The Gallipoli Letter (6 page)

In his book
The First Casualty
a history of war correspondents, Phillip Knightley briefly recounts the story of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Keith Murdoch. Knightley concluded that, ‘If the war correspondents in France had only been as enterprising, the war might not have continued on its ghastly course.' At first sight this claim seems exaggerated, possibly grandiose. But looking closely at the Murdoch letter you can see what Phillip Knightley was driving at. It was a question of telling the truth. Murdoch had a commission from the Australian prime minister to tell him truly what was happening at Gallipoli. Murdoch discharged that commission remarkably well. Yet the truths he told were terrible. That the campaign was misconceived from the start; that the leadership of the British generals was exercised overall at a level of considerable incompetence; that the campaign was unwinnable; and that the continuance of it would most likely cause significant loss of life, through disease and the possible increased availability of Turkish, and probably German, artillery. In Murdoch's view most Anzac soldiers would be blasted into the sea or carried across it in the hospital ships.

Murdoch ended his letter in the same personal way with which he had begun it. ‘This of course is a private letter,' he wrote, ‘but you will show it to George Pearce and Hughes, so I shall say nothing more than goodbye.' But it was not a private letter. It was an appeal to Australia's three most senior war ministers for the rescue of Australian troops from the dire circumstances in which they had been placed. The crucial decisions about the conduct of the campaign were not Australia's to make and these three men must have felt a degree of impotence when reading what Murdoch wrote. But the letter caused events to move as they would have wanted anyway.

The letter's real influence had been in London where the decisions were made. Hamilton had been brought home and never commanded troops in war again. The Anzacs were evacuated, the last men leaving on 20 December, just as the real force of winter set in. They were sad to go, if only because they left so many of their mates behind in graves. As the last soldiers scrambled down to the beach for the last time their boots were muffled to help prevent the Turks from hearing the footfall of these final departures. The Anzacs themselves, though, were pleased to muffle their boots so that those in their graves would not hear them leaving.

Hamilton's estimate that upwards of 50 per cent of the men would be lost in any evacuation was wildly wrong—in the end the evacuation was completed without loss. It was the most successful aspect of the Gallipoli campaign. Even so 8,141 Australians and 2,721 New Zealanders lost their lives in the fighting at the Dardanelles. Writing in 1958 to a fellow journalist Charles Bean had the last word: ‘Murdoch's letter was, I should say, the main agent in bringing about Hamilton's fall.' And a crucial agent, therefore, in bringing about an end to the entire campaign.

Sources

C.E.W. Bean,
Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918
, vol. II,
The Story of
Anzac
, Angus & Robertson: Sydney, 1923

Fred and Elizabeth Brenchley,
Myth Maker, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett: The Englishman
who sparked Australia's Gallipoli legend
, John Wiley & Sons: Sydney, 2005

David Day,
Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia
, Fourth Estate: Sydney, 2008

Kevin Fewster (ed.),
Bean's Gallipoli: The diaries of Australia's official war correspondent
, Allen & Unwin: Sydney, 2007

Phillip Knightley,
The First Casualty: The war correspondent as hero and myth-maker
from the Crimea to Kosovo
, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York, 1975

John La Nauze,
Walter Murdoch: A biographical memoir
, Melbourne University Press: Melbourne, 1977

Clem Lloyd, ‘Andrew Fisher', in Michelle Grattan (ed.),
Australian Prime Ministers
, New Holland: Sydney, 2000

D.J. Murphy, ‘Fisher, Andrew', in Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (eds),
Australian
Dictionary of Biography
, vol. 8, Melbourne University Press: Melbourne, 1981

Geoffrey Serle, ‘Murdoch, Sir Keith Arthur', in Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (eds)
Australian Dictionary of Biography
, vol. 10, Melbourne University Press: Melbourne, 1986

R.M. Younger,
Keith Murdoch: Founder of a media empire
, HarperCollins: Sydney, 2003

THE
GALIPOLI LETTER

High Commissioner's Office,
London.

September 23, 1915.

Personal.

Dear Mr. Fisher,

The Cabinet will, ere this reaches you, have dealt with my report on A.I.F. mails and wounded, so it is no good my saying more on these subjects, other than this, that if you allow the inert mass of congealed incompetency in the Postal Department to keep you from instituting alphabetical sorting by units, 75 per cent. of our unfortunate homesick men in hospitals and at base depots will continue to receive no home letters.

It is of bigger things I write to you now. I shall talk as if you were by my side, as in the good days. In my last hurried note I could deal only with a few urgent matters affecting Australian administration, especially those concerning appointments of senior officers and treatment of wounded.

I now write of the unfortunate Dardanelles expedition, in the light of what knowledge I could gain on the spot, on the lines of communication, and in Egypt.

It is undoubtedly one of the most terrible chapters in our history. Your fears have been justified. I have not military knowledge to be able to say whether the enterprise ever had a chance of succeeding. Certainly there has been a series of disastrous underestimations, and I think our Australian generals are right when they say, that had any one of these been luckily so unEnglish a thing as an overestimation, we should have been through to Constantinople at much less cost than we have paid for our slender perch on the cliffs of the Peninsula.

The first two efforts, those of the fleet alone and of the combined forces in April-May, failed miserably mainly because London expected far too much from floating artillery. It is only now being recognised that the naval guns, with their flat trajectory, are of little avail against the narrow Turkish trenches. The last great effort, that of August 6-21, was a costly and bloody fiasco because, in addition to wretched staff work, the troops sent were inadequate and of most uneven quality. That failure has created a situation which even yet has not been seriously faced—i.e., a choice between withdrawal of our armies and hanging on for a fresh offensive after winter.

