On August 12, 1915, during an attack on Turkish positions during the Dardanelles operation, one of the units of the Norfolk regiment of the British army disappeared without a trace. Until now, various versions of this event have been put forward - from the most fantastic to quite rational.
What happened to the Sandringham Company?
The Royal Norfolk Regiment was formed in 1881 from the 9th Infantry Regiment. They included mainly members of the local militia and volunteers. At the outbreak of the First World War, the regiment consisted of two regular, one reserve and three territorial battalions. Two territorial battalions were assigned to the 163rd Brigade of the 54th Division, which was part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Ian Hamilton. It was they who had to participate in the Dardanelles operation on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
According to various sources, on August 7 (or 10), 1915, an assault force consisting of battalions under the command of Captain Montgomery (1/4) and under the command of Colonel Sir Horace Beecham (1/5) landed in Suvla Bay and began an attack on the village of Anafarta. They were opposed by units of the 36th Turkish division under the command of Major Munib-bey.
For several days there were intense battles. On August 12, by order of Lieutenant General Hamilton, the Sandringham Volunteer Company of Battalion 1/5, led by Captain Frank Reginald Beck, was supposed to occupy the so-called Hill 60. Subsequently, eyewitnesses claimed that a company of 267 people, moving along the ravine, entered fog cloud. Nobody ever saw them again.
Hamilton reported the incident to the Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener: “The battle intensified, and the area became more wooded and broken. By this stage of the battle, many of the fighters were wounded or driven to exhaustion by thirst. These 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."
On the whole, the battalion suffered significant losses. Only two companies remained from the personnel. Until November 1915, they were on the front line in the Agil Dere region, north of the Sari Beir hill. The site is now home to a burial site known as the Azmak Cemetery, where there are also 114 tombs of the 5th Norfolk.
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It wasn't until 1918 that the bodies of British soldiers were discovered, scattered over an area of about one square mile. The remains of 122 people allegedly belonged to the soldiers of the 1/5 battalion, but only two of them were identified. Obviously, they were all killed by the Turks.
Nevertheless, the Sandringham Company is missing. A special commission investigated this case.
Mysterious cloud
In 1967, materials relating to the Dardanelles operation were declassified. And the report, by the way, mentioned a strange fog that was shrouded in Suvla Bay and Plain on August 21, 1915, and which prevented the artillery observers from watching the Turkish trenches.
At the same time, the testimony of veterans from the New Zealand unit that fought on the front line in the area of Hill 60 was published. They said the following event on August 12, 1915:
“There were 6 or 8 clouds in the air in the shape of“round loaves of bread”. All of these similarly shaped clouds were directly above altitude 60. It was observed that, 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. On the ground, just below this group of clouds, there was another motionless cloud of the same shape. It was located at a distance of 14 to 18 chains (280-360 meters) from the battlefield, in the territory occupied by the British … Then we saw a British regiment … of several hundred men, who came out on this dry riverbed or washed-out road and headed to the height of 60 … They approached the place where the cloud was, and without hesitation entered directly into it, but not one of them at the height of 60 did not appear 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 … During all that was happening, the clouds hung in the same place, but as soon as the “earthly” cloud rose to their level, all together set off in a northern direction, to Bulgaria, and after three quarters of an hour they were lost from sight”.
British authorities initially assumed that the missing Norfolk had been taken prisoner by the Turks. However, the Turks denied this, and also stated that they did not engage in combat with this unit and did not even suspect of its existence.
What hypotheses were put forward?
Since there was no information about the missing, various versions of the reasons for the “disappearance of the Norfolk Regiment” (as this phenomenon was dubbed) began to appear. So, ufologists claimed that British soldiers were abducted by aliens. Like, the mentioned cloud was in fact an alien ship that took away some of the British. The rest were destroyed by the aliens. A Turkish peasant who found the bodies of the Norfolk in his field said that they were mutilated as if they had been thrown from a great height, and not killed in battle.
Another common hypothesis was the movement of the company in time and space. This was associated with the experiments of the famous inventor Nikola Tesla. It was rumored that while working on his Wardencliff project, he learned how to open time-space portals.
There is also a guess that explains everything in the most prosaic way: the British were still captured by the Turks and were brutally killed. But, as we have already said, Turkey stubbornly denies the fact of reprisals against them. To date, the mystery of the disappearance of the Norfolk Regiment is still considered unsolved.
Daria Lyubimskaya