It has been said that the task of the Anzacs at this period was to keep open this door to the vitals of the Turkish army and to hold as many of the Turks as possible, and thus relieve the pressure on the Krithia front. It can be said with equal force that the task of the Turks arrayed against them was to hold as many of the Anzacs on this front as possible. Judged from these angles, both Turks and Britons were successful.
In the following week both the British and the French received substantial reenforcements. On May 14 General d'Amade, in command of the French forces at the Dardanelles, was relieved by General Gouraud, who, at the age of 47, was the youngest officer of his rank in the French army. He had enjoyed conspicuous success in northern France, and had been nicknamed by his soldiers, the "Lion of the Argonne." It was believed that his experience in the country of the Argonne and the style of fighting that had developed there would make him especially valuable to Sir Ian Hamilton, who, of course, had had no previous experience with the new style of warfare.
On May 18, 1915, began the second battle of Anzac. Elaborate preparations were made by General Liman von Sanders, the German commander in chief of the Ottoman forces. Fully 30,000 troops are said to have been gathered for the attack upon the Colonial troops. The latter were fully prepared, warned of the concentration by the observers on the warships and the aerial scouts.
About midnight of that day the attack began. After a preliminary bombardment of the British positions, successive infantry attacks in massed formation were launched against the trenches. For six hours the battle waged, but the Anzacs' positions were not shaken. In the end the ground in front of the trenches was literally covered with the dead and wounded. An actual observer wrote of the scene:
"The ground presents an extraordinary sight when viewed through the trench periscopes. Two hundred yards away, and even closer in some places, are the Turkish trenches, and between them and our lines the dead lie in hundreds. There are groups of twenty or thirty massed together, as if for mutual protection, some lying on their faces, some killed in the act of firing; others hung up in the barbed wire. In one place a small group actually reached our parapet, and now lie dead on it, shot at point-blank range or bayoneted. Hundreds of others lie just outside their own trenches, where they were caught by rifle or shrapnel when trying to regain them. Hundreds of wounded must have perished between the lines."
There was a lull after this terrible slaughter, during which the Turks made unsuccessful overtures to obtain an armistice to bury their dead. On May 20, 1915, toward evening, the Turks again attacked, concentrating on Quinn's Point, a strong Anzac redoubt at the outer edge of the Australian trenches. No results were obtained and finally, out of sheer necessity for reasons of health, an opportunity was given the Turks to bury their slain.
There was some additional fighting on this line during the remaining days of May, but nothing of real importance occurred. It was calculated, at the end of the month, that the total British losses, killed, wounded and missing and not including sick, was just short of 40,000 men. The figures for the sick were not given out, but reports made later make it tolerably certain that they must have numbered between 30,000 and 35,000 additional. The intensity of the struggle at the Dardanelles will be realized when it is pointed out that the total British casualties in the three years of the South African War were only 38,156.
During the last two weeks of May the British and French troops on the Krithia fronts made elaborate preparations for an attack upon the Turkish lines. Miners had been brought out from England and France, and mining and sapping had been conducted on a large scale. On June 4, 1915, Sir Ian Hamilton ordered the attack. It was preceded by the usual heavy naval and artillery bombardment. Finally, at noon, the mines were exploded, and the troops advanced along the whole line with fixed bayonets.
It is calculated that the British had no less than 24,000 men on a front of less than 4,000 yards. Their attack was delivered with tremendous power and was brilliantly successful. At one point, however, where the French line linked up with the British, the Turks discovered a weak spot. By noon about a third of a mile had been gained over a front of four miles, but soon afterward the French began to weaken and subsequently were compelled to retreat. This exposed the right wing of the British, which was enfiladed by the Turkish riflemen and machine gun batteries and suffered terrible losses. The Collingwood battalion of the Royal Naval Reserve, according to Sir Ian Hamilton, having gone forward in support when the right wing was hard pressed, was practically wiped out.
The attack slackened in the afternoon and nightfall found almost all the gains of the morning lost to the heavy Turkish counterattacks. So exhausted were the British and French troops that it was impossible to renew the battle on the following day.