[Gallipoli Memories: Pat Lloyd]

Part of a series of ANZAC Gallipoli memories recalled by men who served there. Pat Lloyd is the only veteran who is identified.

An unidentified man, [probably Pat Lloyd]: There's a thing that I found out on this, going back for this pilgrimage, all that's been written about Gallipoli, you know, we landed in the wrong place. I've seen it written that it was a drift of the tide and heard various explanations of it, but on this trip we had a very intelligent, younger generation Turk. And I said "How come that we landed in the wrong place? We landed about a mile left of the place where we should have". And he said if you were here long enough I could take you to the Turk who was still alive, a young junior officer. The navy had put out a buoy marking the two flanks of where the landing was to take place, and this officer that evening before, he spotted these and it was just as simple as that, he shifted them one mile. I've never seen that written in the history and that Turk, he's still alive the chap who actually did it.

[Break in the recording]

Unidentified male interviewer: A veteran of Gallipoli is Pat Lloyd, DCM. Pat, how long were you on Gallipoli?

Pat Lloyd: From the landing on the 25th of April to the 9th of August.

Interviewer: How old were you when you landed?

Pat Lloyd: Seventeen.

Interviewer: Seventeen years of age?

Pat Lloyd: I had my eighteenth birthday.

Interviewer: Well, you must have been pretty young when you went into camp in New Zealand.

Pat Lloyd: Yeah, I was in short pants and a senior cadet.

Interviewer: Where did you actually enter camp?

Pat Lloyd: In Christchurch, at Addington.

Interviewer: And your eighteenth birthday was on Gallipoli?

Pat Lloyd: On Gallipoli, yeah.

Interviewer: You must remember the landing pretty well Pat?

Pat Lloyd: Oh yes, it's clear. And the place I went back, as I say on the 50th pilgrimage, on the 50th anniversary, I could almost recognise my own footsteps on the beach.

Interviewer: What can you remember about the landing?

Pat Lloyd: Oh, well the, we came off this transport, the Itonus. Got down ladders. Oh, I should say we were told to drink water, that would be the only thing we'd be short of. We were walking round and round the water taps on the ship, piling water into us for hours. Then we got down these ladders into a little pinnace, and then into ships' boats and we were taken to within, oh, within, as close in as they could get and then got out and waded ashore.

Interviewer: You'd be under constant fire?

Pat Lloyd: Yes, under fire. Not as much fire as you would have imagined, but they were, there were casualties taking place all the time. As a matter of fact, I saw, not that day, but later on, one of these boatloads of fellows, and they must have got them with a machine-gun, and it was just full of congealed blood and bodies. There must have been thirty of them, dead where they sat. It was a queer-looking sight, to see this boatload of corpses and the congealed blood, just like a jelly, full of dead.

Transcript by Sound Archives/Ngā Taonga Kōrero