling.
The Second Battle of Krithia began on 6 May and when it ended three days later the British front had been pushed forward about 500 yards, without capturing Krithia or getting anywhere near Achhi Baba. Losses were enormous. At the end of the battle only the Indian Brigade and eight Territorial Force battalions were up to strength and available, and it was now clear that any idea of a swift capture of the Peninsula by the MEF must be abandoned, and that if the British were to stay (and at this stage the damage to British prestige that would be caused by withdrawal was considered unacceptable) then massive reinforcement was essential. During the battle 29 Indian Brigade had been in reserve, but on 9 May attached to the 29th Division they went into the front line for the first time, on the left (west) flank with 1/6 Gurkha Rifles holding the area from the sea to Gully Ravine and 89th Punjabis on their right, with the other two battalions to the rear in support. Ahead of the Gurkhas and about 500 yards away was a Turkish bastion on a mound overlooking the sea and dominating the ground between it and the British line. It was situated on the southern bank of a ravine (later known as ‘Gurkha Ravine’) that ran northeast to southwest to the sea, and was surrounded by barbed wire and contained entrenched infantry and machine gun posts. The mound, or bluff, had been attacked by both the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers on 8 and 9 May with no success. Major General Cox thought that rather than attacking the position head on, it might be possible to take it by night from the shore. The task was given to 1/6 Gurkha Rifles.
During the day of 10 May a BO of the battalion went on board a ship of the Royal Navy to examine the position through a telescope from out at sea, while that night a Jemadar and a small patrol crept forward across no man’s land until fired on, when having noted the positions from whence the fire came they returned to their own lines. After further seaborne reconnaissance on the morning of 12 May the battalion’s plan was put to Major General Hunter-Weston, the divisional commander, and approved. That afternoon two eighteen pounder batteries of the Royal Field Artillery registered targets on the mound, but also, in order not to give away the objective, a number of others all along the Turkish front line, while a cruiser and a destroyer of the Royal Navy stood by to provide more fire support. That night at last light two companies of Gurkhas crept down the cliffs to the shoreline and moved along it to a position just short of the mouth of the ravine at the foot of the mound, while the artillery began a bombardment of the mound and the 89th Punjabis provided a diversion by opening fire on the Turkish trenches to the east of Gully Ravine.
Once the artillery bombardment stopped the navy ships opened fire on the landward end of the ravine, where the Turks had established machine guns firing down the ravine, and under cover of that the Gurkhas sprinted across the mouth of the ravine and the lead company began to climb up the mound. By 2000 hours they were there, to find it virtually undefended. The Turks had apparently only manned the position in force during the day, and the second company was swiftly called up and both began to dig trenches while a telephone line was laid back to battalion headquarters. By first light the battalion machine gun section was also up and the brigade was arranging for the other two companies of the Gurkhas plus the 14th Sikhs to join the British front line to the captured mound – which from now on was officially named ‘Gurkha Bluff’[‡] . By the time that the Turks mounted a counterattack it was far too late. By last light on 13 May the British firing line had advanced 500 yards on the left and 150 yards or so on the right from that held by the Indian Brigade on the morning of the previous day. The butchers bill for the operation was eighteen GOR killed, and three BOs and thirty-nine GOR wounded in 1/6th Gurkhas and three Indian Other Ranks (IOR) killed and 50 IOR wounded in the 14th Sikhs.
The success of 1/6th Gurkhas encouraged Hamilton in his view that more Gurkhas was what was wanted, but in the view of this author at least (a Gurkha for thirty years), who has walked the ground in detail, the operation could equally well have been carried out by any battalion of 29 Indian Brigade, hard bitten regular soldiers that they were. That the Gurkhas were lucky enough to be given it was purely because they happened to hold the portion of the line closest to the beach.
[*] Later Kemal Atatürk ‘father of the Turks’ first president of the Republic of Turkey who transformed the crumbling Ottoman empire into a modern secular state and abolished irregular verbs in the Turkish language by act of parliament.
[†] The Indian Army infantry, with the exception of those battalions on the Western Front, had not yet changed to the British system of four rifle companies but still had eight small companies linked together in pairs forming four ‘double companies’ and commanded by one BO. A double company was the equivalent of a British company and to avoid confusion I have used the term company, rather than double company, throughout.
[‡] A slightly unfortunate nomenclature, Gurkha Bluff Day became a regimental holiday. Our replies to queries as to why we were not at work that it was Gurkha Bluff Day, often drew the tired response ‘isn’t every day?’.