War diaries - Gallipoli

[ZackNZ]

Merry Xmas everyone from down under

Does anyone have contacts details (especially electronic) for any war diaries that cover the allies’ involvement on Gallipoli?

Cheers

Zack

[CSMMo]

Hello Zack - Are you referring to ANZAC units or British units? (Or French units for that matter!) I have been successful in getting the NA at Kew to photocopy and mail what WD's are available for the units I'm interested in to me in California - after they were found tucked away in the 29th Divisional Artillery War Diaries by a friend (and forum member) at Kew! And they sent only the dates I requested (14 August 1914 to 31 December 1915). The copies were very good and reasonably priced. I have no experience with Australian unit war diaries - are they kept in Australia or at Kew?

Forgive me if that sounds like a dumb question, but that would be of interest to more than a few folks who are researching action at Gallipoli.

Cheers back at ya'!

Mike Morrison

[CSMMo]

Sorry Zack - forgot to include this: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documen...queryType=1rch0 which will get you started with to the British National Archives search.

Mike Morrison

[ZackNZ]

Thanks Mike - I meant 'any and all' - including Turkish (if any exist for them that are in English).

Zack

[steve fuller]

Hi Zack

Merry Xmas from up here

I have the 5th Bedfords Gallipoli diaries etc. If you want, they are on my web site along with a fair bit more. The 5th Btn "front page" that will take you to wherever you wanna go is here - http://www.bedfordregiment.org.uk/5thbattalion.html - and theres a Suvla battle story here http://www.bedfordregiment.org.uk/id16.html 15th to 16th August 1915.

Anything else give me ashout as I have all sorts of odds & ends for the 5th Beds.

Cheers

[CSMMo]

Steve, Thanks for the reminder that WE might have something of interest. I've transcribed a couple of WD's of relevance to me forgetting that they might be of interest to others as well!

Zack,

I have transcribed the 29th Divisional Artillery War Diaries from 25 April to 31 May (and hope to have some copies of the June and July ones to transcribe as well soon) as well as the 4th Highland Mountain Brigade, RGA (TF) and the Ross & Cromarty Mountain Battery, RGA (TF) of the 29th Divarty. Happy to send them along if you are interested. PM or email me.

Mike Morrison

[Aaron Nelson]

zack,

Do you have a copy of the Wellingtons Battallion War diary for the first week of the Battle, relative of mine was part of the Anzac day landings and was wounded in the first week.

cheers Aaron.

[bob lembke]

Thanks Mike - I meant 'any and all' - including Turkish (if any exist for them that are in English).

Zack

Good news and bad news, re: Turkish documents:

The good news; possibly in conflict with what people might assume, the Turks seemed to have been maniacal record keepers; even the German staff officers (not mean record keepers themselves) at Gallipoli complained about the paperwork burden on Turkish officers; reportedly a Turkish company commander had a set of 146 different reports and forms that he had to produce and send up the chain of command. Perhaps this habit came from the fact that they ran an enormous empire for centuries.

Multiple bad news: I think that it is very hard to find anyone in Turkey today that can even read Turkish hand-writing from the WW I era. First of all, we are dealing with what may be, in balance, the most difficult major language in the world. However, in the WW I era the language was written in the Arabic script, which is worse than it looks. Additionally, it was the fashion for an educated Turk to include as much Persian and Arabic prose and poetry in his written Turkish, to show off his learning. (Hopefully, this was at a minimum in military reports.) The Turk who found the original journals that became the "Lone Pine Diaries" or something of that sort spent months looking for someone to translate the written Turkish into modern Turkish.

Access would be somewhere between very difficult to impossible, I suspect. It seems to be quite difficult to even buy histories written and published by the current-day Turkish Army, even for a Turk in Turkey. A couple of years ago I was able to talk myself into an interview with the colonel commanding the Military Library at the wonderful Military Museum (Askeri Mueze) in Istanbul, shamefully playing on the fact that my father was a German volunteer fighting with the Turkish Army at Gallipoli. In order to use the library, I would need written permission from the Turkish General Staff. And not the Turkish General Staff in their very large office building next door; from the Turkish General Staff in Ankara. (However, it was suggested that I might get this permission over the Internet!)

