Australians in World War I series

Gallipoli

Gallipoli is the third commemorative publication in the Australians in World War I series. It contains a selection of images and a brief history of the campaign. This publication has also been developed into an iBook for your iPad. Rare film footage and animated images complement the iBook, as readers gain a rare insight into the Gallipoli campaign from the author and historian, Dr Richard Reid.

iBook

Chapter 2: On the way to England

The Australian Imperial Force

Australian involvement with Gallipoli began, although none of the individuals concerned at the time would have realised it, with the raising of a military force during the later months of 1914. After the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, the Australian government offered a force of 20,000 men to the British Empire war effort. This force, to be known as the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), was recruited throughout Australia. On 1 November, the first contingent - infantry, artillery, light horse, field ambulances, engineers, and the many other units which made up a modern army - sailed away in convoy from Albany, Western Australia, into the Indian Ocean towards the Suez Canal. Private Archibald Barwick of the 1st Battalion AIF, who was to fight with his unit for the whole war and return home in 1919, wrote:

... all that day we watched the Australian coast fading away, till darkness shut it out, and when we got up in the morning we were out of sight of land, and nothing but the calm blue sea all around us, like a sheet of shimmering glass, and at last we felt we were fairly on the way to England.

Indeed, it was to England that the men of the AIF thought they were going, and then across the English Channel to France to engage the German army, which had invaded France and Belgium in August 1914. Few of them would have heard of a place called Gallipoli.

The first contingent of the AIF never got to England. On 3 December 1914 the force, along with men from the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF), disembarked in Egypt and went into training camps there. Word had come from the Australian High Commissioner in London, Sir George Reid, that facilities in England were totally unsuitable for Winter lodgings, a conclusion with which the British military authorities agreed. Between December 1914 and March 1915, as the Australians and New Zealanders trained in the desert beneath the pyramids, a situation developed which was to bring them to battle not with the Germans but with the men of the Ottoman Army.