A trip to Gallipoli

[Tom Kilkenny]

My brother and I recently visited Gallipoli to see the various sites related to the landings almost 110 years ago.  I've been to the Somme and to Flanders countless times but this was an opportunity to visit battlefields I thought I might never see.  I have to say it was a wonderful trip and one I'd heartily recommend to anyone with more than a passing interest in the Great War. 

Anyway, I thought I'd share a few pictures and thoughts on what we saw.  I'd like to imagine they might inspire any of you who have not been to make the journey too. 

We had decided to spend a few days in Istanbul before hiring a car and driving down to Gallipoli.  I flew into Sabiha Gokcen Airport which is a few miles to the south-east of Istanbul while my brother who was travelling from elsewhere flew into Istanbul's international airport closer to the city.  I'd read some unflattering reviews of Pegasus Airlines but the flights both ways were on time and without any of the nonsense sometimes associated with budget airlines.  I'd been concerned about how difficult it might be to get from the airport to the city but there's a Metro station at the airport that runs into the city and also a very cheap bus you can pick up just outside the terminal.  

I'll not bore you too much with what we did in Istanbul though I'll let you see a photo of our sea-view room.  My brother, who'd booked the room, is as much a lover of economy as I am.  Other rooms in more expensive hotels are, of course, available.

More to follow.

Edited 18 July by Tom Kilkenny

[Tom Kilkenny]

We picked up a hire car from Taksim in the centre of Istanbul on the Saturday morning and made the drive down to Eceabat.  We hadn't booked the hire car before arriving in Istanbul and nor had we booked accommodation in Gallipoli. 

We weren't surprised to find the attractive rate for the car hire was to become less attractive on arrival at the car hire office.  Once they had added the cost of a tag which you need if you use any of the toll roads or toll bridges in Turkey we were paying the best part of twice the hire rate we'd been quoted.  Despite our only being likely to use any stretches of toll road on the day we travelled down to Gallipoli and on the day we travelled back, we got clobbered with a payment for each day of the hire.  In fact the tolls in Turkey seem to be a fraction of those you're likely to pay in France for example and wouldn't have cost anywhere near the daily rate the car hire company charged for the tag.  If you're hiring, ask about this when booking, apparently many companies just bill you for the tolls you've incurred when you return the car.

As I said, we'd not booked accommodation in Gallipoli before we arrived in Istanbul but we'd heard The Gallipoli Houses recommended by others who'd visited the peninsula so gave them a call the day before we were planning on travelling down and were fortunate to be able to get a room for the evenings we wanted.  The owner, Eric, is Belgian and, like so many of his countrymen, speaks English fluently. 

The route out of Istanbul was pretty straightforward and the standard of driving not as scary as we'd heard.  Istanbul is a huge city, however, and it took a couple of hours before we were clear of the urban sprawl and began to see something of the beauty of the country.  There are plenty of places to stop and eat along the way.  We took our time so it was late afternoon when we arrived at The Gallipoli Houses in the small village of Kocadere. 

We'd not planned to do anything battlefield related till the following day.  Eric welcomed us and provided us with a map of the national park and a copy of Major and Mrs Holt's Guide to the Gallipoli Battlefield.  I'd not thought to bring along a copy despite being a big fan of these guidebooks.  I did, however, have Peter Hart's Gallipoli which apart from being an excellent account of the campaign also has a helpful little annex with a suggested tour of the battlegrounds.

The view from the patio was rather better than from our Istanbul hotel room window.

More to follow.

 

Edited 23 May by Tom Kilkenny

[michaeldr]

Best regards to Eric & Oslem (Eric is known as "The Plummed Goose" on this forum). I am certain that you will be very comfortable staying with them, and so centrally located too.

Looking forward to further posts here.

[Tom Kilkenny]

Thanks Michael.

So, my brother and I were up early on the Sunday morning.  Eric recommended a roadside eatery just a couple of klicks away so we headed there for a typical Turkish breakfast with Nescafe - which seems to be the generic term for instant coffee.  Over the next few days I made the effort to develop an appreciation of Turkish coffee - when in Rome etc.  

We were aiming for the beaches at Helles but had decided we would stop at sites as we came across them rather than trying to follow any kind of timeline from the initial landings. 

