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Tag: Gallipoli

  • Secrets of WWI battlefield uncovered

    Archaeological survey is one of the most extensive historic war site to date

    By Wynne Parry

    Department of Veterans' Affairs, Australian Government A water bottle with a bullet hole was among the artifacts found during an archeological survey of a First World War site, the Anzac battlefield, on Turkish soil.

    An ongoing archaeological survey of a World War I site in Turkey has so far uncovered a maze of trenches, as well as about 200 artifacts that offer clues to life on a Gallipoli battlefield where troops faced off for eight months.

    The survey is one of the most extensive to date of an historic battlefield.

    On April 25, 1915, less than a year after World War I broke out, Allied forces — from Australia, New Zealand, Britain and France — landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula, now part of Turkey. Almost a century ago, this land belonged to the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany and the Central Powers.

    The survey is being conducted on the Anzac battlefield, which measures 2 miles by 1.5 miles (3.2 kilometers by 2.4 kilometers), where the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps (known as the Anzacs) faced off against troops from the Ottoman Empire until Dec. 19 and Dec. 20, 1915, when the Anzac troops evacuated.

    As at other WWI battlefields, troops fought from trenches dug into the ground. Some of the networks of trenches found near the frontline of the Anzac battlefield were so dense that they would be difficult to map, even using modern techniques, according to the researchers.

    The trenches for both sides were remarkably close to each other, largely because of the rugged terrain, which made their layout much less orderly than trench systems established at WWI battlefields in western Europe, according to Richard Reid of the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs and Ian McGibbon of New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage, both senior historians working on the project.

    The frontline trenches were occupied at all times, since the two sides could be just 10 to 20 yards (9.1 to 18.3 meters) apart. At a spot on the Anzac battlefield called Quinn’s Post, both sides constantly lobbed bombs at each other, so troops were regularly rotated in and out, Reid and McGibbon wrote to LiveScience in an email.

    The survey, done as part of the second season of field work at the site, also uncovered the top of a tier of terraces constructed to house reserve troops at Quinn’s Post on the Allied side. This discovery was a pleasant surprise because erosion was feared to have obliterated these terraces, they wrote.

    “In terms of archaeology, the most significant finds are perhaps related to living conditions on both sides of the lines — the eating and drinking habits of the troops. A Turkish oven was located, and 200 relics of the fighting, ranging from bullets to bullet-holed water cans,” they wrote.

    These include pieces of medical bottles; tin containers that once held food, such asbully beef, sardines and jam; expended ammunition; shrapnel and barbed wire fragments. It appears the Turkish troops had more access to fresh-cooked meals than troops on the Allied side, where food tins were more abundant.

    “Despite the historical importance of the Gallipoli battlefield, our knowledge of this area to date has been based on maps and written accounts. This area has never been studied in detail through modern archaeological survey methods,” said Warren Snowdon, Australia’s Minister for Veterans’ Affairs in a statement.

    The survey, part of the five-year-long Turkey, Australia and New Zealand Historical and Archaeological Survey of the Anzac Battlefield is one of the largest investigations in battlefield archaeology ever attempted, according to the Australian government.

    This year and last year, excavators have found almost 18,763 feet (5,719 meters) of trenches, 16 cemeteries, about 200 artifacts and numerous collapsed tunnels, dugouts and other features. The next session of field work is planned for September 2012.

    From a military perspective, the Turks won the campaign but lost more than 80,000 dead. The Ottoman Army never really recovered from this effort, and ultimately had to accept defeat in 1918, wrote McGibbon and Reid.

    Ultimately, this campaign was important to the development of modern Turkey, New Zealand and Australia, they wrote.

    You can follow LiveScience writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

    via Secrets of WWI battlefield uncovered – Technology & science – Science – LiveScience – msnbc.com.

  • Ottoman army enjoyed fresh food on front line

    Ottoman army enjoyed fresh food on front line

    Bridie Smith

    The Sphinx at Gallipoli . . . the second fieldwork survey yielded new findings about life during the campaign. Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library, New

    A SIMPLE Ottoman kitchen – complete with brick oven – discovered as part of a five-year survey of Gallipoli has highlighted the two extremes of life on the 1915 battlefield.

