The Anzac Walk

3.Anzac Cove – Anzac Cove Sign

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Directions:

From Ari Burnu point walk back through the cemetery to the road. Notice to your right here the Turkish memorial. On it are words sent in 1934 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, President of Turkey, to an official Australian, New Zealand and British party visiting Anzac Cove:

Those heroes that shed their blood, and lost their lives ...

You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.

Therefore, rest in peace.

There is no difference between the Johnnies

And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side,

Here in this country of ours.

You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries ...

Wipe away your tears.

Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace.

After having lost their lives on this land, they have

Become our sons as well.

Turkish memorial and backpackers
The Turkish Memorial at Anzac Cove

In 1915, Kemal was one of the Turkish divisional commanders at Gallipoli and was particularly noted for his fighting leadership during the Battle of the Landing and during the August Offensive.

Your way now leads south around Anzac Cove. You can also head along the beach itself but when you reach the end it will be a scramble to get back up to the road. Stop by the memorial at the southern end of the cove with the Turkish words ‘Anzak Koyu’ (Anzac Cove). In 1985, the Turkish Government agreed to the official naming of this place as ‘Anzac Cove’. In return the Australian Government named a stretch of Lake Burley Griffin at the end of Anzac Parade in the national capital ‘Gallipoli Reach’. A section of Princes Royal Harbour in Albany, Western Australia was also named ‘Atatürk Entrance’ in memory of the first convoy that left Australia in November 1914 for the war in Europe. Many of the men on those ships, Australians and New Zealanders, later became part of the Anzac Corps and landed here at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. They were the original Anzacs.

And a little rotting pier

A view of Anzac Cove possibly taken about mid-summer 1915
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Until September 1915, after which North Beach began to develop, the Cove was the main ‘port’ of Anzac. All supplies, including water, were brought in here in barges, lighters and small North Sea fishing trawlers. Great mounds of boxes, such as can be seen in this photograph, were from first to last a feature of the Cove. They provided some shelter for beach workers during the virtually daily shelling by the Turks. On 17 July 1915, there lay stored up at the Cove, and other depots, 23 days' rations and 2 days' fuel for 25,000 men as well as 5 days' grain and 1 days' hay for 1,000 animals. [AWM A03632]

During the Gallipoli campaign there was no better-known place than Anzac Cove. It received this name as early as 29 April 1915, by request of the commander of the Anzac Corps, Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood. Sometime after June 1915, a photograph of the cove appeared in Australian newspapers, a blunder, Bean felt, that would have given ‘priceless intelligence’ to the enemy artillery officers had it ever reached them!  Like no other spot on Gallipoli, Anzac Cove has become the image of Anzac. This is not surprising. Something like 50,000 Australians fought at Gallipoli and, although there were other landing places, the great majority of them landed here. That was certainly true of those who served between April and August 1915 in the ‘old Anzac’ area. Consequently, thousands of families all over Australia had a son or husband who knew something of Anzac Cove.

Maoris of the Maori Contingent, NZEF (New Zealand Expeditionary Force) and Australians dragging a water tank up the slope from Anzac Cove to Plugge’s Plateau
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[Notice the dugouts in the side of the hill] The tank would then have been installed in a specially dug terrace and water pumped up from the beach. Sergeant Cyril Lawrence watched one of these tank dragging events:

I saw a party of Maoris … hauling up one of these big tanks … all yelling and puffing. Great big men. Golly! That tank fairly flew up. All Australia stood still to watch and afterwards gave them a cheer. [The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne 1983, p 55] [AWM C01812]

Bean records that some 27,000 Australian, New Zealand, British and Indian troops were put ashore in Anzac Cove between 25 April and 1 May 1915. While the great majority of these troops were Australians and New Zealanders there were also units that many in Australia today have never heard of. Among them were the Ceylon Planter’s Rifle Corps, the Indian Mule Cart Transport, the Zion Mule Corps, the 7th Indian Mountain Artillery and about 2,500 men of the British Royal Naval Division, Chatham, Portsmouth, Nelson and Deal Battalions. All of these units fought alongside the Anzacs. Indeed, it was a 33-year-old Englishman, Lance Corporal Walter Parker, Portsmouth Battalion, Royal Naval Division, who gained the first Victoria Cross awarded at Anzac for his bravery under fire between 30 April and 2 May.

