The Gallipoli Letter (5 page)

Keith Murdoch, though, still had a job of work in front of him. As the
Mooltan
sailed from Marseilles to London he wrote a letter to his own prime minister in Melbourne. Murdoch had not collaborated with Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett in writing their letters on Imbros but there is little doubt that the outlook of the two men was essentially the same. Murdoch's was not a formal report to Fisher, rather it was a personal letter to a prime minister who was also his friend. Murdoch had finished a first draft of the letter by the time he reached London. Over the next couple of days he polished it, either in the offices of the Australian High Commissioner or in his own office, and had it cabled to Melbourne.

Andrew Fisher was by now a sick man, exhausted by the worry and anxiety of the war. He would resign as prime minister on 27 October 1915 to become Australian High Commissioner in London. From Melbourne there was not much Fisher could do to influence events at Gallipoli but the letter alarmed him and added to his anxiety. In October Asquith cabled to Fisher warning him not to place too much faith in Murdoch's letter. He also promised to release to the Australian prime minister documents relating to the Gallipoli campaign. Murdoch's letter had already worked for Australia—there would now be some sort of flow of information.

•

On his visit to London six years earlier Murdoch had been unknown. Now he returned as one of Australia's most prominent journalists. The United Cable Service, which he would head, had its offices in the
Times
building in London and, as a matter of course, Murdoch was introduced to the editor of the
Times
, Geoffrey Dawson, a man in a position of such influence that he probably outranked most cabinet ministers in importance. The two men lunched together and Murdoch gave Dawson a full account of his views about the campaign, the need for Hamilton's recall and the necessity of the evacuation of all the troops. The editor was appalled by what he heard, disbelieving to an extent, but horrified to hear that the campaign could not succeed. Dawson subsequently arranged interviews between Murdoch and some British politicians.

Murdoch first met Sir Edward Carson, chairman of the British Cabinet's Dardanelles Committee. The committee had responsibility for every aspect of the campaign and it needed to know what was actually happening out there, not merely what General Hamilton reported. Carson listened intently—he had been a strong supporter of the campaign at the Dardanelles. He in turn arranged for Murdoch to meet David Lloyd George, Minister for Munitions, and increasingly a sceptic about the Gallipoli adventure. Murdoch must have been persuasive because these men had originally believed in the second front. Perhaps he confused them as much as he convinced them, but out of this confusion action would finally come.

When urged by his ministers, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, read what Murdoch had written to Fisher and was alarmed. Could this be true, he wondered? If so, hard decisions would have to be made. Apparently without consultation Asquith had Murdoch's letter printed as a paper to the Committee of Imperial Defence, immediately giving it much greater authority and significance and much wider circulation than first intended. Murdoch had cracked the facade of confidence that had enclosed the Gallipoli campaign. The Dardanelles Committee, the Cabinet, had to act.

In the course of the next few weeks Hamilton was replaced at Gallipoli by General Sir Charles Monro, who had little faith in the Dardanelles adventure. Lord Kitchener was despatched to Gallipoli to see the situation for himself and to report back, after which a decision was made to evacuate the troops from Anzac and Suvla and subsequently from Helles. The Dardanelles campaign would come to an end. The Murdoch letter played a crucial role in all of these events.

The letter

In his official history, Charles Bean described Keith Murdoch as ‘a man of forceful personality, combining keen love of power with an intense devotion to his country and countrymen'. Bean approved of Murdoch's letter, although he wrote that ‘the picture given in this letter was undoubtedly overcoloured, and some of its statements were not facts'.

The first point to note about Murdoch's letter is its conversational tone. Ashmead-Bartlett would not have written to Asquith in this way but Murdoch was writing to a friend and his letter has greater power because of that. ‘I shall talk to you as if you were by my side,' Murdoch began, ‘as in the good old days.' Murdoch shows that he and Fisher had closely discussed Fisher's fears for the Australians at the Dardanelles before Murdoch had set off for Anzac. Murdoch wrote of Gallipoli ‘as one of the most terrible chapters in our history. Your fears have been justified.' So Fisher must already have told Murdoch that he thought the campaign was in deep trouble, strengthening the view that Fisher wanted accurate information on which he could act. Murdoch intended to reinforce Fisher's concern, perhaps even alarm.

The construction of the letter also shows how dependent Murdoch was on the talk of the men among whom he had moved on Anzac. He wrote as if he were trying to transport his prime minister to Anzac to hear the Australian officers' and soldiers' views on their predicament, to give Fisher the viewpoints of these ordinary Australians. If ‘some of the statements were not facts', nevertheless, as Murdoch understood it, he was repeating to the Australian prime minister what Australian soldiers, officers and the Australian official correspondent believed to be true. Murdoch had come to listen to the Australians and then to tell the prime minister what he had heard.

This is best shown in the early part of the letter where Murdoch concentrated on the landing at Suvla Bay, which began on the night of 6 August. Among the Australians at Gallipoli a special anger was reserved for those who had designed and led the attack by the British at Suvla. There had been good sense in the attempt: in the plan, troops would have landed at points around the bay and then moved quickly to the hills ringing it. Once established on the ridge line they would have been in a good position to support the attempt of the Anzacs and others on Chunuk Bair and Hill 971, the vital points on the peninsula. Suvla's attackers would have come behind the Turks defending Chunuk Bair and help to drive them from the heights.

The Suvla Bay landing was a central piece of the August offensive which was in turn the path to victory, perhaps the only path to victory at Gallipoli. For the campaign at Suvla, and the August offensive in general, the War Council in London had given Hamilton an additional four divisions. He had the men he had asked for, now he had to make the ambitious plan work.

