Reference for ANZAC Diorama, Gallipoli: More historic photos of ANZAC, British and Ottoman troops

Anzac Diorama: More reference photos for Chanuk Bair project 

The realities of war. A commonwealth soldier observes the body of a compatriot.

 The caption reads that he is handling stores, which could well be so, judging from the packed provisions (? ) water barrel and ammunition/food. The roll of cable suggests a different task to me though, and that barrel appears very empty. For some reason the guy also looks like a sapper to me. 

This particular photograph was censored at the time, as it showed a dead commonwealth soldier. The Kings College collection have some really graphic photographs of casualties that were censored and embargoed at the time. Some of the pictures still turn the stomach, even in today's permissive and desensitised world and the era of the internet.

Water supplies being filtered to remove impurities. Water at Gallipoli had to be imported from friendly territory around the Med or captured local supply. 

The harshness of the terrain illustrated. Very steep incline, with hardly any beach at high tide. Notice the line of horses tethered to the start of the undergrowth

Water being filtered before it was fit for consumption. Water quality was poor, shipped from surrounding islands or obtained from captured local sources.

View from one of the ridges. The light coloured specs are bodies. Hundreds of bodies, commonwealth and Turkish, both 

Evacuating  the wounded. I suspect this series of photographs may have been staged. Never the less, it gives us a good look at the uniforms. You can even see the hobnails under the boots that the Perry Brothers have faithfully reproduced in their miniatures that I am painting at the moment.

Field dressings being applied

NZ soldiers fraternising with the locals. There are several photographs of these two soldiers with the Turkish family. Clearly for propaganda purposes.

Exhausted New Zealanders asleep in their trench (IWM)

One tends to think that the troops were dumped at Gallipoli and left untill evacuated. This was not the case. This photograph is captioned " New Zealand soldiers returning to Gallipoli after leave on Lemnos" What it does show clearly is the wide array of headgear worn.

British Officers meeting with Russian Naval allies 

Some traditions endure. British Naval Officers taking tea.

British landing at V Beach, from the sea, and the ridge above

Brits dug in

Landings at ANZAC Cove:

ANZAC Divisional Officers landing

Terrain of the cove - Equipment, supplies and men piled high

Overview of the terrain

 

Once a foothold had been established...

Grenade practice. The webbing can be seen nicely in this picture, as can the variety of trousers, shirts and tunics. There is clear colour variation, even in the B&W photo.

ANZACs in the Trenches. Good detail of footwear and leggings.

Two Australians of the ANZAC in their dugout, named Spliter Villa for good reason. It is estimated that more soldiers died from flying wood splinters than from shrapnel. This was poarticularly true in the wooded areas of Europe (see my previous post on the Dellville Wood debacle, South Africa's WW1 equivalent of Gallipoli's senseless slaughter)

Field surgeon at work on Gallipoli beach.

One tend to think of Gallipoli as hot and dusty. When winter came it was wet, cold, and miserable

Frostbitten men awaiting evacuation

Frostbite victims in makeshift shelter

ANZAC Maori warrior braving the cold in the trenches

Turkish Uniforms

 

Staff Officers (I suspect a tad retouched)

ANZAC Soldiers with a captured Turkish Sniper

Turkish captives

Tending to Turkish wounded

Interrogation of captives

Note the huge variation of dress, mostly civilian. It looks as if pants and tunics were issued, but the enlisted men were free to wear anything underneath. Looks like both sides suffered from shortage of supply

Again the variety in Turkish Uniforms

A Captured Turk who was a barber in civilian life pressed into duty by the ANZACs

 

The omnipresent draught and pack animals. 

A donkey being given coco (!) Anyway that's what the caption says.

A Gallipoli pet. Light distraction was scarce in Gallipoli. One would have to presume that the donkey was pretty tame to allow this!

Indian Mule handlers

More on Donkeys at Gallipoli, and the story of Simpson and his Donkey

 

A cricket game played on the day of the withdrawal from ANZAC cove. A ruse to fool the Turks that all was business as usual in ANZAC Cove. I bet there was no sledging from the Aussie side that day!

Infantry Dress

Mounted Infantry - Huge variation in headgear, all within the same unit.