    While the Diggers were eating bully beef and other canned and processed food, their Turkish opponents ate fresh produce prepared in a terraced kitchen.

    The field kitchen was built much closer to the front line than the Allied food area, which was littered with tins and jam jars.

    Located during the second phase of a combined Australian, New Zealand and Turkish project to survey the battlefield before the 2015 centenary, the Ottoman kitchen was among the most revealing discoveries made last month, according to the survey archaeologist Tony Sagona from Melbourne University.

    ”One of the things that struck me … was that all the metal food containers that we found came from the Anzac side of the battlefield … The Ottoman army was largely cooking their food brought in from the villages.”

    The Allies had field kitchens with camp fires and their diet differed dramatically. Turkish archives suggest soup was a feature on the Ottoman menu.

    On the northern front line areas of the battlefield, archaeologists and historians found one of Gallipoli’s most significant sites on the peninsula’s scrubby vegetation – Malone’s Terraces at Quinn’s Post, considered a critical part of the Allied line.

    The historian Richard Reid said the Ottoman army and the Anzacs would have been no more than 10 metres apart. ”If either side had broken through, that would have been the end of the campaign,” he said.

    The Allied terrace was named after Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone, of New Zealand’s Wellington Battalion, who organised the building of the terraces for troops to sleep in. This dramatically improved conditions when the Kiwis took over from the Australians in June 1915.

    Malone’s Terrace was one of over 30 dugouts, terraced areas and tunnel entrances surveyed last month. More than 1700 metres of trench were also traced, in addition to the 4000 metres of trench mapped last year.

    Among more than 130 artefacts retrieved were buttons, belt buckles, bullet shells, shards from medicine jars and three bullet-holed water bottles.

    via Ottoman army enjoyed fresh food on front line.

  • Robert Fisk: Great War secrets of the Ottoman Arabs

    Robert Fisk: Great War secrets of the Ottoman Arabs

    Forgotten soldiers. We all know about Gallipoli; hopelessly conceived mess, dreamed up by Churchill to move the Great War from the glued trenches of France to a fast-moving invasion of Germany’s Ottoman allies in 1915.

    Thousands of Arabs joined the fight against Anzac troops in Gallipoli
    Thousands of Arabs joined the fight against Anzac troops in Gallipoli

    Embark a vast army of Australians, New Zealanders, Brits, French and others east of Istanbul in order to smash “Johnny Turk”. Problem: the Turks fought back ferociously as Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk, titan of the 20th century, etc) used his Turkish 19th Army Division to confront the invaders’ first wave. Problem two: most of the division were not Turks at all.

    They were Arabs. Indeed, two-thirds of the first men to push back the Anzac forces were Syrian Arabs from what is today Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and “Palestine”. And of the 87,000 “Turkish” troops who died defending the Dardanelles, many were Arabs. As Palestinian Professor Salim Tamari now points out, the same applies to the Ottoman battles of Suez, Gaza and Kut al-Amara. In the hitherto unknown diary of Private Ihsan Turjman of the Ottoman Fourth Army – he would today be called a Palestinian Arab – there was nothing but scorn for those Arab delegations from Palestine and Syria who sent delegations “to salute the memory of our martyrs in this war and to visit the wounded”.

    What, he asked in his secretly kept diary, were these Arabs playing at? “Do they mean to strengthen the relationship between the Arab and Turkish nations… truth be told, the Palestinian and Syrian people are a cowardly and submissive lot. For if they were not so servile, they would have revolted against these Turkish barbarians,” he wrote. This is stunning stuff.

    Far more Arabs fought against the Allies on behalf of the Ottomans than ever joined Lawrence’s Arab revolt, but here is Private Turjman expressing fury at his masters.

