Battle of Krithia Vineyard
On the dusty plateau above the Aegean at Cape Helles, somebody — a Greek farmer most likely — had once planted a small vineyard. By August of 1915 the rows of vines were blackened from artillery, the fence at its edge marked the front line, and the British staff were calling the patch The Vineyard. It was perhaps a hundred metres across. It was meant to be the goal of an afternoon's work to fool the Ottomans about a much bigger landing thirty kilometres north. Instead it became a week-long battle that consumed four divisions and the better part of a generation.
A diversion that grew
The August Offensive was supposed to be the great breakthrough at Gallipoli. The plan was a fresh landing at Suvla Bay combined with a hard push from Anzac Cove up the Sari Bair range. To pull Ottoman reserves away from those movements, two diversions were ordered: the Australian attack at Lone Pine and a smaller British effort at Helles, sixty kilometres south. Lieutenant General Aylmer Hunter-Weston, the corps commander at Helles, had left the peninsula in July. His replacement, Lieutenant General Francis Davies, had not yet taken over. Planning fell to the corps chief of staff, Brigadier General H.E. Street, who proved an attentive student of Hunter-Weston's habits. The Helles diversion grew bigger and more rigid in his hands than the original orders had imagined.
The 88th and the 30th
Artillery was short, so the attack had to come in two waves. On the afternoon of 6 August, the 88th Brigade of the British 29th Division, supported on its right by the 1/5th Manchesters, went forward against the Ottoman 30th Regiment in the Vineyard sector. They captured a piece of the front-line trench. The Ottoman 30th counter-attacked and took it back. The British attacked again and took it back. The Ottomans counter-attacked and took it back again. By the time the firing died down on 6 August, the 88th Brigade had reported some 1,905 casualties — about half the brigade — and held essentially no new ground.
The 42nd East Lancashires
Early on the morning of 7 August, the 125th and 127th Brigades of the 42nd (East Lancashire) Division — Territorial soldiers from cotton towns like Bury and Burnley — went over the parapet. They reached the vines, were driven back, charged again, were driven back again. The bombardment had not been heavy enough; the Ottoman trenches had not been broken; the men charged uphill across a flat field of low vines into machine guns. The first 24 hours of the battle alone cost 3,469 British casualties, 134 of them officers. Total British losses for the week-long fighting that followed have been estimated at over 4,000. Ottoman casualties were perhaps 7,500. Among the men in the line was Private David Ross Lauder of the 1/4th Royal Scots Fusiliers, who in the trenches above the Vineyard kicked a live Turkish bomb away from his comrades and lost a foot in the explosion. He survived. He was awarded the Victoria Cross.
The diversion that wasn't
The whole point of the attack at Krithia Vineyard had been to keep Ottoman reinforcements away from the main fighting at Sari Bair. It did not work. By the morning of 7 August — within twelve hours of the British going forward at Helles — Ottoman regiments were already being put on the road north toward the August Offensive. The Vineyard battle would press on for several more days. Brigade after brigade was fed in. Major General Granville Egerton, watching his 52nd Division lose another third of its strength on top of what it had already lost at Gully Ravine in June, would protest publicly enough that he was relieved of command. Hunter-Weston had warned at Gully Ravine; Egerton was relieved at Krithia Vineyard. The pattern at Helles was that anyone who said the attacks were not worth the cost would be made to leave.
The fence that kept its name
When the firing finally subsided around 13 August, the British line at Helles had moved forward by some yards. The Vineyard itself was now in British hands. Somewhere in those few hundred yards lay the bodies of more than four thousand British soldiers — Lancashire millworkers, Scottish Borderers, Manchester boys, men of the Royal Naval Division, men of the East Lancashires. The 30th Ottoman Regiment had taken comparable losses defending it. The August Offensive failed, and Helles was finally evacuated in January 1916. Today the field is part of the Çanakkale Battles Gallipoli Historical Site. Nothing of the original vines survives. There is a small wooden fence at the rough location of the British objective, and a track that visitors can walk between the cemeteries of Twelve Tree Copse, Redoubt, and Skew Bridge. The plateau is windswept and the soil is poor. It is hard to imagine why anyone planted vines there in the first place, and harder still to imagine why so many had to die for them.
From the Air
40.11°N, 26.27°E, on the southern part of the Gallipoli peninsula about 5 km inland from Cape Helles. The plateau is open and gently rolling; the Aegean is visible to the south and west. Nearest airport is Çanakkale (LTBH) across the Dardanelles to the east. The Twelve Tree Copse Cemetery, which sits roughly on the old front line, makes a useful visual landmark from altitude. Best in clear weather; the peninsula is often hazy in summer afternoons.