Unfortunately I was not in time for any of those big operations, but I visited most parts of Anzac and Suvla Bay positions, walked many miles through the trenches, conversed with the leaders and

PLATE 6 Anglican Chaplain Walter ‘Bill' Dexter stands on the track in a gully on the Gallipoli Peninsula, looking down towards North Beach. He likened scenes at Gallipoli to those he had seen in his ministry in Gippsland in Victoria, where forest workers camped and at the end of the day would make their camp fires to cook the evening meal and boil the billy. Smoke from hundreds of fires drifted lazily upwards as men began to settle in for the night. Men yarned, checked their shirts and pants for lice, repaired their clothes and read their mail, or a weeks-old Australian newspaper or magazine.
Photographer Albert Percy Bladen, AWM Neg. No. C01470

what senior and junior officers I could reach, and was favoured in all parts with full and frank confidence. I could not visit Helles, where we have about 25,000 men and many animals and cars (armoured cars hidden helpless in trenches!). We have abandoned our intentions of taking Achi Baba by frontal assault. This was always a hopeless scheme, after early May, and no one can understand why Hamilton persisted with it. Achi Baba is a gradual, bare slope, a mass of trenches and gun emplacements, but so little did the General Staff know of its task that it expected to storm it with ease. Indeed, the General Staff sent our artillery horses and ambulance transport with our landing parties in April, as if the Australasian Army Corps could get astride the peninsula in a few days, I assure you that if our landing had been at Gaba Tepe as proposed, only a few broken remnants of our magnificent force would have reached the first defensive line. Having at last abandoned his expensive design to storm Achi Baba, Hamilton is keeping his divisions at Helles merely to hold a corresponding body of Turks. Helles is therefore the most quiet of the three zones, though even there, every yard of ground is commanded by the enemy's guns, and even the beaches are frequently shelled.

A strong advance inland from Anzac has never been attempted. It is broken, rough, scrubby country, full of gullies and sharp ridges, and it is all within easy range of the guns of the Turkish forts at the Narrows, and their artillery on Achi Baba and round about. No serious advance could be made direct inland from this quarter. Our men were I found immensely proud of their little progress on the plateau on our right—Lone Pine Plateau, Walker and Whyte thought it brilliant and wonderfully successful. But I found that we had paid 2500 men for this advance, on a short front, of 300 yards! That is the only sort of advance we can make from Anzac proper. The Lone Pine affair was partly in the nature of a holding movement, and it certainly succeeded in holding a large body of Turks, who maintained a series of fierce counter-attacks for 82 hours, during which the Suvla Bay operations were in progress.

Suvla Bay is a shallow, open indentation in the thickest part of the peninsula, about two miles and a half to the left of Anzac. The flat country leading from the beach consists mostly of a marsh called Bitter Lake, which in winter becomes a great morass. After heavy rains the flat is inundated.

On this flat in August nearly 90,000 men were landed. They were New Army and Territorial divisions. They had spent a fortnight on the water, in transports which even the most careful arrangements could not make wholesome. I was on the lower deck on one of these, and the place was putrid. The men could not be allowed on shore at ports of call. One or two regiments were given route marches, but the long spell of ship life was surely in every case weakening. Those which were to land first were given landing practice at Mudros (advanced base) and Imbros (headquarters base), but many were set ashore direct from their ships at Suvla. In addition to the ordinary weakening effects of troopships was the nervous strain of expectation of submarines. Most of the men ignored this, but I was on the Beltana when a submarine was sighted and fired at, and I know that this strain did exist.

You can imagine, then, that these fresh, raw, untried troops, under amateur officers, homesick and apprehensive, were under normal in morale when the day of landing approached. They had to be packed like sardines on the trawlers and small destroyers and vessels for the actual landing, and were kept like this for most of an afternoon and the whole of a night. Before this embarkation, they had each received three days' supply of iron rations—biscuits and bully beef—and had filled their water bottles—one bottle to each man.

Then in the early hours came the landing, when the life of man is at its lowest.

I do not say that better arrangements could have been made. But I do say that in the first place to send raw, young recruits on this perilous enterprise was to court disaster; and Hamilton would have some reasonableness behind his complaints that his men let him down, if he and his staff had not at the same time let the men down with grosser wrong-doings.

The landing was unopposed; the Turks were taken completely by surprise. But with the greatest celerity they galloped their artillery round, and opened fire also from their forts. Before the new troops had advanced any distance they were being racked with shell fire.

I am informed by many officers that one division went ashore without any orders whatsoever. Another division, to which had been allotted the essential work of occupying the Anafarta Hills, was marched far to the left before the mistake in direction was noticed. It was then recalled, and reformed, and sent off towards the ridge. As a practical man, how much water do you think would be left in those thirsty English boys' bottles by this time—after the night on the seas, and the hot march out, march back, and advance? Of course, not a drop. And yet the staff professes surprise that before noon the men were weak for want of water. The whole army suffered intensely from thirst during the next three days. There were many deaths from thirst. One general even assured me that the collapse of Anafarta Hills was due to thirst. Certainly these hot-blooded young men, scions of the thirstiest race in the world, were sent out into tropical heat with food calculated to engender fierce thirst, and without water. The divisional commanders have a just grievance against the general staff when they say that they were sent out not only with indefinite orders and without a good knowledge of the country over which they were to advance, but without water and with little or no knowledge of the few muddy wells existing in these parts.