Anzac reflections - why Gallipoli was a tragedy of errors

Images: Canva

 

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I live not far from an Army base at the southern end of New Zealand's North Island - Trentham Military Camp. It was the staging post for many of our country's deployments of troops to World War One’s battlefields, a hemisphere away. 

The First World War is still an enigma to me, confined to the kitbag of inexplicable matters, alongside why men have nipples. (The reasons for a Second World War can be explained relatively easily - a sociopathic, racist, genocidal madman decided that he had the right to wreak havoc in Europe and kill millions of people in the process while punishing those countries who punished Germany for starting the First World War.)

I didn't study history at school, so taught myself the art of shining light into the past’s musty corners. What I found out about the origins of WW1 was that in the decades leading up to it, two groups of nations had formed sides (much like in ‘Bullrush’, the schoolyard game I played as a boy). On the goodies team were the UK (and its empire), France, and Russia (the Entente powers) with Italy and the US piling on later. On the dark side were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). By August 1914, the name-calling and tongue-poking-out between the two groups of countries and their proxies had markedly deteriorated. A full-scale punch-up erupted when the German side took umbrage at the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

Europe, 1914, Gallipoli Peninsula circled.

Credit: Canva

The Gallipoli campaign formed part of the War's early tapestry. The campaign was staged by the Entente powers in 1915 as part of a strategy aimed at forcing a passage through the Dardanelle Straits and from there capturing Constantinople (Istanbul), the Turkish Ottoman capital. This would have confined Turkey to the war's sidelines and allowed a supply route through to the Black Sea and thence to Russia. It would have also cut the Ottoman Empire in two.

The Entente army was a multi-national body of troops and the 25th April 1915 plan of attack involved Army forces landing on beaches below the steeply-hilled Gallipoli Peninsula. One set of landing points for British and French troops was at Cape Helles at the southern tip of the peninsula. The Australian and New Zealand component (the Anzacs) were to be landed at Gaba Tepe, halfway up the western coast of Gallipoli. The Army units were transported there aboard naval ships which then provided covering fire for the landings. One of the campaign's main sponsors was Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty (the political head of the British Royal Navy).

Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The campaign proved to be a disaster for the Entente powers. The only success they had was when they vacated the peninsula without casualties in January 1916, nine months after the landings. The Ottoman Turks didn’t twig to the withdrawal but rightly claimed a great victory. 

 

Why did the Entente powers suffer this snafu (military acronym for major stuff-up)? The major contributing factors were:

1. Poor and hasty planning. The Gallipoli landings were actually the campaign's ‘Plan B'. In mid-March, Plan A was attempted – a  British naval attack aimed at forcing a way through the Dardenelle straits and capturing Constantinople. It was seriously dealt to by the Turkish gun emplacements and mobile artillery on the peninsula and failed in its efforts. Yet, little over a month later, Entente Army units were being landed from naval craft on unreconnoitered shores beneath a steeply-hilled terrain which the Turks had fortified. In the dark and with tides having not been sufficiently taken into account, the Anzacs ended up landing a mile further north than was intended, at what became known as Anzac Cove. Both landings suffered heavy casualties and could only establish toeholds which in the end, despite much heroism and bravery, were unable to be expanded.
2. Underestimation of the enemy's prowess. The campaign's planners thought that because the British had earlier defeated the Ottoman Turks in Mesopotamia, they would be 'easy-beats' in Gallipoli. That first battle was against conscripts from Iraq. The Gallipoli peninsula, however, was defended by experienced Anatolian Turks who were protecting their homeland from invasion. Capable German and Turkish officers were in command (including Mustafa Kemal, who went on after the war to found modern Turkey). The Turks held the high ground, fought ferociously and the Entente land forces could not dislodge them for any length of time.
3. Atrocious conditions. The toeholds gained by the Entente troops were insufficient for supplies to be stored, waste to be disposed of and bodies to be buried. Wounded soldiers had to be ferried back to naval ships waiting offshore. Infestations of rats and lice broke out and dysentery was rife, spread by huge swarms of flies breeding on the unburied corpses.

 

Turkish soldiers fighting at Gallipoli.
Credit: Canva

The campaign led to large numbers of casualties on both sides. At the highest level for the British, the outcome also resulted in Winston Churchill being demoted. He then resigned from the UK government, joined the army and fought in France. (Churchill's humiliation probably contributed  twenty-five years later – when he was British PM – to him strongly insisting on meticulous planning for the D-Day landings of World War Two.)

