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CHAPTER 1
Artilleryman: Gallipoli and the Western Front
1915 – 1916
In January 1915 the British War Council resolved that the Admiralty 'should prepare for a naval expedition to bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula, with Constantinople as its objective.' British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops were required to support this enterprise, under the command of Sir Ian Hamilton. It was supposed that the fall of Constantinople would open a line of supply to Russia, force Turkey out of the war, secure allies in the Balkans and contribute significantly to the defeat of Germany.
Purser Park and the Maunganui had returned to New Zealand from Vancouver in 1914, ending their peacetime careers. Early in the new year they set sail once more, bound this time for Egypt, as part of the Third Reinforcements for the New Zealand contribution to the Gallipoli campaign. Both were now in military guise: Park as a Lance-Bombardier, the Maunganui as HMNZ Troopship No. 17. Park was promoted to Corporal on 1 February and transferred to the main body on arrival in Egypt. There he served with the 4th (Howitzer) Battery, commanded by Major N.S. Falla. Falla, like Park, was an employee of the Union Steam Ship Company. During 1915 he lent him books and encouraged his growing ambition to get on. It was in Egypt that Park saw his first aircraft. Although he and his friends were keenly interested in them, they learned only later that these aircraft were serving a useful purpose: locating and reporting a Turkish advance several days before an attack was launched.
Early on 25 April 1915, British troops landed at Cape Helles on the southern tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula, French troops at Kum Kale on the Asiatic mainland and Australian and New Zealand troops on the west coast of the peninsula. The landings were fiercely opposed by Turkish forces and narrowly saved from complete disaster by the astounding bravery and resolution of the invaders. The Australians and New Zealanders scrambled ashore at what became known as Anzac Cove. Owing to the accuracy of Turkish artillery fire, the transports carrying the field guns and howitzers were forced to stand out of range. Support from the fleet's guns was inadequate because of difficulties in communicating with the shore to direct fire to where it was most needed. Consequently, the foothold was so precarious that it would have been abandoned had it not been thought that a withdrawal would cost even heavier casualties. Thus Park spent the first Anzac Day afloat, unable to help his comrades on the shore.
Throughout that dreadful day and night, the infantry hung on in the face of ceaseless rifle and machine-gun fire. Six guns were landed at about 5.30 p.m. and their crews performed bravely until the guns were silenced. Clearly, more guns had to be got ashore somehow before dawn if the positions so courageously won were to be retained. By 6 a.m. a section of Park's howitzer battery had been landed and set up in a gully running up to the foot of Plugge's Plateau. It went into action as soon as possible, lifting the spirits of every surviving infantryman. 'We had never fired the guns before,' remembered Park fifty years later. 'We were so short of ammunition that we had not been allowed to expend any in training.'
Once the first frenzied charges and counter-charges were spent, both sides dug in and their lines were often no more than a few yards apart. Densely packed trenches, virtually unroofed, made ideal targets for attack by howitzers, which aim to lob shells over vertical defences, unlike field guns, which try to knock them down. But Park's battery, consisting of four 4.5-inch pieces, was the only howitzer battery at Anzac and ammunition was so scarce that it was frequently restricted to two shells per gun per day. Park's exasperation was tempered by relief that the Turks appeared to have no howitzers at all. He was not, of course, permitted to sit idly by his silent guns. He was sent forward to pass messages down from observation officers and carried out all manner of jobs: telephonist, battery runner and general scrounger (of food and clothing).
By June, it was clear that the Allied forces were pinned down to small bridgeheads at Helles and Anzac and that a new trench warfare had begun, as fierce and sterile as that on the Western Front. Early in August an attempt was made to end the deadlock. Strong reinforcements were smuggled into the Anzac bridgehead to permit a sudden and powerful breakout, aided by a new landing a little farther north at Suvla Bay. The object was to gain the Sari Bair Ridge: that ridge, dominating the battle area, was the key to the campaign. The offensive surprised the Turks, but hesitation and incompetence among the local commanders nullified the initial advantage and led to heavy losses.
Park had been commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in July and the Suvla landings gave him his first chance to distinguish himself. His battery was on the left of the Anzac position, covering the landing of eighteen-pounders on 'C' Beach, south of Nibrunesi Point. The guns were put ashore without carriages, adequate supplies of ammunition or horses, and volunteers were asked to go down and impose some sort of order on the chaos. Park had never seen eighteen-pounders in action, but he agreed to go. He and his men ran along the beach to where the guns lay and manhandled them into position. They had no means of judging range, he recalled, 'except to see that we weren't going to blow the head off the nearest battalion commander' and that they could clear the crest. The Turks were above them and Park's men fired only a few rounds before they were swept by machine-gun fire. Park spent the rest of the day flat on his face in the sand.
