The Gallipoli Letter

Keith Murdoch outside C.E.W. Bean's dugout during his visit to Anzac Cove during the latter part of August 1915

Mavi Boncuk |

The 8000-word document known as 'The Gallipoli Letter' is one of the most important artefacts held in the National Library. Written by Keith (later Sir Keith) Murdoch, with the help of a British war correspondent, it remains a source of interest and controversy both for the manner in which it was written and the effect it had on the Gallipoli campaign and on Australian history.

Keith Murdoch was the Australian journalist who lost narrowly to Charles Bean in the Australian Journalists Association ballot in August 1914 for an official war correspondent to accompany Australian troops leaving for war in Europe. Murdoch congratulated Bean generously but remained disappointed and keen to do his bit for the war effort, as he confided to a friend, then Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher. When Murdoch was offered a position in London as head of the United Cable Service in August 1915, Fisher advised him to take it, asking him to stop off en route to investigate complaints the government had received about the Egyptian-based postal facilities used by Australian troops throughout the Mediterranean.

In Cairo, Murdoch wrote to General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, requesting permission to visit the peninsula in a 'semi official capacity, so that I might record censored impressions in the London and Australian newspapers I represent'. Hamilton agreed reluctantly. The Commander-in-Chief was wary of journalists, believing the press to be a dangerous force. Murdoch was made to sign the standard press declaration that he would submit all his writings to army censors for approval. He filed some uneventful press despatches. Subsequently, in London, free of the censors, he composed a letter that was to have a greater impact on contemporary events at Gallipoli than any articles published in the press.

Murdoch arrived at Hamilton's headquarters on Imbros Island off the Gallipoli Peninsula early in September 1915. He spent four days with the Anzacs on the peninsula. On his return to Imbros, he conferred with Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, an experienced British war correspondent who had covered the Russo-Japanese war and represented a London newspaper at the Dardanelles. Australian army officers in Egypt had already told Murdoch about conditions on the peninsula but it was from Ashmead-Bartlett that he received a more graphic account of the campaign's failures.

Ashmead-Bartlett had become increasingly hostile towards the British leadership at Gallipoli, particularly Hamilton. He was convinced that the landing at Gallipoli had been a mistake and strongly resented his inability to inform the British public due to strict censorship. Ashmead-Bartlett believed Hamilton had too much power, that he was damaging the campaign and that catastrophe was imminent unless authorities in London learned what was going on.

Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett conspired to circumvent the censors by having Ashmead- Bartlett detail his observations in a letter to be carried personally to London by Murdoch. The British journalist's letter was addressed to his Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and Murdoch left Gallipoli for London to deliver it. Hamilton learned of the plot. Murdoch was arrested upon arriving in Marseilles in the south of France and was released only after surrendering the letter.

Murdoch reached London on 21 September and immediately typed up his own 8000-word private report to the Australian Prime Minister, drawing on his conversations with Ashmead-Bartlett, what he could recall from the confiscated letter, and what he had personally witnessed at Gallipoli. He made the same general criticisms of Hamilton and his headquarters as had Ashmead-Bartlett and levelled the same criticisms of the campaign management, but his style was very different to that of his more forensic British colleague. Murdoch was angry at the enormity of the Australian loss of life at Gallipoli and unleashed passionate criticism at those who he believed to be the perpetrators. He praises the 'brave hearts', endurance and ingenuity of the Australian troops and rails against what he saw as their needless sacrifice, describing the outcome of one battle as nothing short of the 'murder' of their own troops by allied headquarters.

Reliant on memory, he made errors of fact which left him open to criticism from future historians. In Gallipoli (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2001) Les Carlyon described the letter as a 'farrago of fact and gossip'. For all its errors, however, Carlyon found the Murdoch letter was 'more accurate than Hamilton's reports to London'. In his official history, Bean had described the letter as 'overcoloured' but containing 'important truths'. The Second World War correspondent Alan Moorehead, in his Gallipoli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956), judged that 'in wartime there is a definite place for the (private) reports of fresh eyewitnesses of this kind. They serve to remind politicians and headquarters planners that they are dealing with human beings who in the end are much more important than machines and elaborate plans . . . [but] such documents can hardly be used as state papers'.

In this case, the letter did not remain private. Murdoch sent the letter, not only to Fisher but also to British Prime Minister Asquith. Without seeking to confirm its contents, Asquith had the letter printed as a government paper and circulated among the British officials in charge of the Dardanelles campaign. Ashmead-Bartlett was expelled from Gallipoli by Hamilton and arrived in London to support Murdoch's basic message, that the campaign had been a disaster and threatened to worsen. The journalists' criticisms coincided with others that authorities in London were receiving about Hamilton's leadership, and with the political interests of those who had opposed the campaign from the beginning. Hamilton was recalled and the allies were withdrawn in December of the same year.

As another Australian journalist, Phillip Knightley, wrote 60 years later in his definitive book on war correspondents, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), the Gallipoli correspondents, despite censorship, had, in the end, achieved their purpose. The tactics they used continued to be the subject of controversy. Charles Bean remained uncomfortable about the ethics of one journalist carrying an uncensored letter for another to a foreign prime minister, but he believed the Murdoch letter played a pivotal role in Hamilton's recall. Phillip Knightley's assessment of the episode was unequivocal: 'if war correspondents in France had only been as enterprising, the war might not have continued on its ghastly course'.