Landing at Suvla Bay

Background

By the summer of 1915 the Gallipoli campaign had stalled at Helles and Anzac. On 7 June the Dardanelles Committee in London agreed to reinforce General Sir Ian Hamilton with three New Army divisions, and two Territorial divisions followed later that month. Hamilton's August offensive had three parts: a holding attack at Helles, a night break-out from Anzac against the Sari Bair ridge, with Lone Pine as a diversion, and a new landing at Suvla Bay, five miles north of Anzac. Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford's IX Corps was to secure the bay as a base of supply, take the ring of hills around it, above all the Tekke Tepe ridge, and then help the Anzac attack.

Suvla was chosen because it was almost empty. The Turks had formed an Anafarta Detachment of six battalions and 19 guns to watch the coast from the Anzac foothills to Ejelmer Bay. By August its commander, the Bavarian cavalry officer Major Wilhelm Willmer, had only three weak battalions there, and on the evening of 6 August he was ordered to send his one reserve battalion south. GHQ believed there were five. Liman von Sanders, commanding the Ottoman Fifth Army, kept his reserve, Feizi Bey's XVI Corps, at the Bulair isthmus some 30 miles away; it would need about 36 hours to reach Suvla.

Everything depended on surprise and speed. Stopford, an officer of advanced years and indifferent health with no experience of high command in the field, at first praised the plan, then had it revised. Citing France, he argued that entrenched hills could not be stormed without howitzers, and he asked for a brigade to land inside the bay. Secrecy was so tight that the 10th Division's leading brigadier arrived off Suvla knowing nothing of the plan.

The armies

IX Corps opened with the 11th (Northern) Division under Major-General Frederick Hammersley: three brigades of New Army volunteers, of which only the 33rd had seen action, with ten days at Helles. Next came Lieutenant-General Sir Bryan Mahon's 10th (Irish) Division, without its 29th Brigade, which was at Anzac, or its artillery, still in Egypt. The 53rd (Welsh) Division began landing on the night of 8 August and the 54th (East Anglian) on the 10th; both were Territorials whose best battalions had been sent to France. By the evening of 7 August Stopford had 22 battalions ashore.

Guns were the corps' weak point. Only twelve, eight mountain 10-pounders and four 18-pounders, went in with the first wave. GHQ planned for 56 by the night of the 7th, but no more were landed that day. The navy's armoured motor-lighters, the "beetles", carried 500 men each, and ships' guns gave fire support whose effect, by German and Turkish accounts, was close to nil.

Willmer had no machine guns and no quick-firing artillery. His men were the Broussa and Gallipoli Gendarmerie and the 1/31st Regiment, joined on 7 August by about 200 dismounted cavalrymen with carbines and on the 8th by four naval machine guns. Behind them Feizi Bey's 7th and 12th Divisions, nine battalions each, had suffered heavily at Helles and averaged about 500 men a battalion. Man for man, the official historian judged, the Turkish riflemen far outshot the New Army and Territorial troops.

The battle

B Beach and Lala Baba, night of 6 August. Just after 9.30 p.m., in pitch darkness, destroyers and motor-lighters brought over 10,000 men to Suvla. South of Nibrunesi Point the 32nd and 33rd Brigades landed unopposed at B Beach, four battalions ashore by 10 p.m. without a casualty. Two companies of the 6th Yorkshires, the first New Army unit to attack in the war, took Lala Baba with the bayonet but lost all but two of their officers. The advance on Hill 10 then stopped for fear of clashing with friendly troops in the dark.

A Beach and Hill 10, 6–7 August. Inside the bay the 34th Brigade's destroyers anchored nearly 1,000 yards south of their station. Two lighters stuck on a reef and men waded ashore up to their necks under sniping; the 9th Lancashire Fusiliers lost their commanding officer and, by noon on the 7th, 60 per cent of their officers. The 11th Manchesters turned north and by 3 a.m. had fought two miles along the Kiretch Tepe ridge, the night's one clear success, for nearly 200 casualties. Hill 10, held by about a hundred Turks, was not found until daylight, when a converging attack took it.

Chocolate Hill, 7 August. Six 10th Division battalions arrived at dawn and were split up: five went to the right flank under Brigadier-General Hill, the rest north with Mahon. Between 8 and 9.05 a.m. 11th Division headquarters issued three orders, each cancelling the last, and Brigadier-General Sitwell, the senior brigadier ashore, stood on the defensive. In great heat, with little water reaching the men, the attack on Chocolate and Green Hills went in only late in the afternoon, the 6th Lincolns crossing the dry Salt Lake, and took both hills at dusk. Willmer had already ordered their garrison, never more than 500 rifles, back to the W Hills. IX Corps had lost about 1,700 men in 24 hours, more than the Turks facing it.

