Original subtitles

Military cemeteries dot the landscape

between Chunuk Bair and Cape Helles.

Turkish, Australian, British, French.

The legends of the Gallipoli campaign

have been woven into the founding narratives

of Turkey and Australia,

but today, what actually happened here can be fully told.

(dramatic music)

The first glimmer of dawn over the Dardanelles.

The Kilid Bahr fortress

controls the narrowest place in this sea lane

between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

On the other side of the straits is Asia

and the city of Canakkale.

The marine traffic that passes through

is the vital lifeline of trade

with the whole of southeastern Europe and Russia.

Turkey has controlled the straits for 500 years.

Here in 1915, the vestiges of the oriental empire

defeated the most powerful forces of the West.

This is a victory, almost, East defeating the West.

Defeating the biggest and best navy in the world,

the Royal Navy.

Defeating the best army in the world, the British army.

The idea was to finish this in three days.

They underestimated Turkish troops,

and they thought a civilized European soldier

could defeat an uneducated Turkish soldier very easily here.

But actually, 99% of Turkish soldiers

were from Anatolia, peasants,

so peasants armies are very difficult to defeat.

In the century after the Gallipoli campaign,

much was written about the military and political failures

that led to one of Britain's

most disastrous military campaigns.

But little has been said

about the role the battle has played

in building Turkish national pride.

(lively music)

The British underestimated the Turks,

largely due to imperial ethnic prejudices.

Kenan Celik is one of the most

knowledgeable Turkish historians.

The statue of Mustafa Kemal, founder of modern Turkey,

dominates this strategic height, Chunuk Bair.

This is like a British arrogance, you know?

Always underestimating Turks.

"Ah, we were defeated by our generals,"

and, "Ah, this caused us the defeat."

So rather than keep saying this,

they should recognize and say and give some credit

to the Turkish young man who fought here

for the home country.

Well, I think a young lieutenant colonel,

George S. Patton, in staff college, the U.S. army,

sums it up brilliantly.

This was before he became

the famous general in World War II,

and he did a study of the Gallipoli campaign.

And he stressed the importance of having the right officers

in the right place at the right time,

for being on the offense and also defense.

And he suggested that it was not the Ottoman army

that defeated the British at Suvla Bay,

it was von Sanders, it was Major Willmer, and Mustafa Kemal.

They defeated Stopford, Ian Hamilton, and General Sitwell.

So he suggested that if they swapped those commanders,

Gallipoli would've been a great success for the British

instead of the dismal failure it ended out to be.

Although the Ottoman Empire's frontiers in 1900

extended far into Europe and Africa,

by the outbreak of war in 1914

it had lost Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Libya

and was in debt with Britain, France, Germany and Russia,

who controlled most of the trade.

When war broke out, Turkey was neutral

and in the throes of internal upheaval,

with a new government intent on modernizing and westernizing

a corrupt, inefficient state.

The most powerful man in Turkey at the time

was the megalomaniac war minister Enver Pasha.

Enver Pasha took the command

of chief of staff, war minister,

so under his control a few portfolios, like ministries,

so he carried out big change in Turkish army.

About 1,300 officers, mostly old generation,

and who were held responsible for Balkan disaster,

Balkan defeat, they were sacked.

Then all the academy graduates were appointed

to replace old people.

For example, Mustafa Kemal was one of them,

and only 35 years old, and he commanded 12,000 men.

Another man with an extraordinary ego

changed the course of Turkish history.

When then-British Navy Minister Winston Churchill

ordered that two battleships built in Britain

but paid for by the Ottoman government

be requisitioned by the British navy,

the Germans eagerly donated two of their own.

They offered the Goeben and Breslau to the Ottoman Empire,

but when the new warships were used

to attack Russian ports in the Black Sea,

this prompted the Allies to declare war on Turkey.

Churchill saw an opportunity to gain control

of the most vital seaway in Europe, the Dardanelles,

and persuaded the government

and the war minister, Lord Horatio Kitchener,

to agree to a naval attack that he believed

would be decisive in winning the war.

On the 19th of February 1915,

British and French ships sailed up the Dardanelles

to destroy the forts at the entrance to the straits.

But when the main attack on the straits began

on the 18th of March at Canakkale,

three ships were sunk

and three others were severely damaged

by Turkish fire and undetected mines.

The fortress at Mecidiye

on the European side of the Dardanelles

was the backdrop to a memorable episode of Turkish heroism.

The Ottoman mobile artillery

was wreaking havoc on French and British battleships,

but they were running out of ammunition.

On the other hand, the heavy guns at Canakkale

were a fixed target for the Allied ships.

Here at Mecidiye fortress,

the gun crane had been destroyed.

