Dominic Sandbrook

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.

As the hailing bullets flicked the life out of the struggling men, we almost wept with impotent rage.

So they're leaping off.

They're incredibly bravely kind of running across this kind of improvised gangway, and they're all being shot down.

After about an hour, the shallows are absolutely choked with dead and drowning men.

The able seaman, William Williams, he's shot and killed.

And Unwin, who's been holding the gangway in place, kind of from not so well swept away by the tide, he basically collapses with exhaustion.

He has to be dragged back aboard the ship.

And at this point, the commanding officers on the river Clyde say, this has been a complete nightmare.

Let's just wait here.

Stop trying to get off the ship and wait for cover of darkness and then try to get ashore.

But, I mean, this is why you should never be too brave, Tom.