Hi all,

I've been trying to come up with a fairly accurate number for the French casualties at Gallipoli, and I'm surprised by the disparity of the results. Most accounts give the vague figure of 27,000, comprising 10,000 (est) killed and 17,000 wounded. But given the fact that the French Cemetery at Morto Bay holds about 15,000 bodies, the stats seem to understate the number of dead by about 50%.

Can anyone clarify?

Thanks in advance.

Mat

Mat

No precise figure, but the following may be of some help
Professor Jean-Charles Jauffret in his lecture on 23 April 1996 gave "On Sedd-el-Bahr side a lantern-tower watches over the French cemetery, in silent homage to the nearly 15,000 men from the expeditionary force who died there." [from 'The Straits of War' Sutton Publishing, 2000 – a collection of Gallipoli memorial lectures given at Holy Trinity Church, Eltham]
The Turkish 'Gallipoli Battlefield Guide' by Goncu & Aldogan says that the French cemetery has 3,238 graves, plus four ossuaries, each containing the remains of 3,000 men.
The Holt's guide book also mentions that some French dead were repatriated in the 1920s

regards
Michael

Mat,

Do not forget that the French could ask as next of kin to have there family member repatriated.

eric

Thanks for both those responses. I hadn't considered repatriation, but that just makes the puzzle more complicated. If some hundreds (or thousands) of French bodies were sent home, we have to add those to the total. The figures from Gallipoli Battlefield Guide for the cemetery (over 15,000) are the same as I've read elsewhere, so I'll assume are correct, so it seems strange that no-one has even a ballpark figure of the total French dead and wounded. The figure of 27,000 can't possibly be correct. If the total French dead is well over 15,000 you would expect the wounded to be at least twice this (and most likely three times this), giving us a casualty figure somewhere between 45,000-60,000. We also have to account for the sailors lost on the Bouvet and other ships.

I did read one figure that quoted 47,000 as total French casualties, so it seems this one (by luck or design) might be closest to the mark. If anyone has a more definite answer, I'd be grateful to hear it.

Cheers,

Mat

Mat

These figures, which are likely to be as definitive as possible, appear in the French Official History Les Armees Francaises dans la Grande Guerre Tome VIII Premier Volume on p 126. This provides some statistics. In all 79,000 troops, of whom over 27,000 became casualties, were sent to the Dardenelles, together with 65, 000,000 bullets and 527,000 shells. More details are supplied in the Annexes 1er Volume to Tome VIII 1er Volume Annex 438 on pp 728 - 734 which lists the casualty breakdown as follows:

Officers 183 KIA; 348 wounded; 42 missing.
OR 3,555 KIA, 16,827 wounded; 6,049 missing.

There is no mention of PW and note states 'The majority of the missing may be presumed dead.'

You may have to look elsewhere for an explanation regarding the size of the cemetery. One possible explanation is that a high proportion of those interred there were killed or died elsewhere or in a different campaign and were concentrated subsequently.

Jack

Possibly the dead of the Foreign Legion were omitted.

Are the remains in the ossuaries at the French cemetery all of French troops? The Douaumont Ossuary at Verdun contains the remains of both Frenchmen and Germans.

I don't want to hijack Mat's thread, but it really highlights the paucity of detail available in English, regarding the effort of our allies in the Dardanelles

From Jack's post
Officers 183 KIA; 348 wounded; 42 missing.
OR 3,555 KIA, 16,827 wounded; 6,049 missing.

Those figure total out at
Officer casualties = 573
OR casualties = 26,431

Professor Jauffret's lecture, referred to in my earlier post, mentions "From 5 to 8 May, a new general attack took place… … … The French incurred heavy casualties at the foot of the Achi Baba crest, in the small valley called Kereves Dere: 246 officers and 12,632 men. For these General Gouraud gained 500 metres of ground from the Turks."

Did the French really have very nearly half of all their casualties in only one battle over three days?

Another quote from Jauffret: "Only one poilu out of three came back unscathed from the Dardanelles. Between 25 April and 1 July, 430 officers and 20,042 men were put out of action within the French ranks."

Were there so few casualties between 1st July and their evacuation?

Does anyone know what the French casualties were for other dates - Eg; the Turkish attack on 18/19th May, IIIrd Krithia , 21st June, 30th June, 12th and 13th July?


regards
Michael

Michael

The heavy casualties you mention are highly probable. Dipping into Tome VIII, Vol I again, on p 68 there is a statement that the French casualties from 25 April - 11 May amounted to 246 officers and 12, 632 men out of, wait for it, 324 officers and 22,107 men who disembarked during this period. What a hammering they must have taken! For comparison the French say that British casualties up until 9 May were 683 officers and 16,000 men. I shall try to look up the remainder of your queries tomorrow.

