The British government finally decided to pull the remaining troops out. 16,000 Allied troops got frostbite and more than 300 froze to death. Relief of a kind – extreme relief that is – came in November, when a storm caused great torrents of water to cascade down the peninsula, smashing through the trenches…Īnd then the snow came. The summer also dried out the shrubbery, which then caught fire, mercifully cremating the rotting corpses, horrifically burning alive some poor wounded men as they lay in no man’s land. In some places, the corpses were piled two to three metres high.” “Men shot, choked and clubbed each other to death … trenches became cluttered with dead. Savage hand-to-hand fighting erupted under the ground: When fighting started up again, as it did on August 6, 1915, attacking troops burst through the Turkish lines and broke into the labyrinth of mining tunnels that had been dug in the interim. I shall certainly have eternal nightmares.”Īs the summer beat on, and the sun beat down, parching men’s throats, the flies came – swarming over food and spreading disease further.Īnd this was what happened during easy periods. I pray God I may never see such an awful sight again. It was a terrible sight to see arms and legs sticking out of the sand, underneath the sandbags. “In some cases, the dead actually formed part of the trench wall. One eyewitness, Percival Fenwick, a New Zealand medical officer, said: ![]() ![]() To show one’s head against the parapet (the front, top edge of a trench) meant instant death.” George Lambert, Anzac, the landing 1915, 1920-1922, oil on canvas, 199.8 cm x 370.2 cm, Australian War Memorial ART02873 “In some places, especially at ANZAC (where the Australians and New Zealanders were) the trenches were only five metres apart. This was exactly the way in which warfare on the Western Front had become bogged down, and might have been bypassed - if the Gallipoli campaign had been a success.īut instead, according to the 2005 documentary ‘Gallipoli’, directed by Tolga Ornek, the absurdities of trench warfare showed up here too: On this day, the ANZACs were landed in the dark and in the wrong place, left fighting their way up from the shoreline and through rugged terrain to reach Turkish defenders on the heights.ĭespite the odds, the ANZACs had some early successes, but when the campaign as a whole faltered, a drawn-out, attritional battle resulted. If successful, it would have allowed for a warm-water supply route from Britain and France to their ally Russia, struggling against Germany and Austria-Hungary on the Eastern Front.īut poor planning, bad luck and the dogged resistance of the Turks blighted a campaign that dragged on for much of 1915 and because it proved to be such a testing baptism of fire the very first day when troops were put ashore, April 25, is now remembered as ANZAC Day. This was the ill-fated attack on the Gallipoli peninsula of Turkey in 1915, an effort meant to knock the Ottoman Turks out of the war and to open up the Black Sea. The ANZAC units also served in World War 2 and Vietnam, but it is their very first campaign, right after their inception, that is most culturally significant. (**There are two or more divisions in a corps). This figure leaves out all the empire formations and because of these, there were almost 100 divisions (98, to be precise) under British command across the world by the end of the First World War, according to ‘ Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War 1914-1920’.ĪNZACs made up the Australian and New Zealand component (including some British and Indian troops early on), first as one single ‘Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’, and later as I and II ANZAC Corps**. (*British infantry divisions later reduced in size).īut in reality, 80-plus divisions was only the total number that Britain herself fielded at one time or another over the course of the conflict. ![]() It’s been noted here before that Britain managed to form upwards of 80 divisions over the course of the war, though not all of them lasted until its end (a division usually being a self-sufficient unit of about 18,000* men, infantry and artillery - though cavalry divisions also existed.) ANZAC is short for ‘Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’, a unit formed near the beginning of World War 1, in December of 1914, and one of many additional components of the British Army that came from the British Empire.
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