Gallipoli campaign

• 1. Introduction

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  The Gallipoli campaign lasted from the 19th of February 1915 to the 9th of January 1916. By the time it ended, each side had suffered approximately 250,000 casualties. The Turks know it as the Çanakkale Savaşı, and the narrow peninsula where much of it was fought is now called Gelibolu.

  The idea behind it was bold. Britain, France and the Russian Empire hoped to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War by taking control of the Turkish straits. If the plan had worked, Allied warships could have threatened the Ottoman capital at Constantinople and isolated it from the empire's Asian lands. Supplies could also have flowed through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles to Russia's warm-water ports.

  Why did such a promising idea begin with a naval gamble? How did two armies come to face each other across trenches only a few metres apart? And who ended up paying for the outcome, from generals to a British government?

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• 2. The Naval Gamble

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  On the 29th of October 1914, two former German warships bombarded the Russian port of Odessa and sank several ships. They now served the Ottomans as the battlecruiser Yavûz Sultân Selîm and the cruiser Midilli. Two days later the Ottoman Empire entered the war and opened a campaign against Russia in the Caucasus.

  The British first looked elsewhere. Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, favoured a landing near Alexandretta on the Mediterranean, an idea originally presented by Boghos Nubar in 1914. The town was the strategic centre of the Ottoman railway network, so seizing it would split the empire in two. France could not spare the resources, and it did not want British forces operating in a region Britain had agreed in 1912 was French territory. The plan was abandoned.

  By the end of 1914, the Western Front had settled into trench warfare following the First Battle of Ypres in Flanders. Germany and Austria-Hungary had closed the overland trade routes between Britain and France in the west and Russia in the east. The White Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk froze in winter, and the Imperial German Navy blockaded the Baltic. That left the Dardanelles, which the Ottomans began to mine in November.

  Later that month, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a naval attack on the straits. Part of his case rested on erroneous reports of Ottoman troop strength. He wanted to send many obsolete battleships, which were of no use against the German High Seas Fleet, supported by a small occupation force from the army. He also hoped the attack would pull Bulgaria and Greece into the war on the Entente side. Then, on the 2nd of January 1915, Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia asked Britain for help against the Ottomans, and planning began for a naval demonstration.

  On the 19th of February 1915, an Anglo-French flotilla that included the dreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth began shelling the Ottoman coastal batteries from long range. Two days earlier, a seaplane from HMS Ark Royal had scouted the straits. The British had planned to use eight aircraft to spot for the guns, but only one Short Type 136 was serviceable. By the 25th of February the outer forts had been reduced and the entrance cleared of mines. The mobile Ottoman batteries, positioned on the orders of General Otto Liman von Sanders, kept evading the bombardment and threatened the minesweepers.

  On the 4th of March, Admiral Sackville Carden cabled Churchill that the fleet could expect to reach Istanbul within 14 days. An intercepted German wireless message suggested the Ottoman forts were running short of ammunition. Carden, suffering from stress, was then placed on the sick list by the medical officer, and Admiral John de Robeck took command.

  The main attack came on the morning of the 18th of March 1915. Eighteen battleships, with cruisers and destroyers, steamed against the narrowest point of the Dardanelles, where the strait is about a mile wide. According to the Ottoman official account, by 2:00 p.m. the telephone wires to the forts had been cut and some guns knocked out. The French battleship Bouvet then struck a mine and capsized in two minutes. Only 75 of her 718 men survived.

  The civilian-manned minesweepers turned back under artillery fire, leaving the minefields largely intact. The battleship HMS Irresistible and the battlecruiser HMS Inflexible both struck mines, and Irresistible sank. HMS Ocean went to rescue her, was disabled by a shell, hit a mine, and was abandoned. The French battleships Suffren and Gaulois were damaged after sailing through a line of mines that the Ottoman minelayer Nusret had laid in secret ten days earlier. De Robeck sounded the general recall.

  Some senior officers, including Commodore Roger Keyes of Queen Elizabeth, believed victory had been close because the Ottoman guns were nearly out of ammunition. The views of de Robeck and the First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher, prevailed instead. Two Entente submarines also tried to pass through the Dardanelles, and mines and strong currents destroyed both. The mobile Ottoman guns that had defeated the minesweepers now became the target of a land force.

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• 3. Rival Preparations

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  General Sir Ian Hamilton received command of the 78,000 men of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force from Kitchener. Australian and New Zealand soldiers were already camped in Egypt, training before a planned move to France. They were organised into the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, known as ANZAC, under Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood. The regular 29th Division and the Royal Naval Division joined them, and a French expeditionary corps was placed under Hamilton too.

