"You'll Never Take That Pine" — How 4,600 Australians Won 7 Victoria Crosses In 4 Days At Gallipoli

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[00:00:00]The Turkish staff had decided Lone Pine couldn't be taken. They'd roofed every forward trench on the position with pine logs three or four layers deep, sealed off the parapets, and built loopholes the defenders could fire through without showing themselves. A grenade thrown from above bounced off the timber. A rifle shot from the parapet hit wood.

[00:00:17]Engineers of the 16th Ottoman division called the design a permanent answer to the problem of Australian infantry. On the 6th of August, 1915, the Australians took it anyway. The first wave reached the timber roofs at 5:35 in the afternoon, less than a minute after climbing out of their saps. They were standing on top of a Turkish trench system they couldn't get into. Some men lay flat on the logs and fired down through the firing loopholes. Others worked at the timber with rifle butts and bare hands. A handful sprinted to the open communication trenches at the flanks of the position and dropped into the dark. The fight that opened on those log roofs lasted 96 hours. By the time it ended on the 9th of August, the first Australian Brigade had taken Lone Pine, held it against repeated Turkish counterattacks, and earned seven Victoria Crosses across four days. The Brigade lost roughly half its strength doing it. The Turks called the slope Kanlı Sırt, the Bloody Ridge. They never got it back.

[00:01:07]What the men of the first Brigade didn't know at the time was that their attack was a diversion. The real blow was meant to fall somewhere else entirely. The Gallipoli campaign had been stuck in trenches since the end of April. The Allied landings had failed to break inland from any of the beaches, and through the long summer of 1915, the casualty lists came in without territory to show for them.

[00:01:26]General Sir Ian Hamilton, commanding the expedition, faced political pressure from London to either crack defense or pull out. He chose to gamble. His plan was a triple offensive in August. New landings at Suvla Bay to the north of Anzac Cove, where the Turkish defense was thin. A breakout from the Anzac sector through the Sari Bair range, aiming to seize the high ground and outflank the Turkish line on the peninsula. And a diversion in the south at the Anzac line itself to pin Turkish reserves and stop them moving north to plug the breach. The diversion was Lone Pine. The first Australian Brigade drew the job. 4,600 men in the first, second, third, and fourth battalions of the Australian Imperial Force under Brigadier General Neville Smythe, an Englishman who'd won his own Victoria Cross in the Sudan back in 1898. Above Smith sat Major General Harold Walker running the first Australian Division.

[00:02:16]Walker's instructions to the Brigade were direct. Take the Turkish position, hold it long enough to keep the reserves busy in the south. Nobody told Smith's battalion commanders the attack was a faint. The men going over the parapet thought they were going in to win. The fourth battalion was held in reserve with two companies committed to follow the first wave and reinforce whatever ground the others took.

[00:02:35]The third battalion was tasked with the southern end of the position. The second and first battalions had the center and the northern flank. Each unit had been given specific bays to take and specific crosscuts to hold.

[00:02:46]Once the trench was in Australian hands, the consolidation party, engineers and second line infantry, was supposed to wire it in within hours.

[00:02:54]The position they were going at was the strongest stretch of trench in the Turkish line on the Anzac sector. Less than 200 m of frontage held by the 16th Ottoman Division under Major Ismet Bey.

[00:03:05]The 47th, 48th, and 57th Turkish regiments worked the trenches in rotation. Above Ismet sat Essad Pasha, the local core commander. Further back, in reserve, was Mustafa Kemal, the future Ataturk, with the formations that would later save the Ottoman August.

[00:03:20]In the weeks before the attack, Turkish engineers had done something the British High Command on the peninsula hadn't seen before.

[00:03:27]They'd roofed the forward trenches over with pine timber salvaged from the slope. Three or four layers of timber, depending on where you looked. The men inside could move along the connecting saps without ever showing themselves to the sky, firing through loopholes cut into the parapet at their convenience.

[00:03:41]To the Australian observers up the slope, the position looked like a wooden lid laid over a network of holes.

[00:03:47]Australian observers had been watching the work for weeks. They saw the pine logs arrive on muleback up the rear slope. They saw the engineers covering the parapet section by section. They worked out the layout of the loopholes by counting muzzle flashes during night patrols.

[00:04:00]By the time the attack was planned in the last week of July, the brigade staff had a near complete map of what was waiting for them and no clear way past it. The Australians did the only thing left. They went underground themselves.

