Though enthusiastically godfathered by Churchill, Gallipoli was an example of the work of the Easterners, those in the War Office and Admiralty who wanted to attack Germany through her supposed underbelly, her allies in the East. The Westerners, those who wanted to defeat Germany in Western Europe, sneered at the operation as if it were a sideshow and, given its mismanagement, it was indeed a frightful sideshow. And in the overall plan, the Anzac landings of 25 April were subsidiary to the main British landings at Helles in the toe of the peninsula. The Anzacs were meant to cross the peninsula and capture the heights which overlooked the Dardanelles, the approaches to Istanbul, in the area known as the Narrows. The British and French, sweeping up from Helles, were to connect up with them there. Once these heights across the Gallipoli peninsula were secured, the British navy would have some chance of sailing up through the Narrows to seize the Golden Horn and Istanbul.
Australians, supposedly a non-poetic race, turned Gallipoli into their legend, and pegged out the entirety of it. This was quite an act of national assertion. The British, for example, sent over 450 000 into the battle on the Gallipoli Peninsula, of whom 33 500 were killed. But the modern British contemporaries of the young Australians who descend on Gallipoli each year probably do not even know such battles occurred on the Gallipoli Peninsula, or where Gallipoli is. The Australian imagination has seized the campaign as if it had been predominantly fought by Antipodeans.
The claim on Gallipoli is all the more remarkable given the unruly and, according to British officers, disreputable behaviour of the Australians in Egypt. E.G. Halse, an Australian stretcher bearer, quoted Kitchener with glee as having said that it took him twenty years to make Cairo what it was, and the Australians had undone it in twenty minutes. The Anzacs, for example, had set fire to the brothel area of Cairo, the Wazzir, when one of their number was knifed there. Halse also observed the reckless amateur archaeology of Australian troops around Zeitoun and Heliopolis. ‘They bring into camp bones and skulls which their entrenching tools have unearthed.’
They penetrated cafes and bars reserved for officers and showed no conventional respect for their superiors. Halse recorded: ‘Sensation in Cairo yesterday. An Australian saluted an officer.’ There is a widespread story which encapsulates the attitude. A British officer (variously a colonel, major or captain, depending on who told the story) stops an Australian who has not saluted. ‘Do you know what I am?’ asks the officer. ‘No.’ ‘Well, I’m a colonel.’ The Australian says, ‘That’s a bloody good job. I’d keep it if I was you.’
At Gallipoli, says the legend, Australians showed that true discipline was not parade ground discipline, but the endurance tempered in the furnace of Australia’s hard bush labours, skills, traditions and misadventures. (Again, the suburbs were downplayed.) And then the obvious fact that this peculiarly Australian vigour and panache was let down by the incompetence of British generals who, like General Hamilton, stayed snugly offshore on his command ship! In the Australian version the Anzacs were superior to all other forces, but in fact they were also quaking boys—if they had inherited stoicism from their forebears (and many, many of them had) it does not mean they felt no fear. To depict them as supra-human is in fact to diminish the bravery of the mass. There was a sizeable number of men who suffered from what they called at Gallipoli ‘DAH’, disordered action of the heart, a form of shell shock. And that there were self-inflicted wounds is dealt with frankly by the official medical history of the campaign. It was a mere human outfall that there be such wounds, ‘a crude and instinctive reaction against a psychic impasse’ to quote a surgeon, Colonel Butler. From 26 May onwards, special instructions were issued by the authorities: men guilty of self-maiming should not be evacuated unless it were absolutely necessary, but treated until it was time to return to duty. These cases serve to emphasise the heartbreaking tenacity of the majority. Since no military victory seemed possible, fortitude itself became the victory and the national triumph.
The health problem on Gallipoli is de-emphasised in the myth. But threat arose not merely from the direction of the enemy but from an early lack of sanitation and from the flies which bred on excreta and the bodies of the dead and then landed and sat like a layer of black across every plate of biscuit, bread and bully beef a man ate. Typhoid, paratyphoid and dysentery struck down the brave, and many Australian mothers and wives, without knowing it, owed their menfolk’s survival to the sanitation officers who created proper latrines and imposed sanitary order in the crazy ravines and on the escarpments of Gallipoli.