  The Allies discounted the Ottoman soldier. That attitude came from a "sense of superiority" rooted in the empire's decline and its poor showing in Libya in 1911-1912 and in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Intelligence was thin enough that some of it came from Egyptian travel guides. Even the loading of the ships went wrong. Troops were packed aboard in the order they would disembark, which caused long delays and forced the French at Mudros to detour to Alexandria. A five-week pause until the end of April followed.

  The Ottoman 5th Army, a conscript force under Sanders, had five divisions with another on the way. Many of its senior officers were German. Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal knew the peninsula from operations against Bulgaria in the Balkan Wars, and he predicted landings at Cape Helles and Gaba Tepe. Sanders thought Besika Bay on the Asiatic coast was the likelier target, and he gathered a third of the army there. Two divisions guarded Bulair at the northern end. Kemal's 19th Division waited in reserve near Boghali.

  Kemal objected that the defenders were spread too thinly to beat an invasion on the beaches. He felt Sanders' classic scheme suited a front with strategic depth, which Gallipoli lacked. His commander, Esat Pasha, did not press the point forcefully. Sanders later reflected that the British had allowed the defenders "four good weeks of respite". They used it to build roads and small boats for crossing the Narrows, wire the beaches, and make improvised mines from torpedo warheads. Troops marched at night to avoid Allied air reconnaissance.

  Between 15,000 and 25,000 Bosniaks, mostly from the Sandzak region on the border of Serbia and Montenegro, travelled to Çanakkale to fight in the Ottoman ranks. On the 17th of April, the British submarine HMS E15 hit a net and ran aground. An Ottoman fort shelled it, killing its commander, Lieutenant Commander Theodore S. Brodie, and six of his crew. The landings were scheduled for the 23rd of April, but bad weather pushed them to the 25th.

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• 4. Landing Day

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  Five beaches were chosen for the 25th of April. The 29th Division was to land at Helles on the southern tip, while the ANZACs, led by the 3rd Australian Infantry Brigade, would come ashore north of Gaba Tepe. The French staged a diversion at Kum Kale on the Asian shore. As the Royal Naval Division pretended to prepare a landing at Bulair, a New Zealand officer named Bernard Freyberg swam ashore under fire to light flares. He later received the Distinguished Service Order.

  At around 2:00 a.m., an Ottoman observer on a hill at Ariburnu spotted a crowd of ships on the horizon. Captain Faik confirmed it through his binoculars and warned Ismet Bey at Kabatepe. Meanwhile Sanders had gone to Bulair, drawn by the few Allied ships there. He stayed for two days with the 5th Division, waiting for a landing that never came. His absence slowed decisions and undermined a defence that depended on speed.

  At 4:00 a.m., the first wave of the 3rd Brigade rowed towards the shore. Undetected currents or a navigational error carried them about 2 km too far north, to a bay just south of Ari Burnu. The land rose steeply behind the beach, and the maps were inaccurate. Two Ottoman companies held commanding ground and inflicted many casualties before they were overcome. Australian parties pushing forward lost contact among ravines and scrub and broke into small groups.

  By mid-morning, Kemal had reorganised the defenders for a counter-attack on the heights of Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair. That evening, Major General William Bridges and Major General Sir Alexander Godley recommended re-embarking. Birdwood agreed, but the navy advised that withdrawal was impossible, and Hamilton ordered the men to dig in. About 2,000 men had been killed or wounded, and the perimeter they held was less than 2 km long.

  One piece of news from that night lifted spirits. The Australian submarine HMAS AE2, under Lieutenant Commander Henry Stoker, had slipped through the straits on the night of the 24th and 25th. By 6:00 a.m. it reached Chanak and torpedoed an Ottoman gunboat. Reports of this feat were relayed to the troops ashore and weighed in Birdwood's decision to persist. Stoker was told to "generally run amok" in the Sea of Marmara, where he cruised for five days. On the 30th of April, AE2 was holed by the torpedo boat Sultanhisar, scuttled, and its crew captured.

  At Helles, Major General Aylmer Hunter-Weston's 29th Division landed on beaches named S, V, W, X and Y. At V Beach, the collier SS River Clyde was run aground beneath the Seddülbahir fortress so troops could leave by ramps. Of the first 200 men to disembark, only 21 reached the shore. At W Beach, later called Lancashire Landing, the Lancashire Fusiliers lost 600 of 1,000 men but overwhelmed the defenders. Six Victoria Crosses went to the Lancashires, six more were awarded for V Beach, and three followed the next day.