Bob Lembke

[ZackNZ]

zack,

Do you have a copy of the Wellingtons Battallion War diary for the first week of the Battle, relative of mine was part of the Anzac day landings and was wounded in the first week.

cheers Aaron.

No I don't have it Aaron - unfortunately!

Zack

[ZackNZ]

Hi Zack

Merry Xmas from up here

I have the 5th Bedfords Gallipoli diaries etc. If you want, they are on my web site along with a fair bit more. The 5th Btn "front page" that will take you to wherever you wanna go is here - http://www.bedfordregiment.org.uk/5thbattalion.html - and theres a Suvla battle story here http://www.bedfordregiment.org.uk/id16.html 15th to 16th August 1915.

Anything else give me ashout as I have all sorts of odds & ends for the 5th Beds.

Cheers

Many thanks Steve - I will take a look see.

Zack

[ZackNZ]

Bob

Thank you very much for your comments! I've always thought that the Turks would have had excellent record keeping but you are the first person I've heard state it along with some cogent reasons! Recently I emailed a bookseller in Ankara asking them if there were any official histories on Gallipoli campaign written by any Turkish historians written in English (other than the couple currently available) but I've never heard back - I guess I never will! A great pity that we may never get a "balanced" view of events that took place there.

Zack

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Bob

G'day mate

The Turks may have been maniacal record keepers, I have no idea. Nor does anyone else save for a small clique who actually have access to the archives. They are like the Vatican archives - not available for any but the select few. You and I and all the rest from the great unwashed will never, in our life times, have access to these records. Judging by the quality of Turkish scholarship on this aspect, I suspect that not even the select have much access. The only books with any quality of information were produced in the first flush of the new republic. Then it has stagnated until scholastic research - if indeed it can be called that - is now an iteration of that which is already available. I have seen little new information and worse still, the current crop of books published by the General Staff looks more like a recitation of salient points after the dog chewed up the homework. It reflects poorly on the state of Turkish scholarship in this area and worse still, it demonstrates that the Turkish General Staff still haven't moved from latter day Ottoman incompetence and lack of political savvy. I often muse over the reasons why the General Staff is terrified of opening up its archives dealing with the Great War. I have a few speculations ... however if I state them, this post will be removed like others that have detailed my analysis of the state of Turkish scholarship. Suppression of the past history is the key to understanding the dearth and corruption of contemporary Turkish scholarship.

As to attitude, find me the Great War Turkish War Memorial that actually lists the names of the men who died in a particular action. You won't find any. This is either because for the Turkish General Staff, the names of their war dead serve no political purpose or the names no longer exist, if indeed they existed at all. Take your pick.

Cheers

Bill

[Owen D]

zack,

5th Wilts at Gallipoli.

Their diary on-line here.

http://www.thewardrobe.org.uk/wardiary.php3

[bob lembke]

Bill;

I agree with you on the state of things re: Turkish history, memorials, but I think that a lot of these phenomena flow out of their culture, religion, etc. I have spent some time poring thru the bookstores and publishing houses in what I understand is the book-publishing center of Istanbul (up the street from the "Underground Cistern", say 200 yards, and say 400 yards from Hagia Sophia), and there do not seem to be a lot of books on history. Bying one of the few, I believe that I read that, despite their fascinating history, the Turks traditionally did not have that much of a sense of our idea of comprehensive history, but rather had about three narrow types of historical study.

The Prophet Mohammed had a very simple burial, and (generalizing horribly) it is unseemly for a Muslim funeral to be too much of a big deal. If a top general or a sultan died on campaign he might be disemboweled and a small shrine (turba ?) be erected to store and honor his intestines, (which tend to rot quickly, as in deer), while the rest of him was salted or something and sent back to Istanbul for burial. But this was sort of un-Muslim.

As for the common soldier, I suspect that the attitude that he was in a better place, that God would know who he was and his good service, and chiseling his name on a wall somewhere would be a bit curious.

After the establishment of the Republic by Attaturk I think that some western-style attitudes were fostered, but that these have fallen a bit to the way-side. Of course many individuals have our sort of attitudes.

