Third attack on Krithia

At noon on 4 June 1915 British and French soldiers at Helles, on the southern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, left their trenches for the third attack on the village of Krithia. Less than a month had passed since the previous attempt. This time nobody expected to take the hill of Achi Baba in a single day. About 30,000 soldiers of General Aylmer Hunter-Weston’s British VIII Corps and General Henri Gouraud’s French corps were to take only the first lines of Turkish trenches, at most 800 yards, or about 730 metres, ahead.

A false alarm

During the last weeks of May both sides had dug in, and continuous lines of trenches now ran from the sea to the strait. The British prepared the attack more carefully than ever: the orders were set out step by step, and for the first time a sketch of the Turkish trenches drawn from aerial photographs was attached to them. The bombardment began at 8 a.m. At 11.20 a.m. the guns suddenly fell silent, and the infantry cheered and showed their bayonets above the trenches, so that the Turks would man their positions and be caught by the second bombardment, which started ten minutes later. The Turks replied with heavy fire, but there were too few British howitzers, and the field guns fired almost nothing but shrapnel. On many sectors the Turkish trenches survived the bombardment almost untouched.

The attack

On the right flank the French came under machine-gun fire as soon as they left their trenches and after a few minutes returned to them. Their neighbours of the Royal Naval Division took a Turkish trench, but fire from the ridge the French had not taken fell on their flank. The Collingwood Battalion, which a quarter of an hour after the first wave advanced “as if on parade” towards the second objective, was almost completely wiped out. In three quarters of an hour the 2nd Naval Brigade lost 60 of its 70 officers and over a thousand of about 1,900 men. On the left flank, above the Aegean Sea, the 29th Indian Brigade was held up in front of undamaged trenches in Gully Ravine and on the spur above it. According to the British official history the 14th Sikhs lost 380 of their 514 men there.

In the centre the attack succeeded. Battalions of the 29th Division took part of the Turkish trenches and 250 prisoners, and the Territorial 127th (Manchester) Brigade of the 42nd Division took all its objectives almost without loss. Its men went a thousand yards deep through the Turkish defences, took 217 prisoners and found themselves less than 1.2 km from Krithia. For a moment there were almost no Turkish trenches between them and the summit of Achi Baba.

A wasted success

At about 2 p.m. the two corps commanders had eighteen battalions in reserve. Instead of sending them into the breach, they decided to renew the attack on the flanks, where it had been repulsed. The French were unable to advance again, and the second attack by the Indians and Gurkhas by the sea collapsed again. Meanwhile Turkish reserves reached the breach. From 4 p.m. they counter-attacked the 127th Brigade, by about 6 p.m. they were attacking it from three sides, and half an hour later it was ordered to withdraw. Its commander, General Noel Lee, was mortally wounded. By nightfall most of the ground gained had been given up. What remained was 250 to 500 yards on a front a mile long.

According to the British official history VIII Corps lost about 4,500 of the 16,000 men who took part in the fighting that day, and the French about 2,000. Turkish losses in the whole battle were about 9,000 according to the Turkish official history. The British official historian quotes accounts by Turkish and German officers according to which the situation that night was considered critical, and another vigorous attack might have broken the defence. The Allies, however, no longer had the strength for one. Over the next two days the Turks counter-attacked and recovered some of the lost trenches. General Ian Hamilton, whom Lord Kitchener had asked the day before whether with reinforcements he would take the positions above the strait, replied on 6 June that with his present forces he would advance very slowly.