March 2015 – Edition 120

Although I have one more article about the life of “Grim” I am now going to tell you about his nephew Donald George Fraser. The reason for this is that in April Australia will be celebrating the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign, where Donald served. This would make it timely to tell you about Donald. I will return to Grim’s life in a later article.

The above Gallipoli photo is of a painting by George Lambert. An actual photo of the area is shown later in this article.

As far as I am aware Donald is the only member of the Heyes family to serve in that War.

Donald, born in 1893 in Ballarat, was a son of Grim’s sister Sarah Hannah Heyes, born in 1870 in Bendigo. Sarah married John Angus Fraser (1865-1940) in 1890.

Donald’s childhood. Donald grew up in Ballarat, with his parents and eight siblings, at 67 Cobden Street. He would have attended Mount Pleasant Primary School, which was at the end of their street. This school was established in 1855.

A machine fitter would have made machinery components using lathes and other machines, involving an apprenticeship in a workshop and part-time study at the Institute. There would have been considerable scope for a machine fitter in a town like Ballarat, which supported mining and a lot of other industries.

This choice of vocation was a departure from the occupations of many of his uncles and cousins, who worked in the mines, but his father was a carpenter and one of his brothers followed in his father’s footsteps.

Donald completes his apprenticeship. Donald would have completed his apprenticeship in about 1910, and being a teenager no doubt played sport. According to his Enlistment Application he spent 18 months in the 11th Australian Light Horse Regiment in Geelong, 56 miles (90km) south of Ballarat. There he would have learned to ride a horse (if he did not already know how to do so), and to shoot a rifle and carry out military drills.

Perhaps he preferred a Light Horse unit because there was already a Volunteer Rifle Brigade at Ballarat which he could have joined. Being only five foot six and a half inches (1678 mm) in height, the Light Horse may have appealed to him more than the infantry.

Donald signs up. Probably this interest in military affairs led him to enlist in the Army in March 1915.

After preliminary training in Australia he was assigned to the 23rd Battalion of the Second Division of the AIF, one of four battalions raised in Victoria. After more training in England the Division landed at Gallipoli on 12th September 1915 to relieve the AIF’s First Division.

In simple terms the Gallipoli campaign had been designed to secure the Dardanelles Peninsula, which ran along the north side of the Dardanelles Straits, which was a narrow waterway connecting the Aegean Sea (on the left hand side of the relief map) and the Black Sea via the Sea of Mamara (on the right hand side of the relief map). The capital of Turkey (Constantinople, also called Istanbul at times) was situated on the Black Sea.

Winston Churchill’s bright idea was that securing the Dardanelles would allow the allies to attack Constantinople via the Straits and take Turkey out of the War.

Although Australian readers probably assume that the landing at Anzac Beach was the sole military operation, there was in fact another major landing to the south on the same day (25th April 1915) at Cape Helles, and there were several diversionary landings.

Cape Helles. Cape Helles, at the western mouth of the Dardanelles Straits, consisted of flatter ground behind low cliffs. There were farms and a village (Krythia) on the flatter ground.

Although surprise is usually crucial to any successful campaign, in this case earlier small-scale naval attacks at Cape Helles warned the Turks that something was in the offing.

The main access from the Strait onto Cape Helles was via two beaches, known as V and W Beaches. These were not particularly suitable for the improvised landing craft, most of which ran aground too far out and were immediately raked with gunfire by the waiting Turks.

Several days after the initial attack four Australian battalions were also deployed to supplement the British, French and Indian troops.

Ernest Fairlie. Ernest, the great uncle of reader Bruce Fairlie was killed in the Second Battle of Krythia at Cape Helles. Ernest, a sergeant, was a Melbourne schoolteacher and had already shown notable bravery, having been awarded the Royal Humane Society Gold Medal for saving two teenagers from drowning in rough seas near Melbourne. Bruce has written a short book about Ernest in a masterly feat of research.

Later attacks. In August 1915 the allies made an unsuccessful attempt to gain the upper hand by launching further attacks at Gallipoli and also mounted a new and equally futile operation at Suvla Bay to the north (shown on the relief map). Australian Battalions from the Fourth and Fifth Brigade took part in action between Gallipoli and Suvla Bay.

Although the attack by the Australians at Lone Pine in Augustwas successful, it was only intended to be a diversion. The main attack by the Australian Light Horse at The Nek was a tragic failure, and the New Zealanders were not able to reach their major objective of Chunuk Bair.

By this stage the Gallipoli campaign had for practical purposes run out of steam. This is where Donald Fraser comes into the picture.

When the Australians had attacked Lone Pine in August they pushed the Turks back in fierce hand to hand fighting but did not completely remove them. My great uncle Arnold McDonald took part in this attack and was wounded in the leg when he fell through the improvised brush roof of a Turkish trench and gashed his leg on a bayonet held by a dead Turk.

After counter-attacking the Turks dug in, with both sides harassing each other in the following months with occasional hand grenade attacks and lots of tunneling.

In September the troops of the First Division, who had reached the end of their tether owing to poor nutrition and poor water quality, coupled with bouts of dysentery and disease, were replaced by the fresh Second Division. Donald’s 23rd Battalion and the 24th Battalion were allocated the Lone Pine area, working on a rotation basis to occupy the Australian trenches, changing every few days.

The trenches of both sides were fairly shallow, built mainly to provide protection from hand bomb attacks.

This comparatively peaceful state of affairs was broken on 29th November by a fierce Turkish bombardment.

The bombardment. Completely out of the blue the Turks bombarded the Australian positions on Lone Pine. To make it worse the Australian 23rd and 24th Battalions were in the exact process of changing over, so both Battalions were crammed into the front and rear trenches and the communication trenches connecting the major trenches.

Undetected by the Allies, a battery of Austrian 9.5 inch siege howitzers and six batteries of German heavy mortars had been brought in behind the main ridge as a result of the opening of the railway line between Berlin and Constantinople.

These were a significant improvement from the field guns used previously.

Howitzers (see photo on the left) were far more accurate because the shell was loaded into the breech at the bottom. They had a range of at least 12 kilometres. On the other hand mortars were loaded by dropping the shells down a much shorter barrel where they hit a firing pin at the bottom. Their range was much shorter and they were inaccurate.

The siege howitzers fired an enormous 300 pound (140 kilo) shell which took up to ten minutes to load because it was so heavy.

The results of the bombardment.
The results of the bombardment using such huge shells was devastating. The earth trenches were blown to pieces, leaving huge craters. If men were not hit directly by the explosions they could be buried by the flying earth or collapsing trenches. Some soldiers simply disappeared without trace.

Fortunately for the hapless 23rd and 24th Battalions the Turks did not follow up with a ground attack.

Although they would not have known it at the time, the Australians were being given forewarning of what to expect later in France.

The seamless withdrawal was made possible by troop pulling out at night and showing lots of activity in the daytime by those left behind to disguise the reduction of numbers.

Also, on the last night sporadic rifle fire was produced by the use of an ingenious system (see photo on the left) which has become the stuff of military legend. This consisted of water dripping through a small hole from the top billy can into the lower billy can which was tied by a cord to the trigger of a rifle. When the second can filled sufficiently it pulled the trigger.

Little did the Australians know that they would be shipped to France where, after a comparatively uneventful time at Armienteres (remember the rude song “Madamoiselle from Armienteres, parlez-vous?) they had a terrible initiation into trench warfare at the notorious Battle of Pozieres, which I will relate to you in a later article.