PeteBlog

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Well a bit of a hangover to greet the dawn but a power shower, breakfast and the tender ministrations of Dr Alka Seltzer soon restore my physical equilibrium. Off we go again: this time to the ‘Big Country’ that is Suvla Bay – an area that swallowed up British troops and spat them out. The mood was slightly ‘tired’ in the coach but we gradually revived.

Our first stop was at the Turkish big guns from the 1870s located near Anafarta. They were definitely ‘big’ and although of archaic design even in 1915 were ideal for harassing fire onto our major corps depot on the beaches at Suvla. Then on to Scimitar Hill and after a bit of ground orientation we had a briefing on the outline of the campaign. The staggering incompetence of the British commanders at all levels was evident. The plans had been watered down from the ‘coup de main’ as originally planned by Hamilton whereby the newly created IX Corps was to seize the heights, establish a viable corps base and if possible to assist in the efforts to seize the Sari Bair range by the assaulting columns driving out from Anzac. However Hamilton had been given an entirely unsuitable and totally incompetent commander for his brand new shiny IX Corps in the august figure of Lieutenant General Frederick Stopford – one of nature’s scapegoats but a man who thoroughly deserved the censure. But Stopford was not alone in his inability to grasp Hamilton’s intentions. It is fair to say that most of the senior officers demonstrated once again the default setting of the British Army at Gallipoli: when in doubt - do nothing! We discussed the irony of Hamilton, so often criticised for his laissez faire attitude, provoked disaster when he finally intervened after a couple of days to insist on an immediate attack on the Tekke Tepe heights. The orders were passed down until the battalion holding Scimitar Hill was removed and sent off on the task of taking the Tekke Tepe Ridge – where they duly failed as the massed Turkish reserves arrived from Bulair. Several of the team members could not believe that such a key tactical position could be so casually and voluntarily abandoned.

We then made the short journey to Green Hill where we first looked at the cemetery and then walked over Chocolate Hill. Here we encountered a mercifully friendly swarm of bees and some notably unfriendly gorse – ouch! We looked at the ground lying in front of the troops and the problems that developed over their route to their first day objective at Chocolate Hill. Stopford was worried by the prospect of Turkish defences to the south of the Hills so he wanted to avoid the option of sending troops on the obvious route straight from the landing beach round the southern border of the Salt Lake. But then as he wasn’t sure of the surface of the (actually dry) Salt Lake, then perforce he had to send the troops on a crazy route swinging all the way round the northern boundary of the Salt Lake. And it is a ‘Big Country’ so that meant a lot of marching in the broiling sun. Then there were the Turks fighting a truly classic delaying action: providing a stiff resistance to troops blundering to contact and then melting away to reform and strike back hard. It reminded us of similar problems at both Helles and Anzac. The delays built up: the generals prevaricated and blundered. No leadership, no mission command, no hope!

We then went by bus to the very end of the Kiretch Tepe Ridge. Here there was a deliberately provoked (by me!) practical demonstration illustrating the difficulty of keeping a group together in a terrain featuring fractured ridges and gullies when you don’t know where you are going! Then we climbed onto the ridge proper and marvelled at the view whilst trying not to break our ankles – medivac did not seem likely to be a comfortable process from that benighted ridge. We looked at the terrain, stretched before us, the landmarks of the campaign, the various posts, sangars and built up stone trenches that criss-crossed the ridge. It was quite a walk but the views were breathtaking and it was with a considerable sense of achievement that we finally reached the bus.

Almost finished (literally and figuratively) we moved on to look at the Cut, the small channel that links the Salt Lake – now wet – to the sea proper. We had considered a swim but deterred by the stench we moved round to Brighton Beach, just south of Anzac, where we both swam and played volleyball. (I am it appears not good at volley ball and at times brought shame to the ranks of military tour guides) Some of us also took the opportunity to look at the remnants of a beached lighter (which was much more visible than in the past) and also saw the trace mark echoes of the holes dug in the sand bank cliffs for shelter from machine gun fire by Leane’s raiders. They had tried to surprise the Turks with a commando style raid and had been comprehensively surprised themselves by the scale of The Turkish reaction. Then it was back to the hotel for a well-earned rest. The team went off for an orgy of food and drink over the straits in the sultry fleshpots of Chanakale, but I had a couple of pints with Bill Sellers – as ever a mine of information and an early(ish) night.

