End of the evacuation of Suvla and Anzac

In the early hours of 20 December 1915 the last British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers left the Suvla and Anzac bridgeheads on the Gallipoli peninsula. After the first night of the final stage of the evacuation about 20,000 men remained ashore. All of them were taken off in a single night, and the Turks realised what had happened only after dawn, when the trenches opposite them had been empty for several hours. The bridgeheads, paid for with the lives of thousands of soldiers since April and August, were abandoned almost without loss.

The last night at Anzac

At Anzac the last garrison was divided into three groups. The “A” parties, about 4,000 men, left the trenches at dusk, and the “B” parties, another 4,000, between nine and eleven in the evening. Fewer than 1,500 men of the “C” parties were left to hold the whole semicircle of trenches. When battalion commanders asked for volunteers for these last groups, it turned out that everyone wanted to stay: the veterans regarded it as their right, and the newcomers wanted to prove themselves. The soldiers moved from loophole to loophole, firing and throwing bombs as usual, and every quarter of an hour they reported: “All normal.” At 11.10 p.m. General Andrew Russell, the commander of the rearguard, reported to the corps commander: “Very quiet. Turks busy digging and putting up wire.”

At 1.30 a.m. Russell embarked, handing over command to Colonel John Paton. The trenches were abandoned in turn, the flanks, lying closer to the beaches, first. The soldiers had their boots wrapped in sacking, and the trench floors had been broken up beforehand to muffle the sound of footsteps. Rifles were left in the trenches that fired on their own after ten minutes or more. The trigger was pulled by the weight of a tin into which water dripped from a second, perforated one, and elsewhere by a burning fuse. At 2.40 a.m. Lone Pine, where the trenches were in places only a few metres apart, was empty; at 2.55 a.m. Quinn’s and Pope’s posts; and at 3.14 a.m. the last soldiers left Russell’s Top opposite the Nek. At 3.30 a.m., when the whole garrison was already on the beaches, the engineers blew the mines under the Turkish trenches on the Nek. According to the Australian official history, the explosions destroyed the Turkish front line and killed about 70 soldiers. The Turks replied with rifle fire along the whole line, but they were shooting at empty trenches. At about four o’clock the last lighter left, and at 4.10 a.m. Paton himself pushed off in a steam pinnace with a few officers, who had waited another ten minutes for stragglers. No one came.

Suvla

At Suvla, where the trenches lay further from the sea, the front line was abandoned at 1.30 a.m. The soldiers fell back through gaps in the wire of the successive lines of defence, which were closed behind them, and the ground in front was mined. The way was marked with lines of flour. General Frederick Stanley Maude left the southern flank with the staff of the 13th Division at about four o’clock. On the northern flank the withdrawal from Kiretch Tepe ridge took longer than planned, and the last soldiers left after five. Finally a supply dump soaked in petrol was set on fire. Not a single gun, vehicle or animal was left behind at Suvla.

The Turks discover the withdrawal

For several hours the Turks shelled the empty trenches. The German general Otto Liman von Sanders, who commanded the Ottoman Fifth Army, later wrote that they had not known of the intention to evacuate “until the last moment”. According to the British official history, the alarm was raised only by the explosion of the mines on the Nek, the burning dumps and the silence on the enemy’s side. Thick fog and the mines in front of Suvla made them cautious, however. At about seven o’clock, after a heavy bombardment of the empty positions, small patrols moved towards the beaches. British warships meanwhile shelled the remaining stores and the approaching Turks.

From 8 December, 83,048 soldiers, 186 guns, almost 2,000 vehicles and 4,695 horses and mules were taken off from Suvla and Anzac. On the last night there were no casualties at all at Suvla, and at Anzac two men were wounded, one still in the evening, the other by a stray bullet in a departing lighter. At Anzac nine destroyed, mostly worn-out guns were abandoned, along with a few dozen mules and donkeys and a burning dump of 200,000 rations. Five million rounds of ammunition, for which there was no transport, were thrown into the sea. The commanders had reckoned with much heavier losses. At the beginning of November General Charles Monro had estimated that the evacuation might cost 30–40 per cent of the men and equipment, and beds for 30,000 wounded had been prepared in hospitals in the Mediterranean.

Sixteen hours after the last boat had left, a violent gale blew up. The British official history observes that a day earlier it could have led to disaster. Many attributed the success to extraordinary luck with the weather, but also to careful planning and the discipline of the soldiers. The bridgehead at Cape Helles still remained on the peninsula. The government in London decided to hold it for the time being.