The Cairns Post is proud to be supporting our Anzacs with stories and images from Cairns' readers about Australians at war.

The Anzac story is one of a catastrophic landing in the wrong location that kicks off an epic battle, which shapes our nation.

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At 3.30 on the morning of April 25, 1915, large rowing boats, each carrying 35 to 40 men, separated from their mother ships and headed towards a barely discernable shore some 1.5km ahead.

In the boats were soldiers of the 3rd Brigade AIF, heading towards a momentous destiny in which they would become the initiators of a national identity. These were the men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and, among their numbers, were diggers of the 9th Battalion, mostly Queenslanders, including many from around Cairns and our surrounding region.

A British naval officer was tasked with holding direction but, as reported by C.E.W. Bean, it was "too dark to even see at times, the next string of boats". As the boats approached the shore, a call was heard, "Tell the Colonel the damn fools have taken us a mile too far north!"

Indeed, instead of landing on the shallow beach between Ari Burnu and Gaba Tepe, our soldiers were faced with the grim, steep cliff face of Ari Burnu itself.

At 4.29am, the first muzzle flash came from land. A bullet whizzed overhead and splashed into the water, followed by another and another, and then a rapid volley broke out as shadowy figures could be seen, silhouetted on the heights above.

Bullets thudded into the wooden hulls as they approached the shore.

The diggers hit the shore on the point of Ari Burnu. From every boat, they ran over the shale beach to the base of a shallow cliff face, many fixing their bayonets as they ran. Others carried those already wounded and dead to the base of the bluff then shrugged off their packs ready to fight.

Fierce rifle and machine gun fire swept the men of the 9th and 10th Battalions, as they attempted to bring order to the chaos of landing on a piece of coastline for which they were totally unprepared. They were lying in small parties of boatloads, units were mixed and individuals’ clothes heavy with water, and rifles choked with sand.

Realisation quickly set in, that to stay where they were was surely death, and platoon commanders took charge of small parties here and there and started to scale the heights. The 9th Battalion faced a vertical cliff some 6m high.

Gasping for breath through tortured lungs; throats dry and aching from lack of water, the diggers clambered up the steep slopes to the top, where they were confronted by a long steep hill. Reaching the plateau immediately above Ari Burnu, the diggers captured a number of Turkish trenches at bayonet point.

Then, slowly, the Turkish fire began to slacken as vantage points were taken from them. This gave the second and third wave of boats an opportunity to land in relative safety, to be met by the brutality of war as the stony beach was littered with dead and dying.

However, with no time to lose, their mates needed them above and so on they swept, taking with them a firm belief in themselves and their mates, a belief that was soon to resonate throughout a young and proud country as the men of ANZAC fought gallantly over eight long months for a bare strip of land.

Dennis Quick is a military historian specialising in units and service personnel who originated in North Queensland. He served 21 years in the Army as a military engineer and saw active service in South Vietnam in 1967 with 1st Field Squadron RAE and in 1970 and 1971 with the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. He also worked in East Timor between December 1999 and October 2001.

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