Rather than cease firing,

legend has it that the Turkish solder Seyit Ali Cabuk

took it on himself to carry three 275-kilogram shells

to be loaded into the gun breech,

one of which would reportedly sink a French battleship.

Although it seems practically impossible

for him to do this alone,

Corporal Seyit became one of Turkey's greatest heroes,

an icon of Turkish resistance.

His feats are just the first of a series

of Gallipoli campaign legends that live on today.

With the navies in retreat,

preparations began for large-scale troop landings

on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

(tense music)

Unable to penetrate the Dardanelles Straits

with ships alone,

military strategists plotted

to capture Constantinople by land.

The plan was simple enough:

50,000 troops from Britain,

Australia and New Zealand, India, and France

would land and quickly capture the high ground

behind the forts commanding the straits

and allow the fleet to penetrate the Dardanelles.

Britain's best general, Ian Hamilton, was given command.

Steve Chambers is a historian and author

specialized in the Gallipoli campaign.

Sir Ian Hamilton, as a case in example,

was probably one of the best general officers,

if not in Britain, in the world at that time,

and this is something the Germans actually say of him.

He had probably fought in every single campaign

from the late 1870s.

He had written books on musketry and modern warfare,

and this was quite rare in the British army at that time.

They had understood that the war was changing.

Commanding on the other side of the battle

was one of Germany's best generals, Otto Liman von Sanders,

the cool-headed and decisive Prussian advisor

to the Ottoman government.

Heading up the 19th Division

was 34-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal.

British thought mostly old people, old generation,

but Turks all graduates of academies.

They go to these ranks through aptitude tests

and very hard exams.

When you look at their diplomas and marks in the classes,

they are like mathematicians,

their points between 95 and 100.

So best brains we apply in Turkish army.

However hastily drawn up,

the plan still gave the defenders four weeks to prepare.

Ian Hamilton was also given inferior tools to do the job.

The only unit of professional troops was the 29th Division.

The best units the British had here at Gallipoli

was the 29th Division.

They were a regular division.

However, they've never really trained together.

They had been put together

from different parts of the empire.

Some were serving in India, some were serving in the U.K,

and together they never trained above brigade level.

And this brought challenges

for the officers commanding them.

And a lot of these were fast promoted

from colonel to brigadier general to command a brigade,

or even major general to command a division.

So even though they had a lot of experience

commanding smaller units, or maybe as big as a brigade,

command of the division was something completely different.

The British territorial units

and the brand-new Australian and New Zealand Army Corps

that came in to support the offensive were undertrained.

The government wanted to win the campaign on the cheap,

and the commander received

second-rate officers and soldiers.

The equipment of the territorials

was lesser than that of the regulars.

It was inferior quality, still effective,

but not as good as the regular equipment.

Also, the rifles were certainly inferior as well.

Where the regulars had the modern SMLE,

the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield, a very, very good rifle

that they could fire 15 rounds per minute through,

the territorials had old, antiquated rifles

from the Boer War, the old, long Lee-Enfield.

Still a very, very good weapon,

but not as good as the SMLE.

The defending Ottoman army was well-trained.

The Turkish soldiers fighting in Gallipoli

were well-equipped with Mauser M1903 bolt-action rifles,

although many carried the 1883 version.

We got German rifles, Mauser.

Not quick when you compare it to Lee-Enfield,

the British rifle, but snipers would prefer a German Mauser.

I talked to Turkish veterans who said to me,

"We had snipers, Turkish snipers,

we used to put a coin between our fingers like this,

then hold it like this."

There were Turkish snipers who shoot and get the coin

without hurting the fingers.

We say three things in a man's life are so important:

horse, a woman, and a rifle.

The 25th and 57th Turkish regiments

were among the best the empire could field.

These hardened Turkish soldiers

had already fought in many wars

during the Balkan crises of the past decade.

They were not just conscripts

drawn from the vast plains of Anatolia.

These were men who were fighting

to save the jewel in the Ottoman crown:

Constantinople itself.

Turks put their best troops on the peninsula

before British landed here.

So experienced it and trained,

and the organization was okay.

And then Istanbul did their best to help the Turks here.

In terms of food supply, it was okay,

like heart of the country.

If Turks lost Gallipoli,

then they could lose Istanbul, the capital,

and then today, most probably,

there would be no Turkish existence in Europe.

Bad weather and the need to train

the Australian and New Zealand volunteers in Egypt

were a boon for Liman von Sanders,

who had four whole weeks to prepare land defenses.

At 4 a.m. on the 25th of April, 1915,

the troop landings began.

