24 May 1915: Truce at ANZAC

A Field of Dead at Anzac

On 19 May 1915 more than 40,000 Ottoman troops attacked the Anzac perimeter, determined to drive the invaders back into the sea. At The Nek, Arab and Turkish infantry made repeated attempts to breach the Anzac defenses, each attack collapsing in the face of accurate machine gun and rifle fire. An estimated 3,000 Ottoman soldiers died during the failed attack, and their bodies were left to rot in no-man’s-land alongside Anzac dead from earlier battles. The fouled state of the line had became too much to endure. 

On 22 May 1915 an extraordinary event occurred on Brighton Beach. At a point about a third of the way along the beach from Hell Spit the "old Anzac" position came down to the sea. Here was a sandbag wall and, reaching out into the water in front of it, two trip-wire entanglements. On the morning of 22 May, a white flag was seen on Gaba Tepe. The Australians had no white flag but someone quickly brought up a beach towel to serve. Turkish envoys then came along the beach toward the trip-wire, where they were met by Australian officers. They had come to negotiate a truce to allow for the burial of the thousands of Turkish dead whose bodies had lain along the front line since their attack of 19 May. A Turkish officer was eventually blindfolded and led along the beach toward the trip-wires.

The Turkish Representative Approaches

Charles Bean was watching.

They directed his feet carefully over the first one … They shouted for coats to help him cross the second; but in the meantime someone had a brainwave. There were several Australians bathing … nearby. Someone rushed off for a stretcher — then they called the bathers. Two of these big Australians — naked as the day they were born — took the stretcher round the larger entanglement. . .

A truce was made between 7:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. on 24 May to allow both sides to bury their dead. Prominent in the organization of the truce was a British officer, Captain Aubrey Herbert, attached to the staff of the Australian and New Zealand Division. On the morning of 24 May, Herbert met and accompanied Turkish officers up the ridge from the beach to 400 Plateau. He found the sight between the trenches and in the gullies "indescribable." So awful was the stench that a Turkish Red Crescent official gave him antiseptic wool with scent to put over his nose. The scent was "renewed frequently." A Turkish officer said to Herbert: "At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage, and the most savage must weep."

Digger Albert Facey described the task of gathering the dead the day of the truce in his autobiography:

I will never forget the armistice — it was a day of hard, smelly, nauseating work. Those of us assigned to pick up the bodies had to pair up and bring the bodies in on stretchers to where the graves were being dug. First we had to cut the cord of the identification disks and record the details on a sheet of paper we were provided with. Some of the bodies were rotted so much that there were only bones and part of the uniform left. The bodies of the men killed on the nineteenth ( it had now been five days ) were awful. Most of us had to work in short spells as we felt very ill. We found a few of our men who had been killed in the first days of the landing. This whole operation was a strange experience — here we were, mixing with our enemies, exchanging smiles and cigarettes, when the day before we had been tearing each other to pieces. Apart from the noise of the grave-diggers and the padres reading the burial services, it was mostly silent. There was no shelling, no rifle-fire. Everything seemed so quiet and strange. Away to our left there were high table-topped hills and on these were what looked like thousands of people. Turkish civilians had taken advantage of the cease-fire to come out and watch the burial. Although they were several miles from us they could be clearly seen. The burial job was over by mid-afternoon and we retired back to our trenches. Then, sometime between four and five o'clock, rifle-fire started again and then the shelling. We were at it once more.

An Australian Casualty Is Retrieved

An important effect of the 19 May attack and the 24 May truce was that the Australians realied that their bullets did as much damage to Turkish bodies as vice versa and that the Turkish soldiers were human like themselves. Sergeant Apear de Vine, 4th Battalion, of Maroubra, NSW, wrote: "The time was taken up by making friends with the Turks, who do not seem to be a very bad sort of chap after all. After today most of our opinions on the Turks were changed."

Sources: Anzac Portal

Also see our article: Turkey's Çataldere Martyrs' Monument and Cemetery at Gallipoli HERE for information on how the Turks dealt with the enormous number of casualties they had suffered.