The First Dawn at Gallipoli: April 25, 1915
5 min read · Intermediate
At 0430 on April 25, 1915, the first boats from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps touched the shore of the Dardanelles. By midday, the beach was a slaughterhouse. By nightfall, the men understood they were part of something larger than a battle—a legend being born.
The Aegean Sea is dark before dawn in April. The transport ships had been lying offshore since midnight, rolling gently in water that was black enough to swallow the coast. At 0300 on April 25, the order came down: prepare to move. Men roused themselves from sleep and climbed into the boats. Approximately 1,500 Australians in the first wave, mostly from New South Wales and Queensland, crammed into open boats pulled by navy crews. The beach ahead was invisible. The cliffs beyond the beach were invisible. The men knew the Turks were there—somewhere. They did not know where.
The boats hit the beach at 0430, not where they were supposed to. The current had set them north of the intended landing zone. Instead of the open beaches the British planners had mapped, the first wave found themselves at the base of steep hills—ravines and gullies running back from the shore. Captain A. E. Shrapnel, commanding one of the boat sections, was first out. He waded through water that reached his waist and turned to wave the men on. A sniper shot him in the head. It had been five minutes.
The men pressed up the beach and into the scrub and rocks above the tide line. Machine-gun fire came from the right flank—the Turks had expected the landing and had positioned defenders on the high ground. The British naval bombardment had not reached those positions. The Australian infantry began climbing the ravines, returning fire upward into positions they could barely see. The work was infantry work: small units, sections of men breaking left and right around obstacles, trying to get above the Turkish firing line. By 0600, the beach was obscured by smoke and dust. By 0700, the beach was a chaos of wounded and new arrivals trying to move forward.
The Turks were not numerous—the initial defense was a single regiment, the 27th Regiment, under Major Mehmed Kemal, later known as Ataturk. But they held the high ground and they understood the geometry of the ravines better than the men trying to assault them. As more boats arrived through the morning, more Australians went into the line. Machine-gun fire chewed through sections and platoons. An officer named Harry Chauvel reported to his battalion commander at 0800 and was detailed to hold a ridge. At 0815, a sniper found him. He was replaced by another officer who was killed at 0845. The position turned over three times before noon.
The sea behind the beach became dotted with wounded trying to swim back to the transports or drowning in the attempt. The medical officers worked on the beach with gauze and morphine, trying to patch wounds on men who would be hit again within minutes. A New Zealand officer named Malone found himself commanding 500 men from six different units, men he had never seen before, holding a steep hillside against an enemy whose positions were somewhere above the smoke. He wrote in his diary that night: 'We are right in it. I don't see how we can stay.' But they did stay.
By midday, the initial assault had lost momentum. The infantry had secured a few hundred yards of beach and the surrounding hillsides, but they were pinned. More reinforcements arrived in the afternoon—fresh battalions from the transport fleet, but they ran into the same fire, the same hills, the same Turkish defenders holding from positions above. The casualty count was mounting. By 1600, the Australians had suffered approximately 2,000 casualties. New Zealand forces had suffered 1,300. The Turks had suffered perhaps 3,000.
What kept the men going was not strategy or hope of breakthrough. It was unit cohesion and the simple fact that there was nowhere to go but forward. Men formed up with the sections next to them and climbed higher. Turkish reinforcements arrived through the day and took positions in the hills. The fighting became less a battle and more a series of assaults and counterattacks, each costing more men. By evening, the position had solidified at a new line about 1,000 yards inland—not far enough to break through, but far enough that withdrawal looked impossible.
As darkness came, the men dug in. They had no idea how many Turks were above them or how long they could hold. They had lost nearly 3,000 men in a single day. They had not advanced far enough to be considered a success. They had not been driven back into the sea. What they had done—without knowing it—was land the first wedge of a campaign that would last eight months and kill nearly 130,000 men. The peninsula would become Gallipoli. The men would become the ANZAC—the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The legend was born in the dark.
In the morning, the sun would rise on a beach that looked like a slaughterhouse. Bodies would be visible at low tide. Wounded would still be crying out from the rocks. Fresh Turks would arrive to reinforce the defenders. The campaign would continue for months until the inevitable order: evacuate. But on the night of April 25, the men did not know any of that. They only knew that they had survived the landing. They had held the beach. Tomorrow would bring more. And somehow, that was enough.
— Sources —
Prior, Robin. "Gallipoli: The End of the Myth" (Yale University Press, 2009)