So that was the end of a typical tour. Military history lessons incorporating plenty of reference to modern doctrine and I hope great fun for everyone on the tour – I certainly enjoyed it. Tomorrow it’s Istanbul but that’s another story not for blogging! 

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Tired, footsore, a bit exhilarated. The perfect end to a perfect day. Today was the first day of my tour with the Combined Services, Northwood Headquarters Staff. Fifteen of Britain’s finest Royal Navy, Army and RAF men and women banded together and bolstered by the addition of one Australian colossus for our three day tour of Gallipoli. We had travelled out by plane to Istanbul on Sunday and then had a fairly tedious journey on a small bus to Eceabat where we are staying at the TJ’s Tours hotel which is very popular with the army battlefield tours.

We started Day One bright and early leaping aboard our little coach and heading for the forts just along the Straits at Khilid Bahr. We looked at the renovated lower fort, then climbed up onto the Kilid Bahr Plateau to get a perspective from the massif that was the British objective overlooking the Turkish forts. (see below)

We had to crack on though and drove then to Backhouse Post en route to Sedd ul Bahr. We didn’t stop in quite the usual place so there was a little confusion in

finding it tucked away in the side of Achi Baba Gully. When we did it was evident that someone was camping out there, that or a suspiciously modern phone had been left by our brave lads in 1915. We then moved on to board the boat at Sedd ul Bahr  in the little port where the Camber had been. The boat trip round the Sedd ul Bahr Castle V and W Beaches was a spectacular as ever: 

We all get a clear view of why attacking the strong Turkish defences in these natural amphitheatres was an overconfident move. Then we anchored off W Beach and it was swimsuits and and the race into the water. The first man in took a huge leap from the stern but the most spectacular ‘bomber’ entrance was made by a large Australian who later repeated the jump from the top deck in an effort to recreate the impact of a Turkish shell close to the boat. He did! Strangely many of our clothes were a little damp afterwards!

Then it was back to the Camber and across the barbed wire, (what was that doing there?) and into the lower Sedd ul Bahr fort. We walked round the lower area, then climbed up onto the wall to enter the main courtyard. The group then ascended the somewhat dodgy steps to stand on the tower roof immediately overlooking where the River Clyde ran aground. What a superb view! Gingerly back down the stairs, pout of the castle and onto the spit of rocks where so many of the troops from the River Clyde died. We had a syndicate presentation and I played a recording of Private William Flynn describing struggling through the water under heavy fire onto the very spit where we were standing. Then across to V Beach Cemetery and up into Fort No 1 which has been renovated in true Turkish style - removing almost all its historical integrity. Up then to the Helles Memorial - always a sobering moment as you look a the thousand of names of those killed who have no known grave.

Then it was off to W Beach. Here the winter storms had exposed an old lighter parallel to the shore that I had never seen before. We looked at the seen of the 1st Lancashire Fusiliers landing, walking along the beach and examining the remains of the old cave which had been stuffed full of ammunition and exploded on the early morning of the final evacuation on 8 January 1916. Stones and boulders shot up into the air still covered the local area. Then back across the beach to follow the footsteps of Brigadier Stuart Hare up the cliffs just round the corner. En route we looked at the huge interconnected dugouts that lie just below the cliff top. As ever I enforced our rule that we all had to go in so that if they collapsed there would be no faffing on with rescue attempts and we could be the ‘Missing Northwoods’! Onto the top and a look at both the reservoirs left from 1915 and the myriad of defensive and communication trenches - on the hill. Then to Lancashire Landing Cemetery where there was a presentation in memory of Private William Keneally VC.

