Indian Expeditionary Force G sails for the Dardanelles

The British chronology of the war records under 7 April 1915 that the first units of Indian Expeditionary Force G sailed from Egypt for the Dardanelles. The new force was formed from part of the Indian troops stationed in Egypt, which had recently come under the common designation of Force E. It was to take part in the landing on the Gallipoli peninsula being prepared by General Ian Hamilton.

The first soldiers from India to set out for the Dardanelles were the gunners of the 7th Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade. According to the history of the regiment descended from this brigade, its two batteries came by rail from the Suez Canal to Alexandria on 4 April and boarded a transport the same day. The ship sailed on 5 April and on 8 April dropped anchor in Mudros Bay on Lemnos. The date in the British chronology may therefore be off by a day or two.

Guns on mules

The brigade consisted of the 21st (Kohat) Mountain Battery and the 26th (Jacob’s) Mountain Battery. It had come to Egypt from Karachi in the autumn of 1914 and for half a year had guarded the Suez Canal. Each battery had six 10-pounder mountain guns. They were broken down into parts and carried on mules, so that mountain artillery could go where horse teams could not. The gun crews were Indian gunners, and the officers were British.

At Alexandria the brigade was placed under General William Birdwood, commander of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The light mountain guns were to support the infantry where it was harder to land and emplace ordinary field artillery, on the steep, scrub-covered hills of the peninsula. Orders opened at sea directed the ship to Lemnos, where the warships and transports of Hamilton’s force were gathering in Mudros Bay. In early April further ships with Birdwood’s soldiers were sailing there from Egypt. The Indian gunners were to go ashore with them, right behind the first waves of infantry.

Force G

Besides the mountain artillery, Force G included Indian transport columns with mules and carts, some of which had come earlier from the front in France, and Indian field hospitals. Its most important component was General Herbert Vaughan Cox’s 29th Indian Brigade, which in February had defended Kantara against the Turkish attack on the canal. It consisted of the 14th Ferozepore Sikhs, the 69th and 89th Punjabis and the 1st Battalion, 6th Gurkha Rifles. The brigade did not sail with the first echelon. It left Egypt only at the end of April and landed at Cape Helles at the beginning of May.

The 29th Brigade was the only Indian infantry brigade to fight at Gallipoli. Even so, India’s contribution to the campaign was not limited to it. The mountain batteries and transport columns served on the peninsula from the first day of the fighting to the last, and by some estimates well over ten thousand soldiers and followers from India passed through Gallipoli in all. In popular memory, however, the campaign long remained above all an affair of the Australians, New Zealanders and British.