Pictured: Troops from the Indian Mule Corp at Gallipoli (Image: Australian War Memorial) "...At daybreak on August 9, 1915, a young lieutenant of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, British Army, watched in awe as an Indian Army battalion almost ended the stalemate at Gallipoli. Men of the 1/6 Gurkha Rifles rose from their positions and pressed up the Sari Bair ridge, crested the heights between Chunuk Bair and Hill Q, and drove back the Turks after some desperate hand-to-hand fighting. The Gurkhas looked down at the waters of Hellespont—the original objective of the Gallipoli campaign. No Allied unit would repeat the feat ever again.
With no backup coming, the Gurkha commander, Major C G L Allanson, decided to go after the fleeing Turks. But they had hardly moved 200 yards when a murderous artillery barrage broke up the attack. According to Major Allanson, it was the Royal Navy that had shelled them, mistaking them to be Turks. The Gurkhas had to withdraw, but they did so in good order.
The action that day left a lasting impression on that British officer who resolved to get a transfer to the Indian Army. Four years later, his wish came true when he got placed in the same regiment that had impressed him at Gallipoli. He was Field Marshal Viscount William "Bill" Slim whose Fourteenth Army destroyed the Japanese juggernaut in the Second World War..." Gallipoli 1915, a tale of Indian bravery buried in history by Manimugdha S Sharma
More than 11,400 Australian and New Zealand forces died in the eight-month Gallipoli campaign. The battle one of the most significant in Antipodean history, is remembered on ANZAC Day.Historical record has long put the number of Indian troops at Gallipoli at 5000 but the actual figure could exceeded 15,000.[1]
SOURCE | See also: The Indian Army at Gallipoli 1915
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Mavi Boncuk |
Historians have underestimated the contribution of Indians[1] to the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey, according to new research by Australian academic, Professor Peter Stanley, a military historian at the University of New South Wales argues that three times as many South Asians fought in the campaign than official estimates suggest. Professor Stanley arrived at the estimate after trawling through military records at the National Archives of India.
Prof Stanley compiled the research for a book Die for Battle, Do Not Despair, which is due to be published in mid-2015. He says that the role of Indians at Gallipoli has long been overlooked. “While Indians have been referred to in books about Gallipoli they have never been given their due." The so-called 'Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels' - Papua New Guineans employed by the Australian administration to carry supplies to the troops and helped evacuate the badly wounded and sick in World War II – now have plagues and monuments around Australia recognizing their place in this country’s history. The South Asian contingent comprised mostly Sikh and Gurkha who fought in three streams: the 29th Indian Brigade, the Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade and the Indian Mule Corps.
Prof. Stanley says the Mule Corps comprised the largest contingent of Indian troops. It relied on 3000 animals to transport supplies. “The Mule Corp basically kept forces alive for eight months of the campaign."
Prof. Stanley also provides an Indian angle to the ANZAC legend of Simpson and his donkey. The stretcher-bearer John Simpson Kirkpatrick carried wounded troops on donkey-back from the front line to the beaches. According to Prof. Stanley, Kirkpatrick’s donkeys were most likely given over to the Indian mule handlers after his death.
Prof. Stanley estimates that about 10 per cent of Indian forces died on the peninsula. He based much of his research on the diaries of servicemen from Australia and New Zealand. He said that the Indian troops kept almost no records of their experience in Gallipoli because most of them were illiterate.
Rana Chhina, a military historian at the Delhi-based United Service Institution of India, says that the Indian troops, as professional soldiers, enjoyed the respect of the ANZACs. “They got on well. They had a cordial relationship of genuine respect.” But he says that the Indians have generally been “sidelined” in Australia and New Zealand’s memory of Gallipoli. “I hope that now the centenary is upon us we will be able to look back at all those who fought and died together. SOURCE | See also: The Indian Army at Gallipoli 1915
[1] ‘The Indian Army was represented at Gallipoli by the 7th Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade, the Indian mule corps, a medical establishment, and the 29th Indian Infantry Brigade. The infantry served in the Helles area from the 1st of May till the 10th of July, being transferred to Anzac after a brief period of rest and reorganisation at Imbros, just in time to take part in the August offensive; while the artillery landed with the ANZAC and shared all the travails and vicissitudes of that corps, from the day of the first landings on the 25th of April till the final evacuation in December.
Some 1,358 Indian soldiers died at Gallipoli with 3,421 wounded. At the third battle of Krithia 3/4 June 371 men of the 14th Sikh regiment were killed or died of wounds.
‘The Indian expeditionary force that served in the Dardanelles was not very large in numbers; barely 5000 men in a campaign that swelled from 75,000, to nearly half a million allied troops engaged by the end of the campaign. Yet it had a significant impact upon the course of the operations, and no account of the campaign can ignore the contribution of the 14th Sikhs in the Third Battle of Krithia, or the 1-6th Gurkhas in the climactic Battle of Sari Bair.’
from a summary of a paper by Sqn Ldr Rana TS Chhina (Retd) of the United Service Institution of India Centre for Armed Forces Historical Research at a conference organised by the Australian War Memorial in August 2010.’