John Antill

Who was John Antill?

Major General John Macquarie Antill, Jr. CB, CMG was a senior Colonial Army officer in the New South Wales Mounted Rifles and the Second Boer War, and an Australian Army and general in World War I. He retired from the army in 1924 as an honorary Major General. In retirement he co-authored a play with his daughter about the life of William Redfern, called The Emancipist.

Mainly due to Peter Weir's 1981 film Gallipoli, Antill is best known for not stopping the waves of suicidal charges on the Turkish lines at The Nek in the Gallipoli Campaign; there are a variety of interpretations of the command circumstances, including much criticism of the story portrayed in the film. However, there is no doubt that all four waves of the charges barely got "over the top" before being cut down by Turkish fire. The ANZAC forces suffered a 60% casualty rate, most having been cut down en masse just feet from their own trenches.

To quote Rex Clark in the Australian Dictionary of Biography: