Lone Pine Cemetery, May 2000. [DVA]
See a gallery of ANZAC DAY SERVICES – GALLIPOLI, TURKEY
To read more about the events that took place here, see the section of the Anzac Walk on this site.
Lone Pine Memorial and Cemetery
Lone Pine Cemetery
This cemetery derives its name from the single pine tree observed to be growing here when the Australian soldiers came up here from the landing on 25 April 1915. From that date through to August there was much heavy fighting at Lone Pine, the rear of the cemetery today marking where the Anzac lines were during those months and the wall and pylon of the Lone Pine Memorial to the Missing marking the region of the Turkish trenches.
The burials and commemorations in Lone Pine represent virtually every phase of the campaign in the Anzac area between the April landing and the December evacuation. Seventy-two graves are of men killed during the ‘Battle of the landing’ between 25 April and 3 May. Most graves, however, are of men killed during the ‘August offensive’ between 6 and 10 August 1915. Among the unidentified burials are 182 so called ‘special memorials’ for Australians believed to have been buried in Lone Pine. The last Australian to be buried here is Sergeant Edward Grice, 24th Battalion, aged 35 years, who was killed in action on 18 December, just a day before the evacuation on the night of 19/20 December.
Lone Pine Cemetery is the very ground over which the famous attack on the Turkish Lone Pine positions took place on the evening of 6 August 1915. Corporal John Wadeson, 7th Battalion AIF, wrote:
We had a ‘full hand’ dealt us when we were given the trenches won at Lonesome Pine on August 7 … We held it all that Red Sunday … it cost us something like 400 casualties … The trenches were something awful, as the dead of both Australians and Turks were still in them, and mixed up in all kinds of positions. But when things cooled off a little, burial parties were going solidly getting the awful litter away … Sometimes when the attack was solid, our dead in the bottom of the trenches, all huddled up in heaps, and it was with difficulty that fresh men could pass to take up their posts…the 7th Battalion earned distinction, as four V Cs were won by its members.
[Wadeson, quoted in Tony Ford, Our Heroes, Tatura’s World War 1 Roll of Honour, Tatura, 2003]
None were more aware of the human suffering at Lone Pine than the chaplains and padres who worked constantly to lift the spirits of the men in the trenches. Chaplain Walter Dexter’s diary reveals the conditions that prevailed during and after the attack. His entry for Tuesday August 10 reads:
In the Lone Pine the moving of the dead goes steadily on. All hope of getting them out for burial is given up and they are being dragged into saps and recesses, which will be filled up. The bottom of the trench is fairly clear, you have not to stand on any as you walk along and the bottom of the trench is not springy, nor do gurgling sounds come from under your feet as you walk on something soft. The men are feeling worn out but are sticking it like Britons. The stench you get used to after a bit unless a body is moved. In all this the men eat, drink and try to sleep. Smoking is their salvation and a drop of rum works wonders … Had a funeral at 6 p.m. One is obsessed with dead men and burials and I am beginning to dream of them. I suppose it is because I am so tired.
[Walter Ernest Dexter, diary, 10 August 1915, AWM PR00248]
Chaplain Dexter’s experiences were not unique. Adelaide Ah Kow in her biography of Salvation Army Padre William McKenzie summed up the enormity of the task that befell the clergy on the peninsula:
[MacKenzie] …toiled with the wounded and dead for three days and nights without rest, and with only three biscuits and six pannikans of tea for nourishment, burying in that period no fewer than 647 men. By the end of that time he was so exhausted by lack of rest and food, and so torn with the sight of the suffering and the loss of so many he knew, that, he confessed years afterwards, he wished inexpressibly for death to take him also.’