The Australian and New Zealand corps, or ANZAC,

were tugged ashore by small steamers

and had to row the last few meters.

They had been spotted by Turkish commanders

who underestimated the size of the invading force.

So Turkish headquarters, 9th Division headquarters,

didn't expect any landing from this spot.

And then moon set, and then Turks lost sight of the ships,

so under the cover of darkness,

without any naval bombardment, they came.

And when they were, say, 100 yards, 200 years of the beach,

then Turks saw them.

Right on the beach where they landed,

nearly 500 yards they covered in the initial landing.

3rd Brigade from Australia landed three battalions,

1,500 strong, from three warships.

And then 86th Guards had to deal with these people.

They stood their ground.

They could hear bushes moving below us.

They could hear the scramble of troops

coming up the cliff face.

They lay down fire.

Very, very quickly, the Anzacs, Australians predominantly,

for the first part of the landings,

got to the top of the cliff.

In little less than 15 minutes, 20 minutes at the outside,

overwhelmed the Ottoman defenders here at the top

and pushed them back.

Over on the other side,

the Australians pushed right over towards 400 Plateau

and down the other side towards the 3rd Ridge.

The first waves of Anzacs

pushed up the steep hills,

sweeping the light Ottoman defenses off the ridges

and reaching an arc of hills

they gave distinctive names to:

Baby 700, Russell's Top, The Neck.

However, they found that the only way up

to the higher ground was along narrow ridges,

where the defenders had the advantage.

By 7 in the morning, the company of Turkish defenders

had finished their ammunition.

Mustafa Kemal was at the head of the 57th Regiment

rushing up to support.

He saw Australian infantry advancing

and then the Turks retreating,

so he just intercepted them.

And then he said, "Why are you retreating?"

They pointed to the hill where Anzacs coming.

"An enemy," they said.

"But you have bayonets. Take out, fix and lie down."

And then Turks stopped.

Seeing this, Australian infantry also stopped.

This not only saved the day, but the entire campaign,

and then future of the country.

More waves of troops disembarked,

but Ottoman guns began firing at the beach.

The legendary Ottoman 57th Regiment swung into action,

while the 27th blocked the Australian advance to the south.

In his order he said, because it was so significant,

"I then ordered to attack or to die.

In the time which passes until we die,

others can come here and reinforce us."

Resistance was so important at that stage, crucial.

The ultimate objective of this landing

was, one, to hold the 3rd Ridge,

the 3rd Ridge goes from Gabe Tepe

right all the way up to the Sari Bair ridge,

and push from the hills

close to where we're standing at the moment

over to the plain of Maidos

to capture the narrowest part of the peninsula.

When Mustafa Kemal and the 57th Regiment

came over the ridge around Chunuk Bair,

they were able to stop the Australian advance

and then bayonet attack and push them back.

By the end of the day,

they were pinned down in this tiny stretch of shoreline.

The commanding officer, General William Birdwood,

proposed evacuation.

At Cape Helles, the British attacked this beach,

known to them as V Beach, at 6:30 in the morning.

They had planned to land three regiments,

two aboard the coal ship River Clyde

that was to have been rammed ashore,

allowing the 2,000 troops inside to disembark,

while another regiment

was to be brought ashore in rowing boats.

The landing here at V Beach

was going to be what we call a noisy landing.

They were not coming in at night like at Anzac.

Here was a full daylight landing,

and the reason for that was

the Royal Navy needed to see their targets.

So what Hunter-Weston,

who's commanding the operation here, relied upon,

was the full weight of a naval bombardment

to destroy and neutralize the Turkish defenses.

The ridge overlooking the beach was fortified

with trenches and barbed wire,

although little more than a company of men defended it.

The naval bombardment was ineffective

due to the flat trajectory of the shells

that landed either too far behind

or in front of the defenses.

We landed, first of all, the first wave, in rowing boats.

These comprise of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

Turkish rifle fire fell down

onto the victims in those boats.

Those who did manage to climb out

in full pack, full equipment weighing up to 70, 75 pounds,

fell into the water.

Some drowned. Others stumbled ashore with or without rifle.

Those with rifles who could get to the sandbank

then found their rifles to be inoperable.

Luckily, there's a sandbank,

a small cliff, or shelf rather,

about five feet from up from the beach,

and that enabled them to shelter from the rifle fire

from the Turks in the trenches behind me.

The River Clyde collier

was supposed to have been akin to a Trojan horse,

ramming the beach and allowing 2,000 men it carried

to land directly onto dry land.

It got stuck on the rocks,

and Turkish soldiers could pick the men off

as they left the sally ports.

The first 50 men out of the River Clyde,

led by one officer,

48 of them were killed or wounded.