[00:04:12]For 5 days before the assault, sappers and infantry of the first brigade cut new saps forward from the Anzac line.

[00:04:18]Narrow tunnels and shallow trenches pushed the front of the position to within 40 m of the Turkish parapet. They also cut secret parallel trenches beneath the surface. Saps with a covering of earth and brush over the top, hidden from Turkish observation balloons and snipers.

[00:04:32]The plan was to have the first wave rise out of these hidden trenches at the moment of attack, closer to the enemy than the Turks thought possible. The work was done in silence at night.

[00:04:39]Australian sappers carried the spoil away in sandbags so it wouldn't pile up in front of the new positions and give the layout away. By the night of the 5th of August, the leading saps were within 40 m of the Turkish parapet. The men of the first battalion went into them an hour before dawn on the 6th, lay down in the bottom of the trench, and waited for the afternoon. Above ground, British and Australian artillery hammered the Turkish position for 3 days straight.

[00:05:03]The Turks had seen this kind of bombardment before. Artillery preparation meant assault. But the shelling went on longer than any preparation they'd seen, and by the morning of the 6th of August, Major Ismet Bey concluded the bombardment was harassment rather than a prelude to an attack. He pulled a quarter of the Lone Pine garrison off the line for rest.

[00:05:21]That single decision put him wrong about Lone Pine in nearly every way that mattered. The Turkish garrison wasn't just rested, it was rotated down to half strength. The forward bays were held thin with most of the duty company sent back to dugouts behind the ridge. Ismet expected to feed them forward again at first light if the bombardment turned into something serious. He never got the chance.

[00:05:41]2 hours before the attack, Australian artillery lifted its fire from the forward Turkish trenches and shifted onto the rear positions. The Turkish defenders came up from their dugouts thinking the bombardment was past them.

[00:05:51]They were back in the firing line when the whistles went. At 5:30 in the afternoon of the 6th of August, whistles blew along the Anzac line. The men of the 2nd and 3rd battalions came over the visible parapet of the front trench at the same instant as the men of the 1st battalion rose out of the hidden saps in front. Both waves crossed the open ground in a single rush. Turkish machine guns on the flanks opened up. Men fell in the dirt. The rest kept running.

[00:06:15]The leading companies of the 2nd battalion lost half their officers in the first 60 seconds. Captains went down 20 m from the timber. Lieutenants were hit and kept going another 10 m before they fell.

[00:06:24]The companies pushed on without their officers, sergeants taking sections forward by themselves.

[00:06:29]They reached the timber lid in under a minute and found nothing to shoot at.

[00:06:32]Just logs and silence.

[00:06:35]From below, the Turks opened fire upward through the loopholes. Men of the 2nd battalion started prying logs apart with rifle butts and bayonets.

[00:06:42]Others followed the line of the trench to its open ends where the communication saps ran back to the Turkish rear and dropped down into the dark.

[00:06:49]The fight that opened in those covered trenches was a knife fight in a corridor.

[00:06:53]The Australians went in with bayonets at arms reach and the small mills bombs they'd carried up in sandbags. The corridors were so narrow that two men couldn't stand side by side. The bombs hung in the close air after they went off choking everybody on both sides.

[00:07:06]By 6:00, the entire Turkish forward line at Lone Pine was in Australian hands.

[00:07:11]Within 20 minutes, men were dropping into the captured trench in numbers.

[00:07:15]Turkish defenders woken from sleep by the explosion of grenades over their heads came up firing into the dark and met bayonets coming the other way.

[00:07:22]The Australians took more than 300 prisoners in the first hour.

[00:07:26]Most of them were sent back along the same open ground the brigade had crossed an hour earlier, hands on their heads under Australian rifles.

[00:07:33]The Turkish counterattack came inside the hour.

[00:07:36]Ismet Bey threw the reserve companies of the 47th regiment back along the communication trenches from the rear.

[00:07:41]They came with grenades in groups of five and six, and they knew the ground in a way the Australians didn't. They hit the captured trenches from three directions and kept hitting them through the night.

[00:07:50]The first counterattack came at 7:00 on the evening of the 6th, a company of the 48th Regiment pushing up the communication saps from the south. The second came an hour later from the north.

[00:07:59]By midnight, the Australians had thrown back four separate rushes in the same captured corridor.

