The Lone Pine Australian & New Zealand memorial

Lying beside them was a man asleep. He had been wounded in the head, and as he breathed the blood just bibbled and frothed at his nose and mouth ... Yet all one gave him was simply a casual glance, more of curiousity than anything else. At ordinary times these sights would have turned one sick but now they have not the slightest effect.

"The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence", (Carlton 1981), R. East, p. 68

We are the Anzacs, and we're true blue,
We're from Australia and New Zealand too,
We're from Down Under, and we're telling you,
We're boozers, we're skiters,
We're bloody good fighters too.
We might curse and swear,
But we'll be right there,
In the fighting we won't turn a hair,
When the whips are cracking everywhere,
You'll find the Anzacs.

We've got shearers and drovers too,
We've got city swells and blokes named Blue,
As horsemen, we're the world's best yet
Ned Kelly's our CO and don't you forget!
Yes we will salute, but only railway porters,
Mothers, lock up your flaming daughters,
Inter kwais, kwais katir, bungaree, bardi,
We are the Anzacs...

We will take orders, but only from the King,
We will play two-up, so come on form a ring.
Alright there digger, a friendly game,
It's "Come in Spinner” and heads are right again
AWL? Don't be absurd
Discipline! Now there's a dirty word,
We'll shout 'Maa Leesh' and 'Gibbit backsheesh'
We are the Anzacs....

From the song “The Anzacs” by Ted Egan

final capture of the hill. But the losses were severe. Many officers were shot down, including gallant Colonel Bauchop, who fell mortally wounded ...

"The New Zealanders at Gallipoli", (Auckland 1921), Major Fred Waite, p. 212

One of the mysteries which remains unsolved to this day, is the disappearance of Private Edgar Adams. This soldier was posted missing after the initial landing, as no member of the unit shed and light on his fate. However, on the 1st November, a member of the 9th Battalion found a bottle washed up on the beach near Alexandria.

The message stated (*) that Adams was held as a prisoner, but as he did not appear on any POW lists provided by the Turks, it was assumed that he had not been captured. Nonetheless, if the message was genuine, Adams was the only member of the 8th Battalion captured by the enemy during the Gallipoli Campaign.

(*) official AWM records state that the message –washed ashore at Montaza beach, Alexandria- read : Am prisoner about 2 miles from where we landed between the dried lake and the other – E.R.C. Adams 8 AIF/picture reproduced from "Gallipoli 1915”, (Sydney 2002), Richard Reid, p. 29.

grave six feet deep, that was just impossible. Not there. We were lucky to get his boots under. I placed him in the grave with the help of some of me mates and one of me other mates read a poem from the little black book we all carried and that was the last of poor little Arthur. I covered him up and put a small cross on top of him. It just had A.R. Fellows written on it. That was all.

Hartley Palmer (Canterbury Infantry Batallion) quoted in "Voices of Gallipoli" (Auckland 1988), Maurice Shadbolt, p. 30-31

Turkish resistance stiffened. Gordon-Bennett was badly wounded and despite his protests his strecher bearers carried him back to the beach – a dangerous venture as the Turks were now fully alerted and hunting down small parties of Australians wherever they found them. Gordon-Bennett’s men continued to fight until overwhelmed, very few surviving to be taken prisoner. Among the dead

Arty was the first of our company to get killed. I was about ten yards away. I went out and saw him there, killed. He was shot right in the head. He never said a word. My officer told me to search his clothes. I’d given him some money in Cairo and the officer said if Arty still had any, I was to have it. My mates said, “No good you looking, he’s spent it.” I said “Good luck to him.” I just found a little pocket-knife and I had it engraved when I went to England and gave it to his mother when I returned to Nelson. We then buried Arty in shrubs on a little hill away from everybody. You couldn’t dig a

As the day wore on, thousands more Australians were undergoing their battle initiation on the precarious beach-head. Some displayed remarkable dash and enterprise. One company of about a hundred men under Major Gordon-Bennett, in civilian life an actuarial clerk and dedicated part-time soldier, wasted no time in leaving the beach; heading south-east they rapidly crossed the first ridge, then the second, and were well across the lower ground and going hard for Gun ridge when the

During the Mission in 1919 Charles Bean and Zeki Bey (during the campaign, commander of a battalion of the 57th Regiment) tells Bean (who had witnessed the event as well but from the opposite trenches and identified the young man as Greig Norman) of a young brave Australian officer :

… But in the crater was a well dressed young officer, a very fine, handsome man. He had retreated into the tunnel mouth. I call out : ”Don’t kill the man - we want to take him!” The men said, “He will not allow himself to be taken”. “There

was the officer, revolver in hand, against the earth at the far end of the crater, by the tunnel. Then he dropped. He had been hit by a bomb and had both legs broken. I afterwards found that he would not have been able to get back through the tunnel-it wasn’t open …
… Zeki Bey said to me more than once : “I would have liked to take that officer prisoner; he was a very brave man.” He had him buried in the valley behind the lines with more ceremony and care than the Turks usually devoted to their dead opponents. …

"Gallipoli Mission", (Crows Nest 1990), Charles E.W. Bean, p. 178

"An Australian trench at Walker’s Ridge in May 1915. The man holding the rifle (211 Pte Andrew Powell Yeates – 9th LHR) is believed to have been the father of the soldier (1103 Pte James Augustus Yeates – 4th Field Ambulance) in the foreground"

Picture & caption reproduced from "Gallipoli 1915 – Frontal assault on Turkey", (Oxford 1991) Philip J. Haythornthwaite, p. 57

For most conspicuous bravery at Lone Pine trenches, in the Gallipoli Peninsula. On the morning of the 9th August, 1915, with a very small party, Captain Shout charged down trenches strongly occupied by the enemy, and personally

threw four bombs among them, killing eight and routing the remainder. In the afternoon of the same day, from the position gained in the morning, he captured a further length of trench under similar conditions, and continued personally to bomb the enemy at close range under very heavy fire until he was severely wounded, losing his right hand and left eye. This most gallant officer has since succumbed to his injuries.

