The Anzac and British Landings

This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's Business and Cmercial Banking. One of the great things about finance is that it may result in you having to pay tax. and this was a constant grumble in Anglo Saxon England which was the most heavily taxed country in the whole of Christendom. And just when the Anglo Saxons thought it couldn't get any worse, they got conquered by King Canute and Canute imposed a tax rate that was effectively one hundred cent Yeah well, that was one very big change, Tom, but another tax change is upon us And this is the advent of making tax digital income tax And if you're at all concerned about it, this is where Lloyd's come in because they are here to help make that change much simpler for you with a useful HMRC recognized accounting tool that will help you stay in line with all the making tax digital requirements. And the brilliant thing about this is that it is free for Looyd's business account customers So when it is time to digitize your income tax You can bank on Lloyd's. seearch Lloyd's business accounts to find out more. This episode is brought to you by MintMobile. It's easy to ditch overpriced wireless with Mint moobile. Sign up online at mintmobile dot com slash history get three months of premium wireless service. fifteen bucks a month. forty five dollars upfront payment required, equivalent to fifteen dollars per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Speeds slower above forty gigabytes on a limited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details This episode is brought to you by TikTok Believe it or not History isn't just in textbooks, it comes to life every day on TikTok. Millions of people are exploring the history of music, fashion, food, and art discovering new facts about the things they love. One scroll could take you from the roots of jazz to the flavourors of ancient kitchens. And the next might reveal a quirky fact about how modern traditions came to be Discover the past in new ways on TikTok Curiosity never gets old At dusk, all lights were put out, and the troops rested for the ordeal at Dawn It was a beautiful calm night with a bright half moon As the moon waned, the boats were swung out The Australians received their last instructions And men who six months ago were living peaceful civilian lives began to disembark on a strange unknown shore In a strange land The boats had almost reached the beach when a party of Turks entrenched ashore opened a terrible fuselade The Australians roace to the occasion They did not wait for orders or for the boats to reach the beach, but sprang into the sea, formed a sort of rough line. and rushed the enemy's trenches. Their magazines were uncharged So they just went in with cold steel I have never seen anything like these wounded Australians in war before Though many were shot to bits without hope of recovery Their chairs resounded throughout the night They were happy. because they knew they had been tried for the first time and had not been found wanting. There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and storming the heights And above all Holding on while the reinforcements were landing. These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Ane Aep and Nerve Chappelle So that was the first report of the Allied landings at Gallipoli in Turkey. on the twenty fifth of april nineteen fifteen written by a chap called Ellis Ashmeed Bartlet and he was the war correspondent of Daily teelegraph and When it was reproduced in the newspapers in Australia a couple of weeks later, it caused an absolute sensation And his praise for the courage of the ANzAac troops, so the Australians and the New Zealanders became a source of immense national pride down under It was all the sweeter because as you could tell from my expert reproduction of his accent Ashmeid Bartlet wasn't Australian. You would of course expect an Australian commentator to big up Australian performance, but this chat was British And so to quote one Australian historian And there it was worthy to fight side by side. We belonged and we've been told so by a pom I think it' said by a poem. It says by an Englishman. No, he did't. He said by an Englishman. he did say by an Englishman. So as our Australian listeners will know and our Kiwi listeners as well This is one of the foundational moments in their national identity. Perhaps the key moment, I don't know And it's also, of course, intriguingly and suggestively key moment in the formation of what will become in due course, the Republic of Turkey So Dominic, it is a really historically significant episode. Absolutely it is. For countries that are you know as different as Australia New Zealand. and Turkey, but it's also It's It's not a story in which Britain comes out well. I mean it's kind of, let's be blunt, it's a cataclysmic disaster. It is. So hello everybody. Yes, it's massively important moment in the history of Australia, New Zealand and indeed Turkey, but it's also one of the most colourful and gripping stories of the entire First World War And as you say, Gallipoli ranks among the great military catastrophes of modern times. And you say the British don't come out well. I mean, some Britons come out extremely well. But others do not, and chief among those who do not is arguably the most celebrated man in all British history Winston Churchill. So let me rephrase that We've been talking about this phrase lions led by donkeys throughout and kind of slightly debunking it. I think this is the example of lions being led by absolute idiots Well, we shall see. we shall see. I mean, among theen at Gallipoli, not just Winston Churchill, the man who carries the can for this disastrous operation Churchill's wartime deputy in the Second World War and successor as Prime Minister Clement Aley He was a captain. And he has a horrible time, doesn't he kind of crawling around among poo? Yes, dysentery gets dysentery The father of modern Turkey. The single best known Turkish person of the last you know couple of hundred years Mustafer Kemel Aturk, Father Turk. He makes his name at Gallipi. Australia's greatest military hero, John Monash, he makes his name A Gillipoi All roads lead back to the man who came up with the entire scheme Wheeze Yes. The man who dominates twentieth century British history and that man is, of course the then first Lord of the Admiralty Winston S. Churchill, because it's his idea to turn the tide of the First World War by landing thousands of British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops on the Gallipoli peninsula south of Constantinople And we will see how that works out. So for those who listen to our series on The Battle of Marathon, that's the Thracan Chersones as was. The Hellespond, isn't it? It is exactly the Hellespond So let's start with Churchill himself At the turn of nineteen fifteen, Winston Churchill is still only forty years old And a couple of years ago, we did a series on the Young Churchill U lookingoo at his life, particularly in the eighteen nineties He has had an extraordinary life up to this point, an extraordinary four decades He's fought in India in Sudan in South Africa He was famously captured by the Burrs and escaped from a prisoner war camp He became a Tory MP. Then he defected to the liiberals He became homeome secretary for the Liberals for the Asquwith goovernment. Then first Lord of the Admiralty, his dream job really running the Royal Navy, and he's been there since nineteen eleven And when war approached in the late summer. of nineteen fourteen, Churchill was terribly excited He loved the idea of a war. he's a martial sort of person He's always put himself in harm's way, and he can't wait to get stuck in. And a few months later, even after it's obvious that the war is going to be terrible clateicism for Europe, he's still thrilled and excited by it. so he sits next to Margot Aswith The Prime Minister's wife at a dinner On the tenth of January and he says to her, My God, this is living history. It'll be read by a thousand generations. Think of that. Why I would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me? And then he stops and he says, I say, don't repeat that I said the word delicious. You know what I mean. I mean he's a man who loves actually, I mean, not just excitement, but a disaster because he famously said of the Titanic that it was a triumph for British pluck Exactly. I think it's one way of framing it. And this is another one. Yeah this week Yes, and of course, for Churchill, the great disappointment of the war is that he is the first Lord of the Admiralty, but the German fleet by and large stays in port. So he doesn't get the great naval showdown that he's hoping for Even so, Churchill seizes every opportunity to put himself at the center of this stage So only a couple of months into the war in october nineteen fourteen He sends what's basically a sort of private army that is cobbled together Naval reservists, the Royal Naval Division Antwerp, which is still under siege by the Germans He says my Royal Naval Division will save Antwerp and he actually goes himself to Antwerp And he offers Asith his resignation and says I would like to take personal charge of the defense of Antwerp. This is