During the First World War, an entire military unit disappeared without a trace in Turkey. This disappearance was very strange … Where did the 267 British soldiers disappear?
Soon a hundred years will pass since the whole military unit disappeared without a trace in Turkey during the First World War - in early August 1915, the fourth battalion of the Norfolk regiment under the command of Captain Montgomery and the fifth under the command of Colonel Sir Horace Boshem landed in Suvla Bay in as part of the landing group.
A few days later, the Sandringham Volunteer Company of this battalion was sent to attack the small "high-rise 60". A group of 267 men, commanded by Colonel Beauchem and Captain Beck, advanced towards the enemy. On the way, the soldiers entered a cloud of fog, and when it dissipated - no one was on the spot, colleagues could not even find the bodies of the Norfolk.
“A battalion of the Norfolk Regiment was on the right flank and at some point felt less opposition than the rest of the brigade faced,” General Ian Hamilton, commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, wrote in an army dry report to Secretary of War Kitchener. “Against the retreating enemy forces, Colonel Sir Horace Boshem - a brave, confident officer - led a stubborn onslaught, dragging the best of the battalion with him. The battle intensified, and the terrain became more wooded and broken. Many of the fighters were injured or thirsty. They returned to camp during the night. But the colonel with sixteen officers and 250 fighters continued the pursuit, pushing back the enemy … They went deep into the forest and ceased to be seen and heard. None of them returned."
The Turks, with whom the British fought, also knew nothing about the fate of the missing. Major Munib Bey reported that 35 British were taken prisoner by the Turks during that battle. And only one of them - Private Brown - was from the same Norfolk regiment. But there was no question of any two and a half hundred soldiers. “During the Gallipoli operation, the Turkish side did not carry out any military operations in the area near the Sulva Bay in the Kayadzhik-dere hollow. And also did not capture British soldiers throughout all the hostilities near the Sulva Bay, - after the war the Turks answered the official request of the British.
Found, but not all
Although, after the end of the war, one officer accidentally discovered the badge of the Royal Norfolk regiment and found out that a local peasant took out many bodies from his site and threw them into the gorge.
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“We found the Norfolk battalion one shot five,” an officer from the funeral brigade reported. - A total of 180 bodies. We've only been able to identify the corpses of Privates Barnaby and Cotter. The bodies were scattered over an area of about a square mile, at least 800 yards beyond the leading edge of the Turks. Many of them were undoubtedly killed on the farm, as the local Turk, the owner of the site, told us that when he returned, the farm was littered with the decomposing bodies of British soldiers, which he had to dump into a small ravine. That is, the initial assumption is confirmed that they did not go far into the depths of the enemy's defense, but were destroyed one after another, with the exception of those who got to the farm.
This find explained the fate of a part of the Norfolk Regiment, but the British government still considers those who remained unidentified to be missing. Where did a hundred more soldiers go if their bodies were never found?
Despite all the circumstances of wartime, this disappearance was very strange. Even a military man to the bone - the commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General Ian Hamilton - noticed something mystical in the fact that an entire unit was missing on the battlefield in broad daylight. And when the British declassified the documents of the commission investigating the incident, the mystery only increased. In the commission's report, a strange fog was mentioned more than once, which sharply descended on the area on an August day. This in itself is unusual, besides, the fog was so bright that it blinded the gunners.
Clouds, where are the people?
“By some quirk of nature, Suvla Bay and Plain were shrouded in a strange fog on August 21, in the afternoon,” recalled one of the artillery observers. “It was bad for us, as we hoped that the enemy's arrows would be blinded by the sun, which was inclining towards sunset, and the Turkish trenches would be clearly visible to us in its evening rays with exceptional clarity. It turned out that we could hardly distinguish the orders of the enemy on that day, while the western targets were especially clearly visible in bright light."
“The day was rising, a clear, cloudless, in general, a beautiful Mediterranean day, which was to be expected,” sappers Reichart and Newnes recalled. “There was one exception, though: there were six or eight clouds in the air in the shape of round loaves of bread. All of these similarly shaped clouds were directly above "height 60". Despite a light wind blowing from the south at a speed of 5-6 miles per hour, neither the location of the clouds nor their shape changed. From our vantage point 500 feet away, we saw them hanging at an elevation of 60 degrees. On the ground, just below this group of clouds, there was another motionless cloud of the same shape. It measured about 800 feet in length, 200 in height and 200 in width.
This cloud was perfectly dense and almost solid. It was located at a distance of 280 to 360 meters from the battlefield, in the territory occupied by the British. She was, like all the other clouds, light gray. Then we saw a British regiment of several hundred men who stepped out onto this dry riverbed or washed-out road and headed for “Hill 60” to reinforce the detachment at that height. They approached the place where the cloud was, and without hesitation entered directly into it, but not one of them at "height 60" appeared and did not fight. About an hour after the last groups of soldiers disappeared into the cloud, she easily left the earth and, as any fog or cloud does, slowly rose up and gathered the rest, similar to her clouds, mentioned at the beginning of the story. After examining them carefully once again, we realized that they are like "peas in a pod."Throughout the entire event, the clouds hung in the same place, but as soon as the "earthly" cloud rose to their level, they all set off in a northern direction, towards Bulgaria, and after three quarters of an hour they were lost.
True, the memories of witnesses should be treated with caution, since they remembered this episode of the war only several decades later.
Versions and hypotheses
After the incident, several versions of what happened appeared: lovers of all kinds of secrets rest on two main explanations. Either the soldiers were abducted by aliens, and that very cloud is nothing more than an unidentified flying object. Or the cloud is a portal to another dimension, where all 267 soldiers of the British army followed in battle formation.
“Coloring and shape for“clouds”is an obvious disguise,” writes Emil Bachurin in his book “Beyond the Absurd Present”. - In September 1986, I myself managed to observe a UFO in the form of a hemisphere, moving under the lower edge of the clouds and having exactly the same color as the cloud. There is no doubt that it was a UFO, since about a minute after the start of the observation, a small, lenticular, bright golden object flew up vertically from behind the forest, and after a few moments without any light or sound effects it entered exactly the center of the base ship … After that, she abruptly changed course to almost the opposite and with a small climb entered the cloud, which very quickly somehow began to rebuild, stretch against the wind, until it merged with a large area of stratus clouds. In Suvla Bay, several "similar" clouds hung motionless, despite the breeze, "watching" the theater of operations or "covering" the "cloud" in the stream valley.
No matter how beautiful the versions about aliens and parallel worlds were, everything was probably much more banal and harsher: the Turks simply killed the British and are still afraid to admit it at the state level. But if everything really was so, then questions remain: what kind of strange cloud circled over the battlefield and why the bodies of hundreds of soldiers from the Norfolk regiment were not found?