I think that the Turkist "top brass" have multiple reasons for staying away from this stuff, but I personally think that they are making big mistakes here. For example, I think that activist Armenians are "eating their lunch" here, in the PR arena. Nuf' said on that topic!

I suspect that conservative Turks find us rather curious themselves, like putting our women's mammilaries on display for public inspection. In balance I rather like the Turks over three visits, and my father, fighting with them, loved them.

Bob Lembke

[ZackNZ]

zack,

5th Wilts at Gallipoli.

Their diary on-line here.

http://www.thewardrobe.org.uk/wardiary.php3

thank you Owen

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Bob

Like yourself, my associations with individual Turks has been a good experience. Since I mix in cosmopolitan circles, the Turks I tend to meet have similar global attitudes so that they would be in place in Canberra, New York, London, Berlin and Beijing.

The naming of individuals on monuments is essentially a political statement directly reflecting a certain set of cultural assuptions. It basically says - we are all in this together, no person is too great or too small as all are remembered - which reaffirms the essential democratic nature of our societies illustrating an egalitarianism that runs strongly through the community. Not only does it honor those in the past, it is a consistant reaffirmation of our values on an annualised basis despite those values changing as the years change.

The lack of names also makes a political statement. Many Turkish Great War monuments appear to celebrate the life and deeds of Attaturk. The fact that this has not been rectified as Turkey attempts to enter the EU indicates the values held by the Turkish society. While many would like the dead remembered and thus introduce some sort of egalitarian principles, there is a strong force - mainly conservative and military - that rails against such openness. Ergo, unless one spends their whole life lionising the Turkish military in such a manner as to appear like their paid client, there is no access to Turkish military files of the Great War era for non-Turkish scholars. They even rejected approaches from the AWM to undertake joint projects. So in essence, there is no political imperative to open up the archives despite such obstruction being antithetical to the EU ideal to which they aspire. One day the penny will drop but not today and possibly not in my lifetime. But I thought that bout the KGB files in 1980 and how wrong I was. But then so was everyone else. So there is hope.

Cheers

Bill

[Eceabat]

Hi Pals,

Sorry I’ve been off the air of late, a prolonged bout of that affliction work has rather distracted me from more important matters, like this forum.

Regarding Turkish record keeping and trying to gain access to the results of the output of a multitude of unnamed officers and clerks. Like any good bureaucracy, the Ottoman Army was fairly handy at generating paper, mountains of which still exist in various archives. As yes, Bill, you are right in that there is a reluctance to give access to this material by the present day military.

However, while there is some truth in the matter that the army like to keep their spin on whatever comes out concerning the war (I quit as the script writer for a Turkish documentary on the submarine campaign at Gallipoli after being told that any script would have to be vetted by the military), there are also other reasons for the lack of direct access.

One of these is that all the material is in the old Ottoman script, with very little of it having been transcribed into modern Turkish, let alone English. With the Turkish language reforms of the late 1920s, a Latin script was adopted and the teaching of the old Ottoman script all but abolished. As such, very few Turks can read material generated before 1928. This makes utilising the Ottoman military and civil archives difficult.

Though not to the same extent as the civil archives, where less than 20 percent of 600 years worth of documents have been catalogued, there is still a vast amount of the military archives still to be worked through, again hindering researchers.

That said, a couple of friends of mine, blessed with the ability to read written Ottoman but in no way linked to the military, have been given wide access to files in the military archives. They are indeed among the select few, the select few who can read the Ottoman script. This greater openness is a more recent policy, and I was told by one Turkish historian no more than five years ago that you had to be a colonel or above to get access to the files.

By no means is access unlimited and I agree that this restricts scholarship but as someone who is on the ground I can say the situation is getting better.

I fully agree that the General Staff’s official histories of the Gallipoli campaign are a dog’s breakfast, so much so that Turkish friends of mine and I have a drinking game. Take a volume of any of the three histories, close your eyes, open a page, open your eyes, and read the page out loud so your companions can find the most outlandish mistake. Hours of entertainment to be had over a beer or a raki.

However, there are some good books coming out of late (he says giving forum member Gursel Goncu and Sahin Aldogan a plug). Apart from a book brought out by these two earlier this year on the campaign (as yet only in Turkish but hope springs eternal), and their Turkish-English text guide book; there have been a few other works brought out in the past few years, some reprints of private writings from the 1930s and some new publications. Sadly, without a knowledge of Turkish, these works are not available to the broader community of those with an interest in the campaign.