refused Antwork promptly falls And everybody back home says Churchill made an absolute fool of himself at Antwerp. He sent the Royal Naval Division for no reason The press, the Morning Post, for example, Tory Paper slams him as an erratic amateur. The Secretary of Warlord Kitchener says it was a pirratical adventure Even As withet, the Prime Minister says it was wicked folly to have sent so many men to Antworp and to have made such a hullabaloo about it when it was obvious it was going to fall But the point about Churchill. Goo loves A gimmick He loves a wheeze of a stunt. and he will do anything to put himself at the centre of the story. Do you think just to stick up for him because we're going to dump on him quite a lot over the course of this the next two episodes I mean, in a sense, he is right, isn't he that there is this stalemate, and it's obvious on the Western Front, but it is also apparent at sea And in a sense, if you're going to break the stalemate, perhaps you do need some left field thinking, some blue sky thinking It's just his blueues guy thinking. T turns out not to be Well a bit dark, really Yeah, it's not the storm clouds of war are very very much present in in Churchill's blue sky thinking. But there is a problem Of course, he's absolutely right that there's a stalemate on the Western Front and that it would be brilliant if they could break it His idea, which is we would come up with sort of great distraction and displacement exercises that will somehow you know, obviate the need for an attritional campaign on the Western frront. He is deluded. The war is only ever going to be won on the Western front. I'm amazed he didn't come up with my ays of invading Switzerland Yes. We'd got on, I think. Yeah, you would have got on. Anyway, so he's casting around for something to do And it's at this point that his gaze falls on the Ottoman Empire Now, to remind people about the Ottoman Empire, The Ottom Empire, which is always referred to in the shortthand as Turkey, although it's not just Turkey of course. The Ottoman dynasty had been ruling in Constantinople for us five hundred years. And in nineteen fourteen, that governing This fast, multi ethnic, multi religious empire Multicultural More than forty million people from the shores of the Mediterranean to the sands of Arabia this Empire famously described as the sick man of Europe is in a pretty ramshackle condition So having once been one of Europe's great powers It's now fallen behind the industrial powerhouses of Western Europe. It's still very much a rural agricultural society, pre industrial in many ways In the late nineteenth century the Ottomans started to lose their Bulkan territories. So they'd lost Serbia, they'd lost Bulgaria, they'd lost Romania And in nineteen oh eight A group of officers in the army, a little bit like a Meiji restestoration in Japan. A group of army officers who were fed up with this, they were generally European born, so they were from the Balkans. They were from the precisely the part of the empire that was beginning to fragment And they were called the Young Turks And they decided they wanted to reverse the decline of the empire. They seized power in effectively a coup, and they turn the sultan into a puppet and the young Turks now run the empire. And how does that go which doesn't go terribly well because just four years later The firstirst Bulkan War breaks out in nineteen twelve And by the following year, the Ottomans have lost pretty much all their Balkan provinces except for eastern Thrace. So that's the bit right next to Constantinople. And some of the possessions they lose are what are now Northern Greece, right? Yeah, Northern Greece, North Macedonia, parts of sort of Bulgaria, Serbia and so on, Albania. Specifically they lose the city of Soalonica, so Thessalonii As today And there is one particular officer who was born there, right? Exactly right. So and he's one of many people, hundreds of thousands of people, actually who are driven out of their homes, who lose the homeland, who are murdered, who are killed and so on and so forth. Th these are Albanian and Turkish Muslims And this guy in particular, he was born in Salonica, as it would have been called at the time He's an army officer. He fought against the Bulgarians in Thrace And his name is Mustfher Kemel. and we'll be coming back to Mustopfher Kemel later on. You see this house? I have in Thessaloniky, yeah, I have. Yes. Next to the Turkish consulate. It's very good. I actually really like Thessaloniky, I think it's great. I mean, a lot of it is very modern because of earthquakes and fires and things, but yeah it's a tremendous place. Yeah, it's great. Anyway, war breaks out in nineteen fourteen And the Ottoman Empire at first, rather like Italy, doesn't get involved, but it is keen to shop around for the best offer And the young Turk leadership, in particular their war mininister, who's called ENvA, are basically putting out feelers to various partists saying what can you offer us But it's always most likely that they will get into bed with the central powers of Germany and Austria, Hungary. And the reason is that before the First World War, the Germans had worked really hard to win influence in the Ottoman Empire They'd put loads of money into a very controversial railway link going which was going to go all the way from Berlin to Baghdad and they had sent a Prussian general who is called Otto Lehman von Sanders modernise the Ottoman Empire along kind of German lines. Isn't there another reason also why they were always going to side with the central powers, which is that their big paranoia is Russia And Russia's abiding passion has been to seize Constantinople, to seize control of the Bosorus, to seize control of the Dardanalas so that they will then be able to get into the Mediterranean And essentially Turkish policy Throughout the nineteenth century has always been to ally with whichever powers will take their side against Russia And most famously that had happened in the Crimean War when Turkey, the Ottomans, had allied with Britain and France. And now of course, the issue is that Britain and France are allied with Russia So therefore The Turks were always going to ally with Germany, don't you think? Well, interestingly, Enver does actually shop around a fair bit. They do offer a deal to the Russians and had the Russians taken it Who knows? It's not absolutely decided in nineteen fourteen fifteen that the Ottomans will jump the way they do. And in fact there are a lot of people in Constantinople who don't want to get involved at all. That's the most sensible course. I mean, as with the Italians. There's a big internal discussion. Anyway, Ever, the war mininister, is very keen on the Germans And in mid october, nineteen fourteen, he agrees a secret deal with the Germans Basically The plan is the Germans will give them a load of gold and the Germans will promise them their balkan territories back if they win the war. And so basically the way they get into the war is at the end of October Eenver sends an Ottoman fleet, led by two German cruisers that are flying Ottoman colours for various complicated reasons. they go up into the Black Sea, they bombard the Russian ports in Odessa and the Crimea. The Russians, of course declare then declaare war in the Ottoman Empire, and Eenvver and his colleagues say brilliant now it's on. And a couple of weeks later, the Sultan Mehmed V, they get him to proclaim a holy war, a jihad against the Allies. And this very much this excites people in Britain, it seizes their imagination, terrifies them. It's the context For John Buckins, a great thriller a green mantle. comomes out in nineteen sixteen, doesn't it? Yeah, which has this great fear of a Jihad and a holy war and a sort of general Muslim uprising across Asia But actually in real life This does not happen at all. and as one historian puts it, the Jihad is and I quote, a miserable failure. So basically it doesn't get anywhere. But I mean it is an important context for why the British, once they've engaged in Gipoli, are reluctant to retreat is that they're nervous that any loss of face might precipitate a kind of Asian wide she had against the Empire. Exactly So how does the war go first for the Ottomans? It does not go well at all. So Evver takes one hundred thousand men and he leads them east to face the Russians in the Caucasus. And his plan is that he will encircle and destroy the Russian Caucasus army at a place called Salakamush, which is a border town close to the border modern day Armenia And the conditions at Sadakamash are absolutely awful even by first World War standards So they're ten thousand feet high. there are snow storms. the temperature goes down to minus twenty six degrees Celsius. By mid december nineteen fourteen, thousands upon thousands of men on both sides had ding of hypothermia or frostbite Tphus. Anyway, the Russians do end up getting encircled So on the first of January, the Russian Supreme commommander Grand Duke Nikolai He sends a message to Britain and he says You know, we're in a mess against the Ottomans Could you please stage a diversionary attack? Could you do something Against the Ottomans to relieve the pressure on us. And this is where Churchill comes back