Jack

Jack,

Many thanks for your time on this
it's much appreciated

best regards
Michael

Thanks for all the replies. What I am gathering is there really isn't a definitive figure about French casualties. Unless the ossuaries at the French Cemetery contain somewhere in the order of 5000 Turks, as well as Frenchmen, then the French casualty figures are way off. Does anyone have an explanation?

Mat

Mates,

I surprised a better count was not done on the french side of the house.

Was this because many of the Regts were colonial?

S.B

I agree Steve. It certainly seems odd. By my rough estimates we should be seeing total French casualties around the 50,000 mark, so I'm not sure where the maths is falling down.

Mat

PS: Reply to this email with 'Interesting point, Mat' or something equally banal and you can chalk up your 1000th post!

I have had a quick look through the relevant volume, but am not sure that all the questions raised may be answered readily. Much of May seems to have been spent by the French putting their organisational house in order in terms of arranging for a regular supply of reinforcements and replacements, together with the necessary provision of a robust supply chain. meanwhile local fighting, firing and artillery shoots were constant. Concerned at the wastage, it seems clear that the French were swift to adapt to trench warfare conditions. Much work was done to improve defences and the density of forward troops was reduced to the extent consistent with security.

In the latter half of May they seem to have conformed to the activities of the RND and, on 20 May, one of its brigades attempted to improve its positions near the so-called Haricot. This assault withered away in Turkish fire and was driven back into its own lines with losses of 8 officers and 250 men. Renewed two days on 22 May by the 2nd Regiment du marche Afrique, which took very high casualties and achieved nothing. (22 officers and 1,250 men, of whom 9 & 192 were killed).

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As far as 4 June is concerned, the French made a major effort, achieving little, despite flinging forward fresh waves of infantry several times. Six batteries of French 75s also fired in support of the British assault. The final outcome was 250 metres of trench line taken at the cost of 35 officers and 1,997 OR, of whom 9 & 141 were killed, i.e. about 1/3 of the British total. The French then decided that they would not attack again until careful preparations could be completed.

Ths preparatory phase lasted for over two weeks then, on 21 June, the Haricot was attacked once more, as were the Quadrilateral and a complex of trenches at the head of the Ravin de la mort. The 176th Regiment took the Haricot, which had already changed hands a couple of times on 20 and 22 May, but casualties were high on both sides, with the French having to beat off a succession of violent Turkish counter-attacks. Some progress was made elsewhere on the front. Positions were improved and, although there were no other major gains, the judgement was that the success wiped out the setback and disappointment of 4 June. Casualties between 21-23 June amounted to 3,200, of whom 506 were killed.

Taken together with general wastage, it is clear to see that casualties were mounting, but not towards astronomical heights and well within the overall losses declared for the whole campaign.


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The feeling was that the latest attacks had created a favourable opportunity to take out the final Turkish trenches on the right hand side of Kereves Dere and all remaining effort in June was directed towards that end. The asssault on 30 June was designated the 4th Battle of Kereves Dere. The 7th Colonial took out the Quadrilateral on this occasion and held it against counter-attacks. Casualties that day included General Gouraud, seriously wounded as he was visiting the wounded of the battle. Losses KIA 4 officers and and 166 OR; 11 officers and 699 OR wounded.

Gouraud was evacuated and General Bailloud assumed command. However it was clear that there could be no question of rapid progress. Tome VIII Vol I (p 93) notes that whilst Gouraud was in command, the French advance had amounted to between 100 and 600 metres on a 1,500 metre front, at a cost of 60 officers and 1,500 men killed, together with a further 6,830 wounded.

As far as the question about losses tailing off is concerned, it is pretty clear that the French were having second thoughts about this diversion of effort as July progressed. Remember that the 1915 spring offensive in Artois and Champagne had been very costly and efforts were being made to renew these major assaults in early autumn so Joffre, in letters to the Ministry of War dated 29 July and 3 August, made it quite clear that he did not think there should be any further attacks in Gallipoli unless they were conducted after a 'precise and full planning process.' (p 100) so although there was local interest in a landing at Youkieri, Joffre wanted nothing to do with invasions of Asia Minor.

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In support of VIII Corps operations, the French attacked again at Kereves Dere, but preparation was inadequate, the Turkish positions were strong and their reaction violent. Of 703 casualties, 5 officers and 230 men were killed.

Meanwhile, the complete stalling of the Gallipoli campaign caused the French to shift its attention to Salonika, which, of course, is a different story. Planning for a French landing had continued as stated but, in the event, the switch to Salonika caused French troop levels in Gallipoli to be halved when the French 2nd Div departed. This left two worn down brigades and only two heavy batteries to guard a front of 2,500 metres. Losses and disease reduced the rifle strength to about 7,600 (p 115). Because of Turkish strength to their front, about 3/4 of these men were permanently in front line positions and there were also concerns about African troops in the front line as winter approached.


