Second-Lieutenant Hugo Throssell
10th Light Horse Regiment
Full of holes from pieces of bomb…
In Australia today the name Hill 60 at Gallipoli, unlike Anzac Cove and Lone Pine, means little. The cemetery and memorial there, well north of the old Anzac position, are hidden by pine trees and surrounded by wheat fields. The place attracts only a few visitors, mainly New Zealanders, by comparison with the cemeteries of Anzac. A narrow road, where one needs to be careful in a car not to become bogged, runs across what was once a battlefield to the cemetery. Few of the hundreds buried at Hill 60 have identified gravestones or special memorials to indicate that they lie in this ground.
Although only 60 metres above sea level, Hill 60 was high enough to command the approaches along the coast between the new British positions at Suvla, after the landing there of 6 August, and Anzac. So between 21 and 29 August 1915, a combined Indian, British, Gurkha, New Zealand and Australian force tried to take this small hill from the Turks. During those days the surrounds of Hill 60, as described by those who were there, were turned into yet another slaughterhouse of the Gallipoli campaign:
The whole place is strewn with bodies – Gurkhas, Australians, Connaught Rangers [an Irish regiment], the smell, another of the minor horrors of war, is appalling, the sights revolting and disgusting. Our work is heavy so that we cannot add to it by burying the bodies.
[Major C Allanson, commanding officer, 1/6th Gurkhas, quoted in Rhodes James, Gallipoli, London, 1999, p.310]
A number of attempts to take Hill 60 made some progress, but at great cost as first this piece and then that piece of trench were seized and held. On the afternoon of 28 August, Major-General Alexander Godley, the commanding officer of the New Zealand and Australian Division, came to the forward position near Hill 60 of the 10th Light Horse Regiment from Western Australia. This was the unit whose numbers had already been decimated just three weeks earlier at the charge at the Nek, one of the costliest of the so-called ‘feints’ of the ‘August Offensive’. Godley informed the officers of the 10th that he wanted them to seize a trench on the summit of Hill 60 – ‘I know you will get it. It’s the holding that’s the difficulty’.
At 1 am on 29 August, the men of the 10th Light Horse rose from their trenches on the slopes of Hill 60 and, within minutes, had bombed and fought their way into a sizable chunk of Turkish trench. A barricade was now erected across the eastern end of the trench to stop the Turks advancing back along it. In charge of the holding of this barricade was Second-Lieutenant Hugo Throssell and a group of determined bomb throwers. Soon the Turks began their counter-attack and there now began one of the most intensive bomb fights of the whole Australian experience at Gallipoli, even by comparison with the Battle of Lone Pine.
To start with a large Turkish bomb, in what looked like a biscuit tin, almost destroyed the Light Horse barricade. However, as a party of Turks attacked they were beaten back. Throssell and his men now retired behind another barricade further back just as a second attack began with bombs and an enemy charge across the open in front of the trench. Yet again it was beaten back with Australian bombs and bullets. Prominent in these bomb duels were men like Corporals Sutton Ferrier (Ferrier was credited with having flung nearly 500 bombs that night.) and Harry Macnee and Troopers Francis McMahon and William Henderson. Throssell later cited them all for gallantry awards:
Whenever a Turkish bomb landed in the trench these men immediately picked it up and threw it out again, frequently succeeding in lobbing it back among the Turks. I saw this act, not once, but a dozen times …
[Throssell,quoted in Stephen Snelling, VCs of the First World War:Gallipoli, 1995, p.223]
- These three Wills’s cigarette cards from 1915 give a fairly heroic version of the fighting at Hill 60, Gallipoli, for which Lieutenant Hugo Throssell, 10th Light Horse Regiment, AIF, was awarded the Victoria Cross. The language employed and the style of the drawings is typical of the extremely patriotic nature of such items at the time. The incident regarding Tiny and ‘Selling the Pony’ are clearly calculated to suggest the supposedly inherent gameness of the Australian soldier and his willingness to indulge in a little gambling even in the midst of battle. The image of Throssell himself with his rifle suggests the steadfastness of the man in defence of his position. The Turkish dead at his feet indicate the price the Turks have paid in attacking such a soldier.
Just before daybreak the last and most serious attack occurred. As a more senior officer had been killed in the earlier attacks, Throssell was now in charge. He later recalled that they were hopelessly outnumbered and that of the 160 men who had mounted the original Light Horse attack, many had died or retired wounded. Throssell himself, as this latest Turkish attack began, was hit in the shoulder and the neck:
Then they crawled out of the trenches and came straight at us. In the dim light we could see them against the skyline. I passed the word to our fellows, and when the first Turks got within ten yards we cheered and shouted, and, standing up in the trenches, started firing as fast as we could. There was no thought of cover. We just blazed away until the rifles grew red-hot … and then we picked up the rifles the wounded or killed men had left.
[Throssell,quoted in Stephen Snelling, VCs of the First World War: Gallipoli, 1995, p.224]
Throssell was wondering how long they could last when the Turks turned and retreated. A few minutes later the Turks came again at Throssell’s position from all sides. So loud was the yelling and shouting of his men, however, that the Turks may have thought they were up against a much larger force. Throssell felt that, if the enemy had only advanced a little further, they would have seen how few Light Horsemen there actually were and easily overrun them. Just as dawn broke, a machine-gun arrived in the Australian line and, in Throssel’s words, ‘It settled the Turk’s third and final charge – and the trench was ours’.
Not surprisingly, Hugo Throsell was shaken up by the night’s events as well as badly wounded. He was now ordered back to a dressing station. When given a cigarette he was unable to light it or bring it to his lips because of the wounds stiffening his arms. Moreover, Thossell, as Captain Horace Robertson wrote, looked spent and exhausted:
He wore no jacket, but had badges on the shoulder-straps of his shirt. The shirt was full of holes from pieces of bomb, and one of the ‘Australias’ [shoulder badge with the word Australia] was twisted and broken, and had been driven into his shoulder.
[Robertson, quoted in Lionel Wigmore in collaboration with Bruce Harding, They Dared Mightily, Canberra, 1963, p.50]
For his bravery and inspirational leadership at Hill 60, Throssell was recommended for and received the Victoria Cross. Sadly, the trench for which the 10th Light Horse had shed their blood was not actually at the top of Hill 60 as General Godley had claimed. The peak, if one can call it that, lay a bit further up. However, enough of the hill had been captured to command what Bean described as ‘a fairly satisfactory view’ over the plain. A halt was therefore called to any further attacks. A New Zealander, Trooper James Watson of the Auckland Mounted Rifles, who had participated in the Hill 60 fighting, made the following terse but biting entry in his diary about the battle:
We gained about 400 yards in four days fighting. 1000 men killed and wounded. Land is very dear here.
[Watson, quoted in Christopher Pugsley, Gallipoli:The New Zealand Story, Auckland, 1998, p.325]