into the story Be Churchill has been thinking about striking east even before the Ottomans entered the war. And he has been looking particularly somew way you've already mentioned, Tom. which is the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, that basically all the great powers have been eyeing very hungrily and dominic, which it has consistently been British policy to stop the Russians getting hold of. Correct. mean that's another kind of mad dimension to this story, that Churchill's plan is essentially Upending centuries of British ition to stop the Russians getting it Well it's not clear what will happen to Constantinople in Churchill's plan after the war. So it's not actually clear that the Russians will get it. But the reason that it is so coveted. is that Constantinople commands the narrow strait that divides Europe from Asia, but also This is the strait that divides the Black Sea from the Mediterranean So the reason it's so important to the Russians is that this is their warm water sea route out of the Russian empire into the seas of the world. And this strait, this waterway, basically the waterway that goes from the Sea of Marmara outside Constantinople. south to the Aegean in the beginning of the Mediterranean This strait is called the Dardanelles and give people a sense The dartenlls are thirty eight miles long But very narrow, no more than four miles wide their widest point So you can imagine almost like a canal, I guess. Now on the right hand side, as you look at the map, the southetern side, the Asian side is the coast of Anatolia of Asia mininor specifically the city of Chanakali And on the left side, as you look at the map, the Northwestern, the European side That's made up of a long narrow peninsula, which is named after one of the towns on the peninsula, which is the town of Gallipoli. So that is the Thracian Cerses as was So Churchill has been long obsessed with this straight So just a few weeks into the war He had said Why don't we send a British and French fleet North through the straits And then if necessary You, if it came to war with the Ottomans, war with Turkey, we could bombard and occupy Constantinople itself And his argument for doing this is If it works and that's a big if This could be a game changer in the war Why Number one If we held Constantinople in the Straits We'd have a warm water sea route so that we, Britain and France, could supply Russia you know, we could send shells, we could send whatever they needed to fight the war on the eastern front Number two If we took the straightits and we were bombarding or inde ooccupying Constantinople Maybe there would be a coup within the young Turk regime Or maybe we could simply impose our own friendly regime. that will change sides and bring the Ottoman Empire in on the Allied side And if we took Constantinople A show of force like that would surely persuade the other Balkan neutral countries, so Greece, Romania, maybe Bulgaria, maybe Italy. It would persuade them to join the war on our side. So basically everybody would pile in and we'd win the war And in fact Even after the Glipply operation had failed, there were people who said Jo Churchill's idea wasn't that mad So for example, we mentioned Clement Atley. Atley had a terrible time at Gallipoli, but he always said, Do you know what on paper? it was a brilliant idea and it could have worked. Essentially, the Churchill's plan requires se power. Alone, Gatok to win the war. So it's a bit like the reliance today on air power to win wars that would be the kind of contemporary analogy. Yeah, I guess so. So Churchill at this point is not talking about using about using troops and we'll get on to how the plan changes. But the plan is the ships sail up, they mor off Cented Apri, they bombard it and the Turks surrender. And then the Turks change sides. Yeah. that's magically the Turks then change sides. It seems improbable Well, when you look at the planet, it's very, very risky. So first of all, just sailing up the straits There are Ottoman forts on both sides. There are mortars, there are artillery, there are underwater mines. So it's going to be very difficult just to get your ships through the straits, up from the Aegean and get them outside Constantinople. So actually British sort of contingency plans have been talking about doing this for years And they had always said, you know, it's much too risky. it wouldn't work And in fact in nineteen eleven, Churchill himself had said It is no longer possible to force the Dardanells and nobody should expose a modern fleet to such perils. So he himself had seen how difficult it would be But now, As we've already mentioned, he looks at the Wesn Front. He looks at the stalemate in France and Flanders and he says, Well, anything would be better than this. He says to Aswith, the Prime Minister, anythingthing would be better than sending out armies to chew barbed wire in fllanders. I mean, you can see the force of that argument, can't you? Of course However You can also see the counter arcuments. So anyway, Churchill gets this request from Grandue, Nikolai, he says brilliant, Well this is the opportunity we need He sents a telegram to the commander of the Eastern Mediterranean fleet, who's a guy called Vice Admiral Sackville Carden Would this work? Could we send some old ships, send them up the straits? you know, could this could this be done? And Churchel adds the line Importance of results would justify severe loss In other words, We could lose loads of ships and load of men. I don't care because the prize is worth it And so Admiral Carden says, Well, I suppose it is doable. You know, first of all, we'd destroy what are called the outer forts or the southern entrance to the straits Then in phase two, we'd go in, send some ships in We would destroy the inner forts, we'd send mines sweepers in to clear the straits of mines, and then we would send our fleet in towards Constantinople entirely through Naval operations. Yes. They're not proposing that they destroy these fleets by landing soldiers to do it. They do it with the guns from their battleships At this stage, there is absolutely no suggestion of using ground troops at all. They are just going to do this with naval power That is all that they are interested in doing And so on the thirteenth of january, nineteen fifteen, Churchill goes to Britain's War Council, as it is called. Now all the big names are there. Lots of people we've talked about in this and other West's History series Herbert Henry Aswith, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, his Chancellor,ir Edward Greay, the foreign Secretary Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for warar, Sir John French. the British commander on the Western Font. Oh well, I mean, if he's there, what could possibly go wrong? Well, Asquith tells his girlfriend, Venishia Stanley, who is a fraction of his age You won't often see a stranger collection of men around one table Anyway They sit there They talk about the Western Front and the stalemates, and then Churchill unveils his plan. And as the civil servant, Maurice Hanky, who was there right afterwards The idea caught on at once, the whole atmosphere changed. We turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a slogging match on the Western Font to brighter prospects as they seemed in the Mediterranean A churchill says, listen, This is going to take a few weeks, max the Turkish guns and thought merely an inconvenience Now actually, Churchill is not being honest with them. His own admiralty experts have already told him Some of them are set specifically It's not possible. It's an impossible task. But Churchill doesn't pass this on to his colleagues because he is now completely infatuated with the scheme And so the War Council proroves a plan For a naval expedition in February, we will bombard and I quote, bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective Now at this point, just to reiterate, he's not talking about doing this with any soldiers is talking about doing it with naval power alone. And as even his haggiographer, Andrew Roberts says, This is mad because ships cannot hold territory and ships cannot occupy cities So if they get there and they bombard Constantinople and then the Turks just don't do anything, what are they going to do You know that this is the issue. anyyway The question is why on Eth the warar cououncilor has approved a plan that I mean, Tom, if you and I can see that there are issues, why can they not see it Now one reason We've already mentioned Aswith Asquith is distracted. There is no question. you know Asquith has no greater defender are in the world of podcasting than me However, even I would have to concede he is not on form at this point in time. To remind people, Asquith is sixty two years old And he is absolutely besotted with his daughter's mate, Ficia Stanley, who was twenty seven Early that morning Before the meeting, in the small h of the morning, Askarith had written her one of his huge long love letters. I give you my most intimate confidence, my unceasing devotion, my fears and hopes, my strength and weakness, my past, my present, my future She has now written back to him. Her letters are lost, so we don't know what she wrote snap out of it