Chunuk Bair Attack

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Most of the civilians living on the Gallipoli Peninsula at the time were Greek. The Ottoman’s Fifth Army forcibly removed from the area 22,000 of the Greek civilians two weeks before the landings. They thought that as Orthodox Christians, they might have supported the Allied invasion. The 2500 years of Greek settlement ended as they never returned to the peninsula.
Timeline: Landings-Allied Evacuation

Significant Event: Chunuk Bair
Alternative strategies were being looked at by the allies to break the stalemate during the futile attacks at Helles. Lieutenant-General Birdwood, the ANZAC commander, formed a plan to break through the Ottoman lines at Anzac and seize the heights of the Sari Bair range. So New Zealanders took a stand at one of …show more content…
Piers built by the Allies to land food, ammunition and other supplies and evacuate sick and wounded were smashed. William Ewing, a Scottish chaplain, recounted the pounding storm:
“The night drew on with heavy rain and loud rolling thunder. The lightning was beyond description splendid... The sea was roaring like a vast monster under the lash of the tempest. Then a mighty sheet of flame would flash across the heavens, torn by gleaming, twisted, and broken lines, and for a moment, the wide welter and turmoil of foaming waters, with the white hospital ships riding at anchor, leapt into view.”
However, there was more of the huge storm to come. From November 27 to November 30, the rain swept away and drowned around 200 of the unsuspecting allies. Temperatures fell dramatically over the following days. The rain was replaced with freezing rain and snow, and floodwaters turned to ice. The storm created more danger for the troops. Not only were they wet and hungry, they also had to face the possibility of freezing to death. Approximately 5,000 men died or were evacuated due to frostbite. Bendall recorded what he and a young junior officer had witnessed while trying to round up his troops following the …show more content…
However, according to Ewing, the Turks seemed happy to observe an informal truce during the storms:
“The Australian Corps, indeed, suffered heavily. Many of the men...saw snow for the first time…Friday evening brought sleet and frost… If the Turks had cared to attack they might have had the position for the asking. But probably they also were suffering, and may have been thankful to be left unmolested.”
Turkish soldiers were also facing their limits of endurance on the other side of No Man’s Land. Mehmed Fasih, an officer in the Ottoman Army, wrote in his diary on November 27, 1915: “10.30 hrs. We find Agati [a fellow officer] distraught. Even though he prodded his men with bayonets, some of them refused to leave the trench and started crying like women. Those who did go suffered heavy casualties from the enemy fire and shells. The entire unit is demoralised.”
The harsh weather brought with it disease, especially typhus and dysentery adding to the already horrid conditions the Gallipoli troops were facing such as lice, bad food, and lacking clean water. W.H. Lench, a British soldier who arrived with fresh reinforcements in November, described the epidemics over the
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