Instead of being landed on the gently rising slopes of "Brighton Beach" further south, grave British errors of planning saw them landed at night on a deadly narrow cove beside Ari Burnu headland (above). The landing place (later to be known as "Anzac Cove") was hemmed in by steep hills, very rugged terrain, and mountain ranges that would clearly favour a defender on the heights who could pour fire down on the Anzacs.
It was not until I reached page 124 of this treatment of the British-engineered Gallipoli disaster in 1915 that I suspected Dr Peter Stanley's purpose in writing the book was to continue his tedious practice of disparaging Australians and Australia's military achievements. Amazon does not provide any rating for books below one star. Having given Dr Stanley's "Lost Boys of Anzac" an effective "fail" rating, I feel obliged to explain my reasons even if that requires a longer review than is usual on Amazon.
"The Lost Boys of Anzac" purports to cover the Australian landings on Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 and Australians who died on that first day. It is written by an academic historian who appears to have no significant understanding of military strategy and tactics. In a radio interview with Lucinda Schmidt on 17 December 2008, Dr Stanley is on public record denying that he was "the type of military historian who enjoys 'arid technical analysis' of battle strategy". He chose to describe himself to her as a "military social historian" - whatever that might be; but it does not suggest profound knowledge of military strategy and tactics. Despite this disavowal of professional interest in military strategy and tactics, Dr Stanley would have us accept that he can claim expert knowledge about how the landings on Gallipoli could have been managed better by "a handful of Australian generals" when he writes in "Lost Boys of Anzac":
"Between the landing and about noon, when the first (Ottoman) counter-attacks developed, the landing was lost…Unaware of how weak the Ottoman opposition actually was and fearful of counterattacks that took hours to develop, they (the Australians) halted on what seemed to be defensible features. The nearest Ottoman reserves were soon on the road marching towards the sound of the guns, but were several hours away from arriving in any strength. By the time Ottoman troops had reached Gun Ridge, a handful of Australian generals had thrown away the battle for Anzac." (at page 124)
Peter Stanley makes four claims in this quoted paragraph from "Lost Boys of Anzac" that are not only false but utter nonsense, and I will show this to be so in the course of this review. In his own review of "Lost Boys of Anzac" in the "Weekend Australian" of 19-20 April 2014, Gerard Windsor could not help posing the obvious question about this typical Stanley book: "no mention, note, nor is there anywhere in the book, of a fiasco that was the doing of British blimps and dolts. Australia blew it, is the Stanley thesis."
English-born Stanley's ridiculous blaming of "a handful of Australian generals" in this book for the failure of the Gallipoli landings exposes what appears to be either abysmal ignorance or driving personal bias concerning the cause of the Gallipoli disaster. Whatever the author's motivation, I feel obliged to prove that "British blimps and dolts", to use Gerard Windsor's apt description, were wholly responsible for a British-initiated and engineered fiasco that cost so many Australian, New Zealand, British, and French lives on Gallipoli in 1915.
Peter Stanley's credibility immediately falls off a cliff when he blames "a handful of Australian generals" for the disaster at Anzac Cove. There was only one Australian general involved in the Anzac landings on 25 April 1915. He was Major General William Bridges, and he was the commander of the 1st Australian Division. Bridges had no role in planning the Gallipoli disaster. He was a fighting soldier who landed with his troops under Turkish fire on 25 April 1915. General Bridges was killed by the Turks on 18 May 1915, and I feel that Stanley insults the memory of a gallant soldier when he attributes to him any blame for what was an entirely British orchestrated disaster on Gallipoli.
British Lieutenant General William Birdwood was in overall command of the two Anzac divisions that comprised the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and Birdwood planned the deeply flawed and ultimately disastrous Anzac landings. No "colonial" generals, Australian or New Zealander, had any say in the planning and execution of the disastrous Gallipoli landings. Peter Stanley either lacks the capability to understand this, or chooses to refuse to understand it in his book.
The hare-brained Dardanelles Campaign and Gallipoli landings were wholly British-engineered disasters produced by British planners Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War Lord Herbert Kitchener, General Sir Ian Hamilton, and Lieutenant General William Birdwood. It was Churchill's reckless plan, in his political role as First Lord of the Admiralty, to attempt to force the narrow and heavily defended Dardanelles strait with old British battleships - regardless of casualties. The Dardanelles strait was sewn with row after row of German-supplied mines and defended by German-manned heavy shore artillery. This plan was doomed to failure from the beginning, and the First Sea Lord, Admiral John Fisher, opposed Churchill's plan as being very high risk. Lord Fisher had been recalled to naval duty when he was an old man and in poor health. Churchill's bullying overcame Fisher's resistance and the high risk Dardanelles plan was initiated. When Churchill's Dardanelles plan failed with heavy loss of battleships and lives on 18 March 1915, the British initiated the unplanned and equally disastrous Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915.
