Chapter 5


The Evacuation

The evacuation of the troops at Anzac Cove had been thought about briefly in the evening of the first day, but the evacuation of the troops from the positions that they were still clinging on to did not come until the following December for the Anzacs, and even later, in January 1916, for the British at Helles.  
By the time of the evacuation, Hamilton had been replaced as the Officer Commanding the MEF by General Sir Charles Monro, who was a committed ‘Westerner’ which meant that he did not agree with a war in the East at all.  In fact he thought that in order to win the war every available man and weapon would be needed on the Western Front, and that all other theatres of war were irrelevant distractions to the business of winning the war.  Churchill had also been removed from the post of First Lord of the Admiralty.  Lord Kitchener had been put in charge of the army on Gallipoli, and had decided to visit the area in early November 1915 to see for himself.  
The decision to evacuate the whole of the peninsula was being discussed by parliament back in Britain, when the weather that had been threatening for some time finally broke.  The evacuation of Anzacs was agreed by a top level conference including Kitchener, Munro, and Birdwood, who was given the task of getting the men off safely.  The evacuation of the Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay areas was again to be tackled in three stages under the plan thought up by Lieutenant General Birdwood who on the recall of Hamilton had been placed in overall control of the Forces on Gallipoli
Willie Goodwin was evacuated from Anzac cove and Gallipoli in December 1915.  His rank at the time was that of acting Regimental Sergeant Major, and in March 1916 he left Alexandria with the rest of the Australian Army, to travel to France and eventually become part of the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front.  In August 1916
he was awarded the Military Cross for gallant conduct during the fighting at Pozieres, on the Somme, having been promoted to Second Lieutenant only two weeks before.  Willie was later awarded a bar to his MC for conspicuous gallantry in rescuing wounded men, during which he himself was wounded, and on being evacuated to hospital, at last was able to return to England, a little over two years after leaving Australia.  After being promoted to Lieutenant, and spending the most part of 1917 either in Hospital or training troops was returned to his old battalion in Belgium, where three weeks later he was killed near Zonnebeke, in the battle of Passchendaele.