Australian graves, fenced off and marked by crosses and grenades.
The remaining eight CWGC cemeteries around Anzac are all post-war concentration cemeteries, and have now become orange on our cemetery map. Starting at the most northern, the area around Embarkation Pier had been taken from the Turks during the August offensive, and a pier was built here to assist in evacuating the wounded, although accurate Turkish artillery fire soon rendered it unusable.
Embarkation Pier Cemetery, this original panorama showing the number of graves at the war’s end,…
…and here after more graves had been concentrated post-war from a number of smaller cemeteries,…
…including Apex Cemetery,…
…Chalak Dere Cemetery No. 1 (left) & Chalak Dere Cemetery No. 2 (right),…
…Chalak Dere Lower Cemetery,…
…and Mulberry Tree Cemetery.
Today, 948 men are buried at Embarkation Pier Cemetery, of whom 663 are unidentified, and 262 men are remembered on special memorials.
On the left, Embarkation Pier Cemetery plan. The previous pictures of the concentrated cemeteries, and in particular Chalak Dere No. 1, with far fewer crosses than graves, show why so many men would be reburied as unidentified soldiers. However, there would have been cemetery registers of some sort for the men buried in the original cemeteries, even if the identity of individual graves could no longer be ascertained at the time of concentration, explaining the large numbers of men remembered by name on special memorials. Above right, the cemetery plan for The Farm Cemetery, another post-war cemetery created when the slopes of the surrounding hills were cleared of bodies. A lot of them.
Trenches still cross the Farm – this was indeed a cultivated area of the battlefield – in this shot taken in 1919, the cemetery just beyond to the right,…
…and two earlier views of the Farm, looking through the barbed wire protecting the Allied trenches at the Apex. The Turkish trenches on the slopes opposite are clearly visible.
Early shots of The Farm Cemetery (above & below),…
…and later, the cemetery bottom left,…
…and here in the foreground, on the north-western slopes of Chanuk Bair, in the background the Salt Lake at Suvla and beyond, Suvla Bay itself. Today, 652 men lie in The Farm Cemetery. Only seven are identified, six British & one New Zealander, all of whom are remembered on special memorials.
A couple of hundred yards east of The Farm Cemetery stands the Chanuk Bair (New Zealand) Memorial. One of four memorials that commemorate New Zealand soldiers who died on the Gallipoli peninsula, its panels list the names of over 850 men who died during the Battle of Sari Bair in August 1915, and in other operations in the area, and whose grave sites are unknown.
Transporting the blocks of stone for the memorial’s construction* (left), and the memorial’s unveiling (right).
*I cannot guarantee that this particular block was used on this particular memorial, there being four of them on the peninsula, but this is the biggest.
Chunuk Bair Memorial, Chunuk Bair Cemetery, and the cemetery plan.
Chunuk Bair Cemetery was created on the burial site of Anzac soldiers interred by the Turks after the Battle of Sari Bair, fought between 6th & 10th August 1915, in which the capture of Chunuk Bair had been one of the main objectives. Chunuk Bair, the secondary peak of the Sari Bair range, was indeed taken and briefly held by British & New Zealand troops, but on the morning of 10th August, an overwhelming Turkish counterattack regained the hill, effectively ending any further effort by the Allied forces to reach the heights. Thereafter, the front lines would remain static here until the evacuation.
632 men are buried in the cemetery, of whom just ten are identified. This is why. The white cross in front of the saluting soldier can also be seen in the previous picture.
One of the identified men is a Ghurka havildar (sergeant), one is British, and eight are New Zealanders.
Memorial & cemetery, construction completed, in 1924,…
…fifteen years later, in 1939, on the eve of another war,…
…and here in the 1960s, with the memorial peeking over the trees behind.
Wounded soldiers awaiting evacuation. This view looks down on North Beach and the later site of Canterbury Cemetery.
Sick soldiers await their turn to be evacuated. In the foreground, an Indian muleteer glances at the camera. Over 1,300 Indian soldiers died during the campaign, although you will find few in the cemeteries, as many of the dead, if their bodies were recovered, would have been cremated, their names now to be found among the panels surrounding the Helles Memorial.
Sick and wounded soldiers leave the beachhead on their way to one of the hospital ships (left), smoke from Turkish shellfire drifting along the coastline. On the right, seriously wounded men are towed away from the beaches in lighters, to who knows what final destination; Lemnos, Alexandria, Malta, perhaps even Blighty, explaining why you may find the graves of Gallipoli casualties far from the scene of their injuries.
