Saving the trenches: the next battle for Gallipoli
Anzac heritage is at risk as tunnel systems and trenches crumble but efforts to save them may bring other problems.
Like so many Australians before him, Michael Whitty experienced a sense of awe when visiting the Gallipoli Peninsula where more than 30,000 Anzac soldiers were killed or wounded during the Great War.
Whitty felt a strong personal connection: his grandfather fought in the 1914-18 war with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and a great-uncle on his father’s side was at Gallipoli with the Australian Light Horse. As a child growing up in the 1950s in a small Riverina town, Whitty used to watch World War I veterans leading the Anzac Day marches.
The 72-year-old was shocked, however, by the physical state of the Anzac trenches, especially when compared with the reconstructed World War I trench systems in France and Belgium.
As an engineering geologist, Whitty knew exactly what he was looking at: fragile earthworks worn away by more than a century of natural erosion (slumping) and stormwater run-off and more recently by the footsteps of tourists.
To Whitty it felt like an insult to the memory of the Australian and New Zealand troops who fought and died at Gallipoli. Gazing at those trenches, he felt what he describes as “almost a spiritual experience. I walked away from that place thinking: ‘Here is a job that needs to be done.’ ”
Irreversible loss of heritage
The dilapidation of the Anzac trenches was in sharp contrast to the well-preserved Ottoman trenches, some of which were protected from damage by the installation of elevated boardwalks.
On his return to Australia, a fired-up Whitty wrote to his local MP, Liberal National Party member Colin Boyce, who needed little persuading to take up the cause.
“Gallipoli holds immense national and historical significance for Australia,” Boyce tells Inquirer. “Yet the trenches and tunnel systems, including those at The Nek, Johnston’s Gully, Quinn’s Post and Lone Pine cemeteries, are increasingly at risk because of natural erosion, stormwater run-off and a lack of structured preservation … Without intervention, these historically significant sites may continue to deteriorate, leading to an irreversible loss of Anzac heritage.”
One of the most damaged sites identified by Whitty is the tunnel opening at Johnston’s Gully, on the northern part of Plateau 400 in the Anzac sector of the peninsula. Timber shoring up the entrance has collapsed and soil erosion has blocked the entrance of what Whitty suspects is a complex tunnel system, possibly including auxiliary tunnels or saps dug by Australian miners to lay explosives under enemy trenches.
Australian troops captured Johnston’s Gully on the day of the Gallipoli landings, April 25, 1915, but Ottoman troops retook it the next day and held it for the duration of the campaign. The position owed its nickname, Johnston’s Jolly, to the commander of the nearby 2nd Australian Division Artillery, Brigadier-General George Johnston, who used his guns to “jolly up” the Turkish defenders.
By early May, Anzac troops were dug in along the ridge between Lone Pine and Johnston’s Jolly. Desperate resistance by the Ottoman army had prevented British and Anzac forces from capturing the southern part of the peninsula, putting an end to the Royal Navy’s hopes of breaking through the Dardanelles to threaten Constantinople (now Istanbul).
The Anzac position remained precarious and Turkish commanders believed that by throwing the Australians off the ridge they could drive the enemy back into the sea.
On May 18, a British observer plane spotted Turkish soldiers massing in the valleys east of the ridge. By 3am on May 19, the Anzac trenches were bristling with Allied troops, wide awake and ready for the enemy to attack.
“The sky was, for that hour, exceptionally clear,” Charles Bean wrote in his history of the campaign, “and the pale light could be seen reflected from sheaves of long thin Turkish bayonets.”
Nightmare at Johnston’s Jolly
The attack was a slaughter, with the Anzacs firing into the Ottoman troops until their rifles became too hot to hold.
Bean described the nightmare scene at Johnston’s Jolly: “(T)he dead and wounded lay everywhere in hundreds. Many of those nearest to the Anzac line had been shattered by the terrible wounds inflicted by modern bullets at short ranges. No sound came from that terrible space; but here and there some wounded or dying man, silently lying without help or any hope of it under the sun which glared from a cloudless sky, turned painfully from one side to the other, or slowly raised an arm towards heaven.”
Of the 42,000 Turkish troops packed into the valley before dawn, as many as 10,000 were dead or wounded by midday. Anzac losses were fewer than 700.
Across the following days the stench of the battlefield became intolerable. Allied leaders feared disease from “pestilential” clouds of flies. Five days later a truce was agreed to allow both sides to bury their dead and recover any wounded men who had survived.
A British officer attached to the staff of the Australian and New Zealand Division presided over the truce.
“The dead fill acres of ground,” he wrote, “mostly killed in the one big attack, but some recently. They fill the myrtle-grown gullies. One saw the result of machine-gun fire very clearly; 116 entire companies annihilated – not wounded, but killed, their heads doubled under them with the impetus of their rush and both hands clasping their bayonets. It was as if God had breathed in their faces.”
The failed Turkish attack at Johnston’s Jolly confirmed that the Anzacs could not be thrown back into the sea. But it had a profound and lasting effect on the minds of the Anzac soldiers.
As Bean put it, “After that morning the fierce hatred of the Turk, which had possessed them since the Landing, disappeared … After the terrible punishment inflicted upon the brave but futile assaults all bitterness faded.”
After that day Australians and New Zealanders were able to see the Turks not just as the enemy but as fellow sufferers.
