When the evacuation of Gallipoli was announced to the New Zealand troops, it did not produce the expected feelings of relief. Instead, the men felt let down. The months on the peninsula had been unimaginably hard on the Anzac troops. Gone were the optimistic, fresh-faced recruits; battle-hardened soldiers stood in their place. The men had seen their friends killed and wounded, had survived injury and sickness themselves, and had not given up. News of the imminent evacuation seemed a betrayal. If they ran away now, they felt their mates had died for nothing.

The evacuation was organised into three parties, with different tasks. ‘C Party’ would be the last to leave. Heavy casualties were anticipated for this rearguard, so men were asked to volunteer for it. Dejected at the thought of leaving their dead friends behind, and feeling a sense of duty to see the thing through, “companies volunteered to a man.”[1]

In this compilation of archival radio recordings, former gumdigger and schoolteacher Joe Gasparich and an unidentified man recall their sadness at leaving their dead mates. The last speaker, Leonard Leary, reads from his memoirs and recalls the men felt they “were leaving owing to force of circumstances, and certainly not being driven off.”

[1] Christopher Pugsley, Gallipoli The New Zealand Story, Auckland, 1984, p.342