image above: 5th Battalion Norfolk July 1915

Britain’s Missing World War One Regiment

     My love affair with history came back when I was young, probably seven or eight. I’d already been fascinated by reading at this point and was known to sit and go through encyclopedias hours at a time, just reading and absorbing. One day my Dad’s friend brought over two black garbage bags full of paperback books. They were full of books written about World War I and II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict. I spent the next year or so reading them all. I read about Iwo Jima, Battan, Inchon, Dein Bein Phu, and so on and so on, I would have bet that I was the most informed ten year old on these subjects at the time. The stories those books told of the Wars (or police actions as Korea and Vietnam were called) and the people involved fascinated me, the bravery, the horror, the strategies and the reasons, it all mattered to me. War is a jumble of emotions fought by a majority of young people who never even got to live a normal life before being thrown into the Hell that awaited them. These books not only highlighted how we won or lost battles but dove into the psyche of the people involved in them. War wasn’t just about a couple of armies facing off with each other there was logistical, strategic and civilian aspects as well. I’m not writing a post on that just yet, I’ll save my most critical and dark stories for a later date. I know and knew then that war is horrible and there is no need for it but I figured the more I knew about them the more I could possibly help prevent them in the future and as any good historian will tell you, War definitely plays into the socioeconomic and political affairs of countries and continents, helping to define borders, cultures and regions.  By the time I had read both garbage bags full of books I had gained quite a knowledge for the history I read and wanted more. I began watching every documentary and history special on them, this was well before cable tv and the internet so I did most of my research at the library or by watching PBS. A lot of people don’t realize how much World War I and II impacted the entire world both economically, geographically and population wise. World War One which started in 1914, just about a hundred years ago, had the UK, France and Russia battling the Ottoman Turks and the German’s for control of mainland Europe. The United States (who was practicing isolationism at the start of the war) would jump in in 1917. Without further ado I give you the tale of the missing regiment.

The setting for the incident was  in particular the Gallipoli Peninsula of the Ottoman Empire from 25 April 1915 and 9 January 1916. The objective of the campaign was for the Allied powers of Britain and France to launch an ultimately unsuccessful naval and amphibious assault against the Turks to secure the Dardanelles, which is a strait that connects the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and served as an essential sea route for their ally, Russia. At the time, the strait was controlled by Turkey, an ally of Germany’s. The eventual plan was to push through and forcefully claim the city of Constantinople (present day Istanbul), which was the Ottoman Empire’s capital, and expel the Turks from the war. I should mention for those unfamiliar with WWI history, it was a battle of attrition fought in long drawn out battles. Warfare had changed from armies lining up and squaring off to armies digging into trenches and staring each other down, dropping bombs, using gas or shelling each other. Every so often after weeks or months of stalemates one side would attempt to breach the others trenches and emplacements. These forays into no man’s land almost always ended up with one side  (usually the side that charged) getting completely decimated. Gallipoli was no different. It was cold, brutal, depressing, lonely, terrifying trench warfare, if the enemy didn’t kill you the diseases from the horrible living conditions were always there to do the job a bullet couldn’t. I am digressing but I’m just tryng to set up how horrible life was back then for the soldiers on both sides. Back to the Battle:

The Norfolk Regiment, made up of 250 men, 16 officers, and led by Sir Horace Proctor-Beauchamp (interesting side note, my Mother’s maiden name is Beauchamp, I may have to look into this guys history), set out for the Gallipoli Peninsula from Liverpool on July 30, 1915 and arrived in Gallipoli on 10 August 1915 amidst heavy fighting. They did not have to wait long to see battle themselves. On August 12, just two days after their arrival, the 5^th Norfolks, as part of the 163rd Brigade, were ordered to launch an offensive against Turkish positions holding the Anafarta Plain in order to clear them out ahead of a planned Allied advance. From the beginning the mission was faced with setbacks. The men were in poor physical condition due to the rigors of their journey, the side effects of inoculations, a lack of sleep, and the harsh, brutally hot and arid climate of the area. Many of them were sick with dysentery, and general morale was low. In addition, the advance was to be carried out in broad daylight, with poor supplies, inadequate water, and with inaccurate maps, against seasoned Turkish fighters who knew the land well and were deeply dug in along ridges. In other words it seemed like a normal military mission FUBAR. To make matters worse the objective of the mission was not made particularly clear, with some of the men thinking that they were to attack the village of Anafarta Saga rather than clear the way for the British assault. It is perhaps no surprise that the attack turned into a massacre.

The exhausted, thirsty, and sick men first made an error and turned the wrong way, separating them from the larger 163^rd Brigade. Realizing their mistake, they nevertheless prepared to advance against Kavak Tepe ridge without support or reinforcements. When they did, they were immediately met with a rain of machine gun fire and picked off by numerous snipers entrenched in the ridge and sitting in trees. The Norfolk Regiment bravely pressed on into the hail bullets, actually managing to push the enemy back towards a forest that was ablaze from artillery fire. Beauchamp and his men continued the charge into the burning forest, and that was the last anyone would ever see of them. The battalion would never emerge from the forest, none would come back to tell the tale, and by most accounts they had simply vanished from the face of the earth. It is from this charge into the smoke and trees that the mystique and mystery of the vanished Royal Norfolk Regiment really takes off.

