Chapter 2

The Preparations
Australia went to war in 1914 because it had no choice, being a colony of Great Britain, and when Britain declared war, Australia was also at war.  Australia had been warned by Britain in July 1914, that war was imminent.  In Australia the build up to war also coincided with a General Election, and within a couple of days the prospective candidates were using the expectation of war to get the people behind them.
After the Australian government had offered twenty thousand men to support Britain, how did it intend to raise this force?, and just how successful was recruitment in Australia?
Australia had no standing army to raise a fighting force from, so any contingent that Australia offered to the fight in the war would have to be recruited from the men of the country who had volunteered.  Recruitment in Australia was very successful, with men marching great distances and flocking to sign up all over the country, many wanting to go to war for different reasons.  A great many of these men had either been born in Britain, or had strong family ties with it, and even those men who had no real connection with Britain still wanted to join in.  Signing on to become a soldier would mean steady employment and a regular wage for some, as the Australian forces along with the other Dominion troops were paid a wage of six shillings a day, compared with the sum of only two shillings a day paid to British troops.  Others were simply looking for the adventure that they thought was lacking in their lives.  
The Australian contingent was raised wholly on a volunteer basis, and because of this it was necessary to vet them to separate out some of the more undesirable elements.  This was an ongoing activity that was even carried on once the army was training in Egypt, and men considered undesirable were sent home.  On one occasion C.E.W. Bean , official Australian war correspondent, recounts that the authorities intended to return around five or six hundred men who were as he calls it, ‘endangering Australia’s good name by being drunkards, or shirkers or had made themselves unfit for service by incurring disease ’.  In the end only 132 such disciplinary cases were sent back to Australia, along with 169 invalids on an Australian merchant ship in February 1915.   
It was later suggested that conscription into the Army was necessary on a couple of occasions, particularly when the number of recruits declined towards the latter part of the war.  Conscription was made the issue of a referendum on both occasions, once in October 1916, and then again in December 1917.  This issue was defeated on both occasions, so that Australia was able to feel proud, and boast at the end of the war that it had been the only country to have an Army that had been made up completely of volunteers.  This was not strictly true however, as the Hughes Government on October 2nd 1915 did actually go as far as calling up men between the ages of 21 and 35, but only to do service within Australia itself.  This order was later changed after the first referendum had taken place, and on the 22nd of November all those called up under this scheme were allowed to leave and return home.  
Also in 1915 a war census was proposed by the Labor government, to be held during September as a lead up to the referendum.  This found that there were some sixty thousand fit men between the ages of 18 and 44 still in Australia.  These men were intended to be targeted by the recruiting committees, who proposed to carry out the census from door to door, asking why these men had not volunteered, and these committees were actually empowered to ask the following questions :
1) Are you prepared to enlist now?  If your answer is yes you will be given a fortnights notice before being called up.  
2) Are you prepared to enlist at a later date?  If so name the date.  
3) If you are not prepared to enlist state the reasons why.  
Enlistment still remained high throughout 1915, but the conscription idea still remained in a lot of peoples minds, mainly because they were worried that volunteering was not being judgemental enough, as only the youngest and fittest men were seen to be enlisting to fight.  
Across the sea the New Zealand contingent was promised by the government to be a strong one, and was to be made up of seasoned troops from established regiments, many of which had previously fought for Britain in battles such as the Boer War, at the turn of the century.  These troops were all trained men who had come through the territorial forces, and were members of regiments such as the Wellington and Otago Infantry Battalions that were soon to make a name for themselves at Gallipoli.    
This new fighting force of Australian, and New Zealand troops was to become known as the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps[A&NZAC], and it was originally intended that they would be transported to Britain for training on Salisbury Plain, before being sent across to France to fight on the Western Front.  While the transport convoy was under way however, there was a change of plan.  Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, came up with a plan to outflank the stalemate situation on the Western Front, which seemed on the face of it simple, and easy to carry out.  If it was successful, this plan would not only take the pressure off the war on the Western Front, but would also bring the possibility of a swift end to the War as well.  
Churchill’s plan was to storm the vital waterway known as the Dardanelles, which was the gateway to the Black Sea, and to Russia.  It was at first intended that by using only sea power this channel could be prevented from falling into enemy hands.  Turkey, which controlled the Straits could be stopped from entering the war, while the other countries in the Mediterranean that were as yet undecided, could be either prevented from joining in, or persuaded to join in, on the side of Britain and her allies.  Also, a permanent ice-free route to Russia to enable vital aid to reach them, and goods in exchange to be shipped out, could also be established and maintained through this channel once it was secured.  