Only two got to the beach.

So you have this cluster of bodies

fallen from the River Clyde

onto the rock spit you see behind me.

One of the heroes of the day was a Commander Unwin,

who was the commander also of the River Clyde.

He dived into the ocean, all under fire,

connected up these boats by just manpower,

taking the ropes from each boat,

pulling them together with the manpower,

tying 'em together to allow this bridge

to connect the shore.

He did this several times under fierce enemy fire.

At 9 a.m. the landing was stopped,

but just two kilometers north,

another slaughter was unfolding.

On this beautiful, sandy beach, known as W,

where still today the remains of British hardware

rust under the Gallipoli sun,

the Lancashire Fusiliers,

soldiers from rural Northern England,

were killed before they even made it ashore.

There was barbed wire on the beach,

and then, again, traps in the water, like landmines,

and then, just on top, the Turkish trenches.

Of the 200 men in the first wave,

only 21 survived,

the heaviest death toll of all the landings.

But the defenders were outflanked by a landing further north

and eventually forced to retreat.

They were told to wait till 400 yards range and open fire,

and it was very costly,

more costly than V Beach around the corner.

At dawn they were able to charge up from the beaches,

where two more Victoria Crosses were won

from a Captain Walford, Royal Artillery,

and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie,

VC, Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

They took their men forward.

Actually, they didn't take their men forward.

They weren't supposed to be there.

These were staff officers.

The staff officers took these men forward

because of the huge amount of officer casualties

in the infantry battalions,

stormed these trenches.

At the time the Turks were pulling back.

They realized that the game was probably over

now at that stage,

'cause they're being enfiladed from the W Beach landing.

Overlooking V Beach

are the remains of two fortresses,

the ancient Ottoman fort Sedd el Bahr,

and on the other side,

the powerful guns of its 20th century counterpart.

Behind it, the Turkish cemetery,

and below that, the British graveyard.

Close to this tragic site

lies the only lone grave of the whole campaign:

Charles Doughty-Wylie.

We're here at the grave

of Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie, VC,

He was in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers

and attached to the general staff.

He led the charge with his walking cane in hand.

He vowed never to take arms against the Turks

'cause he was a friend to the Turks prior to the war.

At the moment of glory he got to the top of this hill,

captured the fort,

and then unfortunately got shot by a Turkish sharpshooter.

Charles Doughty-Wylie's wife

was a nurse on a nearby island,

but he also had a romantic liaison

with one of the most famous women of the Middle East,

explorer and spy Gertrude Bell.

There was one woman visitor to this grave

during the campaign.

It's important to understand there were no women

fighting on Gallipoli.

There were no women nurses on Gallipoli.

So who was this lone woman who came to visit this grave,

allegedly in around November 1915?

(tense music)

French and other smaller forces

had landed at Morto Bay, or S Beach as it was known,

and at X and Y beaches almost unopposed.

Now the Allies were able to consolidate their positions

on the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula,

but the shock of the losses on the landings

had taken its toll.

(somber music)

The sun sets on the Cape Helles monument

to the British dead.

In just two days, three battalions had been decimated

and the heights of Achi Baba were still out of reach.

Three days after the landings, on the 28th of April,

the French and British forces at Cape Helles

made their first concerted effort

to move forward to capture Achi Baba

and then to attack the fortress at Kilid Bahr.

This Turkish village now stands

where the Greek village of Krithia once stood,

razed to the ground by British guns.

Here the local British commander, Aylmer Hunter-Weston,

planned a daylight attack

covered by artillery on land and sea.

It was a disaster,

and over the next weeks,

the same tactic was repeated twice more.

British, French, and Turkish soldiers were slaughtered

as attack was followed by counterattack.

The French were slightly more successful

on the eastern edge of the line on the 21st of June,

supported by heavy artillery in a rolling barrage.

On the 28th of June

the British gained a kilometer of terrain

during the Battle of Gully Ravine,

but from then on the Helles front was a stalemate.

The forts at Kilid Bahr were unreachable.

The little farming village of Bashyal

was completely destroyed during the campaign.

The villagers were recruited into the Ottoman army.

Their families moved to the land behind the lines.

Hassan is the grandson of a soldier

sent twice to the front here in Gallipoli.

That young soldier was stable boy to Enver Pasha

when the war minister came to see the massacre for himself,

Enver stopped the frontal attacks,

which were killing too many Ottoman soldiers.

(speaking Turkish)

Well, my grandfather

was too young to join the army.

He was taken by Enver Pasha

as a stable boy and dispatch writer.

He helped Enver Pasha by showing him

the roads and the water wells.

