The Fatal Delay at Chunuk Bair

0:00You know what? It sucks to be bored. But when I get on my phone and play real casino games on SpinQuest.com, the time flies by. That two-hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite spots. Live Black Check, live preps, with a live dealer. New players, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. Play SpinQuest.com and you'll never be bored again. SpinQuest is a free to play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. Welcome to today's Custom Tailored Deep Dive. We are absolutely thrilled to have you with us today. Yeah, thanks for joining us. We've got a really incredible topic lined up. We really do. Today we are traveling back in time to August 1915. We're stepping into this brutal heartbreaking and just incredibly pivotal clash during World War I Gallipoli campaign. We are talking about the Battle of Chinook Bear. It is a profound piece of military history. I mean for this deep dive, we're drawing our insights from a single comprehensive source.

1:05Yeah, a highly detailed Wikipedia article dedicated entirely to this battle. Exactly. And it lays out the sprawling strategies, the unforgiving geography, and really the immense human cost of this specific engagement. So our mission today is to extract the most vital nuggets of this history for you. We're going to explore how a combination of impossibly rugged terrain, delayed decisions, and fierce leadership turned what could have been a decisive, you know, war altering allied victory into a devastating tragedy. It's a heavy one, but so important to understand. It is. Okay, let's unpack this. To really understand the stakes at Chinook Bear, you have to place yourself in the sheer frustration of the Gallipoli campaign up to that late summer point. Right, the allies were just entirely bogged down completely. The attempts to capture Krithia or make any progress on the Cape Helos front had failed completely. There's a grinding bloody stalemate. And that stalemate meant General Ian Hamilton, he's the commander of the Mediterranean expeditionary force.

2:05He was sitting there with his forces tripling in size desperate for a breakout. Yeah, he originally had five divisions and now he was up to 15. Meanwhile, the Ottoman defenders had swelled from six divisions to 16. So Hamilton needed a radical shift to break the deadlock, which leads him to launch the August offensive. And the grand prize of this offensive was the Sarri Bear range, specifically the high ground of Hill 971 and a secondary peak called Chinook Bear. Because controlling the high ground in warfare is always critical, but... But, at Gallipoli, it dictated everything. If the allies could take those peaks, they could look down directly onto the Ottoman trench lines. They could potentially sever their communications and break the entire siege. But the Ottoman senior commanders weren't really losing much sleep over an attack on Chinook Bear, were they? Not at all. They looked at the terrain, these steep, rocky, scrub-covered ridges intersected by deep valleys, which they called Darees. And they genuinely considered an assault there to be a logistical impossibility.

3:05I mean, if the terrain was that brutal, did the Ottomans just leave the entire ridge exposed? Basically, yes. Most of the high command did. But there was one commander who looked at the exact same map and saw a massive vulnerability. Mustafa Kemal. Exactly. Mustafa Kemal, the commander of the Ottoman 19th Division. He anticipated this exact allied move. He realized that the peak of Chinook Bear was incredibly dangerous precisely because it was lightly defended. And he pleaded with his superiors to strengthen the lines. Yeah, he did, but his warnings were completely ignored. Man, so the stages set for this massive allied nighttime advance, we are looking at the night of August 6th going into the 7th. The plan is highly complex. The New Zealand and Australian Division, commanded by Major General Alexander Godley, is tasked with pushing up a piece of high ground called Rooted Dendron spur. This spur runs directly from the beach up to the peak of Chinook Bear.

