The last gasp - August Offensive on Gallipoli

In early August 1915, after three long months of stalemate, Australian, New Zealand, British and Indian troops launched a series of assaults against the Turkish strongpoints on the Gallipoli peninsula. This was an all-out attempt to break the deadlock and force a decisive victory.

The ensuing battles were the largest and most costly in the eight-month-long Gallipoli campaign. All the allied attacks ended in heartbreaking failure and produced heavy losses on both sides. Many of the sites of the bloody struggle – Lone Pine, The Nek, Chunuk Bair, and Hill 60 – became sadly familiar names in Australia and New Zealand.

Beginning on 6 August, Lone Pine was the scene of a hellish struggle. Charles Bean, the First World War Australian official historian, considered the hand-to-hand fighting there, “the heaviest of its kind in which Australian troops ever took part”. Soldiers of the 1st Australian Division captured the Turkish front-line trenches and over the following three days and nights withstood repeated counter-attacks to hold much of the newly won ground. An Australian officer later described the carnage:

When anyone speaks to you of the glory of war, picture to yourself a narrow line of trenches two and sometimes three deep with bodies and think too of your best friends, for that is what these boys become by long association with you, mangled and torn beyond description by the bombs and bloated and blackened by decay and crawling maggots.

The 1st Division suffered more than 2,200 casualties – virtually half of those who went into the attack – including more than 800 who were killed or died of wounds. Seven Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross. The Turks incurred more than 6,000 casualties, including more than 1,500 dead.

Simultaneous attempts to break out from the Anzac enclave failed. At the feature known as The Nek, Australian light horse soldiers launched ill-fated bayonet attacks towards the Turkish trenches. Four waves of men charged the enemy lines and were cut down within metres: of the 600 who charged more than half became casualties, with 234 of them killed.

Further north, soldiers of the Australian 4th Brigade, together with British and Indian troops, launched night assaults against the Turkish positions on the heights of the Sari Bair ridge. Hundreds were killed or wounded in these ultimately futile attacks. New Zealander soldiers assaulted the high peak of Chunuk Bair and held it briefly, but within days the Turkish forces had reclaimed the heights in a ferocious counter-attack.

New British divisions landed at Suvla Bay but failed to make headway before Turkish reserves occupied the surrounding heights and stemmed their advance. The fighting petered out in late August with the last failed allied attempt to capture the crest of the relatively insignificant feature of Hill 60.

To this day many questions remain about the tactics employed, the actions of allied commanders, and the Turkish responses to the August Offensive. What ultimately became the allies’ last throw of the dice on Gallipoli has been called both a lost opportunity and an inevitable tragedy.

• read more on the August Offensive
• view collection items related to the August Offensive
• read more on Gallipoli
• read more on the people profiles, including the Australian Victoria Cross recipients awards at Gallipoli