And then, when his elder brother was shot in the war,

the younger one released to go back home for a while,

and then recalled back for duty.

So total loss we suffered in six battles here,

known as Six Battles of Krithia,

three battles of Krithia,

and then one battle with the English in Gully Ravine

and then two with French on the left.

Roughly 150,000 Turkish losses suffered,

and more than 100,000 British losses suffered.

French lost nearly 30,000 men, nearly half dead.

They were buried in a single cemetery in Gallipoli today.

So total loss, nearly, Allies lost 200,000 men here,

and to both sides,

nearly half a million people

in Gallipoli campaign, total loss.

Hunter-Weston was probably,

as some people say, was one of these donkey generals.

I don't know if that's strictly true,

that he was a bit of a butcher

and threw men into action aimlessly

in these frontal attacks with bayonets only,

facing the Turkish guns.

But Hunter-Weston was not stupid.

That was really the only options

available to him at that time.

Here Turkish army suffered more casualties than Allies.

And the main reason was, for that country, not much cover.

And before every battle,

and then navy bombarded Turkish lines,

so devastated Turkish trenches.

Mostly they tried to advance along the flanks,

getting support from the navy,

rather in the middle.

But Turks knew this very well,

so they attack in the middle.

So when the lines advance on the flank,

but Turks made a breach in the middle,

then British had to move back

to make a line with that area,

so then had to retreat to the back.

The Allied troops were ill-equipped

to face the battles that were to follow.

Logistics were a nightmare.

A shortage of shells forced the British artillery

to limit themselves to firing just one shell a day

in order to save ammunition for big offensives.

British artillery here was very ineffective.

One, we didn't have enough guns,

and two, we didn't have enough shell.

The shell we did have, or the majority, was shrapnel shell.

Shrapnel shell is okay to use with troops in the open,

where it would spray the canister of shell,

the ball bearings inside,

and splatter the fields in front of us.

However, to destroy wire, to destroy trenches,

to destroy machine gun emplacements

which were fortified with sandbags and dug in well,

you needed high explosives.

Life for the Allied infantryman was miserable.

There was nowhere for troops off duty to really rest,

and too few men to keep the British

military machine working properly.

Food an sanitation were poor.

Disease was rampant.

The British had only advanced

a maximum of four miles here at Gallipoli,

at the Helles side of the peninsula,

so they could go back to the beaches,

but still under Turkish shellfire.

They would also be use for labor.

They would be building piers and digging trenches.

It was very, very hard work

in a climate that is very hot.

They would've been on poor rations,

predominantly bully beef and biscuits.

Bully beef, during the summer, would melt in the tins.

It turned into liquid. It was horrible.

Hassan's memories of his grandfather

bring to life the horror and humanity of the war here.

(speaking Turkish)

Personally, I was a little boy

and my grandfather didn't speak much about the war,

but he did say that the soldiers

did not have a bad relationship with each other.

They threw tobacco and water to each other,

they looked after each other when they were wounded,

but when their commanders ordered them to shoot,

they had to obey orders.

The geography of the Gallipoli Peninsula

played a decisive part in the stalemate

that followed the Allied landings.

The terrain was rugged. Roads were bad.

At Anzac, the mountain ranges that slope towards the sea

have steep escarpments

and the ridges are diagonal to the shoreline,

so they had to be stormed one by one

by the Australian and New Zealand troops

before they could take advantage of the gullies

that eventually afforded them protection from enemy snipers.

Here, in Shrapnel Gully, the phenomenon is abundantly clear.

The Australian eventually occupied a line

below the ridge, beyond the gully,

but only a few yards away,

the Ottomans had built impregnable trenches.

The only way out of the enclave was upwards,

northeasterly towards Chunuk Bair.

Machine gun fire mowed down troops engaged in mass attacks

while sniper fire killed individual soldiers at random

on a daily basis.

We're standing here in the Australian front line.

This is on 400 Plateau.

Over to the right-hand side is Johnston's Jolly,

and behind me is the memorial above Lone Pine.

And this was 400 Plateau,

one of the objectives of the landing,

which was overrun very, very quickly.

Course, first days of the landings,

there were no trenches here, these were dug later.

When this impasse happened, trench warfare, we all dug in,

it became this holding pen for the ANZAC division.

24,000 men, two divisions, were penned in here.

Behind me, the road you can just see

represents the front line.

Between here and up towards Quinn's Post,

the road represents the front line, how narrow it was

between the Australian and New Zealand trenches

and those of the Ottomans on the other side of the road.

Both sides were constantly being reinforced,

and now, with a massive army of 42,000 men,

Mustafa Kemal believed he could push the Australians

out of Anzac Cove altogether.

The attack was launched

less than a month after the landings.

