Brave stories of Tasmanians in Gallipoli battle

Few eyewitnesses give a better account of the landing than Ivor Margetts, writes

e had six lifeboats and the men were arranged in two tows with about thirty-six men in each boat … it was a wonderful sight to see the men smoking and joking with one another … ready for whatever lay before them. As we neared the Peninsula, the captain gave the order for silence … and thus in darkness and silence were we carried towards the land which was to make or mar the name of Australia.”

These words were written 109 years ago by a Tasmanian officer barely a month after leading his men at the Gallipoli landing. He was 23 years old, a sometime school teacher at Hutchins but better known as a champion footballer with Lefroy. His name was Ivor Margetts and the men were of the 12th Battalion, recruited from Tasmania, in August and September 1914.

The tiny lifeboat they were in was one of several from the P&O ship SS Devanha. One of these boats, possibly the very one, is now housed deep inside the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. It is one of only two landing boats still believed to exist.

The Anzac landing and the story there of the 12th Battalion is told in my new book Two Good Soldiers, One Great War (Forty South Publishing), to be released next month. It tells the story of Margetts and his military mentor Charles Simmons, a Derwent regiment veteran too old to go to war.

The commander of the 12th was Boer War veteran Colonel Lancelot

Fox Clarke, who had been recalled to active service from Devonport. At 57, Clarke was the oldest battalion commander in the 1st Division.

Around 2pm on Saturday, April 24, the men of the 12th boarded the Devanha at Lemnos for the short journey to the island of Imbros, just 16km from the Gallipoli Peninsula. There, at midnight, they crossed to a Royal Navy destroyer HMS Ribble, alongside of which were tethered the Devanha lifeboats.

Few eyewitnesses give a better account of the landing than Margetts, which somehow amidst the carnage he managed to write down and post to his parents a few weeks later.

Under the cover of darkness, the lifeboats crept towards the shore. About 4am the Turkish defenders on the hills above the beach saw the invaders through the gloom and began firing.

The 12th Battalion A Company filled the first two tows, including Clarke and his deputy Lt-Colonel Sidney Hawley. Margetts was making ready the second tow when a bullet fizzed out of the dark and the man beside him dropped dead, their first casualty. Margetts ordered his men over the side and into the water, to wade chest-high to shore through the hailstorm of Turkish bullets.

Slowed by their heavy packs, terrified by the balls and shrapnel coming at them, the invaders struggled ashore, desperate to find some protection.

Hawley didn’t even make the sand, shot through the spine while standing up in his lifeboat.

In the dark and under fire, officers and men scattered and the agreed plan to assemble on the beach as a brigade was abandoned; it was every