For eight months between April and December 1915, Anzac Cove became, in Bean’s words, Anzac ‘city’:

We are never likely to see anything like it again in history, for two reasons. For one thing, it is the complete base for an army, which you can take in with a single glance; stacks of every sort of supply – biscuits, cheeses, fodder, disinfectant, beef, sugar; ordnance stores – clothing, cans, boots, carts, spare wheels, engineer’s stores of every sort, great beams and baulks, rails – every one of the great accumulation of things an army wants.

[Charles Bean, official despatch, Gaba Tepe 28 June 1915, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, No 97, 26 August 1915, p 1635]

Sick men leaving Anzac from Anzac Cove
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After the first great battles of the campaign in April-May, most of those evacuated from Anzac were suffering from sickness. A monotonous diet, hot weather, exhaustion from the constant physical labour of digging and carrying, bad hygiene and a plague of flies – all these produced an epidemic of illnesses such as chronic diarrhoea and dysentery. In August one Australian medical officer wrote:
Men who were just skin and bone; hands, arms and legs covered with septic sores; ill with dysentery; had to work in the trenches on bully-beef, bacon and biscuits. [The Australian Army Medical Services in the War of 1914-1918, Vol 1, Part 1, Colonel A G Butler, ‘The Gallipoli Campaign’, Melbourne, 1930, p352] [AWM C01675]

Crawling up the hillsides above the ‘city’ were the ‘business suburbs’.  In Anzac Gully behind the beach was Corps Headquarters and the dugout of the Corps commander, Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood. Sir William could be seen most days swimming in the blue waters of the cove like thousands of other men who worked on the beach or who had come down in some ‘fatigue’ party from other parts of Anzac to fetch and carry materials back to their own positions.

But Turkish gunners had an almost precise fix on Anzac Cove and many men were killed or wounded in the beach area or in the water by bursting shrapnel shells. Most of these came from a gun battery christened ‘Beachy Bill’. It was estimated that during the campaign over 1,000 men were killed or wounded in Anzac Cove by ‘Beachy Bill’ alone. So constant was it you had to get used to the shelling and, where possible, even find it funny. Sergeant Cyril Lawrence, 2nd Field Company, Australian Engineers, went swimming in the cove on the evening of 10 June 1915 when ‘Beachy Bill’ opened up:

There were hundreds on the beach and one of the shells burst over a latrine up on the hillside. The men sit on this, which is just a beam supported at each end over a long hole, like a lot of sparrows on a perch. There is nothing to hide them from the view and they look extremely funny to see all their bare bums in a row … one burst over this latrine. In the scatter that followed, none waited to even pull their trousers up. The roar of laughter that went up could have been heard for miles. It’s only these little humorous happenings that keep things going here.

[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne 1983, pp 27–8]

Lieutenant-General Sir William Birdwood, the commander of the Anzac Corps, swimming at Anzac Cove
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Birdwood’s headquarters were in Anzac Gully directly in the hills behind Anzac Cove and ‘Birdie’ regularly went for a swim amongst the other soldiers. This photo appeared in the Australian press and led to an increase in Birdwood’s parcel mail from that country. The story goes that when he excitedly opened these parcels anticipating perhaps a cake or chocolates instead they contained bathing trunks from shocked readers! [AWM G00401]

So effective was the shelling of the cove that it determined movement by the little transport ships running supplies into the pier, Watson’s Pier, constructed under the supervision of Major Stanley Watson, 1st Australian Division Signals Company. Approach to the pier by day became an almost suicidal matter so from early June all reinforcements were landed by night.

After the evacuation of December 1915 Anzac ‘city’ disappeared rapidly. When Bean visited here in early 1919, just three years later, he found that everything moveable had been cleared by the Turks – ‘Now nothing stirred except the waves gently lapping on the shingle and a few of the piles of our old piers gently swaying in the swell’. Two white steel lifeboats used to land troops were also on the beach and Bean had one of them shipped back to Australia where it is on display in the Introductory Gallery of the Australian War Memorial. Of all the descriptions of Anzac Cove none is perhaps more evocative than that of soldier-poet Leon Gellert. Gellert landed here on 25 April 1915 with the 10th Battalion, South Australia, and was evacuated in July with dysentery:

Staff Sergeant Lionel Sergeant, 4th Field Ambulance, doing his washing outside a dugout at Anzac
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Staff Sergeant Lionel Sergeant, 4th Field Ambulance, doing his washing outside a dugout at Anzac. [AWM P01116.062]

Anzac Cove

There’s a lonely stretch of hillocks:

There’s a beach asleep and drear:

There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.