A quarter of his men died,

and still the Australian and New Zealand troops

resisted the attack.

It was ANZAC's most heroic day,

the day Australian stretcher bearer

John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his mule

were killed and entered the Australian book of heroes.

There's lots of myth about John Simpson.

The myth really comes along

about how many people he saved,

and we get quotes from 2- to 3- to even 400 men

he's bringing down from the lines.

Seeing he only operated here

between the 25th of April and the 19th of May,

how many men would that be per day?

Roughly works out to be 12 or 14 casualties per day.

The Turks and Australians

arranged a truce to bury the dead.

In these photos, the blindfolded Turkish officer

is taken to ANZAC headquarters to negotiate a truce.

For the first time, they see each other for what they are:

desperate men forced into a pointless battle.

Audrey Herbert, an intelligence officer

and later a politician, who spoke Turkish,

was present that day.

Aubrey Herbert says in his memoirs,

"There was a Turkish captain beside me

while walking along no man's land,

row after row, bodies lying.

He said, 'Look at this. This is diplomacy.

Look at this. This is politics.

We are poor soldiers here.

May Allah protect all of us here.'"

The men who fought here

on the Anzac front in Gallipoli

were neither all Australians nor all young farmers,

despite Australian mass media myths

that sometimes suggest otherwise.

If you look at the occupations,

a vast majority worked in the city.

They were bankers, clerks,

they were shopkeepers, cobblers, et cetera.

So very few, actually, were from the farms, the outbacks.

Saying that, they were fairly fit, a lot of 'em.

They were also fairly young,

but not as young as a lot of accounts do make out.

You do hear about these boy soldiers.

There were no boy soldiers here during the landings.

The average age of the Australian foot soldier

was 28 years old in 1915.

In terms of health,

Turks were better physically, stronger,

than the British troops here in Gallipoli.

And Birdwood, later on,

when he was questioned by Dardanelles Commission,

he accepted this truth.

He said Turks were stronger than British here in Gallipoli.

The Australian and New Zealand soldiers

in the Anzac enclave

were led by Australian General Birdwood,

who answered directly to Ian Hamilton.

The staff officers lived and worked close to enemy lines.

General Bridges was shot in the leg by a Turkish sniper

and died of gangrene.

Too many men were penned into this tiny place.

One of the other myths is British officers

led these Australians to their death,

they were sacrificed on this British empire's altar.

Totally not true.

The ANZAC corps, with the New Zealanders as well,

were commanded by Australian generals.

In charge of the corps was General Birdwood.

He was actually born in India,

but again, became the Australian corps commander,

and held in high respect by the Australians

and New Zealanders.

Bridges, another Australian there,

commanded the 1st Australian Division.

By the end of June 1915,

there was stalemate on both fronts.

With stalemate at Cape Helles and at Anzac Cove,

Ian Hamilton asked London for more troops

to break the deadlock.

He planned to allow the Australians and New Zealanders

to break out of the Anzac enclave

by making massive diversionary attacks

at Helles, the southern Anzac,

and on a new front to the north at Suvla Bay.

Once again, he was handed a wildcard,

in the shape of the elderly General Frederick Stopford,

a bumbling and inexperienced British officer.

The landings were planned to coincide

with attacks by the New Zealand brigade

towards the lightly defended Chunuk Bair,

while the Australians attacked at The Neck.

As diversions, the British attacked Krithia once more;

the Australians attacked Lone Pine Ridge.

On the 6th of August, in the afternoon at 5 o'clock,

the Australians went over the top

from positions on this reverse slope,

and they pushed the Turks back,

they overran three or four trenches,

and dug in on the far side,

overlooking the Turkish lines

of communication and reserves.

The Lone Pine fighting was very ferocious,

very hand-to-hand, bitter fighting

with bayonets, trench clubs, and bombs,

and they fought on for three days and four nights.

General Stopford's 10th and 11th divisions

landed at Suvla Bay under the cover of darkness,

but chaos reigned supreme.

By daylight on the 7th of August, rather than push forward,

the British troops had lost contact with their general.

Communication is only as good as the people

who are receiving the message or sending the message,

and this is where so many elements

of the Gallipoli campaign fell down.

One example of that was Hamilton

was adamant that communication was set up

very, very early for the Suvla landings.

So what he did was run cables from the island of Imbros,

from headquarters, to Suvla here.

And unfortunately, Stopford decided

to move his headquarters

during the day of the landing,

so even though they managed to get cable across,

there was no Stopford to talk to.

He had disappeared.

The British soldiers had landed

on the most advanced landing craft available at the time,

the so-called Beetles.

Standing on the remains of a lighter.