Most Australians know of the misfortunes of the first day. The Australians and New Zealanders were to have landed on smoother terrain a mile or so further south, and any visit to Anzac Cove shows how the vagaries of the offshore currents damned them to land beneath intimidating heights, broken by ravines, where losses were guaranteed, where the chances of penetration seemed impossible—though Anzacs did that day nearly take the heights while they were under-defended by the Turks.
Since the story of Gallipoli from a campaign point of view has in the past been so brilliantly written by others, it is instructive to look at how it appeared to the rescuers, the Medical Corps, their doctors, orderlies, and stretcher bearers. A member of the Australian Army Medical Corps aboard ship saw landing parties going ashore on destroyers ‘packed like sardines’, with the destroyers towing barges no less packed. ‘Many of these fellows, before they reached the shore, were shot and tumbled overboard—picked off by snipers . . . one lot of ambulance men were picked off in this way. They were WA boys.’ The field ambulance men and doctors were confronted with the sheer cliffs and prickly scrub, and murderous machine-gun fire and shrapnel. The pebbly beach was described by many as not being wider than a cricket pitch, and the wounded had to be treated in the shelter of three-feet-high overhangs by men of the 1st Australian Field Ambulance. Some of them were killed by fire retrieving wounded. ‘Talk about mixed bathing,’ said one field ambulance man. ‘Men and bullets.’ The ambulance men could see a boat lying aground packed with dead, and on the beach a piled heap of twenty men, dead and wounded, half in and half out of the water. Because of enemy fire, it would be three days before anyone could reach them.
Further forward a regimental aid post had been established and those wounded in the chest, abdomen and head, and others with severe leg wounds, were being carried back while others walked or limped to join the crowd on the beach, where a casualty clearing station had been set up. A white label was attached to light wounds and a red to those who had suffered grave wounds. But it was dangerous and close to impossible to create field ambulance hospitals out of view of the Turks. The doctors and hospital orderlies had never expected anything like this level of mayhem, and triage—the sorting out of casualties—was near hopeless because of the scale of wounded. Many men who were killed or hit on boats heading for the shore were offloaded to passing minesweepers and destroyers to lie wherever they could be fitted on steel decks before being taken to the initial Gallipoli hospital ship, the Sudan.
On 25 April, one field ambulance reported its casualties as two killed, eighteen wounded and four missing. Yet they had cleared more than 3000 wounded. All urgent operations were done, including necessary amputations, tying of arteries, and attending to abdominal wounds, compound fractures of the skull, bladder wounds and compound fractures of the thigh. All these necessitated anaesthetics, which were administered in nearly every instance by non-commissioned officers or by privates.
After dark the wounded were placed on anything that would float them out to the hospital ships or the transports. It was cold that first night at Gallipoli and there was some rain. In the rain and the dark, one transport was hailed by a boat from shore and asked to take ninety Australian wounded on board. The men had been towed around in a small boat for hours seeking accommodation. Forty stretcher cases were swung on board by means of cargo nets lowered over the sides. Several of the casualties died shortly after being put
on board.
At four-thirty the next morning, men of the 3rd Australian Field Ambulance landed, some of them immediately becoming victims of sniping, but the rest setting up under an embankment and bringing in the wounded from nearby country. The landing units were scattered groups so it was not easy to find the wounded. The only hospital ship off Anzac Cove at that time, the Gascon, rapidly filled up with wounded. Two transport ships were set aside for the lightly wounded. Private Gissing on the transport Seang Bee described the ship’s hospital being filled almost instantaneously. ‘The mess tables were ripped up from below, blankets spread down and the men were laid here as closely as possible.’ The Seang Bee, its decks already crowded with 900 wounded by 26 April, could not leave the area yet, since her hulls were still full of unloaded ammunition.
An Australian orderly with Number 2 Australian Stationary Hospital, while off Anzac Cove on a transport which had suddenly taken aboard nearly 700 wounded men, ‘the majority of them in an awful state’, was offered a bribe of 5 sovereigns by one desperately bleeding man to fetch a doctor. Yet a ship full of medical equipment named the Hindu had been ordered away on the evening of 25 April without having unloaded its medicines and medical equipment onto the ships where casualties might be carried. The medical situation at Anzac Cove between 25 April and 5 May was also affected by delay and shortage of supplies.