We arrived first at the Çanakkale Destanı Tanıtım Merkezi or 'Epic Promotion Center' which is the main war museum on the peninsula.  I'm not sure the translation of its name does it justice but the museum presents the campaign in a fairly digestible way with the use of contemporary images, objects from the battlefields and even some full scale dioramas.  I was struck by how even-handed the commentaries were on the events of 1915.  The generosity of Ataturk's remarks in 1934 to the mothers of the Commonwealth and France who had lost their sons is reflected more generally by the Turkish people and their attitude to those who, after all, had invaded their land.       

We carried on to Skew Bridge Cemetery.

This must be the ideal time to visit Gallipoli because of the flowers in the cemeteries, the beauty of the landscape of the peninsula and because it is not yet too hot to be out and about.  For the men landing on the beaches in April 1915 it must have seemed oddly, even perversely, idyllic given their reason for being there but it's not difficult to imagine how different it would have felt just a couple of months later.   

Buried in the cemetery is Joseph Aloysius Townsend of the East Lancashire Regiment who was only 15 when he died on 18 May 1915.

Major and Mrs Holt's guidebook tells us the cemetery was named after an uneven wooden bridge nearby but I wonder if it was also a humorous reference to the Kew Bridge back home that would have been well-known to the men of the London battalions who fought there.  

More to follow.

Edited 24 May by Tom Kilkenny

[KGB]

I wanted to go to Suvla whilst in Istanbul. All tours seem to be 99% ANZAC related. 

[Tom Kilkenny]

Yes KGB, I think the tour companies tend to cater for the Aussies and New Zealanders who form the bulk of the non-Turkish visitors to the battlefields.  I wouldn't imagine many of the coaches make it to Suvla at all.    

[Tom Kilkenny]

Having paid our respects at Skew Bridge, we visited Morto Bay French National Cemetery.  Like many, I used to think of Gallipoli as mainly an ANZAC operation and I certainly had no idea of the French involvement.  I believe France lost 25,000 men in the campaign, many more than the ANZACs in fact.  The cemetery is impressive in its scale with more than 2000 identified burials and many more whose remains are contained in a tower memorial resembling the one at Douaumont in France and in four mass graves around it. 

The memorial has a number of plaques on it which came originally from some of the other French cemeteries on the peninsula which were subsequently closed, alongside at least one other commemorating a post-war pilgrimage in 1930. 

The cemetery is rather beautiful, as is the view from the memorial down to the sea.

We had found a coin on one of the graves in Skew Bridge Cemetery and we found another another here, this time commemorating the Queen's Silver Jubilee.  We were to find coins in many of the cemeteries we visited, usually British and including a penny from 1911, but also including an American dime. 

Edited 26 May by Tom Kilkenny

[Tom Kilkenny]

We moved on to the village of Seddulbahir where we parked the car and went for a coffee, Turkish this time.  Fortified by caffeine, we walked up towards the grave of Charles Doughty-Wylie VC but spotted a house which was clearly a private museum, along the lines of the small collections, open to the public for a small fee, that used to be so common in France and Belgium.  It was only a few lira and is worth a visit if you're not pressed for time.  There were lots of interesting items, some more gruesome than others.  I'll spare you the photo of the 'shoe with human bones inside'.   

The museum is popular with Turkish battlefield visitors and we were fortunate to have a window between one coach and the next to see the exhibits without a scrum.  A coach arrived just as we were leaving.   

We carried on up the hill to Doughty-Wylie's grave.  The view from the grave down to the sea is superb though someone has plonked a great big plastic water tank just a few yards from the grave which detracts from that view somewhat.  Life must carry on of course.  Although I was aware of his heroism, and his status in the eyes of the Turks themselves, I wasn't familiar with the connection between Doughty-Wylie and Gertrude Bell.  My brother had visited her grave in Baghdad and had been keen to see the grave of the man she had so much admired and, if the stories are to be believed, had visited herself.   

We then walked down the hill to V Beach.  We noticed as we walked past the houses that seem to have been built fairly recently that in the gardens there were collections of shell casings and other items, rather like you'd see in France or Belgium.  I believe much of the coast was a military zone until just a few years ago so it may be that these items were just lying around of little interest to those who had permission to be there.  

Before coming away, I'd watched Paul Reed's Old Front Line Podcast Talk 'Gallipoli in Private Photos' and it was amazing to find ourselves standing on that very beach where the River Clyde had run aground, an image that appears in several of those photos, and where the troops had fought their way ashore on the 25th of April 1915.  

