6th May, 1915- Gallipoli

[christine liava'a]

Before dawn on 6 May, the NZ Infantry Brigade, now with a strength of 88 officers and 2724 other ranks, landed on V beach near the stranded River Clyde, immediately west of Sedd el Bahr village on the toe of the peninsula. (They) were issued picks and shovels and moved north at daybreak to their bivouac at Stone Bridge...

The Allies attacked in the morning on 6 May, with the 1st French Division again on the right and the 29th Division again on the left. Between them, the Plymouth and Drake Battalions of the Royal Naval Division attacked up each side of the Sedd el Bahr-Krithia road. The 29th Division attack was divided between the 29th (Indian) and 88th Brigades to the right between Krithia Nullah and Gully Ravine, and the 89th and Lancashire Fusilier Brigades to the left between Gully Ravine and the Aegean coast

Bloody Gallipoli- Richard Stowers

[christine liava'a]

Inaccurate pre-attack naval bombardment of the deep and narrow Turkish trenches meant the infantry attack came under heavy and accurate machine gun and rifle fire as well as shrapnel and high explosive shells. They had little or no protection from the hail of bullets from the invisible enemy; every yard of the attack was marked by dead and wounded....

The surrounding landscape was mostly flat with cultivated areas, olive groves and a few stands of stunted pines and fir trees. Wells were commonplace, unlike Anzac where water was scarce....

Helles had a more cosmopolitan flavour. NZers mixed with British, Frenchmen, Senegalese, Sikhs and Australians.

Bloody Gallipoli; Richard Stowers

[michaeldr]

“Thursday, 6th May: John J.’s birthday. What a way to spend a birthday! Replaced in Reserve Trench by Naval Engineers. Advanced at 10 a.m. Gun brigaded to-day. Dug a gun pit up the Nullah under shell-fire. Covered the advance of the troops. Got our first meal – biscuits and jam – about 7 p.m. Kennedy, Aitken and I in a tight corner, quite isolated. Advanced to a night attack at 8 p.m. A rotten job – barbed wire and shrapnel. Got into Worcester lines and then among the Sikhs and Gurkhas. A wretched, cold night and had to lie out in the open. A weird night altogether. Don’t want another like it. Captain MacIntosh killed to-day.”

from the ‘Diary of John F. Goate, Machine Gun Section, 5th Royal Scots, 29th Division’ [discovered after his death in 1946, by his daughter Ms Dorothy Goate] as reproduced in ‘The Gallipolian’ issue No.91, Winter 1999