[00:08:04]Men were dragging the Turkish dead onto the parapets to use as sandbags. There was nothing else to build with.

[00:08:10]That set the pattern for the next 96 hours. The Turkish grenades had fuses of five to seven seconds. A man with quick hands could catch a smoking bomb and throw it back before it went off. Some men did.

[00:08:21]Private Leonard Keysor of the 1st Battalion was the best of them.

[00:08:24]For 50 hours, he worked the same stretch of captured trench, picking up bombs from the dust as they landed and hurling them back at the Turkish side.

[00:08:31]Sometimes, he held them an extra second to make sure they wouldn't come home.

[00:08:35]Keysor took shrapnel across the face and the body.

[00:08:38]Twice, his officers ordered him to the rear. Twice, he came back to the line.

[00:08:41]By the time he finally came out on the 8th of August, he hadn't slept for two days. And the recommendation for his Victoria Cross credited him with breaking every counterattack in his sector.

[00:08:51]Conditions inside the captured trenches were getting worse by the hour.

[00:08:54]The summer dead, both Turkish and Australian, lay in the corridors where they'd fallen. There was no way to remove them. The bombs kept coming.

[00:09:01]The Australian wounded had to be passed back along a chain of men over the bodies into the open above the trench and down the slope to the original Anzac line through the same fire that had cut them on the way up. Where the bombs couldn't be caught, they had to be smothered. The Australians used greatcoats and folded blankets, dropping them over a hissing grenade and pressing down with whatever was nearest. The blast would shred the cloth. The man on top would absorb whatever made it through.

[00:09:25]It worked often enough to become standard practice along the captured line.

[00:09:29]That technique cost the brigade Corporal Alexander Burton of the 7th Battalion.

[00:09:33]Burton was in a bay called Jacob's Trench on the night of the 8th of August, holding it alongside Lieutenant Frederick Tubb and Corporal William Dunstan. A Turkish grenade landed in the bay.

[00:09:43]Burton dropped onto it. He didn't get up. Dunstan, standing beside him, took the flash of another bomb across both eyes a moment later and lost his sight on the spot.

[00:09:52]Tubb, already wounded in the head and the arm, kept the bay through the rest of the night. The Turks rushed Jacob's trench again and again. Tubb threw them back. By dawn, the bay was held and Burton was gone. Burton was buried near where he fell.

[00:10:04]Tubb and Dunstan both got the Victoria Cross and survived. Dunstan, blinded at the age of 20, recovered partial sight in one eye after the war and worked at the Herald and Weekly Times in Melbourne until his passing in 1957.

[00:10:16]He never spoke to his colleagues about Lone Pine. Most of them only learned what he'd done from the obituary in his own paper.

[00:10:22]There were others whose names didn't appear in the citations. Junior NCOs who held bays alone after every man in their section went down.

[00:10:29]Stretcher bearers who carried the wounded out of the captured ground through fire that should have stopped them.

[00:10:33]Privates who used their own bodies to plug gaps in the parapet while Turkish bombers came up the trench.

[00:10:38]The brigade reported acts of conspicuous courage for men in every company. The seven Victoria Crosses awarded were the seven being could verify in writing. The actual number of men who earned one might have been three times that figure.

[00:10:50]Lieutenant William Simons of the 7th Battalion held another bay through the same nights.

[00:10:54]The Turks came at his position five separate times. Simons led the defense in person, shooting attackers at 5 m range as they came around the traverse, organizing the survivors when his sergeants went down, sealing off the bay with sandbags when the Turks broke through and reopening it once the rush had stopped. He came out alive and got the Victoria Cross as well.

[00:11:12]Above the trench, on the open parapet, Private John Hamilton of the 3rd Battalion did something different. The men in the corridor below couldn't see where the Turkish bombers were forming up to throw. So, Hamilton climbed onto the bullet-swept top of the position, lay flat on the dirt, and called down corrections to the Australians inside in real time. He stayed there for the better part of a day. Turkish rifleman knew exactly where he was. They missed him every time. That left Captain Alfred Shout of the first battalion. He was the best small unit fighter the AIF had on the peninsula. Shout had already taken the Military Cross at the April landings. At Lone Pine on the 9th of August, he led a clearing party along a stretch of captured trench the Turks were trying to take back yard by yard.

[00:11:51]He was packing his own bombs, lighting them in his hand, and throwing them at close range with no margin to spare. He worked his way along eight bays of trench in succession, clearing every Turkish defender in front of him.