 The coach lifted us from there to the path leading down to the very beautiful Gully Beach at the exit of the Gully Ravine. We could see the remnants of the abandoned lighter still int he sea and the well supposedly dug by Joe Murray the well known Hood Battalion veteran whom I had interviewed back in the mid-1980s. Back on the bus and up to the Nuri Yamut Turkish Memorial. This marked the British furthest point and was also a mausoleum for all the thousands of dead bodies collected by the Turks in the 1940s. The skulls are supposed to have littered the fields on Gully Spur and the upper Gully Ravine like a melon field. Then the walk through the upper reaches of the Gully. A fantastic walk; sometimes extremely difficult physically true, but dead easy in the summer. The front lines, the bones up a side gully, the unexpected pools that had to be circumnavigated while idiots threw stones close by in the water, the threat of a difficult exit through the maze of prickly bushes if the party got too out of hand. Eventually we emerged from the lowering cliffs of the ravine at Geoghagen’s Bluff. From there a fairly dull walk up Gully Spur back to the bus at the Turkish Monument.

Now it was time for something vital to any unit’s morale - an ice cream! And where better to get it than the village of Alcitepe or Krithia as it had been. Not really an objective at all it had attained a ludicrous importance in the mission creep of the campaign in 1915. Then on the bus up to the summit of Achi Baba. From the upper slopes of the hill we pondered on the obvious tactical importance of Achi Baba at Helles - it loomed over everything and from there Turkish artillery observers could accurately direct the fire of the concealed batteried on the reverse slopes. Then to the very crest - now we would see our reward a view of the Narrows! Oh no we wouldn’t! All we could see was the Straits where the French and British Fleet had manoeuvred on 18 March. We couldn’t see the Narrows Forts at all! Once again we realised that the Kilid Bahr Plateau was everything; Achi Baba was just the first day’s objective - just a stepping stone - to the real objective of dominating the Narrows Forts.

What a great day. Then back to the hotel, a shower a meal and a few pints with an Australian historian called Bill Sellars. And so to bed!

www.peterhartmilitary.com Quite unlike anyone I know. Possibly one of the last great British eccentrics. A brain with ideas buzzing round it that you can almost hear crackling, a man who can talk 90 to the dozen, possibly a photographic memory - quite unnerving really …On no account let Peter persuade you to come for ‘just one drink’. Even now I’m suffering the consequences - not a hangover, just a lot of time that was supposed to be spent on ‘history’ used up in an evening of cheery company, a lot of laughs and only a tiny bit of ‘history’. Why, oh, why? When will I ever learn?!I wouldn’t swap him for the world though. After all, what would I get for him? A couple of shirt buttons and a broken bic biro? We can only admire Polly (we call her ‘the long-suffering Polly’) for her fortitude and selfless sacrifice in marrying him. Her reward will be great, I’m sure.Blog on, Pete - but keep it clean, eh?BrynleyH