    Year of the Locust is an odd little book, terribly short but darkly fascinating, concentrating on the Great War diaries of three Ottoman soldiers, one of them an actual Turk, the others Palestinian Arabs. We are used to British and German soldiers’ accounts of the Great War; scarcely ever do we read of the personal lives of our Ottoman opponents. The Turjman family home, by extraordinary chance, is the very same Jerusalem building, in ruins since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war but now transformed into an art gallery, which I visited in Jerusalem just three weeks ago today.

    In 1917, when Turjman was shot dead by an Ottoman officer, Palestinian Arabs were less concerned about the Balfour Declaration than whether the British would give them independence, annex them to Egypt or allow them a Syrian homeland. How wrong could they have been? Britain had no intention of adding to its Egyptian interests when it had already given its support to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Later, as Tamari recounts, the lives of the other two diarists, one Turkish, the other Arab, would revolve around Palestinians who came to believe that it was Jewish immigration that would threaten their future. But it is the Great War that dominates their memoirs.

    In the anti-Ottoman literature that permeated the Arab world (and the West) after the war, it is important to remember these Ottomans, Turkish or Arab. There is a touch of Robert Graves here. Turjman’s diary records the plague of locusts that settled upon Jerusalem, the cholera and typhus and the 50 Jerusalem prostitutes sent to entertain Turkish officers, the Ottoman troops hanged outside the Jaffa Gate for desertion, the Turkish aircraft that crashes (“badly trained pilots or badly maintained engines”). Turjman even has a crush on a married woman.

    Long forgotten now are the Arab-Turkish Ottoman inmates of the Tsarist prison camp at Krasnoyarsk, in Russia, where Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, born in Jerusalem in 1892, ended up. Islam united them; class divided them. But there were concerts, sports clubs, football teams, a camp library, a Great War version of all the stalags and oflags made famous in the Second World War. Come the Bolshevik revolution, Shehadeh high-tailed it back to the Middle East – via Manchuria, Japan, China, India and Egypt via the Red Sea.

    But the most impressive text in this tiny book is not a diary but a letter from Shehadeh’s wife, Saema, in Jerusalem when, 30 years later, he had set off for Gaza as a British mandate officer. “I woke up early this morning,” she writes. “I walked around in the garden for a while. I picked up some flowers and leaves. I picked up some beans to cook for myself. While I was milling around, you were always on my mind. It is your presence that makes this garden beautiful.

    “Nothing has a taste without you. May God not deprive me of your presence, for it is you who makes my (our) life beautiful. When you left us last time I noticed that you had a little cold. I am thinking about it. Let me know about your health. Your life’s partner, who loves you with all her heart. Saema.” Now that’s quite a love letter to get from your wife.

    via Robert Fisk: Great War secrets of the Ottoman Arabs – Robert Fisk, Commentators – The Independent.

  • Turk teens help forge ties

    Turk teens help forge ties

    CRAIG HOGGETT | April 26, 2011 12.01am

    Turkish students, from left, Doruk Akarcay, 17, Idil Cengiz, 17, Cem Cavus, 17, at the Anzac Day ceremony in Hobart yesterday. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES
    Turkish students, from left, Doruk Akarcay, 17, Idil Cengiz, 17, Cem Cavus, 17, at the Anzac Day ceremony in Hobart yesterday. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES

    SEVEN Turkish students have marked the 96th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings by urging people to focus on reconciliation.

    A student exchange program, Tears of Gallipoli, has been established to forge closer ties between Australia, New Zealand and Turkey.

    Tears of Gallipoli also aims to help heal the scars left by World War I.

    The Tasmanian branch of the Returned and Services League of Australia invited the students to attend Anzac Day ceremonies in Hobart yesterday including the laying of a wreath at the main service.

    After the dawn service, 17-year-olds Doruk Akarcay, Cem Cavus and Idil Cengiz from the Istanbul Lisesi School said it was an honour to be part of the dawn service and the wreath-laying ceremonies.

    The three youngsters said it was important to remember those who went to war regardless of the countries they served.

    Doruk said Australia, New Zealand and Turkey all suffered from World War I so it was important to remember it together.

