The seizing of Lone Pine was one of the most heroic Australian actions of the Gallipoli campaign. But questions remain over whether the achievement was a tragic miscalculation.
ANZAC commander Lieutenant General William Birdwood was confident of success. With his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Skeen, in July he drew up ambitious plans for a major offensive to break the trench deadlock that had confined the Australians and New Zealanders to their narrow beachhead since they landed on Gallipoli in April. The key to his plan was to be "a demonstration” at Lone Pine, a tactical feint to deceive the Turks about the direction of the principal attack.
Lone Pine was a formidable objective. The heavily defended stronghold was pivotal to the Turkish defence of the low ridges it overlooked to the south. The capture of Lone Pine, Birdwood argued, would force Turkish commanders to launch counter-attacks to retake the position and would divert Turkish reserves from the main assault to the north. The task was given to the 1st Australian Division. But Australian headquarters staff had serious reservations about the plan. Brigadier General Harold Walker, commander of the 1st Division, was reluctant to commit his forces to a frontal assault across open ground and in broad daylight against such a strong Turkish position, particularly before any other attacks commenced.
Lieutenant Alfred Shout, 1st Battalion, at Quinn's Post, two months before he died of wounds received at Lone Pine on 9 August 1915. For his bravery in that action, Shout, by then a captain, was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.
Walker pointed out that the Turkish-held hill to the north, Baby 700, dominated Lone Pine: unless that crucial hill was first captured, the Australians would be exposed to heavy Turkish artillery fire. Birdwood countered that this situation would make the feint all the more effective, as the pressure of continuous fighting at Lone Pine “must help the attack elsewhere”, implying that the Australians at Lone Pine might be expendable for the success of the larger plan. Walker argued that if the attack at Lone Pine had to be made, then it was better that it be done to secure some real advantage rather than simply as a feint. Always forthright and outspoken, he proposed a full-strength divisional attack to press on for Third Ridge to outflank the Turkish lines.
“Hooky” Walker was one of the finest fighting commanders on Gallipoli and his views could not be dismissed lightly. But Birdwood remained obstinate. After several angry exchanges between the two men, Walker was forced to comply with his chief, despite his misgivings. He persuaded Birdwood to postpone the attack for two hours but it would still be launched in daylight. Preparations began for the Australians to attack Lone Pine on 6 August.
Most of the troops to be committed were worn down by months of heavy labour, poor food, dysentery, and the strain of continuous enemy fire. They were now joined by partly-trained reinforcements who were unprepared for a full-scale attack. Major Iven MacKay, commanding A Company of the 4th Battalion, found his reinforcements could not even load their rifles properly, so he put the new troops through an accelerated course in musketry. On the eve of the attack he gave them a final test in loading their rifles and using their bayonets.
From 4 August ANZAC artillery began a slow bombardment of the Turkish front line for three days. Then at 4.30 pm on the afternoon of 6 August, the shelling increased in intensity, aiming to smash the barbed-wire entanglements in front of the Turkish trenches and drive the defenders to shelter in their underground galleries.
As the bombardment reached its crescendo, Australian troops of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Battalions massed in Brown’s Dip on the reverse slope behind the Australian front line and pressed forward in tunnels and crowded communication saps. All wore white cloth patches sewn onto the backs of their tunics and white armbands to act as markers for observers and to help distinguish their khaki uniforms from those of the Turks.
At 5.30 pm the artillery bombardment lifted, and at the signal of three shrill blasts of an officer’s whistle, followed by echoes of the whistle all along the line, the troops charged. Some emerged from tunnels opened in no man’s land; some ran for up to 100 metres across open ground under Turkish fire. Others were caught before they could even leave their trenches as Turkish artillery almost immediately found the range of the support lines. The charge took less than a minute. But soldiers reaching the Turkish line encountered an unexpected obstacle. The trenches were roofed with heavy pine logs and earth, and Turkish soldiers were firing from loop-holes cut in the long earth mound. “I saw a Jacko [Turk] rifle or two pushing their nasty snouts out through the openings,” recalled Sergeant Major Paul Goldenstedt of B Company, 3rd Battalion, who tried to return fire, but the Turkish soldiers were well concealed. In the confusion, numbers of men were hit. Some fired back at the loop-holes or tried to break through the cover. Others leapt in through holes made by artillery shells or entered the open communication saps at the rear. A line of men who lingered briefly in the open were mown down by Turkish machine-gun fire.
Australian soldiers of the 1st Division in the Turkish positions at Lone Pine, captured on the afternoon of 6 August 1915.
This debacle should not have occurred. In June the Allied staff had produced a rough plan of the Turkish trenches at Lone Pine, based on aerial photographs. But the map failed to show that the Turks had covered the southern sector of their trenches, although this was clearly visible in the photographs. The map also failed to show that a deep hollow behind the Turkish lines, named the Cup from the time of the landing, restricted any further advance to the east. The gully was terraced with bivouac positions, crammed with Turkish reserves and regimental headquarters, which were marked incorrectly on the map as trench lines.