[00:12:00]The trench Shout was clearing was a salient that the Turks had pushed back into the Australian holding three times that morning. Each time a clearing party went forward and lost men trying to drive them out. The brigade was running short of officers who could lead such a party. Shout volunteered. He was 23 years old, a New Zealand-born carpenter who'd settled in Sydney, married, father to daughter, and signed up in the first week of the war.

[00:12:22]On the ninth bay, working with three bombs lit in one hand to save time on the next throw, the last grenade went off early. The blast took his hand and tore open his right side. He lost his eye to the shrapnel that came with it.

[00:12:33]He passed away two days later on a hospital ship at sea.

[00:12:36]Bean's official history records that Shout was holding three grenades when the last one off. He was packing them in one hand to save the seconds it took to strike the fuse on each separately. He knew the risk. He went ahead anyway. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, the seventh recognized for the four days. Shout's wife, Rose, was at home in Sydney when the telegram came. She'd already been told her husband was wounded. The next message confirmed his passing. She received the Victoria Cross from the Governor-General in September. She held the medal for the rest of her life. It was sold at auction in 2006 to the media owner Kerry Stokes, the highest price ever paid for an Australian VC at that point. Shout, Symons, Burton, Dunstan, Keyser, Tubb, Hamilton.

[00:13:16]Seven Victoria Crosses awarded for one battle on a piece of ground less than 200 m wide across four days in August.

[00:13:22]No single AIF action of the First World War produced as many.

[00:13:26]The record has stood for over a century.

[00:13:28]The cost was paid in flat numerical terms, 2,277 Australian casualties, about half of every man committed. 569 of them fell on the position. 1,708 wounded, many mutilated by grenade fragmentation in the close work of the trench corridors. The 7th Battalion, which had held Jacob's Trench, lost 78% of its officers in the 96 hours. Turkish losses were higher. Ottoman casualty estimates put the figure around 6,000 total. The 47th, 48th, and 57th regiments were effectively destroyed in their attempts to retake the position.

[00:14:01]They never did.

[00:14:02]By the morning of the 9th of August, Major Ismet Bey called off the counterattacks.

[00:14:07]The Australians held the ridge. They held it for the rest of the campaign.

[00:14:11]Through August, September, October, and November, and into the evacuation in December, Lone Pine stayed in Australian hands. The men of the 1st Brigade and the units that relieved them sat in the same trenches whose log roofs they'd torn off in the assault, looking across at the same Turkish line 200 m away.

[00:14:28]On the ground, both sides settled back into the trench routine that had defined the campaign before August. Turkish snipers worked the ridge from positions 100 m away. Australian raiding parties slipped out at night. Through September, the heat broke and the autumn rains came. By November, the trenches were knee-deep in mud and water. Men passed away of dysentery, of jaundice, of pneumonia.

[00:14:49]The wounded who'd held the line through the 96 hours were long since invalidated home or back to base hospitals in Egypt and Malta.

[00:14:56]And the whole thing didn't matter. That was the part nobody put in the citations.

[00:15:00]Lone Pine was a tactical success and a strategic failure at the same moment.

[00:15:05]The point of the attack had been to pull Turkish reserves south, away from the main offensive at the Sari Bair range and the new landings at Suvla Bay.

[00:15:12]The reserves did move, but the main offensive collapsed anyway. The British units at Suvla landed on the beach and sat there for two full days while Mustafa Kemal raced his reserves to the heights above them.

[00:15:23]By the time the Suvla force finally moved inland, the high ground was held in strength. The August offensive ended in the same stalemate as everything that had come before it. The Australians at Lone Pine had taken their objective. The British at Suvla had not.

[00:15:36]The bill for the diversion, paid in Australian dead on a piece of ground that didn't change the campaign's outcome, became one of the founding bitter facts of the Anzac story.

[00:15:45]Hamilton was relieved of command in October. He came home to a quiet reception in London and never held a field command again.

[00:15:52]Mustafa Kemal, who'd done more than any other Ottoman officer to stop the August offensive, was promoted to colonel and then to brigadier within the year. After the war, he would lead the Turkish War of Independence and become the founder of the Turkish Republic.

[00:16:05]Esat Pasha lived to see that as well and held senior posts in the new state until his passing in 1930.

