The Cemeteries of Gallipoli Part Five – Suvla Bay

View of the Gallipoli coastline taken in September 1915 from one of the offshore ships; ahead, a hospital ship, while on the far left, white hospital tents line the shoreline. 

This map shows the three Allied landings that took place on the peninsula, two on 25th April 1915, and the third, at Suvla, in early August.  History remembers Gallipoli as an Australian campaign, but as this map shows, it was the British who bore the brunt of the invasion forces.  And it was the British who would be landing at Suvla Bay on 6th August.

The Suvla landings were intended to secure the Salt Lake and the high ground beyond, at the time lightly held by the Turks, as quickly as possible, enabling a speedy link-up with the troops at Anzac, followed by an advance across the peninsula at its narrowest point, around five miles, cutting off the Turkish troops at Anzac & Helles to the south before Turkish reinforcements could arrive from the north.

This aerial photograph, taken from Anzac on 6th August 1915, shows, in the foreground, troops advancing along a track (bottom left) into the Anzac hills where the New Zealanders were in the process of pushing towards the summit of Chunuk Bair (further to the right), and, stretching across much of the picture in the distance in front of the dark range of hills, the Salt Lake at Suvla.  Dry at this time of year, British troops are advancing across the lake at this very moment, smoke from shellfire visible on the far right.  The small boats are carrying wounded, seen on the beach, to the offshore hospital ships.

And now looking back the other way towards the Anzac hills as troops and equipment are brought ashore at what is probably B Beach, the furthest south of the Suvla landing beaches.

Here’s a map showing all the cemeteries we looked at at Anzac over the last three posts, and at the top, in red, the four cemeteries where today the Allied dead of the Suvla Bay campaign are buried.  The landings at Suvla were the Allies’ final attempt to take the peninsula, but the usual confusion and failure of command resulted in disastrous delays in the troops moving inland against, initially, limited Turkish opposition, and, as at both Helles & Anzac, once Turkish reinforcements had been allowed to arrive, trench warfare would take over until the evacuation in December.

The Suvla campaign was doomed almost before it began.

Map showing the final positions reached on 8th August.  Not nearly far enough, as the succeeding months would prove.  Note the landing beaches, from north to south, A, C & B, for future reference.  The red-shaded area, including A Beach,…

…is shown here in close-up.  These beaches to the north of Suvla Bay soon became a hive of activity, being sheltered, for the most part, from Turkish shellfire.

Two views of Kangaroo Beach, number seven on the map,….

…and post-war views of the northern Suvla beaches.

Boxes of bully beef stacked on one of the beaches, this view taken from the roof of No 1 Casualty Clearing Station.  All four of the Suvla cemeteries were created after the Armistice, when casualties from at least twenty nine wartime cemeteries, as listed above, were concentrated into four new cemeteries, along with men found buried in isolated battlefield graves.

Troops trudge inland across the dry Salt Lake.  Shrapnel shells, fired from Turkish batteries in the hills, would account for many an unfortunate soldier crossing this expanse.

British troops advancing towards the hills to the north of the Salt Lake, the scrub behind them set on fire by Turkish shells.  Wounded British soldiers are being cremated in the flames.  That’s simply the truth of the matter.

Lala Baba Cemetery at the war’s end.  Lala Baba was a low hill a few hundred yards inland between the southern curve of Suvla Bay and the Salt Lake (see maps) that was taken by the British in the early morning of 7th August.

By the time of the evacuation there were a number of small cemeteries, nine in all, that were later concentrated, post-Armistice, into what is now Lala Baba Cemetery, including…

…C Beach No. 1 Cemetery,…

…and C Beach No. 2 Cemetery, along with a few isolated battlefield graves.

Lala Baba Cemetery in the 1960s.  There are now 216 men, 53 of whom are unidentified, buried here, and 16 men are remembered on special memorials.

Lala Baba Cemetery plan (left), and Green Hill Cemetery plan (right).

Green Hill Cemetery at the war’s end.

Green Hill, two miles east of Lala Baba on the other side of the Salt Lake, was another small hill taken by the British on 7th August,…

…the cemetery created when the burials from several cemeteries* were concentrated here after the war, along with a number of men brought in from isolated battlefield graves.  2,971 men are now buried in the cemetery, 2,472 of whom are unidentified, some remembered on special memorials.

*Some quite large, such as the cemetery at Scimitar Hill, with over 500 burials, mostly unidentified, and some smaller, such as Chocolate Hill Cemetery, pictured below.

Green Hill & Chocolate Hill were in effect two peaks of the same hill, and both were taken by the British on 7th August.  Despite attempts over the following days to continue the advance, the Turkish defenders of Scimitar Hill, the next hill in line, proved resolute, and the British could make no further progress.

