ANZAC: An Original Digger
Charles Hedley Wood joined the Australian Imperial Force aged 19 in August 1914: one of the first to enlist, it appears that actually he may have lied about his age and was only 16 in 1914 – he certainly looks very young in the photo.
A century ago today he landed in the second wave at ANZAC with the 6th Battalion AIF and fought with them in the trenches above the beaches until he was wounded on 8th May 1915. That brought his war to an end; he was subsequently discharged but he was certainly alive fifty years after Gallipoli to claim his ANZAC medal in the 1960s.
Today we remember the original Diggers like him who were part of Australia’s baptism of fire in the Great War and at the dawn of their country coming of age a hundred years ago today.
ANZAC: The Canterbury Regiment Originals
For many today is ANZAC Day as well as the centenary of the Gallipoli landings but it is all too easy to forget the NZ in ANZAC.
The New Zealand Expeditionary Force was part of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and it’s units landed alongside the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) battalions at what would be known as ANZAC Cove a century ago today.
This image shows original volunteers of the Canterbury Regiment in New Zealand in 1914. The regiment took part in the landings a century ago today as described in their regimental history:
The first troops of the New Zealand Brigade to land were the Auckland Battalion, at noon, and the Headquarters and 1st and 2nd Companies of the Canterbury Battalion, at 12.30 p.m. These were immediately ordered to reinforce the left flank of the 3rd Australian Brigade, and to fill the gap between that flank and the sea. While the order was in process of being carried out, the two Canterbury Companies became separated on Plugge’s Plateau, a quarter of a mile east of the beach. There was great confusion, as the men of the various companies had not only become mixed with one another, but in some cases had attached themselves to the Auckland and various Australian Battalions; while Aucklanders and Australians were picked up by the officers commanding the various Canterbury parties.
Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart with the 2nd Company got well forward, and took up a position on the upper portion of Walker’s Ridge, which ran north-east from near Pope’s Hill down to the sea. They immediately became involved in heavy fighting, and Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart, going back to bring up reinforcements, collected a large party of Australians, and was killed while exposing himself in leading them up to the firing line. There the 2nd Company and the Australian reinforcements repulsed with the bayonet three Turkish attacks, and then withdrew slightly to more suitable ground, where they dug in.
These men were among those who paved the trail of New Zealand immortality and legend a century ago: we must always remember the NZ in ANZAC.
The French at Gallipoli 1915
Today on the centenary of the landings at Gallipoli much focus will be on the Australian and New Zealand troops who landed there in April 1915. One of the forgotten combatants of the campaign French soldiers who served alongside their British and Commonwealth comrades.
Some 80,000 French soldiers fought at Gallipoli as part of the Corps expéditionnaire d’Orient with almost 27,000 casualties. Many of the French troops were from Colonial units drawn from the far corners of the French Empire. This image comes from a French source and depicts a French Zouave in the trenches at Gallipoli in 1915 from the 17e division d’infanterie coloniale who took part in the fighting at Krithia.
Gallipoli Remembered: 1915-2015
Today is the centenary of the landings at Gallipoli: on 25th April 1915 British and French troops landed at Cape Helles and Australian and New Zealand troops of ANZAC landed further up the coast on what would be called ANZAC cove.
This morning on Great War Photos I will be posting a number of Gallipoli related images starting with this image showing troops at ANZAC sometime in the campaign. It was taken by a French officer who had been serving with the French forces at Helles. British troops, who served here later in the operations, are visible as well as Indian Army and Naval personnel from the Royal Navy vessels that supported the landings here.
Remembering Gallipoli 2014
On this day 99 years ago the Gallipoli landings began at Cape Helles and what would later be described as ANZAC Cove. Across Australia and New Zealand today many families will be remembering, and there will be dawn services in Gallipoli itself and at Villers-Bretonneux in France. Thousands of ANZAC descendants will be there on this, ANZAC Day.
In Britain Gallipoli is not seen as significant compared to how it is viewed down under, and even less remembered in France, although more French troops fought in the campaign than Australians.
Gallipoli will always be personal to me as my paternal grandfather took part in the landings at W Beach – ‘Lancashire Landing‘ – two great uncles were in the campaign, one of them being killed at Krithia, and my maternal grandfather worked on the cemeteries there with the British Army in the 1920s.
