Gallipoli map claim rejected

An expert on Gallipoli has debunked a British theory on why 2700 New Zealanders died there. Warren Gamble reports.

A New Zealand expert on the Gallipoli landings has rubbished a British study largely blaming the poor quality of maps for the First World War disaster.

Dr Chris Pugsley, a former Army officer and now a senior history lecturer in Australia, said last night that the Greenwich University study was another example of the myths that had grown up around the Gallipoli campaign.

British geographers Peter Doyle and Matthew Bennett used satellite and other technology to plot the Gallipoli battlefields, on which 42,000 Allied troops died, including 2700 New Zealanders.

Their comparison with the maps issued to officers in the campaign found them to be inaccurate in almost every respect.

A report in the Sunday Times said the research found that the maps came from tourist guidebooks bought in Egypt that were at least 10 years out of date.

One general had obtained accurate maps for the second stage of the campaign in August 1915 but left them on a train.

The report said in one case New Zealand and Australian troops were told to use a sandy beach for an easy landing but no one had charted the area for currents.

The soldiers were swept onto rocks beneath steep cliffs, becoming easy prey for enemy gunners.

In another incident troops took a strategically important hill, only to find a second one behind it, unmarked on the map, with heavy Turkish fortifications.

But Dr Pugsley, who now works at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, said the maps issued were as good as could be expected at the time.

Copies he had seen showed they were drawn by British Royal Engineers in Egypt from information supplied by the War Office.

The scale used was comparable to modern-day military maps, but the rugged terrain in Gallipoli meant there would have been smaller-scale features not shown.

"Unquestionably mistakes were made in the Gallipoli campaign but the Anzac errors and the British errors were not map errors. They were simply human errors."

He said the Royal Navy's navigation errors in delivering the soldiers to the wrong beaches triggered a chain of mistakes.