This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Australian veteran Jack Nicholson speaks to ABC about his experience of landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. 336 Private John Leslie 'Jack' Nicholson (1894-1985) was an electrical engineer from Sydney who served with the 1st Australian Infantry Battalion in the Gallipoli Campaign and on the Western Front. He was wounded in action 3 times. Jack returned to Australia as a Sergeant in 1918. This clip was released in 2015 with the DVA-ABC joint production, Gallipoli: The first day.
Transcript
Well, we're about a mile a mile and a half off the course and we landed in a sort of a gully. Consequently, it was all, all virgin country. We had to pull ourselves up, you know, from parts of the different plants that were there, and that's how that's how we made contact. I think if we had have landed where we were first intended to land, I don't think anyone would have been left because they'd have knocked us over like, they'd have knocked us over like fight the cocks. It was very, very steep terrain, up steep gullies, and it was pretty hard going. We didn't see many Turks at all. Didn't see many Turks. It was just a matter of go for your life, and we got mixed up. We were all over the place. There was 5th Battalion, 6th Battalion, 8 Battalion, all over the place, 'til we got right up, and when we got up to, the higher we got up, the worse it got, and then we got heavy fire, and the casualty were very, very high, and we, after that, we got the orders to dig in. We got, as a matter of fact, you could see water. You could see water right over, whether it was the Black Sea, or the Sea of Marmara or something, God knows what. That's about as far, and then we, we had to come down a bit, you know, to straighten our line out a bit. It was all over the place. No, you see, most of the officers were gone. It was just a matter of everyone for himself
