4. Hell Spit – Anzac Cove Sign
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From the ‘Anzac Cove’ sign make your way along the coastal path to Beach Cemetery. Walk through the cemetery and look out to sea. The Anzacs gave the name Hell Spit to this area, the southern point of Anzac Cove. On a clear day you will have directly in front of you the Turkish island of Imroz (Imbros in 1915, as it was largely a Greek island then) and off to the north-west the Greek island of Samothrace. It was on Samothrace that pieces of a statue of Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory, were discovered. The pieces were reassembled and today form one of the most famous sights of the Louvre Museum in Paris – the headless Winged Victory of Samothrace. The sun sets behind these Aegean islands and during the Gallipoli campaign the beauty of these sunsets produced many lyrical descriptions from Australian soldiers:
Away about fifteen miles off our position are two mountainous islands, Imbros and Samothrace. The sun goes below the sea’s horizon just off the northern end of the latter throwing them both, great jagged peaks, into silhouette on a crimson background. The sea is nearly always like oil and as the crimson path streams across the water the store ships, hospital ships, torpedo boats and mine sweepers stand out jet black. God, it’s just magnificent!
[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne 1983, p 35]
Health to the Navy, that took us there and away
- The battleship HMS Cornwallis firing at Turkish positions on 20 December 1915
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- A fairly common sight for the Anzacs during the Gallipoli campaign – a British warship shelling the Turks. Here the battleship HMS Cornwallis is firing at Turkish positions on 20 December 1915, the day after the final evacuation. Cornwallis was the last Royal Navy vessel to leave Anzac. It had also been the first to open fire on the Dardanelles forts on 19 February 1915. [AWM H10388]
Looking out to sea at Hell Spit we can image the activity in the stretch of water between here and the islands during the eight months of the Gallipoli campaign. As the phrase above from Lieutenant Oliver Hogue’s poem ‘Anzac’ suggests, the men of the British Royal Navy and Merchant Marine were a central part of the whole Anzac story. Without them there would have been no landing, no ongoing naval bombardment support, no supply of food and fighting material, no removal of the sick and wounded and no successful evacuation at the end.
At most times the sea between Anzac and the islands was full of warships and other vessels. Standing here after mid-June 1915, you might have seen the little North Sea trawler (fishing boat) which brought fresh bread across from the Australian Field Bakeries on Imroz to Anzac. Wood to fuel the bakery ovens was brought from all over the islands of the Aegean, supplied by Greek contractors, but especially from Mount Athos. At one point over 14,500 bread rations were arriving every day.
- A flat-bottomed barge arriving with stretcher cases and walking wounded beside the hospital ship Gascon off Anzac
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- These barges went inshore to Anzac Cove and other parts of the Anzac shoreline from which they could evacuate the wounded. They were towed out to the hospital ships by naval launches and steam boats. [AWM A02740]
The men of the Royal Navy also turned up at Anzac Cove as members of naval beach parties. At the beach soldiers could buy food items that were rare on Anzac, such as eggs and condensed milk, from the sailors who were able to obtain them from the islands. The cases of exploded Turkish shrapnel were also used as currency. As Charles Bean observed, ‘The man who brought down a shell case, when duty brought him to the beach, knew that it was as good as a loaf to take back again’. The sailors in one battleship, the Prince of Wales, were known for keeping many an Anzac supplied with cigarettes for free.
In charge of the comings and goings of the little ships from the piers was Lieutenant Commander Edward Cater. The Commander could often be heard bawling himself hoarse through a megaphone:
… [directing] the incoming barges to their proper piers and [superintending] the Anzac Beach parties in making them fast – no easy matter, where the only illumination for the whole bay and its foreshores was the light of the stars, or a rare stable lantern swinging in the hand of one of these officers or tucked behind some stack of provisions where work was active.
[Charles Bean, Story of Anzac, Vol 2, p 352]
- A North Sea trawler of the kind regularly seen at Anzac
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- These little fishing boats, which had been brought to Gallipoli originally to assist, unsuccessfully, in minesweeping operations in the Dardanelles, were kept on for the purpose of bringing ashore men and supplies. [AWM P1287/11/11]
In the style of many British officers of the period Cater wore a monocle. The story goes that Australian soldiers would mockingly approach Cater, ‘the Bloke with the Eye Glass’, with their identity discs in their eye-sockets. Relishing the joke, he would take his monocle out, throw it in the air, catch it in his eye-socket and respond – ‘Do that, you blighters’. Cater was killed by shellfire as he was running out to help the crew of a small steamboat which had been hit and was sinking off a pier at Anzac Cove. His remains lie in Plot 2, Row G, Grave 5 behind you in Beach Cemetery.
Also visible daily from Hell Spit were the hospital ships, painted white and with a Red Cross on their sides. A constant stream of trawlers and steamboats towing rowing boats and barges made regular trips to the hospital ships carrying sick and wounded. Chivalrously, the Turks never usually deliberately fired on these medical vessels, but inevitably many stray bullets found their way out to sea towards the hospital ships. On 11 August 1915, Sister Daisy Richmond, Australian Army Nursing Service, was on the deck of a hospital ship off Anzac:
- HMS Queen Elizabeth
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- Forward guns and bridge of the Royal Navy's dreadnought battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth, off the coast of Gallipoli in April 1915. [AWM G00224]
We are well under fire many bullets coming on the decks. I was speaking to one boy, moved away to another patient when a bullet hit him and lodged in the thigh. I just missed.
