Book Extract

ROYAL HAMPSHIRE REGIMENT - 1914-1918 by C.T. Atkinson. Naval and Military Press

The assaulting troops were in position by 8 a.m. (August 6th) but had to wait for six hours before the bombardment started. As again the artillery support was utterly inadequate: General Davies, who had just arrived from France to take over the Eighth Corps1 from General Hunter-West on, invalided, was quite horrified to see how very far it fell short of the Western Front standard, low as that was in 1915, and the volume and vigour of the Turkish reply showed that they were unpleasantly ready for the attack and augured ill for its chances. After an hour’s deliberate bombardment by a handful of heavy guns, the field guns took up the tale and for 30 minutes plastered the objective as vigorously as their scanty ammunition would allow: then at 3.50 p.m. the infantry went forward with the utmost dash and gallantry, the Hampshire attacking in four waves. A low crest fifty yards from our line was crossed almost without loss but then machine-guns opened up on all sides and mowed the attackers down wholesale before many of them had got any way across No Man’s Land, some guns across the Krithia Nullah on our right being particularly deadly. Our guns could do nothing to subdue their fire and under it the attack soon withered away.

The Hampshire suffered terribly, above all in losing Captain Parker, who fell in leading the advance of the second line, and with him two other ‘originals’, Captain Day and Lt. Webb, both previously wounded but back at duty, and 2/Lt. Gawn, who had won the D.C.M. in Somaliland, while 2/Lt. C. Moor fell on the Turkish parapet, which a very few of the leading waves seem to have reached. The supports lost as heavily as the leaders but pressed forward with equal determination, and some men, among them Lt. Morris and some of Z Company’s second wave, entered the Turkish lines and established themselves in H.i2a, some apparently even reaching H.13. Too few to maintain their foothold, they were overcome by numbers, though Sergeant Sinsbury held on for some time to a sap with a few men and, when they were bombed out, he covered their retirement with great skill and resource.2 Rather more Worcestershire got in and held out till dark, while a fair number of Essex from Hampshire Cut established themselves in H.12 and eventually managed to retain a tiny corner, but within a few minutes the attack had come to a complete standstill, the unhit survivors lying out among the dead and wounded, pinned to the ground by the machine-guns and unable to move until darkness let them and the more slightly wounded crawl back. It had been the worst day in the whole story of Cape Helles.

Inadequate artillery support had once again led to a heavy sacrifice of lives to little purpose. Nothing had been gained locally and even if the Turks had been distracted from the main attack at Suvla, its unavailing gallantry had left the 88th Brigade a wreck, the Hampshire having lost eighteen officers and 224 other ranks killed and missing....

During the night any wounded who could be reached were brought in, and then the 86th Brigade relieved the 88th and the surviving Hampshires made their way back to Gully Beach, where they were warmly congratulated on their gallantry by General de Lisle and reorganized in two companies. Little rest could be given to the brigade: shattered as it was, it had on August 14th to take over the line again from the 86th. Things had gone wrong at Suvla, and though Sir Ian Hamilton had deliberately refrained from using the Twenty-Ninth Division in that attack because he had already asked so much of it and wished, if possible, to spare it, he had now to employ the ‘Old Guard’ of the M.E.F. in a last-minute effort to retrieve the situation.