[Ah Kow, Anzac Padre, Adelaide, 1949]
Lone Pine Cemetery in 1920 before the reconstruction of the cemetery by the Imperial War Graves Commission, later Commonwealth War Graves Commission. [AWM P02751.609]
Graves at Brown’s Dip before the relocation to Lone Pine Cemetery.[AWM P02751.606]
General view of Lone Pine Cemetery with Lone Pine Memorial in the background. [DVA]
Second Lieutenant Everard Digges La Touche,
2nd Battalion AIF
Plot 1, Row E, Grave 3
The grave of this Irish-born Anglican clergyman who served in the AIF was moved from the Brown’s Dip cemetery to Lone Pine in the early 1920s. His headstone bears the inscription:
Faithful unto death - Quis Separabit
Quis seperabit means ‘who shall separate us’, the motto of the Order of Saint Patrick.
Of French Huguenot background, Digges La Touche was born at Burrendale, Newcastle, County Down, Ireland, in 1883, a son of Major Everard Digges La Touche and his wife Clementine. A man of keen intellect, he trained as a minister and became the youngest Doctor of Letters to graduate from Trinity College, Dublin. Due to his ill health Digges la Touche emigrated to Australia in 1912 where he took up a position lecturing at Moore Theological College, Sydney. At the outbreak of war he tried for an appointment as a chaplain but, when refused, enlisted as a private in the 13th Battalion on 27 August 1914. Three months later was discharged as being medically unfit and, after a surgical procedure he re-enlisted in late December acting as a Sergeant until promoted Second Lieutenant in early May 1915. Second Lieutenant Digges La Touche arrived on the Gallipoli on 5 August 1915 and within hours was leading his men in the attack at Lone Pine.
Major Oliver Hogue, 14th Australian Light Horse wrote:
… he [Digges la Touche] absolutely convinced us all of the righteousness of our cause and likened our present struggle for liberty to a Holy Crusade. So when we finally sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, we meant it.
[Oliver Hogue, Love Letters of an Anzac quoted in Phil Taylor and Pam Cupper Gallipoli, a Battlefield Guide, Kenthurst, 1989]
Official historian Charles Bean described Lieutenant Digges La Touche’s first and only battle:
The deep sap, though inaccurately shown on the map, was recognised by almost all parties of the 2nd as their objective … Among the first eager leaders to reach it was a reinforcement officer who had arrived only the night before from Egypt but had begged leave to join the attack … At its first bend he and two of his men fell mortally wounded.
[C E W Bean, The Story of Anzac, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Volume 2, Sydney, 1941]
Despite contrary advice, Lieutenant Digges La Touche insisted that he be moved from the trench to enable the movement of reinforcements -
‘It’s not me you must consider, but the position’.
Bleeding profusely from his stomach wounds he died soon after in the trench. Charles Bean stated that Lieutenant Digges La-Touche, aged 32 years, was killed on 6 August although his date of death is recorded as being between 6 and 8 August 1915. He was buried initially in Brown’s Dip Cemetery in Victoria Gully by the Reverend Albert Talbot who returned the personal belongings found on his body to his wife Eva, who with their two small sons had returned to live with her father the Reverend W J King at the Rectory, in Miltown, Co Kerry, Ireland. Her late husband’s service medals were issued from Australia House, in London in the early 1920s after she moved to Surrey, England. Sadly, Eva’s brother, Sergeant William Ernest King, also serving with the 2nd Battalion AIF, was also killed at Lone Pine between 7 and 14 August and is commemorated on the Lone Pine Memorial to the Missing.
Everard’s younger brother, Lieutenant Averell Digges La Touche who was serving with the Irish Rifles in Belgium, was killed in action on 25 September 1915 at the Battle of Hooge. His body was never recovered and he is commemorated on the Menin Gate in Ieper (Ypres), Belgium.
The two Digges La Touche brothers are also commemorated by a brass and black marble memorial erected by their mother in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin and by another in the graveyard of St John’s Church, Newcastle, Co Down, Ireland.
Everard Digges La Touche – [Sydney Mail 1/9/1915 p27, Anzac memorial p47]
Grave of Second Lieutenant Digges La Touche who was killed in action within days of his arrival on the peninsula. [DVA]
Plaque commemorating the Digges La Touche brothers, Everard and Averell, both of whom were killed in action, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. [Courtesy of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin]
The following inscription is from the Digges La Touche plaque in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.