[Sister Daisy Richmond, diary, 11 August 1915, Australian War Memorial 2 DRL/0783]
Undoubtedly, the most dramatic naval sight to be observed from Anzac was that of a Royal Navy warship shelling Turkish positions. The navy lent regular support to Anzac operations from the very beginning of the campaign and an unforgettable sight would have been a naval bombardment at night using searchlights. If you look down the coast to your left you can see the promontory of Gaba Tepe (Rough Hill). In early newspaper reports the landing of 25 April was referred to as the Gaba Tepe landing. In the darkness, if you had stood at Hell Spit and looked towards Gaba Tepe this might have been the scene:
- Grave marker of Lieutenant-Commander Edward Cater RN
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- The original grave marker of Lieutenant-Commander Edward Cater RN in Beach Cemetery, Anzac. Cater, the Anzac beach commander, died from shrapnel fire at Anzac Cove on 5 August 1915. [AWM J02444]
… just after dusk a destroyer creeps right in upon our flank and lies there, black and silent. Suddenly, without warning, a vivid white streak shoots out from here and stretches across to the shore … Her light travels slowly up and down along the beach and the rising ground with their [the Turks] trenches are behind it; sometimes it stops stationary upon one point for a minute or so; see how plainly everything stands out, trees, sandbags and patches of scrub. Round goes the light until it lights up Gaba Tepe. There is a vivid spurt of flame from the inky blackness; then comes the sharp, ‘whouf’, ‘bang’ of the gun, a short and sudden roar, then crash! and up go showers of red sparks from – no, not Gaba Tepe, but the opposite end of their track. Then immediately the light is switched round on to that spot and then click and she is out again. A few more minutes and out it flashes, rests a second or so on a certain spot and then bang! bang! bang! go the guns.
[The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers, Sir Ronald East (ed), Melbourne 1983, p 124]
Gigantic guns
HMS Queen Elizabeth
Go to the AWM website for Bean's Official History of Anzac
- Shells that were hurled at the Turks by the Royal Navy dreadnought battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth off Anzac
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- This photograph shows the size of the shells that were hurled at the Turks by the Royal Navy dreadnought battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth off Anzac. On the second day of the landing – 26 April 1915 – the Anzacs were hard pressed and the Queen Elizabeth arrived to support them. One soldier described how the great warship’s guns ‘firing from five miles [eight kilometres] out was like a physical blow on one’s body’. [AWM G00195]
But, on that second day, as it was in the end, it was not so much our own artillery that relieved the situation. It was known over-night that the Australian troops ought to be supported by all the gun-fire available. And off the shore there appeared with the early light the great flagship which the day before had been blowing the forts at Sedhl Bahr in dust clouds right across the toe of the peninsular, to cover the fearfully expensive landing of the British Regulars at some of the beaches there. There is no question that she was needed at the mouth of the Dardanelles to support that British landing, but her appearance off Gaba Tepe next day was exceedingly welcome. We had seven other warships that day – their number varied on different days – supporting us closer in shore. The Queen Elizabeth stood out a little to the south-east, and they gave the Turks all through the day a tremendous obstacle to face in delivering any attack. At intervals brigadiers, or battalion commanders through their brigadiers, would ask for the fire of the ships on some particular point; and almost every time that fire was asked for it came.
At the back of them all was the Queen Elizabeth with her gigantic guns. I do not know how many rounds she fired during the day. It may have been no more than a dozen. We have no direct evidence of what damage they inflicted on the Turks; but she shook the hills with her reports. She flung huge clouds of earth into the air from the shoulder of the main ridge over which the Turks were advancing. One Turkish attack melted away before her there in the afternoon – and little wonder. She put great heart into our men. The Australian from the first has watched the wonders which he sees before him with exactly as much gusto as if he had paid a shilling entrance fee; and the Queen Elizabeth’s shells have been one of the marvels. There have been other ships which have been our closer friends and intimates – ships like the Triumph and the Bacchante, which stood by us day in and day out, and on which we never called in vain. Their firing was always a delight to the men that were in a good position to see it, particularly when they fired all their 6-inch guns on one beam in a salvo, but none of them were ever quite such a wonder as these volcanoes of the great flagship.
[Charles Bean, dispatch, Commonwealth of Australia Gazette 14 July 1915, pp.1328-1329]
Here's a health to the Navy
- Bodies being transferred from the hospital ship Gascon to a North Sea trawler for burial at sea off Gallipoli
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- Union Jack-draped bodies being transferred from the hospital ship Gascon to a North Sea trawler for burial at sea off Gallipoli. These men would have been wounded ashore, evacuated to the Gascon and subsequently died before they could be transferred for shore-based treatment on Lemnos Island or further away in Egypt. Those Australians buried at sea in this way were counted among the ‘missing’ and had their names recorded on the lone Pine Memorial or on the Hellas Memorial. [AWM A01859]
Meanwhile, here’s health to the Navy, that took us there, and away;
Lord! They’re miracle-workers – and fresh ones every day!
My word! Those Midis [Midshipmen] in the cutters! Aren’t they properly keen!
Don’t ever say England’s rotten – or not to us, who’ve seen!
Well! We’re gone. We’re out of it all! We’ve somewhere else to fight.
And we strain our eyes from the transport deck, but “Anzac” is out of sight!
Valley and shore are vanished; vanished are cliff and hill;
And we’ll never go back to “Anzac” . . . But I think that some of us will![From 'Anzac', in Oliver Hogue, Trooper Bluegum at the Dardanelles, London, 1916]