4:05But they couldn't just march an assault column straight up the spur. The Ottomans had heavily protected outposts scattered all along the way, fortified with machine gun positions. So before the main assault column could even begin their climb? A covering force had to go into the cover of darkness and clear those outposts one by one. Sending a covering force into the pitch black of that terrain to clear machine gun nests sounds like a recipe for absolute chaos. It was a brutal undertaking. They sent in four under-strength regiments, so the New Zealand mounted rifles brigade. We're talking about the Auckland Regiment clearing old number three outposts. Right, and the Wellington's taking to destroy your hill in tabletop, and the Otago and Canterbury Regiments assaulting Bouchops Hill. And the fighting was ferocious. Strictly hand-to-hand combat in the dark. This hill is actually named after Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Bouchop, who died capturing it that very night. The New Zealanders lose about a hundred men just clearing that initial path, but they do succeed the outposts fall. The outposts fall, but that struggle costs them two precious hours. And in a coordinated offensive, two hours is an eternity.

5:08Exactly. The plan begins to run dangerously behind schedule. The main assault columns advance up the valleys on either side of the stir, and by 4.30 in the morning, shortly before dawn, three battalions finally managed to get into position on a knoll dubbed the Apex. Here's where it gets really interesting, because the geography at the Apex is agonizing. There are only 500 yards away from the summit of Chinook Bear. Just 500 yards. And at that exact moment at 4.30 in the morning, the peak is essentially empty. Completely wide open. There were only about 20 Ottoman soldiers up there, and they were sleeping. The entire Gallipoli campaign was sitting there right for the taking. It remains the ultimate what if of the entire campaign. The door was wide open, but the Canterbury battalion, which was traveling on the south side of the spur, had gotten hopelessly lost in the dark and the confusing ravines. They were delayed. Yeah. And the overall commander of the attack on the ground, Colonel Francis Johnston, makes a fateful decision. Even though he had explicit original orders not to halt for any reason.

6:11Right. He decides to stop the advance of the Apex and wait for the lost battalion to arrive. He just stops. 500 yards away. It's agonizing. And this attack was supposed to coordinate with other assaults happening simultaneously, down at a place called the neck, and attack goes ahead at 4.30 a.m. Which was supposed to coincide with the New Zealanders attacking down from Chinook Bear into the rear of the Ottoman Frenches. But because Johnston halted at the Apex, the New Zealanders weren't there to support them. The battle of the neck goes ahead anyway, resulting in absolutely staggering allied casualties. And while Johnston is waiting at the Apex, the Sun inevitably comes up. With the daylight, comes the realization for the Ottomans that Chinook Bear isn't imminent danger. Mustafa Kamal, the man who had predicted this exact scenario, rushes to the area and frantically starts ordering regiments to the peak. German Lieutenant Colonel Hans Kanengesser, Commander of the Ottoman 9th Division, also reaches the summit and immediately begins organizing the defense. The cost of that delay changes history.

7:12By 10.00 a.m., the window of opportunity has slammed shut. Those 20 sleeping soldiers have been reinforced by around 500 Ottoman and German troops. I want you to imagine the psychological toll of that scenario. Put yourself in the boots of those soldiers sitting at the Apex. You've climbed all night through impossible terrain, surviving hand-to-hand combat in the dark. Just brutal conditions. You get within a short sprint of a victory that could end the stalemate. You can literally see the empty summit. Then you are ordered to sit in the dirt and wait. Just sit there and watch. Exactly. As you wait hour after hour, you watch the enemy heavily fortify the very hill you now have to charge. It's an unimaginable level of frustration. And the tragedy compounds from there. Because it's daylight and the enemy is now entrenched on the high ground, taking the peak looks suicidal. Totally suicidal. Colonel Johnston, seeing the reinforced peak, actually requests permission to wait until nightfall to resume the attack. But General Godley, who is stationed miles away from the front line,

8:14sends down a rigid response. Attack now. So at 11.0 a.m., on August 7th, the Auckland battalion is ordered to charge. They have to sprint from the Apex to another knoll called the pinnacle and from there it's a straight, utterly exposed climb to the summit. It's an absolute disaster. Barely 100 men make it as far as the pinnacle, desperately trying to dig into the rocky ground. Around 300 fall as casualties just trying to cross the open space between the Apex and the pinnacle. And seeing his men slaughtered, Johnston turns to the Wellington battalion and tells them to continue the attack. This brings us to one of the most remarkable figures in this battle. Lieutenant Colonel William Lone, the commander of the Wellington battalion. Yes. When ordered to send his men into that same meat grinder, Lone flat out refuses. He just says no. He states that he is not willing to order his men to carry out a hopeless, suicidal daylight attack. He insists his battalion will take Chinook bearer, but they will do it at night. Standing there while men are dying and refusing a direct order

