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Bloody Sea. But fail they did, and the decision was made to open the passage by capturing the shore. On the morning of April 25, 1915, 60,000 Allied troops headed toward the Dardanelles peninsula in the first great amphibious land assault of modern times. In an age when armored landing craft were practically unknown, British, French and Anzacs went ashore in a flotilla of paddle steamers, trawlers, yachts and river tugs. Scarcely a naval gun boomed to soften up the Turkish beaches before them: the warships at Gallipoli were too busy transporting the troops. The result was carnage. At Cape Helles the Turks began "firing from a few yards away into the packed mass of screaming, struggling men in the boats." The men "died in the boats just as they stood, crowded shoulder to shoulder, without even the grace of an instant of time to raise their rifles. When all were dead or wounded—the midshipmen and sailors as well as the soldiers—the boats drifted helplessly away." Air Commodore Samson came flying over at this moment, "and looking down saw that the calm blue sea was 'absolutely red with blood' for a distance of 50 yards from the shore."
To the north the Anzac Corps of Australians and New Zealanders carried out a night landing just about six miles across thexinountains from the big Narrows forts. In the darkness tidal currents swept their boats a mile beyond their target beaches. But the Anzacs indomitably clawed up the cliffs, and "raising their absurd cry of 'Imshi yallah' [a phrase picked up in Cairo meaning 'Go away'], the Dominion soldiers fixed their bayonets and charged. Within a few minutes the enemy before them had dropped their rifles and fled."
By 7 a.m. the first Anzac scouts scaled Gallipoli's third ridge and looked down on the calm waters of the Narrows, only 3½ miles away. Mustapha Kemal Ataturk was then an obscure colonel commanding a reserve division at Boghali near the Narrows. Grasping instantly that the heights were the key to the Allied assault, Kemal threw his whole division into the attack, drove the Anzacs from the ridges and pinned them to the cliffs. That night the Anzac toehold seemed so precarious that the corps commander asked permission to pull out. In the best British tradition Sir Ian fired off a midnight reply: "You have got through the difficult business, now you have only to dig, dig, dig until you are safe." Before dawn the assault troops turned the seaward slopes into a maze of huddled holes and ditches.
Ever since, the Australians have proudly borne the name of Diggers.
The Trojan Truce. But Kemal's tireless Turks had stopped the Allied expedition at the beachheads. In London Church ill was tumbled out of the Admiralty. At Gallipoli the battle bogged down in stalemate. One million men, Allied and Turk, were pinned down in a rocky battleground no more than 25 miles long by 13 miles wide; in places the trenches were only ten yards apart. Across the narrow no man's land, men exchanged gifts of food and cigarettes as well as shots.