To the Glory of God
and in most proud and loving memory of
The Reverend Everard Digges La Touche Litt.D.
2nd Lieut 2nd Battalion 6th Reinforcements
Australian Imperial Force who offered
the great sacrifice at the Battle of
Lone-Pine Gallipoli August 5-7 1915, aged 32.
‘All is well, I know that my Redeemer liveth.’
‘Faithful unto the death.’And of
Lieut Averell Digges La Touche,
5th Att. 2nd Batt. Royal Irish Rifles who
gave his life for God and the Empire at the Battle of
Hooge, Sept.. 25-27 1915, aged 30.
‘Greater love hath no man than this, that
a man lay down his life for his friends.’
‘Twas not for honours to be won
But for the duty to be done’ and he did it.The intensely loved sons of the late
Major Everard N Digges La Touche,
Bengal Infantry and Assam Comm.
and of their devoted mother Clementine
his wife by whom this memorial is erected
and who waits for the day dawn.‘Peace perfect peace with loved ones far away
In Jesus’ keeping we are safe and they.’Quis Separabit.
Private Frederick Stevens
24th Battalion, AIF
Plot 1, Row C, Grave 29
Buried in the Lone Pine Cemetery are thirty men of the 24th Battalion and a further ten from the 23rd Battalion who were killed during a Turkish bombardment on 29 November of the Lone Pine trenches. The position had come under increasingly heavy fire throughout the morning and, a little after midday, as the men of the 24th Battalion were making their way along the deep and narrow trenches and shallow tunnels of the approach trenches to relieve members of the 23rd Battalion, the bombardment intensified. Witnesses watched the men enter a tunnel just before heavy enemy shelling found its mark and caused the tunnel to collapse, burying the men alive.
Amongst those trapped in the cave-in was a nineteen year old engineer, Private Frederick Stevens, B Company, of Prince’s Hill, Victoria, who had left Melbourne on 8 May 1915. Sergeant William Vale of his company told the Red Cross Missing and Wounded Enquiry Bureau that the men of the 24th Battalion had not been able to locate all of those buried by the shells. Stevens’ body, however, was found and buried in Brown’s Dip Cemetery before being moved after the war to Lone Pine.
Brown’s Dip marker in Lone Pine Cemetery. [DVA]
Private Frederick Stevens, 24th Battalion, killed during a Turkish bombardment at Lone Pine on 29 November 1915. [AWM DA08748]
Private Thomas Bell Gibbons,
2nd Battalion, AIF
Special Memorial C 106
Amongst those commemorated in this cemetery is twenty-six year old Private Thomas Gibbons who had been working as a labourer in Grenfell, NSW, at the time of his enlistment in November 1914. A native of Boorowa, NSW, he sailed with the 2nd Reinforcements of the 2nd Battalion on 11 February 1915 and, after an initial training period in Egypt, went with the first contingent to Gallipoli.
Private Gibbons went ashore at Anzac Cove on 25 April and over the next three days, sixteen officers and 434 men of the 2nd Battalion were either killed or wounded. Amongst them was Private Gibbons who was wounded and evacuated to Cairo. A month later he rejoined his unit but during heavy fighting at Lone Pine on 8 August he was first reported wounded and later found to have been killed in action. The First Australian Division during the ‘August offensive’ suffered over 2,200 casualties, with the 2nd Battalion having virtually three quarters of the 582 men who took part either killed or wounded.
Private Gibbons’ mate, Private Gerard Sullivan, of Newry, Victoria, later reported from hospital in Cairo that he understood Gibbons had been killed by an enemy bomb while he was throwing bombs from a communication trench somewhere near Lone Pine. Volunteers had been called for to take his place after he was wounded and Sullivan’s brother was selected. A fortnight after Gibbons’ death a burial party recovered his identity disc. He is now known to have been buried in the Lone Pine Cemetery but the exact location of his grave is not known and so a Special Memorial bears his name, rank, unit and has the inscription Believed to be buried in this cemetery along with the epitaph chosen by the Imperial war Graves Commission:
Their glory shall not be blotted out.
