The Battle of Lone Pine

The Battle of Lone Pine; At the Lone Pine Cemetery and Memorial at Gallipoli it is moving to realise that this place was once a battlefield. At Lone Pine, with its sweeping views over the Aegean and down the Gallipoli peninsula, Turks and Australians lived, fought and died. During the days of the Battle of the Landing, 25 April to 3 May, this area was the scene of a fierce struggle as the Anzacs tried to push inland and then settled for establishing a line on the seaward side of the plateau against Turkish counter-attacks. There are a number of headstones in the cemetery with dates in April 1915, especially 25 April, the day of the landing. But Lone Pine is not remembered today for those early clashes of the Gallipoli campaign. Many more headstones here carry dates between 6 and 9 August 1915, the days of the Battle of Lone Pine.

Given the losses and the savagery experienced at Lone Pine during that battle, it is something of a shock to realise that it was called a ‘demonstration’ or a ‘feint’. To the north, along the ridge, at such places as German Officer’s Trench and the Nek, other attacks resulting in great loss of life were also called ‘feints’. Feint is defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as a ‘sham attack’, designed to engage the attention of the enemy from some larger and more central action taking place elsewhere. These attacks at Anzac were part of a plan known as the ‘August Offensive’. This offensive aimed at nothing less than victory at Anzac by driving the enemy from the heights of Chunuk Bair and positioning the Allies for an advance across the peninsula in the Turkish rear. In this way the original objective of seizing the Straits of the Dardanelles would be achieved and the Royal Navy sail triumphantly through to Constantinople.

During the planned offensive Chunuk Bair and Koja Temen Tepe (Hill 971), a higher peak further north, were to be seized in a complex set of actions involving New Zealand, Australian, British and Indian troops. They would carry out a night march to their attacking positions from the North Beach area of Anzac after sunset on 6 August 1915. That same evening, a British force would land even further to the north at Suvla Bay and begin pushing its way inland across the plain. To cover these movements, and to make the Turks think that the main attack was happening elsewhere, the biggest ‘feint’ of all was planned for Lone Pine. At the Pine the men of the Australian 1st Division would assault the central stronghold of the whole Turkish line and capture its forward trenches. If the the attack were convincing enough, so it was believed, the Turks would think that this was a major effort to break through their lines. Consequently, they would throw into the recapture of such a significant position their main reserves so drawing them away from the main assault at Chunuk Bair and Koja Temen Tepe.

The ‘demonstration’ opened at 4.30 pm on 6 August 1915 with a one-hour bombardment of the Turkish trenches. Previous bombardments had destroyed many of the barbed-wire entanglements that the Turks had placed out in front of their line in no-man’s-land. As the bombardment proceeded the men of the attacking battalions – the 2nd, 3rd and 4thBattalions, all from New South Wales – packed into the Anzac forward positions. Packs had been dumped to the rear and each man wore a white arm-band or a piece of white material attached to his back. This was to help tell friend from foe in the close fighting in the Turkish trenches that would soon be upon them:

The men chaffed each other drily, after the manners of spectators waiting to see a football match. Some belated messenger hurried along the trench to find his platoon, and, in passing, recognised a friend. ‘Au revoir’, Bill’, he nodded, ‘meet you over there’. ‘So long, Tom’, was the answer; ‘see you again in half an hour’.

[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol II, Sydney, 1924, p.502]

The Turks were taken by surprise. Many of their front line soldiers had sought safety in mine-shafts during the bombardment and did not have time to emerge before the Australians were upon them. One thing the Anzacs did not know was that much of the Turkish front line was covered with large pine logs. Some men ran on over this obstacle and jumped into the communication and reserve trenches to the rear. Others found gaps in the log cover blown open by the bombardment and let themselves down into the semi-darkness. By 6 pm, the attack had proved a great success as the main objectives in the enemy front-line had been taken and posts established well forward into the communication trenches. It had not been done without loss as General Birdwood later reported:

The boys went right through these Turkish works, and had regular hand to hand fights every yard. To show you the nature of the fighting I may mention that in one corner we came across eight Turks and six Australians, all dead, who had evidently fought it out man to man to the last.

[Birdwood’s report on Lone Pine, quoted in Harvey Broadbent, The Boys Who Came Home: Recollections of Gallipoli, Sydney, 2000, p.92] 

Birdwood went on to describe what became the main feature of the Lone Pine battle. This was the Australian defence over the three days and nights of what had been won as the Turks, as anticipated, threw their reserves into numerous counter-attacks to regain their lost trenches. Both sides, as Birdwood wrote, lost heavily – ‘ … we dragged a thousand corpses out of the actual trenches which gives some idea of the fighting and was irrespective of the large numbers lying around outside’. The presence of the dead and dying all around in the confined spaces of the Pine was something that those who fought there never forgot. Private William Tope, 12th Battalion, recalled one Turkish counter-attack where bodies saved his life:

I thought the best thing would be for me to be down in this trench that had no men in it at all, where the bodies were, because I felt that the counter-attack could come at any time. I’d hardly got into position before an absolute avalanche of bombs fell, puncturing these bodies, and up on top you’d hear the air coming out of the ones up there. I think they were aiming for the bodies that they could see. I was sheltering behind them, and I was there for all that day and the next night, then suddenly it all stopped, just like that…

[Tope, quoted in Harvey Broadbent, The Boys Who Came Home: Recollections of Gallipoli, Sydney, 2000, p.94] 

The fighting at Lone Pine for both sides during these Turkish counter-attacks was all about throwing bombs across hastily erected barriers, dashing around corners in trenches and getting off a few rounds at the shapes of advancing men, slipping over the dead and avoiding the dying and wounded. For the Anzacs, the action revolved around holding on to half a dozen such barriers erected during the attacking phase on 6 August and the network of Turkish trenches seized at that time. Dozens of small-scale actions were fought on 7, 8 and 9 August to hold back the brave and determined Turkish efforts to drive the Australians back out of their Lone Pine positions. This was the battle context for the award to seven Anzacs during this period of the Victoria Cross. In every way the story of how these awards were gained by these soldiers is typical of the actions carried out by hundreds of soldiers who fought at Lone Pine but who received no official recognition of their courage. Proof of this can be found in the pages of Charles Bean’s two chapters on the Lone Pine battle from his The Story of Anzac, Vol II – ‘The Attack Upon Lone Pine’ and ‘The Counter Attack at Lone Pine’. That said, the VC stories are stories of high courage and fully deserve to be told in memory of the VCs themselves.