There are sunken trampled graves:

And a little rotting pier:

And winding paths that wind unceasingly.

There’s a torn and silent valley;

There’s a tiny rivulet

With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.

There are lines of buried bones:

There’s an unpaid waiting debt:

There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the south.

An Australian holiday resort
Anzac Cove

When the struggle of the Landing had subsided, the Beach on summer days reminded many onlookers of an Australian coastal holiday-place. The shoreline itself resembled rather an old-time port, with its crowded barges (often beached to prevent being sunk), a few short piers, piles of biscuit boxes and fodder stacked behind, the smell of rope, of tar, of wet wood, of cheese and other cargo; but in the water the hundreds of bathers, and on the hillside the little tracks winding through the low scrub, irresistibly recalled the Manly of New South Wales or the Victorian Sorrento, while the sleepy “tick-tock” of rifles from behind the hills suggested the assiduous practice of batsmen at their nets on some neighbouring cricket-field.

The naming of Anzac Cove
 
Two French interpreters at Anzac, M Rene de Marigny (left) and M Petitcol, in their dugout
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They were appointed to the headquarters of the First Division AIF in Australia when it was believed that the division would be sent to the Western Front in France in 1914. Instead, the division was stopped in Egypt in December 1914, and when the Gallipoli campaign was in the planning stage, it was available for the landing of 25 April 1915. [AWM C02143]

General Birdwood asked that the Beach between the two knolls, being the original landing-place, should be known as “Anzac Cove”; and the name “Anzac”, till then the code name of the Army Corps, was gradually applied to the whole area. Day and night the Cove was full of the noises and sights of a great harbour – launches with tows moving constantly in and out, the shrill whistles of small crafts, the hoots of trawlers, the rattle of anchor-chains, the hiss of escaping steam. At either end of the Beach was the hospital – the New Zealand station at the north end, the Australian at the south. Colonels Howse and Giblin would not display the Red Cross on their station, crouched as it was among supply depots which the Turks might justifiably shell. Along the middle of the Beach were long lines of picketed mules. Even by day the strand between the growing supply stacks and the water was a crowded thoroughfare. Odd men, parties, strings of animals, jostled through it, lucky if they escaped the kick of a mule. During shell fire the casual hands would quickly disappear behind stacks of biscuit-boxes; but the working parties carried on without regarding it.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Sydney, Vol 2, p.346 and Vol 1 p.545]

Popular with all hands
Swimming at Anzac
Anzacs swimming and relaxing at Anzac Cove
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All of the beaches in the Anzac position – Brighton Beach, Anzac Cove and North Beach – were used by men from all over the Anzac for swimming and getting clean. Bathing was however a dangerous pastime. Turkish guns regularly shelled the beach, often causing casualties but never stopping the practice. When the shelling ceased, men simply resumed their swim. Of one occasion Bean wrote:
… it is recorded that on June 23, during bathing, eight men were hit – one of them came our of the water holding his almost severed arm.
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol II, Sydney, 1924, p 383] [AWM P01116 005]

Swimming was popular with all hands. Early in the campaign we had a Turkish attack one morning; it was over by midday, and an hour later most of the men were in swimming. I think it not unlikely that some of the “missing” men were due to this habit. They would come to the beach and leave their clothes and identity discs ashore, and sometimes they were killed in the water. In this case there was no possibility of ascertaining their names. It often struck me that this might account for some whose whereabouts were unknown.

While swimming, the opportunity was taken by a good many to soak their pants and shirts, inside which there often was, very often, more than the owner himself. I saw one man fish his pants out; after examining the seams, he said to his pal: “They’re not dead yet”. His pal replied “Never mind, you gave them a ---- of a fright”. These insects were a great pest, and I would counsel friends sending parcels to the soldiers to include a tin of insecticide; it was invaluable when it could be obtained.

[Joseph Beestson, Five Months at Anzac, Sydney, 1916, pp.35-37]