Birdwood temporary commander at Gallipoli

On 17 October 1915 General Ian Hamilton took leave of the army he had commanded since the spring on the Gallipoli peninsula. Recalled two days earlier by the government in London, he handed over command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force to General William Birdwood, commander of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Birdwood was to hold it temporarily, until General Charles Monro arrived from France.

The day was cold and drizzly. In the morning the French commander, General Brulard, and Generals Julian Byng and Francis Davies, the corps commanders at Suvla and Helles, came to the island of Imbros. Hamilton said goodbye to them and then went to the new General Headquarters at Kephalos to part with his staff. As he noted in his diary, that was the very day he was to have moved into the stone hut built there for the winter. In the afternoon he boarded the cruiser Chatham. As the ship threaded her way between the anchored vessels of the fleet, the crews came out on deck and cheered him. His chief of staff, General Walter Braithwaite, sailed with him. In his farewell order Hamilton thanked the soldiers of all ranks and wrote that no risk had been too desperate for them and no sacrifice too great.

Birdwood, born in India in 1865, was one of the most trusted men of Lord Kitchener, on whose staff he had served for years. Since December 1914 he had commanded the Australians and New Zealanders, with whom in April he had landed at Anzac Cove. It was he who devised the plan for the August attack on the Sari Bair ridge. Hamilton, who called him “Birdie” in his diary, valued his loyalty. He wrote that if he were handing the command over to him permanently, he would feel nothing but joy at a well-deserved success.

Birdwood was taking over troops in a poor state. According to Hamilton, the whole army was at roughly half its establishment strength, and dysentery and exhaustion were still taking their toll. According to the British official history, in October 200–300 sick men a day were evacuated from each of the three beachheads, and reinforcements did not make up these losses. Autumn gales were destroying the piers and small craft at Anzac and Suvla. The staff on Imbros was preparing a memorandum for Monro. It calculated that taking the Straits would require an army of about 250,000 men in the spring, while an evacuation, although feasible, might cost half the soldiers and two-thirds of the guns.

On 19 October Kitchener asked Birdwood for an assessment of the situation. The general replied that an advance was possible only at Suvla, if the units were brought up to strength and two fresh divisions arrived. In his view, however, the best way to end the campaign would be to combine that attack with a landing of large forces on the Asiatic side of the Straits. Kitchener further asked whether the army could withstand prolonged attacks by Turks supported with German ammunition. Birdwood replied that his corps commanders viewed this with great anxiety: there was a shortage of materials for fortifications, and the beaches could not be protected from shellfire. Birdwood’s temporary command lasted eleven days. On 28 October Monro arrived on Imbros.