Rear view of mounted Infantry

The Facts and the FURY: M4A3E8 Sherman

FURY: M4A3E8 Sherman in the movies

I saw “Fury” with my son Luc, and Mark T. and his son Cameron last night. Stopped for a curry at at our favourite restaurant on the way in, and settled in to watch the latest war movie offering at the local cinema.



I thought it was well worth the effort.  A brutal, realistic, violent portrayal of tank warfare, a story not often told. I thought it one of the better movies I've seen focusing on the subject.

“Fury” revolves around the tank crew of a late war M4A3E8 Sherman tank with the name “Fury” crudely painted on the barrel of its 76 mm gun.  The crew is commanded by Staff Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt).  The rest of the crew consists of veterans Boyd “Bible” Swan (Shia LaBeouf) the gunner, Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal) the loader, Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Pena) the driver and the very green and sensitive Norman "Eventually to become Machine" Ellison (Logan Lerman), a soldier from the typing pool press-ganged into serving as the bow gunner due to a shortage of trained tank crewmen.

From a historical equipment and military hardware depiction perspective, the movie is great.  Unlike most other war movies I've seen there are relatively few inaccuracies to distract from the movie’s message.

I appreciated the use of  different types of rounds against different targets as well as  personal idiosyncrasies of the lead character carrying a colt six-shooter revolver (A-la Patton, albeit not a pair of pearl handled six-shooters) and a German MP 44 SMG, and also the hypocrisy of looting war medals off dead enemies, displaying them in the tank; and then shooting a German soldier who was wearing a US trench coat in the back. There was several sub-plots that I found quite interesting: History buffs may have picked up on some of them. I may also have missed a few. Later more on that.

The interactions between soldiers, superiors, subordinates, civilians and the enemy come across well, although a bit stereotyped. (Inexperienced and disrespected junior officer sending the platoon off to their doom, and the battle-hardened field commander, "You're all that we have", sorry to send you-in-but-hold-the-line-and-buy-us-time cliches)

Speaking of stereotypes, the director/screenwriter (thankfully) chose not to have the stereotyped African American, Jewish or Italian crew members. No slur intended in saying this, but in some ways I found it refreshing to escape the common Hollywood angst subjects. Instead they opted for a Hispanic, bible punching Episcopalian and a Cajun Swamprat...

German officers were the usual (ho-hum) stereotypes of fanatical Nazis who mindlessly send their troops in to die and kill innocents left right and centre. Even the field officers. Historically this was not the case. Just like the British and Americans, German officers and NCOs led from the front, cared about their men, and even late in the war, and suffered an incredibly high rate of attrition.

The final scene of droves of SS troopers in a suicidal rush attacking a tank with small arms while their officer stands by egging them on, is a little hard to believe. When they were seen marching up they had enough shouldered panzerfausts to make them look like an asparagus field! The officer than later cracks open a packing case, nowhere seen before, and exclaims: "These are the only ones we have"

These were supposedly elite soldiers, well led and trained, and even if inexperienced, their NCOs/officers would not have committed them to a suicide attack while they had perfectly good anti-tank weapons. Against an immobilised Sherman. And not taking cover ? Deploying the MG 42 in the open ?
But I suppose you could pick holes in anything, and the object of the movie is entertainment, and not military accuracy after all.

The German speakers among us also probably picked up that the subtitles were quite often inaccurate to what was being said or written on the placards of the executed civilians, for example. Not that it detracted majorly from the story line, but just saying. (One placard on a strung up woman read: "I would not let my children go to war" and it was subtitled " I would not go to war" and Brad Pitt also read out it incorrectly to his crew. So much for being a German speaker as the movie implies. (Think a little pathos in the script was lost there as a result.)

He also addresses the 20-something young woman as "Maedchen (little girl) where any German speaker would have addressed her as " Fraulein" (Young Lady); as the subtitles this time grammatically correctly read, but did not reflect what he actually said.

The unsung heroes of the movie are the tanks though.  The movie features the only running Pzkfw VI Tiger tank in the world (The Bovington Tiger) and uses several versions of the Sherman which would have been very accurate for the time. In Saving Private Ryan a T-34 was dressed up to vaguely resemble either a Tiger or late model PzKfw IV.

