Remembering WW1: fraternisation in the Dardanelles
The Gallipoli Campaign, also known as the Dardanelles Campaign, took place on the Gallipoli peninsula in the Ottoman Empire between 25 April 1915 and 9 January 1916.
The campaign was one of the greatest Ottoman victories during the war and is considered a major Allied failure and the casualties and losses on both sides amounted to some 250,000 each on both the Allied and Turkish sides.
My paternal grandfather, Ted Woods, was shipped out there as a member of the Norfolk Regiment and was thus part of the PBI – the poor bloody infantry – the cannon fodder for the mechanised slaughter that characterised the erroneously styled Great War. The only photograph I’ve seen of him depicted him in his uniform just before being shipped out there.
Conditions for the Allied troops during the campaign could hardly be described as luxurious, as the picture below shows.
In some parts of the peninsula, the front line trenches between the Allied and Turkish forces were only a handful of metres apart and in spite of the ferocity of the fighting, there were times when fraternisation took place.
Gallipoli by Robert Rhodes James, originally published in 1965 by BT Batsford Ltd., and republished in 1974 as Part of Illustrated Grand Strategy series by Pan Books Ltd. gives one instance of fraternisation between Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) forces and their Turkish opponents on p. 187 of the Pan edition:
The Anzacs sometimes threw tins of bully-beef into the Turk trenches, and once received the reply: “Envoyez milk. Bully-beef, non”; on one occasion a tin of cigarettes came flying over from the Turkish trenches, on which was written, “Prenez avec plesir a notre heros ennemis*”.
*To our heroic enemies, take these with pleasure.
This year marks the centenary of the start of the First World War and already at least one government minister, Education Secretary Michael Gove, is banging the jingoistic drum (warning: link to Daily Mail article. Ed.). Unfortunately, Gove later received support for his attack on ‘left wing academics’ from those experts on the First World War – Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson (warning: link to yet another Daily Mail article. Ed.).
People as ignorant as Mr Gove et al. should heed the words of the late Harry Patch (17th June 1898 – 25th July 2009), who was dubbed “the Last Fighting Tommy” in his later years and who very wisely said the following:
[The] politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.
Harry never spoke a word in public about WW1 until he was over 100 years old. Mr. Gove on the contrary approaches every subject with an open mouth and a closed mind.