 

Today, in and around Trentham Camp, there are permanent reminders in the form of street names of those terrible World War One battles - Anzac Drive, Messines Avenue, Suvla Road, Gallipoli Road, Somme Road, Gaba Tepe Way.  Each year on the 25th of April, New Zealanders and Australians pay special homage  to those who died in war. We wear red poppies (as abundant on the hills of Gallipoli as they were in Flanders’ fields).  Local communities mount street banners with poppy emblems on them, and memorial services are held throughout each country and in other countries, including Turkey. The day is known as Anzac Day.

Poppy banner, Lower Hutt, April 2024
Image: Keith Westwater

Anzac Reflections – the man, the donkey, and the quail

 

Images: Canva

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(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons)

The Man with the Donkey, Pukeahu National

Memorial Park, Wellington, NZ 

The bronze sculpture of The Man with the Donkey, by Paul Walshe, depicts New Zealand Medical Corps stretcher bearer Richard Henderson and his donkey carrying a wounded soldier from the battlefield at Galliopli in 1915. Henderson continued his work at the Battle of the Somme the next year. He repeatedly rescued the wounded while under heavy fire and was later honoured with the Military Medal.

Credit: Lainey Myers-Davies

The statue sits beneath a stand of Pohutukawa Trees. Also known as New Zealand's Christmas Tree, their red flowers bloom in December and provide magnificent displays up and down most of the country. Close by is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which contains the remains of a New Zealand soldier who died on the Somme during the First World War.

 

Californian Quail (Image: Canva)

The man, the donkey, and the quail

After midnight, when the traffic quietened, the man could hear the quail calling "Where ARE you? Where ARE you?" as it marched towards the tomb. 

"G’day mate," said the man. "I see you’re back on duty tonight. Smart uniform you’ve got there. I like the browns and the plume. Nice grey tunic. Very Kiwi, very Army. You are a Kiwi aren’t you?" asked the man, looking a little puzzled.
 
"Well I’m a Californian quail, actually. But I hatched here, so I guess that makes me a Kiwi as well," said the quail. "And thanks for the compliment – I try to look my best for him," he remarked, looking at the tomb. "He deserves it – so, do you, come to think of it."
 
"Just did my job for the Anzacs, mate," said the man. "If anyone deserves a fuss, it’s the donk here, not me. Must have carried a good couple of hundred wounded out of Quinn’s Post." 
 
The quail nodded his head towards the Unknown Warrior. "Was he there?" he asked.
 
"Dunno, mate," said the man. "Could have been. He copped it later on in France, possibly the Somme. I got gassed at Passchendaele. We Kiwis lost thousands on the Western Front – more than at Gallipoli."
 
"I was up country when they brought him home," said the quail. "About a year ago wasn’t it? What was it like?"
 
"Aw, mate, you missed a show. Eleventh of November it was – Armistice Day. Your Army lot did him real proud, slow-marching him here all the way from the cathedral, crowds lining the footpaths, real quiet-like, big-wigs all over the place, famous poets, padres, not a dry eye for miles. Tell you what though, that funeral march they played – it still makes me fair shiver, the way it sounded."
 
The quail stood silently on one leg for a while, leaning against the tomb.
 
"How many more guard-nights are you on for?" asked the man.
 
"Not sure. No one else seems to be putting their hands up. Why?"
 
"Strewth," said the man, sounding embarrassed. "It’s just that I could do with some company over the next few weeks – my nerves get a bit stretched this time a’year. Truth is, around Christmas this tree here starts bleeding all over the ground and I...I mean the donk doesn’t handle it too well."

In early November 2005, a Californian Quail was reported to have taken up a periodic sentinel by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the steps of the National War Memorial.

Anzac Reflections – Counting Casualties

Images: Canva

 

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The Aegean Sea from Anzac Cove at sunset Image: Lainey Myers-Davies

April 25th is known as Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand. The day commemorates citizens of the two countries who were killed in war and honours returned and serving servicemen and women. It was on this day in 1915 when Australian and New Zealand troops, or Anzacs as they came to be known, had their first major military action of the First World War. That action was the landing at ANZAC Cove on the Dardanelle Peninsula in Turkey at the start of the Gallipoli campaign.

 

New Zealand and Australian soldiers landing at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, Turkey.

Credit: New Zealand Free Lance: Photographic prints and negatives. Ref: PAColl-5936-18. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22768446

Counting Casualties

Battlefield statisticians were good

at counting Gallipoli's casualties – 

 

2, 779 died

4, 852 wounded

67 % missing 

 

Categories

for how our soldiers expired

were compiled – 

 

died of wounds

died of sickness

died of other causes

just plain killed. 