Collaborative restoration
Preserving and developing the spiritual, historical, cultural and natural values of the Gallipoli Peninsula for future generations is a collaborative process between the Turkish authorities and the governments of Australia and New Zealand. But management of the battlefields, like that of other battlefields throughout the world, is a thorny issue involving a range of often competing objectives.
Monash University senior lecturer in archaeology Jessie Birkett-Rees was a member of the Australian government-funded Joint Historical and Archaeological Survey that studied sections of the Gallipoli battlefields between 2011 and 2015. The physical record of Gallipoli, of which the earthworks are a part, constitute an important part of the record of the 1915 battles, Birkett-Rees tells Inquirer, and provide a different kind of evidence to that contained in historical documents.
But the concept of “proper preservation” is not straightforward, she says, pointing out that “people have been wrestling with how best to manage the battlefields since the war ended” and “there are different cultural and professional interpretations of what is ‘appropriate’.”
As at other World War I battlefields, Birkett-Rees considers it “important that the integrity of the (Gallipoli) battlefield is respected while also allowing people to visit the commemorative sites safely”.
But reconciling the two is not easy. “There are complex ways that people relate to battlefields, including Gallipoli, and experiencing being in the place can be an important part of that,” Birkett-Rees says.
Walking in the trenches
While acknowledging that boardwalks might discourage people from walking in the trenches, she warns that their construction would physically disturb – and potentially damage – the ground and could be seen as materially altering the experience of visiting the battlefield.
She points out that infrastructure to support tourism, such as the widening of the coastal road near Anzac Cove, damaged the Gallipoli battlefields and that this was part of the motivation behind the JHAS.
When the Anzac area at Gallipoli was reserved, with modern development within this area restricted, the primary purpose, Birkett-Rees says, was “to preserve this portion of the battlefield as a mass war grave for the many missing soldiers from multiple nations”.
While the care and maintenance of cemeteries and memorials across the Gallipoli Peninsula rests with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, responsibility for the former battlefield sites within the national park, including the Anzac area, lies with the Canakkale Wars and Gallipoli Historical Site Directorate (GHSD).
Turkey’s military attache, Colonel Hakan Balci, says preservation efforts by the GHSD are an “ongoing priority to ensure the historical integrity of the site while accommodating visitors”.
A spokesperson for Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh confirms that the GHSD consults with the Australian and New Zealand governments and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission when significant works are planned in the Anzac sector of the peninsula. The GHSD liaised closely with the Australian government through the Australian consulate in Canakkale after bushfires swept through the Anzac sector of thepeninsula in August 2024.
The military attache tells Inquirer that Turkish authorities are “aware that natural erosion and visitor activity contribute to changes in the landscape, including the deterioration of some trenches and tunnels” and that preservation challenges are “continually assessed” as part of broader conservation efforts.
While Turkish authorities have the final say over restoration and preservation plans at Gallipoli, Balci says measures such as “structural reinforcements, controlled access and conservation projects” are regularly reviewed.
A decade ago, during the lead-up to the centenary of the Gallipoli landings, the Joint Historical and Archaeological Survey used advanced mapping and GPS technology to locate more than 14km of Anzac trenches and recovered more than 2000 artefacts.
While the JHAS used strictly non-invasive methods to map the battlefields, Whitty is among those who say the time has come for a proactive approach to preserving the Anzac trenches before it is too late.
But reconstructing lost or damaged structures, such as the timbered entrance (itself a later reconstruction) to the Johnston’s Jolly tunnel, could itself be problematic. Article 10 of the international Vimy Declaration for the Conservation of Battlefield Terrain states that while the reconstruction of missing features may be an “effective interpretive method” in some contexts, reconstructed terrain “will generally lack authenticity and there should be a presumption not to impose reconstructions on ‘authentic’ battlefield remains”.
Whitty says he hopes to see the Anzac trenches “restored with respect and brought back to the way they were in 1916 after the battles”. His dream, he says, would be to enter the tunnel at Johnston’s Jolly and “find a sap that goes underneath the Turkish trenches”.
Not everyone will agree with Whitty’s vision or his methods but the RSL already has shown interest in the project.
Having spoken to Whitty and seen his photographs of the Anzac trenches, Maroochydore RSL president Peter Tsakissiris tells Inquirer: “One way or the other, we want them restored.”
In the book that grew out of the JHAS, Anzac Battlefield: Gallipoli Landscape of War, the authors acknowledged the “many conflicting and at times seemingly irreconcilable aims” of parties involved with places such as the Anzac battlefields, noting the challenge of accommodating the needs of “tourism, commemoration, historical interpretation, preservation and personal pilgrimage”.
The Vimy declaration, drafted in Arras, France in 2000, portrays these battle landscapes as places of a “vivid, visceral imagery” that have imprinted themselves on our “historical consciousness and on our cultural memory of war”.
The JHAS uncovered a much richer and more complex story than was evident from brief visits to cemeteries and Anzac Cove, a story rooted in the “trenches, dugouts, saps and tunnels where Anzac and Ottoman soldiers spent their time at Gallipoli, where they transformed this dramatic, barren, isolated battleground into an unforgettable landscape of war and memory”.
With Anzac Day 2025 approaching, the question of how to protect that sacred landscape remains contested. Whitty has no intention of walking away from it. After making a second trip to Gallipoli, he has begun compiling a detailed report on the state of the Anzac trenches. This is a battle he is determined to win.
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