    World War I is an important part of the Turkish education system’s curriculum.

    The students said yesterday’s service was very different from those held in Turkey where the 250,000 people who died during the war are honoured on March 18.

    But they said the reasons for the services were the same.

    “It’s the same pain so it’s important that we remember what happened,” Idil said.

    And Cem said: “It is also very important for new generations to remember what happened during World War I.”

    via Turk teens help forge ties Tasmania News – The Mercury – The Voice of Tasmania.

  • Turkey holds int’l ceremony for Canakkale Battles 96th anniversary

    Turkey holds int’l ceremony for Canakkale Battles 96th anniversary

    mehteran

    “Canakkale Battles”, also known as “The Gallipoli Campaign”, took place at Gelibolu peninsula in Turkey from April 1915 to January 1916, during the First World War.

    Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that Canakkale in northwestern Turkey was the place where the first heartbeats of the Republic of Turkey were heard.

    An international ceremony took place in Gelibolu Peninsula in the northwestern province of Canakkale to mark the 96th anniversary of the Canakkale Battles.

    Wreaths were laid at the Monument of Martyrs on behalf of Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, France, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Pakistan and the United Kingdom.

    Davutoglu said at the ceremony, “this battle which claimed lives of our grandfathers, has laid foundation of sound friendly ties between Turkish, Australian and New Zealander peoples. We think that Canakkale was the place where the first heartbeats of the Republic of Turkey were heard. Modern Republic of Turkey has risen from the ashes of an empire thanks to courage and determination of young soldiers who sacrificed their lives to defend their country.”

    “Canakkale Battles”, also known as “The Gallipoli Campaign”, took place at Gelibolu peninsula in Turkey from April 1915 to January 1916, during the First World War.

    A joint British and French operation was mounted to capture the Ottoman capital of Istanbul and secure a sea route to Russia. Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) formed the backbone of a 200,000-man British-led army that landed at Gelibolu. The attempt failed, with heavy casualties on both sides. The campaign resonated profoundly among all nations involved.

    Nearly 1 million soldiers fought in the trench warfare at Gelibolu. The allies recorded 55,000 killed in fighting with 10,000 missing and 21,000 dead of disease. Turkish casualties were estimated at around 250,000.

    The battle is considered as a defining moment in the history of the Turkish people. The struggle laid the grounds for the Turkish War of Independence and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey eight years later under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, himself a commander at Gelibolu.

    AA

    via Turkey holds int’l ceremony for Canakkale Battles 96th anniversary | Diplomacy | World Bulletin.

  • Gallipoli battlefield being mapped by GPS

    Gallipoli battlefield being mapped by GPS

    Archaeologists in Turkey are making a detailed survey of the famous World War One battle of Gallipoli. Using period military maps and GPS technology, they’re mapping the old trenches and redoubts used by both sides.

    bundesarchivbild183 r36253trkeigallipolimg unterstandGallipoli was the scene of fierce fighting starting in 1915. A peninsula with highlands dominating the Dardanelles strait linking the Black and the Aegean seas, it guarded the western approach to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire was on Germany’s side during World War One and the British Empire’s high command believed an attack on Gallipoli would be the first step to knocking the Ottomans out of the war.

    They were wrong. The Ottoman Empire, long dismissed “the sick man of Europe”, put up a determined resistance and the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and French troops got stuck on the beaches as Ottoman troops pummeled them from the highlands. After nine bloody months, the allies sailed away.

    The international team of Turkish, Australian, and New Zealand archaeologists and historians have discovered large numbers of artifacts from the battle and are busy working out a complete map of the complicated network of trenches, many of which can still be clearly seen today.

    The battle started 25 April 1915, and this date is marked as ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, who did some of the toughest fighting in the campaign. Many people in both of these countries feel the soldiers’ efforts proved the worth of the two young nations.

    Last year archaeologists discovered the HMS Lewis and a barge sunk off the shore.

    via Gallipoli battlefield being mapped by GPS | Gadling.com.