Excerpt from 'My First 30 Years' by Ralph L Cross, Royal Naval Division, Cape Helles, Gallipoli
On April 25th units of the Division were put ashore in company with the men of a number of Army Regiments on all the beaches at Cape Helles where landings were affected and from that date the Division was continuously employed in the fighting at Gallipoli until the last of the landing forces were withdrawn on the 9th January 1916.
To counter the rapid wastage of personnel occasioned by casualties and sickness, which latter mounted to appalling proportions due to the ravages of dysentry until it was checked by the colder weather on the onset of winter, the strength of the Division was maintained by drafts of men sent out from the training camp at Blandford. On the 28th and 29th May the effective strength was brought up to 10,500 men by the arrival of the Hawke, Benbow, and Collingwood Battalions. On June 4th the Collingwood Battalion was practically annihilated by the Turkish artillery and enfilade machine gun fire, within three quarters of an hour of its first going into action in an assault which commenced at 12 noon, Commander Spearman and his Second in Command Lieutenant-Commander Annand were both killed with 14 others of the officers. The strength of the R.N. Division which by the June disaster had been reduced to 208 officers and 7,141 men, had by the 1st August shrunk to 129 officers and 5,038 other ranks. The continued effort to advance and consolidate the front line at Cape Helles during June and July caused heavy losses in the 52nd Army Division also. The difficulty, often the impossibility, of burying the dead, under the conditions of the continuous Turkish sniping and bombardment, occasioned not only further losses but was the main cause of the fly-borne epidemics which by August were widespread, practically every man having dysentry to some degree, and in the course of the campaign caused more losses from sickness than the total of all the troops which took part in the Boer War. The appalling stench of decomposition borne by the wind off the land provided the most forceful and sickening impression of what they were about to enter to drafts of fresh troops arriving in landing craft.
The carnage and corruption was concentrated in a wedge-shaped area, contained by the coastline and a front line of trenches approximately three miles in length and advanced four miles from Cape Helles ["Hell-ess"], within which the troops were continually under enemy fire day and night except for a few favoured spots on the beaches sheltered by the cliffs.
After the landing at Suvla ["Soo-v-la"] Bay, when 30,000 men were put ashore in the first ten hours of 7th of August in intolerable heat and with insufficient supplies of water, and the associated attack at Anzac, and diversion of Cape Helles, all of which failed to achieve their ultimate purpose, the fighting south of Achi Baba ["Aky-Ba-ba"] relapsed into static trench warfare in which the war weary divisions weakened by physical illness and hardships became disheartened by the realisation that the campaign was at a standstill.
The Howe Battalion, to which I was now attached as Bombing Officer and Platoon Commander in B Company, and in which my brother commanded a Platoon in C Company, occupied a position in the front line below the ruins of the village of Krithea. The trenches here were sighted on the rise of the lower foothills of Achi Baba, and the Turk's position on higher ground enabled them to deliver accurately aimed fire from rifles and machine guns which they concentrated on the more exposed and weakly constructed points in the British line. The Turkish snipers were constantly active and fired at the slightest observed movement, once when one of our men fired a shot at night through a hole in a steel plate, a sniper fired at the flash, and his bullet came in through the loophole and struck the knob of the bolt of the rifle. An officer who shall be nameless, obstinately against advice mounted the fire step to observe the enemy front line and was shot dead within less than an hour of first being in the trenches.
Saps extended from the front line, the head of one being only 40 yards from the Turkish trenches, from which close inspection could be carried out through carefully raised periscopes disguised as sacking. Numbers of dead lay unburied on the ground in `no man's land' between the trenches. Many were men of the Lancashire Fusiliers Regiment killed in the engagement of 7th August by converging machine-gun fire. In one place 700 men lay in the three long rows in which they had been shot down as they advanced. Immediately in front of our section of the line lay piles of dead. Dead men were buried in the parapet, in places their feet hung down into the fire trenches from among earth and sandbags. The heat was intense and the smell horrible. Some lay in peaceful attitudes with faces swollen, sun baked and reddy-black, others in positions full of action just as they fell, some half rotted away. One man lay close outside a loophole which looked into an old Turkish communication trench, his hair and scalp peeling from his skull. One night I lay on the fire-step nauseated by an intense concentration of the reek of decomposition and discovered when daylight came that I had been lying on top of a corpse covered by a layer of sandbags. To endure this sort of thing men had either to become indifferent or perish mentally. I turned a traverse in the trench one day to encounter a smiling rating who said "Have you seen my peep show?" He lifted a piece of sacking and revealed a rotting hand protruding from the side of the trench. Mostly the men in the trenches were cool and indifferent to fire, full of unselfishness, helping each other, active, obedient to essential discipline, realising with force that to work together was the only method of combating their mutual dangers. There was next to no grumbling though most of them were tired and many seriously ill. All longed for home.