As a result, the French were in defensive, casualty limiting, mode throughout the final stages of the campaign, so my impression is that the worst of the casualties were indeed suffered early on and that the overall figures I gave earlier are likely to be accurate. Where does this leave the discussion about the size of the cemetery? I have no idea unless it contains a fair number of Turkish dead.

Inter-library loan should be able to produce a copy of the book I have been looking at, in case anybody wants to read all the twists and turns of the French aspects of the story in detail.

Jack

Jack,
My boots are covered (not with mud or sand) but with spots of paint as I start the decorating campaign this morning. I am just having a snack and cup of char before returning to the front.
I am very grateful (as I am sure others are too) for your survey of the French effort and their casualties
I hope that I can get back to it later this evening for a more detailed look at your posts

Thanks again
Michael

Undoubtedly, the oft repeated figure of 47,000 French casualties includes those evacuated sick, who, it would appear, amounted to some 20,000. In the same way, the generally accepted figure of 215,000 British Empire casualties also allows for close to 100,000 who were so ill that they had to be evacuated. I'm sure Jack is correct in his suggestion that the ossuarie with its fifteen thousand cadavers includes bodies from areas far away from the Gallipoli battlefields. The battle casualties of 27,000 that the French suffered are high, and, in common with those of the British, contain an inordinately high proportion of killed to wounded : taking into account that their 6,000 + missing were probably dead, we see that nearly 10,000 French were killed compared with 17,000 wounded. That is a lethal toll from a force of 79,000. The British lost 38,000 killed/died of wounds and 76,000 wounded ; their losses also indicated a higher proportion of killed to wounded than that sustained on the Western Front. Phil.

Thanks for all the replies. Based on this, I'm going to assume the official figure of 27,000 is correct. Jack, I think you might be on to something with the suggestion that the bodies in the cemetery came from further afield, but the maths still looks pretty wonky. For example, there's the grave at the front of Frenchmen who died as part of the occupation force after the war, but it only contains 22 bodies.

The real issue seems to be working out why there are so many bodies in the cemetery, not why the official casualty figures are wrong.

I'll keep investigating.

Cheers,

Mat

hello all.

I'm new in the forum and I'm also quite interested in the Gallipoli campaign, particularly from the french point of view.

Maybe the following link can help you with the figures of the dead buried in Turkey. It's quite a long document of the French Senate - it's a summary of the cemeteries and etc. that they have all over the world. Further down th epage there's a table with all the countries the graves are in and in Turkey, at Sedd ul Bahr, the figure is 17235.

The link is: http://www.senat.fr/rap/r07-065/r07-065_mono.html#toc105

Hope this helps a bit.

I suppose one of the problems of war data is that under "casualties" they listed everything: killed, wounded, missing and therefore it's sometimes impossible to understand things clearly.

This is a feature of the war which intrigues me in regard to other fronts as well. The German war graves information for its Great War dead in Italy, for example, cites a total of 16,000 burials : a much greater figure than one might expect, given the very brief participation of German units in the Caporreto fighting.
Likewise, the figure for Romania is high - more than 50,000 IIRC - and the numbers for Poland exceed 400,000. The disparity between official British figures of fatalities and the dead enumerated by the CWGC is significant, but nothing like as large as these Franco-German differences.

Phil.

Hmmm, the plot thickens. Let's assume for a minute that the French cemetery at Helles contains somewhere in the order of 5000 French bodies from other theatres. The question is, what other theatres? Salonika? It seems highly unlikely they'd go to the trouble of shipping that many bodies from far flung battlegrounds just to neatly consolidate them at Gallipoli.

Any thoughts?

M.

You definitely have a point, Mat. It is all very well that we've tried to account for this anomaly, but it just doesn't "click", does it ? There were some significant French naval casualties, including the loss of at least one battleship, but that doesn't allow for several thousand additional dead. I'm as confounded as you are. I cetainly cannot beleive that seventeen thousand French troops died in the Gallipoli fighting - it's hard enough to reconcile their involvement with the ten thousand dead that are acknowledged.

Phil.

This is just a notion as I was rereading the thread. It seems to me that the weak point in the 15000 dead is, who counted them? We have 3 ossuaries with a suspiciously exact number of 3000 in each. Perhaps the 5000 or so are merely part of a not very good estimate? A transcription error perhaps? It is then copied and repeated without checking. How one would do that, is problematical. In short, I suggest that there are not as many remains in the ossuaries as is normally assumed. Perhaps we are looking at a discrepancy of less than 2000.