 Unlike in today’s combat units, Allied units did often have mismatched equipment as new vehicles were supplied to replace older models that were destroyed/damaged beyond repair in combat. Older models were retained until they were considered obsolete or unserviceable.  This is noticeable when looking at the American tank platoon that had various models of the M4 Sherman (at least 3 that I could identify without losing the plot of the story by focusing solely on the hardware)

This is historically important, as only the last production model Shermans (Armed with the 76 mm high velocity gun) had any real chance of penetrating most German heavy and medium tanks (Pzkfw V Panther  and Tiger I and II by the end of the war) at a distance. German tanks could engage and destroy Shermans at long range, whilst the standard 75mm rounds failed to penetrate the thick frontal armour of the German tanks. It wasn't uncommon to need a five to one (or more) ratio of Shermans to one Tiger to overwhelm the enemy.

The Bovington Tiger

This is accurately portrayed as the 75 mm guns fail to make any impact on the Tiger and its 88 mm take them out with comparative ease over the same distance. The 76 mm of the Easy 8  also only destroys the tiger at short range, from the rear, and by out-maneuvering it, and then firing 2 shots at point blank range

Click here for a walk-around the Sherman M4A3E8 (Easy Eight) that was used in the filming of Fury

One criticism I would have of the fire-fight scenes is the decision to use laser to depict tracer. The flight paths were inaccurate and it looked a little like star-wars. (But then that was probably a safety decision, but it could just as easily have been done in CGI.)

 If you've ever seen real tracer fire you'll agree it looks nothing like that. The flight path is more parabolic and appeared linear in the shots. Though the US did use blue tracer, it was far more common to use a yellowish red.The only picture I could find (above) shows the red tracer, but the blue was very apparent in the movie.

I enjoyed a the good Hollywood style yarn, never the less.

The Guardian in the UK has the comments from a 91 year old radio operator veteran on the movie:

"Fury accurately portrays how superior the German tanks were. A Sherman provided you with protection against most enemy fire but against a Tiger it could easily become your coffin. I remember a very near miss where an eight cm shell from a Tiger tank went within inches of our turret and we decided not to stay around too long after that. In open combat we never had a chance. So, like in Fury, we always had to be one step ahead. It was only because we could call up air strikes and had many more tanks than the Germans that we eventually won."

As the film makes clear, a Sherman tank was a lightweight in comparison to a Tiger. The Sherman weighed 33 tonnes and had a 75 mm gun, compared to the Tiger's 54 tonnes and a 88 mm gun. A Tiger also had 3.9 inch thick armour, so shells from a Sherman literally bounced off it.

"Fury shows just how vulnerable you were fighting in a Sherman tank. There is a lot of blood and gore in the film but nothing can really come close to the true horrors of tank warfare. I saw people being blown up and burnt alive. Going to see Fury you don't get that dreadful, nauseating smell of burnt flesh. That will stay with me forever."

"I was in the Essex Yeomanry, a territorial regiment. All the crew were from Essex except me. It took us a while to get along but then I trusted them implicitly with my life. We fought along side the Americans in their Sherman tanks and I found them to be very brave. We didn't write the name of our tank on the barrel like they did in Fury or plaster the inside with photographs but we were just as proud of our tank. Ours was called Beverley and her name was written on the turret."

The corpses certainly mount up in Fury, particularly in the final scene. This was the only part Bill,  (the veteran) too, felt lacked credibility.

"I thought the film showed accurately how tough life could be in a tank, but the final scene where the crew hold out against a battalion of Waffen SS troops was too far fetched. The Germans seemed to be used as canon fodder. In reality they would have been battle-hardened and fanatical troops who would have easily taken out an immobile Sherman tank using Panzerfausts (an anti-tank bazooka).

They also seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of ammunition and fuel. A Sherman tank only does five miles to the gallon so I think they would have run out long before the final showdown."



The Easy 8 used in the film as well as the Tiger are now on display at Bovington. Clink on the link for more pictures of both vehicles and the opening of the display: Blackmore Vale Magazine