 

After, when the stench

from the trenches resiled

and the rats and the flies

ran out of flesh to defile

artefacts for the dead

were erected on the Peninsula – 

 

Headstones

Cemeteries

Memorials to the Missing 

 

With no bodies for burial

home soil saw proliferation of – 

 

War Memorials

Rolls of Honour

Gardens of Remembrance 

 

Other consequences

attributable to the Expedition

went uncounted – 

 

holes in the fabric of families

women unwed for the lack of men

bedrooms preserved in memory of sons

suicide of boys-school headmasters

(they’d blown the recruiter’s bugle)

premature ends of those at home

(and those who made it back) – 

 

died of despair

died of brokenness

died of sick in the head

Keith Westwater

I wrote this poem after hearing an anecdote about a headmaster at a large school for boys who, in response to all the jingoism at the start of the First World War, actively encouraged school-leavers to enlist in the NZ Army. As lists of 'Old Boy' casualties - particularly of those who had been killed - grew, the head became increasingly depressed and died in circumstances that suggested suicide. He was probably not the only headmaster to do so. From my experience in serving in the military, I was already aware of the way the casualties of war are counted and classified. I was taken with the notion that we don't put the same effort into counting and categorising those 'back home' who also become casualties of war.

 

A contagion of unbridled smiles

Some days, on the 4.59 to Melling,

the trans clippie is slated. I know

what comes, what always happens.

 

I wait, watch, wonder which

nail-paint colour will greet us,

whether there'll be hibiscus

 

and is today pony-tail or ringlets?

'Let me alone' tokens – books, mags,

phones – topple-close like dominoes.

 

Kia ORA! NICE to see you! How ARE you?

 

Soft words course closer each clip,

lips, eyes pleated in a miles-wide smile,

cheeks, brow crinkled with aroha.

 

Powerless to resist, each passenger

reciprocates, swathes the train in

a contagion of unbridled smiles.

 

Some days, I wish every Posie Parker

had to have their visa clipped

on a rainbow trip to Melling. 

Keith Westwater

This poem was selected for publishing in the New Zealand Poetry Society's 2023 anthology, white-hot heart. Posie Parker is a British anti-transgender rights activist. In March 2023, she sought permission (by applying for a visa) to enter New Zealand. Following political debate, transgender protests, and a judicial review of the application, a visa to enter the country was granted.

'Kia ora' is a Māori greeting phrase.

'Aroha' is a Māori word for love. 

If you are a Medium member, you can read this poem here.

 

Home Base online book launch

A box of hot-off-the-printing-press and great-looking books arrived today, just in time for the launch of Home Base on Tuesday. The launch is an online affair and is being hosted by the Good Books bookshop. Details are on the invitation below and the link to the launch and to pre-order books is: https://goodbookshop.nz/events/homebase

If you can 'attend' the launch, I look forward to catching up with you at a distance.

Best

Keith

 

New book coming up

Home Base

If you have been visiting this now revamped site in the hope of a new post, then you have struck it lucky. For the last two years or more I have been putting together a new book - Home Base. It is a memoir of the three years I spent as a New Zealand Army Regular Force Cadet, living  in barracks at Waiōuru military camp. The work is a sequel to the highly rated No One Home (Mākaro Press, 2018), which records my early and somewhat chaotic boyhood, and ends at the point I board the Auckland to Wellington overnight express in early January 1964 on the way to my boy-soldier life. I was 15, which at the time, was the youngest age one could join the Army. 140 other recruits of a similar age entered camp at the same time.

The work provides a personal snap-shot of the years 1964 - 1966 and distils the essence of what life was generally like for each annual intake of teenage boys who flowed through the Regular Force Cadet School from 1948 - 1991. Like No One Home, Home Base uses more than text to portray memories of time, people and place. Employing a bricolage approach, the work tells its story through short prose, poems, photos, sketches, maps, diary excerpts, and images of contemporary artefacts, memorabilia, and documents.

Home Base chronologically unfolds my Cadet years, but is more thematically structured than No One Home. Themes include arrival, learning the ropes, kit and caboodle, daily routine, marching and parading, minders and carers, leave and time-out, and aspects of barrack life. Vivid and sometimes humorous vignettes are used to gradually lay bare my army home and its harsh physical and social environment. Ever present are the volcanoes that form Waiōuru’s backyard, with Ruapehu in particular writ large in the lives of the cadets. Also woven through the memoir’s narrative is the story of how my individual post-cadet future came to be shaped and secured through the interest and actions of an Army benefactor.

Home Base will appeal to those who read life-stories to learn about and be reminded of times before and to an audience who enjoys reading about the New Zealand Army's past. It will also interest those who have served (or who are still serving) in the military in some capacity. Rather than being solely an account of one person’s memories of a particular life-period, Home Base will pique the reader’s curiosity and attention through the variety of literary and graphic forms that it employs and by revealing the uniqueness of a place in New Zealand most people only experience while passing through it. 