While war poetry is not for everyone, this is what I shall be thinking of today, as well as the times I too have slept by that shore and walked those bluffs above the beaches.
The guns were silent, and the silent hills
had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze
I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,
And whispered, “What of these?’ and “What of these?
These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,
Some crossless, with unwritten memories
Their only mourners are the moaning waves,
Their only minstrels are the singing trees
And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfullyI watched the place where they had scaled the height,
The height whereon they bled so bitterly
Throughout each day and through each blistered night
I sat there long, and listened – all things listened too
I heard the epics of a thousand trees,
A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew
The waves were very old, the trees were wise:
The dead would be remembered evermore-
The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,
And slept in great battalions by the shore.The Last to Leave by Leon Gellert
ANZAC Day: Remembering
On this day when the first ANZACs came ashore at Gallipoli in 1915, remembering the sacrifice of Australian and New Zealanders on many battlefields from Gallipoli to the Western Front and beyond.
It is apt to recall that sacrifice in the words of one of those original ANZACs who served at Gallipoli, Leon Gellert.
The Last to Leave
The guns were silent, and the silent hills
had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze
I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,
And whispered, “What of these?’ and “What of these?
These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,
Some crossless, with unwritten memories
Their only mourners are the moaning waves,
Their only minstrels are the singing trees
And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfullyI watched the place where they had scaled the height,
The height whereon they bled so bitterly
Throughout each day and through each blistered night
I sat there long, and listened – all things listened too
I heard the epics of a thousand trees,
A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew
The waves were very old, the trees were wise:
The dead would be remembered evermore-
The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,
And slept in great battalions by the shore.Leon Gellert, Australian Gallipoli veteran, 1924
New Zealanders in France 1918
Unseen Gallipoli Images
The Gallipoli campaign has long fascinated me as my grandfather and two great uncles fought there and I have made many trips to those haunting and fascinating battlefields where the campaign was fought. From a photographic point of view Gallipoli took place in a period of the war when there were no official photographers; what images we have of it were taken by press correspondents or by soldiers who took illicit cameras with them.
I was pleased therefore to acquire a series of previously unseen images taken during the campaign in 1915 showing locations in and around the British sector at Cape Helles. There is no clue as to who took them or what they did at Gallipoli, but I have quite a few examples of images put into postcard format dating from the Gallipoli operations.
The image above is taken from in front of the ruins at Seddulbahir and shows the beached SS River Clyde which spearheaded the landings on V Beach on 25th April 1915. This photo appears to have been taken much later in the campaign; the ship remained there until after the war when it was eventually re-floated, renamed and sadly scrapped in the 1950s.
Other images show positions in occupation by troops, which one caption states were from the 42nd (East Lancs) Division, who fought at Gallipoli and suffered heavy losses in the fighting at Krithia. The image above shows the entrance to Gully Ravine, a long gully that ran towards Krithia. At the end shown it in the photo it reached the sea and became a major reserve, communications and billeting area for British troops.
The other images may appear on Great War Photos at a later stage, although I am currently gathering material for a possible publication and maybe even an App – watch this space!
Gallipoli: Catapult Gun In The Trenches 1915
This image is from the autumn of 1915 and shows men of the 2/4th Battalion London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), then part of the Royal Naval Division, in the front line trenches at Gallipoli. This weapon these Territorial soldiers are employing is typical of the makeshift weapons being used not only in the trenches of Gallipoli but the whole Western Front in France and Flanders.
Catapult guns were employed from 1915 to allow soldiers to fire hand grenades or small explosive charges (often contained in jam tins) over much greater distances than they could throw them, or more often fire them from positions of safety as seen here. The weapon could be set up and loaded, then fired at the enemy positions. In most cases the sort of distance they were firing projectiles was only measured in tens of yards, which was also typical of conditions on the battlefield in 1915 when both sides often lived almost on top of each other. In this photo the officer on the left has a grenade in his right hand about to load it while the Private on the right has the contraption used to tighten the catapult. In his other hand is a box periscope, no doubt used to observe the enemy targets safely before firing.