Focus. I don't think she did Because during the meeting, while Churchill has been talking, Asquith has been reading her letter And unbelievably, he's been writing back to her during the meeting as well And he says to her, We are having a most interesting discussion, but it's so confidential and secret. I won't put anything down on paper. I'm keen to tell you all about it and to see if it meets with your approval. It's great that Vanisa Stanley will be invited to what have you s on? Fororcing the Forcing the dardnas, we don't know, because our letters Her letters are lost, who knows? It's a lost of military strategy. More seriously, I think a lot of the people around the table J do not take this seriously enough. They think it's this little navvel gimmick and the sidesh. and if it doesn't work, we can just pull the plug and we won't have lost very much. And lots of historians who've written about this say this was incredibly irresponsible of them So the historian Peter Hart wrote a great book about Gallipppi A serious operation of war should not be undertaken in such a casual fashion. Hundreds of men's lives cast away a whim as if in a mere game of sport that could be abandoned at halfim. Do they have soldiers in reserve? at all, or is it entirely naval at this point At this point it's entirely naval. and one reason for that is of course if you do have soldiers hanging around, where do you want to send them There is an urgent desperate need for soldiers on the Western frront. Right. Remember the pre war army has effectively been destroyed, the British Expeditionary force. Kitchener is now raising so called new army, a volunteer army to replace them. The idea that you will send one hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred thousand soldiers across Europe to some mad scheme. I mean, that would appall Kitchener and Sir John French and so on. Because there's no way that even say the very best happens when they capture Constantinople s not going to help the war on the Western frront, is it That's where the war is going to be won or lost. This is exactly the point that this is a massive, massive distraction And what is more The great rationale for this, which is we're going to help out the Russians, has now disappeared Because even as they are having these meetings In mid January It becomes clear that actually this encirclement at Salakamash. has actually worked out in the Russianans' favor, not the Ottomans Evver has made a terrible mess of things of his a hundred thousand men eighty thousand of them are killed They die of frostbite or freezing to death or typhus or whatever. The Russians then basically pile in to U Western Armenia, Eastern Turkey And this is the point at which Eenver and the young Turk leadership say, well, it's not our fault that we lost this terrible battle. It's actually the fault of fifth columnists and traitors within the Armenians. who've stabbed us in the back Wh stabbed us in the back? and this is what sets the stage for the Armenian genocide, which begins just a few weeks later Now meanwhile in London, Churchill, of course is oblivious to all this he doesn't care about any of this. He is just thrilled that his pet scheme has got the go ahead And when he goes back to the addmiral and says, it's on. Let's do this A lot of his colleagues are horrified Most obviously, the first sea lord So this is the senior naval officer effectively at the Admiralty, H is Admiral Lord Fisher, Jackie Fisher, a great celebrity in nineteen tenens Well he'd launched the Dreadnord, hadn't it the first dreadnaord? HM Dreadnaord kind of the prototype for that entire class. He had been the man in charge of the Navy before the war and he'd been brought back from retirement in nineteen fourteen. Jan Morris' great hero loved him was writing books about him? He is a remarkable, remarkable character. So he's very short, very stocky. He's bright yellow because he had malaria when he was young He's extremely religious. he would go to when he was ashore, he would try to go to church two or three times a day, which seems a lot to me Oddly for somebody who's such a great naval hero who's suffered from seasickness On the other hand, he was an incredibly good and enthusiastic dancer How did he have time with all the church and the I also dancing on board ship where you' seasick Soshing all over the p. Exactly. Anyway, Fisher is a great character. Everybody loves Fisher. They're very excited that he's being brought back, rather like bringing back Kitchener to run the war office could actually as with kitchener Jackie Fischher is a bit of a loose canon He's seventy three years old. He's very autocratic, he's very indecisive, he's very difficult. He spends most of his time leaking to the Tory press and saying, I hate church or Churchill is useless And he really hates the Dardenell scheme Fisher says this is absolutely insane. The only way this could work is if you landed two hundred thousand, it would take two hundred thousand men to secure the coastline so you could get your ships through the strait And frankly, we don't have enough men to send two hundred thousand men Church doesn't listen to him. Fisher is more and more enraged. He goes to see Lloyd George's secretary stroke mistress, Frances Stevenson And he says We are trying people at the addmiralty are trying to argue with Churchill And I quote, But he simply overrides them and talks them down. If he continues his domineering course, they fear there may be a catastrophe. Fish's not good at the internal politics and Churchill is. So when they have meetings, Churchill's very excited and bullant and tells everybody about a scheme Fisher sits there sulking, staring out of the window. You know, irritable, difficult, so people don't listen to him. They listen to Church instead. It's anyway They signed off on the scheme on the nineteenth of February Admiral Carden's fleet, combined British and French fleet launches the first stage of the operation. So the French have they've joined as well. The French are involved as well, exactly. in much smaller numbers. Nody ever talks about the French Galipoli, but the French ships and they will, in due course, be French troops. And they've basically joined because they are they're the Allies, they've got ships. Yeah, exactly So they' in the Mediterranean too So They start by shelling these outer forts at the entrance to the straitss and they're horrified when they get there to find out that The Ottomans whom whoom they've assumed would be completely useless. I've spent the winter laying minefields, preparing kind of howitzers bringing up you reinforcing their artillery batteries and whatnot. So basically This is going to be tougher than they thought It takes them a week. they finally knock out these outer forts, they clear some of the minefields Churchill is thrilled with all this He's sitting next to Asquith'saght to Violet at a dinner. He says I love this war. I know it is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet I can't help it I enjoy every second of it So people may reflect on those words when they get into the suffering of some the troops. Galipi. Yeah. And he says, it's this operation of mine is going brilliantly. Soon the Royal Naval Division will be marching into Constantinople. That will make them sit up, the swine who snarled at the naval division. He's talking about the people who said they were useless at Antwerp And in fact, Churchill is so giddy now that three days after this of the twenty fifth of february, so six days after the operation began He goes to the warar council And he says, We will be in Constantinople by the end of March. We will be able to capture and destroy all Turkish forces in Europe And we will eliminate Turkey as a military factor in the war. Some chicken, some neck I mean, absolutely insane from Churchill The next phase is scheduled for mid March, and this is the full scale attack on the inner forts inside the Straits Now. At this point, one of the big flaws in Churchill's scheme has become apparent, and this is He hass forgotten that there's another side in this whichich is the odsums And the Ottomans will see what's going on and they will reinforce accordingly And that is, of course, exactly what the Ottomans have done. They've made more mines, they've brought up more artillery And some of Churchill's own know subordinates are now becoming extremely anxious about this. So Admiral Carden, who was already ill Two days before the operation, has a complete nervous breakdown and has to be sort of taken away, and he is replaced by his Vice Admiral, John D Robek, who has always thought the whole scheme was mad However, the whole thing goes ahead anyway The big day is Thursday, the eighteenth of March It's a lovely day. Beautiful sunny sort of spectacle sixteen British and French ships Steam towards the entrance to the narrows, the straits. and immediately things go wrong So one of the French ships, the Bouvet hits a mine and explodes and it sinks so quickly that of more than seven hundred men aboard this ship All but seventy five of them are drowned And then two more ships, British ships, HMS irresistible and HMS inflexible. They hit Turkish mines too. Inflexible managers to get away, But irresistible is totally