Stanley's produces two absurd claims concerning the strength of the Turkish defences on Gallipoli. He claims that the Ottoman (i.e. Turkish) opposition on Gallipoli was "weak" and that the two Anzac divisions (comprising Australians and New Zealanders) were facing only Ottoman "reserves". The British commander at Gallipoli, Sir Ian Hamiliton, had only two Anzac divisions, two British divisions, and a French contingent. Stanley appears to have no appreciation of the fact that the German-led, German-trained, and German-equipped Ottoman army on the Gallipoli peninsular comprised six divisions and could call on a reserve of ten divisions located off the peninsula. The Turkish soldiers were mostly veteran troops and equipped with more and better German artillery. The German commander on the Gallipoli peninsula, General Otto Liman von Sanders, did not believe that any British commander would be so foolish as to land troops at a small cove at Ari Burnu (later to be known as "Anzac Cove") hemmed in by steep hills, very rugged terrain, and mountain ranges that would clearly favour a defender on the heights. Leaving nothing to chance, and motivated by Frederick the Great's advice to his generals "he who would defend everything, defends nothing", von Sanders had posted small detachments as outposts at every possible landing spot, including the Ari Burnu promontory above Anzac Cove, and placed two Turkish divisions in positions that would enable battalions to be quickly deployed to wherever danger threatened on the coast. To facilitate swift movement to any threatened area of the Gallipoli coast, he had turned narrow tracks into access roads for troops and artillery. His German artillery was placed to strike any spot where he thought landings were possible. He toughened his Turkish troops with regular manoeuvres.
Stanley's fourth absurd claim in the quoted extract declares that "between the landing and about noon, when the first (Ottoman) counter-attacks developed, the landing was lost". The Gallipoli landings were effectively doomed to failure before any Anzac, British, or French troops set foot on Turkish soil. The disastrous Gallipoli landings are not worthy of the descriptive term "campaign". Those landings on Gallipoli were essentially the result of ad hoc decisions by British generals Lord Herbert Kitchener and Sir Ian Hamilton following the failure of Churchill's naval campaign to force the Dardanelles. Hamilton had been appointed by Kitchener to command the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force which consisted of two British divisions, the two Anzac divisions, and a French contingent. Hamilton's force totalled only about 75,000 troops and it was originally intended to perform the role of an occupying force after the expected surrender of the Ottoman Empire to the British and French navies. There was no suggestion from Kitchener that Hamilton might be called upon to capture the Gallipoli peninsula by force of arms with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. When the Dardanelles Campaign failed, and Hamilton was allotted the task of capturing Gallipoli, he reported to Kitchener that his three senior commanders, Lieutenant General William Birdwood, commander of the Anzac Corps, Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, commander of the British 29th Division, and Major General Archibald Paris, Commander of the Royal Naval Division, had grave doubts about the prospect of a successful outcome to the Gallipoli landings when the Turks had been given ample time to prepare their defences. Kitchener ignored the warning.
Lacking any appreciation of how strong the Turkish defences were on the Gallipoli peninsula, the British government, including Kitchener, formed the culpably reckless view that Hamilton could capture Gallipoli with only five divisions that lacked any training or equipment to land on a strongly defended hostile shore. Kitchener appears to have had no appreciation of the ruggedness of the western coast of the Gallipoli peninsula where it was proposed to land Anzac troops. He also appears to have had no appreciation of the professionalism of the veteran Turkish army led by German officers or the strength of the Turkish army deployed across the Gallipoli peninsula which amounted to six divisions backed by a reserve of ten divisions - at least 160,000 Turkish troops. The Allies would be landing 75,000 mostly untested recruits against a Turkish army equipped with German artillery and composed of many veterans who had fought against Italy in Libya, and in two Balkan Wars. Being completely out of touch with reality, Kitchener had assured Hamilton that the Turks would be likely to run away when Hamilton's troops landed on Gallipoli. None of the British generals involved in planning the Gallipoli landings had any experience of an amphibious landing on a hostile defended shore.
