The Gallipoli Regiment Swallowed by a Cloud (Hill 60, Suvla, 1915)

In 1908 King Edward VII asked for a company to be raised from the Sandringham estate staff. It became part of the 5th Norfolks, led by the royal land agent Capt. Frank Reginald Beck. On 10 August 1915 the 1/5th Battalion, Norfolk Regiment landed at Suvla.

12 August. The battalion attacked towards Kuchuk Anafarta Ova and pushed on beyond the rest of the line. General Sir Ian Hamilton's despatch called it "a very mysterious thing". The men "charged into the forest, and were lost to sight and sound". "Not one of them ever came back." There was no cloud in it.

Early 1965. At a UFO meeting in Rotorua, the veteran Frederick Reichardt told a different story. His signed statement dated it "August 28, 1915". About 22 men of No. 1 Field Company, New Zealand Engineers, were in trenches on Rhododendron Spur.

Over Hill 60 hung six or eight "loaf of bread" shaped clouds, light grey and "all exactly alike". A larger cloud sat on the ground, about 800 ft long, 200 ft high and 200 ft wide. It was "absolutely dense, almost solid looking in structure". A breeze blew from the south. The clouds did not move.

Then a column of troops, which the men took for the "First Fourth Norfolk", marched up a sunken road. "When they arrived at the cloud, they marched straight into it, with no hesitation, but no one ever came out to deploy and fight at 'Hill 60'." The ground cloud rose slowly and joined the others. They moved north towards Thrace. In about three quarters of an hour they were gone.

The statement reached the New Zealand UFO magazine Spaceview. Charles Berlitz retold it in 1977. Paul Begg published the first critical investigation in 1979. In 1989 the paper New Truth ran it as "ALIENS TOOK GALLIPOLI REGIMENT". Philip Bradley of the NZ Skeptics showed the story was nothing new.

In 1999 Ian McGibbon checked the records. The 1/4th Norfolks never disappeared. The battalion that suffered was the 1/5th, two weeks earlier and several miles away. Of the two co-signatories, R. Newnes had left Gallipoli on 21 August and J. L. Newman on 5 August. Reichardt's own unit records suggest he was not on Rhododendron Spur on the date he gave. After the war a graves registration search found 180 bodies, 122 of them Norfolks, behind the Turkish lines.

McGibbon thinks Reichardt probably saw troops moving through ordinary ground mist. Over the years that memory may have merged with the Sherwood Foresters' attack of 21 August, and rumours that Foresters vanished "in a cloud of smoke". It may also have merged with Hamilton's famous passage. Others point to shelling, scrub fires and battlefield smoke. No one has shown that he invented the story on purpose.

David Clarke ranks the tale second only to the Angel of Mons in UFO literature. The real loss inspired the 1999 BBC film All the King's Men, with David Jason as Beck. In 2002 Tim Travers and Birten Çelik used Turkish archives to reconstruct the fight. The cloud story became a legend. The men who charged into the forest were real.