However, if you were to read most Australian tomes on the Dardanelles campaign, UK and French casualties hardly rate a mention.
Could that be because the vast majority of ANZAC operations took part in a separate area to the British/French sector?
The Australians and New Zealanders landed at a separate site, cut off from the British and French, some 20 miles north of the British/French sector at Cape Helles.
There were exceptions. For instance, the Royal Naval Division was originally at ANZAC, but they were withdrawn to join the British at Helles, and the action that caught the attention of Ashmead Bartlett, the British correspondent who wrote so glowingly of the Australians’ spirit in the attack, was when a battalion of Australians was shipped down to Helles quite early in the campaign to take part in a suicidal daylight attack over open, uphill ground in board daylight.
(I’ve walked over that ground and it’s hard to believe any general could have been so stupid as to ask men to attack over it in a daylight attack.)
The Australians were the third wave, and they got up and walked forward into withering machine gun fire after watching the first two waves quite literally cut to pieces. Ashmead Bartlett wrote of seeing men holding entrenching shovels in front of their faces as they marched forward to protect themselves from the machine gun bullets(!)
(Chimbu, if you can find an account of that attack to post here for us, it’s almost on a par with the Beersheba charge.)
The British did join the Australians up at ANZAC in the August when they landed a large force immediately to the north of ANZAC, but that did little to endear them (or at least their leadership) to the ANZACs, for the mishandling of that landing was mind boggling. Virtually unopposed, the British landed and planted themselves on or near the beach while they waited for their artillery to be landed. Meanwhile, the Australian Light Horsemen were carrying out their extraordinarily costly ‘diversionary’ attack at the Nek to draw Turkish forces away from the British landings. (This was the subject of the movie ‘Gallipoli’.) From the Nek, they could see the British brewing up their tea on the undefended beaches below.
At the other end of the ANZAC salient, the Australian infantry were carrying out their diversionary attack, again to keep the Turks away from the British landings. They became known as Lone Pine. Look that name up on Google and see what those attacks entailed.
Few Australians today care to admit it, but a large proportion of the Australian Diggers of WW1 were British born, and virtually all the Australians felt a close affinity to the Motherland, something few Australians today could understand. However, they fast became very dismissive of the British military leadership after witnessing disaster after disaster.
It was a German General who said of the British soldiers that they were ‘lions led by donkeys’, and the Australians came to agree with this assessment when in 1918, after the British front line divisions were shattered by the most concentrated artillery bombardment ever assembled to that date. The Australians were sent in to plug the gap and save Amiens, and they were instructed to stop any retreating British troops and attach them to the Australian units.
(There was one famous instance where an English Colonel took up a rifle and placed himself and his men under the command of an Australian Corporal.) After seeing the British soldiers fight, the Australians had nothing but good things to say about them.
You’ll have to forgive the jingoism that sometimes surfaces among some Australians around ANZAC Day. Until that day in 1915, Australia was a bit like today’s EU, a collection of widely scattered colonies, each of whom really wasn’t interested in giving up any of their identity to a airy-fairy idea called Federalism. After 25 April 1915, they were able to call themselves ‘Australia’ with some sort of real meaning.
Not mentioned here yet was another factor that April 1915 put to rest, (at least in Australian eyes, if not the British), the ‘bad seed’ argument. Many, both in Australia and in Britain, thought that the Australians, because of their convict heritage, would have to be second class soldiers not suitable for combat. There was talk that they would only be suitable for garrison, labour and other such secondary duties. The landings at Gallipoli put that argument to rest.