Photograph of Private Thomas Bell Gibbons, 2nd Battalion of Boorowa NSW taken at Grenfell NSW prior to his departure on the Seang Bee. [Courtesy of Alan Grocott]
Special memorial of Private Thomas Bell Gibbons in Lone Pine Cemetery. [Cheryl Mongan]
Lone Pine Memorial
The Lone Pine Memorial to the Missing stands at the eastern end of Lone Pine Cemetery, which derives its name from a single low growing pine tree that once stood on the site. The area where the cemetery and memorial now stand was known initially as 400 Plateau and Australian soldiers advanced on to the plateau from the beach landing sites early on the morning of 25 April 1915. There was much heavy fighting here over the next few days at the Ottoman soldiers tried to drive the Anzacs off but after this initial ‘Battle of the Landing’ the Anzacs had held on to a line located to the eastern end of the Lone Pine Cemetery. There was hard fighting here again between 6 and 9 August 1915 at the Battle of Lone Pine, during which the Australians drove their enemy out of trenches which once stood around where the Lone Pine Memorial is today. After the battle, the line rested there until the Allied evacuation of the Anzac and Suvla positions on the night of 19-20 December 1915. Such great losses occurred in this area that Lone Pine was known to the Turks as Kanli Sirt (Bloody Ridge).
The Lone Pine Memorial contains two commemorative structures. There is a fourteen metre high, limestone pylon on which are engraved the names of New Zealand soldiers who died in this area and have no known graves. The 4,228 names of the Australian missing, and those who died on hospital ships and were buried at sea off the peninsula, are listed the panels of a wall which faces back towards the cemetery a short distance from the pylon. An inscription on the memorial wall reads:
To the Glory of God and in lasting memory of 3,268 Australian soldiers who fought on Gallipoli in 1915 and have no known graves, and 456 New Zealand soldiers whose names are not recorded in other areas of the Peninsula but who fell in the Anzac Area and have no known graves; and also of 960 Australians and 252 New Zealanders who, fighting on Gallipoli in 1915, incurred mortal wounds or sickness and found burial at Sea.
Australian Chaplain Walter Dexter had held burial services for the dead almost daily from 25 April onwards, the first of these being burials at sea. His diary recorded every action at Anzac and, as the Battle of Lone Pine commenced on 6 August 1915, he wrote:
At 4.30pm to the minute Hell broke loose.
Between 6 and 9 August at Lone Pine the bravery of the men of the AIF was recognised by the award of no less than seven Victoria Crosses for the fighting in this area. This recognition came at great cost. Over five days the AIF suffered more than 2,000 casualties and then came the aftermath of dealing with the loss and burial of the dead. Chaplain Dexter recorded the anguish of it all:
How worn out and dead beat everyone is. Some men are so shaken they will never be any use to us again and may just as well go home, but it is enough to shake the stoutest. I reckon I have no nerves but last night and tonight I dreamt of miles of dead and me burying them. It is only exhaustion and will come alright with a bit of rest.
[Chaplain Walter Ernest Dexter, diary, PR00248, AWM ]
Among the missing listed on the memorial are some of the AIF’s youngest soldiers, including three seventeen-year-olds – Private Joseph William Watts, 1st Battalion, killed in action on 17 May 1915, and Privates Archie Park and Ernest Beer, both of the 6th Battalion who died during the Battle of Lone Pine.
The officially recorded dates of death of those Australians listed on the Lone Pine Memorial are broadly representative of every phase of the action at Anzac from the landing of 25 April to the evacuation of 19-20 December. Today Lone Pine Cemetery and the Memorial is the location on 25 April - Anzac Day - of the Australian national service of commemoration at Gallipoli.