The book is due for publication by The Cuba Press (Mary McCallum) in October 2021. Before then, I'll advise when and where book launches will be and post some more extracts.

 

Here is a taster from Home Base:

 

Parade states

 

We were marched on and marched off

We were marched in and marched out

We were dressed up and dressed down

We picked up our dressing and lost it again

We marched paces forward or paces back

We stood at ease and stood easy 

We stood to attention and stood around

We braced ourselves and paced ourselves

We numbered from the right but not the left

We were wheeled in and wheeled around

We marched in quick-time

We marched in slow-time

We double-marched

We halted

We formed up in columns of three

We moved to the right or left in threes

We got on parade and got off it

We changed step and marked time

We fell out and fell in

We gave eyes right and eyes left

We advanced in review order

We presented arms

We hurried up and waited

Photo: Aerial view overlooking Waiouru Military Camp and Mount Ruapehu. Burt, Gordon Onslow Hilbury, 1893-1968 : F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-  

  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding  

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding  

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing  

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding  

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding  

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!  

  

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here  

  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!  

  

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion  

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,  

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. 

Another of my favourite poems (and poet).

If you like a story on a page, try Bonsai

Bonsai launches in Christchurch on Sunday 2 September and in other places as listed below:

It's National Poetry Day today!

Come along to the Wellington Library at 1.00 pm today, 24 August to hear some poets do their thing!

NZ National Poetry Day 24 August 2018

National Poetry Day will be celebrated across New Zealand on Friday 24 August with public poetry readings and other events.

I will be joining a number of other poets at 1.00 pm at the Wellington Library where we will doing a sort of 'tag team' set of readings. Come along and be entertained. More details below.

The fist review of No One Home!

Unity Books Wellington Window

No One Home front and centre

No One Home launch invitation

The launch of No One Home is all lined up - I would love to see you there if you can make it!

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; - on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Every now and then I reach back to a poem which inspires me. Dover Beach is one of these.  Its haunting lyrics link sounds of tide and sea from an English beach scene on a moonlit night to a crisis of faith which Matthew Arnold was experiencing at the time. There are more than one or two lines that are still quoted today, though it was written in 1851. Matthew Arnold was a son of Thomas Arnold, who while headmaster of Rugby School, is credited with having a lasting effect on the development of public school education in England. (I bet you thought I was also going to say something about a certain oval ball game’s birthplace.)

News of No One Home’s book launch - it is set for Thursday 26 April at Unity Books, Wellington from 6.00 - 7.30 pm. A Facebook event page will be set up soon (where you can indicate whether you are coming) and email invitations will also be sent out.

Town Hall Dance

I only went the once –
          an expat's visit,
claiming a rite of passage
          I thought was owed.

Nineteen sixty four, sixteen
          kitted out
in all the right gear –
          stove-pipe trou,

winkle pickers, car coat
          (collar up), white shirt,
thin black tie, Brylcreem
          Old Spice.

Hoping a girl from my past
          remembered me,
liked me enough to dance –
          no such luck.

So I joined the bunch
          of wallflower boys,
caught up on goings-on –
          who was seeing whom,

watched the rock'n roll
          extroverts perform,
realised my chances
          of emulating them

were hostage to Peter Posa,
          'She's a Mod',
and a faded avatar of
          my Papatoetoe past.


While I was sourcing images for ‘No One Home’, I reconnected with Jenny Clark – we were classmates at primary and intermediate school. Jenny is now a mainstay of the Papatoetoe Historical Society, who provided me with images of the old St Georges Anglican church and the Wyliie Road orphanage, which I converted to sketches for my book:

At the same time, the Historical Society was putting together a display of memorabilia relevant to the Papatoetoe Town Hall, which is celebrating its centenary. I wrote the 'Town Hall Dance' poem for inclusion in the display, which the Society then photographed and produced a set of four postcards from – see the post card with the poem in it below. if you would like to order a pack (or more) of the postcards at $5 a pack, contact Jenny at jennya.clark@xtra.co.nz

'No One Home' in its bundling box

There’s nothing quite like seeing a collection of poetry in its new-born published glory. What were once promising images and text on screen can now be cradled carefully, cooed over, and have its cover and pages, if not quite caressed, at least given ‘Oh, wow!’ compliments.

This happened last week for me with the delivery of my latest work, No One Home – see sidebar – from the printer (Wakefields Digital) to the publisher (Mākaro Press).

Once the distributors have had a chance to get the book ‘out there’ over the next two or three weeks, we will have a proper christening. At the moment this is looking like it will be in the second week of April, but I will post the details as soon as they firm up.