Start of the Second Battle of Krithia

On 6 May 1915 the British and French at Helles, at the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, attacked the village of Krithia (today Alçıtepe) and the hill of Achi Baba for the second time. The first attack of 28 April had collapsed within a single day. This time General Ian Hamilton had concentrated about 25,000 soldiers on this sector and hoped to take that same day the hill from which the forts in the Narrows of the Dardanelles could be seen.

Everything that was to hand

At the beginning of May the Turks twice tried to drive the Allies into the sea in night bayonet attacks. They suffered heavy losses but also badly strained the French division of General Albert d’Amade. Hamilton wanted to strike before the Turks brought up further reinforcements and built a continuous line of trenches. The depleted British 29th Division of General Aylmer Hunter-Weston was joined by the fresh 125th Brigade, made up of Territorial battalions of the Lancashire Fusiliers, which had arrived from Egypt on 5 May, and by the 29th Indian Brigade. In the night of 5–6 May destroyers and minesweepers brought two of General William Birdwood’s brigades from Anzac Cove, the 2nd Australian Brigade and the New Zealand Brigade, about 5,000 men in all. In the morning they landed at W Beach and were placed in reserve. The French were just beginning to receive their second division.

On the other side stood, according to Turkish figures, 29–31 battalions from the 9th and 7th Divisions, numbering according to various estimates from 15,000 to 20,000 men. For a few days they had been commanded by the German general Erich Weber, known as Weber Pasha. The Turkish positions were still a loose chain of trenches and machine-gun nests, hidden in the scrub on the spurs between the gullies running down from the slopes of Achi Baba.

An attack without artillery

The Allies’ greatest weakness was the shortage of ammunition. The artillery had already used up more than half its stock of shells, and the ships were saving theirs for a future forcing of the straits. Hamilton therefore wanted to attack before dawn, but Hunter-Weston judged that after losing most of its company commanders his division would not cope in the dark. The attack was set for 11 a.m. It was preceded only by a short and weak bombardment. The British 88th Brigade in the centre moved off on time, but the 125th Brigade on the left wing left its trenches half an hour later, and the French on the right wing only at 11.40 a.m.

At first the Turks fell back, but after a few hundred metres the attackers were stopped by machine-gun and shrapnel fire. The Lancashire Fusiliers on the Aegean coast, near Y Beach, abandoned on 26 April, were pinned down by fire from a nest that even the ships’ guns could not reach. The 88th Brigade failed to get into the small pine wood that the British called Fir Tree Wood, and at about 4 p.m. began to dig in. The French advanced furthest, near the mouth of the Kereves Dere ravine, but in the centre they were stopped by newly discovered Turkish trenches. The Hood Battalion of the Naval Division, which tried to fill the gap to the left of the French, lost its commander and had to withdraw.

By the evening the front had moved forward by an average of about 400 yards, or just under 370 metres. The British official history later observed that on that day the Allies had fought only Turkish outposts, and the main body of the defenders had not come into action at all. Losses were relatively light, and at 7.30 p.m. Hamilton, after talking with Hunter-Weston and d’Amade, ordered the attack to be renewed at 10 a.m. the next day.