MILITARY AND NAVAL NOTES.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18640, 18 December 1928, Page 13

MILITARY AND NAVAL NOTES.

NEWS FROM BARRACKS AND PARADE GROUND. (By "GUNNER”). Personal. Captain 11. R. Rod well, Ist Cadet Battalion, Canterbury Regiment, is transferred to the Reserve of Officers. Lieutenant A. A. Cooper and 2nd Lieutenant R. K. Palmer, Ist Battalion. Canterbury’ Regiment, have resigned their commissions. Mr Robert Davidson is appointed a second lieutenant (on probation) and is posted to the 2nd Cadet Battalion, Canterbury Regiment. Major (temp. Lieutenant-Colonel) C. E. Ilercus. D. 5.0., 0.8. E., N.Z.M.C., is granted the substantive rank of lieuten-ant-colonel. Mr S. G. Forbes is appointed a second lieutenant in the Southern Depot, N.Z Army Service Corps. In the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (New Zealand Division), Lieutenant A. J. Lever-Nay lor. Lieutenant G. P. Bothamley, and Lieutenant A. Cornelius are appointed Acting Lieutenant Commanders. The members of the Permanent Staff have now all returned from their annual camp. The staff of Areas 10a and 10b returned a week ago. and the remainder returned on Saturday, after spending a week at Waianakarua in preparation for the Brigade Camp. The majority of them now go on their annual holiday*. A Gallipoli Book. Wednesday night, or more accurately early’ Thursday morning, is the thirteenth anniversary’ of the evacuation of Gallipoli—a day on which a feat almost as desperate as that performed on April 25, eight months before, was successfully’ carried out. Of great interest to those who knew Gallipoli is the book "The Campaign in Gallipoli,” written by the German, General Hans Kannengeisser Pasha, and translated by Major C. J. P. Ball. General Kannengiesser was one of the numerous German officers who held high command under Marshal Liman von Sanders, and his record is especially' valuable because his duties took him to all three sections of the defence —-Helles, Anzac, and Suvla. He writes simply as a scientific soldier, without national or 'political feeling, and he is fair to the British general in the extreme difficulties of his task, as well

as to the British soldiers in their courageous endurance of danger, heat, thirst, flies, and the other torments of that terrible campaign. Being struck in the chest by a bullet during the fighting of August, he was absent for a time from the scene, but his narrative is fairly consecutive, and it agrees in almost every point with the histories written from the British side. There were some 500 Germans on the peninsula; the rest were Turks, chiefly from Anatolia. He admired them and got on well with his men, but he had his difficulties. Ignorance of their language was serious, and often his orders were mistaken or misinterpreted. lie speaks of their courage and power of endurance, but he notices that thei? failure as soldiers lay in their passive acceptance of anything that came along rather than in initiative to overcome it. They obeyed orders to the letter, but they* always looked for some superior officer on whom to lean. They did nothing for themselves, but silently submitted to the will of fate. It was a daily battle to force the Turks to do what was needful for their own protection. They were easily contented with the smallest rations"lt was a pleasure to see them at meals. Eight men sat round a tin tray’ having a common meal a la turca. Each threw a piece of bread into the soup and, calmly and dignified, each without haste, recovered it with his spoon. I have never seen a battle for food, no matter how great the hunger." But another Turkish train afforded a sight less pleasant— The Turk is unbelievably insensitive to corpses and their stench. I remember||for instance, two soldiers who on the extreme right flank of the front line had laid three corpses one on another as cover from the sea. They sat on these and ate their bread and olives. The author also notices the impossibility of restraining the Turkish habit of breaking into continuous and causeless firing at night—a habit which all who were at Anzac will remember. As to criticisms, he mentions, of course, the error of the great naval attack and its discontinuance; the terrible oversight in the packing of the transports which caused a delay of at least a month, during which the Turks prepared their impregnable trenches; and the Marshal’s expectation that the British would attempt a landing at Bulair or on the Trojan plains (a landing at Bulair was too childishly obvious, and that very’ expectation would have prevented it; “Never do what you know the enemy expects.” was Napoleon’s maxim; and the Asiatic side was expressly forbidden by Kitchener). But the German thinks Sir lan Hamilton would have been wiser to have stretched his “forceps” wider at the first landing, and it is noticeable that the Marshal was most afraid of that landing on Y beach, from which our small force was compelled to retire to the ships. He also observes, what was indeed evident to everyone upon the scene, that the enormous shells of out* naval guns were ineffective on land, owing to the flat trajectory. The shells made an explosion like a volcano, but they did not kill as howitzers would have killed. “The Turkish soldiers named them ‘fountains.’ as they saw that thev mostly escaped with a shock.” Upon the fatal inertia during the second day of the Suvla landing the author writes in terrible words: “During the whole of the Bth of August the goddess of victory held the door to success wide open for Stopford, but he would not enter. Nobody advanced. *ln short, a peaceful picture almost like a BoyScouts’ field day.” Those who were there will not forget the ominous peace of that Sundav, while the men who should have been storming W hills were quietly bathing | on the beach. 1

As to the purport and value of the whole campaign, the General writes; “Both sides had fought with a stubborn bravery as if each individual fighter was personally convinced of the world importance of these battles, where a successful break-through could have given the war a totally different complexion, because in addition to a new Russia fully equipped with material, a powerful new front could have been constituted in the Balkans against the Central Powers.”