An artist’s impression of the Lone Pine Memorial to the Missing which records the names of those men of the AIF who have no known grave or were buried at sea. [AWM H03226]
Crews of HMAS Australia and HMAS Sydney visiting the Lone Pine Memorial to the Missing during a visit to the Gallipoli peninsula in 1936. [AWM P00604.041]
View of Lone Pine Memorial. [DVA]
Lone Pine Memorial with Stone of Remembrance in the foreground. [DVA]
View of commemorative panel at the Lone Pine Memorial naming 3,268 Australians who died during the Gallipoli campaign and have no known graves or were buried at sea. [DVA]
Private James Charles Martin
21st Battalion
Panel 65
Commemorated amongst the missing is one of the youngest known soldiers to have served in the AIF. Private James Charles Martin of Hawthorn, Melbourne, Victoria, enlisted on 12 April 1915 aged 14 years and three months. Like many boys anxious to play an active part in the war, he raised his age, claiming to be 18 years old and even obtained his parents consent to enlist. In late June 1915, Private Martin sailed for Egypt on the Berrima with the 1st Reinforcements of the 21st Battalion. The battalion embarked from Alexandria on 30 August for Mudros on board the Southland which was torpedoed as it neared its destination. Most of the troops on board managed to disembark on life rafts with the remainder being taken on board the hospital ship Neuralia.
The unit reformed in Mudros and sailed to Gallipoli on the transport Abassieh and landed just before midnight on 6 September 1915. The following day the battalion took up its position in the line. There were a small number of casualties caused by enemy action but within a few short weeks the force of 1,000 men dwindled to some 650 through constant work, food shortages and illness. Amongst those evacuated sick on 25 October 1915 was Private Martin, suffering from enteritis. He died on board the hospital ship Glenart Castle and was buried at sea the same day. His mother, Amelia, noted as his next of kin, was advised of his death on 16 November 1915.
Later, Private Martin’s identity disc, testament, note book, letters and belt were returned to his family and, in 1969, the Anzac Medallion was issued to his surviving next of kin, his sister Mrs A G Chaplin. This material was donated to the Australian War Memorial along with Private Martin’s other medals – the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. The AWM also holds letters, photographs and souvenirs relating to his military service.
James Charles Martin, 21st Battalion, AIF, aged 14 years 9 months, was possibly the youngest Australian soldier to have died in the First AIF. [AWM P00069.001]
James Martin, 21st Battalion, AIF, with his five- sisters, (l to r) Annie, Alice, Millie, Ester and Mary, prior to his departure on active service. [AWM P05051.001]
1914-15 Star [AWM REL28919.001]
Victory Medal [AWM REL/13269]
British War Medal [AWM REL28919.002]
Anzac Medallion issued to Private Martin’s next of kin in 1967 by the Australian Government to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Australian landing at Anzac Cove. [AWM REL28920]
Souvenir embroidered cushion cover from Egypt signed ‘To Mother from Jim’. [AWM REL/13040]
Private Edgar Robert Colbeck Adams
7th Battalion, AIF
Panel 30
A unique survival of the Gallipoli landing is a handwritten note on a scrap of paper:
Am prisoner about 2 miles from where we landed between…….. E R C Adams AIF.
The note was placed in a bottle which washed up on the beach at Montazah, Alexandria, Egypt on 1 November 1915, just over six months after it had been dropped into the sea at Gallipoli. Written by Private Edgar Adams it is the last remaining link to this eighteen-year-old soldier who went missing on 25 April 1915.
Private Adams was born in Mildura, Victoria, and gave his occupation as a surveyor and engineer when he enlisted in the 7th Battalion in September 1914. He embarked on the troopship Themiscles in December for training in Egypt. The 7th Battalion landed on the peninsula from the Galeka, a hundred or so metres from a small knoll above the Fisherman’s Hut at around 5am under heavy rifle fire. The unit suffered heavy casualties from Turkish machine guns and snipers on the knoll and from the Shepherd’s Hut, located on the inland side of the knoll.