Numerous eyewitness accounts told of how the men charged into a thick fog or smoke and then simply vanished. It was assumed at the time that the men had been captured by Turkish forces and held as prisoners of war. The British made inquiries to the Turkish government as to whether they had taken the men as prisoners, but they denied having any knowledge of the Norfolks. When the war was over, the British demanded the return of the soldiers, but again the Turks adamantly denied having them, and indeed declared that they had never even heard of them. The War Graves Commission carried out searches for war dead on the battlefields of Gallipoli in 1918, which would meet with mixed success, as 14,000 of the 36,000 Commonwealth soldiers who had died in the bloody campaign were never found, and another 13,000 were uncovered in unidentified graves. During one of these searches, a Rev Charles Pierrepoint Edwards found a Norfolks regimental cap badge, along with 180 bodies scattered about around a farmhouse surrounded by the wooded area in which the men had last been seen. 122 of the bodies were found to have shoulder badges that identified them as members of the Norfolks, and one was even identified by his shoulder flashes as Lt-Col Beuchamp himself. At the time this was seen as definitive proof as to the fate of the regiment, and it was a pretty closed case, yet the case of the “Vanished Battalion” would only get weirder in the ensuing years.

And here is where it gets real weird:

The case of the Vanishing Battalion remained pretty much closed until the 50^th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings in April 1965, when a New Zealand WWI veteran by the name of Frederick Reichardt, along with two of his compatriots, came forward with their own alleged first-hand account of what he saw on that fateful day. The story was recounted by Reichardt during a reunion of veterans and offered a bizarre, if controversial, twist on the tale of the missing battalion.

Reichardt went on record saying that they had been sappers with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force and that they had been operating in an area near a Turkish position known as Hill 60, which was not far from where the lost Norfolk Regiment had been waging war. The sapper claimed they noticed between 6 and 8 odd, grayish brown, “loaf shaped” clouds hovering over the battlefield. The weird clouds were described as being completely still even in the face of high winds at the time. Beneath these clouds was reportedly another, even larger and denser looking cloud that was estimated as being around 800 feet in length and around 200 feet high. This massive cloud was allegedly hugging the ground over a dry creek bed when the Norfolk Regiment approached, and without hesitation they proceeded to march directly into it. When the regiment had disappeared into the cloud, Reichardt claimed that it had then slowly risen upwards to join the other strange clouds, apparently taking the soldiers with it, after which they all moved off to the north in unison before disappearing from view. The story was first published in the September/October edition of the New Zealand UFO magazine Spaceview in 1965. The story would be somewhat corroborated when in 1966, another New Zealand veteran of the campaign, Gerald Wilde, told Spaceview magazine that although he had not seen the disappearance directly, he had heard many rumors among soldiers that the entire Norfolk Regiment had disappeared into a cloud that had been straddling the ground.

It was a bizarre story that flew in the face of the official conclusion of what had happened to the Vanished Battalion, but it was immediately jumped upon by UFO enthusiasts and became an almost legendary tale among missing persons cases, particularly those suggesting alien abduction. The story took on a life of its own, especially among alien abduction enthusiasts, and would be told again and again in various publications, each time gaining further details or having the details changed somehow. People just couldn’t seem to get enough of this sinister tale of cloud-shaped UFOs whisking away a whole regiment of men in the middle of a battlefield. The story gained such a following among the public that the British Ministry of Defense and the Imperial War Museum were constantly deluged with letters demanding the release of top secret files that outlined the mass alien abduction and had been covered up.

There have been a few books and many, many theories as to what happened to the men of the Vanished Battalion and it is very possible that they all did just die on the battlefield but even that is hard to believe when there were so many (over 13,000) bodies unaccounted for after the battle. Years later another group of New Zealand WWI veterans would collaborate their countryman’s story of thick clouds. Of course the British Government believes the unit was decimated during the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and has no real explanation for the lack of bodies and most government officials had stopped all inquiries into the Campaign shortly after the war because it was a complete disaster. They would rather forget about their horrible strategy and the 40,000 or so people that died because of it even if a few hundred of them were abducted by strange cloud formations.

     In conclusion I must say that there is way more evidence and meat to this story as it has been turned into at least two books already. I have given you just the tip of the iceberg its your job to read up on this and decide for yourself whether it was just the horrors of was and some missing bodies or if aliens did interfere with a World War One battlefield. I am also going to do some genealogy to see if Col. Beauchamp may in fact be a relation that would definitely make me want to solve this mystery even more.  Of course just like every other unsolved mystery there are many who claim this is just a sensational story brought about by some guys looking for attention but to me there is just enough mystery and intrigue to say I don’t count anything out at this moment. I urge you all to research the Lost Battalion and come up with your own hypothesis, that’s why the Mysterious is so fun. Well I hope you all enjoyed this and I hope you’ll all have a great day and as always:PEACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PS: the majority of this story was written with material gleaned from a few websites including: mysteriousuniverse.org, Wikipedia and through the book Mysteries of the Unexplained. 

 above image: lenticular clouds similar to those witnesses described as descending down and engulfing the Regiment.