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View of the Turks

Although few Australians arrived at Gallipoli feeling strong animosity towards the Turks, Bean explained in his diary that 'they [the Australians] were very savage to them [the Turks] on the first day because they found some of their wounded (or dead) mutilated'. However, Bean believed that from the time of the Turkish attack at Anzac Cove on the 19 May 1915, the Australians' attitude had changed completely and that they had become 'quite friendly with the Turks; anxious to get in the wounded if they can-give them cigarettes'.

Bean repeated this belief in his article on the nature of the Australian soldier saying:

After the attack of May 19, when for five or six hours our men were shooting Turks almost as fast as they could load their rifles. . .the attitude of these seasoned old troops towards the Turk underwent a quite remarkable change. The sight of Turkish wounded lying there in front of the trenches, rolling now and then from side to side, staring at the hopeless bright sun in the midst of a beautiful cloudless sky, occasionally bending one arm in pain, and then letting it drop down again, whilst they threw their heads from one side to the other, and presently back again in helpless pain, it was this that turned the sternness of some Australians into the gentleness of a little child. From that day on they have been very fierce against the Germans but almost friendly towards the Turk.

REFERENCE
Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean's article, dated 3 July, on the 23 June attack by Turkish forces at Gallipoli
The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 August, p. 8, NLA newspaper call no. NX 354
Click to view transcriptClick to view manuscript

Bean and other correspondents made a point of complimenting the fighting style of the Turks, which the journalists said made them worthy foes. In his description of the Turkish attack of 23 June, headlined 'Enver's Attack' after the Turkish military leader Enver Pasha, Bean tried to dispel the myth, popular on the home front, that the Turks were vicious and cruel opponents. Instead Bean argued that 'The Turk has been untrue to all the ordinary ideas of him. He has fought on the whole a very fair fight so far'.

In one of his accounts of the fighting at Sari Bair in the first August offensive, the Age correspondent described a 'tragic discovery which is a tribute to both the Australians and the Turks':

After the battle [an] officer discovered, facing one another with but a score of yards between them, two heaps of bodies-the Australians, six of them, lying one on top of the other, the sixth man with his rifle still pointing toward the foe. On the other side, the Turks lay piled in exactly the same fashion. It had been a fight to the death. Man after man must have crawled up and died over the dead bodies of his comrades until they had filled the trench.

REFERENCE
Bean's official report
Commonwealth of Australia Gazette, No. 7, Thursday 13 January 1916, p. 92, NLA call number N82
Click to view gazette

Bean's official despatches record the Australian soldier's contrasting view of Turkish and German troops. 'Our army does not contain a man who is not in this war heart and soul to see the end of the sort of regime that sank the Lusitania,' he wrote. The Turk he described 'a brave enemy ... a courteous enemy ... a very superior enemy to some of the Germans'. His official reports contain several references to friendly discussions between Anzac and Turkish soldiers during the eight-hour armistice on 24 May when both sides stopped fighting while they collected their dead and wounded.

In one of his final despatches from Anzac, Bean recorded an Australian's regard for the Turks with this story of the burial of a dead Turkish soldier:

The most pathetic evidence that I have heard of [of Australian regard for the Turks] is a little wooden cross found in the scrub, just two splinters of biscuit box tacked together, with the inscription 'Here lies a Turk'. The poor soul would probably turn in his grave if his ghost could see that rough cross above him. But he need not worry. It was put there in all sincerity. Some Australian found him and buried him exactly as he would bury one of our own men-with that last little homage to mark the resting-place of a man fighting for his country.

IMAGE

ENLARGE IMAGE
Dead Turks in front of our trenches, [showing two several bodies lying a few feet from the Anzac trench] June? 1915
Pictures Collection.