crippled. And then they send another ship to try to rescue them HMS Ocean And that is hit first by a Turkish shell, then by a Turkish mine and that sinks too So by nightfall, when Rbex says, okay, we're calling off this off, this has been an absolute shambles Weve cleared one line of mindes out of nine Of one hundred and seventy six Turkish shguns, they have knocked out precisely four. and Of their sixteen ships, three of them have been sunk and three of them have been badly damaged So, this has been a terrible day. I mean, it's gone really badly. The next day, Churchill goes to the War cououncil, he reads out the telegrams reporting what's gone on, and he says it's actually going fine. Yeah, we've taken a few losses. He doesn't mention the French ship and its men at all. He says we've lost Less than thirty British lives and two or three worthless ships. So the French just forgets about them and doesn't count them. And then he says, well now that it's going to say, well, is this perhaps the moment to discuss partitioning the Ottoman Empire Admiral Fisher says, you are mad We told you to use troops as well, but you wouldn't listen And Churchill himself wrote after the war For the first time since the war began, high words were used around the octagonal table In other words, people are now saying to him, You have totally led us. You've led us into an absolute mess. This is a shambles. Lots of people have died What are you talking about partitioning Turkey? We're nowhere remotely near to conquering Turkey, you mad And this is the moment when they should clearly have said Stop enough Cull the plg and they don't And the reason they don't It's partly because there's Churchill there who's a force of nature, who's basically clearly going to have a massive tantrum. if they don't continue with this scheme. It's partly because they've already lost lives and ships So It's that classic thing of, you know, pouring good money after the bad. You know, you have to justify the initial investment, the initial sacrifice and the only way to do that is to keep you know throwing resources down the sink as it were But also, Lord Kitchener raises the point about the Jihad that you mentioned earlier. He says, We cannot afford to lose to an Asian Muslim power, because the authority of our empire is based on the perception of our superiority Qote, the effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious. I There's a slight kind of wanting to pull out of the Iran war I really could imagine it Vietnam You know, a humiliation or a defeat here would be so catastrophic for America's image abroad. that we just have to keep pouring and pouring m and hoping that something will change. And so The warar Council makes the fateful decision that they would double down They will send in the fleet for another go But first They will prepare the ground They decide we will send A small expeditionary force to the European side of the Straits We will land troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula And it should be a very easy job to take the peninsula and to knock out all the Ottoman forts and batteries along that side of the coastline then we can send our ships through. It will be dead easy Nothing possibly go wrong? We will find out after a break This episode is brought to you by Disclosure Day. The new movie Disclosure Day is directed by legendary filmmaker Stehven Spielberg. And now with Disclosure Day, Spielberg is back with another movie which asks the fascinating question, what would you do if you found out that we here on planet Earth were not alone. See, I feel quite good about it because I've actually been prepping for some years. So I've laid up stores, I've got weaponry. I'm ready when the aliens attack, I will be able to fight back with the arsenal at my disposal So I'm excited about it. But Dominic, you are not actually appearing in this cast because the cast is a really extraordinary one and clearly Spiilber didn't need you because he's got Emily Blunt, he has got Colin Furth, he's got Josh O'Connor, he's got Coleman Domingo. And it's a completely gripping and original story and absolutely it demands to be seen, not on TV But on the big screen, Disclosure Day is in cinemas, Wednesday, june tenth tickets now Hi, this is Garal Linka from Gold Hangers. The restest is Football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. 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Hello everyone and welcome back to the restest is History Dominant, you said before the break This scheme that Churchill has cooked up for sending land forces. that nothing could go wrong This is confidence justified Well, we will discover Judgeel says to them And I quote, There should be no difficulty in effecting a landing. It doesn't occur to him that it will be at all tricky to land thousandousands of troops on enemy territory a long way from home, you know what will effectively be an amphibious landing Facing modern weaponry, this is something that has never been done before. So can I just ask the nearest land bases that Britain has are what Egypt and Cyprus Egypt, Yeahah So they have troops in Egypt and as we will see, those are the Anzacs. Who are they going to bring over So the man who has chosen to command the operation is one of Churchill's closest friends in the army is a guy called Siran Hamilton Soan Hamilton is often given A very bad press in books about Galipoi You know, you mentioned lions led by donkeys mean, he's definitely not a donke If you were being very critical of him, you'd say he was a bit of a diltante. And in fact, that's the criticism that people make He fought in both Ber wars, decorated He's a novelist, he's a poet He is regarded as you know the most cerebral, the most intellectual of the British Army's senior officers He's got a kind of quite a wry sardonic sense of humor. I like his line after the war. He said there is nothing certain about war except that one side won't win. And I think that's, you know, that suggests that he's not u, is not absurdly over optimistic Hamilton, however, has been dealt a very rough hand He's being asked as a reminder, he's being asked to carry out the first ever landing. B C. on enemy territory, facing modern technology. He's been given a month to plan it. So this is not D day, you know, months and months in the planning This is going to be much quicker. But presumably even a month is giving the Ottomans time to beef up their defenses. Of course. the Ottomans know what's coming. Yeah. I mean, they're not idiots And also Another contrast would say D day. And his task is made harder because the Secretary Wardlord Kitchener gives him a very ragtag collection of troops, many of them untested and untrained So to give people a sense There's the twenty ninth Division of the British Army And that had basically been cobbled together by loads of colonial garrisons. So people who'd been serving all over you Asia or whatever are now told, you're going to come back and you're going to fight and you're going to be lumped in with these other blokes Then there is Churchill's Royal Naval division. Churchill' so proud of this, you know, his favorite child or whatever They're basically a load of naval reservists and volunteers who signed up to join the Navy when the war broke out, but there was nothing for them to do. So they've been told know you're going to be like a sort of little naval Marine force fighting on land, right And thenen there's the French, the Orient Expeditionary Corps, as they are called. And a lot of these people are colonial troops from Algeria and from Senegal. So they're there too And then most famously the Anzacs the Australian Imperial Force and the New Zealanders's expxeditionary Force And these have been made up of volunteers by the two dominions of Australia New Zealand to the outbreak of war They thought they were going to fight in Europe and they have been training in the desert, outside ro so that will prepare them for the mud of Flanders. Right. So After the war Australian writers in particular absolutely lionized these guys. And they said these were the embodiments of the Anzac spirit They are free spirited, manly sons of the outback and of the outdoors. What a contrast between our brave boys and the sort of sickly pallid products of Britain's industrial cities. It's like a kind of Australian ashes preview Exactly, exactly. Now actually this is slightly misleading quarter. of the Australian imperial force had actually been born in Britain So these are people who were British but have emigrated to Australia and now have decided that they will sign up. And actually, a lot of the others were not sons of the Obach at all. They came from cities themselves, cities like Sydney and Melbourne And as Australian historians have actually done lots of work in showing They're not always the most admirable adverts for Australian virtues. You know, Tom, I like Australia a lot I been there in tour, I'm a big fan of Australia and Australans and indeed New Zealanders But actually in Cairo, these blokes don't bring great credit on the Cairo Yeah, it's kind They take great credit on the Australian flag. They there's a lot of fighting, there's a lot of drunkenness There's a lot of looting. There's a lot of sexual