www.peterhartmilitary.com On this blog I will post occasional reviews that I have written on books that I think were particularly good. Here is the first 25 April 1915 by David Cameron. It wasn’t perfect - what book is - but it was a cracking read whilst reorganising the Anzac material to give you a newish perspective of the battle there that day. I can’t wait to get back there with the army in about a month.25 April 1915: The Day the Anzac Legend was BornDavid CameronThis book is a temptation to any Gallipoli enthusiast. David Cameron’s method is simple but beguiling: he has recast Charles Bean’s magnificent geographically dominated account into a chronological narrative encompassing the whole of the events at Anzac on 25 April 1915. Into this framework he has layered in copious personal experience accounts that include key Turkish accounts. I initially was sceptical, especially on encountering the spectacularly misjudged couple of paragraphs that summed up the Allied naval assault of 18 March 1918, which contained a series of errors that undermined my confidence in the author – who by his own account is not a historian. He has no grasp of the differences between super-dreadnoughts, dreadnoughts, pre-dreadnoughts and battlecruisers. This wouldn’t really matter, but in itself the details are really not that complex and indicate a complete lack of interest in maritime affairs despite the list of naval sources that are lovingly inserted in the bibliography, but were clearly never read. The Inflexible wavers between being a battleship and a battlecruiser, the Irresistible is apparently a battlecruiser although it was actually a pre-dreadnought etc, etc. This is compounded by the irrelevant intersections throughout the book of the exploits of the AE2, these have nothing to do with ANZAC and serve only to distract from the narrative that he has gone to such efforts to create.But boy what a narrative it is!I read most of the book during a recent tour of Gallipoli in May 2007 with a British Army logistics unit, which included a full day at Anzac. Whatever doubts I had were washed away by the sheer power of the story as Cameron tells it. The chance to walk the exact ground in the footsteps of these men would entrance and enthral anyone. To teeter down the Zig Zag path from Plugge’s Plateau into Rest Valley, to climb up on to Russell’s Top, to nervously walk down a muddy Walker’s Ridge, to search for the Cup, to overlook Dead Man’s Ridge and Bloody Angle from Quinn’s Post with the voices of the dead playing in your ears. The heroism of certain individuals created a legend that Australians rightly will never forget. Names ring out like clarion bells: Loutit, Margetts, Bennett, Westamacott, Talbot Smith and Braund. Cameron’s book is a salute to their initiative, determination, endurance and all too frequent sacrifice.One thing that clearly emerges from the time-sequenced narrative is the utter brilliance of the Turks. The heroic defence of the very few men that face the initial landings. Their retirement time and time again just before their positions were overrun by massively superior numbers. The deadly accurate sniping that stripped units of first their senior officers, then the subalterns, the senior NCOs and finally of every individual that showed initiative and courage. Advance to contact is always painful, but in amidst the gullies, ridges and dense undergrowth of Anzac it was usually fatal. Significantly when the Prisk and his men on Pine Ridge came under sustained ‘friendly’ fire on falling back towards Bolton’s Ridge they suffered no casualties. Perhaps not every Australian bushman was a crack shot despite all the legends? Then when the Turkish reinforcement battalions arrived they flung themselves into battle with no thoughts of their personal survival under the inspiring leadership of Mustafa Kemal and the often forgotten Colonel Sefik Aker. The importance of artillery support, as always in the Great War is correctly emphasised time and time again.Perhaps Cameron brushes things under the carpet: the overblown accounts of the initial almost unopposed landings, who was the officer Major Bennett had to threaten with a revolver to keep him in line, the ubiquity of men drifting back to the beach is referenced, but nevertheless significantly underplayed while the incompetence of senior commanders who constantly failed to grasp the tactical situation is not really nailed to the ground. He also uses ‘decimated’ time and time again when he clearly does not mean one in ten; he thinks the Nek is of ‘strategic’ importance – the Kilid Bahr Plateau and the Narrows were of strategic importance, the Nek is just tactically significant. But this is not intended as an analytical book; it is a story and a bloody good one. In the end I loved this book and if you want to relive the battle I can recommend nothing more than you read this and the Official Australian History by the ‘Blessed Bean’ - side by side. Then visit Anzac…