This plan was one of many ideas submitted by the various members of the War Cabinet, with Kitchener and Lloyd George both preferring different strategies in the East.  Kitchener wanted to make sure that Egypt and the Suez Canal were made secure, while Lloyd George wanted to support Serbia by making an attack on the Balkans.  Churchill’s plan was eventually agreed by the War Council, with a few criticisms voiced, particularly by General Haig, who as Commander in Chief of the British forces on the Western Front was worried that troops and vital supplies needed on the Western Front would be transferred to set up a new front in the East.  
The plan which had seemed so straight forward soon met with difficulties, as the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean area soon knew of an impending attack.  The  existence of mines, a new weapon, had also been overlooked, or at least their use and capability had been underestimated by the British.  The storming of the channel was a complete disaster, with the loss of a third of the naval force, and it was then further planned that an amphibious invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula, and the Dardanelles was needed to secure the straits before the Navy could continue.  Kitchener was reluctant to spare troops from the fighting in France, so any fighting force would have to come from the Australasian contingent that was in the Red Sea and heading for Egypt.  
On reaching Egypt, it was first planned that part of the force would be transported to help the South African government that was experiencing internal trouble, with another uprising by a group of Boers.  While plans to bring this about were being devised, the problem was sorted out by South African forces themselves, under the leadership of General Louis Botha, who later went on to conquer what was then German South West Africa.  While in Egypt, The Australian and New Zealand forces were officially combined under the leadership of General Sir Ian Hamilton.  
Training in Egypt, was supposed to prepare the troops for what they would experience in a landing on Gallipoli, but there was nowhere that could compare with what they were about to face, and no one was firing real bullets at them.  Training consisted in the main of route marches with full packs, practice at fighting pitched battles, and imaginary attacks, all in the heat of the desert, and as a result the men became very fit if not prepared.  On one occasion the troops had to pretend that they were billeted in an imaginary French village, talking to and dealing with imaginary French people , which must have been very amusing for the natives that followed them everywhere.  
Probably the most worrying aspect however, was that there were instances that foretold of the way things were to be on Gallipoli.  Bean again tells of one such incident where around a third of the division marched out of camp as if they were going to the Suez Canal, but unfortunately due to the watch of one of the Colonel’s being wrong, the Artillery started out some four minutes behind the rest of the troops .  The lack of good, accurate timekeeping would have disastrous consequences later at the attack on The Nek, when valuable time was lost in starting an attack either because a covering barrage finished early, or because an Australian Commander’s watch was wrong.  In another training incident, due to muddled orders, the men of one battalion charged at another, armed only with bayonets, a typically British way of fighting, that had been practiced for many years.  Unfortunately they were charging against men armed with machine guns and as a result they were all ‘killed’ .  
When not in training, boredom was one of the biggest problems that the troops had to overcome in Egypt, and as a result they were notoriously high spirited on their trips into areas such as Cairo, the nearest habitation to the sprawling camp at Mena, on leave.  On a couple of occasions they got totally carried away, and their riots became condemned even by their own people.  Even Bean, in his diary says that ‘There was a great deal of drunkenness, and I could not help noticing that what people in Cairo said was true - the Australians were responsible for most of it.  There were rowdy, noisy British Territorials, and rowdy, drunken New Zealanders, but my own observation was that the Australians were easily the most noticeable, and the most frequent offenders were Australians. ’
The most notorious rioting took place in the red light districts of the Wassa area of Cairo on Good Friday 1915, when the area was set on fire by the troops enraged by the bad drink and diseased whores that they said were supplied to them by the Egyptians.  The drink that they were offered as whisky was very often mixed with large amounts of methylated spirits, and this combination led to the deaths of Australians on more than one occasion.  Egypt was retained as a training camp throughout the campaign, and the Good Friday rioting was not to be the last, even though the first of the Anzac troops left for the Island of Lemnos on their way to the Gallipoli peninsula soon after.  The 3rd Brigade of the AIF. who were to be the first troops ashore in the battle, spent most of their time on Lemnos practicing for the first time getting on and off the boats they were to use, and in making an attack on the coastline.