misbehavior, there's allegations of rape Two out of ten of these blokes at some point get venereal disease And in fact, there is a thing that' Apparently very well known in Australia Code. The Battle of the Wazer Well And this is This is when they run a mock on Good Friday because they've all got VD from the Lad of the night, Egyptian ladies of the night And they run am mock through the brothels of Cairo trying to locate the women who they think have given them the Basically. Oh And there's a huge there's a massive riot basasically as they run am mock anyway. But I suppose it helps to build up elite mateship think so? elite m. Elite meship is what the anzac S spirit is all about So it's all about mateship. Yeah. so they could they could not be in a better condition as they? They're ready to have a crack a crack at the turk. Sake on the Turk, Eactly. Anyway So basically this is Hamilton's force. They haven't trained together. A lot of them are barely trained at all. They don't have enough guns. Their officers have no experience with this kind of operation Basically because nobody has any experience with this kind of operation. It hasn't really been done before. I mean the more you go on the madder the whole scheme seems. But the rationale for it, obviously, is they say If it all there doesn't matter. Because it's only the Turks So as soon as we get ashore The Turks will undoubtedly run away 'a they're just hanging around smoking hookars and drinking very thick coffee. Well, this brings us to Johnny Turk as the Tommys and the Anzacs called him So But There's obviously a massive sense of racial superiority that underlies all this. I mean, the Turks, the Ottomans, are not a joke at all. They are battle hardened. They've just fought two Balkan wars and they fought the Italians in Libya. This time, they will be fighting very clearly in defense of their native lands. for their native soil. The idea that they're just going to run away is laughable And they have been very busy. So this German guy, Otto Lemman von Sanders He has been modernizing the Ottoman army, and he has now been moved specifically to the Dardanelles and told take charge of the fififth Army. The Ottoman fifth Amy is going to defend the Straits from these blakkes And Lhman has been given two hundred thousand men And he thinks, well You know, he's not an idiot. He can see what's happened on the Western Front and whatnot And he says, rightight, Well obviously what we're going to do is we're just going to wait for them to land and then we'll just kill them all. We'll let them approach us We'll establish trenches, we'll establish that barbed wire We will lay mines, we will have supply roads ready to bring up more ammunition We will prepare our positions on the high ground When the Allies land You know, we will basically just drive them into the sea or side them down with our machine guns. So We now get to mid April On the tenth of April, Serene Hamilton and his senior officers arrive on the island of Lemnos in the Northern Aegean And two days later they're joined there by the Anzacs from Egypt And there by the twenty ninth division of the British Army and also by the French Meanwhile, Churchill's Royal Naval Division have been training on the island of Skiros, which is to the south of Lemnos And one of the men on the island is the Cambridge educated poet Rupert Brooke And Rupert Brooke is twentyw twenty seven years old. He is he was described by W B Yates as the handsomest man in England I always find that kind of ludicrous. like has Yates seen every other man in England? No, he hasn't I mean, he is in an absolute lather of excitement about all the classical and the historical associations, isn't he? Yeah. I mean, Troy is just up the Dardardels and he dreams of fighting there on the plain of Troy. And he comes up with this amazing phrase which I think speaks for so many of us He wrote I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been since I was two to go on a military expedition against Constantinople I mean His dream will come true or will it? Where will it? Brook has already imagined his own death, of course, very famously, some of the most famous lines written in the First World War. If I should die, think only this of me, that there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. Yeah, and he wants to die if he has to die like Achilles bravely in the heat of battle on the plain of Troy. Yeah. He will lead his men Over the plain of Troy under beating sunshine in a chariot. You know, everyone cheering. Yeah, the most handsome man in England in B you know, in burning armor. How does he died on on it Bitten on the lip by a mosquito the mosquito bite becomes infected And he dies of blood poisoning on the twenty third of April So he hasn't even seen an Ottoman defender. He hasn't set foot on the soil of Asia. He hasn't even got to the Galliipoline peninsula. He's dead before he's set off And you know, this report in the newspapers, the Aswith family knew him very well. They were devastated by this. Churchill knew him, was devastated, wrote a Absolutely sort of tear stained syrupy obituary for him, I think in the times And you might say this is quite a bad omen that this bloke who was going to lead the kind of the attack on Troy. I just think generally attacking Troy is nons senseense. Yeah It's going to go on for ten years at least. There's a slight sign at this point. I think the Churchill is beginning to wobble himself Lloyd George said he was looking worried and looking ill The former Tori Prime Minister Arthur Balfa asked Churchill, How's it going to go this business at Gallipoli? You know, you must be absolutely bet you can't wait And Churchills then said, I think there's nothing for it but to go through with the business No one can count with certainty on the issue of a battle which suggests that he is beginning to wobble. And then he says, But we have the chances in our favor and we play for vital games with non vital stakes And I think the Tens and tens of thousands of men who died at Gallipoli would be probably quite offended to be referred to as non vital stakes. Anyway, The landings were initially set for the twenty third of April, the day that Brooke died they are postponed by two days because of bad weather, another bad omen, possibly we shall see The plan calls for two distractions to kind of confuse the Turks So the French will land at Kumcaler in Asia They're get off the ships. thenen they'll get back on again and come back the other side, really? This is just a trick the Turks. What a wheez And then a brilliant whz actually, the Royal Naval Division would pretend to land at a place called Boa which is in the north of the peninsula And actually they get New Zealand's greatest war hero Bernard Freyberg He swims ashore A light flares on the beach to distract the defenders. and then he swims back again And this is an incredible feat of New Zealand plg There's not as much New Zealand action in this story as there should be Well N New Zealand is generally more retiring Yeah they, I think than Australians And this comes to rugby Yeah, I guess. They're putting all their eneries into rugby not enough into boasting about their martial feats. Is that true? Yeah, or swimming ashore and lighting flares. Exactly, which I think is very impressive So these are the distractions And then there'll be two landings Landly number one is the two Antsac divisions led by the thirird Australian Infantry Brigade They will land on the western side of the Gallipoli Peninsula this sort of crescent bay, sandy bay which ends up being called AnZac Cove And meananwhile, the British, the twenty ninth Division willll land at the very southern tip of the peninsula, which is called Cape Hllies. and there are five beaches SV, W, X and Y around this tip and they will land at these five beaches. Can I just ask Are they more British than An Ss Yes 'ause that's not the sense you get, is it? generenerally Are youing Are you disissing Australian stuff? No, I'm not disissing. I mean, my sense is that Gillippy was entirely fought by Anzacs. I think that's the kind of the vague sense you have. Yeah and that there are British generals lurking in the background being sinister and posh and like Douglas Jardine Yeah, drinking tea. Yeah. They're drinking tea and swimming, the British on the beach. while Australian plucky Australian boys who've come with core cats from the from the Outback have been moaned down by Cruel Turkish gunners Loads of British are being moowed down as well. Well we will see Yeahah loads of British are being moowed down. Yeah. So The plan is you will land, you'll establish your beachhead and then you will push in land The terrain is not ideal. It's these kind of scrublands, these hills, these deep ravines But the planners say, don't worry The Turks will crumble as soon as all lads get ashore Well will they? We willll find out We'll start with the Azac sixteen thousand of them. Remember these are untrained soldiers, untested And they are attempting something very difficult a landing at sea at night against machine guns and barbed wire. I mean, has this ever happened before No one has ever done this before. I mean, that's a massive ask. It's huge.'ve you've come all the way from