This is Canterbury Cemetery after the war, twenty-one burials in a single row marked by identical wooden crosses,…
…this later shot showing the headstone bases seemingly in place, but without their name panels, hence the crosses have yet to be removed. And the reason this grave layout looks nothing like that in the previous shot…
…is because although the cemetery was indeed made after the Armistice, this Exhumation form tells us that the earlier photograph of the cemetery was taken at a different location, although somewhere very close by, and the twenty one men were moved en masse to their present location post-war.
Canterbury Cemetery, headstones now completed (compare with the previous photo, although if you do, you might find yourself with questions I cannot answer) and crosses removed. There are only 27 men in total buried here, five of whom are unidentified, and twenty of whom are known to be men of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles, the majority Canterbury Mounted Rifles, hence the cemetery’s name.
Canterbury Cemetery plan (left), and on the right, the cemetery plan for the next post-war burial ground on the map,…
…The Nek Cemetery.
The locations of the remaining four cemeteries, The Nek & Baby 700 (near the top), Quinn’s Post (centre) & Johnston’s Jolly (bottom) cemeteries, are all to be found on this map extract I showed you previously, with Anzac Cove marked by the red flag on the left.
Original panoramic shot of The Nek Cemetery, created in what was once No Man’s Land. On 7th August 1915, as part of the Allies’ August offensive, six hundred men of the Australian Light Horse Brigade attacked on foot in four waves, one after the other, across this narrow strip of land linking Russell’s Top with Baby 700.
This photograph, taken from the Australian trenches on 7th August, looks directly at the barbed wire in front of the Turkish trenches at the Nek. On the hill slope opposite 234 Australian bodies lie among the debris of the attack. Another 138 were wounded.
Post-war view of No Man’s Land, this time from the Turkish lines looking towards the Australian positions at the Nek on the ridge opposite, across which the Australian Light Horse attacked. For those of you who’ve seen it, the denouement of the 1981 film ‘Gallipoli’ takes place here on this very day.
The attack on The Nek was a complete failure, the bodies of the fallen Australians lying where they fell until after the war, explaining why so many of the dead now buried in the cemetery are unidentified. This aerial view from June 1923 shows scaffolding surrounding the under-construction Cross of Sacrifice.
Only ten (six Australians & four New Zealanders) of the 326 burials here are identified, and only five have known graves; the other five, which include four men of the Light Horse, are remembered on special memorials.
Ironically, the Nek had been passed by the Australians during the confusion of the first day of the landings at Anzac, but had not been held. The trenches at the Nek would remain in Turkish hands throughout the campaign. Note the Turkish memorial, also visible in the previous two shots beyond the cemetery, in the background of this faded colour image, erected shortly after the evacuation in January 1916. Human bones, almost certainly Australian, still litter the ground,…
…as they do in this view from the Nek across to Baby 700, the Turkish memorial on the left.
Baby 700 Cemetery in its very early stages at the end of the war. A quarter of a mile east of The Nek Cemetery, Baby 700 had been an objective of the Australians on the initial day of the landings, 25th April, and had indeed been taken on that first morning. Driven off the hill by Turkish counter-attacks, Baby 700, like The Nek, would remain in Turkish hands despite being the objective of further attacks in May and, as we’ve seen, August.
Baby 700 Cemetery, seen above under construction, was created after the war, and today 493 men are buried here, although only 43 (32 Australians & 11 New Zealanders) are identified, with ten Australians believed to be buried here remembered on special memorials.
Baby 700 Cemetery in the 1960s.
Quinn’s Post Cemetery, once graves had been brought in from isolated battlefield graves after the war. Quinn’s Post had been captured and consolidated by the New Zealanders on the afternoon of the first day of the landings, 25th April, and would be held by both New Zealand & Australian troops, in the face of incessant Turkish attacks, throughout the campaign.
Quinn’s Post Cemetery under construction post-war.
View from within Monash Gully looking up at the heights of Dead Man’s Ridge, Pope’s Hill in the centre, and the back of Quinn’s Post on the far right,…
…and the view from Dead Man’s Ridge, looking across at the reverse of Quinn’s Post.
Taken on the day of a local armistice in May 1915, hence the figures you can see scurrying around, and shot from the side of Monash Valley, this view looks at Pope’s Hill towards the left, Dead Man’s Ridge immediately beyond, Quinn’s Post on the right, and the Turkish trench system known as the Chessboard in the background, below the horizon.
