Chunuk Bair Address

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, this morning we gathered at Anzac Cove at dawn to mark the anniversary of the fateful landings at Gallipoli 94 years ago.

Here at Chunuk Bair, we remember especially the young New Zealanders who fought and died so far away from home. We also remember and commemorate the New Zealanders who have served in conflicts since that time and who lie buried in graves in many parts of the world.

In August 1915, three months after the landings at Anzac Cove, the Allies held little more than a tiny enclave and had suffered terrible casualties.

But it was widely believed that if the Sari Bair range, and particularly the prominent hill of Chunuk Bair, could be taken and secured, that it would open the road to the Turkish capital and with it, a quicker end to the war. Anzac soldiers fought bravely for this objective against odds that eventually proved impossible.

But this battle has a wider significance for New Zealand and New Zealanders.  Like the splitting of the atom and the conquering of Mt Everest, the story of Chunuk Bair has become a legendary part of what it means to be a New Zealander.    

The initial assault was led by soldiers from Australia, Britain, India and New Zealand on 6 and 7 August on a point known as the Apex, 500 metres from the crest of Chunuk Bair.  An attempt by Auckland Infantry Battalion in the late morning of 7 August gained just 100 metres of ground at great cost.  Each metre gained cost the lives of three soldiers.  

Wellingtonian William McCaw, a Signaller in the Otago Battalion, recounts one of the August 7 attacks: "‘Buck' Laws shouted: ‘Come on boys' and we went.  All I could see was rifle flashes about 30 yards ahead and spurts of dust on the ground where the bullets hit. ... I was alone about five yards from the trench and wondering whether I'd be impaled on a bayonet if I jumped into the trench, when my troubles were otherwise solved.  I received a tremendous smack in the upper (left) arm which spun me half around so that I fell on my face, feet towards the trench ... but when I came to lift myself out, my left arm refused duty, being powerless."

It was in the early morning of 8 August that the Wellington Infantry Battalion, led by Lt Colonel William Malone, a farmer and lawyer from Stratford in Taranaki, finally captured the hill.  Malone had, the previous afternoon, refused to carry out orders from superiors to attack the summit in daylight, since he saw such an attack as suicidal.

From the summit, the soldiers could finally see the Dardenelles, the prime objective of the Gallipoli campaign, but Malone's forces were subject to relentless Turkish attempts to regain this strategic hill.  

Malone continued to order counter-attacks, heroically leading many of them himself, armed with his bayonet, which had been bent by a Turkish bullet.  Corporal Cyril Bassett won an epic Victoria Cross for laying and maintaining a field telephone wire to the front line from brigade headquarters.

British historian Robert Rhodes James recorded the perspective of one of the few survivors, Captain Hastings, in the following words: "About 5pm, the long-needed artillery support came ... Malone and a few other officers saw a warship approach the shore at a great pace, turn and open fire.  ‘Swish! Swish! Came the shrapnel,' Hastings has related, ‘and all except two in our little trench were killed or wounded ... Colonel Malone collapsed into the adjutant's arms.' ... Of all the misfortunes of the day, this was the hardest one to bear."

Two days later, Chunuk Bair was lost in a massive Turkish counter-attack, fearlessly led from the front by Colonel Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who within a decade was to become the President of modern Turkey.

The failure to press home this advantage doomed the Gallipoli campaign and led eventually to the evacuation of Allied troops just before Christmas 1915.

But its symbolism for New Zealanders has never died.  In his play, Once on Chunuk Bair, New Zealand playwright Maurice Shadbolt recounted the taking of the summit.   He imagined the following response by New Zealand's Colonel to a British general's enquiry about progress :  "Tell him some scarecrows called Wellington Infantry have taken Chunuk Bair. No. Tell him, God damn it, that New Zealand has taken Chunuk Bair.  Tell him New Zealand is holding Chunuk Bair."

But fatefully, the message never got through-the carefully laid telephone line had gone dead. 

The men who scaled Chunuk Bair had joined the war to fight as a part of a bigger Imperial plan. However, they died on its summit as New Zealanders.   As field ambulance officer Ormond Burton recounted some 20 years later: "The way men died on Chunuk is shaping the deeds yet to be done by generations still unborn ... When the August fighting died down there was no longer any question but that New Zealanders had commenced to realise themselves as a nation."

In honouring those who died at Gallipoli and later on the Western Front, we are sadly reminded that, almost a century after their sacrifice, our world continues to be wracked by conflict and warfare.

As we commemorate the lives of those who have fallen, it behoves us all-as individuals, as communities and as nation states-to redouble efforts to build a peaceful world and a just world, where differences can be settled without resorting to violence.

I will close by quoting a First World War poem that aptly describes the sacrifice and spirit of the Anzacs:

"Not many are left, and not many are sound.
And thousands lie buried in Turkish ground
These are the Anzacs; the others may claim,
Their zeal and their spirit, but never their name."

No reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, kia ora, kia kaha, tēnā koutou katoa.