Australia. You've had what six months of training and you've got to do something that no one in military history has done. It's insane and this is why D dayay This is arguably why D D is so remarkable Well, it's partly because they had the lesson of Gallipoli. I mean, Gallipoli are the back of their minds all through D day because it was such a shambles So to go back to the Anzacs, they've been given a very narrow window of time. Between three o'clock in the morning, four o'clock in the morning. So this is the time between you the moon will vanish at three, the sun will come up at four, this is your time The assumption is it will be very straightforward and doesn't turn out that way. So this is Private Walter Stigls of the Third Australian Battalion He was part of the second wave that went ashore and I'll read what he said It was pitch stock Then all of a sudden, the coast, a dim outline of the coast loomed up As we got closer, we were all beginning to get tensed up, nervous, wondering what was going to happen as everything was so quiet. Then a single shot rang out and a yellowish light flared up in the sky And from then on the Turks let loose, machine gun and rifle fire at the boats. As soon as the boats grounded, it was every man for himself And it's very saving private at Ryan. So an Amy surgeon, Australian surgeon in his diary, he watched the men going ashore under all this Turkish fire. Several fell as they ran and on the beach I saw even more men lying untidily, some quite still, others making an occasional movement en I jumped over in two feet of water and waded heavily ashore. The lapping edge was already pink and frothy with fallen men. Oh God. So it takes them about four hours to get their men ashore, the Anax. It's amazing they do get ashore, really It is it's very impressive. I mean, that opening reading, I mean, they do perform very, very bravely. Yeah They start to push up the hill up up in land. But it is clear that their guiding assumption was wrong. The Turks have not cut and run, quite the reverse So This is another guy, Eric Moorehead from Victoria. He says basically they went up the hill. They're expecting to see the enemy there We were now in a scrub covered plane fairly in the open. No turks would have been seen, but the air was literally full of bullets and the sound was deafening. The point blank explosion of rifles and the concealed snipers firing on us at close quarters A bayonet charge had failed, the men became disorganized. Some ran about distractedly poking in the bushes for Turks, others fell on their faces nerve racked by the terrible fire. So what has happened is this The Ottoman troops have let them come in land And then at the point where the Turks might have panicked under the Australian onslaught They have rallied and this is thanks to somebody we've already mentioned in this episode Their front line commander, liieutenant Colonel Mustf a Kemel So up to this point, as we said He's an obscure sort of nationalist army officer Born in Salonica He's a big drinker, he's very intense, very driven But people haven't heard of him, and this is the moment where particularly within the army he becomes a national hero. Be at ten o'clock that morning, Mropher Kemmel is heading towards the front line And he sees some of the Turkish troops retreating and he says, Why are you running away? Sir, the enemy. Wh over there And they point to this place that the Australians end up calling battleship Hill about two miles in land, which is where the Australians have got to Mustauck Kemel comes out with this line that becomes part of Turkish nationalist mythology He says to his troops I don't order you to attack I order you to die By the time we're dead, other troops and other commanders will be ready to take our places And amazingly, I mean That would I would find that terrifying and I probably would continue running away. But the Turks are made of stern stuff than I am And they turn round and they run back into their fray and they drive the Australians back down towards the beach I mean, the Australians do love a beach. Australians do love a beach. But you wouldn't associate Australians with going backwards, would you? No wouldn't But that is precisely what they are doing by mid afternoon. far from going forwards and pushing a land. They are being driven back towards the sea. The officers are being sithed down by Turkish machine guns. and they're absolutely shattered. Of course, I mean, imagine How exhausted they must be after making this landing. So this is Private Herbert Fildlders of the Twelfth Battalion Theour of us lay under a shrapnel, machine gun and rifle fire, not daring to lift our heads the whole while. if we'd budged, we wouldd have been killed dozens of times over The bullets were streaming so thick over our heads Our officers said he'd never seen anything like him and he's an old soldier. I was jolly tired too. as a matter of fact, I went to sleep twice. That's impressive. That's so impressive. I mean, do is this worse than fighting it on the Western Front. It is really, isn't it Yeah, I think in the grand scheme of things. I mean, you're kind of in the open, aren't you? You don't know what you're doing, you're blundering around all these. your mad landscape It's really hot. I we willll see particularly in our next episode In Thursday's episode. I think the conditions of at Gallipoli are just unbelievably hellvish. And they're definitely worse than the Western Front. And a lot of people who served on both said Yeah, the Wester front wasn't brilliant But the one thing it had in its favor was it wasn' Gallipoli, which was so much worse. Yeah, it sounds awful. So anyway, this Bokeku fell asleep. He was hit three times in the legs, but he still managed to get out to the beach, which is very impressive Bobbie. Anyway, Night falls, the Stanacks do have a foothold. They've got this little pocket with a kind of perimeter which is about two miles long But in total, they've basically got only half a mile in land. They are nowhere near where they were meant to be And they've already lost two thousand men. Out of their sixteen thousand killed, wounded or missing. So that's the Anzacs Now meanwhile, the British have been landing further south at Cape Hellys, and this is actually the bigger landing This is twenty one thousand men of the twenty ninth division. And they're given a tremendous send off by their commanding officer Major General Aylmer Hunter Westteron, Hunter Bunter He says to them The eyes of the world are upon us, your deeds will live in history, to us now is given the opportunity of avenging our friends and relatives who have died in France and Flanders. So I looked him up. Yeah. Mache. Very good mouache. Excellent mouache. think the best British military moustache I've seen so far. I think the moustaches at Galipoli by and large are better than accross the board than British muststaches on the Western front. So Atturk had an excellent mustouache So a pencil though. Hunter Bunter's moustache is so echcked British military officer inuring the First World War. It's the platonic archetype of it Do look at it. Do have a look. Anyone who Who's a fan of military mustoustaches? Military moustaches Now things here Cpe Pellies do not go according to plan at all So I mentioned there were five beaches and the main ones, we'll forget three of them, we'll just talk about two of them W and V So the first wave to land at W Beach are the first Lancashire Fuseiliers And when they get there, they find that the Turks are waiting with all their barbed wire and their machine guns I mean this is Captain Harold Clayton There was tremendously strong barbed wire when my boat landed. Men were being hit on the boats and as they splashed ashore I got up to my waste in water, I tripped over a rock and went under. I got up and made for the shore and lay down by the barbed wire The front of the wire by now is a thick mass of men the majority of whom never moved again The trenches on the right raked us and those above us raked our right, while trenches and machine guns fired straight down the valley. The noise was ghastly, the sight's horrible. I mean just so they've got in land. they're stuck on the barbed wire and they're just being absolutely raped for machine guns So the Lancashire Fuseiliers, they went ashore with twenty seven officers and one thousand two men. end the day with sixteen officers just three hundred and four men. But have they secured a foothold? They have secured a little foothold. I mean, they've definitely got a shore So that's something Now if you think that's bad, V Beach is the real shocker So V Beach, the Turks had really put a lot of effort into reinforcing this beach. They had put two lines of barbed wire and then behind them two various lines of trenches So one of the British naval commanders who's called Edward Unwyind? Ces up with a clever plan that you and indeed Rupert Brooke. would admire He says, Look We're just across the straits from Troy. You know, If you've done classics at public school as I have then you will know. How to cope Trojans We need a Trojan horse, not a literal horse. Not a literal horse, but a shepherd to roll the Norm horce on the beach. I mean I' be a ri fractly. it couldn't go worse I wouldn't