Hamilton had planned the British landings to take place at Cape Helles which is the southernmost tip of the Gallipoli peninsula. Here the ground rose gently from the beach and the only obstacle to the British reaching their primary objectives of the village Krithia and the hill Achi Baba would be the strength of the Turkish defences. In the event, determined Turkish resistance prevented the British divisions reaching either objective before the ill-advised Gallipoli landings were abandoned
Hamilton's plan for the Anzac divisions should have seen them landed with horse-drawn artillery on a front of about a mile (1.6 km) on a beach about one mile north of the heavily defended headland at Gaba Tepe and south of what is now Anzac Cove. This beach and the gently rising land behind it appeared so pleasant that it had been dubbed "Brighton Beach". Horse-drawn artillery and transport wagons could negotiate the slopes at Brighton Beach. The Anzacs had two primary objectives. The first was to seize and hold a spur of the rugged Sari Bair Range, to become known as both "Third Ridge" and "Gun Ridge" (hereinafter to be called "Gun Ridge"), that ran roughly down the centre of the Gallipoli peninsula from Hill 971, past Chunuk Bair above Anzac Cove, and down towards Gaba Tepe. With Anzac artillery entrenched on Gun Ridge, the Anzacs would have been able to see the Dardanelles and would have commanded the Maidos Plain and placed under artillery fire any reinforcement of the Turks from the north. The second primary objective was to seize Mal Tepe which was the high point of a spur running south-east from the Sari Bair Range. Anzac artillery mounted on Mal Tepe would also have inhibited reinforcement of Turks fighting the British landings at Cape Helles.
Instead of being landed on the gently rising slopes of "Brighton Beach", grave British errors of planning saw them landed at night on a narrow cove beside Ari Burnu headland (see photograph above). The landing place (later to be known as "Anzac Cove") was hemmed in by steep hills, very rugged terrain, and mountain ranges that would clearly favour a defender on the heights. In his critically acclaimed and very readable account of the Gallipoli Campaign, Les Carlyon accurately describes the forbidding place where the British landed the hapless Anzacs in these words: "Behind Anzac Cove is a confusion of ravines, gullies, razorbacks and cliffs."
Past the narrow beach, the hills rose so steeply that the Anzacs faced an exhausting climb on hands and knees while under Turkish fire. Horse-drawn Anzac artillery and wagon transport could not negotiate such steep trackless hills, and the Anzacs were denied artillery support and the capability to move supplies inland. Only a very foolish British general or one totally ignorant of the grave risks attending amphibious landings on a defended coast would have landed the Anzacs at such a place; but that is where British Lieutenant General William Birdwood landed them when he chose to put the Anzacs ashore in total darkness and without a naval covering barrage. Amphibious landings at night on a very rugged and unfamiliar enemy shore are notoriously difficult, especially when made on a moonless night, and it was not the choice of the British navy to land the Anzacs on a moonless night. The British naval force transporting the Anzacs knew that it was supposed to land them on "Brighton Beach" but the navy lost its way in the darkness and landed them instead at Ari Burnu (Anzac Cove). Birdwood could ride a horse and was an experienced staff officer but he knew nothing about amphibious landings on defended enemy shores.
The failure of British planning and execution denied the Anzacs any hope of reaching Gun Ridge before the Turks could place their own artillery on the strategically vital ridge. The very competent commander of the Turkish 19th Division, Mustafa Kemal, knew the strategic value of Gun Ridge. He had trained his troops to seize and hold the vital ridge; and he had built tracks to enable his artillery to reach the ridge. When he heard the gunfire from the Anzac landings at his Maidos HQ (now Eceabat), he did not wait for orders, but deployed his division to seize Gun Ridge and hold it. Kemal ordered his troops to hold Gun Ridge, no matter what the cost, and they did. Turkish control of Gun Ridge effectively doomed the Anzac landings. With eight Anzac landing parties put ashore on a narrow cove that could not contain so many troops, it is not surprising that the landing became a disorganised shambles. On the narrow beach, Anzac officers tried to work out where the Royal Navy had landed them. To use a military term, the British had landed the Anzacs on a "killing ground". The Anzacs were tightly crammed and hemmed in on a narrow beach, and subjected to deadly shrapnel fire from Turkish heavy guns at Gaba Tepe and Kemal's deadly plunging artillery fire from Gun Ridge. Anzac losses were so heavy on the first day that the Anzac divisional commanders (Major Generals Bridges and Godley) urged complete evacuation of the Anzac force, but they were not supported by General Birdwood and Sir Ian Hamilton refused to evacuate the Anzacs, simply telling them from the comfort of his battleship "dig in!".