In their initial rush, some Australians swept past the Turkish trenches to the edge of the plateau overlooking the Cup, where hundreds of Turkish soldiers in close support were sheltered. Most of the Australians were killed or captured.
The Australians eventually entered the Turkish front-line trenches and cleared them with rifle and bayonet. The ferocity of the close-quarters fighting in the dark trenches and tunnels defies description. The dead and wounded of both sides piled up on the bottom of the trenches as fighting with rifles, bayonets and bombs went on around them. In a comer of one trench, eight Turks and six Australians were later found lying as they had bayoneted each other. The roofed trenches effectively trapped the Turkish defenders and increased their casualties.
In a captured trench at Lone Pine, Major Leslie Morshead of the 2nd Battalion (right) looks at Australian and Turkish dead lying on top of the parapet. Morshead later commanded the 9th Division during the Second World War.
By 6 pm the Australians had cleared and captured the main network. They established a series of seven or eight isolated defensive posts in the broken trenches at the centre, and on each flank they blocked long communication trenches with sand-bag barricades. As darkness fell the struggle continued. At least one Australian post became cut off and overrun, the last message being received from Captain Harold Nash of the 2nd Battalion: “For God’s sake send bombs.” No trace was ever found of him or his party.
Throughout the night Sergeant Harry Freame of the 1st Battalion and a team of 60 reinforcements and engineers worked furiously to dig a communication trench across no man’s land to the Lone Pine trenches. They finished the task by daybreak, establishing a vital life-line for supplies and reinforcements, and an evacuation route for wounded men.
Men of the 3rd Battalion waiting below front line trenches about 3 pm on 6 August 1915, before commencing their assault on Lone Pine at 5.30 pm. All wore white armlets and white square patches on their backs to distinguish them when darkness fell.
Meanwhile, the Turkish area commander called up his reserves. Major Zeki Bey, commanding the 1st Battalion of the Turkish 57th Regiment, was leading his battalion out for rest after 45 consecutive days in the front line when he was ordered to rush his unit to Kanlisirt (“Bloody Ridge”, as the Turks called Lone Pine). They moved at the double, fixing bayonets as they went. There they joined other units to establish a new front line in a deep communication trench. Later they attempted to mount a counter-attack but it petered out in disorder and confusion in the dark. Over the following three days the Turks launched determined counter-attacks. These involved the heaviest bomb fighting Australians ever experienced. Turkish soldiers were well supplied with effective hand grenades, spherical “cricket ball” bombs that could be ignited in seconds with a striker worn on soldiers’ tunics. The Australians in contrast were desperately short of “jam tin bombs”, crudely improvised grenades that might take up to two minutes to light from a smouldering rope. Few Australians had been trained in bomb throwing and the arrangements for bombing squads quickly broke down in the turmoil of combat.
Each side hurled bombs at the other’s crowded trenches, in places just five metres apart. Australian soldiers tried to smother Turkish bombs with half-filled sandbags and greatcoats: many were killed or horribly injured in the attempt. They also fielded unexploded Turkish bombs and threw them back at the enemy lines, until the Turks learnt to shorten the fuses. Some of the Turkish grenades were said to have made a threeway trip before exploding. One of the 1st Battalion’s best bomb throwers, London-born Lance Corporal Leonard Keysor, continuously threw bombs, and on several occasions caught Turkish bombs and flung them back. Wounded twice, he refused to leave the front line for 50 hours before finally being evacuated. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his outstanding bravery and leadership.
In the pre-dawn of 9 August a storm of rifle and machine-gun fire struck the Australian line, shattering sentries’ periscopes and protruding bayonets, and ripping into the sandbag barricades. Under cover of this heavy fire, the Turks launched furious assaults all along the Lone Pine front. All day the Australians drove them back in desperate fighting at close-quarters with bombs, rifles and bayonets. Six more soldiers were awarded the Victoria Cross for their outstanding bravery in this prolonged action. Among them was Captain Alfred Shout of the 1st Battalion, an inspiring leader who rallied his men during an attack. He was mortally wounded when he lit three jam-tin bombs at once and the third bomb burst in his hand and face. Shout was evacuated but died of his wounds on board a hospital ship and was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.
The fighting became increasingly confusing in the maze of intertwined front line trenches and outposts. Major Zeki Bey sent one of his Turkish companies in to attack on this day but it simply disappeared into the maelstrom. “I don’t know if it was captured or killed, or if it got involved in a panic that happened on the left," he said. “Possibly they turned round and attacked their own troops by mistake - the trenches were so involved.”
A line of Turkish firing loopholes above covered trenches at Lone Pine, as they appeared to the Australian soldiers charging the position in August 1915. Photographed during C.E.W. Bean’s Australian Historical Mission in February 1919.
As fighting continued around dead and dying men in the front line, bodies began to clutter the trenches and saps where men could not avoid walking on them. Soldiers holding the broken trenches and posts were now “not only almost completely exhausted but also sick with the stench of the dead and the dreadful conditions of the position," wrote Australian official historian Charles Bean.