put it past that. and you're not wrong. It couldn't go worse than what they actually did. they said instead of using a horse, a wooden horse, We'll use a bloody big ship, like a huge old coller or a cold ship called the SS River Clyde We will put two thousand men We'll put loads of ammo and we'll put loads of supplies in this big old ship. And then we will deliberately run it aground We'll run the ship aground as close to the beach as possible We'll have another little ship coming up called a steamhopper And this will go in between the ship and the actual sand So all the men will be able to jump off the river Clye onto the steamhopper. and then jump off the steamhopper onto the sands and run up the beach and then This big ship that's stuck on the beach, the River Clyde We can use that as our headquarters, as a little field hospital, as a kind of supply depot, all of this. I think it's quite a good idea T you? How does it go Well, we'll find out So so they start bombarding the beach And then they're going to send up the Dublin Fusileiers first and little rowing boats And then this Bloody big sh, the river Cld The Dubblein infusiiliers make very slow progress, so unfortunately they land out of order The River Clyde lands first crashes aground But it hasn't got as close to the beach as they hoped it would. It's still eighty yards away If the men can't jump out and waade, they willll just drown So this is where your steam hop a little boat, which would act as a bridge Cha a gangway comes in. Unfortunately, the steam hopper has also run aground but on the wrong side of the ship and pointing the wrong way So they can't use that at all So they're all stuck on this boat offshore, like how we going to get off At this point, the Dublin Fusiliers and their raingboats come to land and they are absolute sitting ducks for the Turkish machine gunners who basically sce through them Some of the Dublin boats jump out and they try to wade ashore, but their packs are so heavy that they they can't really make any progress. They end up being riddled with Turkish bullets. It's a terrible, terrible scene. Private Robert Martin. There were twenty five in my boat and there were only three of us left. It was terrible to hear our poor chums moaning and to see the poor boys dead in the water Others on the beach roaring for help, but we could do nothing for them Those who were left wounded on the shore, in the evening the tide came in and they were all drowned, and I was left by myself on the beach that's That's not great. No. And then what about this ship, the River Clyde? Yeah, I'm sure that comes to the rescue. It's just sitting there It's just sitting there, right And the Turks are just hammering shells at it and bullets. Oh, it's a mad idea to have done that then Yeah, precisely, Stupid idea Because the men can't jump off. they're in six feet of water, theirir packs are so heavy they will just be dragged down and drowned And this guy who came up with the idea Unwind can see that it's all falling apart to his massive credit He says, I willll fix this And he takes an naval seaman with the excellent name of William Williams They jump into the sea They've got all these barges with them They lash together all the barges with ropes. And they literally hold them in place, these two guys as a gangwit. Okay, that is impressive Right? And the Turks are firing at them and they don't hit these two bloes, which is so impressive. that these guys such courage And the men start jumping down from the ship onto the gangway But they' being raped all the time with Turkish bullets So the first two hundred men twenty one of them reached the beach alive And there was a petty officer who was watching from the ship and he wrote in his diary. he said one after another The devoted fellows made the dash down the deadly gangways But to our horror we saw them suddenly begin to flounder and fall in the water They went down, never to reappear. as the hailing bullets flicked the life out of the struggling men, we almost wept with impotent rage So they're leaping off incredibly bravely kind of running across this kind of improvised gangway and they're all being shot down After about an hour, the shallows are absolutely choked with dead and drowning men The able seaman William Williams, he shot and killed And Unwyin who's been holding the gangway in place would kind of from not say won't be swept away by the tide He basically collapses with exhaustion, he has to be dragged back aboard the ship And at this point, the commanding officers on the river guys say, This has been a complete nightmare. Let's just wait here, stop trying to get off the ship and wait for cover of darkness and then try to get tohore. I mean, this is why you should never be too brave, Tom And I don't think this is an issue that we will ever have to face, frankly, but just so you know. Don't be too courageous Becauseuse at this point, one of the infantry commanders who iss called Brigadier General Napier says, no, no, we can still do this. And he jumps down from the ship onto the gangway and he says, comeome on, man. And somebody shouts at him You can't possibly land And Napier says, I'll have a damn good try And he starts to run across these barges, followed by his loyal major and some of his men. He gets to barge number three and a bullet just smacks into his head and he falls into the water, and his body was never recovered So that was the end of him. I suppose they couldn't recognize it if his He's being blown to pieces. I guess. his second command, his major is right behind him secondecond bullet hits the major The major raises himself to one knee It's carry on man And then another bullet hits and that's the end of him as well. Lord So basically, they're all killed By mid afternoon, there are still only two hundred men on the beach and they're huddling for cover, sort of under punishing Turkish fire, and there's a thousand blokes still on the river Clyde and only when darkness falls and the Turkish firing dies down. can the rest of them Get asshore. And they get ashore a lot of them by basically using the bodies as a bridge. But just to be clear If they're all now on the beach, I mean, they're just exposed. Well it's night Yeah, I know, but when dawn comes Were' they all just be shot to pieces? Well, no, because they do manage to push a little A Cpeellis, they do manage to push a little way in land So they lost two thousand men and they'd lost two thousand men at Anzak Cove. But then the south, they do manage to push a little bit further So it's a great triumph. Well, They have not come remotely close to realising their objectives or to getting to where they wanted to. it is terrifying the obvious to them at this point. that the Turks are not the sort of pushovers they thought they were. that they are duck in They are well supplied, they're extremely well motivated, and the last thing the Turks are going to do is to run away. And that evening, the AnNZac commander who was called William Birdwood, sent a signal to San Hamilton And he said You know, my men have performed heroically But they are thoroughly demoralized by snipers, shrapnel, and shellfire If we have to resume fighting tomorrow, he says, there is likely to be a fiasco You need to get us out of here right away. And Hamilton actually talks to the Naval officers, Can this be done? And the naval guys say to him, it's actually not possible. There's no plans You know, we don't have the we haven't prepared. We literally cannot physically get them out at such sure notice And so Hamilton sends the signal back to the AnZacs. Dig yourselves right in and stick it out. Dig, dig. Dig until you are safe And so this is what they're doing. And is this where the word diggers for Anzac troops comes from? I think it is actually. Yeah, this is my assumption, I guess, alough I'm not certain. So both AnzZac Cove and at Cape Heelly's further south The men are now digging trenches. and this of course is the grim irony of all this That's This whole operation was meant to avoid the horrors of the Western Front. It was a diversion from the Western Front And now after all, they are back in The trenches And I assume that it is much harder to dig trenches here than it is in the mud of Flanders Definitely is Definitely isn't in the chalk lenss of the ae or something. So the question now Now that they've landed, what's the plan Is Churchill finally going to accept that this mad scheme has failed B Is he going to throw in more men We'll find out next time. Yeah, there's only one way to do that, and that is to listen to the next episode. and of course members of the Rest is History Club can do so right away and if you're not a member the rest of the History club and you would like to Listen to the next episode immmediately enjoy a host of supplementary benefits you can of course go to the rest ishistory. com where you will get them all. But for now, Dominiic, thank you very much for what's been a very grim story and I suspect that in the next episode, it will get even grimar Goodby Goodbye Oh You canan't reason with the sun, trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's omni shade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. 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