'It was at Gallipoli that our young nations came of age'

Turkish honour guards are silhouetted behind a fluttering New Zealand flag during an international service at a Turkish memorial in Gallipoli. Picture / Reuters

HELLES, Turkey - New Zealanders and Australians have poured into Anzac Cove for the 90th anniversary of one of World War One's most vicious battles.

Some 20,000 people, the largest gathering ever, are to commemorate the Anzac landing on Gallipoli, 40km north of the ancient battlefields of Hellenic Troy.

Each year thousands of Australians and New Zealanders make a pilgrimage to this finger of land jutting into the Aegean Sea.

The Gallipoli campaign marked the first time Australian and New Zealand troops fought under their newly independent nations' flags. The British-led Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) lost more than 10,000 men before the Allied forces abandoned the peninsula in defeat eight months later.

In Gallipoli alone, 2721 New Zealanders died - more than during the 25 years of fighting now known as the New Zealand wars. More than 4700 New Zealanders were injured.  It was a 87 per cent casualty rate.

Today's dawn service at Chunuk Bair (2.30pm NZ time) had a prelude an hour earlier with a heraldic bugle call, music, poetry readings and the reading of a letter by Lieutenant Colonel William Malone, the commanding officer of the Wellington Battalion who died on August 8.

Air Force jets flew low overhead as ancient Turkish dances were performed for the leaders of Turkey, New Zealand and Australia.

The dawn service will feature the New Zealand chief of staff, Air Marshal Bruce Ferguson, the Australian chief of staff General Peter Cosgrove, Helen Clark, Mr Howard and other dignitaries.

Hours before the dawn service began the hills above North Beach were already packed.

Newstalk ZB political editor Barry Soper said giant screens had been set up on Anzac Cove, there was a sea of sleeping bags and crowds had been pouring in for several hours.

"It's a bitterly cold morning on the Gallipoli peninsula."

"It's obviously a very moving moment for many people here where so many young men, Australians and New Zealanders, lost their lives 90 years ago," Barry Soper told Newstalk ZB.

Today's bucolic Gallipoli, blanketed with barley crops and groves of olive trees, belies its bloody history.

Yesterday Helen Clark was guest speaker at the Turkish service and she also attended the British and French services.

"To walk on the battlefields of Gallipoli is to walk on ground where so much blood was shed it has become near sacred soil," said New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark at an ceremony to honour Turkey's fallen soldiers.

"For New Zealand, as for Australia, it was at Gallipoli that our young nations came of age."

Clark's Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan said the hatred of war had long ago given way to a bond between the nations.

"The respect that arose between the two sides has formed the fabric of friendship and co-operation that Turkey has since established with those states that we had fought in Gallipoli."

After the services Helen Clark walked the rugged 4.5km track from the Chunuk Bair memorial down the hill to Anzac Cove where Anzac troops landed and died in their thousands 90 years ago today in 1915.

"I also appreciate New Zealanders came up this hill on foot (in 1915) and we are doing it the easy way," she said.

Yesterday Turkish warships sailed through the Dardanelle straits below the cliffs of Helles, site of a British war monument to Commonwealth soldiers who lost their lives in a doomed attempt to take the Gallipoli peninsula from Ottoman Turkish forces.

"When I hear the piper play, the courage of those troops resonates for me today," said Bob Candler, 49, of Perth, Australia, whose grandfather survived the battle in 1915.

"They may have lost the battle, but our nation was born with their sacrifice."

Australian prime minister John Howard has refused to talk about his non-attendance at the New Zealand national service today. Instead will have a barbecue on the beach with Australian soldiers.

"We've talked enough," he said when asked for comment as he entered a reception.

Helen Clark will be at both the Australian service at Lone Pine and the New Zealand service at Chunuk Bair but she said the decision for Mr Howard not to attend the New Zealand service was for him and Australia to make.

The decision was believed to have been under discussion by the two countries for at least a month but Helen Clark said nobody had discussed it with her.

"It hasn't been discussed with me. He determines his own programme," she said.

Helen Clark said this year was the first time the services had been split over two days and in the past several had been held at the same time.

"People peeled off to do that so that has been the pattern and there isn't really a precedent to draw on."

Today the Chunuk Bair Memorial will be host to many thousand people who will cram on to the small hilltop site to remember Gallipoli war dead.

However, some of the tourists walked away from the spot where hundreds died with a wrong impression of the casualty figures.

One guide told a group of Australian tourists nearly 500,000 soldiers from both sides died in the eight-month campaign before the Allies pulled out in December, 1915.

The casualty figure was much lower with 44,000 Allied deaths and 88,000 Turkish deaths for a total of more than 130,000.

Another man working on restoring some of the trenches where the Anzac and Turkish soldiers faced each other, sometimes from as little as 20m apart, insisted the British did not get to Chunuk Bair.

The British actually relieved the Wellington Battalion after the Wellington soldiers captured Chunuk Bair on August 8. They held it for a bloody two days when 700 of the 770 Wellington soldiers were killed or wounded.

On August 10 the British were thrown off by a huge Turkish counterattack.

Historians believe no one could have withstood the Turks on Chunuk Bair on August 10 and that the British were not the incompetent troops many Anzac soldiers believed them to be when they lost Chunuk Bair.

- REUTERS, NZPA and NEWSTALK ZB