On April 25, in the early hours of dawn, the landing begins. Let's leave history for a moment to take a closer look at what the survivors called "the hell of Gallipoli", and follow the ANZAC attacking Gaba-Tépé.
The bugle sounds the gathering in the passageways of the battleship Prince of Wales. The day is not up, the night is cold and clear, the stars still shine in the west, but a faint light is already emerging, behind the dark indentation of the coast, towards the east.
The 10th Australian Infantry Battalion takes its positions along the rail. The men have hardly slept, but the maneuver takes place in relative order and in complete silence. The sounds carry far on the sea. The coast is very close, we guess it at some 3,000 meters, hemmed by the surf.
The machines beat gently back to break the err of the great battleship. The canoes are already in position, on their coat racks. A midshipman directs the embarkation of the men in each canoe. As soon as a boat is full, the maneuvering officer launches and bears down to land.
The canoes, immediately afloat, must pass their trailer to a steam pinnace, then, when a train of four canoes is formed, the convoy slowly sets off for the coast.
About fifty meters from the shore, when the bottom no longer allows the pinnaces to move forward, the mooring lines are cast off and the canoes, loaded to the brim, row out with their human cargo. This first part of the operation seems to be proceeding as if on a maneuver. Not a sound, not a movement, not a light can lead to believe that the enemy is awake.
Half an hour after the start of the landing, the battleships withdrew to a distance and seven destroyers came to anchor between the coast and them, loaded with the second wave which was to attack twenty minutes after the start of the assault.
General Sir William Birdwood, commanding the ANZACs, proposed to land 4,000 men of the 1st Australian Division in three successive waves, on a front of about 2,000 meters. All the success of his operation was based on speed and surprise.
Once disembarked, the troops had to rush inland to gain a footing, two kilometers from the beach, on top of three dominant hills. Once this first objective was reached, the other assault waves, protected by the posts established on the heights, would approach relatively easy terrain and set up an organized line, 3 or 4,000 meters further on. There the predictions for the first day ended.
Unfortunately, none of this went according to plan. Either they had been carried away by an unrecognized current, or, as the Turks later claimed, a marker buoy, laid the day before, had been moved intentionally, the battleships launched their lifeboats too much to the north.
So that instead of finding a two kilometer long beach in front of it, the first wave of the assault landed on the narrow promontory crowned by the fortifications of Ari Burnu , facing almost impassable escarpments.
The skippers of the pinasses realized the mistake, but it was too late to change course and there was no going back. nor skirt the hostile coast towing laden canoes to sink.
Just as the first boat touched the shore, the Turks started a hell of a fire. The men sprang out of the boats in disorder, jostling each other, throwing themselves into the water to try to escape the bullets raining down on them.
A good number did not go beyond the limits of the beach, but their comrades managed to approach the first line of enemy defense and exterminate the defenders with bayonets. Then, clinging to the roots, tearing their hands at the edges of the rocks, they set out to climb the slope inwards, having got rid of their heavy equipment.
At the landing places, the disorder was at its height. The canoes continued to arrive, crowded with men. The downward fire of the Turkish machine guns hit them head-on as they approached the shore. A large number of boats were thus lost and their occupants put out of action, killed or drowned. safe from enemy fire, but the men had to plod along the shore to reach a fairly flat place where they could regroup. The mixture of units was inextricable. Impossible to bring together the men of the same company, impossible to identify the objectives assigned to each detachment.
Despite this incredible crowd, the Australians managed, around 6 a.m., to occupy the top of the first hill and began to infiltrate towards the second. On their left flank, the overwhelmed Turks fell back without order, allowing the landing, without losses, of new Australian reinforcements.
Some 4,000 men were now hard at work and the second ridge had just been reached by the vanguard. At 7 a.m. the advanced sections reached the summit of the third hill.
From up there, three kilometers as the crow flies, the ANZACs, receding from fatigue, could see the arm of the Dardanelles sea which shone under the rising sun. For these men, success seemed to be close at hand after the horrible hours of the night.