During that month of August 1915, while taking part in a grossly mismanaged campaign in conditions of squalor such as he cannot have imagined even in nightmares, Park decided to become a regular officer in the British Army. He never subsequently commented on this momentous decision which separated him from his own countrymen and led to his shaping a career outside New Zealand. He transferred to the Royal Horse and Field Artillery as a Temporary Second Lieutenant on 1 September and was attached to the 29th Division. That division, having fought at Cape Helles since April, had been brought round to Suvla Bay to take part in the August offensive. After that offensive failed, Park returned with the 29th to Helles where he served until the evacuation.
On 24 September he was posted to No. 10 Battery, 147th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery. The gun line lay on the west of the peninsula, facing Turkish trenches in front of Krithia. The forward observation post was in the front line near Gurkha Bluff, where the trenches were only twenty-five yards from those of the enemy. The battery's horse lines, in which Park took a particular interest, were at the bottom of Krithia Gully, well protected from enemy fire. Most of the men were reasonably fit by Gallipoli standards, although the effects of hard fighting, constant tension, bad food, worse cooking and lack of exercise were wearing them down. Nothing was done, as far as Park could remember, to provide books, papers or games to help them forget, even for a few minutes, their fear and misery.
He remembered Little Kate more happily. She was a naval twelve-pounder, well supplied with ammunition by the Navy, and despite her small size she did more damage than the rest of the battery put together. A covered emplacement was built for her on Gurkha Bluff and she did such splendid service, scattering Turkish ration parties and making their trenches dangerous, that they brought up a couple of field guns in an attempt to silence her. Although Little Kate's position was often hit, repairs were made with sandbags each night to enable her to fire the next day.
A surviving letter written by Second Lieutenant A. Jennings, RFA, on 9 November 1915, describes his arrival at Helles in October and his early experiences in No. 10 Battery:
Park [he wrote] had landed at Anzac with the first lot and so has seen plenty of service, mostly in the ranks. He has only had his commission a few weeks. He is about my age but has seen more life than I have. When I arrived, he was 'up forward' in the trenches. There was no dugout for me, so I slept in Park's. It was tiny and quite cold, but he didn't seem to mind so I couldn't.
Another glimpse of Park appears in his battery's War Diary, which recorded in December that it became rather unpopular 'because 2nd Lt. Park exercised the horses on the sky line near to Corps Headquarters resulting in the enemy shelling the sacred area.'
The evacuation from Cape Helles began for Park's battery on 2 January 1916. Sixty rounds were fired during the afternoon and Little Kate was then removed from her position and taken to 'W' Beach. There she was embarked at night under the command of Park and nine men. Not long before he died, Park recalled this dangerous exercise. He felt 'most frightened' when ordered to take Little Kate and other guns off on flat-bottomed 'lighters' and sail them to Mudros harbour, on the island of Lemnos. These unseaworthy craft had little freeboard and under shelling from the Turks, 'I was bloody scared and so were my men.' Even when they passed beyond the range of Turkish fire, Park and his men merely exchanged one fear for another: Mudros lay some fifty miles from Cape Helles, the night was black and a heavy sea was running. As with so many other dramatic incidents in his long life, Park rarely mentioned it in later years and never in detail. By the early hours of 9 January, the battery, in the words of its War Diary, was 'in abeyance': scattered about ashore and afloat in the eastern Mediterranean.
Park looked back in 1946 on his Gallipoli service with a nostalgia unusual for him. He remembered the Anzac commander, Sir William Birdwood, prancing naked across the beach for his daily swim. Known as 'Birdie' to the troops and 'the Soul of Anzac' in the history books, he earned both styles, showing Park how a leader can relax without cheapening his authority. Park tried to follow many of Birdwood's precepts: attention to detail, regular tours of inspection, indifference to personal danger and, not least, Birdwood's recognition that the uniformed civilians of a wartime army should not be treated 'with barrack-square discipline'. Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston, commander of the 29th Division, taught Park equally valuable lessons. 'Hunter-Bunter', in Park's opinion, was 'a great hot air merchant'. One day he began an inspection of Park's battery shortly after a two-man ration party had had an 'accident' with a jar of rum. Both men were incapable by the time the General arrived and had been hastily laid out on stretchers and covered with blankets. Hunter-Weston gazed solemnly down at the stretchers, drew himself upright and said in his best graveyard voice: 'I salute the dead.' As he moved away, a muffled voice rose from one of the stretchers: 'What was the old basket saying?' Park learned that a pompous manner earns contempt rather than respect.
