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ANZAC
3 Shrapnel Gully
Shrapnel Gully, leading into Monash Valley, was the artery of Anzac. Here, men made their way along the valley and up the steep slopes to garrison the trench line along Second Ridge at places such as Quinn’s Post and Pope’s Hill. Up the gully went all the supplies essential to holding the line – food, water, engineering supplies and ammunition –while Turkish shrapnel shells exploded overhead, sending down showers of deadly pellets. Trooper Ion Idriess, 5th Light Horse Regiment (Queensland), reached Anzac in mid-May 1915 and went at once by night into Shrapnel Gully. ‘Shrapnel burst above us in an instantaneous black-grey cloud of smoke’, wrote Idriess, ‘bushes around bent as if under a hailstorm … we quickly learnt the best way of dodging shrapnel … we had to … immediately that scream came tearing directly overhead we would duck down flat’.
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- The main track up Shrapnel Valley, Anzac, 1915. The sandbag walls were built to provide cover from Turkish snipers high up on the ridge from where they had, in the early days of the campaign, a clear view of all movements in the valley. [AWM C02676]
Equally lethal in Shrapnel Gully and Monash Valley were the Turkish snipers. These sharpshooters fired from camouflaged sites up on the ridge, and for safety there were sandbag walls between which men dashed as they made their way along the valley floor. Eventually, a deep communication trench, dug along the side of the track, gave better protection, and a party of ‘counter-snipers’, led by Lieutenant T Grace, Wellington Battalion NZEF, took on the Turkish marksmen. Anzac snipers, a rifleman and a spotter with a telescope, lay out all day observing Turkish sniper positions and firing on them when the least movement was observed.
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- The view up Shrapnel Valley from Shrapnel Valley Cemetery towards the ridge at Anzac, Gallipoli, 2005.
Despite all these precautions there were many casualties in Shrapnel Gully. Undoubtedly the best known is Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, renowned for his use of donkeys to evacuate wounded men from the slopes of the valley and along to dressing stations at the beach. As he was bringing a wounded man down Monash Valley on the morning of 19 May 1915, Simpson was killed by Turkish machine-gun fire. Simpson’s grave is in Beach Cemetery.