One area I will take issue with Bill is over his statement that the Turkish military have no interest in commemorating the fallen of the campaign. About six years ago, after an extensive research program through the archives, the General Staff produced a list naming the 87,000 Ottoman soldiers who fell in the campaign. While the list is not fully complete, with estimates putting total losses at 102,000 dead, the difference coming in part due to lost returns and from men having been hurriedly drafted into units, they are still working on updating the list.

As to there being no memorial naming those soldiers of the Ottoman forces who fell in the campaign, many have been or are being commemorated on new memorials being constructed in recent times. While I have views over some of these memorials, mainly regarding their actual locations, design and the damage done to the battlefields at certain points, I fully support the commemoration of the fallen.

There are also plans to commemorate the 60,000 or so Ottoman troops who have no known grave, with the suggestions revolving around the placing of 10,000 headstones, each with six names on it, or the building of a commemorative wall bearing the names of each of the fallen.

One reason that the Turks have put less emphasis on the role of the individual soldier has been the portrayal of the campaign as a national war. There are monuments aplenty to Mehmetcik, the nickname for the common soldier as well as to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who is revered by most (though by no means all) Turks as the saviour of the nation and its founding father.

While by no means an apologist for the Turkish state (I’ve had enough run ins with officials to last me a life time) there are some positive developments and the situation is no where near as bleak as Bill paints it.

Here endeth the rant.

Cheers

Bill

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Bill

G'day mate

Well, the Berlin Wall is falling and we almost missed it. Thanks for the additional information as I am now feeling a little better about this situation. Perhaps they have taken on board the idea of becoming part of the EU and to do so, they need to accept a few fundamental principles - free access to archives being one of them.

The language thing isn't a big problem - I have heard those types of arguments before. The language thing was used to inhibit scholarship upon the Dead Seas Scrolls by Vat69 and it is a thing I constantly hear in Japan - "Oh, Japanese is a very difficult language to learn." which it ain't since it is propbably the easiest language on earth to learn [very few irregular verbs, 7 vowel sounds and no dipthongs] but the Japanese have this belief that it is difficult for some reason - and so on. Occasionally, just occasionally, I get a tad bit cynical when I hear this particular comment. Open up access and everyone with an interest learns the script, especially native speakers, and then volumes appear.

Indeed, if the Turkish authorities invest a couple million USD on language identification programs, cataloguing would be done in next to no time. The hand writing recognition programs exist world wide - thats how they do the zip and post codes. It takes very little work to alter these OCR programs to read all the variations of the Ottoman script. They have more than enough political prisoners or alternatively bright eyed and bushy tailed students who are happy enough to scan the millions of documents. The Canadians did it this way - with students of course since they deny that they have any political prisoners. Anyway, if the will is there, then they have every ability to open up their archives and make it readily accessable to the world at large. It would take a few years, I realise that, but the technology is there to make it fully available to the global scholastic community.

Anyway, that is my little rant.

Cheers

Bill

[Eceabat]

Bill,

I agree that money is the answer as far as translating the Ottoman achives, civil and military, along with an investment in human resources. However, as Turkey still has a massive debt problem, and a lot of things that need fixing urgently, such as health, education, housing and the environment, I fear things like the archives are rather well down the list.

Most of the best scholars going around that I know of are not part of the establishment, but are instead unfunded independents doing their own thing. However, there is a new crop of younger historians coming through around here. It will be a slow process (as will Turkey's EU bid) but things are going in the right direction.

Cheers

Bill

[erickson]

For those interested, the Turks have large archives and very well produced official histories of WW1. The Gallipoli set is three volumes (maybe 1500 pages in all, with 50 maps and maybe 20 OB charts). You may wish to refer to the following journal article:

Edward J. Erickson, "The Turkish Official Military Histories of the First World War, A Bibliographic Essay” in Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 39, Number 3, July 2003

[bob lembke]

I am delighted to see Colonel Erickson join our discussion. I will happily look up the article and I am sure that I will profit from it. Welcome!

