There is no reason to think that this document has been edited or changed by others with an eye to the General’s later career as the dictator of Turkey; the original notebook is preserved by the Historical Branch of the Turkish General Staff at Ankara, and most of it is filled with Kemal’s own handwriting in the fine arabic script which he later abolished in Turkey in favour of the more practical and much less beautiful Latin alphabet. The rest of the notebook has been dictated to an assistant either on the battlefield itself or shortly afterwards.
There is one very interesting passage dealing with the period immediately before the Suvla landing. As so often happened, Kemal was involved in a dispute with his commanding officer — in this case Essad Pasha, the Corps Commander opposite Anzac. It had been decided to extend Kemal’s divisional front in the north of the Anzac bridgehead so as to take in part of a ravine known as Sazlidere. Kemal at once protested that this was too much responsibility for him to undertake. He went on and on about it, writing letter after letter (which he quotes) to Corps Headquarters. Essad took the line that this was all very unimportant, but, since Kemal wished it, he would remove the area from the 19th divisional front and take it under his own command. This did not suit Kemal at all. He replied that the Sazlidere area was so important that it must be put under a strong independent command; did they not realize that it was quite possible for the enemy to advance by day up to the very foot of Sari Bair under the cover of this deep ravine? Essad answered that he was in feet establishing an independent command from Suvla to the north of Anzac, and a German officer was coming out to take charge of it. The dividing line between his and Kemal’s command would be the Sazlidere ravine — or at any rate the upper part of it, since the mouth was already occupied by the enemy.
Once again Kemal protested; a dividing line between two commands, he said, was always the weakest point. The responsibility for Sazlidere must be made perfectly clear, and strong forces posted there. Essad was growing weary of the argument. ‘Little valleys like this,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be inclusive or exclusive of either side.’ However, he agreed to come down one day with his chief-of-staff to survey the position. Kemal led them to his advance headquarters on a plateau known to the British as Battleship Hill, and from there they looked down, as from an aircraft, at the coastline to the north of Anzac, the salt lake glistening in the distance by the sea, the empty bay at Suvla, the hills to the east, and in between, the flat plain reaching up to the tangle of foothills around Sazlidere at their feet. The three crests of Sari Bair — Chunuk Bair, Hill Q and Koja Chemen Tepe — with their apparently unclimbable slopes, rose up above them immediately to their right.
Kemal reports the discussion that followed in these words: ‘Seeing this view, the Chief-of-Staff of the Corps said, “Only raiding parties could cross this ground.”
‘The Corps Commander turned to me and said, “Where will the enemy come from?” Pointing with my hand in the direction of Ari Burnu, and along the whole shore as far as Suvla, I said, “From here”.
‘ “Very well, supposing he does come from there, how will he advance?” Again pointing towards Ari Burnu, I moved my hand in a semi-circle towards Koja Chemen Tepe. “He will advance from here,” I said. The Corps Commander smiled and patted my shoulder. “Don’t you worry, he can’t do it,” he said. Seeing that it was impossible to convince him I felt it unnecessary to prolong the argument any further. I confined myself to saying, “God willing, sir, things will turn out as you expect”.’
In short, Kemal had anticipated the general lines of Hamilton’s attack — the landing at Suvla, the advance up Sazlidere and the neighbouring ravines to the crests of Sari Bair — and perhaps it was only human that Kemal later should have written in his journaclass="underline" ‘When from the 6th August onwards the enemy’s plans turned out just as I expected and tried to explain, I could not imagine the feelings of those who, two months before, had insisted on not accepting my explanations. Events were to show that they had been mentally unprepared and that due to insufficient measures in the face of hostile action, they had allowed the whole situation to become critical and the nation to be exposed to very great danger.’
From the British point of view the important thing was that Kemal at this stage had no power to enforce his ideas, and while he fumed and complained on Battleship Hill all the broken ground from Sazlidere to the north-east remained virtually unoccupied by the Turks, and the Suvla plain was left to the care of only three weak battalions. However, the German officer arrived to take command of the area, a Major Willmer of the Bavarian cavalry, a tall, spare figure with a duelling scar on his cheek, and he proved to be a very capable man indeed. When the salt lake dried up in July, Willmer saw that it was no use posting his 1,800 men along the coast, since there was no hope of preventing an enemy landing there. Just two outposts were left beside the sea: one of them on a patch of rising ground known as Hill Ten, to the north of the salt lake, and the other at Lala Baba, a 200-foot hillock between the salt lake and the bay. In the event of a landing being made, these men were told to resist as long as they could, but not to get cut off: they were to retire to the hills some three miles inland where the bulk of the little force was entrenched. And there, somehow or other, Willmer hoped to hold on until help reached him from Bulair in the north.
At the end of July Willmer received the warning issued to all Turkish army commanders that an enemy offensive was to be expected at any time, and he took care to conceal his men as much as possible by day and to push on with the digging of his entrenchments by night.
On August 6 the Major went down to the coast to inspect his outpost at Lala Baba, and it was there, late in the afternoon, that he heard the tremendous barrage of guns starting up at Anzac. Shortly afterwards he received an order from Liman to send one of his battalions there. The men were put on the road, but Willmer himself remained at Lala Baba to watch the horizon for any sign of approaching enemy ships. He saw the crimson sun go down on a flat and empty sea, and then, giving orders to his men to remain in instant readiness through the night, he rode home to his headquarters in the hills. He had hardly arrived there when he had word from Lala Baba that enemy soldiers were coming ashore on the beach below them in the darkness. At once he sent off a signal to Liman asking for the return of the battalion which was on the march to Anzac. Liman refused, and Willmer was now left with a force of less than 1,500 men to hold the whole area around Suvla Bay.
The night was pitch dark, and for some time the outpost at Lala Baba could not make out what was going on. Had they been able to see out to sea they would have been much more alarmed than they were, for the British fleet had carried through the first part of the plan with remarkable timing. There were three echelons: the 10,000 men from Imbros who, in three brigades, were to make the first landing, one of them inside the bay and the other two on the open beach to the south of it, and then, following on behind, the 6,000 men from Mytilene and the 4,000 from Mudros. Precisely at 9.30 p.m. the leading destroyers in line abreast came to a stop five hundred yards out from B Beach — the beach to the south of the lake — and quietly eased their anchors into the sea. The beetles and the picket boats which they had been towing were then cast off and made towards the shore.
At Lala Baba the Turks held their fire, for they could still see nothing, and in a fresh and gentle breeze the boats ran up to the beach and dropped their ramps on the sand. Within a few minutes some 7,000 men had walked ashore without getting their feet wet, and they were disturbed only by a single rifle shot which killed a sailor on the beach. As they marched inland for half a mile, two Turkish sentries rose in the darkness, fired their rifles and fled, but there was no other opposition; the invaders were in possession of an empty countryside.