First attack on Krithia

On 28 April 1915, three days after the landing on the Gallipoli peninsula, the Allied troops at Helles made their first attempt to break out of the bridgehead. General Aylmer Hunter-Weston’s British 29th Division and General Albert d’Amade’s French troops were to take the village of Krithia (Turkish Kirte, today Alçıtepe) and the hill of Achi Baba overlooking it, a little over 200 metres high. These were objectives that, according to the plan for the landing, should have been reached on the very first day. The attack, carried out by exhausted soldiers, broke down that same day.

A tired division

After the fighting on the beaches the 29th Division was in poor shape. It had lost two of its three brigade commanders and most of the senior officers of the battalions that had landed first. The soldiers had hardly slept for three days. Few guns had yet been landed and pack animals were lacking, so the infantrymen themselves carried food, water and ammunition. On 27 April the British, meeting no resistance, moved the front forward about three kilometres into the peninsula, and the French, who had withdrawn from Kum Kale the day before, took over the right flank above the strait. Meanwhile the Turks also received reinforcements. Regiments brought down from Bulair began to reach Colonel Halil Sami’s 9th Division, but some of them arrived only during the battle.

The attack

At about 8 a.m. the warships opened their bombardment. Hunter-Weston’s plan was complicated, and few in the battalions understood it well. The French on the right flank were to advance slowly, while the British on the left were to swing round in an arc, take Krithia and come at Achi Baba from the west. At first the attack went easily, but it soon ran into Turkish pockets of resistance and into the deep ravines running from the slopes of Achi Baba down to the sea. On the left flank two battalions of the 87th Brigade, the Border Regiment and the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, entered Gully Ravine and were stopped by a Turkish machine gun near the former Y Beach. According to British accounts, a Turkish counter-attack on this flank was broken up by the guns of the dreadnought Queen Elizabeth. A single 15-inch shrapnel shell was said to contain about 13,000 balls.

On the right flank the French at first pushed back the weakened Turkish 26th Infantry Regiment. At about noon, however, the Turks went over to the counter-attack. According to Turkish studies it was led by Major Mahmut Sabri, the commander of the battalion that had defended V Beach on 25 April. He gathered the reserve and the retreating soldiers and charged with the bayonet. The French units, including Senegalese tirailleurs, fell back in disorder, which exposed the British flank. In the afternoon the British in the centre and on the left flank also began to fall back, in places all the way to their starting positions. Soldiers were collapsing from exhaustion, and Hunter-Weston, who was directing the battle from afar, had no real control over it. At about 6 p.m. the attack was called off.

Outcome

The village of Krithia and the hill of Achi Baba remained in Turkish hands. Of the roughly 14,000 Allied soldiers who took part in the attack, the British lost about 2,000 killed, wounded and missing, and the French 1,001. According to Turkish sources the defenders’ losses amounted to 2,378 men. The front moved only slightly compared with the line of 27 April. The battle showed that the Turks were not an enemy who could be smashed with a single blow, as Hamilton’s staff had assumed. In the following days it was the Turks who went over to the attack, and at Helles trench warfare began, in which successive attempts to take Krithia cost thousands of casualties and yielded gains measured in hundreds of metres.