The London Gazette, No. 29328, 15th October 1915

As Howe and his companions reached the summit, Turks were running back across it. A yard or two beyond its nearest edge lay a trench; but many Australians on this first morning had the impression, which had been common in Britain and Australia, that in this war trenches might be mined. Consequently some of the men lay down behind the low parapet, firing over it at the running Turks, and a few of the Turks turned at the far edge of the plateau and similarly blazed at them. Howe showed us where, so far as he knew, about fifty yards to his left, Captain W. R. Annear, one of the first climbers to reach the top, was shot as he lay behind this parapet, the first Australian officer killed in the campaign.

"Gallipoli Mission", (Crows Nest 1990), Charles E.W. Bean, p. 76-77

Henry Sutton Ferrier lost his arm in combat. He didn't seem to concerned about that :

... When the dressing station was reached the doctor in charge tenderly referred to the loss of the arm, to which the Light horseman replied: “It’s not the arm I’m concerned about; It’s the sleeve. I spent two hours patching the b***** thing last night.

"Official History of the Wellington Mounted Rifles", (Auckland 1924), Major A. H. Wilkie, p. 67

Yet about this time observing officers stationed in the trenches on Russell’s top undoubtedly saw, through the haze of dust raised by machine-gun bullets, a small red and yellow flag put up in the enemy’s front line. It was on the south-eastern corner of the trench. Who placed it there will never be known, but there were almost certainly a few men of the first line who had managed to get into the extreme right of the Turkish trench. For ten minutes the flag fluttered behind the parapet, and then some unseen agency tore it down. (*)

"The Story of Anzac", (Sydney 1981) Volume II, Charles E. W. Bean, p. 615-616.

(*) The evidence of the Brigade Signalling Officer, Lieut. W.D. Oliver (of Melbourne), whose duty was to watch for the flags is definite. He saw a man of fine physique whom he believed to be Sgt. Roger Palmer (of Winchelsea, Vic.) drop into the enemy’s trench, and immediately afterwards the flag was waved.

To-day Lone Pine -known to the Turks as Kanli Sirt ("Bloody Ridge")- is again a placid plateau, with a cool white chamber, inscribed with the names of the Australian dead, beneath a white column the top of which is just visible from the Narrows. The column replaces the stunted pine tree; and the position is no longer recognizable for what it used to be. But in the December of 1918 a visitor to Anzac, while making his way to the plateau, records a 'strange incidental whiteness on the ridge in front, a thin scattered whiteness, not unlike a sprinkle of melting snow’. This whitening of the ridge he discovered to be no less and no more than a white litter of human bones. ‘on the tumbled soil of the trenches lay the bare white bones, piled or clustered so thickly in places that we had to tread upon them as we passed.’

"The Fading Vision", (London 1936), John North, p. 219

was the company commander’s younger brother, serving as a sergeant(*). The bodies of these gallant band were not to be recovered till 1919 when their remains were found high up on Gun Ridge – the furthers any Australians managed to penetrate on that first day.

"Gallipoli", (London 2000), Michael Hickey, p. 113

(*) Godfrey Bennett

specimen he had seen that day. After landing with his battalion on Gallipoli on 8 September 1915, Jim was immediately involved in the fighting. His death was recored in the Lone Pine Cemetery on Gallipoli

Transcribed from "Memorial for Jim Martin, 14, the youngest digger to die in Action", and article that appeared in "the Age" on October 26, 1985

Canberra - A 14-year-old boy who fought in Gallipoli for the Australian Imperial Forces in 1915 died before he received his first mail from home. A ceremony commemorating the 70th Aniversary of Private Jim Martin's death was held yesterday at the Australian War Memorial.
He was Australia's youngest soldier killed in action. Jim's 79-year-old sister, Nancy Johnson, said yesterday her brother had only been in long pants for three months when he decided to enlist because their father had been rejected. "He said 'Never mind , Dad - I'll go',"she said. She said her brother had threatened to run away if his family would not give their permission. They had expected him to be send back after his age was discovered but he was not.
On 13 November 1915 - Mrs Johnson's 10th Birthday- the family received the news that Jim had died quite suddenly of heart failure and had been buried at sea. He had earlier caught enteric fever after spending four hours in the water when the steamer Southland was torpedoed on the voyage from Egypt to Gallipoli.
On 12 April 1915 Jim told recruiting officers for the 21st Battalion of the AIF that he was an 18-year-old farmhand. The recruiting officer accepted him after noting that six-foot-tall Jim was the fittest

Max, Rex, Ralph & Roy went on to the Western Front where Ralph was taken prisoner on April 11th 1917 during the attack at Bullecourt. The four remaining brothers all returned to Australia after the war. (infomation provided by Andrew Pittaway)

The Wheeler Brothers are from left to right :

Harold Wheeler (16th Battalion), Max Wheeler (10th Light Horse), Rex Wheeler (16th Battalion), Ralph Wheeler (16th Battalion), Roy Wheeler (16th Battalion), Herbert Wheeler (16th Battalion). These six brothers all served on Gallipoli where Harold & Herbert were both killed on 8th August.

"Face of a hero : the ever-cheerful Captain alfred Shout, VC, MC, Australia's most decorated soldier at Gallipoli. A carpenter who emigrated to Sydney from New Zealand, he had both hands and an eye blown away in the battle for Lone Pine in August. He died, aged 33, a few days later", period picture reproduced from " Gallipoli", (Sydney 2002), Les Carlyon, p. 376.