Gallipoli (99 page)

For his bravery in forcing the Narrows on 25 April 1915, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) – a far lesser honour than the Victoria Cross awarded to the other three Allied submarine captains, one of whom had failed to get through, and the other two only having accomplished it once Stoker had proved it could be done.

For a brief time, he returned to the submarine service, but his passion had gone, and he left the Royal Navy in 1921, before embarking on an entirely different path in life, finding great success as an actor, writer and producer. His book
Straws in the Wind
, about his adventures on
AE2
, came out in 1925, and was a critical and commercial success. But his greatest triumph was on the stage and screen, where he frequently played the role of a military officer.

In 1925, he got remarried to a talented young English actress, Dorothie Pidcock, and the two lived happily ever after, or at least for the next 41 years. Fred and Elizabeth Brenchley's book,
Stoker's Submarine
, quotes veteran Tudor Jenkins, writing about the submarine captain in the London
Evening Standard
in 1965, on the 50th anniversary of the landing. ‘Now a spry 80,' Jenkins wrote, ‘he lives in Chelsea. I asked him whether he sometimes wondered whether it would not have been better if his message to de Robeck had not got through? “Maybe an immediate evacuation would have saved those terrible casualties,” Stoker replied.'
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The Brenchleys also quote from a letter that Stoker wrote to
AE2
crew member Cecil Bray in the mid-1960s: ‘The receipt of our signal stopped the Anzacs being withdrawn that night,' he told Bray. ‘What a tragedy that campaign failed. It would have altered all history. No Russian revolution and possibly no communism.'

Dacre Stoker died on 2 February 1966. He, too, was a great.

Stoker's closest equivalent in this saga – a veritable lone wolf, seeking to sow havoc in enemy waters – was the admirable Karl von Müller, of
Emden
fame. Müller spent most of the rest of the Great War in a POW camp for German officers in the English Midlands. He was the ringleader of 21 of them escaping via a tunnel to briefly breathe the air of liberty once more, before being quickly recaptured. Falling ill in 1918, he was repatriated back to Germany just before the end of the war as part of a humanitarian prisoner exchange. Retiring from the navy within months of the war's conclusion, he briefly served as a politician, before dying on 11 March 1923.

Müller's one-time offsider, Kapitänleutnant Hellmuth von Mücke, returned to Germany a hero, having led his men to safety over nearly 7000 miles. He wrote two books on the saga, both of which sold well. Like Müller, von Mücke became involved in German politics after the war, and though he started out as a Conservative, by the end of the 1920s he was an outspoken pacifist. Through the 1930s, he was such a vociferous critic of Adolf Hitler that he was briefly imprisoned in 1936, and then again briefly at the beginning of the Second World War. A notable peace activist after the war, he died on 30 July 1957.

With the Ottoman surrender, General Liman von Sanders, then in Constantinople after unsuccessfully leading the Ottoman Army in Syria, gave himself up, and for his trouble the British imprisoned him on suspicion of war crimes for the next six months before releasing him in August 1919. He returned to Germany a respected figure in a devastated nation. Shortly after penning his memoirs,
Five Years in Turkey
, he died, aged 74, in Munich in 1929.

While the Dardanelles campaign, overall, is remembered in Germany, Great Britain and France, and revered in Australia and New Zealand, it is in Turkey itself that it achieves its greatest significance, changing an entire nation. The day the Turks would choose to commemorate it, however, would not be the day of the landing but, rather, a month earlier, 18 March, when they had successfully beaten back the Fleet from entering the Dardanelles. This day would ever after be known as ‘
Çanakkale Deniz Zaferi
'
⁵¹
or ‘The Çanakkale Naval Victory'.

Just after the Ottomans surrendered in October 1918, under the sheer weight of Allied arms pressing them on all sides, two key leaders of the Turkish Government, General Enver and Talaat, were among those who, on 3 November, fled across the Black Sea on board a German battleship to exile in Berlin.

Talaat stayed in Germany, living quietly under an assumed name, while Enver went on to Moscow. They were both soon condemned to death,
in absentia
, by a British court in Constantinople, for the Armenian genocide. The intent of both men was to rise again, ideally in a newly established Turkish state that could strike back at the Allies. But things would prove difficult …

On 15 March 1921, Talaat was just leaving his house in the affluent Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was the hand of the young Armenian man Soghomon Tehlirian, who had been lucky to escape the Armenian massacre of 1915, though his beloved mother, father and sisters had not. Left for dead, taken in by a Kurdish family, he had escaped through Persia and, by a long and circuitous route, made his way to Germany to start a new life. Two weeks earlier, Tehlirian had awoken from a nightmare: the vision of the corpse of his beloved mother, standing up before him, looking him in the eyes and saying, ‘You know Talaat is here and yet you do not seem to be concerned. But you seem quite heartless and are not my son.'
⁵²

A cry in the night. He can bear it no more.

Now, as Talaat turns, Tehlirian points his nine-millimetre German automatic pistol straight at the Turk's forehead. It is
not
a shot heard around the world. In fact, it is not even heard by Talaat. For, after Tehlirian pulls the trigger, the bullet shreds Talaat's brain before the sound can reach him. He falls to the ground, blood gushing from his head.