The 2/4th Londons stayed at Gallipoli until evacuated in late 1915 and then went to Egypt where they were disbanded, most personnel going to France to join a re-formed 1/4th Battalion which would go on to fight on the Somme.
Gallipoli: The Dead of Gallipoli
More than 220,000 British, Commonwealth and French troops were casualties at Gallipoli; Turkish casualties were at least a quarter of a million, although some estimates put the true figure at many more than that. The British buried their dead but many bodies remained unburied at the time of the evacuation in 1916. When British parties returned in 1919 they found several cemeteries desecrated, and in the majority of cases the final resting place of British and Commonwealth dead could not be ascertained.
This image dates from 1919/20 and shows a ‘collection of bones & skulls’ – whether these are British and Commonwealth, French or Turkish, is impossible to say but they show the huge problem facing the burial parties that returned after the war and in this ANZAC week the image offers us a sobering insight into the sacrifice made in Turkey – by all sides – in 1915.
Gallipoli: Anzac Day 1923
Today is Anzac Day – the day in 1915 when Australian and New Zealand troops landed alongside British and French troops at Cape Helles in the Gallipoli Campaign. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) had been formed in Egypt and Gallipoli was their baptism of fire. Despite the fact that more French troops died at Gallipoli than Australian, it has become something of a national obsession for Australia – and to a lesser sense New Zealand – with many thousands observing today as a day of remembrance at home in Australia and New Zealand, on the battlefields in France and Flanders, in Great Britain and also with a Dawn Service in Gallipoli itself; attended by an increasing number of people.
The very first Dawn Service at Gallipoli was on 25th April 1923, pictured here on this image that comes from a small collection of Australian images I have. A crowd of Anazc Gallipoli veterans along with some families of those who had died in the campaign assembled on the beach where the Australian landings had taken place. This was the birth of the service performed earlier this morning but this image captures in time men for whom the experience was not even a decade old. Out of shot in the background was even a Gallipoli war horse; a horse from the Light Horse that had been brought from Australia and was still owned by the officer who had ridden it during the war.
Australia and New Zealand paid a mighty price for their service in the Great War; Gallipoli was only the start, with more men from both countries dying on the Western Front in the remaining years of the war. While Anzac Day connections us to Gallipoli, it is right and proper we remember them all, as many thousands of Anzac descendants will be doing across the globe today.
Gallipoli: Lancashire Landing 25 April 1915
This week Great War Photos will feature some Gallipoli related images as Wednesday will be ANZAC Day.
At times someone with a casual interest in the Great War could be forgiven for thinking Gallipoli was an ‘Australian Battlefield’ but the reality is that the majority of troops who assaulted Turkey on 25th April 1915 were British. This image depicts the men of the 1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers landing at W Beach that day. Coming under fire from the bluffs above they took heavy losses and my own grandfather, a member of a Naval party from HMS Implacable, rowed them in and remembered the sea running red with their blood. The bravery of the men that day resulted in the award of sixVictoria Crosses leading to the legend of ‘six VCs before breakfast’. W Beach itself would be officially renamed ‘Lancashire Landing’ in honour of the action here on the first day of the landings.
With The 5th Royal Scots at Gallipoli
These images come from an album compiled by an officer of the 1/5th Battalion Royal Scots who survived the war. He fought with this unit as part of the 29th Division in Gallipoli, the 1/5th being one of a number of Territorial units attached to what was a regular division. Against orders the officer had packed a camera into his kit and took a number of shots of life at both Cape Helles and ANZAC where the battalion fought, as well as during training in Egypt.
It is hard to believe when looking at the photo above that this is an officer of the battalion; to say he is dressed casually is an understatement but it gives a good insight into how the heat and conditions at Gallipoli forced the British soldiers who fought there to have a complete rethink. Behind him is the dugout occupied by the officers of his company.
Below another officer of the battalion talks to Indian labourers attached to the unit to carry out labouring tasks close to the battlefield; this may have been anything from carrying up ammunition, food or water, to assisting in trench and dugout construction or repair.
There were no official photographers at Gallipoli so we rely on illicit collections like these for our visual insights into the campaign; given the number of such albums known to exist, this officer of the Royal Scots was far from unique but his photos are perhaps the only pictorial record of the Royal Scots in the Gallipoli campaign.
Great War Photos 