GALLIPOLI:BIRTH OF NATIONS

Gallipoli. Nearly 100 years ago, this place, a modern day paradise with pine groves that grow right down to the long, yellow sand beaches that are lapped by the crystal clear waters of the Dardanelles, was hell on earth. Thousands came here to fight from all around the world and legends were born; John Simpson, the medic with a donkey who helped countless wounded, the Turkish soldier dragging an injured Allied soldier to safety. Thousands came here to die. Mustafa Kemal, the Turkish commander who later became Ataturk the father of modern Turkey, famously told his men "I don't order you to attack, I order you to die.” They did.

Enlisting poster from Australia.

Our tour group of 30 consisted entirely of Australians and New Zealanders, all drawn to this place of suffering by a shared knowledge that something important happened here, something bigger than war. It’s the sort of place that demands the utmost respect. For example, I thought at the bare minimum, one should wear a shirt. One of the young guys on our tour failed in this regard. These sorts of situations bring out the grumpy old man in me. I was hoping two things that a) he was an Australian and b) that I wouldn’t have to ask him to put his shirt on.  When we reached ANZAC Cove, he did the right thing; he covered up, saving me from doing my curmudgeon impersonation. We spoke to him later; he was from Whangarei, in New Zealand. 100 years earlier, men like him and me died alongside each other here. Now we come to pay our respects to those that died and shake our heads at the futility of war.

ANZAC Cove as it is today

Gallipoli was the brainchild of Churchill, who was at the time the First Lord of the Admiralty. He was convinced of Turkish fragility. He wanted to ensure that Russia had access to its Black Sea ports and eventually hoped to open up a Balkan front against the Central Powers. On the first count, the Turks were far from fragile. With a grasp of modern warfare and weaponry boosted by its military links to Germany, and a growing surge of nationalistic pride, the Turks were no pushovers.  The intelligence that the Allies were reliant on was far from intelligent: it greatly underestimated the strength and size of the Ottoman Army in the region, used maps that were wrong or failed to accurately show the topography of the region. The region where the troops landed is rugged, rising to several hundred feet above sea level, with the Turks dug in in strong positions that allowed their machine gunners to dominate the peninsula. In summer, it was brutally hot; the reverse in the winter. All in all, it was one of the Allies biggest failure of the war and a failure that Churchill almost never recovered from. World War 2 largely redeemed him but the Gallipoli Campaign remained a large blight on his proud record. However, the blame is not entirely Churchill's. Minister of War Lord Kitchener, hero of Africa, took too long to commit to the plan. Naval admirals refused to continue bombardments at key times and the generals refused to admit that the tactic of just throwing huge numbers of men at well set and positioned machine guns wouldn't work. Ironically, the greatest success of the campaign was the evacuation. Troop numbers steadily reduced and by December 1915, plans were made to evacuate all troops. It was done with little fanfare or loss of life, via the use of cunning ruses like self-firing guns and a change in troop patterns that deceived the Turks into thinking that more men remained than there actually were.

The terrain was demanding. This outcrop was know as the Sphinx.

 Every stop on the tour we did around the peninsula was poignant. First stop was ANZAC Cove, a small, nondescript beach, where Turkish machine-gunners shooting from elevated positions killed and maimed hundreds, if not thousands of ANZAC troops on the eventful first day landing on the 25^th April, 1915 (now enshrined as ANZAC Day, Australia and New Zealand’s shared day of remembrance). Walking to the first Allied cemetery from ANZAC Cove, we come across a World War 1 bunker, possibly used by the Ottomans to pour bullets down onto the beach.  The small cemetery overlooked the ocean shaded by a large Trojan oak. 

Allied war cemetery

Around the corner from here is a memorial that contains Ataturk’s immortal and highly evocative words.

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives....

You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country

Therefore rest in peace,

There is no difference between the johnnies

and the mehmets to us where they lie side by side

here in this country of ours...

You, the mothers

who sent their sons from far away countries,

wipe away your tears”

The memorial with Ataturk's speech.

I had to wipe away my tears and I’m no mother. It’s hard not to shed a tear here in this place of sorrow. Gravestones of young men in their prime cut short, the youngest on the Allied side a mere 15 year old, who like so many lied about his age to go to war. The last gentlemanly war, it’s been called, as if a gentlemanly war wasn’t an oxymoron. I would prefer to think of it as the last major conflict of naivety, a war where the honour of battle still held a glamour, a mystique to the masses. Bonds formed here, between soldiers, friendly and enemy, familiar and alien. But make no mistake, this was warfare at its most brutal. A medieval war fought with modern technology.

Statue of a Turkish soldier saving an injured Allied soldier.

The heart-strings continued to get pulled. Near Quinn’s post, stands a statue of the Turkish soldier pulling an injured Allied soldier to safety, seemingly justifying the term gentlemanly war.  Maybe, it was war-time propaganda although reports do speak of it or something similar happening on the frontline. We come to Lone Pine, the main Australian memorial and cemetery where 2,000 odd Australian men died one day in an area about the size of a rugby field .6,000 Turks were injured or killed defending the position. 

Lone Pine, the Australian memorial and cemetery.

Around here were trenches, sometimes only 10 metres separating the Turks from the Allies. This was by no means unusual. The Turks and the ANZACs co-existed so closely that they could often talk easily from trench to trench. They had armistices to bury the dead, recognizing it did no man any benefit to be around the stench of decay. The area is littered with tunnels, mostly now collapsed in the unsteady sandy soil, with gnarly and mostly rotten old sleepers dressed with rusty barbed wire.

