5th Norfolks

[historian9]

Good evening

Read the "From the Times" reprint from Jan 2nd 1921 ( The Times, Saturday January 2 2021) which mentions the actions of the 5th Norfolks around Chanak. This motivated me to learn more, and I found the account by Steve Smith, quoted on  :  

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/5th-Battalion-Norfolk-Regiment-The-True-Story/

 

Can anyone with significantly better understanding of these tragic few hours add some clarity ? Was this group of men shot at one by one with the remainder corralled into a farm building ? Or did they literally walk into machine gun fire that slaughtered them so easily ?

 

I am researching my Great Uncle who was MIA, presumed killed, at Hill 70, Loos in October 1915. There appear to be similarities between how these brave 5th Norfolks met their untimely deaths and the Guards walking up Hill 70.  In particular the lack of reinforcements and and paucity of armaments.

I wonder whether there was any subsequent communication between Hamilton and Churchill with Kitchener which might have informed actions on the Western Front ? 

[PRC]

My current write up that I use for men of the 1/5th Battalion who died on Anarfarta Plain on the 12th when I come across them on a local War Memorial is this :-

 

Events of the 12th August 1915

Sir Ian Hamilton had issued orders that a division, marching by night, should attack the heights known as Kavak Tepe and Teke Tepe at dawn on the 13th. As the country from Kuchik Anafarta Ova eastwards was held by the enemy the Corps Commander decided to send forward the 163rd Brigade in the afternoon for the purpose of occupying Kuchik Anafarta Ova “and securing an unopposed night march for the remainder of the division.”

Accordingly, at 4 p.m. on August 12 the 163rd Brigade advanced, the 1/5th Norfolk Regiment being on the right, the 1/8th Hampshire Regiment in the centre, and the 1/5th Suffolk Regiment on the left and directing the attack. The 1/4th Norfolk Regiment was in support on the left. There was no artillery co-operation other than that afforded by naval guns. The brigade immediately came under a most destructive fire from artillery, machine-guns, and infantry, and units became much intermingled; nevertheless they succeeded in reaching a position about 1500 yards from the starting-point. Here the battalion was checked, detached parties still endeavouring to push on. An hour later, however, the brigade was ordered to withdraw about 200 yards to a fenced ditch, affording better cover as well as a definite line of defence. Strangely enough this position, taken up so soon after the battalion landed, remained its front line right up to the evacuation. It was during this attack, “creditable in all respects to the 163rd Brigade,” to quote the words of General Sir Ian Hamilton, that 16 officers and 250 men of the 1/5th Norfolk Regiment, under Colonel Sir Horace Proctor-Beauchamp, charged into the forest and were killed to a man.

The plain stretching inland from Suvla Bay is covered with long grass and trees, and the hills with tough prickly bushes, breaking up an attack and forcing troops to wind in and out in single file. The fighting at Suvla was not static warfare, but hill warfare, requiring long practice and a high standard of training to prevent loss of cohesion, co-operation and direction, and to avoid confusion. Some of the troops engaged had not had sufficient training to carry out in its entirety so ambitious a programme.

From Page 103 – 105 “The History of the Suffolk Regiment 1914-1927” by Lieutenant-Colonel C.C.R.Murphy

In the advance some of the men of the 1st/5th Norfolks swerved to avoid machine gun fire and so became intermixed with the 1st/5th Suffolks. As a consequence the fate of some of those missing men became intertwined.

An urban myth began to appear in later years that the men of the 1st/5th Norfolks had been abducted by an alien UFO – they had been seen to advance into a low cloud.

An article was published in the UFO Magazine (UK) 2004 in an attempt to debunk this.

