Author wants Anzac Day altered

Press, 23 April 1984, Page 4

Author wants Anzac Day altered

PA Wellington A day in August would be more appropriate for Anzac Day than a day in April, an Army major suggests in a new book on the failed 1915 Gallipoli campaign being published this week. April 25 was Australia’s day, Major Christopher Pugsley has written in “Gallipoli, The New Zealand Story,” because Australian troops led the dawn assault planned by the British.

New Zealand soldiers landed on the beaches much later in the day and took little part in the first-day fighting apart from seeking shelter from Turkish artillery barrages. If New Zealand has a day and a dawn service, Major Pugsley wrote, it should be August 8, commemorating the day when New Zealan-

ders suffered their single costliest day in battle and captured Chunuk Bair, a strategic hill from which they could see “the Narrows” of the Dardanelles Straits, the whole object of the failed eight-month campaign. It was the day New Zealand soldiers gave up their amateur status and found an identity as fighting men, he wrote. More than 1000 New Zealanders were killed capturing and holding the ridge. Major Pugsley agreed with earlier World War I historians that if Chunuk Bair had been held, the aim of the whole campaign could have been achieved. Two British battalions which relieved the exhausted New Zealanders two days later were thrown

off the heights by a daring daylight raid led by the senior Turkish commander, Mustafa Kemal, and the New Zealand forces in reserve trenches opened fire on the British in a vain bid to stabilise the line.

Major Pugsley quoted from the diary of a New Zealand colonel: “To save a disaster of the first magnitude and to prevent the whole front collapsing I gave orders to the machine guns of our brigade to open fire upon them and at some cost in life the movement was checked and they ran back to their lines.” The British were also caught by a Royal Navy bombardment from offshore and the Turks recaptured the ridge, never to lose it.