Accounts I've read (English-language only unfortunately) of the Gallipoli fighting, both at Helles and Anzac, seem remarkable for lack of reference to civilians. Yet the maps, at least at Helles, show numerous roads and villages, also farmhouses. The infrastructure of a farming economy, admittedly poor and low-density, appears to be present. Which means there would have been children, schools, markets, cultivations, animals, temples, etc. Just like rural France. Yet none of this exists in accounts I've read.
There are occasional references to Greek civilians, but only relating to their availability for use as labourers.
I have to ask, is there some racial element here : did non-white civilians just not exist in the minds of writers on the Allied side ? Or did they all immediately leave ? I certainly have not found any reference to the obligation of an occupying power to take responsibility for welfare and administration of the zone under its control, which appears to apply at least at Helles. These people's livelihood must have been badly hit.
Does anybody know what Turkish accounts state ? Any good translations into English available ?
Rod

One way or another most, if not all, civilians would have been evacuated from areas of hostility. There are tales of people returning after the conflict and clearing out bodies from their farms (eg the "infamous" 1/5th Norfolks at Suvla Bay.

Rob,
The following is an extract from a web site.



The whole article can be seen Ambassador Morgenthau's Story Chapter XIX

Hope this helps.

Cheers Andy.

I was referring to civilians disrupted by Allied occupation of their land and infrastructure, not bombardments at distance. The quoted Gallipoli (town) bombardment and the allegations remind me of Gaza today - parties from different cultures and value systems talking past each other.
There doesn't seem to be much if any evidence that civilians were killed or wounded by Allied actions. But a poor farming familiy forced to relocate for a year or more, then return and start from scratch, probably with their farm and village destroyed and animals dead - that's a very negative outcome if you live at the subsistence level.
My question is whether indeed all the locals did disappear... certainly in France there are many reports of locals refusing to evacuate. But Allied reports read as if they are fighting on a clear battlefield, with no civilians or civilian infrastructure existing. And my cynical brain says that this is how occupiers always report their own actions, whereas the other side's report of the same situation refers copiously to wanton destruction, cynical disregard for civilian life yadda yadda. Certainly the lowland near Morto Bay appears to have been good farmland, and a season's wheat would have been lost. But did everybody in fact live in Krithia ?
Rod

Rod;

Your comments are well taken here. I could expand on your analogy with Gaza and set off all sorts of alarm bells.

I have read the memoirs of the German/Turkish commanders, several between the wars German books on Gallipoli, several recent good German books on Gallipoli from the Turkish/ German side, besides the more usual English-language sources, and I cannot recall a single mention of local civilians. I think that the area was very thinly settled and the civilians got themselves out immediately.

Bob Lembke

It's a part of the vast subject that has possibly never been researched. I think the general consensus is that there were no civilians in the area. There were buildings in the region and some of the land would have been used for farming. The few residents would have been pushed north to other parts of the country, but where to and what did they do.
I would say that many did not return until after the war. I think we have all heard and read the reports of farmers and soldiers removing crosses from the graves to use as firewood, so some did return. Their fields would have been covered in all sorts of detritus from the conflict, including many, many remains of the dead.

I included the passage as it states that there were no civilians in Gallipoli. If there were no civilians there then I would have thought that would have been the same for the rest of the conflict zone.

Cheers Andy.

The population of the Peninsula was around 100,000 in 1914

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Gallipoli,_Turkey

The majority of the population was Greek.

Krithia was deemed a "Greek village" but the people were evacuated beforehand.I assume camps were set up by the Ottoman authorities.

Somewhere in Bean there is a reference to Greek refugees coming down through the north of Anzac and being evacuated by ship.Around May/June 1915.I think the total was 10,000 or so.

Giles Morton claims in his book Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922 that initially the Greeks were allowed to return to their homes after the campaign but were then driven out by the Turkish military in 1916/1917.

Hi,
Excellent subject RodB;
indeed there is not much said about civilians. This is something ı will definately do abit of research on. However, from high school texts we know that many people stayed at their homes, farms etc. Some were in fact evacuated. By the way; I wouldn't rely on Ambassador Moergnthau's accounts a great deal. His writings are certainly biased.

Dear Rod,

I can only give you some basic information which is incomplete and might at certain times be incorrect. Official reports on the subject are to my knowledge inexistent.

There are 7 villages in the southern part of the peninsula:

Helles : Seddülbahir, Alçitepe (Krithia) & Behramli
Anzac : Kocadere & Bigali
Suvla : Büyük & Kücük (Small & Big) Anafartalar.

Let's start with Helles :

Seddülbahir & Krithia : Both villages were evacuated before the hostilities started. I do not have an exact date but I estimate it to be in late 1914. These villages remained unoccupied till 1936 as the Helles area was considered prime military zone. Krithia was not reoccupied by it's original inhabitants (who were Greek) but by Turkish imigrants from the Balkans.

Kocadere & Bigali : Kocadere was evactuated at the start of the landcampaign (25th April) and most people moved to Bigali. Kocadere was the biggest village in the peninsula before the war, now it is the smallest because most people settled in Bigali and did not come back after the war. Today still alot of people living in Bigali own land in Kocadere. When exactly Kocadere was reoccupied I do not know but I know the village was occupied again by some of it's original inhabitants in 1919.

Büyük & Kücük (Small & Big) Anafartalar : were evactuated at the start of the august offensive (6th August) and most people moved to other villages in the rear. When exactly the Anafarta villages were reoccupied I do not know but I presume it was also in 1918/19.