The actual fate of the battalion was discovered in 1919 at the end of the war when the Commonwealth War Graves Commission began searching the battlefields at Gallipoli for the remains of soldiers. There an investigator discovered a cap badge belonging to a soldier of the Norfolk regiment hidden in sand 800 yards behind the Turkish lines at Suvla Bay. This led the commanding officer to write home triumphantly: "We have found the 5th Norfolks." When this news reached the War Office they sent a chaplain who had served during the campaign back to Gallipoli to investigate. The Rev Charles Pierrepoint Edwards examined the area where the cap badge had been uncovered and found a mass grave containing 180 bodies, from which the remains of 122 were identified as members of the "Vanished Battalion." The remains included those of their commanding officer, Lt-Col Beuchamp, who was identified by the distinctive shoulder flashes on his uniform. Of the 266 officers and men reported as missing, 144 remained unaccounted for, but a number of these had been captured and some had subsequently died in the notorious Turkish prison camps. A few had survived captivity to describe what had really happened, but their stories did not emerge until half a century later.

In his book The Vanished Battalion (1991) McCrery revealed new evidence that explained why the full facts discovered by the clergyman who visited the mass grave were not revealed in 1919. He found there was evidence of an official cover-up but this was not to hide evidence of an extraterrestrial kidnapping. In this case it was to conceal evidence of both a military blunder and a war crime. For it emerged that of the bodies discovered that many had been shot through the head as the Turkish soldiers did not like to take prisoners of war. His evidence was backed up by the story of a British survivor of the massacre, who testified before his death in 1969 that he had seen Turkish soldiers bayoneting wounded and helpless prisoners and shooting others in the wood where the battalion disappeared. The survivor escaped only because of the intervention of a German officer who saved his life and he spent the remainder of the war in a prison camp.

It appears that the Rev Charles Pierrepoint Edwards concealed this disturbing evidence in his report to the War Office so as to spare the feelings of the families and the King, who continued to believe their loved ones died gallantly in battle with the enemy.

 

www.drdavidclarke.co.uk/vanbat.htm

A slightly different tale appears elsewhere.

It was not till four years later that any trace was discovered of the fate of this body. Writing on September 23, 1919 the officer commanding the Graves Registration Unit in Gallipoli says:
" We have found the 5th Norfolks - there were 180 in all; 122 Norfolk and a few Hants and Suffolks with 2/4th Cheshires. We could only identify two - Privates Barnaby and Cotter. They were scattered over an area of about one square mile, at a distance of at least 800 yards behind the Turkish front line. Many of them had evidently been killed in a farm, as a local Turk, who owns the place, told us that when he came back he found the farm covered with the decomposing bodies of British soldiers which he threw into a small ravine. The whole thing quite bears out the original theory that they did not go very far on, but got mopped up one by one, all except the ones who got into the farm."
(The website where I sourced this many years ago no longer exists).

 

A number of those that died on the day as far as I can discern turn up on CWGC as having died on the 21st August 1915. My working theory on this is that in the immediate aftermath of the action the survivors of the 1/5th were attached to the 1/4th Norfolks, only reforming as a separate unit away from the front line on the 21st when a draft arrived. At that point a roll call would have been taken and it is likely that additional absentees were found. CWGC has 36 of them, which Steve Smiths' article I believe doesn't take into account. In a couple of the cases I've had cause to investigate men shown on CWGC as having died on the 21st were regarded in documents like the Register of Soldiers Effects as having died on or after the 12th August 1915.

 

Hope that helps,

Peter

Edited 4 January , 2021 by PRC
Typo

[historian9]

Many thanks Peter, a helpful and detailed reply. I would still like to find out what conversations may have taken place between the chain of command for Galipoli /Suvla in the first half of 1915 and the War Office. There seems to be an inevitability that no lessons would be learnt which could, had communications been any different, have informed actions on the Western Front in the second half of 1915. Perhaps the intense difficulties involved in i) training enough soldiers to cover both Western Front and other theatres ii) manufacturing enough ammunition (etc) and iii) developing tactical expertise which would have ensured reinforcements were available, together resulted in poorly executed campaigns. Hence my question about the levels of dialogue between High Command and those in charge at the battlefronts.    

 

[PRC]

Sorry @historian9, just trying to get my understanding straight of what you have written, so please read it in that light.

 

I'm not sure what universal lessons you believe were first identified in the fighting at Gallipoli that the BEF hadn't already learned in campaigning since August 1914. Undoubtedly the BEF were still on a very steep learning curve, but post battle "lessons learned" reports, (copied in war diaries), setting up of Divisional and Corps Schools, and updated pamphlets and guides and courses, along with a weeding out of those senior officers not physically or mentally robust enough for field command was already happening I believe in the BEF.