The lighters were used during the landings at Suvla,

during the night of the 6th of August, 1915,

and also for the final evacuation as well.

In front of it there were two antennas, almost,

but this is where they got the nickname Beetle,

these big, black antennas.

And attached to that would be a wooden ramp,

steel reinforced and held to the top

of the antennas by chains.

The Australians attacked Lone Pine

is a brutal battle that raged for four days

in bloody hand-to-hand fighting.

They gained a fine view over the Ottoman lines of supply.

The main thrust, however,

was to be between Chunuk Bair and The Neck.

For the Allies, here again, precious time was lost.

Chunuk Bair was so important to the Allies

because it afforded two things.

One, by capturing this summit,

you deny the view from the Turkish side

of the British positions and ANZAC positions behind.

As you see behind me, you've got the jewel there,

you've got what the objective was:

the Dardanelles Straits.

The plan was to rush

the lightly defended defenses at 4:30 a.m.

to take the Ottomans by surprise.

The capture of Chunuk Bair was not without problems.

They were to get up here on the 7th of August

at 0430 in the morning by dawn.

That never happened.

Colonel Johnston, who was the brigade commander,

stopped his men short and had tea,

which was absolutely unforgivable

'cause he was only 500 meters from the summit.

On the summit where we're standing today,

there were no Turkish defenders.

By the time Johnston pushed his troops forward,

it was too late.

The Ottomans had occupied the summit

before the New Zealanders could get there,

and now there was no option

but for a costly frontal attack.

He then ordered the Wellingtons,

under a Colonel William Malone, to take the top.

He refused, he refused the order of his commanding officer,

and he said he will not do it in daylight.

He will do it at dawn where he's afforded cover,

he can plan the attack properly,

and use the bombardment prior to the attack

to capture the top of the hill.

That's exactly what happened.

During the morning of the 8th of August,

Wellington Battalion, commanded by William Malone,

stormed up to the top of this hill,

took the trenches, and started digging in.

The breakout was planned for the 7th of August,

and Chunuk Bair was the highest point

of the Ottoman defenses.

If it could be captured while the Turks were busy elsewhere,

there was a chance of cutting the peninsula in half.

The New Zealanders held the heights

for as long as they could, but they arrived too late

to support another attempt at breakout

by the Australians at The Neck.

He held on for two days.

He was supported by other New Zealand battalions.

The New Zealand Mounted Rifles came up,

two British battalions as well,

but they could just hold the reverse slope,

but not the summit.

So even though they had a brief glimpse

of the Dardanelles very early that morning

on the 8th of August,

that was lost to 'em later on that day,

never to be seen again.

While the senior officers

lost the initiative here on Chunuk Bair,

the soldiers fought heroically.

The fighting up at Chunuk Bair

was probably the most fierce of all Gallipoli battles.

The New Zealand regiments that were involved in here,

the Wellington Battalion for example,

the mounted rifles, suffered hugely.

And if you can imagine the ground around us here

just being full of dead and dying soldiers of both sides.

The Wellington Battalion, for example,

came up to the top of the hill with 700 men.

It came down from the hill with 35,

which gives you an illustration

just how heavy the casualties were.

That battalion ceased to exist.

They lost their commanding officer.

They lost all their company commanders.

They lost the vast majority of their officers.

Hardly anyone came down at all.

Meanwhile, the troops at Suvla Bay

had made no move towards the semicircle of hills

overlooking the coast,

although they knew that within 48 hours,

Ottoman reserves would be arriving.

Mustafa Kemal replaced the sick local commander.

On the 8th of August in the afternoon,

finally Turkish columns started reaching from long march

from the neck of peninsula, nearly 60 kilometers.

The Turkish 16th Army Corps,

12th Division and 7th Division.

Mustafa Kemal and his men were successful.

He said, "I am very grateful to British General Stopford,

because he waited for me two days till I get ready."

Suvla was not aimed to do anything more

than secure the base.

Once that was secure,

they would then use the forces ashore,

part of General Stopford's 9th Corps,

to support the ANZAC operation to break out of Anzac

where we're standing here, on the ridge,

push over the Sari Bair ridge,

and then try and cut the peninsula in half.

It's really the same plan as the 25th of April.

It hadn't changed that much.

It was just more men were available to do it this time,

which was something Hamilton wanted.

Now he has the men.

Now, additionally, he has the resource.

Could he do it?

The 48-hour delay

condemned the Suvla landings to failure.

When the British did move forward

and occupied some of the Anafarta hills,

they found the Turks were waiting for them.

Tantalizingly close was Chunuk Bair,

the high point where the New Zealanders

were fighting to the death.

