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ANZAC
10 Chunuk Bair (Conkbayiri)
The view from Chunuk Bair is breathtaking. The Wellington Battalion –men from the ‘Uttermost Ends of the Earth’, as words on the nearby New Zealand Memorial state – struggled up here at dawn on 8 August 1915, and were momentarily awed by where they were and what they could see. With little opposition, they had taken Chunuk Bair. Spread out to the east was the long watery sliver of the Dardanelles, the capture of which was the whole point of the campaign. The Wellingtons had little time to savour the moment before Turkish fire drove them to ground.
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- Ion Brown, The battle of Chunuk Bair, 8 August 1915, oil on canvas, 232 cm x 116 cm. This painting was commissioned by the New Zealand Defence Force as a sesquicentennial gift to the nation, and to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli. [Image courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand: Ref No D-001-035. Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library must be obtained before any re-use of this image.]
If the New Zealanders could have hung on to Chunuk Bair until strongly reinforced, the outcome of the Gallipoli campaign might have been different. Throughout 8 August, the Wellingtons defended a trench against repeated Turkish attacks. Leading them was someone who has become the best-known New Zealander of the campaign, Lieutenant Colonel William Malone, aged 53. With rifle and bayonet, Malone fought with his men and died that day. ‘Of the 760 Wellington Battalion who had captured the height that morning’, wrote Charles Bean, ‘there came out only 70 unwounded or slightly wounded men … they could talk only in whispers … their eyes were sunken … some broke down and cried’. During 9 August, other New Zealand soldiers hung grimly to Chunuk Bair, but no reinforcements arrived.
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- The New Zealand National Memorial (left) and the Ataturk Memorial, Chunuk Bair (Conkbayiri), Gallipoli, 2004.
Opposite the New Zealand Memorial is a large statue of a Turkish officer, holding a whip, who assumed command at Chunuk Bair on 8 August–Colonel Mustafa Kemal. Kemal summoned the last Turkish reserves to the mountain, and striding out in front of his men, near dawn on 10 August 1915, he held aloft his riding whip. ‘Soldiers!’, Kemal declared, ‘There is no doubt we can defeat the enemy opposing us … When you see the wave of my whip, all of you rush forward together’. At the signal, a great Turkish counter-attack swept over the crest of Chunuk Bair and down the other side, where it was halted by New Zealand machine-guns. But Chunuk Bair had been saved for Turkey, and no Allied soldier ever stood on those heights again.