Barbed wire. If you look carefully, bullets can still be found.

Next was the largest Turkish memorial in this part of the peninsula, a cemetery and open air mosque containing many members of Ataturk’s 57^th Company, the ones that he urged to die for their country (legend has it that no man from this company survived the whole campaign). The Turks, even more than the Allies suffered heinous losses, in defence of their homeland. I took a few minutes to ponder and marvel yet again at the Turkish welcoming of generations of New Zealanders and Australians, who have come to pay tribute to their fallen heroes, men who died trying to invade Turkey. Do you think America welcomes with open arms busloads of Japanese tourists coming to honour the Japanese dead at Pearl Harbour? Or France, lays down the red carpet for German tour groups who wish to tour Nazi battlegrounds? It’s really should be no different here but Turkish people have welcomed ANZACs here since the 1920s.

The main Turkish memorial and cemetery on the peninsula.

The warm welcome ANZACs get here is maybe an extension of the war itself. As the war progressed, both sides got familiar with each other. The Allies allowed an old Ottoman batman to hang his platoon's washing on the barbed wire without attracting fire. It’s said that there was a "constant traffic" of gifts being thrown across no-man's land: dates and sweets from the Ottoman side, and cans of beef and cigarettes from the Allied side. Both sides spoke in glowing terms about the other. Initial British propaganda had portrayed the Ottoman Army as cowardly, apt to "melt away at the first show of force and the cold steel of a bayonet". Later, the ANZACs spoke highly of their foe. In his poem ANZAC, Lieutenant Oliver Hogue said "I reckon that the Turk respects us, as we respect the Turk; Abdul's a good, clean fighter-we've fought him and we know."

After the Turkish memorial, there was the Nek. Here, in a piece of land about three tennis courts in area, immortalized in the movie Gallipoli, 350 or so Australians were killed or injured in a few short hours, knocked aside in a futile attempt to cross the 27 metres that separated them from the Turkish line. Turkish machine guns and a mis-timed naval bombardment ensured that this was, like so many other missions during the campaign, a suicide mission. 

The New Zealand memorial at Chunak Bair.

And lastly, Chunak Bair, the only success of the Gallipoli campaign, albeit fleetingly and for me the most poignant. New Zealand soldiers managed to overwhelm and take the position for a time before it too was lost. It took a large toll. A division from Auckland was wiped out. William Malone, in charge of a Wellington bulletin, refused an order to attack during the day, deeming it a suicide mission. He clashed with his British superiors as exemplified by this diary entry about a superior “He didn't know and knew nothing. Had no defensive position, no plan, nothing but a murderous notion that the only thing to do was to plunge troops out of the neck of the ridge into the jungle beyond”. His battalion, attacked at night. They won but Malone paid the ultimate cost. However, his decision saved many men their lives. Even still, 711 out of 760 in his battalion were either injured or killed. He was viewed as a hero by his men, for his clashes with superiors on their behalf. In 1923 the soldiers of the Wellington Regiment paid for the construction of the Malone Memorial Gate, white marble gates at the entrance to King Edward Park; New Zealand's largest war memorial commemorating an individual soldier. Today, at Chunak Bair, a New Zealand memorial graces the plateau, the first of its kind to be built on the peninsula after the war. A wall lists those men who died during the Gallipoli campaign, many young, all far from home.

Wall  with the names of the dead from New Zealand.

Ironically in a place of so much death, it’s a place that saw the birth of a national identity for three countries. While it might be naive to say that Gallipoli was the birth of a national identity for both Australia and New Zealand, Gallipoli certainly was something that solidified a true national identity for both countries, as entities distinct from Great Britain. The fight bought with it the realization that they were both independent countries, however small and new, that could play a role on the world stage. The belief in the invincibility of the British Empire started to erode here, taking an almost fatal blow in World War 2 before fading out in the 1970s as Britain moved into the EU and Australia and New Zealand looked towards Asia and the Pacific. For many in both countries, ANZAC Day is seen as the day when both countries became truly independent.

For the Turks, the victory can be seen as sowing the seeds for the rise of the national of Turkey from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of Ataturk, who first rose to prominence here. The Ottoman Empire may have been in its death throes but the seeds of struggle to fight for a Turkish homeland were sown here-before growing into a full-blown independence movement culminating in the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. 86,000 Turks died here, double the number of Allied deaths. Mustafa Kemal, at the time a corporal, rose to fame at Gallipoli. His commandment at Gallipoli was the stuff of legends. Nearly killed at Chunak Bair (a stopwatch gifted to him by a German official prevented shrapnel from entering his body), he rose with Turkish aspirations until he assumed the name Ataturk, Father of the Turks, becoming the first president of the new republic in 1923.

Perhaps this is truly why ANZACs are welcome here today. The Turks recognize a kindred spirit, a shared destiny, a determination to make three countries great that had its foundations here. For New Zealanders and Australians, don’t feel that you miss out on anything by not going to Gallipoli on ANZAC Day. If anything, the lack of pomp and ceremony is more befitting the memory of those men who died in tunnels, those men cut down by machinegun fire or killed by disease. And remember to spare a thought for the Turks, both living and dead, who have generously nourished the Gallipoli legend. Lest we Forget.