www.peterhartmilitary.com Jury Duty is our obligation as members of society. Twelve just men/women combining their life experiences to come to a fair and binding judgement directed by a pillar of authority and rectitude - an old bloke dressed in drag with a wig. Of course that doesn’t apply to me: I’m far too busy interviewing veterans, writing fab history books and taking the army to far off Gallipoli to drink EFES and raki. Well I soon found out that, as far as the court summoning service, were concerned it did mean me. Although I was allowed a postponement from October 2007, my excuses were brushed aside and I could only bring the jury service forward - no more postponements.I was seething with frustration and rage - couldn’t somebody else do it - I’m busy!So I decided to turn up in such a disreputable state that I would be excused as manifestly unsuitable. I had allowed my hair to grow so that I looked like a mad professor, Max Wall or Coco the Clown depending on your viewpoint. I didn’t shave! I got out my filthy dirty ripped denims, a Drive by Truckers T-Shirt and examined the effect - perfect. I’d be home by lunchtime.My Polly had a different take on what would happen. She said I would turn up, sulk like a child for the first few days, gradually get friendly with the people around me, get called for a case, get interested, start wearing my normal clothes and be a fully committed jury member within a week. How little she knows me even after all these years of domestic bliss!What really happened was this. I turned up 30 minutes late, was rude to the security people on the door who searched us, playing my I-Pod, refused to fill out any documentation, threw my attendance sheet away, refused to claim food allowance/expenses, ignored the briefing by a pompous dwarf brassy woman with dyed blond hair and refused to watch the briefing video.I told the brassy woman that I had regular migraines: she ignored me! Well I do - they are regular - one a year!I sat on my own, I-Pod playing, working on some cataloguing and reading the Guardian. I snapped at an old Labour Party comrade who tried to speak to me, I refused to eat anything and for some reason became increasingly irritable as the long day wore on. I wasn’t called, and - Jesus wept on a bicycle! - some people were being considered for an 8 week case. Well not me - ha - my cunning plans were working a treat!The second day, same clothes, but as I sat down I got talking to a nice barrister who had been called up and was in danger of being put on the long case. Sympathised as penury loomed for her and her one woman law firm! Noticed that we seemed to be on an all Guardian reading table and two of the chaps and chappesses worked for the Labour Party - we all got talking some how. I still wasn’t called and we were allowed to go at lunch time - hooray it was working!Third day, same clothes, tee hee - I’d show them what the word uncooperative meant. Spent a reasonably pleasant day chatting, reading and cataloguing. We were allowed home early but warned that we were now selected for a jury for Thursday.Thursday dawned, New T-Shirt - a Ba-Lamb number! I was absolutely confident that the judge would take one look at me and I would be kicked out. No! Not a blink! Oh god it was a serious assault case! Quite interesting and oooh look the first prosecution witness was clearly lying! Drew a diagram so that I could follow the exact sequence and location of events! Mind you the defence lawyer kept sniffing in the classic manner of coke snorting solicitors the world over! Naughty boy!Friday. Well I wanted to be taken seriously by my fellow jurors so I wore my usual work clothes - to be honest I was still pretty scruffy but not now by design! Case really interesting! My jurors were a mixed lot but we seemed to be rubbing along all right.Monday: the verdict - unanimous not guilty and the initial doubters were motivated by the ‘no smoke without fire’ instinct. Watched the accused in the dock - would he laugh thus undermining my faith in human nature. No he cried real tears of relief and brokenly thanked the jury - I felt great that I’d played my part…And that was that. We had to call in the next day but we were all released from jury duty that the Tuesday so it was back to work for me on Wednesday!Quite an interesting experience, in parts at least. Perhaps I was wrong to behave like an infantile child at the start. I wonder if I can still claim expenses!Will I learn from this - shouldn’t think so - I am 53!Pete

www.peterhartmilitary.com Well fresh from an unwise consumption of assorted pints of foaming ale and bubbly cider on Saturday night I can assure you they do. The carefree cheeriness with which I accepted my seventh pint; that feeling of joie de vivre, that everything was right in the world has been replaced by a dull ache. For five days I had not drunk anything alcoholic: my mind was racing streets ahead, every neuron springing to work with a metaphorical spring in their steps. I was able to bash off an article for the Australian War Memorial in a matter of hours, I could intervene in complex family quarrels between my four and eight year old daughters without making the situation worse and I could accept the deep trauma of Liverpool’s humiliating defeat by the mighty Barnsley without too much collateral damage to my nearest and dearest.After my night of revelry, when I got back home I found the ‘pillows of doom’ outside the bedroom door! It seemed it was to be the attic and the cold comfort of my library for me. Yet even then I had the residual brainpower to drink a couple of glasses of water and soluble aspirin! I even realised that Polly was fast asleep and would never notice me sneaking into the matrimonial bed. I’d still got it! I was unaffected by booze. A new life of carefree debauchery lay before me…But come the dawn, all is dull as if a strange cloudy cloud has descended on me like the blanketing fog over the British lines on 21 March 1918. I have an ache at both the front and back of the head, disrupted eyesight, a slight feeling of nausea and everyone I know is a bloody nuisance. I still have to check and send off the article written yesterday and I can barely read it, never mind focus on any finely honed arguments. Thank the Holy Sausage that looks down on us all that I didn’t have the eighth pint is all I can think! Urrrggggghhhhh!Peter Hart Sunday 17 February