Dissecting a legend : reconstructing the landing at Anzac, Gallipoli, 25 april 1915, using the experience of the 11th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force

Abstract

This thesis re-examines and reconstructs the Anzac Landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 by applying a new approach to an old topic - it uses the records of a single battalion over a single day to create a body of evidence with which to construct a history of the battle. This focus on the battle's participants might be expected to shed light only their immediate experience, but it also creates a profile of the fighting on this day. This is in part due to the methodology developed to assess and compile accounts, but also to the fact that the chosen battalion, the 11th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Brigade, 1st Division, Australian Imperial Force, landed with the covering force for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and its members fought from Fisherman's Hut to 400 Plateau, on Third Ridge and Battleship Hill. This study therefore places much of the battlefield under the microscope. The use of veterans' accounts to re-tell the story of the Landing is not new. Anecdotes are often layered over the known history, established in C.E.W. Bean's Official History of Australia in the War, The Story of ANZAC, Volume I, to colour narrative and connect with personal experience. Less frequently are they reliably used as historical evidence. In this thesis, letters, diaries, memoirs, manuscripts, photographs, maps, diagrams and other information, collected from private collections, libraries, museums, archives and period newspapers, the battlefield and many secondary sources, are used as evidence to construct events, chronologies and frames of reference in order to reconstruct the history of the day. This thesis will argue that eye witness testimony can be extremely unreliable when taken in isolation, but when verified, contextualised and validated by a thorough and robust methodology, can provide valuable information with which to re-examine some of the battle's significant events and outstanding questions. Why did the advance stop? Why was the high ground not taken? Why do the accounts of the adversaries of the best known clash of the day not match? The missing evidence may lie in the smallest of fragments - not in isolation, but when examined in aggregate. This shift in the way evidence is collected and analysed leads to a shift in the way the battle is interpreted. The Landing has not previously been studied at this level of detail. Bean amalgamated the disparate and confused accounts of that day into a canvas; this thesis digs deeper into the foundation data to analyse, verify, add to and reconstruct the day. It builds on and complements Bean's work, confirming and enriching some aspects of his account, filling gaps, and, in some aspects, potentially re-writing the history of the Landing. There has been much rhetoric over the years and many myths and legends surround this battle. This thesis will argue that even though nearly 100 years have passed since the Landing, and well over 1000 books written on the campaign, much can be learned by returning to the 'primary source, the soldier'.