When one of them ran aground and had to be abandoned there was no room for them all on the one remaining lighter and in consequence a party of 150 men was ordered to make its way to W Beach by the path cut into the shoreline and they set off just after 02.00. As Major General Sir Stanley Maude was not willing to abandon his headquarters kit he decided to make his own way with his immediate staff by the main road using mobile stretchers to carry the load
"We had all the kit of headquarters with us, for which we had provided two steamboats, but as the horses had been shot and the vehicles destroyed, it was somewhat of a problem to get it along. Luckily however the ADMS remembered that there were three or four vehicle stretchers lying handy, and these we got and loaded up. We could not go by the beach route as it was too heavy going, so we started up hill on to the plateau, and very hard work it was. We all puffed and blew like grampuses, especially as we were all warmly clad. I then sent Hildyard by the beach route to try and notify W Beach that we were going, and the ADMS and I and party pursued our weary way across the top." (Major General Sir Stanley Maude, 13th Division)
At W Beach Brigadier-General James O'Dowda was placed in a quandary.
"I packed up my dispatch case, and leaving my office, brought up the rear of the last party. Just at that moment a GSO very disturbed, rushed up and told me that General Maude had not yet arrived. I asked what had happened and was informed that, after they had left Gully Beach General Maude discovered that his bedding roll had been left behind. He said that he was hanged if he was going to leave his bedding for the Turks, got two volunteers with a stretcher and went back for it. The time was now 3.50am and there was no sign of the missing General. I therefore sent an Officer and a couple of men, who knew every inch of the beach and gave them ten minutes to retrieve him. Fortunately they found him almost at once." (Brigadier-General James PMLO Beach Party)
For obvious reasons, O'Dowda was unwilling to abandon General Maude and his eye fell upon Lieutenant Owen Steele, who was peremptorily ordered to track him down. It was a terrifying experience.
"I went up over the hill and shouted the General's name until I eventually found him and so soon hurried them on board the waiting lighter. This was a dangerous and fearsome undertaking when one considers the following. When I left it was 3.30am - the fuses in the magazines were lighted at 3.15 timed for 45 minutes - one of the many fires to be lit, among the stocks of supplies etc., was already burning - the Turks had sent over a few shells during the night, though very few, but two at a time, and two were likely to come at any time - and again, our firing line had been empty since just before 12 o’clock - 4 hours - so one might possibly encounter a body of Turks." (Lieutenant Owen Steele, Newfoundland Regiment, 88th Brigade, 29th Division)
While he waited in considerable desperation O'Dowda had taken to verse:
Come into the lighter, Maude,
For the fuse has long been lit,
Hop into the lighter, Maude,
And never mind your kit
Lieutenant P. M. Campbell of the Ayrshire Yeomanry and detached to the beach party was in Maude's lighter as they finally left the beach.
"We pushed off in some excitement, for the last men to leave the firing line had done so four hours before (12 midnight), and the Turks might be expected any time; the glare showed us up very clearly to Asia, and why they didn't shell us is a mystery still; then the magazine fuse had been lit and was due to blow up any minute. As we let loose the wind caught us, and for some moments we drifted back towards the shore and straight to where the magazine was, within 50 yards of the beach. For some seconds we thought all was up, but the skipper succeeded in getting the nose of the lighter into the wind again just in time, and we began to make way safely out to sea." (Lieutenant P. M. Campbell of the Ayrshire Yeomanry)
O'Dowda was aboard the lighter and had got only 200 yards from the beach when the ammunition had blew up in a shattering explosion.
"We had not gone 200 yards from the jetty when the expected terrific explosion nearly blew us out of the water. Thousands of tons of debris, rock, shell cases, bits of limber wheels, and other oddments hurtled over our heads. I could never understand how we escaped injury. The men had been battened down in the hold of the lighter and were safe, but the few of us who were on deck escaped I imagine because we were within the cone of the explosion i.e. the mass of stuff fell all round us like the outside of an open umbrella. At the same time the beach was lighted up as if for a Carnival, and would have delighted Mr Brock of fireworks fame. It truly was a magnificent sight. But the very last man left at Helles seems to have been Lieutenant Ronald Langton-Jones of the Royal Navy. He had been detached with two seamen on to the sunken hulk which was only connected by a flimsy pontoon bridge to the W Beach with the duty of making fast the destroyers from which many of the men would embark. Now he was trapped."
"In, the early hours of the morning, the frail bridge connecting us with the shore broke away. However, I managed to get a hurried despatch through to Captain Staveley, advising him of the situation, and he was able to divert in time the few remaining troops due to pass through the hulk. When the evacuation was completed, he passed by the end of the hulk in his picket boat, and shouted above the now howling gale that he would send in a destroyer to rescue us. The main magazine by that time had exploded and blown sky-high the cliff, forming it into a gully. Stores and dumps were burning furiously, and the Turks were really excited. As we stood in the dawn watching and waiting a piece of shrapnel tore off my left shoulder-strap and knocked yet another hole in the hulk's funnel. Just as daylight was breaking HMS Fury arrived, and, by a superb feat of seamanship, turned his ship short round on a lee shore and shoved her bows close into the hulk and held her with a bow line. Willing hands then threw us ropes and hauled us on board over her forecastle, one at a time. I was the last man." (Lieutenant Ronald Langton-Jones, Royal Navy)
He was taken off at about 04.30 in the morning. Shortly afterwards, as the rescuing Fury moved away with a smattering of Turkish shrapnel as a last goodbye, the British warships responded in kind, plastering the slopes of Achi Baba with mottled layer of shell bursts and spurts of flame in one last bombardment as a gesture of defiance.
The Allies had tried hard to destroy their accumulated stores but much remained for the delectation of the Turks as witnessed by General Otto Liman von Sanders.
"The booty was extraordinary. Wagon parks, automobile parks, mountains of arms, ammunition and entrenching tools were collected. Here too most of the tent camps and barracks had been left standing, in part with all of their equipment. Many hundreds of horses lay in rows, shot or poisoned, but quite a number of horses and mules were captured and turned over to the Turkish artillery. Here as at the other fronts the stacks of flour and subsistence had some acid solution poured over them to render them unfit for our use. In the next few days the hostile ships made vain attempts to set the stacks and the former British tent camps and barracks on fire. It took nearly two years to clean up the grounds. The immense booty of war material was used for other Turkish armies. Many ship loads of conserves, flour and wood were removed to Constantinople. What the ragged and insufficiently nourished Turkish soldiers took away, cannot be estimated. I tried to stop plundering by a dense line of sentinels but the endeavour was in vain." (O. L. von Sanders, Five Years in Turkey (Nashville, Tennessee: The Battery Press, 2000), p.103)
So at last the long futile campaign was over. As is Gallipoli Day-by-Day. Hope you have enjoyed it!
SOURCES:
O. W. Steele, Edited by D. R. Facey-Crowther, "Lieutenant Owen William Steele of the Newfoundland Regiment"(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), p.123-124
S. Maude quoted in Sir C E Callwell, "Life of Sir Stanley Maude", (London: Constable, 1920), p184
J. P. Campbell "Letters from Gallipoli", pp.96-97 & O'Dowda, lecture notes pp.15-16.
IWM DOCS: R. Langton-Jones, Sunday Times, Letter; R. Langton Jones Collection
O. L. von Sanders, "Five Years in Turkey" (Nashville, Tennessee: The Battery Press, 2000), p.103
Peter Hart
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