The wasted day, 8 August. At 1 a.m. Willmer held the W Hills with about 1,100 men and five mountain guns, and three Gendarmerie companies held Kiretch Tepe; the plain and Tekke Tepe were empty. Stopford, still aboard HMS Jonquil, signalled that he must "consolidate the position held", and his 11.30 a.m. order to push on applied only if the ground proved lightly held. Hamilton could not get a ship until 4.30 p.m. and reached Suvla after six, insisting that at least one battalion be on Tekke Tepe by daylight. That evening Liman, told that Feizi Bey had put off his counter-attack until morning, replaced him with Mustafa Kemal, who reached Feizi's headquarters about 1 a.m.

The race for Tekke Tepe, 9 August. Lieutenant-Colonel Minogue had called the 32nd Brigade back to concentrate at Sulajik, and his runners lost their way in the scrub; the advance began only at 3.30 a.m. As the 6th East Yorkshires' leading company neared the crest at dawn, two battalions of the Ottoman 12th Division came over it. The race, the official historian wrote, was lost by rather less than half an hour. On Scimitar Hill the 33rd Brigade's attack swayed back and forth until the scrub caught fire, and Brigadier-General Maxwell's five battalions lost more than 1,500 men. On Kiretch Tepe, Nicol's Irish battalions, tormented by thirst, gave up the ground they had gained.

10–15 August. The 53rd Division's attack on Scimitar Hill on the 10th broke down. On the 12th the 163rd Brigade crossed the open plain in daylight; a party of the 1/5th Norfolks, 15 officers and 250 men, pushed on and was never seen again. On 15 August, the day Stopford was removed, the 10th Division and the 162nd Brigade attacked along Kiretch Tepe and took its summit, but Turkish bombers, far better equipped than the Irish with their few jam-tin grenades and stones, drove them back on the night of the 16th, for nearly 2,000 casualties.

Aftermath

The British had Suvla Bay as a base, but none of the hills that made it safe. Hamilton had lost over 25,000 men on three fronts in four days. The Turkish official account gives 3,536 casualties for the 7th and 12th Divisions between 9 and 13 August and 1,696 on Kiretch Tepe on 15–16 August.

Kitchener's telegram of 15 August, "This is a young man's war", sealed the fate of the IX Corps generals. Major-General Beauvoir de Lisle came from Helles to replace Stopford until Lieutenant-General Julian Byng arrived from France. Mahon refused to serve under a junior officer and gave up his division in the middle of the Kiretch Tepe fight; Lindley resigned the 53rd Division, Sitwell lost his brigade and Hammersley was replaced on 23 August. Reinforced by the 29th Division and dismounted yeomanry, the British attacked again at Scimitar Hill on 21 August and failed. Suvla then subsided into sporadic fighting until its evacuation in December,

The argument has never closed. The official historian found the root cause in the delays of 7 and 8 August, but spread the blame: to Kitchener for sending an elderly, untried commander, to a stultifying secrecy, and to Hamilton for staying at Imbros on the 7th. Liman von Sanders believed complete British success had been possible; the Turkish official account concluded that the landing force "did not attack vigorously and swiftly the weak force opposed to it". Even the water crisis, de Lisle later testified, had been much exaggerated.

Wargaming it

Suvla is a race against the clock. The British player lands two divisions against perhaps 1,500 men with no machine guns and a handful of guns, and has about 36 hours before Feizi Bey's corps can arrive; the Turkish player must trade space for time while holding the W Hills and Kiretch Tepe. A brigade- or battalion-level game on the bowl from Nibrunesi Point to Tekke Tepe and Ejelmer Bay, with turns of a few hours, covers the whole battle. The night at A Beach and the dawn of 9 August on Tekke Tepe make tense company-level scenarios.

The key terrain is a ring: Kiretch Tepe in the north, Tekke Tepe and Kavak Tepe to the east, the W Hills and Anafarta spur to the south-east, with Hill 10, Chocolate, Green and Scimitar Hills as stepping stones across a plain of dry salt lake and thick scrub. The rules that matter are about friction: water, heat and exhaustion; contradictory orders passed by runner; a corps commander afloat and out of touch; units that halt until told to move; naval gunfire that rarely hurts; scrub that burns.

The "what ifs" are many. Land the 34th Brigade south of Nibrunesi Point as GHQ first intended; attack Chocolate Hill from the south-west at dawn on the 7th; get Hamilton to Suvla on the 7th; send the 32nd Brigade straight up Tekke Tepe on the evening of the 8th; or give Feizi Bey the nerve to attack that evening as Liman ordered.

Maps and pictures

Pictures from the time

Photographs by the armies' photographers and the press, and drawings made at the time: free-to-use pictures from the battle's category on Wikimedia Commons. Each opens its file page there, with the full caption and source.