THE GREAT EPIC

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3893, 23 April 1937, Page 3

THE GREAT EPIC

RED DAWN OF ANZAC. (By Chester Reynolds.) It was a few hours before the memorable landing. At midnight the troopships, which had been riding at anchor in Lemnos harbour for thirteen days awaiting orders, moved to their rendezvous in the Aegean. Shadowy forms, they glided in silence through the deep azure of a Mediterranean night. Not a light, hardly a sound beyond tire gentle lapping of wavelets against the ships’ sides, not even the dull glow of a cigarette end betrayed any semblance of life. Officers and men were snatching the fitful slumber that for many would be their last night’s sleep in the land of the living. Their tonus, with full packs and rifles close at hand, lay side by side along the ful( length of the ship’s decks. His Majesty's transport Atlantian was conveying the Australian Field Artillery and other divisional units to the beach that would shortly be a shambles, and I was captain of the day. My tour of duty would end with the dawn, but for the time being it kept me astir. An occasional snore, or the muttered imprecation of some indignant “Digger” as a rar. scampered across his chest, and the gentle splash of the.sea lent realism to the uncanny I stillness.

I made my way to the ship captain’s bridge and talked with the "old man” himself. No comfort frent that quarter. The business before us was a blank to him and all he knew was his < immediate course. Black out we rode, (not even navigating lights. But dawn was on its eve. The dim outlines of warships became solhouetted in the half light. The tiny sail of a fisherman’s boat could be discerned straight ahead. Did its occupant know he was on the threshold of battle? Perhaps wars to a Turkish fisherman had something of a week-end sameness about them. But in the holocaust that followed he was forgotten. Flashes leapt from the warships. Broadside after broadside sent their messengers of death against the forts of Seddul Bahr and Kum Kale. The gathering light showed twenty-six fighting ships and twice as many transports, mothered by the powerful Queen Elizabeth the pride of Britain’s naval might. All were simultaneously showering destruction on the Turkish coast line. Troopships lined up behind the fighting warships and discharged their human freight into rakes of lifeboats, which made off under the towage of steam pinnaces. It was a sudden awakening from last night's dream. Within a flash a peaceful seascape, with, that solitary fisherman furnishing the only human touch, was transformed unto a blazing inferno. The Atlantian lay alongside

the cruiser Euryalus, which spat out ear-splitting devastation in broad- < sides every minute, and the great fighting vessel lurched with every discharge. In a twinkling almost, the intervening spaces between the warships and the transports were littered with small craft, all loaded to capacity

with soldiers of the 29th Division. V whose job it was to storm and capture the beach and forts of Seddul Bahr. Down the gangways the troops surged into the boats which, under the command of petty officers and tiny midshipmen, made fast to one another and in the lee of torpedo boat destroyers these strings of lifeboats made their perilous voyage to the shore. Once shallow water was reached the destroyers had to back water, leaving the cockelshell craft to the mercy of

the devastating Turkish fire. 4 The light had now improved, and we could see the great shells bursting

lon the beach and over the forts. The water surrounding our ship was lashed to fury with high explosives and the swish of shrapnel. And as a background to the boom of great cannon was the incessant rattle of musketry and machine guns. While the warships representing Britain’s naval might, aided by battleships of the French and Russian squadrons, poured out their broadsides, the fire was returned gun for gun from the Turkish batteries. The spectacle was aweinspiring and dreadful. A string of boats would be forging its' perilous way shoreward, when a devil-guided Turkish shell would obliterate a unit of the mosquito fleet, and in the shambles that followed a midshipman, with perhaps a bluejacket or two, would rectify the damage and make fast the boats on either side of the mishap. So numerous were the casualties among these schoolboy mid shipmen that at a later stage in the campaign it was found necessary to withdraw them from the battle line. Under the pounding of the guns from the warships the forts at both Seddul Bahr and Kum Kale were reduced to vast heaps of cement and ashes. One could plainly see the gradual work of demolition. But their destruction signalled the birth of hundreds of mountain batteries, which were never silenced, although they were driven back. And throughout our occupation of the Gallipoli Peninsula they were not only effective, but indestructible.

The beaching of the River Clyde was one of the host of incidents plainly discernible to the troops aboard the Atlantian and the Australind, the only two Australian transports that, were present, at the actual bombardment of the Dardanelles. The moment the vessel grounded she was riddled with shells, and her funnel rapidly as sumed the appearance of a sieve. Machine guns from the Turkish position trained on her disembarking troops dropped them off the gang planks like ants out of an ant-ridden log one might hold above a fire. A four mile an hour current issuing from the Dardanelles bore along boatload after boatload of dead and wounded men. They had failed to make the shore.

The Atlantian’s job was to drop certain gun landing barges she had been towing from Lemnos. This task completed she sailed for Anzac, where, the troops she was conveying disembarked. The epic landing of the Australians on the beach just north el' Gaba Tepe has been told and retold a thousand times. These few lines concern only the landing of the redoublable 29th Division. Their objective was achieved at enormous cost, just, as the landing of the Anzacs was successfully accomplished, but. the casualty lists that accompanied the dispatches from the awful battle front brought stark desolation to many Australian and many British homes. Time possibly has eased the hurt, but never let it be said that those who parsicipated in the fighting at Gallipoli loved fighting with the blood lust, of swashbucklers. They faced and suffered death and lifelong disablement for their country. To them it was a war to end war, and they hoped to make the world a better place for the generation that was then unborn. Are we worthy of their sacrifice?