The Vanishing of the Sandringham Company

On the afternoon of 12 August 1915, during the Allied campaign against Ottoman forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, the 1/5th Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment took part in an attack on the slopes above Suvla Bay. A company of that battalion, drawn largely from the King’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk and known unofficially as the Sandringham Company, advanced into the broken country at the head of Kuçuk Anafarta Ova and was not heard from again. Of the 267 officers and men who went forward, very few returned. For decades the fate of the rest was unknown, and into that silence grew one of the most repeated stories in the literature of military disappearances.

The New Zealand Account

The story rests primarily on a signed statement made in 1965 by three New Zealand veterans, all former sappers of No 3 Section, 1st Field Company, New Zealand Engineers. Frederick Reichardt, John L Newnes and a man named Newman declared that on 21 August 1915, during the wider Suvla Bay offensive, they had been positioned on Hill 60 with a clear view of the slope opposite. They watched a column of British infantry, perhaps a battalion in strength, advance up the hill and into a strange low cloud that lay over the crest. The cloud, they said, was solid-looking, oddly shaped like a loaf of bread, and remained on the ridge for some minutes after the men had entered it. It then lifted into the air, joined a formation of similar clouds that had been hanging motionless against the wind, and drifted away. When the cloud was gone the slope was empty. No men were ever seen to descend.

The statement, signed at a fiftieth-anniversary reunion in Wellington, was widely reprinted and became one of the founding documents of the modern UFO literature. The cloud was identified by some writers with the unconventional aerial phenomena catalogued in cases such as the foo fighters of the Second World War, and the missing battalion was claimed as one of the largest mass abductions in history.

The Historical Record

The historical record tells a different and more sombre story. The unit the New Zealanders described advancing on 21 August was, in any case, not the 1/5th Norfolks. The Sandringham Company had been lost nine days earlier, on 12 August, during the action at Anafarta Ova. The Battalion’s war diary, the contemporaneous reports of the Brigade Commander, and the account written immediately afterwards by Sir Ian Hamilton, the Commander-in-Chief, all describe the same event. The 1/5th Norfolks, advancing on the right of their line, pushed too far forward into a wood and broken ground, became separated from the rest of the brigade, and were not seen to come back. Hamilton wrote in his despatch that the men had vanished, and the word, taken out of its context, contributed to the legend.

In 1919 a battlefield clearance team examined the ground over which the battalion had advanced. Among the scrub of the lower slopes they recovered the bodies of 122 of the missing men, identifiable from cap badges and personal effects. The remains were scattered across an area consistent with a small unit being overrun in close-quarters fighting. Subsequent research, in particular by the historian Nigel McCrery in the 1980s, established that the company had advanced into a position held by Ottoman irregulars, had been cut off, and had been killed at close range. Some men, captured rather than killed, may have died subsequently in captivity.

Conventional Explanations

The cloud described by the New Zealand sappers was almost certainly real. Heat haze, smoke from the artillery preparation, and the dust raised by the advance combined to form thick, low banks of obscurity over the Gallipoli ridges, and such banks could lift unpredictably as the wind shifted. Veterans of other Suvla actions describe the same conditions in their own diaries. The men who entered such a bank and did not emerge were not lifted into the sky; they were killed by Ottoman fire on the far side, where the New Zealanders could not see them fall.

The fifty-year gap between the events and the signed statement is also a significant factor. The sappers, recalling at distance an episode they had witnessed under fire in dust and confusion, may have honestly conflated several memories. A Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Suvla operations in 1917 had already raised the possibility that men captured by Ottoman forces had been executed rather than imprisoned; the climate of unease around the disappearance, and the absence for years of any clear account, encouraged interpretations that the documentary record did not require.

Legacy

The Sandringham Company is now commemorated at the Helles Memorial and at the parish church of Dersingham in Norfolk, where the names of the men of the King’s estate are listed on a wooden panel. Their fate is no longer a mystery. The story of the bread-loaf cloud, however, has persisted, repeated in books and television documentaries and woven into the fabric of unexplained-disappearance lore alongside cases such as the Eilean Mor lighthouse keepers and the Flannan Isles vanishing.

It is a useful and salutary case. A real and dreadful event, the destruction of a small infantry company, was overlaid by a striking misremembered image, and the image proved more durable in popular memory than the documented record. The men of the Sandringham Company died on a Turkish hillside in August 1915. They did not vanish into the sky.

Sources

• Hamilton, Sir I. Final Despatch on the Dardanelles Operations. The London Gazette, January 1916.
• McCrery, N. The Vanished Battalion. Simon and Schuster, 1992.
• Reichardt, F, Newnes, J L, and Newman. Signed statement, Wellington, New Zealand, 1965.
• Royal Norfolk Regiment Battalion War Diary, August 1915. The National Archives, WO 95.