FORTY YEARS AFTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 821, 22 April 1955, Page 19

FORTY YEARS AFTER

HEN the Turks took over the Anzac dug-outs they found notes like "Remember, Johnny, ycu didn’t push us off. We went." And those words typified the courageous, tragic, calamitous Gallipoli campaign which cost the Anzacs alone 23,000 casualties, 10,000 dead; a campaign in which the attacking forces had four enemies-the Turks, dysentery, thirst and the Peninsula’s natural defences, The programme commemorating the Gallipoli Campaign starts simply enough "We present The Magnificent Failure, a programme to mark the anniversary of the Anzac landing on Gallipoli, forty years ago today, on April the 25th, 1915." It goes on to tell of the landing on the peninsula after the Turks had had warning and time to prepare their defences. It tells of the Turkish massed daylight effort to dislodge the Anzac line on May 19 when the rifles grew hot but the defence held. The programme tells of the queer nine hours armistice following the Turkish offensive, when the dead were buried. "By four in the afternoon the work was done, "The "burial parties exchanged souvenirs; then each side returned to its own trenches. For the next half hour there was no sound at all. At 4.30 both sides fifed tremendous salvoes at nothing in particular; then silence settled once more." It tells of the passing of May and June and July when the fighting never stopped and the crosses on the hillside grew. The place was black with flies; dysentery broke out. The men were lousy; chloride of lime bubbled and stank na . It tells of how the New Zealanders took the vital Chunuk Bair but lost it again because they were too few and too exhausted to hold it. For the second

time, victory was close, but the help from Suvla never came, It tells finally of the evacuation, that gigantic bluff when 20,000 men were taken off the peninsula without Johnny Turk knowing and without a casualty. Written by Asquith M. Thomson, and produced in the Wellington studios of the NZBS, The Magnificent Failure will be broadcast on all YAs and on 3YZ and 4YZ at 7,30 p.m. on Monday, April 25. The Magnificent Failure will be preceded and followed by two Anzac programmes from the BBC. Details of these were not available as we went to press, but the first, to be heard in the Main National Programme at 9,30 a.m. this Sunday (April 24), will be a programme of reminiscences. The second, Dardanelles: The Campaign Reconstructed, from all YA and YZ stations (except 3YA), at 8.0 p.m. on Anzac Day, was specially prepared to mark the 40th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing. Other Anzac programmes from. individual stations will include several commemorative services. The Commercial Division’s Anzac Day programme, written and produced by Alan Sleeman and entitled The Pride of Nationhood, will be broadcast from 1ZB at 4.0 p.m., 2ZB at 7.0 p.m. 3ZB at 6.0 p.m., 4ZB at 6,30 p.m. and 2ZA at 8.15 p.m.