Dominic Sandbrook

It's just sitting there, right?

And the Turks are just hammering shells at it and bullets.

Oh, it's a mad idea to have done that then.

Because the men can't jump off.

They're in six feet of water.

Their packs are so heavy, they would just be dragged down and drowned.

And this guy who came up with the idea, Unwin, can see that it's all falling apart.

And to his massive credit, he says, I will fix this.

And he takes an able seaman with the excellent name of William Williams.

They jump into the sea.

They've got all these barges with them.

They lash together all the barges with ropes, and they literally hold them in place, these two guys, as a gangway.

Okay, that is impressive.

Right, and the Turks are firing at them, and they don't hit these two blokes, which is so impressive.

that these guys, such courage.

And the men start jumping down from the ship onto the gangway, but they are being raked all the time with Turkish bullets.

So the first 200 men, only 21 of them reached the beach alive.

And there was a petty officer who was watching from the ship and he wrote in his diary, he said, one after another, the devoted fellows made the dash down the deadly gangways.

But to our horror, we saw them suddenly begin to flounder and fall in the water again.

They went down, never to reappear.