[00:16:12]Charles Bean, the official Australian historian, was on the peninsula through the whole campaign and saw the rest of it first hand. He wrote afterwards that Lone Pine was the grimmest and bloodiest of all the actions there. He stood by that judgment for the rest of his life.

[00:16:26]Bean spent the rest of the war on the Western Front with the AIF. He saw Pozières and Bullecourt and Villers-Bretonneux.

[00:16:32]He came back to Australia and spent the next 20 years writing the 12-volume official history. Lone Pine got more pages, proportionally, than any other action in his work.

[00:16:41]He believed it was the truest mirror of what the AIF was capable of in attack and in holding ground, and he never changed his mind.

[00:16:49]The Turkish position itself, the timber lid that had seemed permanent in July, became a piece of military history within months.

[00:16:55]British staff officers studied the design and the methods the Australian engineers had used to break it.

[00:17:01]When the Somme offensive opened the following year, British infantry assault doctrine included starting attacks from secret underground saps cut close to the enemy line.

[00:17:09]The technique came directly from what the AIF had done on the cliff at Lone Pine in August 1915.

[00:17:15]The pine itself was already gone before the attack.

[00:17:18]Turkish soldiers had cut down the single tree that gave the position its name during the long summer using the timber for cover and fuel.

[00:17:25]One Australian soldier picked up a pine cone from the ground after the fighting and carried it home in his pack. The seeds were planted in northern New South Wales after the war. Saplings raised from those seeds were transplanted across the country in the decades that followed. The cone was carried home in the pack of a soldier of the brigade.

[00:17:41]The names of two men have come down through the decades, but neither was identified in the public record at the time. Both served at Lone Pine, both came home. Neither talked much about which one of them actually picked it up.

[00:17:52]Saplings descended from that cone grow at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne has its own, and country towns across every Australian state have planted theirs.

[00:18:03]The Australian Embassy in Ankara has one.

[00:18:06]Another stands on the ridge above Lone Pine Cemetery itself. Each tree came from a cone a soldier of the first brigade had put in his pocket on a piece of ground where his battalion had fallen around him.

[00:18:16]The Lone Pine Cemetery sits on the ridge today. It's the largest British and Commonwealth military cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

[00:18:23]Most of the Australian dead from August 1915 have no marked grave there.

[00:18:28]They were buried in the trench where they fell, and the trench has long since collapsed into the slope. Their names are carved on the memorial wall instead.

[00:18:35]The evacuation in December was the only fully successful operation of the entire campaign.

[00:18:40]The Australians slipped out of their trenches at Lone Pine on the night of the 18th of December, leaving the position empty behind them. They rigged drip rifles that fired automatically as water filled a trigger pan, kept the Turkish patrols guessing for hours. By the time the Turks worked out the line was abandoned, the brigade was already at sea. Leonard Keysor came home. He moved to London after the war and ran a paint business in Soho. He passed away in 1951. He didn't talk about the bombs.

[00:19:04]He kept his Victoria Cross in a drawer at the back of his shop and showed it to customers who asked, then put it away without explaining what was behind it.

[00:19:10]He told a friend once, late in life, that he didn't remember most of the 50 hours, only the dust and the smell and the noise the fuses made when they hit the trench wall. William Dunstan, blind in one eye and partly sighted in the other, lived in Melbourne and worked his desk job at the Herald and Weekly Times and avoided Anzac Day services for years.

[00:19:28]William Symons came home, worked in Australia for a stretch, moved to England and ran a fruit farm in Devon and passed away in 1948.

[00:19:36]Frederick Tubb went back into uniform.

[00:19:38]He served at Pozières the following year. He lost his life at Polygon Wood in 1917.

[00:19:44]A Turkish veteran of the 16th Division, interviewed years after the armistice, told an Australian researcher that the men who came over the parapet at Lone Pine that afternoon were not normal soldiers. Bunlar normal asker değil. The line is preserved in Charles Bean's working notes. Bean never identified the man who said it.

[00:20:00]In the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, in one of the glass cases on the ground floor, there's a small wooden box. It holds three pieces of metal, fragments of Mills bombs, recovered from the floor of a trench at Lone Pine, donated by a private of the First Battalion who carried them home in his pack.

[00:20:15]The card beside the box gives a date, 6th to 9th of August 1915, and a sentence describing where the fragments came from.

[00:20:22]The sentence ends with a fact and stops.