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Preface

THE FIRST ANZACS

The half-moon was already sinking in the Turkish sky as the men of 1st Field Company Engineers slipped silently over the side of their trans-port ship into the waiting lifeboats below. It was about 2 a.m. and this was a manoeuvre they had practised so well that during one rehearsal their navy hosts didn’t even realise they were already in the boats.

The sea wasn’t quite millpond flat as they were towed then rowed to shore, as quietly as possible to avoid alerting the enemy guards on the cliffs high above, but the waves were less restless than they’d anticipated, making the landing easier.

The 1st Field Company Engineers’ orders were clear. The sappers were to land and charge with the first-wave infantry, to help capture and destroy three defensive positions. But one group had a job to do before that. Heavy barbed-wire fortifications had been spotted days earlier on the beaches and in the shallows, just under water, doubt-less established in response to a failed incursion a couple of months previously. So the sappers were positioned at the front of the landing party, equipped with grappling irons, rope and wire-cutters, to cut and clear away the defences so that the other troops could push through.

Before the sun had even risen over the bay, there was gunfire from the Turkish defenders, which intensified when they realised the long-anticipated invasion was finally underway. But the first screw-up of this ill-fated adventure was also evident. There was no barbed wire for the sappers to remove because they had been landed a mile north of their intended target. Instead of flesh-shredding wire and spike pits, there were daunting cliffs and sandhills, perfect vantage points for Turkish defenders.

By the end of this first assault, several sappers lay among the dead on the beach. But, according to official records, the men charged with cutting the wires and dragging them apart to let their comrades through were never there.

Obscured by the fog of war, lost in the mists of time, whatever the reason, it would take more than one hundred years for the sappers to be recognised, albeit begrudgingly, as among the very first Anzacs to plant their boots on the beach at Gallipoli.

Why this excision from history occurred is a mixture of bureaucratic confusion and, one suspects, intra-service rivalry. It’s unlikely that the sappers were deliberately expunged from the records, but once that had occurred, the ratchet effect of official histories made it difficult to alter the accepted version of events. For many years the official line was that the sappers were elsewhere, ready to fall in behind the initial assault to set up the vital infrastructure—water supplies, roads and defences—that would be needed for the long haul. And, indeed, some sappers had been given precisely those orders.

But then, there were those barbed-wire defences, spotted during a routine reconnaissance from the sea. It’s unthinkable that the Turkish commanders would not have placed physical obstacles in the path of potential attackers at the most vulnerable, and therefore most tempting, potential landing spots. And what better way to slow the enemy and drive them back than pick them off as they became tangled in the twisted wires?

Sappers’ diaries record the fact that their orders were to prepare the landing area for the infantry assault. So we can have no doubt that many of the first boots on the beach at Gallipoli belonged to the sappers of 1st Field Company.

But why were they excluded from reports of the events of that fateful day?

The truth is that their exploits were absorbed into accounts of the infantry’s own actions. And that set a pattern for the rest of the war. The contribution of the sappers would often be overlooked and underplayed amid reports of the more obvious heroism and horrific losses of the Australian forces as a whole.

The sappers’ role at that first Gallipoli landing was proved beyond doubt by journalist and history sleuth, the late Catherine Job. She had been trying to reconcile the official army record that there were no sappers involved in the first landings with her family’s long-held belief that her great-uncle, Sapper Cleve Page, was one of the first Australians to perish on the beach that fateful morning. As she put it so eloquently in the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes report of her findings, ‘The absence of evidence became the evidence of absence.’ When the landing party, including the sappers, were landed at the wrong beach, meaning there weren’t those anticipated defences for them to deal with, they simply joined in with the assault.

And while a squabble over who was the first to set foot on the sands at Ari Burnu beach may seem unseemly when set against the horrific deaths and injuries that ensued that day, and every day for the rest of the doomed Gallipoli operation, the simple fact remains that sappers were there, right at the front among the very first Anzacs. Soon they would be building defences and digging tunnels, Many years later, during the Vietnam War, the 1st Field Squadron was engaged on counter-tunnel operations numerous times. Those of us who served in the unit and went down the ‘holes’ basing our procedures and techniques on those established by the 3rd Field Troop, commanded by Captain Alex ‘Sandy’ MacGregor during his tenure in Vietnam in 1965/66. Most of us considered that Sandy was the original ‘tunnel rat’ and that it was he and his men who broke the ground in tunnel warfare. But we now know from the Gallipoli sappers’ diaries that Vietnam was not the first time sappers had ventured underground into enemy tunnels.

The sappers’ World War I story doesn’t end at Gallipoli. Far from it. Australian forces would also be deployed to France and Belgium where the sappers’ skills would be truly put to the test and their exploits would become the stuff of engineer legend.

There was a constant need to dig trenches and build defences, of course. There were the bridges to blow up to foil the enemy and bridges to build to aid the rapid deployment of their own troops. Famously, there was the mining operation that placed tons of high explosives under the enemy’s positions at Hill 60—now the subject of a thrilling movie—and the audacious theft of a German artillery piece that was so massive it could only be moved by rail. And throughout they were expected to down tools and pick up their guns when circumstances demanded it, which is why in modern parlance they are called combat engineers.

Through all of this sappers were first in and last out, because that’s what sappers do. They prepare the combat zone for the main body of the troops, clearing obstacles and building infrastructure, digging tunnels and trenches (or saps) so that infantry can advance, and all the support structures such as field hospitals, HQ bases and kitchens they’ll need to hold their positions. And when the fighting has ended, they remove anything that might be helpful to the enemy or dangerous to the local populace.

In this book, combining military records with extracts from sappers’ diaries and letters, we have set out to tell the true story of the sappers in World War I, but also to reveal what it was like to be a soldier and an engineer, while surrounded by danger, destruction and death.

Lt Col George Hulse (Retd)

Jimmy Thomson

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The First ANZACs

by George Hulse and Jimmy Thomson

The incredible untold stories of Aussie and Kiwi combat engineers in WWI.

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