Australasia Triumphant!: With the Australians and New Zealanders in the Great War on Land and Sea

by Arthur St. John Adcock

Another description says that the strip of beach with the cliffs sloping steeply up from it has resemblances to Folkestone; another compares it with its wild hinterland to the grimness and barrenness of Dartmoor; and yet another pictures the whole Peninsula as like a sea petrified in the height of a storm, heaving to gaunt ridges and falling away into deep troughs and hollows, to sweep up and over again in a wave-like succession of tumultuous hills.

This was the terribly inhospitable country that the Australasians approached warily in the smallest dark hours of the morning. The land lay almost invisible in the black depths of the night; no sound came out to them, and no light glimmered anywhere. Silently and shrouded in the shadows the warships took up their appointed positions in readiness, at the right moment, to cover the landing with a hail of shell-fire; the steam pinnaces, with their strings of boats loaded to the gunwale with eager troops, glided past them towards the coast; and after a brief interval a flotilla of destroyers crept on their track, packed with more men to be rushed ashore as soon as the covering parties had obtained a footing.

At this stage happened one of the most daring of the many instances of individual heroism with which the progress of the Gallipoli campaign has been marked; a deed that was fittingly rewarded with the D.S.O. It had been suggested that three boatloads of men should be sent ahead of the rest to land and light a series of flares along the beach with the two-fold object of enabling the invaders to get a glimpse of where they were going, and of drawing the enemy's fire and so disclosing his whereabouts for the benefit of the ships' gunners who were waiting to begin the bombardment. Major Freyberg, a born New Zealander and in command of the landing party at this point, had suggested to Major-General Paris, his chief, that the men who went on such a desperate mission would certainly be annihilated, and had offered to swim ashore and light the flares himself; and Mr. Malcom Ross, who accompanied the New Zealand forces as official war-correspondent, has related the story of this plucky adventure in The New Zealand Herald.

A destroyer was to have dropped the major into the sea within half a mile of the beach, but the distance was misjudged in the darkness, and he found he had to do a swim of nearer two miles, "with three oil flares and two Holmes lights which he carried in a waterproof bag, with sufficient air to support the weight in the water. He also carried, attached to a belt round his waist, a small revolver and a sheath knife." He calculated that he was swimming for an hour and a half before the sea shallowed and he could feel the earth under his feet, and as the usual landing-place was powerfully protected with barbed-wire entanglements, he had to grope his way along till he found an accessible spot where he could emerge from the sea. He was threatened with cramp, for the water was bitterly cold, but without loss of time he cautiously made his way inland to a place where on the previous day, when he had reconnoitred the coast in a destroyer, he had seen what he had taken to be a line of trenches. When he arrived at them, a quarter of a mile from the sea, he discovered that they were dummies, intended for the ships to waste their shells on, "and he could hear the Turks talking and see them striking matches to light their cigarettes in the lines higher up."

Crawling back to the beach, he lit his first flare, dived, and swam for his life. Firing commenced immediately from the Turkish trenches, but the major landed again safely farther along the beach, lit his second flare, dived, and got away, and still farther along landed once more and set his third blazing; then took to the water and was swimming for an hour before the destroyer could find him and pick him up.

Meanwhile the destroyer, guided by the Turkish fire, had opened on the enemy's trenches with her guns and maxims, and the warships farther out were not slow to take a hand in the proceedings.

It was now towards five in the morning, and already the dawn was showing a pale glimmer above the crests of the hills. The boats with their loads of troops were nearing the shore, and squads of Turks could be dimly seen scattering about the beach to intercept them. Their firing from below and the fire of rifles and machine guns from the heights was terribly effective, but, with their comrades falling dead or wounded beside them, the men in the boats remained grimly, resolutely silent, their coolness and steady discipline never for an instant shaken.

"The moment the boats touched land the Australians' turn had come," in Sir Ian Hamilton's glowing words. "Like lightning they leaped ashore, and each man as he did so went straight as his bayonet at the enemy. So vigorous was the onslaught that the Turks made no attempt to withstand it and fled from ridge to ridge, pursued by the Australian infantry.

"The attack was carried out by the 3rd Australian Brigade under Major (temporary Colonel) Sinclair Maclagan, D.S.O. The 1st and 2nd Brigades followed promptly, and were all disembarked by 2 p.m., by which time 12,000 men and two batteries of Indian Mountain Artillery had been landed. The disembarkation of further artillery was delayed owing to the fact that the enemy's heavy guns opened on the anchorage, and forced the transports, which had been subjected to continuous shelling from the field guns, to stand further out to sea."

All day the fighting continued with unflagging determination and ferocity on both sides. The Turks had been cleared out of their first trench in a flash, and the Australians and New Zealanders went swarming up the steep, scrub-covered cliff to the trench that was devastating them from above; they wasted no time in firing back, and troubled little about taking cover; they just swung and scrambled up as swiftly and straightly as was practicable, hurled themselves into that second trench, and brawny giants among them were literally pitching the Turks out on the points of their bayonets before the enemy had fully realised what was happening to him and made haste to climb out unassisted and bolt headlong up the cliff and over the ridge with the Australasians in hot pursuit. Officers and men were mixed indiscriminately. Here would be a small group, unofficered, holding an advanced ridge and triumphantly hurling back the desperate counter-attack of a force of thrice their numbers; here and there a solitary sniper, snugly ensconced behind a boulder, putting in some useful work entirely on his own; and here again would be a detachment of Australians, New Zealanders and Maoris, flitting nimbly from cover to cover through the brushwood to dash suddenly into the open with fearsome war-cries and drive the Turks from some post where they had rallied farther inland.