I have my field glasses in front of me. In Seddülbahir, between their Headquarters and their trenches, are units marching to the front.

 “Go ahead, Intepe, fire !”, I say to myself. I can see the enemy, can’t you ?!

Less than a minute later a few salvo’s are fired from Intepe. One, fired  with great accuracy  falls on the group and blows it to pieces ! Enemy soldiers fly and fall everywhere.

The battleship in front of us gets angry, becoming furious again. Intepe fires again. The ship replies with hundreds of shells again. The batlleship’s guns begin to  fire.  Intepe is silenced. The guns continue  firing for hours.  Intepe keeps silent for hours.
                                                                 ***
Enemy planes appear over Intepe. The plane flies to find the Intepe batteries and locate them for the enemy ships so that the ships may shoot at them.  The planes keep circling the skies over Intepe.
                                                                 ***
But the enemy doesn’t know and is not aware there are two battery positions at Intepe : A real one, is seriously hidden. Another, is  fake, and in the open.
The  gun barrels in the open consist of boiler pipes, you see ?  Every day hundreds of shells and bombs are fired by those ignorant of what our  “boiler-pipes”  really are...   What an  amusing sight this is...

Translated from “The Gunners of Intepe”, Çanakkale Recollections / Volume III, (Istanbul 2005), Şükrü Fuad Gücüyener, p. 171-172

"Mehmet Bey, O.C. the big gun which was known as "Asiatic Annie".  And they gave him a medal for it", picture reproduced from "Gallipoli Revisited", (London 1934), W. E. Stanton Hope

Before long it became known that in the Governor’s party was a Turkish gentleman many of us would have given our Maconochie rations to have met in ’15 –the OC “Asiatic

Annie”.  Through an interpreter, I had a long chat with this officer, Mehmet Bey, a likeable kind of man with bald brown head, typically hook-nose and many rippling crows’-feet at the corners of his eyes. He told me that “Annie” was roughly of 11 inch calibre, and that the famous big gun had moved frequently its position in the In Tepe region of Asia, although she had never “run on trails” as many of our troops surmised. In the latter part of of the campaign, he stated, a British monitor firing over Rabbit Island in the Aegean Sea, scored a direct hit, killing five men and putting the gun out of action for six days. In return I told him how, on the last night of the evacuation, we had a bugler posted at Sedd-el-Bahr fort to sound the long “G” for warning each time he saw “Annie’s” yellow flash.  To which Mehmet Bey responded that he had heard faintly that warning bugle note across the Straits.

"Gallipoli Revisited", (London 1934), W. E. Stanton Hope, p. 37

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Last updated : 10/02/08

"Communication by telephone from the observation post of the intepe battery", picture reproduction from "The War Magazine", (Istanbul - 2004), p. 59

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