The history of the Galipoli campaign
The battlefields and cemeteries today
a ) Anzac Cove and the beach areas
b ) The Anzac front line and the heights
c ) The Helles area
d ) The Suvla area
Anzac units on Galipoli
Casualties
Travel advice and information

 


 Courtney's and Steele's Post Cemetery is located over the tunnels which connected these two posts. The opposing front lines were separated by a no-man's-land the width of the roadway now running between them. The cemetery contains the graves of 167 men, 160 of them unidentified. Many of them were from the 14th Battalion AIF who took over the posts on 27 April and held them for two weeks during very bitter fighting. During the Turkish attack of 19 May the most concentrated attacks were on Courtney's Post and Johnston's Jolly. Lance Corporal Albert Jacka of the 14th Battalion was awarded Australia's first Victoria Cross of the war for his heroism in repelling a Turkish bombing party which broke into Courtney's.

Quinn's Post Cemetery was made in 1919 over the southern trenches and tunnels of the post, incorporating 79 burials from Pope's Hill and 399 isolated graves in the area (most of them unidentified soldiers). Quinn's Post was the most important and dangerous position on Anzac. The opposing trenches were narrowly separated by the width of the present road and at one point on the extreme left of Quinn's, there was only an earth palisade two feet thick between the Australian and Turkish trenches.

 Because of its locafion the Turks never ceased their pressure on Quinn's. So intense were the bombing duels that the Turks called the position Bomba Sin (Bomb Ridge). Under these hazardous circumstances, the Anzacs succeeded in expanding the trench system at Quinn's to create a maze of tunnels. The desperate struggle continued underground with both sides employing mines. Due to the intensity of the fighting here, Allied units were frequently rotated through Quinn's to minimise the strain. Charles Bean observed that men in Monash Gully, stared up at the noise of bombing duels coming from Quinn's Post 'as they might at a haunted house'.

 Turkish 57th Infantry Regiment Cemetery and Memorial (57. Alay Sehitligi ve Aniti) is north of Quinn's Post, built in 1992 on the area known to the Anzacs as the Chessboard. Troops of the 57th Infantry Regiment of the 19th Division were the first Turkish soldiers to resist the Allied landing of 25 April. The cemetery is symbolic, with few actual burials beneath the headstones. Australian visitors are welcome but should be respectful, especially as the memorial represents a mosque. Outside the memorial is a bronze sculpture of Turkey's oldest war veteran who died in 1994, aged 108. Opposite is a gigantic sculpture of a Turkish soldier, Turk Askerine Saygi (Respect for the Turkish Soldier), erected in 1992 in memory of those who lost their lives for their country.

 

 
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