 

If anything it is the other way round - the failure to apply appropriate lessons learned in France & Flanders to the Command & Control system at Gallipoli, that led to this calamity on Anafarta Plain and so many others.  Could the lessons , if any, of the decimation of one Battalion on the 12th August 1915 have been identified and disseminated in such a way as to stop the errors at Loos, when such losses had become a regular occurrence? Was there anything truely unique or revelatory about the outcome of this action? Or would it have been cumulative?

 

Once again as a result of a poor choice of leadership - for which the blame has to lie at the door of the War Office in my opinion and beyond them the politicians - the men of the 1/5th Norfolks and the 1/4th Norfolks would get out of their trenches in April 1917 at 2nd Gaza and advance towards the Turkish machine guns in a scenario more akin to the Western Front. The butchers bill was many times higher on that occasion, but by then there was few if any Sandringham estate workers left, no stewards and estate managers that the King knew as friends and sat down to meals with and discussed the running of his estate with when he was in residence. So one devastated battalion at Anafarta amongst so many get singled out for attention not because of the human cost of failure, keenly felt in so many villages in Norfolk, but because the King keeps asking for information about the missing men. The 1917 dead would lie in no mans land until the Allies fought 3rd Gaza and had control of the battlefield - but to the best of my knowledge the King took no express interest in the fate of these missing men.  Both the 7th & 9th Norfolks would lose more men as far as I'm aware at Loos than the 1/5th did at Anarfarta. So easy to overestimate the importance both strategically, tactically and potential for universal lessons learned.

 

55 minutes ago, historian9 said:

would still like to find out what conversations may have taken place between the chain of command for Galipoli /Suvla in the first half of 1915 and the War Office.

 

The first half of 1915 would end in June, and so predate the landings at Suvla in August, so not sure of the distinction you're looking for or how the loss of the Norfolks fits in if the original landings is your focus of interest.

 

Cheers,

Peter

[T8HANTS]

When 163 Brigade started their advance, with the senior Bugler of the 8th Hants - Bugle Major Peachey sounding the 'advance' (who was promptly shot in the thigh).   The 5th Norfolks apparently misinterpreted an order and advanced at slight deviation to the rest of the Brigade.  Urged on by their ex cavalry Colonel Beuuchamp an unfortunate gap formed between the 5th and the rest of the Brigade as they advanced further and slightly different direction from the other Battalions.  Eventually any form of Brigade line broke up, the bulk of the 5th Norfolks were almost 500 yards ahead of the other units, who were also muddled by the scrub, bush fires and green troops who just charged rather than realizing the importance of maintaining a cohesive front.  Eventually after a series of attacks and counter attacks, the Turkish major of their 36th Division had no more men available and with every chance of him loosing the position and allowing a British breakthrough, could not afford the luxury of sparing men to guard unwounded prisoners, and being short of ammunition had the unwounded prisoners bayoneted, having been put in the position of either keeping a fairly large bag of prisoners, who may turn against him alive, or doing what his duty demanded of holding his front at all costs..  As a side note KGV, was actually C in C of the 8th Hants (Princess Beatrice's Isle of Wight Rifles) a unit with which he ahd served as a young man and the the only TA unit to have the King as their C in C.

[historian9]

Thankyou again Peter.

Two Octobers ago I walked up Hill 70 at Loos and saw for myself how the land gently folds in and out of itself across an otherwise flat and open plain. The various copses, mining outbuildings and roads which remain are all visual echoes of the intensity of battle. I could see how confusion must have been rife as different groups of men fought their way up and down that slope. 

I left with an overwhelming sense of sadness and vowed to gain a better understanding of the decisions which lead to the lack of reinforcements, which, had they been made available, may very well have catalysed a more successful outcome.

I am certainly no expert, but I am trying to piece together my GU's story and looking beyond the Western Front to see if there are any similarities between other campaigns and what happened in October 1915 at Loos. 

I appreciate your replies Peter and anyone else who may help further my understanding

Regards