He had survived a prolonged test under fire and chosen a new career. Gallipoli marked him both physically and mentally, for he was there in the ranks, seeing and sharing the exceptional squalor of that campaign, observing and suffering from the exceptional bungling of those responsible for conducting it. He had shown himself resourceful as well as brave under fire. No less important, he had also shown that he had the mental and physical toughness to function efficiently in conditions of acute, prolonged discomfort. Gallipoli has a unique place in the history of warfare: 'for the first time,' wrote H. A. Jones in the official history of the war in the air, 'a campaign was conducted by combined forces on, under, and over the sea, and on and over the land.' In the next war, Park would be among the commanders of similar combined operations in the Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean, where many of the mistakes made at Gallipoli were avoided. But Gallipoli remains one of the greatest disasters in British history: ten thousand Anzacs left their bones there and the losses suffered by the British and French were much heavier, and all to no purpose.
Six months after the evacuation, Park was thrust into a disaster of even greater magnitude: the Somme Offensive. Early on 16 January 1916, No. 10 Battery's headquarters staff arrived in the 29th Division's camp near Suez. Most of the men caught up during the next few days and strict training began because it soon became known that a transfer to the Western Front was likely. Training at Suez, Park recalled, included no work with aircraft. Not the slightest account was taken of the certainty that when they reached France, German aircraft would try both to observe and to attack their positions. He and another subaltern asked permission to be flown over the brigade, when it was in position under cover, to see what could be seen from above. The request was curtly rejected. Observation from the air, they were told, was all stuff and nonsense. Park found this attitude only too common among senior officers.
On 21 February the division was ordered to get ready to go to France. These orders were a great relief to all because living conditions were primitive, the flies a great nuisance (even to veterans of Gallipoli) and few officers or men had any tropical kit. The battery entrained for Alexandria on 10 March. It was a rough journey but at least they were away from the heat and sand of Suez. They arrived early next morning and, naturally, found Alexandria wet and cold. During that day, the brigade embarked on Horse Transport Elele, bound for Marseille. After a miserable week at sea, the Elele docked at Marseille late on the 17th.
Next day the battery set off for Pont Rémy on the Somme front in open cattle trucks, arriving at 3 a.m. on 21 March – frozen, hungry and filthy. There had been no opportunity to cook or wash throughout the fifty-five hours that the journey lasted; nor was there any at Pont Rémy. After a few more dispiriting hours spent assembling gear, the battery trudged off to Vauchelles, some ten miles away, in driving rain. Horses and men were soon slithering in thick mud. Park was thrown from his horse, which then fell on him, and he was dragged away to hospital on a stretcher. Four days later he rejoined the battery, although still unable to walk unaided. On 25 April 1916, the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, Park's battery (equipped with eighteen-pounders) fired 120 rounds of shrapnel 'in registering a piece of wire at Hawthorn Redoubt' from a position east of Englebelmer.
Life settled into a routine for the battery. It registered positions, cut wire, retaliated, supported small raids and tested guns for calibration. The battery's command post was a deep pit connected by a trench to the signallers' pit. It contained a small table, a telephone and message pad, and an empty ammunition box to use as a bench. There were two bunks, one above the other, for the officer on duty and the signaller at rest. The officer climbed up a ladder to shout his orders (using a megaphone) through an opening in the rear wall of the pit to the gun crews. During this quiet time, Park learned that on 23 May he would be promoted from Temporary to Substantive Second Lieutenant.
The brigade commander, wrote Park after the war, was urgently advised by experienced troops that concealment from the air was necessary, but ignored the advice until a battery on his flank was accurately shelled following enemy aerial reconnaissance. Park was then permitted to accompany a pilot of 8 Squadron in a flight over all the brigade's gun positions. Every position, Park reported, was plainly visible because of the huge areas of newly-turned earth, new tracks and shadows cast by high emplacements. In fact, the guns would have been less obvious standing in the open. Perfunctory attempts were made to remedy the situation.
The British trenches ran for twenty miles from the village of Hébuterne south across the river Ancre to Maricourt Wood, held jointly by British and French troops. Two miles farther south lay the Somme. For such an extended front the artillery available was inadequate, but the offensive depended on the artillery destroying the Germans in their trenches. Many shells would fail to explode and the German fortifications proved immensely strong – which was hardly surprising on a front undisturbed for nearly two years. The bombardment began on 24 June. The task of Park's battery was to destroy the broad, dense tangle of barbed wire protecting German trenches in front of the fortress of Beaumont Hamel. Throughout the week-long bombardment, No. 10 Battery was allotted 160 rounds per gun per day and half the battery was at work each night, attacking communication trenches in the hope of delaying the movement of reinforcements and ammunition. During these hectic days. Park was all over the place. On the evening of 30 June he was observing for a 9.2 howitzer battery as well as attempting to cut wire with his own guns. Park thought them useless: 'little pipsqueaks' with a flat trajectory which caused little damage even when they did hit the wire.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Park: The Biography of Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park, GCB, KBE, MC, DFC, DCL"
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Copyright © 2001 Vincent Orange.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
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