The mysterious disappearance of the soldiers of the Norfolk Regiment during the First World War has become a real legend and was reflected in the mass culture of the last century. The most interesting thing is that even in our time the most incredible and fantastic hypotheses are being built on this matter.
After Turkey entered the war on the side of Austria-Hungary and the German Empire, the French and British began to realize that they might face great difficulties.
To prevent this, a simple plan was developed: to capture the Dardanelles, which connects the Marmara and Aegean Seas. Due to this, the Entente would have received good strategic advantages. It should be noted that France and England (especially England) considered in the future to seize Constantinople, completely withdraw the Ottoman Empire from the war and open a sea route to Russia. The plans are impressive. However, as history has shown, they were not destined to come true. As soon as it began, the military campaign turned into a bloody mess, continuous chaos, confusing even experienced combatants.
From the very beginning, the operation did not work out. The ships of the Entente entered the Dardanelles on March 18, 1915, and there they were professionally fired upon by Turkish artillerymen. Part of the battleships was blown up by mines, three ships went to the bottom. However, this did not stop the allies, and a month later, on April 25, they landed their troops on Cape Helles, which was met with heavy machine-gun fire from Turkish fighters. Already on the first day of the landing operation, the Entente lost 18 thousand people. Allied troops managed to gain a foothold on the coast, but they could not advance further. The command made repeated attempts to move inland, expanding the bridgehead, but this did not bring any results. It should be noted that for ordinary soldiers the conditions were terrible: hot wind, scorching heat, dust. The bodies of the dead were decomposing at great speed, clouds of insects swarmed above them. In addition, the fighters did not have the required amount of medicines, so often the wounds received in battles were not treated with anything. Moreover, dysentery broke out among the soldiers, which quickly dehydrated the body.
Ultimately, even the British, the main initiators of the campaign, realized that the situation was deadlocked. For this reason, on December 7, 1915, the command of the allied forces issued an order to begin the evacuation. The losses of the British alone in killed, wounded and missing amounted to more than one hundred thousand people. The main task of the operation was never completed.
The Norfolk Regiment was formed in 1881 from the British Army's 9th Infantry Regiment. Since then, his story began. The regiment included local militia and volunteers. In August 1915, several battalions of the Norfolk regiment landed in Suvla Bay and attempted an attack on the settlement of Anafarta. The fighters of the 36th Turkish division, commanded by Major Munib-bey, spoke against the British. Soon, the command sent a volunteer company Sandringham of the 1/5 battalion of the regiment (some sources say about the entire battalion) to occupy Hill 60. But more than 260 people, led by Captain Beck and Colonel Beech, advancing half a hollow, found themselves in a dense "strange" fog … According to eyewitnesses, the artillerymen were literally blinded, so they could not provide fire support to the attackers. By the way,such support was not required, because after the fog cleared, neither the soldiers of the regiment nor the bodies of the dead were found in the hollow. One got the impression that the unit simply disappeared into the fog.
The materials on this case were declassified only more than half a century after the tragedy, in 1967. Information about the strange fog that blinded the soldiers can be found in the official documents, which set out the investigation of this incident.
The British command quite logically assumed that the fighters could be captured due to some unforeseen situation, so they demanded to return them, but the Turkish side announced that its soldiers did not take any prisoners in this area, and did not conduct any hostilities at all.
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The soldiers who disappeared in the gorge were still found. This happened, however, only in 1918. There were no survivors among them. In total, 180 bodies were found, only a few people were identified. The bodies were scattered over an area of approximately one square mile, approximately 800 yards from the forward positions of the Turkish forces. Most of them were killed in this area. A local resident, the owner of this site, said that when he returned home, he saw that his farm was littered with the bodies of British soldiers. He threw the bodies into a small ravine. Thus, the original version that the British soldiers did not go deep into the enemy's positions, but were killed one after another, with the exception of only those who did not manage to reach the farm, found confirmation. All these data are given in the officer's report,in charge of the burial of the fallen soldiers.
At first glance, there is nothing strange and supernatural. The soldiers entered the battle, but something went wrong. They were surrounded and then destroyed. At the same time, this version is refuted by the Turkish fighters, who said that they did not know anything about the presence of the British battalion fighters in that place. The New Zealand soldiers, who were allies of the British, also had no idea of any battle. Moreover, Major General Ian Hamilton, in his report to his superiors, wrote that the soldiers of the regiment went deep into the forest, after which they were not seen and heard. Thus, it turns out that no one heard the screams or shots.
According to documents, New Zealand soldiers said that at the scene they saw some kind of cloud, which seemed to be made of solid matter. Despite the fact that there was a wind, these clouds did not react in any way. A total of 6-8 such clouds were counted. Thus, if we take on faith the words of the New Zealand soldiers, we get a very strange picture: the British soldiers, finding themselves in the fog, disappeared without a trace, never reaching height 60. It is worth noting that this testimony is about a battalion? 1/5. And then the sources give absolutely incredible things: about an hour after the soldiers got into the cloud, it left the surface of the earth, slowly rose up, like an ordinary cloud or fog, and collected all the other clouds similar to it. According to eyewitnesses, it all resembled peas in a pod.
There is nothing to say about the reaction of the public during that period of time, characterized by the general interest in UFOs. Ufologists immediately noted in this incident the intrigues of alien aliens who, for some unknown reason, dropped the soldiers from a great height. The nature of the damage is also of great interest. The official report states that the farmer who found the bodies of the dead British soldiers claimed that their bodies were severely mutilated, bones broken.
Thus, it turns out that the death of the entire Norfolk regiment was not. Moreover, many soldiers of the 1/5 battalion returned home unharmed after the war. At the same time, the fate of that small unit, which under the command of Captain Beck and Colonel Beecham went into battle, remains a mystery to this day. Some historians say that the death of several hundred soldiers during the war on the battlefield is a completely natural phenomenon. However, there are certain oddities associated with this story. So, in particular, the strict secrecy that is shrouded in this whole story is incomprehensible. Why is there no evidence that there was a collision, but at the same time there are deaths. The problem is that researchers don't knowwhether an examination of the bodies of the dead soldiers was carried out and whether at least some conclusions were made based on the results obtained.
Those documents that have survived to our time make it possible to quite confidently say that there was a kind of fog and there were British soldiers who most likely died behind the front line. It is possible that the stories about aliens appeared much later than the publication of official documents, so there is no confidence in the veracity of the source of the speech. Some historians have hypothesized that British soldiers could have been captured and executed by the Turks, who subsequently refused to admit their guilt and denied any clashes from battalions 1/5. Probably, the soldiers died in a battle about which the command knew nothing. All these versions, with a large number of shortcomings, still look more realistic than the hypothesis about aliens.