December 1915 view from the Australian trenches looking towards the Chessboard, the Nek on the left.
Australian burial party burying the dead at either Quinn’s Post or the Chessboard during the temporary armistice, more on which later.
The original 225 burials brought to Quinn’s Post were all unidentified. More men, including the graves from Pope’s Hill Cemetery, were later brought in, and today 473 men are buried or remembered here. 294 of these are unidentified, and 64 men who were known or believed to be buried either in Pope’s Hill Cemetery (below) or here at Quinn’s Post are remembered by special memorials.
These forms list ‘Names of soldiers presumed to be buried in this cemetery but whose graves have not been identified’ (as with most images, click to enlarge). All but one, a private in the Royal Marine Light Infantry, are Australian.
And here are the names of men – there may be more – once buried in Pope’s Hill Cemetery, who were reburied in the ‘Pope’s Hill Plot’, as it was once referred to, at Quinn’s Post.
The final cemetery at Anzac that we have yet to look at is Johnston’s Jolly Cemetery, another post-war cemetery, and another on land that was taken by the Australians on 25th April, lost the following day as the Turks counterattacked, and never retaken. Seen here with the first temporary grave markers in place, there are now 181 men buried here, 144 of whom are unidentified, although special memorials remember 36 Australians believed to be buried among them.
Most of the men buried here died during the Battle of Lone Pine, their headstones bearing the inscription ‘Died Between 06 August 1915 and 09 August 1915’ or similar.
A shell bursts on Johnston’s Jolly.
Dead Australians – the white brassards on the men’s arms were for identification purposes – at Johnston’s Jolly, May 1915.
Turkish troops looking mean & moody. Not quite as famous as the Christmas Truce on the Western Front in 1914, Gallipoli had its own truce, although primarily for very different reasons; the inset shows a blindfolded Turkish envoy being escorted away from Australian headquarters after a meeting to arrange the ceasefire. On 19th May 1915, over 40,000 Turkish troops made successive attacks on the Australian perimeter at The Nek, suffering heavy losses as they were repulsed each time by the Australian machine gunners. The day ended with some 3,000 Turks lying dead on the battlefield along with around 160 Australians; according to reports, one million rounds of ammunition were expended during the attack, although quite how anyone knows is beyond me.
With no possibility of retrieving the bodies, within days, No Man’s Land had become a mass of putrefying human flesh, and with the bloated bodies soon producing the most appalling stench (ships approaching the peninsula would first encounter the smell while still some distance offshore),…
…a nine-hour armistice – the only official cessation of hostilities between two belligerent countries to take place during the Great War – was arranged for 24th May to allow both sides to retrieve and bury the dead. These shots show Turkish soldiers (and some German officers on the right) burying their dead in trenches during the armistice, some wearing white arm bands bearing the red crescent (the red crescent, as opposed to the red cross, is used in predominantly Muslim countries).
Australian burial parties burying the dead during the armistice.
The photographs you see here were taken by some of the men involved in the clear-up (notwithstanding that photography was forbidden under the terms of the truce) and I make no apologies for showing them.
Military cemeteries are, in general, such well-cared-for and respectful spaces that sometimes, perhaps, a reminder is required as to exactly why they exist in the first place.
Turkish troops in No Man’s Land during the ceasefire. The white flags denote the limit of the area in which Allied soldiers could operate. The soldier on the far right of the left-hand shot is collecting Turkish rifles picked up from the dead,…
…and here Australians are disarming Turkish rifles before returning them under the terms of the armistice.
Turkish trenches photographed during the ceasefire, Turkish troops seen on the right.
List of the Anzac cemeteries, the inset showing a post-war view of the Sphinx. Note that both Brown’s Dip (last post) & Pope’s Hill are listed as permanent cemeteries, so clearly more concentrations were made after this list had been compiled.
We’ll end with this small group of graves known as the Taylor’s Hollow R.F.A. graves. The hollow, shown in the main picture, was presumably the site of a British artillery battery, and these casualties the result, most probably, of return Turkish artillery fire. But there is no mention of these graves on the cemetery list, and one has to presume that there might be other small cemeteries like this whose identity was lost post-concentration, but before such lists were compiled.
Next, the final post in this series looks at the cemeteries that still exist around the Salt Lake, seen here in the distance, at Suvla Bay.