Both hills are marked at the top of this map extract (left), as, in the bottom right, is Dead Man’s Gully, pictured on the right.  ‘In front of the trench in the gully, and up the hillside, were thousands of unburied and rotting bodies, lying in fantastic attitudes, there seemed to be at least one a yard and in many places they were piled into little heaps. The stench was appalling, and the flies from all these putrefying corpses came over in their swarms and settled everywhere.’

Hill 10 Cemetery, one of two cemeteries that contain the dead of the northern sector of the Suvla operations, was created when a number of cemeteries associated with dressing stations or casualty clearing stations were concentrated into one burial ground, along with other isolated burials from the battlefield.  As its name implies, Hill 10 was nothing but a very slightly higher piece of land half a mile to the north of the Salt Lake that was one objective that was taken on the morning of 7th August, although initial attempts proved problematic, primarily because no one could work out exactly where Hill 10 was!

The graves from 88th Dressing Station Cemetery were moved to Hill 10,…

…as were the three cemeteries near B Beach, here B Beach No. 1 Cemetery,…

…here B Beach No. 2 Cemetery,…

…and here B Beach No. 3 Cemetery.  Of the 699 men now buried in Hill 10 Cemetery, 150 of the burials are unidentified, some remembered on special memorials.

Hill 10 Cemetery plan (left), and Azmak Cemetery plan (right).

Azmak Cemetery, the fourth of the Suvla cemeteries, contains 1,074 men who died in the actions in the northern sector at Suvla in the attempts to capture, and hold, the Kiretch Tepi ridge that ran parallel to the coast north of the Salt Lake (see map below).  684 are unidentified, some of whom are remembered on special memorials.  Most of these men were originally buried in the following cemeteries: Dublin; Sulajik; 5th Norfolk; Borderers’ Ravine; Oxford Circus; Worcester; Kidney Hill; Irish; Azmak Nos. 1, 2, 3 & 4; Jephson’s Post; Essex Ravine; Hill 28 & finally Lone Tree Gully.  I mention them all as I can find photos of none.

Interesting Turkish map showing the two sides’ positions to the north of the Salt Lake, Allied trenches in blue, Turkish in red.  The summits of Chocolate Hill & Green Hill are marked in brown and green respectively at the bottom.

Storm & shell.  Ships being battered by a gale at West Beach, number four on the earlier map close-up (left), and ‘A miss is as good as a mile’ (original caption), as a Turkish shell explodes harmlessly close to one of the piers (right) .

‘View of Suvla Bay with usual strafe going on in distance.’

According to the original caption, ‘A Turkish high explosive shell bursting alongside a dugout. The officer who took this wasted quite a number of films trying to get a burst and this is his best.’  Note the tramway rails cartwheeling out of the picture on the left.

Evacuation.  Troops head for the Suvla beaches and the waiting boats on the afternoon before the Allies evacuated the area.  The story of the evacuation is one of good organisation, for once, and clever tactics (see below) by the ever-decreasing number of men still manning the trenches.  The beaches at both Helles & Suvla would be slowly evacuated, without the Turks realizing, between 15th & 2oth December, with the men at Helles following suit on 9th January 1916.  Casualties, estimated prior to the event to perhaps climb into the tens of thousands should the Turks realise what was occurring, would be negligible.

A self-firing ‘drip’ Rifle set up to fool the Turks; water would drip, or trickle, from the full upper tin into the empty lower tin, which was attached by a length of string to the trigger of the rifle.  The lower tin would eventually overbalance as it filled and the upper tin emptied, in turn pulling the string and firing the rifle.  By which time the men who had set up the contraption were long gone, back towards the beaches and evacuation.

4.00 a.m., 20th December 1915.  Burning stores, the fires lit by delayed-action fuses, on the Suvla shoreline as the last ships depart.  The eight-and-a-half-month campaign had seen the British employ some 420,000 troops in total, alongside 50,000 Australians & 9,000 New Zealanders, and around 80,000 French.

The Allies suffered some 250,000 casualties, 58,000 of whom died, including around 30,000 from Britain, 11,000 from Australia & New Zealand, 1,500 from India and over 12,000 from France.  Of the Allied troops who died, only 11,000 have known graves.  Churchill’s folly indeed.  And Kitchener’s.  And Hamilton’s.  And Asquith’s, come to that.  Share the blame, chaps.

Turkish losses amounted to over 300,000, of whom 87,000 died.  And all for nothing.

THE END

Postscript: The same section of the Salt Lake as seen earlier, the scrub fires now extinguished.  Some time back, I published a series of posts entitled ‘The Chateau Generals’, one of which looked at the command disaster at Gallipoli, and the men responsible; in just nine months, for a variety of reasons, no less than thirty one generals, and they are just the ones I managed to identify, would lose their jobs, temporarily or permanently.  The post also included a number of previously unpublished photographs of the Suvla campaign, such as the one above, and if you wish to take a look, or to refresh your memory, click here.  Otherwise, a return to Flanders beckons.  Next post.