I've watched that particular podcast again since returning and I am reminded again of just what a difference it makes to one's grasp of events to have walked the battlefield.  

More to follow. 

Edited 27 May by Tom Kilkenny

[Keith_history_buff]

French losses were:
  3,706 killed
17,371 wounded
  6.092 missing, presumed killed, of whom 45 soldiers were confirmed as captives by the ICRC & Red Crescent
20,000 are implied to have fallen sick, requiring evacuation

[Tom Kilkenny]

Those figures are sobering Keith.

[Tom Kilkenny]

We walked across the beach to V Beach Cemetery, the white wall of which can be seen at the end of the first stretch of beach in the last picture above.  I couldn't imagine there being a cemetery any closer to the sea than this, but the following day of course we were to visit Beach Cemetery which has the waves literally lapping at its edge.  

We returned to the car and drove up to the Helles Memorial.  

As well as the names of men of the County Regiments, ANZACs and Royal Navy who have no known graves, the monument commemorates more than 1500 men from a variety of Indian Army units.  

From the memorial, we walked down to Ertugrul Bastion, one of the forts either side of V Beach that had been bombarded and put out of action in the weeks before the April landings.  In the Holts' guide are photographs showing how the fort looked at the time of publication, I think around 2000 when it was still pretty much overgrown.  It's now been tidied up and you can enter its various rooms where there are displays retelling the history of the fort and the part it played in the events of 1915.  One of its Krupp guns remains.  

Close by there is a very good little diorama depicting the beach in April 1915 with River Clyde and Ertugrul Bastion at one end of the beach side and the arguably better known fort of Sedd el Bahr at the other. 

From the west end of the beach.

And from the east.

We didn't visit Sedd el Bahr, in fact I was surprised to see it looked very different to how it's seen in photographs of the period, having recently undergone restoration.  I see this has been discussed elsewhere on the forum.  

There are many Turkish memorials at this site and it's clear that the Turkish people regard the area in much the same way as we do the Kent coast.  

More to follow.  

Edited 19 August by Tom Kilkenny

[Tom Kilkenny]

From Ertugrul Bastion we drove up to Lancashire Landing Cemetery.  I'd read Geoffrey Moorhouse's Hell's Foundations back in the early 1990s and found it very moving.  The book focuses on the impact of the losses at Gallipoli on the town of Bury.  I'd expected to see the graves of men from the town in the cemetery who had died on 25 April or in the days afterwards but, while there were some Bury men, they appeared not to have died in the initial landing on W Beach.  Nor could I find many Bury men commemorated on the Helles Memorial though, of course, details of a man's home town aren't always to be found against his name in the CWGC's records.  Anyway, I'll have to read the book again.  

The cemetery is beautiful.

We were tired and hungry so It was time to head back to The Gallipoli Houses.  Eric had recommended a couple of wineries in Eceabat so we headed there and decided on the Suvla Winery which also has a restaurant.  It was a lovely evening so we ate in the garden and enjoyed a bottle of their Malbec. 

My brother enjoyed rather more of it than I did - I was driving after all.    

More to follow.

Edited 30 May by Tom Kilkenny

[Tom Kilkenny]

The following day we wanted to spend around Anzac Cove and set off in that direction - it's not at all far from The Gallipoli Houses.  The first cemetery we wanted to visit was Lone Pine.  We hadn't planned a route and found ourselves on the loop road which runs up to Chunuk Bair.  It's one-way and we were in two minds about whether to try heading back to the coast road before we got too far.  We didn't fancy the idea of having to follow a predetermined route but decided we'd better not in case we bumped into the police who might not have been too impressed.  In fact the route has clearly been well planned, the road is excellent and is by far the easiest way to access the cemeteries and other sites above Anzac Cove.  We might have got away with turning round at that time of the morning but the route quickly became busy with coaches.

There are several Turkish memorials along the route including the Mehmetcik Memorial of the Turkish soldier carrying a wounded Australian.  We noticed the image on the front of the Holts' guide seems to be reversed. 

We came to Lone Pine and parked up.  The memorial there was taped off for works but we paid our respects to the men buried there and walked through the cemetery and then across the track that runs alongside the back of it and into the trenches beyond.  We have to thank Peter Hart and the suggested battlefield tour in his book, Gallipoli, for having alerted us to the trenches being there because I saw no signs indicating their presence around the cemetery.

