Landing on the beaches from Hell

It is, of course, in Turkish Thrace, across a narrow strip of water from ancient Troy - the strategic waterway called The Dardanelles which separates Europe from Asia and where over 20,000 Britons never returned from the savage campaign fought there in 1915.

Many who fought and died were from the Lancashire Fusiliers (LFs), and many of those were Territorials from Bury. The LFs raised a total of 30 battalions in the Great War.

Of all their deeds the transcending feat was the landing, on 25 April 1915, by the 1st Battalion at Cape Helles at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsular on a beach which was ordered to be renamed Lancashire Landing by the commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton who said: "It is my firm conviction that no finer feat of arms has ever been achieved by the British soldier - or any other soldier - than the storming of these beaches from open boats on the morning of 25th April."

When, inspite of the bravery of the assault, the ambitious objectives of the invasion had not been secured and the casualties had been heavy, the men of the 1st/5th (Territorial) Battalion - the men who had trained in their spare time in the Drill Hall of the Castle Armoury in Bury - disembarked on Lancashire Landing, the very beach which their own 1st Battalion had won so gloriously 11 days earlier. Many of these men were to die, bringing a grief which bestrode the town all that summer and autumn, and which is still remembered today.

The invasion had a hopelessly over-optimistic plan: it was no D-Day style invasion of Normandy with its nervous but meticulous planning, and a brilliantly successful strategic deception. Hamilton's job at Gallipoli was to organise, in a matter of three weeks, the setting up of the largest amphibious operation ever attempted in the previous history of warfare. No invasion against beaches defended with modern weapons had ever been tried before.

It was the cliffs that were the killer on that first morning assisted by the barbed wire, some of it underwater. The beaches themselves had no comparison with Normandy: they were only a few hundred yards wide overlooked by cliffs and hills. There were no cliffs on the Normandy beaches, except at Omaha beach - the only Normandy invasion beach where heavy losses were suffered.

At Normandy, hundreds of miles had to be defended in case of tactical surprise: at Gallipoli the Turks knew we were coming, and the cliffs were protected by enfilading fire from positions overlooking the beaches. If there were any illusions about how tough the landings would be, they were chiefly in the underestimation of the fighting qualities of the Turks, who were fighting for their survival.

The 1st Battalion, LFs took the heavily defended cliffs from the beach, but the casualties were frightful. On that fateful day, six officers and 183 men were killed, four officers and 279 men wounded, and 61 men missing, a total of 533 casualties. The Battalion won six VCs, two DSOs, two MCs and a DCM; in doing so they entered military legend.

It was a nightmare, but imagine: the invading soldiers had to be rowed into the attack, yes rowed ashore in front of defended cliffs. The battalion was carried close to the shore in the cruiser HMS Euryalus. At 4am the companies transferred to small, ships' cutters, which were towed towards the shore, by steam-powered boats from the warships. When about 50 yards from the shore the pinnaces cast off, leaving the boats to be rowed to the beach by their naval crews, under covering fire from the warships. The Turks were waiting for them.

To realise the horror as the men reached the shore, consider the following based on an eyewitness account of a man in charge of one of the Euryalus cutters: "We landed the Lancashire Fusiliers, 35 in each boat. I shall never forget it as long as I live. We lost 19-20 of our ship's company. I would not like to go through the same again. It was wicked and I, like a lot more, never expected to come through it alive. We landed under a very heavy fire from our ship. It was deafening. There was no sign of the enemy till we touched the shore.

"Then they opened fire on us in the boats. They were very strongly entrenched above us in the cliffs, fired on us with automatic weapons. I was in charge of No12 boat and I told the men to lie down in the bottom of the boat, leaving myself and six oarsmen exposed to the enemy's fire. I then ordered them all to jump out and get under cover as quickly as they could. As soon as we touched the beach we could see wire entanglements. The fire was terrible; just like a hailstorm. I jumped out of the stern up to my arms in water and pushed the boat in. The sergeant jumped in front of me and got mortally wounded. The cries of the wounded were terrible.

"By now the Lancashires were ashore. We came off for more men and one man was killed in my crew. He was shot in the ear, and was quite dead when I picked him up. I could mention a lot of cases, but they are better left for the present. I hope I am spared to tell you the thrilling story when I come home. It is without equal in this war, landing troops under fire. There is such a bond between the Lancashire Fusiliers and us now that it will never be broken by (those) that are left."

General Hamilton had a good view of the landing; he wrote in his dispatch that 'So strong, in fact, were the defences of W beach (Lancashire Landing) that the Turks may well have considered them impregnable'. Of the 1st Battalion he wrote: "It was to the complete lack of the senses of danger or of fear of this daring battalion that we owed our astonishing success."

