out to try and get the barges straight. These barges were filled with dead and wounded, very few of the men from the two companies had got ashore. Those who had were taking cover behind a bank about 8 feet high that ran along the beach 10 yards from the water’s edge. In front of this bank was a line of barbed wire entanglements about 25 yards distant.12
Geddes made it to the shore by swimming, but many of the men of his company, unable to swim or weighed down by their huge packs, drowned in the treacherous currents. ‘We got it like anything,’ Geddes later wrote; ‘man after man behind me was shot down but they never wavered. Lt Watts who was wounded in five places and lying on the gangway cheered the men on with cries of “Follow the Captain”. Captain French of the Dublins told me afterwards that he counted the first 48 men to follow me and they all fell.’13 The first of the Munsters to actually make the beach was Sergeant Patrick Ryan who swam ashore in his full kit. He subsequently received the DCM for some risky reconaissance work.
Meanwhile Henderson’s company, on the starboard side of the ‘River Clyde’ was faring no better. One of his platoon commanders, Captain Lane, survived to write an account of the nightmarish assault on the beach.
All the way down the side of the ship bullets crashed against the sides but beyond a few splinters I was not hit. On reaching the first barge I found some of the men had collected and were firing. I mistrusted the second barge and the track to the shore so I led them over the side, the water nearly up to our shoulders. However, none of us were hit and we gained the bank. There I found Henderson badly hit and heaps of wounded. Any man who put his head up for an instant was shot dead, and we were rather mixed up with the Dublins. Nearly all the NCOs were hit.14
Of the first 200 men down the gangway 149 were killed outright and 30 were wounded. Private Timothy Buckley of the Munsters, a native of Macroom, Co. Cork, counted 26 men down the gangway before him: ‘I stood counting them as they were going through. It was then I thought of peaceful Macroom, and wondered if I should ever see it again.’ Instead of running down the gangway he jumped over the rope and straight onto the pontoon. Two more followed suit and lay flat on the pontoon bridge. ‘. . . the shrapnel was bursting all around. I was talking to the chap on my left, and saw a lump of lead enter his temple. I turned to the chap on my right. His name was Fitzgerald. He was from Cork, but soon he was over the border.’15
A safe distance (or so he thought) from the massacre on V Beach on board a Royal Navy support vessel was seventeen-year-old Thomas Leavy from Dublin. He was well acquainted with a number of the 1st Dublins, some of whom were boys close to his own age. He watched with sickened dismay as they went to their deaths. His ship was maintaining a constant covering fire. ‘After things settled down we were out in a boat pulling the dead bodies onto an island there called Rabbit Island … it was terrible to see it, we couldn’t do anything, all we could do was fire over their heads with our two 14” guns.’ Almost sixty years after the landings he still believed that ‘the undertaking was all wrong … it was a blunder. There wasn’t a hope in hell of taking the place.’16 Also watching from naval vessels offshore were a number of newspaper war correspondents. One of the more naive members of the group, watching through field glasses noticed the the men lying on the beach and was heard to ask ‘Why are our men resting?’ It was pointed out to him by the veteran correspondent H.W. Nevinson that they were not resting but dead.
By the time he got to the shore Geddes felt badly in need of a rest.
[I] was completely exhausted and lay on the beach until I was able to crawl up to the slender cover the Dublins were holding – ten yards from the water’s edge . . It was the most ghastly hell you can imagine and you might just as well have walked the plank. You can form no idea of the horror of the undertaking – two splendid regiments practically wiped out.17
Movement on the beach was practically impossible. As Captain Lane discovered, any man who worked himself into an exposed position was inviting instant death. He was hit running for cover. ‘The bullet went through my right ankle and carried on sideways smashing my left leg to bits. One of my platoon then came out very pluckily and pulled me into safety. I had only been on the beach five minutes and never saw a Turk.’18
Tizard, watching from the River Clyde realised that it was impossible to carry out the original plan of attack which had been devised by Brigadier General Hare, Commander of the 86th Brigade.
Nothing could live on the ground about the beach. Men who left the cover of the bank for an instant were killed and five men of the R.M. Fusiliers who had been sent forward to cut the wire had all been killed within ten yards after leaving cover. The concentrated fire from the beach on to the one point of landing from the vessel, and also on to the gangways and exits was so heavy and accurate our losses had already been very severe. More than half of those who had left the vessel were either killed or wounded.19
There were also fatalities on board the ship. The Munster’s Second in Command, Major Monck-Mason was wounded there, as was the battalion’s adjutant while the CO of the Hampshires was killed on the ship’s bridge.
Various efforts were made to reinforce the survivors who reached the shore. Some of the Dublins who were fortunate enough not to have been allocated seats in the lighters that had turned into death traps were despatched down the makeshift pontoon bridge to the beach. Men from W Company of the 1st RDF, among them Sgt C. McCann (later promoted to Lieutenant), were met with the same Turkish fusilade which greeted everything that moved off the River Clyde.
[We] reached the two barges that formed the landing stage when we came under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire again. We threw ourselves flat on the barges and lay still for some time; I was between two men of the Munster Fusiliers who were dead, but I did not realise this until I asked one of them to make more room, and as he did not move I pushed him with my hand, and then found that his head was blown away.20
On shore Geddes, who estimated that he had lost about 70 per cent of his Company, was trying to extricate what was left of the Munsters and the leaderless Dublins from their exposed position. Breaking for shelter near the old fort, along with half a dozen others, he too was wounded. ‘However we got across and later picked up 14 stragglers from the [Dublins]. This little party attempted to get a lodgement inside the Fort but we couldn’t do it so we dug in as well as we could with our entrenching tools.’21 Geddes continued in command until he was evacuated from the beach after dark. Gradually he had worked the vestiges of the two Irish regiments into a more defensible position and into place for a possible counter-attack against the well-protected Turks.
The River Clyde was now a distinctly uncomfortable place to be, well within range of the Turkish artillery and machine-guns; filling up with wounded who had been evacuated from the beach or from among the heaps of bodies in the barges. At about 9.00 a.m. the Turkish firing abated and Tizard decided to try and get some more men ashore. Major Jarret and some of Y Company were despatched.
A ship’s cutter had been put into position and with the two barges and a gang plank formed a way from the vessel towards a spit of rock that jutted out from the beach on the right of where the ‘Clyde’ was beached. This spit of rock was thickly covered with dead, and the enemy had got the range of this spot to a nicety making it a veritable death trap.22
Elsewhere, in accordance with the lottery of war, the landings had been more successful. In some cases they were virtually unopposed. At W Beach, where the 29th’s Divisional commander had concentrated his own attentions to the exclusion of all other landings, there had been stiff opposition but it had been overcome. A flanking movement from that beach could have caught the Turks at V Beach in the rear. During the afternoon Tizard spotted, from the River Clyde a party of men on the cliffs to the left of the bay but a message he sent to the 29th Division HQ asking that they be used to outflank the Turks was ignored. Also at W Beach the 86th Brigade’s CO, Brig.-Gen. Hare had been wounded so Tizard was obliged to take command of the Brigade. The CO of the 88th Brigade, General Napier, then came aboard the River Clyde along with a platoon from the Worcester Regiment. Instructions came from 29th Division HQ that the landings must continue so, reluctantly, Tizard sent out another company of the Hampshires. Once again the barge closest to the shore had broken away and, unable to move forward, the Hampshires began to crowd back into the boat. Seeing this General