Gallipoli Campaign
The Allies landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in April 1915 and evacuated eight months later having gained almost nothing. The idea was Churchill's and was strategically sound: force the Dardanelles, take Constantinople, knock the Ottomans out of the war and open a supply route to Russia through the Black Sea. The execution was almost uniformly bad. A purely naval attempt in March lost three battleships to a minefield that had been laid in a bay the sweepers had not covered, and was called off. That gave the Ottomans five weeks' warning to fortify the peninsula under the German general Liman von Sanders. The landings on 25 April put British and French troops at Cape Helles and Australians and New Zealanders a mile from their intended beach under cliffs, and both were held on the shoreline within days. Mustafa Kemal, commanding a division at Chunuk Bair, ordered his men that he did not command them to attack but to die, and stopped the advance on the high ground. What followed was trench warfare in summer heat with flies, dysentery and no possibility of manoeuvre. The August offensive at Suvla failed through inertia on the beach. Some 44,000 Allied and 87,000 Ottoman soldiers died. The evacuation in December and January was the one flawless operation, removing 105,000 men with almost no casualties. Anzac Day is the Australian and New Zealand national commemoration. The campaign also made two national identities and one Turkish one. Australia and New Zealand date a good deal of their sense of themselves from it, and Mustafa Kemal's reputation as the defender of the straits is what made Atatürk possible.
- Year: 1915 CE
- Category: Military
