Published: 22 April 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
In this extract from his book Jewish Anzacs, MARK DAPIN tells the stories of the Jewish soldiers who served and died at Gallipoli
IN APRIL 1915 the Anzacs left Egypt, sailing for Turkey. Along with larger numbers of British, French and Indian troops, they were despatched to open up another front against the enemy and secure the Russian navy’s access to the Black Sea via the straits of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. The Gallipoli Peninsula was also to be a staging point for the eventual invasion of Constantinople, which lay about 270 kilometres to the north-east. Like so much of Turkey, the area had a Jewish history.
The peninsula’s port town of Gelibolu (Gallipoli) itself had been home to a sizeable Jewish population since at least the thirteenth century although the old Jewish Quarter, with its two nineteenth-century synagogues, had been destroyed by an earthquake in 1912. But the Anzacs never reached Gallipoli town. The assault force waded ashore at a nameless bay between Ari Burnu and Hell Spit, later known as Anzac Cove.
Captain Eliazar Margolin, a Russian-born Jewish officer from Collie, Western Australia, arrived at Anzac on that first day, as did Samuel Weingott, a Sydney-born tailor’s cutter; Sidney Diamond, a 21-year-old piano tuner who received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his actions in the Gallipoli landings; and Harley Cohen, a 21-year-old Sydney clerk who had joined the 4th Battalion AIF on August 17, 1914.
Harley Cohen had been driven to enlist by a great sense of urgency. Men were allotted service numbers according to the order in which they arrived at the recruiting office: Cohen was number 27. He charged onto the beach in the first landing at nine o’clock in the morning of April 25, and “rushed through the scrub into the firing-line,” he said later.
“Men were dropping like skittles, and as an officer was yelling for someone with a knowledge of first aid and no one answered, I chipped in, and did a bit of it. When I’d bandaged up a few of the worst cases I resumed the job I went out there for, and that was to give the Turkish first-aiders some work to do.
“The Turks seemed to have screened themselves so thoroughly that we could not see them, and volunteers were called to go out and locate them.” Cohen and half a dozen of his comrades crawled out in search of the enemy.