"Gallantly led by their officers, the Fusiliers hurled themselves ashore and, fired at from right, left and centre, commenced hacking their way through the wire. A long line of men was at once mown down as by a scythe, but the remainder were not to be denied "

Vice-Admiral De Roebeck the commander of the Naval Force, singled out the same action for special mention in his dispatch: "It is impossible to exalt too highly the service rendered by the 1st Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers in the storming of the beach; the dash and gallantry displayed was superb."

From Euryalus herself came another intimate tribute: "We are as proud as can be to have had the honour to carry your splendid regiment. We feel for you all in your great losses as if you were our own ship's company, but know the magnificent gallantry of your regiment has made the name more famous than ever."

The bravery of the ship's company of Euryalus, the men who rowed the warriors ashore, was largely unremarked. The ship lost 63 out of 80 ratings killed or wounded, but the words of praise for the infantry assault, given as they were independently of each other, offer an exalted testimony.

From that moment there was created an unbreakable bond between the ship's company of HMS Euryalus and the Lancashire Fusiliers - a bond which survives today: on Gallipoli Sunday a contingent from the Euryalus Veterans' Association will march with the Fusiliers to Bury Parish Church. The ship's battle-flag that was flown at the time of the Gallipoli landing is also lodged in Bury Parish Church.

The whole system of the Turkish defence of Gallipoli was based upon the principle that they must hold the hills so that they could overlook the enemy. Although the cliffs overlooking the landing beaches were taken by sublime bravery, the most important hills were never taken. It was not distance that counted on Gallipoli, nor even the number of soldiers or the guns of the Fleet; it was a simple issue of the hills. Many men, including men of the Bury Territorials were to die establishing this fact.

When the first objectives of the landings had not been achieved, and the cost in casualties so high, Hamilton needed reinforcements. He had his eye on the 42nd East Lancashire Division which was part of the force defending Egypt and which included the 1st/5th Battalion, the Lancashire Fusiliers. These were the men who had joined the Territorials before the war and who had volunteered, almost to a man, to renounce their 'home defence only' obligations. The 42nd East Lancashire Division was the first territorial division to arrive at Gallipoli.

These Territorial - the Saturday Night Soldiers as they had been cheaply dubbed - weren't supposed to be part of the Gallipoli campaign at all. They had been in Egypt since September 1914 as a garrison and securing the Suez Canal. In being there they had the grave misfortune to be in wrong place at the wrong time. All of them were to suffer; many were to die. The total losses of Bury Territorials in the Great War, many of them at Gallipoli with no known grave, are staggering.

Can you imagine: a town of 50,000 or so population, which loses 1,662 of its men? This is only a part of the suffering of Bury. If you add in the families touched by the battle casualties of the campaign but who survived its savagery, one can begin to understand the degree of the human impact of such a tragedy concentrated as it was on the small community of Bury.

There were over 42,000 Commonwealth soldiers and sailors who died at Gallipoli or of their wounds elsewhere. Of these, 29,000 were British, 8,000 Australian, 3,000 New Zealand and 2,000 Indian. The French lost about 10,000. The Turkish losses are vague but the official estimate of 80,000 dead is thought to be a considerable underestimate. The great majority of soldiers who died on Gallipoli have no known grave.

These losses, though frightful, are very small compared with the mass destruction of life on the Western Front in France; but the losses at Gallipoli were different; they were suffered in defeat and there was no family that was not touched by loss or suffering, or both.

HOWARD MALLINSON lives in Surrey and has a third generation interest in Gallipoli. It wasn't until he retired and inherited a clock that he had any knowledge of his family's loss at Gallipoli.

The inscription on the clock - a retirement present to his great grandfather from the officers of the 1st Volunteer Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers - was the only clue to a Gallipoli story which had gone to the grave.

Howard's book Where is Gallipoli is a detective story of how the secret was discovered: so great was the grief at the loss of Private George Vivian Ash, a Territorial with the 1st/5th Battalion, that the Ash family womenfolk - no men of the family survived the Great War - shut the memory away.

Now Howard has discovered that his grandmother's brother died in the third battle of Krithia.

Here, in this edited extract from his book, he shares the Gallipoli remembrance with all those other Bury families who lost family members at Gallipoli. "The mystery is now solved," says Howard. "Now I understand why, as a child, my grandmother could only spit the words 'The Dardanelles' as she held back her tears."

l Where is Gallipoli? is available, price £17.95, from the Lancashire Fusiliers Museum, Bolton Road, Bury