Eceabat (Maydos) : was heavily bombared and reduced to ruins. Therefore I think it was also evacuated as there were no houses left to live in. Maydos was a predominant Greek Town and was therefore not reoccupied by it's original inhabitants but also Turkish imigrants from the Balkans.

Those returning found most of their houses in ruins an tried to restart their life with agriculture. (By the way the WHOLE peninsula is very fertile). For the more enterprising there was some money to be made by collecting relicst from the battlefields.

Pieces of iron would fetch good money and till the 1950/60ies were brought to Eceabat where it was loaded on ships : destination Spain.

Bullets got also good money because till well in the 1950/60ies these would go to Eastern Turkey where compatible calibre rifles were still in use.

Explosives were used by fisherman to fishing.

Wether there has been a systematic evacuation by the military, I don't know. Personally I think Seddülbahir and Krithia were evacuated "by force" being directly in the "line of fire" but I think most other were evacuated by the villagers themselves, realising it was "not healthy" to stay ...

Sorry I can not be more accurate and cannot quote any sources. Hopefully somebody else can be more precise.


eric

RobB,

I was hoping Eric would come along with reliable information on the 1915 population for Anzac and Suvla areas.
With the 3rd Light Horse Brigade on Walker's Ridge and Russell's Top, there are references to the local inhabitants seen in the distance, out to the North, still plowing their fields during the August campaign.
As Eric has mentioned, most of the population in this sector seem to have been of Greek origin, and there is one photograph of Greek refugees being brought up onto Walker's Ridge, taken by Signaller James Pinkerton Campbell, "B" Sqdn, 8th Light Horse Regiment.
This photograph comes from the album held by the Australian National Library, Canberra, and tattaching the link here -

http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.p...mp;x=9&y=12

If this link does not work, do a Google search using - J.P.Campbell (James P.)
This will bring up the entire album, but the photograph in question can be found on pages, "Set 121- 140", photograph No. 134.

Jeff

Peter,

If you still have Giles Milton's book Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922, please take a look at the index for references to Rev Charles Dobson (my grandfather)who wrote a report on the fire at Smyrna (in fact he wrote 2).

Dobson was a New Zealander, a padre with the Otago Mounted Rifles at Gallipoli, and later with 2nd Battalion Auckland Regiment in France and Belgium. He survived and returned to New Zealand, newly married to his Greek wife in 1920, (I have a post about their return voyage on HMNZ 'Rimutaka' currently on GWF).

However, 1922 saw him posted as Anglican Chaplain at Smyrna, and my mother was born there in May. You've read the book, you know what happened in September - one particularly sordid piece of 20th Century history, of which no one nation can be proud, and part of a succession of atrocities.

I am, nonetheless proud of my grandfather and what he did to help people get away from the fire.

Joanna

Hi Joanna

How can I obtain more details about the work your grandfather Rev. Charles Hobson conducted in Smyrna including the two reports he wrote on the Smyrna holocaust?

Regards
David Whitman
Australia

dwhitman124@gmail.com

Thanks all for your thoughtful replies.. sounds like British and Anzacs unwittingly precipitated an ethnic cleansing - if the local population were mostly Greek and fled but could not come back - presumably they would have been caught up in the postwar Greek-Turk population swaps...
Rod

Bob, I'm always interested in "compare and contrast" exercises - what are your thoughts about alarm bells here ? I realise that in terms of population density, Gaza and Gallipoli are not comparable. I was relating them in terms of how the events get reported depending on what side the reporter is on. I'm thinking, what if say Turkey had invaded the Tasman Peninsula on Tasmania, roughly comparable to the Gallipoli peninsula, and its population had been forced to flee... and if they had returned postwar to a ruined landscape.. how would Allied reports of the campaign read ?
Rod

"These Greeks were subsequently robbed of much of their riches by the senseless harshness of the Turkish government, which compelled all those who were reported as unreliable by the police to move away from the sections near the coast."
(Liman von Sanders, [Translated] 'Five Years in Turkey' p51).

Hello David,

One of the reports by Rev Charles Dobson can be found online as a pdf file: http://www.greek-genocide.org/books.html . Will e-mail further details.

RobB, please excuse my sort of "hijacking" of this post. Perhaps others who have read this far would be interested in David Whitman's question.

Joanna

I doubt that the civilians of Gallipoli suffered any more than the civilians of France and Belgium who lived in and around the front line.

"So quiet was the situation at Y that during the morning Colonel Matthews and his adjutant crossed Gully Ravine, and walked unaccompanied to within 500 yards of Krithia without seeing any sign of the enemy. The village itself seemed deserted, and it is now known that this was so, the two Turkish companies who were in local reserve in its vicinity at daybreak having been ordered south when the British bombardment opened." (Aspinall-Oglander, Official British History, Gallipoli, Vol 1 p205).

No civilians remained in Krithia. The village was deserted.

Some more information (from Pemberton's "Gallipoli to-day", London-1926) :

As part of their aim to concer Anatolia the Greek took the Gallipoli area in august 1920. A Greek governor was appointed and the peninsula was policed by the Greek.
When in 1922 the Greek were pushed back most Greek inhabitants also left the peninsula and made for Thrace, Saloniki and Athens.

Hi Eric,

In your earlier post # 9, you mentioned the pre-war population of Krithia was Greek.

What about the inhabitants of the Anafarta villages who were evacuated in August 1915? Do you know if they were Greek, a mix of Greek and Turkish, or just Turkish?

Tunesmith