Bob Lembke

[ZackNZ]

Many thanks I will see if I can get a copy of the article.

Zack

[Bryn]

I often hear that the Ottoman army kept good, or 'meticulous' records at Gallipoli.

I'll accept that this is true of personnel records when someone produces ONE ordinary soldier's record that equates in detail to the records kept by, for example, the AIF or NZEF.

The record of a soldier from the 77th Regiment would be a good one, showing his details at enlistment, including place of birth, occupation, next-of-kin and their address, his height, weight and eye colour, and whether he had previous military service, etc., etc., etc.

The record should go on to indicate any ilnesses or wounds he suffered, and where and when these were reported and ultimately dealt with. Any breaches of discipline he was caught for? What were they, and how were they dealt with? If he died, when did this occur? If he was buried, were was he buried? Correspondence with his family should be included when this occurred, including details of where his medals were sent if he died.

That shouldn't be too hard to do if these records were kept as meticulously as is claimed, and anywhere near as carefully as they were by Australian and New Zealand forces (I believe Canada and the UK did much the same). Translating a single record isn't too much of a burden for someone conversant with the 'old' Ottoman script, and I'd be very interested to see such details on an ordinary soldier of one of the Arab regiments. I strongly suspect I never will, however.

If records were not kept to this sort of level, or at least something approaching it, I fail to see how they can be described as meticulous. It's 92 years since Gallipoli. You would think a single personnel record might have been found, translated and produced to 'prove' records were as well-kept as some claim. Of course the fact that no such thing has ever happened doesn't prove these records don't exist, or that they were not as well-kept as some claim, but it doesn't prove it's true, either.

Access the record of a private soldier of the AIF who died at Gallipoli. THAT's meticulous record-keeping. Less detail than that is not as meticulous by definition. Preparing mountains of paperwork does not automatically translate to good, detailed, or meticulous record-keeping.

Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick, though. Maybe it's not Ottoman army personnel records that are being referred to. If it's not, can anyone inform us which records are being referred to?

[Guest Bill Woerlee]

Erickson

G'day mate and welcome

If you are the same Edward J. Erickson who wrote "Ordered to Die. A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War" then let me say that I have read it and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was well put together and thoughtful. I may not have personally agreed with all your comments but then who does agree with anyone. That does not take away from the fact that it was a fine job and definitely a plus in Turkish Great War historical scholarship.

Now for your comment:

For those interested, the Turks have large archives and very well produced official histories of WW1. The Gallipoli set is three volumes (maybe 1500 pages in all, with 50 maps and maybe 20 OB charts).

I scratched my head with curiosity at this comment. I know of no such "very well produced" work on WW1 relating to Gallipoli. I have in front of me:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ÇANAKKALE CAMPAIGN IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR (JUNE 1914 - JANUARY 1916) by The Turkish General Staff Directorate of Military History and Strategic Studies and Directorate of Inspection Publications ANKARA, THE TURKISH GENERAL STAFF PRINTING HOUSE 2004

Just picking a page at random, let me quote from page 190:

After that short bloody fight, the land was full of dead English troops as well as dead and wounded Turkish troops. A few surviving Turkish soldiers continued the war to knife not to allow English troops to move forward.

With the best will in the world, Turklish is not substitute for gooder English in found what the mens see. This is an embarrassment for the Turkish General Staff. Not only are the books no more than short notes lacking any great coherence, the translations display an arrogance that is truly breathtaking - they don't give a toss what their readers think. If they did, they would have at least hired a proof reader who is conversant with the English language, not a crony who spent ten days at Majorca stopping at the bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their Speedos squirting Timothy White's suncream all over flesh with a whole lot of English tourists and then claiming they have absorbed English culture and thus gained linguistic competency. It requires something a bit more than a couple hack report writers and one barely literate translator to make "very well produced official histories".

But heck, what would I know?

Cheers

Bill

[The Plummed Goose]

Dear Bill,

- the Eceabat one-I also have not been very active lately thanks to other more "concrete" jobs but I just felt I had to add that -being an "imported belgian turk" for now nearly 17 years- :

I AGREE

that's all

eric

PS : hope to be joining these interesting discussions again in a couple of mpnths time !!!