Suvla Bay had become another useless enclave

of British troops in the Gallipoli campaign.

Ian Hamilton decided that it should at least

be linked with Anzac Bay,

and the Turks pushed back from their dominating position.

Between the 21st and the 27th of August 1915,

one of the most complex battles of the campaign

raged around Hill 60,

where the Australian Light Horse

managed to capture the frontline Turkish trenches

and take prisoners with the help

of Indian and New Zealand troops on the flanks.

They ran out of resources

before they could exploit their slight advantage,

and the Ottoman forces reoccupied

much of the ground they had lost.

The British troops at Suvla supported the action

by advancing on the Anafarta hills,

in particular Scimitar Hill.

Where hills, for example Scimitar Hill,

had been in British hands earlier on that day,

they had evacuated it in some confusion.

When they come back to capture Scimitar Hill,

it was in Ottoman hands.

There was also a lot of heavy brush,

and that became so tinder-dry

that any sort of spark set it off.

Very sadly, what happened to Scimitar Hill

and the surrounding area, it all caught fire,

not on the Turkish side, on the British side.

And the troops that were trying

to fight their way through it

were consumed very, very quickly by the fire.

It was the last battle of the campaign.

In September, Bulgaria entered the war,

giving Turkey direct access

to supplies of guns and shells from Germany,

and General Hamilton was replaced by General Charles Monro.

There were to be no more attacks in Gallipoli.

The Allies and Ottomans made life

as unpleasant for each other as possible by sniping,

even using periscopes to allow them

to keep their own heads down.

The campaign had been a dismal failure,

but the British and ANZAC troops

still had to survive and defend their positions.

They built tunnels and dugouts

to watch and listen for Turkish attacks.

Steve Chambers has found one of them

just below the machine gun post known as The Apex.

We know a lot about the war on top, in the trenches,

but at Gallipoli we don't know much

about the war underground.

This is a New Zealand tunnel

built towards the end of the campaign

by the New Zealand engineers and infantry.

Where it goes is from the Rhododendron Ridge,

from their front line, right under the Turkish positions.

It had two purposes:

one, as an observation post for the Turkish trenches

over on Battleship Hill, on the other side of this spur;

and also to listen to the Turks in their frontline trench.

The Turks would've been

probably 150 to 200 meters along this track,

under a defensive position called The Apex.

The tunnel proceeds for 100 meters

and then branches off to the left and downwards.

You know, the sandstone, the sediment here,

that has almost made this like concrete.

So even though it's under Fingorn Farm,

it's quite solid and holds together fairly well.

It's amazing to think this is 100 years old.

For the Allied soldiers,

the August heat was almost more lethal than the Turks.

Water was scarce, washing was complicated,

and flies infested the rotting corpses in no man's land.

Human refuse could not be washed away

and intestinal diseases spread like wildfire,

with the hellish sanitation conditions

making controlling the epidemics impossible.

Wounds became infected easily,

and hospital ships were soon overcrowded.

And yet, worse was to come

as the Allied invasion petered out.

(somber music)

The Allied troops were now essentially stranded

and useless to the war.

General Monro assessed the situation

and recommended evacuation.

Failures here and elsewhere

caused the British government to foam,

and Winston Churchill lost his job as navy minister.

Lord Kitchener came to see for himself,

and soon afterwards ordered evacuation.

Slowly and secretly,

British and Australian troops were withdrawn,

not before the winter set in

and yet more soldiers fell to frostbite and flash floods.

When Sir Ian Hamilton was given this job,

it was a real tough nut to crack

with the resources available,

but what he didn't have available were the troops.

You can blame Kitchener for that.

He didn't have the support of the navy when he needed it.

You can blame Winston Churchill for that.

General Sir Ian Hamilton, as an officer,

always hoped that one more push

would change the balance to his favor.

Unfortunately, he had several pushes

and all of those were failure,

and he was letting Kitchener know

that yes, we're almost there,

one more push and we'll be okay,

so he was withholding the truth, really,

from Earl Kitchener.

There was one Australian doctor,

Charles Ryan, good example.

This man was in Ottoman-Russian war in 1877,

in Pleven, in Bulgaria.

He was given Turkish medal, the Medjidie medal,

and he was in ANZAC,

he was director of hospitals from Australia.

And when they said this would be easy victory

and just go to Istanbul, he was saying,

"No, no, this will be very bloody, very bloody.

You don't know the Turks. Turks very determined people.

They will fight you until the last man."

He was right, actually.

In January 1916,

the last Allied troops were evacuated.

Now and for the next century,

the blame game raged among the British,

while the Turks consecrated this rugged land

as the birthplace of a nation.

(somber music)