Gallipoli: The New Zealand story by Christopher Pugsley

Page 1 of 3 View as a single page 5:00AM Friday April 25, 2008
By John Gardner

Soldiers spent the campaign in cramped trenches, just metres from the Turkish enemy. Photo / Supplied

No matter how familiar you are with the Gallipoli story it is impossible to read any account of that tragedy without being moved and troubled; moved by the suffering and troubled by the fact that such anguish seems to be the price of creating a national identity.

More than 90 years on, Anzac Day is celebrated as wholeheartedly as ever and new generations of New Zealanders are reflecting on the sacrifice of their forebears. Christopher Pugsley's book records in harrowing detail exactly how that price was paid.

This is not a new account. Just as Alan Moorehead's classic account of the campaign, first published in 1956, was reissued last year, so this book is a new edition based on a 1998 revision of Pugsley's original 1984 work, in conjunction with a TVNZ documentary. But among the wealth of books on the campaign - almost every local library has at least half a dozen - Pugsley's has a specific New Zealand perspective.

He is a military historian and the campaign is thoroughly analysed but the strength of the book is the wealth of personal histories, from high-ranking officers to the humblest orderlies. Frequently told in flat, unemotional language, they tell how men were willing to walk into a slaughterhouse in which their companions dropped all around them, without any faith in how they were led.

The big picture version is brutally simple. In 1915, the Allies, including Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand, mounted an attack on the Gallipoli peninsula on the southern-most shore of the Dardanelles, the channel between the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmara, a strategic waterway linking the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The aim was to help Russia by breaking through to the Dardanelles and driving on to the Turkish capital of Constantinople.

After two attempts by the Royal Navy failed to force the straits, troop landings were made. But despite bitter and heroic fighting, the Allies made no significant progress inland. Some eight months later the invading forces were pulled out with the evacuation, like Dunkirk later on - the most successful part of the ill-fated operation.

But compressed into this short episode was a saga which created a national myth, both for Australia and New Zealand.

Although the whole enterprise has been described as the fantasy brainchild of Winston Churchill, and it was certainly regarded by many in British high command as a wasteful sideshow from the main on the Western Front, it had real potential.

Major Arthur Temperley, a British regular officer and no great supporter of the colonial effort, commented of the second phase battle for the heights of Chunuk Bair: "The New Zealand Infantry Brigade was for 48 hours at the throat of the Turkish Empire and had support been forthcoming at the right time and place, the Turkish Army would have been beaten, Constantinople would have fallen and the war might have been shortened by two years."