After a cursory two-day trial, Soghomon Tehlirian was found innocent by a German court on grounds of temporary insanity due to the traumatic experience he had gone through during the genocide. In the course of the trial, an exchange took place:

The fate of Enver was similar, even if what actually happened is less clear-cut. The upshot was the same: in fact, many shots from the Red Army all over his body on 4 August 1922, after the Russians perceived that Enver had double-crossed them.

No less than Vladimir Lenin had sent Enver to the ‘Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic' in Central Asia to suppress the revolt there against the Bolsheviks, only to find that the Turk had colluded with the locals to rise against them! The most compelling account of his death is that, when the Russians came for him, Enver gripped his Koran and charged straight for them, firing all the while, before being cut down … and then having his head cut off for good measure. He was 40 years old.

The Ottoman victory at Çanakkale turned out to be the making of Mustafa Kemal. After recovering from his poor health in Constantinople, he was sent to various garrisons throughout the Empire. He was at the head of Seventh Army in Palestine during the final Allied offensive, which was the decisive blow that defeated the Turks in 1918.

Unhappy with the peace settlement imposed upon the Turks by the victorious Allies, Mustafa Kemal began and led the ‘Turkish Nationalist Movement', which ultimately waged the Turkish War of Independence. In 1921, Mustafa Kemal established a provisional government in the central Anatolian town of Ankara, away from the occupied Constantinople.

The following year, the Ottoman Sultanate was formally abolished, and, in 1923, Turkey became a secular republic under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, the peace treaty that finally ended the state of war that had existed between the Turks and the Allies since 1914. The Turkish National Movement culminated in the Grand National Assembly, and Mustafa Kemal became the new republic's first President.

Once in office, President Mustafa Kemal launched a drive for modernity in all things, to convert the new, constitutional Republic of Turkey into a secular, modern nation-state. During his 15-year presidency, a range of sweeping reforms were introduced in every field. It started with a new constitution, which borrowed heavily from established European codes. He also introduced language reform, which saw the official script changed from Arabic to Latin. He implemented broad education reforms, many of which were aimed at secularising society and lessening the influence of religion in public life. His government nationalised industry, established a banking system, introduced reforms to encourage equal opportunity for women, and brought in a number of other measures designed to build a new nation-state for the Turks.

In 1934, a law was introduced requiring all citizens to adopt a surname,
à la
the Europeans. Mustafa Kemal, never one to hide his light under a bushel, agreed with the Grand National Assembly that he be given the surname ‘Atatürk', as in, ‘Father of the Turks'.

His triumph at Gallipoli of course remained the foundation of his legend, and yet, despite the ferocity with which he had fought the invaders, he evinced no hatred for them after the war was over, and in 1935 penned words that became famous: ‘Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours … you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

‘Today we honour the men who fought on both sides at Gallipoli. We honour the countries from which they came, but above all we honour the spirit of peace and friendship which has proved to be an enduring legacy of the Gallipoli conflict.'
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Those magnificent words are now inscribed on a monument not quite as John Monash had predicted, ‘on some high plateau overlooking Anzac beach,'
⁵⁵
but in fact right by the beach itself, honouring all who fought in this extraordinary campaign.

In 1990, for the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, the government of Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke flew 58 Diggers back to the fatal shore. In April 2014, I was sitting beside him at a lunch for the Australian Republican Movement, and he told me that it was the most moving moment of his time in office when the old Diggers arrived at Gallipoli and gingerly climbed off their bus to be cheered to the echo by the 4000-strong crowd of Australians, including many young backpackers, who had gathered for the occasion. And then when the Diggers had shuffled forward to meet a similar number of old Turkish soldiers waiting to greet them.

It was just as in days of yore, as had happened on 24 May 1915, during the first armistice.

Tentatively at first, and then with growing confidence, the Anzacs and Turks rise from their trenches and slowly walk towards each other, scarcely believing that this is possible, that they could really be upright in no-man's-land without being shot to pieces.

These men from countries on opposite sides of the planet continue to walk towards each other – over the corpses of their fallen friends, their brothers, the enemies who they have shot – until they are face to face.

‘The two groups came together on the very spot where they had fought for their lives,' Mr Hawke said, ‘shook hands, embraced, and clapped each other on the back. There was no rancour and many tears, and not just from the crowd. It was a truly wonderful thing to see.'
⁵⁶

Two of those men – Jack Ryan, 95, from Australia, and Hüseyin Kaçmaz, 97, from Turkey – were featured in an article, with photograph, in
The Sydney Morning Herald
, as they kissed each other on the cheek, hugged … and wept.

Jack Ryan and Hüseyin Kaçmaz embracing at the 1990 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing (AP Photo via AAP/Burhan Ozbilici)

(Me? I should like to think that, later on, they exchanged cigarettes, had a cup of tea, and for once the Australians might have had something better than bully beef to offer and, at last, some milk to lend.)

At the midday commemoration at Lone Pine a few hours later, when Prime Minister Hawke noted that, ‘We do not come here to glorify war,' the veterans ‘wept silently but called “Hear, hear”.'

And some wept openly …

‘Of course I cried,' veteran George Abraham, DCM, 92, told
The Herald
. ‘Did you? Yes? It's good that so many young people did. It shows me the spirit is still there …'
⁵⁷