That had occurred to me too, Tom. It does seem a little too slapdash, though, to allow for such a rash exagerration whilst dealing with such a sombre and sensitive matter. That doesn't preclude it from being the case, but if so, it's inexcusable. Mind you, I have heard rumours that the 150,000 dead in the Douamont ossuarie is an overstatement, and that 130,000 is considered to be the maximum. Then there is also the very nature of ossuaries, which, being catacombs of bones, must entail a certain random and inexact promiscuity of internment. Who knows how many of the dead were actually just fragments, with one person counted as two, or even, as has been suggested above, Turks ?

All the same, there is such a big discrepancy that I can well understand Mat's disquietude about the numbers.

The Australian War Memorial at Canberra gives the number of French dead in the Gallipoli campaign as 9,874 : this equates to one in eight of all the men sent, a rather higher proportion than that suffered by the British, and, bearing in mind the brevity of the time that the French contingent was deployed in very heavy fighting, is bad enough. Phil.

I have been raking around French websites, to see if they can cast any light on the question: thus far without success. However I did come across one extraordinary snippet. On 8 May 1915 a soldier named Desire Bianco, serving with 58th RIC, was killed - less than a month after his 13th birthday!

Desire Bianco Born 4 April 1902; KIA 8 May 1915 RIP.

Jack

Here I am, pontificating about numbers and proportions, and here comes this post of Jack's....it's a bit humbling, makes me feel rather ashamed. RIC : does that "C" stand for "Colonial" ? I wonder what Joanna Lumley would say !

Phil.

To make a point about these statistics, I note that French losses on the Western Front in 1914 approached 300,000 in dead alone, with at least half a million more wounded or PoWs. The heaviest losses were in September, when 210,000 French casualties were sustained. The significant thing is, only 18,000 were posted as killed that month, the missing numbered 82,000, the wounded 110,000. The real number of fatalities must have exceeded 60,000. The gap between those posted as killed, and the actual number who died, is huge. The missing who were dead, and the wounded who died, resulted in a three fold plus increase. With the same adjustment applied to Gallipoli, we could account for well over ten thousand deaths, but still be far short of that seventeen thousand from the ossuaries.

Phil.

Assuming that RIC stands for Regiment d'Infanterie Coloniale, these were composed of long service professionals recruited in France or from white colonists and were intended to serve in the colonies but also fought in France during the Great War. The conscript army served only in Metropolitan France. No idea how a 13 year old came to die in such a unit. The colonial infantry units recruited from the indigenous population were generally called Tirailleurs.

I remember reading somewhere that the French Cemetery at Morto Bay also contains some French dead from the Crimean War but I can't find the source. I assume these were those that died of sickness around Scutari,Constantinople etc,and were dug up and consolidated with the French dead of Gallipoli when the Allies occupied the Constantinople region.I also think the exact figure of dead interned at Morto Bay is given as 14,300,another 700 or so missing at sea being added,giving a final figure of "up to 15,000" dead honoured there if only by a name plaque.

French dead from the forays in Odessa(1919) and Cilicia(1919-1921),though in small number and more as a result of disease,are also interned there.

Thanks Peter. Interesting stuff.

You may be on to something, but the basic maths is still eluding me. Every account I've read (including signage in the cemetery itself) claims there are 3000 bodies in each of the four ossuaries. Now I agree this might be an approximation, but it still puts us roughly in the 10,000+ area. Plus the more than 3000 graves in the cemetery. This is far above the estimated death toll of 10,000 in total and we haven't taken into account French bodies repatriated, sailors lost at sea, bodies still undiscovered in the fields, bodies totally destroyed by shellfire that will never be recovered, etc, etc, etc. In rough terms, if you have WWI cemetery burials of about 13-15,000, you'd expect the total death toll to be more like 20,000, not the 10,000 claimed.

The most likely answer seems to be that there's nowhere near 12,000 bodies in the ossuaries but, as mentioned in a previous post, this seems a little bit careless on the part of the people doing the burying. You'd think if they had no idea how many bodies are in the ossuaries, they wouldn't put the specific figure of 3000 in numerals on the side of it.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Mat

This is surely the only feasible explanation for the disparity. Many thanks for the contribution, Peter...like Mat, I was becoming rather troubled by the numbers mis-match.

It is simply not possible to reconcile the size of the French force that was dispatched, and the length of the time that it was engaged in heavy fighting, with a loss of much more than ten thousand dead. If it had been twenty thousand, then, taking the wounded and the sick into account, there would not have been a frenchman left standing.

Mind you - adding this as an edit - before I scoff at such a prospect, I have to acknowledge that it appears that almost the entire New Zealand contingent was killed or wounded, and that doesn't even take into account those Kiwis who were sick !
From Pugsley's book, I see that, from a contingent of 8,556 who served at Gallipoli, 2,515 were killed in action and 4752 were wounded, a casualty rate of eighty five per cent....and an additional 206 died from disease or accident. Applying the same death rate to the 79,000 French engaged would produce 25,000 fatalities.

Phil.