Alas! the disorder, far from subsiding, was growing two kilometers below, on the landing beach.
With a few hundred meters to drop their men ashore, instead of the 2,000 meters planned, the commanders of the two reinforcement brigades had lost all possibility of putting some order in their arrangements.
In addition, the wounded began to flow in and we found him completely incapable of evacuating them. The unfortunates contributed to cluttering the landing places a little more, lying, sometimes in agony, among the abandoned packages, the boxes of ammunition, the heaps of food and equipment that no one knew where or how to send them. .
Furthermore, liaison with the interior had to be provided by runners, which the rough terrain made difficult to say the least, and no officer in charge yet knew where the attack was. .
By a happy coincidence, the Turks did not take advantage of this confusion, for the probable reason that they were themselves in ignorance of the exact situation of their forces. From the top of the cliffs, the Turkish machine-guns nevertheless continued to rain long bursts on the Australian lines, but the bullets passed well above their mark and the fuse shells made much more noise than harm to the troops piled up on the beach. Unfortunately, the same was not true for the boats shuttling between the fleet and the coast. They constituted an ideal target for the Turkish artillery whose projectiles raised large columns of gray water between the lighters loaded with men and equipment.
The New Zealand brigade was landed as reinforcements , with the mission of prolonging the Australian attack on the left left free by the rout of the Ottoman front line troops. The men reached the mainland without too many losses, but the barges carrying the mountain artillery fell under the fire of the enemy guns and had to turn back.
The New Zealanders therefore attacked without the support of their artillery, under the well-aimed fire of the Turkish howitzers. Eventually, an Indian mountain battery managed to climb into a favorable position and gave them much needed support.
The Indians, adept at using the terrain, managed to accompany the advancing infantry by moving their guns on their backs as the Turks scouted their firing positions.
Failing to make significant progress, the New Zealanders were at least able to organize themselves to resist a predictable counter-attack.
It was around this time that the event occurred which perhaps changed the course of the battle.
If the ANZAC corps was experiencing enormous difficulties in setting up its supplies and transporting its reinforcements, the Turks had reached the limit of their possibilities of resistance.
Their artillery ammunition was rapidly running out and the Australians' first success on the heights above AriBurnu had left their disposition deeply disrupted, not to mention the adverse psychological effects which the panic on the right wing had unleashed.
At the headquarters of the 19th division, the young general Kemal Pasha received the order, around 6:30 a.m., to put a battalion on the way to Ari Burnu. Kemal's opinion was that it would take a lot more than a battalion to stabilize a line of fire which, if his ears were to be believed, was getting ever closer. So, disobeying the orders received, he put his entire division on the road to the coast, himself taking the lead of the first regiment ready to leave.
Arrived near the line of fire, Kemal Pasha gave breath to his men, after a forced march on rocky paths, and headed, in the company of four officers of his staff, towards a nearby height. He then found himself facing infantry who were falling back in disorder before the Australian assault waves.
Encountering a general under enemy fire is rare enough, even in the Turkish army, for this appearance to have a profound effect on the troops. Kemal Pasha succeeded in recapturing the fugitives, regrouping them and, making them fix their bayonets, for lack of long-exhausted ammunition, he launched them into an improvised counter-attack on the first Australian combat groups which were beginning to appear on the the ridges.
The counter-attack was fairly easily repelled by the attackers' fire, but this was enough to halt their progress. For the first time since their landing. the ANZACs saw the initiative elude them and suffered the ascendancy of the defenders.
Kemal Pasha then deployed the regiment which was massed against the slope, gradually driving back the Australians who fell back on a line of heights already in the hands of their comrades. The Allied troops were then completely cut off from their command, each platoon leader maneuvering as he saw fit. Opposite them, Kemal Pasha's soldiers had the immense advantage of being led on the very line of battle by a 34-year-old general, on the way to becoming a national hero. The fate, once again, was unfavorable to the allied fighters from the antipodes.