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- The southern end of North Beach, dominated by
the Sphinx and Plugge's Plateau, where Australian
soldiers landed on the morning of 25 April 1915.
(photo courtesy Tom Curran)
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For Australians and New Zealanders, the landing at Gallipoli
on 25 April 1915 is forever associated with a short stretch
of beach known as Anzac Cove. The cove was part of the small
portion of the Gallipoli peninsula captured that day by
the men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps–the
‘Anzacs’–and held until the evacuation in
December 1915. Australia’s official war historian,
Charles Bean, would later describe this small area as ‘Old
Anzac’. The sites of ‘Old Anzac’ have ever
been sacred to Australians and New Zealanders for their
associations with events such as the Landing, the Battle
of Lone Pine and the charge at The Nek. But, as the term
‘Old Anzac’ suggests, there was more to the whole
‘Anzac’ position on Gallipoli than the few square
kilometres of Turkey seized on 25 April.
Approaching Anzac Cove from the sea, an arresting sight
is the amphitheatre of coastline and escarpment immediately
to the north. Beyond Ari Burnu point, at the northern end
of the cove, North Beach and then Ocean Beach sweep away
in a great semi-circle towards the lowlands of Suvla Bay.
Bordering this coastline, precipitous and sparsely vegetated
spurs run down to the sea from a range of high hills which
terminates at Kocacimentepe–the hill of the great pasture.
At North Beach, the eye is drawn to a spectacular natural
feature. This is the ‘Sphinx’, a worn and weathered
pinnacle from which the ground falls steeply away into narrow
gullies. To the Turks, the Sphinx was Yuksek Tepe, ‘High
Hill’, and its steep slopes Sari Bair, ‘Yellow
Slope’. In Australian, New Zealand and British accounts
of the Gallipoli campaign, the high hills leading to Kocacimentepe
were known as the Sari Bair Range and Kocacimentepe as Hill
971.
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- The approach to North Beach by sea.
(photo courtesy Tom Curran)
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On 25 April 1915, some of the first waves of Australians
landed at North Beach beneath the Sphinx. Thus, North Beach
was part of ‘Old Anzac’. However, in early August
1915, thousands of Australian, New Zealand, British and
Indian troops marched from North Beach up the coast and
into the hills in an attempt to seize the heights of the
Sari Bair range. This great assault, together with the Australian
attack on the Turkish positions at Lone Pine, was the start
of the so-called ‘August offensive’. This resulted
in a significant enlargement of the Anzac area, so that
it now embraced a region along the coast and up the valleys
of the Sari Bair Range to trench lines just short of the
peaks.
What happened in 1915 in the rugged landscape leading to
Kocacimentepe is as much part of the Gallipoli campaign
as what happened at ‘Old Anzac’. This booklet
tells that story.
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