One of the first sets of women’s eyes to look upon Gallipoli belonged to Daisy Richmond of the hospital ship Guildford Castle as it edged in to collect wounded on the morning of 26 April. Until recently Daisy Richmond had worked in Boorowa, New South Wales, and she had volunteered for the Australian Army Nursing Service. Unlike the British and Canadian nurses the Australians lacked official rank and status, and were sometimes bullied by traditional army regular medical officers who, against much evidence to the contrary, believed nurses had no place close to the battlefront. The first casualties—eighteen men—came alongside at 2 p.m. on the deck of a destroyer but within hours hundreds more arrived. The nurses had to adjust to a new and unimagined scale of damage to young flesh. ‘It was terrible. Badly wounded men kept crawling in from the barges. At times we worked for thirty-six hours without stopping.’ The ships were as yet not equipped with the quantities of morphine and dressings needed for the magnitude of events. Surgical instruments were sterilised in water boiled over one or two inadequate primus stoves in a converted pantry.
Because of the possibility that the military operation might be cancelled and the troops withdrawn, there was great anxiety to get wounded men away from Gallipoli as soon as possible. Indeed, General Birdwood, commander of the Australians, a man of considerable courage, suggested a withdrawal. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if he had persuaded the others, who were in some cases more obtuse men, such as the overall commander General Hamilton. Birdwood would certainly have saved his men in the short term, but only to have them committed all the earlier to the great mincing machine of France and Flanders, or to other poorly planned campaigns in the East.
Dr A.G. Butler, who wrote the medical history of the war, said that the interests of the medical service—to get the severely wounded and amputees away from the primitive and pestilential Gallipoli to fit environs elsewhere—was often at odds with the interests of a ruthless martial machine. Early in the campaigns there was less prompt loading of the badly wounded onto hospital and transport ships than later. According to original orders no ship was to leave its position off Anzac Cove for forty-eight hours. But by 27 April a number of vessels carrying 2800 wounded, below and on their decks, had left for Egypt. Medical units slated to land were broken up so that there were sufficient orderlies to go with the wounded on the transports. Colonel J. Maher of the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps was made Deputy Director of Medical Services Lines of Communication, to control evacuation from Anzac Cove. Under him the flow of the damaged men out of that lethal peninsula improved.
In a conventional war the regimental aid station was furthest forward, just behind the frontline, then the dressing stations and field ambulances a further distance back to give primary aid, and then, ideally three or four miles back, the casualty clearing station, where emergency surgery was performed, wounds were treated, dead flesh cut away and sepsis, wound infection, warded off with antiseptics and cleansing. Patients were also assessed and had labels attached to them according to the severity of wounds. But the casualty clearing personnel, doctors and orderlies at Gallipoli had no more protection than the field ambulances when they first landed.
Dressing stations and field ambulances were eventually set up in the more protected gullies, often dug into the sides of hills and covered with corrugated iron and camouflage, and then the wounded were carried down to the casualty clearing station closer to the beach but similarly concealed. From there, those who could be safely moved to a ship were so moved. Not all of this could happen by night. Casualties lying on the beach waiting for a barge to take them out to the ships were sometimes wounded again or killed by fire from above. Major John Corben of the overworked 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station was ultimately, in August, put in charge of clearing the beach promptly, but several of his orderlies were put out of action by shrapnel and bullets, and a shelter shed erected to protect waiting wounded was pierced by a huge high explosive shell, which killed a sick man lying on a stretcher, wounded another ‘and so shattered the leg of a member of our unit that it had to be amputated two days later on a hospital ship’. The man did not survive.
The Australian surgeons operating competently on the wounded were not meanwhile themselves free from danger. Late in the Gallipoli campaign one casualty clearing station surgeon, Captain H.F. Green, a citizen of Daylesford before medical practice took him to Melbourne, was, wrote Lieutenant George Bell, ‘operating on a man when a shrapnel shell from Beachy Bill Battery burst overhead and a pellet went right through his chest and Green fell into the arms of the doctor who was administering the anaesthetics’.