Between 25 April and 1 May the battalion landed nine hundred and seventy officers and other ranks, of which seventy were killed, another 244 were wounded and 277 were missing. Private Adams was one of the missing. A letter from the Red Cross Missing and Wounded Enquiry Bureau advised that there was no trace of Private Adams being held captive:
Exhaustive and fruitless enquiries have been made and we fear that he is dead. He is only one of the many mysteries of that fatal landing at Gallipoli, when so many were killed and have never been found.
The AIF took the note from the bottle as evidence of his capture by the Turks. The finding of an official enquiry into his death held in London in 1918 was that Private Adams ‘died in enemy hands on or about 25/4/1915’.
The Adams family suffered a double tragedy on the day of the landing. Private Adams’ older brother, Private Frederick Adams, 8th Battalion, was also killed in action. He is buried in Shell Green Cemetery, Gallipoli. The brothers’ older sister, Staff Nurse Edith Adams, enlisted with the Australian Army Nursing Service and served in India from 1917 until her marriage the following year.
Portrait of Private Edgar Robert Colbeck Adams, 8th Battalion, of Mildura, Vic. [AWM H14064]
Fisherman’s Hut is located about a hundred metres from where Private Edgar Adams, 8th Battalion, AIF, landed on the morning of 25 April 1915. [DVA]
Image of the scrap of paper contained in a bottle which washed up on the beach at Alexandria, Egypt on 1 November 1915. The note indicated that Private Edgar Adams, 8th Battalion, AIF, had been taken prisoner shortly after he landed on 25 April 1915. [AWM H02397]
Portrait of Private Frederick James Adams, 8th Battalion, AIF, brother of Private Edgar Adams, was also killed on 25 April 1915 at Gallipoli. [AWM H05906]
Captain William Richard Annear
11th Battalion, AIF
Panel 33
Colonel Arthur Plugge, commander of the New Zealand Auckland Battalion, established his headquarters at the northern end of MacLagan’ Ridge, after it was captured by the Australians on the morning of the landing. The position named in his honour Plugge’s Plateau, rises some 100 metres above the beach with commanding views of Anzac Cove and Suvla. A battery position was established on the plateau and was known to the Turks as Hain Tepe (Treacherous Hill), and equally treacherous for the men of the AIF in its capture.
Ballarat-born Captain William Annear, variously described as a commercial traveller, master printer and storeman, was an experienced civilian soldier before his enlistment in the AIF in 1914. He sailed from Egypt with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on HMT Suffolk. With his men of the 11th Battalion, mostly drawn from Western Australia, Annear was among the first ashore at the dawn landing of 25 April 1915.
The battalion made its way up the steep and slippery face of the cliff leading up from Ari Burnu to Plugge’s Plateau, as the Turkish rifles fired from a trench on the very edge of the plateau. Footholds were precarious and elusive and the wounded rolled or slid down the slope until they were caught in the tufts of scrub. As the first Australians climbed on to the plateau, they flung themselves to the ground taking shelter behind the low parapet of the enemy trench and were met with fierce fire from the other side of the plateau. Two officers were wounded, and the third, forty-year-old Captain Annear, had the misfortune to be the first Australian officer to be killed on the peninsula when he was shot through the head.
Annear was buried at Plugge’s Plateau which now has the smallest cemetery on the peninsula with just twenty-one identified and four unidentified burials. During exhumation work carried out after the war, Captain Annear’s body was never located and he is commemorated on the Lone Pine Memorial to the Missing.
Portrait of Captain William Annear, 11th Battalion, the first AIF officer to die at Gallipoli. [Sydney Mail 2 June 1915 p18]
Officers, including Captain William Annear and men of the 11th Battalion, AIF photographed on 10 January 1915 at the Great
Pyramid near Mena Camp shortly after their arrival in Egypt. [AWM A02875]
Official CWGC grave
listings for 
Lone Pine Cemetery (External link)
Official CWGC grave
listings for Lone
Pine Memorial (External link)
Commonwealth
War Graves Commission Website and "Debt of Honour" Register