9:14because you know it's a death sentence takes incredible amount of conviction. What's fascinating here is how history has recorded this moment and how the line between insubordination and tactical sanity is sometimes drawn. For decades, the myth was that Malone directly defied General Godly. But the source highlights a 2018 insight from New Zealand military historian Ian McGibbon, who challenges this narrative. Okay, so what really happened? McGibbon points out that Malone and Johnston actually both vehemently disagreed with Godly's order. Johnston had reluctantly accepted it, but Malone pushed back. Right. Crucially, Malone didn't actually refuse a direct order from the general himself. He argued fiercely with a junior British officer. Major Arthur Temporally. Exactly. Major Temporally, who was Johnston's brigade major, this nuance as a really compelling layer to how chaotic the chain of command had become on that ridge and how Malone navigated that friction to save his men from a pointless slaughter. Godly finally calls off the daytime attacks, but hundreds of Anzacs are already dead or wounded on the slopes.

10:18So they pivot to a night attack plan. The shattered Auckland and Canterbury battalions are pulled back replaced by the Otago and Wellington battalions. At 3.30 a.m. on August 8th, a heavy naval bombardment pounds the peak for 45 minutes. And this time, the tactics align with the terrain. How so? Well, the ground on Chunic Bear was too hard and rocky for the Ottomans to dig deep protective trenches. So the naval barrage essentially sweeps the defenders right off the summit. Wow. Following the bombardment, Malone's Wellington's, followed by the British 7th Gloucesters, push up and reach the summit virtually unopposed. They secure Chunic Bear. But taking the high ground is one thing, holding it proves to be a completely different nightmare. Yep. As daylight breaks on August 8th, the peak is totally exposed to infillating fire from the main Ottoman line on Battleship Hill to the south and from Hill Q to the north. And the terrain turns against them again. It's solid rock. The New Zealanders can only scrape the shallowest of trenches, offering minimal cover.

11:19Which is terrifying. Worse, the slope of the hill on the Ottoman side is incredibly steep, creating a terrifying blind spot. The Ottoman troops could creep up the slope and get within 22 yards of the Allied trenches completely unseen. 22 yards. They were practically breathing on the summit before they could be spotted. Yeah. By 5.8 a.m., massive Ottoman counter-tax surge up that blind spot. It results in desperate, close quarters combat. Just relentless. The New Zealanders fought so relentlessly, firing their own rifles and picking up the rifles of their fallen friends to keep up the rate of fire, that the wooden stocks of the guns became physically too hot to hold. Too hot to hold? That is insane. And when the Ottomans crested the ridge and poured into those shallow trenches, the fighting devolved entirely into vicious bayonet combat. They managed to hold on all day, through sheer willpower. But around 5.0 a.m., a devastating blow strikes the Wellington's. Connell Malone, the man who had saved his men the day before, is killed. And he isn't killed by an Ottoman bullet. He is struck by a misdirected artillery shell.

12:21It was friendly fire, either from their own Anzac artillery or a British ship off the coast. It's a catastrophic loss of leadership and a crushing blow to morale. As darkness falls on August 8th, the Wellington Battalion is finally relieved. And the casualty numbers are difficult to process. Out of the 760 men of the Wellington Battalion who reached the summit that morning, 711 had become casualties. 711 out of 760. Unbelievable. And a British regiment suffered terribly as well. The Gloucesters lost 350 men, which included every single one of their officers. The Welch Pioneers had 417 casualties. For the wounded who survived the summit, getting off that mountain wasn't ordeal in itself. We took some men three full days to travel just over a kilometer down the rugged road at Dendron's Burb back to the beach. Meanwhile, General Godley remains at his headquarters near the beach. Largely insulated from the horrific realities on the summit and the exhausted state of his troops. Completely disconnected. Ignorant of the conditions, he devises a new, highly complex operational plan for August 9th.

