now. A Colonel Doughty-Wylie who led the whole attack was killed at my side. I wrote in about him to the staff and he has been recommended for a VC. I buried him that evening and got our Padre to read the service over him.33
There were a couple of attempts that night by the Turks to retake the hill but the depleted 86th Brigade held on. A force of almost two thousand men had now dwindled to a bare 700 and O’Hara was the only officer of the 1st Dublin Fusiliers who was not a casualty. The Brigade Major of the 86th, Major Farmer wrote of O’Hara, that he ‘rose to every occasion with the greatest coolness and competence, from commanding a platoon at the terrible landing from the River Clyde to the command of a company the next day, and after 28 April to commanding the Battalion.’34 In the days that followed he would be obliged to exhibit all his considerable composure as the Turks counter-attacked mercilessly.
The following morning (27 April) at 7.00 a.m. two thousand French troops arrived to relieve the Dublins and Munsters who returned to site of their virtual annihilation two days before. ‘We went back to Beach V where we had landed, had breakfast and tried to sleep. It was very hot. The dead lying on the beach wasn’t a pleasant sight. There were hundreds of them … No one can understand how we ever affected a landing when we see the strength of the position. There were 9000 Turks up against us.’35 The next day the advance began on the town of Krithia with the 29th Division and the newly arrived French working in concert. The Dublins and Munsters had to traverse V Beach on their way to take up reserve positions. Now a safe two miles from the nearest enemy machine-gun it was an altogether different place.
The French were already quite at home on Beach V where we had landed and it looked very different with camp ovens and tents in the place of corpses and dying men. The sea was beautiful and the colour was no longer red with blood as it was the day we saw it last.36
At the last moment the ‘Dubsters’ were sent forward as the advance began to falter. But it made no difference, the Turks managed to hold on to Krithia and (though this was not apparent at the time) little further progress would be made by the Entente forces. Bar a further attack on Krithia two months later the duties of the British and French troops were, from that point onwards, of a holding or defensive nature.
Lt Guy Nightingale’s diary entry for the night of 1 May, 1915 conveys something of the extremities to which the men who had come through V Beach were further exposed when the Turks attacked in huge numbers, often egged on (sometimes savagely) by German officers. The night was cold and Nightingale was resting under a makeshift canvas tent which he had managed to scrounge from the body of a French officer.
Woke up at 10.30 p.m. to the sound of firing from a dense mass of Turks advancing on the line, silhouetted against the moon which was rising. They were on the other side of the nullah but on our side they had crept up through the gorse and bayonetted most of the men in their sleep and swept on. Whatever remained of our co[mpan]y retired. I ran up the line shouting to them to get back and on joining my Dublin co[mpan]y which was on the left of my own co[mpan]y found a great scrap going on so joined in myself and stuck a Turk with my bayonet. We drove them back. I spent the remainder of the night with O’Hara and my Dublins. We fought for 5 hours driving back charge after charge of the Turks. At dawn they were in full retreat and we slaughtered them.37
Henry Desmond O’Hara was told that as many as 20,000 Turks had been involved in the night attack. The 360 men who remained of the 1st RDF between them fired 150,000 rounds of ammunition. The fight began at 10.30 p.m. when Nightingale was awoken, and continued until 5.00 a.m. the following morning. ‘The Turks were simply driven on to the barbed wire in front of the trenches by their German officers, and shot down by the score,’ wrote O’Hara.
At one point they actually got into the trenches, but were driven out by the bayonet. They must have lost thousands. The fighting is of the most desperate kind – very little quarter asked on either side. The men are absolutely mad to get at them, as they mutilate our wounded when they catch them. For the first three nights I did not have a wink of sleep, and actually fell asleep during the big night attack.38
Writing to his sister about the attack Guy Nightingale does not bother to spare her feelings. His tone is that of a man who has already been utterly desensitised by his experiences.
The Turks attacked again and again shouting Allah ! Allah !. It was most exciting hearing them collecting in a dip in the hill about 40 yards away waiting for their next charge. We mowed them down and only once did they get so close that we were able to bayonet them. When dawn broke, we saw them in hundreds retiring and simply mowed them down. We took 300 prisoners and could have taken 3000 but we preferred shooting them. All the streams were simply running blood and the heaps of dead were a grand sight.39
Elsewhere the 1st Inniskillings, of the 87th Brigade, who had come ashore unopposed on 25 April at X Beach (north of where the Dublins and Munsters met their nemesis) were getting and giving similar treatment. They were defending a position guarded only by a single stand of barbed wire and with long grass in front of their lines which afforded some cover against detection to the attacking Turks. ‘We heard the swish swish of the Turks’ feet as they advanced towards us and the voices of their officers as they gave orders. Somebody sent up a Very light, and they were advancing in a solid mass towards us.’ The Inniskillings let loose a murderous fire against the full frontal assault of the Turks. ‘The effect was deadly. We could hear the shrieks of their wounded and the shouts of their officers as they urged them on; but they never reached our line.’40
A sort of torpor now settled on both sides and the fighting became sporadic and episodic. The troops of two armies were crushed into an area of a few square miles and the corpses of the dead of both forces were ubiquitous. Nightingale, sent forward for a night attack with a contingent of Munsters, found himself sharing an entrenchment with the bodies of men from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers which had lain in the same spot since the landings of 25 April.
These bodies were still lying there highly decomposed and the stench was awful. In the dark we kept tumbling over the bodies and treading on them. When it was light I found I had dug in next to the remains of an officer in the KOSBs whom I had last seen at the Opera at Malta and had spent a most jolly evening with. There were ten KOSBs and seven South Wales Borderers lying there but I only recognised a few.41
It was not until the middle of May that a four-day truce designed for the purpose allowed both sides to bury their dead. By then, ironically, the campaign had become a carbon copy of the stasis of the Western Front.
It was only in retrospect that the full enormity of the losses at V Beach and on other parts of the Gallipoli peninsula became apparent. It took some time for the name ‘Gallipoli’ to acquire the connotations of military disaster and incompetence which it eventually did. The casualty figures were manipulated to give an erroneous impression of the success of the landings themselves. Nightingale noticed this when he was sent a copy of the Times in May.
I see they are breaking the casualties gently to you at home. Out of the 14 officers of ours hit on Sunday April 25th the Times of the 2nd of May only gives Major Jarret killed and five wounded. A lot of the regiments like the Lancashire Fusiliers who lost 20 officers the first day are not mentioned at all ! I think the Dublins are the only complete list. I suppose they’ll try and make out it’s been nothing at all out here, just a scrap with the Turks whereas its been hell and frightfully mismanaged.42
Such were the losses that when an officer like Capt G.W. Geddes returned from having his wounds treated he did so not as a mere Company commander but as CO of the battalion. But he was a much changed man.
Geddes is a ripping commanding officer to work with but he is frightfully worried and his hair is nearly white! I’ve never seen fellows get old so quickly. This morning I saw a fellow called O’Hara in the Dublins whom I hadn’t seen for about a fortnight and I hardly recognised him.43
The constant and vicious fighting of the early days of the campaign had taken their toll. ‘Simply tons of fellows are going off their heads from strain and worry – mostly fellows who have been wounded and come back but there are very few now who have gone through from the beginning and are not the worse for it.’44 One such victim of the fatalism induced by war was Henry Desmond O’Hara. He wrote to his