LONESOME PINE The Bloody
Ridge
Simon Cameron
Big Sky Publishing, 2013, 176pp
ISBN 9781922132307
(paperback)
Simon Cameron’s book on the Battle for Lone Pine in August
1915 will appeal to a readership seeking descriptions of the detailed events
during the battle, and of the personal experiences of the soldiers there.
However, the battle is also placed in its wider context, as a diversionary
element of the last Allied attempt to resolve the Gallipoli impasse by
offensive action.
Cameron describes clearly the debilitated state of the men
of the 1st Division before the attack. The similarly debilitated state of the
men in the brigades making the main attack from ANZAC on Chunuk Bair and Hill
971 probably contributed significantly to the failure on Sari Bair, for which
Lone Pine was a diversion.
The descriptions of the attack and defence of Lone Pine are
well set out. When they are linked with the many maps, it is easy to gain a
clear picture of events. Cameron’s use of anecdotes also gives a good sense of
how the battle affected the individual participants on both sides. Cameron
records the part played in the battle by the Ottoman Major Zeki Bey, who later
helped Bean to understand the course of the battle from the Ottoman side when
Bean was researching his Official History.
Personalities such as Chaplain McKenzie, said to have buried
some 450 men at Lone Pine, are featured, as are men who rose to fame in the
Second World War, such as Leslie Morshead and Iven Mackay. The delightfully
named Lieutenant Everard Digges La Touche (an ordained minister with a PhD from
Trinity College, Dublin, who had originally enlisted as a private soldier)
features briefly, before being killed. More junior soldiers are not neglected.
Cameron makes the case that Lone Pine was a success because
the Australians held part of the ridge after the attack (but not the part
overlooking The Cup, in which the Ottoman forces concentrated for
counter-attacks), and that significant Ottoman forces (‘three regiments from
the reserves of the northern group’) were sent to Lone Pine, and thus were
unavailable to counter the attacks further north.
As a simple statement this might be true, but in the absence
of success on Sari Bair, success at Lone Pine was nugatory. Even Cameron
concedes that the ‘ground itself offered little advantage … since [it] … did
not [provide] a commanding view of Owen’s Gully and Legge Valley’. The new
Australian position was a salient vulnerable to fire from three sides.
Bean records some 2277 Australian casualties at Lone Pine
during the battle, of whom Cameron estimates around 900 died during or in the
immediate aftermath of the battle, with more succumbing in later years. To
quote one of Rome’s many enemies, Pyrrus of Epirus, after a particularly bloody
victory over Roman forces, ‘One more such victory and we are lost’.
Cameron’s account of the origin of the name of the battle
site as ‘Lonesome Pine’, from a pre-war music hall melody, is interesting. I
had always assumed that the name was based on the single Aleppo pine tree that
once grew on the ridge, however, the contemporary evidence that Cameron quotes
clearly indicates the then-widespread use of Lonesome Pine, which was later
shortened. Bean even used the name in an early report on the battle.
The maps are generally useful aids to comprehension. That
said, it is unfortunate that Map 1 has the key reversed, so that the feint
attacks are shown as the principal objectives, and the principal objectives as
the feints. Fortunately, the adjacent text clarifies the issue. Leslie Morshead
also has his name occasionally spelled incorrectly as ‘Morsehead’ or as
‘Moreshead’.
JOHN DONOVAN