But the Anzacs, watching the landing at Suvla as if in the dress circle of a theatre, could not believe what they saw unfolding before them. The British, in numbers, landed unopposed and then seemed to stop, seemingly making no attempt to rush forward to the hills.

‘The Suvla Bay tea party' Anzacs called it, as they watched the British apparently settle down to a brew rather than rush to the hills with the advantage of surprise. Alerted to what was happening as the British assault faltered, the Turkish commanders rushed their own troops to Suvla's hills and the element of surprise was promptly lost.

There were reasons for the slowing of the British momentum, of which the soldiers at Anzac could not be aware, but Murdoch accepted their anger and contempt for the failure at Suvla and this coloured his letter to Fisher, justifying, to an extent, Bean's criticism of the letter. But Murdoch was not writing history; he was reporting what he had heard.

Much of the blame for the catastrophe at Suvla has fallen on the British general, Sir Frederick Stopford. Put simply, Stopford was too old and yet also too inexperienced for the command. Born in 1854 Stopford was 61 years of age at the time of his appointment to the Dardanelles. He had never commanded troops in battle. He had retired from the army in 1909 and was not in good health. He was selected for command at Suvla because he was the next most senior officer on the list and to pass him over would have caused unpleasantness in an army that was still based more on social class

PLATE 5 The 21st Battalion marches up Monash Gully after arriving at Gallipoli on 8 September 1915.
AWM Neg. No. A00742

and good form than on professionalism. It was ‘Buggin's turn' for Stopford. Even Ian Hamilton had urged greater vigour from Stopford in the first hours of the Suvla campaign but he was ignored. Hamilton sacked Stopford within days of the start of the fighting at Suvla but by then it was too late. Bean undoubtedly told Murdoch the sorry saga of Frederick Stopford but the letter reflects more the Australians' anger over the ‘tea party' rather than an unfortunate British appointment. Murdoch describes the troops sent to Suvla as ‘fresh, raw, untried troops under amateur officers'. Sending such men to battle was ‘to court disaster'. Murdoch was more interested in the decisions made in London than with one elderly, failed leader.

It is no surprise, then, that the early part of Murdoch's letter to Fisher contains a blistering condemnation of Suvla. But Murdoch is exaggerating when he writes that at Suvla ‘one division went ashore without any orders whatsoever' and he misunderstands when he says that another division down there had initially set off in the wrong direction. Murdoch's summary conclusion is correct, however, when he writes that, all things considered, the work of the general staff ‘has been deplorable'.

Bean's influence on the letter is apparent as Murdoch moves to his next major point: that the attempt at a break out could not be resumed until spring next year and that in the meantime the troops would have to endure an appalling winter, which many would not survive. That was the anxiety in all quarters at Anzac by the time Murdoch arrived. The August offensive had failed. It could not be resumed without as many as 150,000 additional troops. And in the meantime those who were already there would simply have to sit out the awful conditions of winter: rain, wild seas, heavy snow.

This was a prospect to which Fisher needed to give the closest attention. The men were already sick, Murdoch reported, as many as 600 soldiers a day were reporting ill. What if the force were to lose 30,000 to sickness over the winter? Murdoch asked. The 60,000 remaining ‘will not be an army. They will be a broken force, spent.'

This was powerful writing, and awful reading for a prime minister responsible for the health and well-being of his nation's soldiers. Fisher would need to ask himself how the Australian people would cope with the news of mass evacuations from Anzac due to sickness.

It is worth noting, too, some of the images that Murdoch used to impress his points on his prime minister. Men were already sick, he wrote, from dysentery caused by the flies. But what of the consequences, he asked, of the autumn rains which will ‘unbury our dead' and add vastly to the dangers of airborne disease.

In similarly powerful prose, Murdoch had informed Fisher that ‘sedition is talked around every tin of bully beef on the peninsula'. Murdoch realised that almost every soldier or officer he met had buried a good mate on the peninsula already. Australian soldiers saw themselves as quite competent to form their own opinions, to think for themselves. They had freely offered their service as soldiers to their country but they had not surrendered their capacity for independent thinking and judgement. The Australian prime minister needed to know this about his soldiers.

Sedition is a dangerous word to use about men in an army but it was an effective word to send to a prime minister. The British might have thought that Australian troops were there to be used in whatever way the British generals chose, but even the mild-mannered Charles Bean recognised the strength of independence among the Australians and railed at the arrogance and insensitivity of many of the senior British officers. Murdoch had picked it up among the Australians in a matter of days and it was another factor that Fisher had to bear in mind in his thinking about Gallipoli.

Throughout the letter there ran a thread that Charles Bean observed in Murdoch: ‘an intense devotion to his country and countrymen'. In part his high regard for the Australian soldier lay in the contrast Murdoch perceived between soldiers of his own country and the British soldiers. At one point in the letter Murdoch referred to the British soldiers at Suvla as ‘toy soldiers', a terrible insult.

He was on firmer ground when he wrote directly about the Australians. He wrote of the ‘wonderful affection of these fine young soldiers for each other and their homeland'. ‘It is stirring,' he continued, ‘to see them, magnificent manhood, swinging their fine limbs as they walk about Anzac. They have the noble faces of men who have endured.' It was an implied demand that Fisher, Australian prime minister, care for these men and defend them, nourish and protect them. ‘Oh,' Murdoch concluded this section of the letter, ‘if you could picture Anzac as I have seen it, you would find that to be Australian is the greatest privilege that the world has to offer.'