Patrick Lindsay - Spirit of Gallipoli: The Birth of the ANZAC legend

T HE S PIRIT OF

G ALLIPOLI

The birth of the Anzac legend

P ATRICK L INDSAY

This ebook published in 2013 by Hardie Grant Books
Published in print 2013 by Hardie Grant Books

Hardie Grant Books (Australia)
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658 Church Street
Richmond, Victoria 3121
www.hardiegrant.com.au

Hardie Grant Books (UK)
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London WC2E 7HF
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Copyright Patrick Lindsay 2006

Cataloguing in publications data available from the National Library of Australia

The Spirit of Gallipoli: The birth of the Anzac legend

eISBN 9781743580424

Front cover photographs courtesy
Australian War Memorial (AWM G00599) and Getty Images
Back cover photograph courtesy the author
Cover design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design
Digital editing by Hannah Koelmeyer

CONTENTS

Dedicated to the Anzacs
and the men of Turkey who faced them

For Lisa, Nathan, Kate and Sarah

The battlefields of the Gallipoli Peninsula in western Turkey possess a special aura. Australians and New Zealanders who travel halfway around the world to visit them are invariably struck as soon as they arrive. They feel an affinity with the souls of their forebears who rest there and a deep respect for the Turkish defenders who stood opposite them.

The Gallipoli campaign involved many countries but it had an especially powerful and lasting impact on three in particular: Turkey, Australia and New Zealand. Each was a fledgling nation at the time: Australia and New Zealand were only recently independent from the British Empire, and Turkey was still emerging from the Ottoman Empire.

For each, the Gallipoli campaign was a crusade and, at the same time, a national rite of passage; all three countries emerged with enhanced international reputations, and each saw its image clarified in its national consciousness. Not surprisingly, each now regards the calamitous events of 1915 as a coming of age in its growth to maturity.

The tragic irony of the campaign is that, handled properly, it could have been a relatively clean triumph for the Allies. Alas, in the end, it ranks as one of the bloodiest military engagements in history, where two armies, each of around a half a million men, fought to a standstill. Each side lost approximately half its strength in casualties.

Ari Burnu Cemetery, overlooking Anzac Cove, where some of the first Anzacs to fall on Gallipoli are buried.

What began as a superpower flexing its muscles against an archaic Asian Dads Army, ended as a prequel to another Asian war half-a-century later. The lessons were not learned: the result was the same.

In 1985 at Ari Burnu Cemetery at the northern end of the Gallipoli Peninsula, the Turkish Government unveiled a monument and officially named the place Anzac Koyu, or Anzac Cove.

The monument immortalises the words of Mustafa Kemal, one of the commanders who fought against the Anzacs and who went on, as Kemal Ataturk, to become the first president of his nation. Addressing Anzac and British veterans and their families in 1934, Kemal Ataturk said:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace, there is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours You the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now living in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

The memorial at Ari Burnu immortalising Ataturks speech of reconciliation.

Could there be a more generous sentiment of forgiveness and humanity from one warrior to his foes?

There have been many historical revisions of the Gallipoli campaign but, as with most momentous events, those who were there speak with the greatest authority. Wherever possible, Ive tried to use their own personal accounts in telling their story.

Patrick Lindsay, 2006

Throughout the 19th century, Europe dominated the world stage. By the dawn of the 20th, one country in particular had emerged as an aggressive maverick and a showdown of some description seemed almost inevitable.

Between 1800 and 1914 European powers, through their colonies or former colonies, extended their footprint on the earths surface from 35 per cent to 84 per cent, as the railway, the telegraph and the steamship opened the way for the first stages of what we now know as globalisation.

During this period, the world endured many armed conflicts. Most, thankfully, were contained: the Taiping Rebellion in China in 185064; the Crimean War in 185456; the Italian War of 1859; the US Civil War in 186165; the Seven Weeks War in 1866; the FrancoPrussian War in 187071; and the RussoTurkish War in 187778.

Germanys Kaiser studying maps with Marshall von Hindenberg and General Ludendorff.

In 1871, Germany unified as a nation and her newfound nationalism quickly became apparent. In 1879 she signed an alliance with Austria rather than Russia, which upset the delicate international balance and prompted Germanys neighbours France on the west and Russia on the east to sign a protective alliance a few years later.

In 1898, Germany caused further concern, particularly in Britain, by overtly strengthening her navy. The threat moved Britain to change her policy of avoiding alliances and, in 1904, she signed the Entente Cordiale (or friendly relations agreement) with France. Three years later, Britain created the Triple Entente when she allied herself with her other major colonial rival, Russia.

Battlelines were being drawn, Europe was effectively divided into two armed camps, and citizens on both sides soon began to see conflict as not merely inevitable but as welcome.