13:26While the men on Chinook Bear are just trying to survive the night, Godley decides it's time to capture the neighboring peak, Hill Q. He sends a mixed force commanded by Brigadier General Anthony Baldwin to assault the hill. They are supposed to stage their attack from a small, sheltered plateau on the north side of the spur known as the farm. But the friction of war immediately takes over. It's pitch black. The terrain is an absolute labyrinth of ravines and thick scrub. And Baldwin's battalions get completely lost. Later in the dark and don't manage to locate the farm until 6 c.a.m., well after dawn. So the coordinated attack entirely falls apart before it even begins. There is one agonizingly fleeting moment of success on Hill Q. A battalion of Gurkhas, commanded by Major Allonson, actually manages to fight their way to the summit of Hill Q. But in a horrifying repeat of the tragedy that killed Colonel Malone, they are almost immediately shell by their own artillery and forced to retreat off the high ground. It perfectly illustrates the total breakdown of communication between the front lines and the supporting artillery batteries.

14:30Commanders firing the guns simply don't know where their advancing men are. Right. As night falls on August 9th, the surviving, exhausted New Zealanders are pulled back down to the apex. And they are replaced on the summit of Chinook Bear by two British new army battalions. The 6th South Lancashire and some of the 5th wheelchairs. Those were troops unfamiliar with the sheer brutality of the landscape they had just walked into. And waiting for them in the dark is Mustafa Kamal. He spent August 9th personally reconnoitering the area. Yes. He knows the allied troops holding the peak are exhausted, disjointed and stretched thin. So at dawn on August 10th, he launches the final decisive blow. If we connect this to the bigger picture. If we connect this to the bigger picture, you really see Kamal's ruthless military pragmatism. His plan for this counterattack lacked any kind of subtle maneuvering. It was terrifyingly direct. His strategy was simply to overrun the defenders using the sheer overwhelming weight of numbers.

15:32He amassed six entire battalions for this dawn strike. Six battalions charging against about 2,000 defenders scattered on or below the summit. Plus Baldwin's brigade down at the farm plateau. When the sun comes up, the autumn is charged. They completely sweep over the Lancashire battalion on the summit in minutes. The wheelchairs were caught unequipped and were just scattered. The Ottomans reclaim the peak and then pour down the slopes like a tidal wave. They capture the pinnacle, leading to one of the most chaotic and tragic moments of the entire battle down at the apex. The fog of war at the apex becomes an absolute nightmare. The New Zealand machine gunners are still positioned there watching this massive wave of Ottoman soldiers charging down the spur directly toward them. They open fire to break the assault. Their treating British new army troops are entirely mixed in with the charging Ottomans. The gunners cannot discriminate friend from foe, in the smoke, the dust, and the chaos of the charge. To stop the Ottoman advance from breaking the entire line, they have to keep the guns firing, knowing they're cutting down many of their own allies in the process.

16:34It's devastating. And on the other side of the spur, the Ottoman wave crashes down onto the farm plateau. They completely overrun Baldwin's lost brigade. The entire regiment are decimated. Brigadier General Baldwin himself is killed in the slaughter. The survivors are forced to retreat all the way back to Cheshire Ridge. The Ottoman infantry utterly exhausted by the momentum of their own attack and the sheer scale of the casualties finally fall back to the main ridge. And just like that, the Allied offensive is definitively over. The human cost of these four days is staggering. In the fighting around Chinook Bear and Hill 971, the Ottoman suffered 9,200 casualties. Which contributed to roughly 18,000 total Ottoman casualties across the entire Anzac sector during this offensive. On the Allied side, the British Empire forces, the New Zealanders, Australians, British and Indian troops, suffered between 12,000 and 13,000 casualties. All of this blood was spilled for a peak they held for barely two days before being finally pushed back to where they started.

