Great War Spearhead II - Gallipoli 1915 in heerr... 1/1 scale (part 6): V beach on the 25th of April

This is a general view of V beach at Cape Helles, the place for the landing of the I/ Royal Dublin Fusiliers, I/ Royal Munster Fusiliers and two companies of the II/ Hampshire Regiment on the 25th of April 1915. The Turkish defenders were only around one company of 100 men. They had other companies in reserve to the rear and, specially, several Maxim HMGs placed on both the Sedd-el-Bahr fort (seen close to the horizon line in the centre) and Ertugrul fort (Western side) from were this picture was taken. In previous naval bombardments the 10 artillery pieces of the two forts were mostly silenced.  The beach is only 270 m long and very prone to HMG cross-fire. In the 1931 movie "Tell England" you can see the dreadful effect of the Turkish machine guns on the men exiting SS River Clyde through the sally ports and gangways. Years later the famous Omaha beach will have WN 61 and WN72 with their 88mm PAK guns doing the same. 

Red arrow- Barbed wire field (only noticed about it after seeing the diorama on the northern defences of V beach); nowadays occupied partially by the local Commonwealth military cemetery. 

Blue arrow - The place where SS River Clyde, turned into a sort of landing craft, disembarked its soldiers.

Green arrow - The  sandbank where many Irish and English soldiers looked for shelter (in fact the arrow should be pointing a bit more up and to the left into the darker division on the beach but I still don't know very well how this damn thing works).

Reconstituted Turkish trenches maybe a bit too perfect. I´ve seen older pictures of the previous set of reconstituted trenches and it looked better than these ones. 

The view with a true (ex) Turkish soldier (by force) inside. 

On the Western side of the defences you can see a nice 1/72nd diorama of the battle. The Fort of Sedd- el-Bahr is shown after the naval bombardment with its partially destroyed walls.  

The SS River Clyde is also in the diorama but a smaller scale model was used. The two machine guns in its makeshift casemates at the bow seemed to have saved the day as they pinned down the Turkish fire or at least didn´t let it becoming even more deadly. The model is very nice and only the unfinished painted sand camouflage on the hull is not there. Also you can see the Turkish trenches and barbed wire closing the beach. The figures used were the obvious HAT Turkish infantry and Airfix British. 

With this one I tried to capture the diorama bunker ( in sand yellow) and the true bunker on the western side of the Turkish defences, part of Ertugrul fort. In its interior there were HMGs that coupled with the ones at Sedd-el-Bahr contributed to more than 2000 casualties on the British side. 

Ertugrul fort also had some large guns, like the remains of this 240mm L/35 Krupp  fortress gun, but these were apparently put out of combat by the Royal Navy before the landings at V beach.  Besides these guns were aimed at the ships not at the beach. 

For a great article on the Turkish guns at Gallipoli check: 

  https://www.navyingallipoli.com/Artillery_Heavy.asp

 This one is a Flickr and  was not taken by me but its useful to see the sandbank that stopped many Turkish bullets to reach the British infantry at the beach. In fact in period pictures you can see a dark mass of men.... 

... trying to get cover behind this sand bank made by the tides of mother nature. 

And I know I'm a truly disgusting person, but all my Gallipoli figure's bases are textured with true sand from the several Gelibolu beaches, together with some cat litter !...  

Next: 1915 British infantry in metropolitan uniform or my visit to W beach.