Redemption - Leon Uris [243]
A horrendous blunder shook our trust in the officer corps down to the nubbins. With our advances at both Anzac Cove and Helles stopped cold, the southern height of Achi Baba no longer held strategic meaning.
Why? Why? Why? Why? It seemed that Major General Sir Alexander Godley thought Achi Baba should be captured as a show of resolve.
To even consider such an operation there should have been a Corps reserve of at least several divisions backing us up on Lemnos. There was no Corps reserve. All were ashore who were going ashore.
Godley pulled his New Zealanders off our lines at Anzac and transported them by boat down to Helles with orders to storm the heights of Achi Baba. This, apparently, was conceived by Godley to put himself up for hero status.
Using remnants of the Otagos, Wellingtons, and Aucklanders, they had to charge, in the open, across flat ground called the Poppy Field. It was a slaughter. No New Zealander reached the foothills of Achi Baba.
An enraged General Brodhead, who had been unaware of the debacle, recalled the survivors to Anzac Cove. From that time on, Colonel Malone disobeyed order after order from Godley to launch suicidal assaults. With Lieutenant General Brodhead obviously siding with Malone, Godley was all but stripped of authority.
Firing generals in the middle of a battle can have a debilitating effect on the troops’ morale. Godley was kept around for ornamental purposes. He was a man who appeared to be looking at you through two glass eyes.
Here was now and this was what was what. From the minute we hit the beach at Anzac and Helles we had lost our offensive posture. All we could do was dig in and hang on by our rinny-chin-chins.
Anzac Cove was four hundred acres of ruptured and tormented land owned by the devil and under lease to the Turks. Four hundred bloody acres we had. Ballyutogue Station was over ten times larger. Fifty thousand of us were packed in, living in caves on the reverse side of the hills with a Turkish meat grinder in front of us and the sea to our backs.
* * *
May 1915—either end of the first week of May or beginning of the second, I’m not sure.
We were lucky Yurlob Singh had had the balls to stow away to Gallipoli. Between himself and Dr. Mordechai Pearlman, the mule operation was honed to a textbook study by future generations of muleteers. The animals were the best-fed, safest, cleanest, and most comfortable British troops on Gallipoli, and did they haul the tonnage uphill!
Unfortunately, we were losing the animals fast. In some areas the Turks had to change positions slightly to be able to hit our trains with gunfire. As luck would have it, a hundred mules from the Zion Battalion landed at Anzac by mistake and we also got some small mules from the Sikh Mountain Howitzers. Yurlob knew how to handle the Sikhs, and thank God, Modi was there to deal with the Palestinian Jews. They had no sense of military discipline. They argued about everything, although they worked like hell. I’m glad I wasn’t at their paddock.
Anzac Cove grew even more colorful. We landed a couple battalions of Ghurka infantry of Nepalese origin. They were a lively bunch, the Yellow Aussies we called them, and the Aussies were called the White Ghurkas.
Some more New Zealanders arrived, a Maori battalion and troops that had been guarding the Suez Canal in Egypt. This was all well and good but these were not Corps reserves, just men to plug up the line and replace the steady stream of dead and wounded.
We were trying to play catch-up because we had come ashore without a whole list of things a modern army carried. Because Australia and New Zealand had very little in the way of standing peacetime armies, we had no howitzer artillery, vital to this kind of fighting. We also came in without steel helmets, gas masks, with obsolete Boer War rifles and even makeshift uniforms. The Turks had hand-thrown bombs called grenades, something we’d never heard of.
Anzacs had achieved a standoff for the moment, but sooner or later the Turks were going to try to push us into the sea, and there seemed to be no