Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Gallipoli Book Review: Quinn’s Post by Peter Stanley




The bastion known as Quinn’s Post after Major Hugh Quinn, the first commanding officer there, was said, by soldiers, to be ‘the hottest corner of Gallipoli’ and it was a vital position, too, sitting at a fork in what was known as Monash Valley. It was said that if Quinn’s was overrun, so, soon, would the rest of the ANZAC lines be rolled up by Turkish forces who would be on the beach in minutes. 

Not only were the Australian trenches dangerously close to the Turkish ones – close enough that they could hear the enemy talking, and vice versa – but they also occupied the low ground, meaning the Turks could lob grenades and fire rifles and machine guns from their higher elevation down into the network of trenches at Quinn’s. 

Famed war journalist, Charles Bean – who is responsible for meaty, early detail of the Gallipoli campaign and, in some ways, is also responsible for the beginnings of the Anzac Legend – wrote of Quinn’s that men pass by there, looking at it as they might have looked at a haunted house. Without doubt, it was a charnel house of almost unimaginable horror, where killing occurred day and night, and where so many wounded men lost hands or wrists or sometimes entire arms after attempting to toss grenades back from whence they’d come, back into the Turkish lines. They were successful on occasion, but the consequences when they weren’t were dire.

Just like with his excellent The Lost Boys of ANZAC (which I reviewed earlier, and can be found here), author/historian Peter Stanley focuses on a small part of the Gallipoli campaign and finds great success as a result. In ‘Lost Boys’, it was those men who had found their way far inland on the first day, and killed because they were so scattered. In Quinn’s Post, he captures the horror of that ugly and violent place.

Even if the rest of the Gallipoli peninsula was quiet, Quinn’s Post was a raging battle that seesawed back and forth. Australians would attack, gain Turkish trenches – generally using bayonets, the most gruesome way to take another man’s life – but a Turkish counter-attack would soon push them back. Bombs were thrown back and forth with violent regularity, not just the grenades issued to them, but, as supplies dwindled, homemade bombs, jam tins packed with nails, shards of metal and whatever else the ANZACs could find, topped off with a wick for detonation. It was a brutal example of Australian ingenuity on Gallipoli.

Stanley relies heavily on eyewitness evidence, framing diary, letter and memoir excerpts with snatches of prose from Charles Bean and other first-hand accounts of the violence and courage that saturated Quinn’s Post from the first hours of the invasion to the last gasp of the campaign, just before evacuation. Around that, with a historian’s eye for detail and a novelist’s eye for the dramatic, is a tight narrative of the long-running battle for command of one of the most important spots on the entire Gallipoli battlefield.

There is less about the lead-up and aftermath of the campaign and, indeed, very little other than some broad stroke detail on events going on elsewhere on Gallipoli that didn’t directly affect what was taking place at Quinn’s Post. It’s just the claustrophobia of close-in fighting that is ghastly to imagine and would surely have haunted survivors on both sides for the rest of their lives.

Quinn’s Post is both a tribute to the tenacity of men on both sides, and a stark reminder of why war should be avoided at all costs.

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