I don't know how often the Turkish authorities cut back the brush, but you can imagine how difficult it would be to make your way round if they didn't do it fairly regularly.  As it is, there are various signposts indicating where the trenches led and you can explore these to your heart's content.    

We wandered around for the best part of an hour.  There are information boards at various points which help you get a sense of what happened here all those years ago.  While the routes of the trenches are still apparent, I wonder for how much longer they will be.  Unlike many of the other trenches we saw, these appeared to have been left untouched for the past century or so, other than to have the brush and overgrowth cleared away, and the earth is slowly but surely healing itself. 

We walked up Lady Galway Road which contemporary photographs show was very much deeper in 1915 and which led to a tunnel at the top.

And we spotted these youngsters who emerged from a literal foxhole to see who was on their territory.  The hill is littered with tunnels of course which must be full of wildlife of various kinds.  

We had no wish to disturb them any further and walked back up to the cemetery where a group had just arrived.  Hearing an Antipodean accent, I asked from where in Australia they had come.  Of course they were New Zealanders.  My brother rolled his eyes but I have form for this kind of faux pas, having once explained to an American couple in Ypres that, of course, their army had had seen action much further south in France, only to be told by the owner of the hotel afterwards that they were Canadians.  Naturally, being Canadian, they'd been much too polite to tell me what a twit I was.  We returned to the car and carried on.

More to follow.  

Edited 2 September by Tom Kilkenny

[Tom Kilkenny]

Not far up the road is Johnston's Jolly where we stopped and paid our respects at the cemetery before walking across the road to look at the trenches.  

These were much more defined than the ones we saw back at Lone Pine and, perhaps because they are more accessible, I suppose they have been 'maintained' over the years and there may even have been an element of recreation.  We didn't make use of any trench maps on our trip so we couldn't see if they followed the original lines of the trenches.  In fact, I believe these may have been support trenches and that the front line trenches are now under the road we were driving up.  One of the advantages of having a battlefield guide alongside you must be that they can tell you to what extent what you are seeing reflects the ground as it was at the time.

There's something to be said for being able to walk through trenches - as you can, say, at Sanctuary Wood in Ypres - but walking through a recreation is not the same as walking through or along the real thing.  The question of course is what constitutes the real thing.    

We returned to the car and carried on up the road, stopping at Quinn's Post, again to pay our respects, and then drove on to The Nek.  

There are are 326 men buried or commemorated here, 316 of whom are unidentified.  It's one of the most striking features of the Gallipoli cemeteries, especially those above Anzac Cove, that they contain so few headstones.  I understand this cemetery was made in what had been No Man's Land in 1915.  I had never had the sense before of just how close opposing armies could have been to each other.  A plaque at Quinn's Post had indicated they were at most 15 metres apart there and I wonder, was there anywhere on the Western Front where they were quite so close to one another?  The view from the cemetery is wonderful as it is from virtually all the cemeteries in this part of the battlefield.  In his book Gallipoli, Peter Hart calls Beach Cemetery the most beautiful cemetery in the world.  Not even a 'perhaps' there.  I wondered how it could be any more beautiful than The Nek.  

We walked on down the track and spent a while exploring the trenches there.  You can see Suvla Bay in the distance and it was in support of the landings there in August that the 3rd Australian Light Horse made the attack over this ground depicted in Peter Weir's (and Mel Gibson's of course) Gallipoli.

It's been some years since I watched the film but my brother has watched it again since and says I must too.  I'd imagine it must be all the more poignant seeing it now, having visited the battlefield it portrays.

My brother walked on to Walker's Ridge Cemetery but I returned to the car, passing the New Zealanders who had arrived after us and were having their lunch.  I thought I might engage them in conversation but decided I'd probably upset them enough suggesting they were Aussies, besides which they might have felt obliged to offer me something to eat.  It had been a while since we'd had breakfast and I might have been tempted to accept.  

More to follow.

Edited 8 July by Tom Kilkenny

[tomisitt]

Wonderful photos, I really need to go there one day.

[Tom Kilkenny]

Thanks Tom.  Don't wait till you've exhausted the Italian Front!