Efforts were made to clear the dead by heaping them into unused saps, shelters and tunnels until they could later be buried roughly underfoot or in the parapets. In places the bodies lay three or more deep, Australians and Turks mixed together. Newly arrived reinforcements of the 2nd Battalion were sent in to clear the bodies, now so badly decomposed that soldiers had to wear respirators when handling them.
After four days fighting in the captured positions, the 4th Battalion was relieved and withdrew to the rear of their old lines. “The men looked like a thin line of spectres,” recalled Chaplain Albert Talbot of the 3rd Battalion. “One officer who knew me well stared at me with glassy eyes and failed to recognise me.” The heavy cost of the battle became apparent as Talbot presided over the burial of the dead; in one place 19 bodies were interred in a single long trench.
Finally, on the evening of 9 August, after relentless days and nights of almost continuous fighting, the battle abated. The Turks abandoned their attempts to re-take their lost ground. The main focus of the struggle had now shifted far to the north. At dawn on 10 August, Turkish forces swept the British and Indian troops from the summit and slopes of Chunuk Bair. With that final stroke the ANZAC offensive had failed. On 11 August Charles Bean wrote, “Woke up to find everything perfectly quiet... Evidently our big battle has come to its standstill.”
The Australians had succeeded in capturing the Turkish front-line trenches, which were now smashed almost beyond recognition and vulnerable to further counter-attacks. But the effort had cost the 1st Australian Division 2,277 casualties, virtually half the total number who had gone into the attack. The commanding officers of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions were killed and virtually all the other officers in both battalions were either killed or wounded. Typical of companies in the thick of the action was B Company of the 3rd Battalion, which went into the attack on 6 August with five officers and 166 other ranks. On 10 August, at the company’s first muster parade on coming out, just 49 men answered the roll call. Turkish casualties were even heavier, totalling 6,270 of whom 1,520 were killed. More than 1,000 corpses, both Turkish and Australian, were dragged from the Australian trenches for burial. In the four days and nights of fighting, 134 Turkish soldiers were also taken prisoner.
Turkish soldiers in their trenches at Kanlisirt ("Bloody Ridge" or Lone Pine). The Turkish positions were deep and well constructed with effective overhead protection from artillery shells. The Turkish soldier in the foreground is holding two "cricket ball" bombs in his left hand. He wears a striker (used for igniting the bomb's fuse) on the left breast of his tunic.
What was achieved at such cost? Charles Bean maintained that the “demonstration” at Lone Pine was “the most effective [feint] within the experience of infantry commanders of the AIF”. In reality, the attack proved too effective as a feint because it drew in two Turkish regiments from the south and then an additional Turkish division; this was quickly relocated to the north to stem the New Zealanders’ assault on Chunuk Bair, once Turkish commanders realised that it was the real objective. Significantly, Turkish officers afterwards referred to the Australian attack at Lone Pine not as a battle but simply as “The Demonstration”, the term originally used by Birdwood to describe his plan.
The capture of Lone Pine resulted in an advance of less than 150 metres along a total front of less than 300 metres. It was a purely subsidiary operation for an objective of no decisive tactical or strategic advantage. Lone Pine quickly became an ANZAC liability for the rest of the campaign.
The captured trenches at Lone Pine were exposed to Turkish observation and fire from the higher ground that overlooked the position - all the way from Baby 700 in the north to Johnston’s Jolly on the flank and the Turkish command headquarters at Scrubby Knoll to the east on Third Ridge.
In September, Trooper Ion Idriess of the 5th Light Horse visited Lone Pine and judged it “the most dangerous spot” of the whole ANZAC line. “Men are killed here every hour,” he wrote, and “if some precautions were not taken no one could live here at all.”
The Turks found their new position equally hazardous. In early November Second Lieutenant Mehmed Fasih of the Turkish 47th Regiment, holding trenches immediately in front of the Australians, recorded in his diary: “In my view, defending these positions is difficult. We are nose to nose with Above: Turkish soldiers [the] enemy and our defences are inadequate. Our engineers are using adobe bricks to repair our fortifications, yet our trenches on Kanlisirt resemble anything but trenches. They have been shot to pieces.”
At the same time from the other side of no man’s land, Private Henry Alcock of the 23rd Battalion wrote home:
The Turks are only fifteen yards [14 metres] away and in some places only a sand-bag separates them from us. We often throw notes over to one another and once the Turk threw a note over saying, “You are too weak to advance and too strong to retire and we are the same, so what the [hell] are we going to do about it?" Another one said, “If you don’t surrender in twenty-four hours we will!”
This stalemate endured until the ANZACs evacuated the peninsula in late December 1915. Three years later, in December 1918, the first Allied visitors to the Gallipoli battlefields found the plateau around Lone Pine covered with a “thin scattered whiteness, not unlike a sprinkle of melting snow”. Over the former trenches “lay the bare white bones, piled or clustered so thickly in places that we had to tread upon them as we passed.”
Today the site is a war cemetery and memorial. The trenches, tunnels and galleries - with their grim contents - were filled in as a mass grave and a white stone pylon stands sentinel over the former front line where some of the fiercest fighting on Gallipoli raged in August 1915.