Private H. Chichenani, an Australian orderly, wrote that during the first fortnight abdominal wounds were predominant but as the men got better entrenched, abdominal wounds lessened and head injuries were more notice-able. These wounds must have shocked members of the Australian Medical Corps, who had rarely seen such damage before. But Private A. Gordon remarked on the new respect stretcher bearers received. ‘Some of the fellows before this had looked upon the AMC men as cold footers—easy jobbers, etc.’
Many found the Dominion hospitals, generally run by citizen-soldier medical staff, much preferable to the British army hospitals more likely at this stage to be headed by professional military surgeons. John Monash, commanding the 4th Australian Infantry Brigade, was critical of the British hospitals which operated on the nearby island of Lemnos, in Malta and in Egypt. ‘It’s about time too that somebody asks about the treatment of Australian soldiers in Tommy hospitals, for it’s the absolute dizzy limit. Nothing could be better than our Australian or New Zealand or Canadian hospitals, but as to the British hospitals here, well, the sooner they hang somebody for gross mismanagement, the better.’ The food supplied to the wounded and ill was poor and insufficient ‘to ensure rapid physical restoration of the personnel’, as Monash put it.
For the first three months after the landing and that early close call for the Turkish defences above the beach, the campaign was a matter of consolidating, but doing it in daily peril—even in the rear—of being sighted by snipers and artillery and killed or wounded—not in a charge, but in doing simple, homely things such as unloading crates of canned beef or strolling on the beach. The August offensives, when the British attempted to capture Krithia while the Australians assaulted Hill 60 and the New Zealanders were slaughtered on the slopes of Chunuk Bair, were the next great attempts to break out, and again the impossibly confused terrain prevented it all. Some generals blamed Monash for mistaking his objectives and getting his men lost, but the maps were inadequate, the darkness o
f the night of the attack confusing, the advice of guides ambiguous, while once again the valour of Monash’s brigade was admirable. The critics were the same men who had failed to possess or provide adequate maps and lacked the capacity to read them competently, who did not know about the coastal currents of the Dardanelles and who—aboard their floating headquarters—had no topographic imagination. There had already been three ferocious battles for the village of Krithia inland from Helles, the toe of the peninsula, and some of the Anzacs were thrown in there as well. The French lost particularly heavily at Krithia in the infamous Ravin de la Mort. But after these August failures, simply hanging on to the beachhead at Anzac Cove, Suvla Bay and Cape Helles became the issue.
THE NURSES AT LEMNOS
Sister Kit McNaughton, from Little River in Victoria, who had trained as a nurse in the Geelong Infirmary and Benevolent Asylum, was now serving at Number 2 General Hospital in Cairo, dealing with the wreckage of the August offensives on the Dardanelles, when she found out she had been accepted as a volunteer to work on the island of Lemnos. She and twenty-four other army nurses travelled by train from Cairo to Alexandria and sailed aboard the SS Assaye—650 miles across the Mediterranean to Lemnos in the northern Aegean, only a two- or three-hour journey from Gallipoli.
By now the wind-scoured, if mythic, Greek island of Lemnos had been taken over as the centre of medical activities in the area, the clearing station for all casualties. In September and October alone these casualties amounted to 50 000 men. The guns of Gallipoli, only fifty miles away, were quite audible, and the deepwater harbour was full of ‘ships by the hundred’, many of which had delivered the wounded and sick.
The nurses served in tent cities to the north-east and west of the harbour—East and West Mudros. It was stony earth. As a staff member, Sister Aitken, commented, ‘At one period or other it seemed to have rained stones.’ Nurses were always cheered ashore by soldiers and sailors in the surrounding ships, but their experience once they got to their nursing stations was more ambiguous. A number worked in the Number 2 Australian Stationary Hospital under the courtly Lieutenant Colonel Arthur White who, on their arrival, had escorted them in motor cars up to the hospital site on Turk’s Head Promontory in West Mudros. Unlike some of his colleagues, he respected their work. Nearby, the Number 3 Australian General Hospital also had its lines, along with two Canadian and a British stationary hospital, and a convalescent depot with accommodation for 2000 men. Across the inlet was a rest camp newly created to give relief and recreation and rotation out of the line for some of the Anzac Corps.