V Beach At Gallipoli

25 April, 2007. 394 words.

Sometimes I like to go to Wikipedia and click random links until I find an interesting historical article. That probably sounds boring, but keep in mind that I’m easily entertained (especially when I’m at work behind a firewall that won’t let you browse anywhere fun).

Anyway, the other day I ended up on an article about the amphibious assault on Cape Helles during the Gallipoli campaign by British and Anzac troops in 1915.

When you think about dangerous amphibious assaults on heavily defended beaches, I would imagine most people (me included) immediately think of Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and rightfully so. But I was surprised to learn that the British landing at V Beach on April 25, 1915 resulted in just as much carnage, if not more so.

The first wave of 700 British soldiers towed in rowboats were slaughtered by machinegun fire, leaving just “a few” soldiers pinned down behind a sand bank. Another 2,000 men waited to come ashore from the collier ship River Clyde, intentionally grounded on the beach, but every attempt to disembark resulted in massive casualties as the Turk machinegunners cut down anyone who stepped out onto the gangplanks. Allegedly only 21 of the first 200 soldiers to leave the River Clyde made it onto the beach. Four failed attempts to lead men out of the ship occurred before someone finally decided V Beach wasn’t going to be the best place to land the main invasion force. It wasn’t until nightfall that the British made it onto V Beach, and it wasn’t until the next morning that they finally took the defenses.

It’s hard to imagine the kind of courage it takes to go someplace where you are almost certainly going to be shot to death in seconds. Can you imagine the poor guys in the second, third and fourth waves that left the ship? The last one saw three companies of men killed in front of them, and they still had to jump out and try to get ashore. Yikes.

It’s also hard to imagine the lunacy (arrogance?) of the commanders who thought that repeating the same failed tactic over and over again would somehow result in a different outcome. I think that was a recurring theme among the military commanders during World War I, much to the detriment of the soldiers in the trenches.

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