When the British government recognised in late 1915 the level of incompetent planning that had produced the Dardanelles and Gallipoli disasters, Winston Churchill and Lord Fisher had already resigned, Lord Kitchener had died at sea, and the only possible response was to dismiss General Ian Hamilton from command and plan the withdrawal of all troops from Gallipoli.
When writing about the Anzacs at Gallipoli, Peter Stanley ignores these inconvenient historical facts. In order to blame Australian commanders for the Gallipoli disaster, Stanley conveniently ignores the appalling incompetence of the British planners of the Dardanelles Campaign and the Gallipoli landings. We are left wondering whether this approach by English-born Stanley proceeds from monumental ignorance or driving personal bias.
The Australian victims of appalling British political and military incompetence that produced the disastrous Gallipoli landings in 1915 deserved a better chronicler of their sacrifices than Dr Peter Stanley who has form for disparaging Australia, respected wartime Prime Minister John Curtin, Australian soldiers, and Australia's military achievements in his published works that include titles such as "Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force" (2010) and "Anzac's Dirty Dozen: 12 Myths of Australian Military History" (2012). When he was senior historian at the Australian War Memorial, Stanley dragged the national memorial into public controversy with a series of published essays.
In the essay "He's (not) coming South - the invasion that wasn't" (2002), Dr Peter Stanley unjustly accused Prime Minister Curtin of deceiving Australians for political advantage by exaggerating the gravity of the Japanese threat in 1942. When claiming falsely in this essay that the Japanese did not invade any part of Australia in 1942, Stanley chooses to ignore the historical fact that the Commonwealth of Australia was physically invaded by Imperial Japan when Japanese troops landed on Australian soil* at Buna and Gona in the Australian Territory of Papua on 21 July 1942. When Stanley wrote "Curtin did not save Australia from any real (Japanese) threat", he chose to ignore the grave concerns of Commander in Chief US Navy, Admiral Ernest J. King, who sacrificed three of his six American fleet aircraft carriers defending Australia from Japanese attack in 1942.* Papua became legally part of the Commonthealth of Australia with the passing of the Papua Act 1905 (C'wealth). Papua remained legally part of Australia until 1975 when it achieved independence.
In another published essay with the title "Threat made manifest" (2005), and speaking of the Japanese threat to Australia in the Pacific War, Dr Peter Stanley again reflected his English birth when he crassly wrote: "It seems to be that Australians want to believe that they were part of a war, that the war came close; that it mattered...Set against the prosaic reality, the desire is poignant and rather pathetic." in that same essay, Stanley dismissed the first bombing of Darwin by the Japanese on 19 February 1942 - a bombing that killed 260 Australians - as "small beer". These statements emanating from the nation's war memorial plunged the memorial into public controversy and produced sharp criticism of Stanley by Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley. The Australian War Memorial was spared further public embarrassment by Dr Stanley when he resigned in 2006.
Dr Peter Stanley's attacks on Australia's Anzacs are not new. In an article headed "Charge of the rewrite brigade", published in "The Australian" newspaper on 20 December 2002, Jonathon King suggested that some Australian historians, including Dr Stanley acting on behalf of the Australian War Memorial, then under director Major General Steve Gower, had attended a conference relating to Gallipoli convened in Turkey in June 2002. The article suggested that some historians attending the conference intended to rewrite the Anzac story from a perspective that would debunk the heroism and sacrifice that established the Anzac tradition. One of these "historians" was reported as saying: "We must stop calling the Anzacs heroes..". Another "historian" was reported as saying: "...the so-called heroic Anzacs were not even particularly good fighters but were often cowards…". Dr Stanley was reported as saying: "We are just rediscovering Gallipoli and what it means to Australians today....We cannot get sucked in by the patriotic propaganda." The closest any of these so-called military historians would ever have been to a war would probably be their own television screens.
Australians may fairly wonder what soured Dr Stanley's feelings towards the country that welcomed him and his family as migrants in 1966, and provided him with a very comfortable living in Australia.
Having regard to the serious historical errors in this absurd treatment of the Anzac landings on 25 April 1915, and they are errors that should be apparent to anyone with some depth of knowledge of the Gallipoli landings, I suspect that anyone who gives this book approval rating on Amazon would have to be related to Peter Stanley, be one of his friends, be someone who has no depth of knowledge of the Anzac landings on 25 April 1915, or be someone employed by his publisher to push the sales of this appalling book.
A better written, very engaging, and historically accurate account of the Anzac landings can be found in Les Carlyon's critically acclaimed "Gallipoli". It is available on Amazon.