17:37The Battle of Chinook Bear left a massive enduring scar, particularly on the national consciousness of New Zealand. Out of that tragedy, incredible acts of bravery emerged. Corporal Cyril Bassett was awarded the Victoria Cross for repeatedly repairing fragile telephone lines under heavy enemy fire throughout the battle, ensuring some level of communication remained intact. And the leaders who sacrificed themselves are also etched into memory. In 1923, the Malone Memorial Gate was constructed in Stratford, New Zealand. Honoring the Lieutenant Colonel who pushed back against the feudal order to save his men. Two years later, a memorial honoring all the New Zealand soldiers who died there was unveiled right on the peak of Chinook Bear itself. It's a battle that heavily influenced pop culture in art too. New Zealand writer Marie Shadbolt wrote a play about it in 1982 called One's On Chinook Bear, which was adapted into a 1991 film. There's a brilliant brass band piece by a composer Dwayne Bloomfield called Behold the Narrows from the Hill.

18:37Musician PJ Harvey even wrote about the lingering ghosts of this landscape in her 2011 song on Battleship Hill. These artists gravitated to this battle because it perfectly encapsulates the profound, almost futile sacrifice that defines so much of the First World War. This raises an important question. Why does learning the granular details of this specific battle matter to you listening to this right now over a century later? Why does it matter? It matters because Chinook Bear is a masterclass in the dangers of disconnect. It exposes exactly what happens when rigid, inflexible planning from a distant headquarters collides with the chaotic, unpredictable realities of the ground. It's a profound study in the friction of war. How a battalion taking a wrong turn in the dark, a two-hour delay at a ridge, or a miscalculated artillery coordinate, can completely alter the trajectory of world history. The capture of Chinook Bear was the single fleeting success for the Allies during the entire Glippoli campaign. For a few brief hours, those soldiers could look down from the summit and actually see the Dardanelles Straits, the ultimate objective of the entire war in that theater.

19:44But because of delays, miscommunications, and overwhelming counterattacks, that victory slipped right through their fingers. So what does this all mean? I want to leave you with a deeply unsettling detail from our source material regarding the aftermath of this battle. Okay. We discussed the small plateau called the farm, where Baldwin's brigade was overrun and effectively destroyed on the morning of August 10. After the battle ended, the farm became an unreachable part of no man's land. It was completely abandoned to the dead. The source reveals that it wasn't until 1919, long after the war had ended and the guns had fallen silent, that the Imperial Wargraves Commission burial teams finally returned to that exact spot. Four years later. When they arrived, they found a macabreality. The earth was still so thoroughly carpeted in the surface bones of the men from Baldwin's lost brigade that they couldn't even separate or move them. Oh, my God. Instead of relocating the remains, they were forced to build a farm commonwealth wargrave's commission cemetery right there, directly on top of the bones where the men had fallen four years prior.

20:46Wow. It is a stark, haunting reminder that the earth literally holds on to the brutal mistakes of our past, forcing us to reckon with them long after the politics of the war have faded. A truly powerful thought to end on. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the Battle of Chinook Bear. We hope we've helped you understand the profound weight and the cascading consequences of this historical moment. Keep questioning, keep exploring, and we'll catch you next time. Forget whatever plans you have this weekend because you're staying at home and playing on SpinQuest. And there's never been a better time to sign up then right now. New users get $30 coin packs for just $10 all the table games you love, with hundreds of slot games and real cash prizes. That's at SpinQuest.com, S-P-I-N-Q-U-S-T dot com. SpinQuest is a free-to-play social casino. Boydware prohibited. Visit SpinQuest.com for more details. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog.

21:48If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS dot com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. Even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at RSS dot com.