 

[Tom Kilkenny]

We then headed up towards Chunuk Bair.  We passed Baby 700 Cemetery named after one of the two 700 feet hills that lie alongside each other here, the other being Big 700, later known as Battleship Hill.  Why is one Baby and the other Big when they're both the same height?  Apparently it's all down to the Allied maps of the time and the circle marking the summit on one being larger than the circle on the other.  I like that. 

We stopped a little further on and went to inspect a large gun pointing in the direction of the beaches below.  It's known as Mesudiye Topu and I believe it was part of the Turkish coastal defences that were in already in place before the landings.  I don't know how big the gun is and I don't know to what extent it saw action during the landings.  The damage suggests that, rather than being damaged by shellfire, it was spiked but I'm not sure whether by the Turkish defenders fearing it would fall into the hands of the enemy, by the Allied troops who apparently reached this point on the first day of the landings or perhaps at some point after the Armistice.  

If I recall, there's a photo of the gun in the Holts' guide which would have been taken a couple of decades ago.  At that time the gun was just lying there in the undergrowth and I'd imagine it wouldn't have been easy to get to.  The Turkish authorities have done an excellent job of making it more accessible but I can't help thinking it would have been more impressive somehow to see it lying there as it had probably done for the best part of a century or more.  Of course left entirely untouched it might simply have disappeared into the earth. 

We then crossed over the road to look at a statue group including the figure of Mustafa Kemal Bey Ataturk looking out over the battlefield.  

The group is based on an iconic photograph taken by a major on Kemal Ataturk's staff in June 1915.  

Kemal Ataturk was well aware of the power of images and must have been one of the most photographed personalities of his time.  But apart from photos taken perhaps with a view to posterity there are a remarkable number of photos taken during the campaign by ordinary soldiers.  In his podcast on the subject, Paul Reed points out that attitudes to soldiers carrying cameras were much more relaxed than they were on the Western Front.    

More to follow. 

Edited 16 July by Tom Kilkenny

[michaeldr]

Tom,

the Mesudiye gun (15cm) was salvaged from the old (launched 1874) Turkish battleship of that name which was torpedoed by the British submarine B-11 on 13 December 1914 at Sarisiglar Bay (near Canakkale) in the Dardanelles Straits.

Charles Bean saw the gun in 1919 and concluded, from its exposed position, that it had been placed there after the allied evacuation.

Thanks for sharing these photographs

Michael

Edited 17 July by michaeldr

[Michelle Young]

10 hours ago, Tom Kilkenny said:

If I recall, there's a photo of the gun in the Holts' guide which would have been taken a couple of decades ago.  At that time the gun was just lying there in the undergrowth and I'd imagine it wouldn't have been easy to get to

I’m away from home at the moment, but I’m sure I have a photo of Baby 700 and the gun taken in 1990. Will look when I get back.

[alantwo]

There is a photograph of the gun in Major and Mrs Holt's Battlefield Guide, it's item A42 on their map. The image below I took during our road trip in 2019; we also stayed at Gallipoli Houses.

Alan

[michaeldr]

Quote: 
“In the period after the land battles ended, a 152/45 mm ship gun was deployed to the north of 180 Altitude Hill, probably in 1917, in order to consolidate the defence of the peninsula and protect the western side of the peninsula against dangers from the Aegean Sea. The cannon, which was one of those removed from the battleship Mesudiye before it was sunk, was rendered unusable by the invaders during the armistice period. Today, a part of the body, which remains in a piece too large to be removed and taken away, remains half buried in the ground.”

From https://canakkalemuharebeleri1915.com/genel/muharebe-alani-yer-isimleri/ariburnu/537-180-rakimli-tepe-baby-700 
Go to near the bottom of the page and the last item before the bibliography to see a 1919 photograph of the gun

[Tom Kilkenny]

Thanks Michelle, Alan and Michael. 

Interesting to see what the gun looked like only five years ago.  Michelle, I'd be interested to see the picture of how it looked almost 35 years ago if you're able to find it!  

And thanks for the background gen on the gun Michael though that link doesn't work for me.  I suspect it may be because my IP address is in the UK.    

[Michelle Young]

I’m home now so I will look later. 

[Michelle Young]

April 1990. 

[alantwo]

1 hour ago, Tom Kilkenny said:

And thanks for the background gen on the gun Michael though that link doesn't work for me.  I suspect it may be because my IP address is in the UK.    

Hi Michael

The link hasn’t worked for me either.

Alan