  On the slopes below Chunuk Bair, the Ottoman 57th Infantry Regiment had run out of ammunition and had only bayonets. Kemal ordered them: "I do not order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places". Every man in the regiment was killed or wounded. The Dublin and Munster Fusiliers were so depleted they merged into a unit called The Dubsters. Of 1,012 Dubliners who landed, just 11 got through the whole campaign unscathed.

  At Y Beach, the Allies landed unopposed and advanced inland, but the commander had no orders to exploit the position. He pulled his force back to the beach. It was as close as the Allies ever came to taking the village of Krithia.

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• 5. Attrition and Truce

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  On the 28th of April, the Allies attacked Krithia. Hunter-Weston's plan was overly complex and badly communicated, and his tired troops were still shaken from the beach fighting. The Ottomans stopped the advance halfway between the Helles headland and the village at about 6:00 p.m., having inflicted 3,000 casualties. With Ottoman reinforcements arriving, the chance of a quick Allied victory vanished.

  The Second Battle of Krithia began on the morning of the 6th of May with 20,000 men and was planned for daylight. The Australian 2nd Brigade charged across open ground and gained 600 m, still 400 m short of its objective, at a cost of 1,000 casualties. The Third Battle of Krithia on the 4th of June also failed. The British lost 4,500 of 20,000 men, and the French lost 2,000 of 10,000, about 25 percent on each side. After that, objectives were measured in hundreds of yards.

  Sniping took a toll on officers at Anzac. Major General William Bridges, the commander of the 1st Australian Division, was wounded near Steele's Post and died aboard a hospital ship on the 18th of May.

  On the 19th of May, 42,000 Ottoman troops attacked Anzac to drive 17,000 Australians and New Zealanders into the sea. British aircraft had spotted the preparations the day before. The Ottomans suffered about 13,000 casualties, of which 3,000 were deaths. The Australians and New Zealanders lost 160 killed and 468 wounded. Among the dead was the stretcher bearer John Simpson Kirkpatrick, whose rescues of wounded men on a donkey became a famous part of the Australian story.

  So many bodies lay between the lines that a truce was arranged on the 24th of May by Aubrey Herbert and others. Private Victor Laidlaw of the Australian 2nd Field Ambulance wrote that "things are unnaturally quiet" and that many men were bathing as if on a seaside holiday. The truce was never formally repeated.

  At sea, the Allies suffered heavy blows. The destroyer Muâvenet-i Millîye torpedoed HMS Goliath on the 13th of May, killing 570 of her 750 crew, including Captain Thomas Shelford. A German submarine then sank HMS Triumph on the 25th of May and HMS Majestic on the 27th. The Allies pulled most of their warships back to Imbros, which sharply reduced their firepower at Helles.

  Beneath the surface, the story was different. HMS E14, under Lieutenant Commander Edward Boyle, entered the Sea of Marmara on the 27th of April and sank four ships. One was the transport Gul Djemal, carrying 6,000 troops. Boyle received the Victoria Cross. Lieutenant Commander Martin Nasmith's HMS E11 sank or disabled eleven ships after passing through on the 18th of May, and it even entered Constantinople Harbour. On the 8th of August, E11 would torpedo the Ottoman battleship Barbaros Hayreddin, with 253 men lost.

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• 6. The August Offensive

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  The failure at Krithia pushed Hamilton towards a new plan built around the Sari Bair hills. Both sides had grown, with the Entente rising from five divisions to fifteen and the Ottomans from six to sixteen. Two fresh divisions would land at Suvla, 5 mi north of Anzac, while forces at Anzac advanced through rough, thinly held ground.

  The Suvla landing took place on the night of the 6th of August against light resistance. Lieutenant General Frederick Stopford, the British commander, limited his early objectives and did not push hard for an advance inland. Little more than the beach was taken, and the Ottomans occupied the Anafarta Hills, which turned Suvla into static trench warfare.

  The Battle of Lone Pine, led by the Australian 1st Infantry Brigade, began as a diversion. It captured the main Ottoman trench line and drew defenders away. The New Zealand Infantry Brigade reached within 500 m of the nearer peak of Chunuk Bair by dawn on the 7th of August but could not take the summit until the next morning.

  The Nek was a disaster. On the morning of the 7th of August, the Australian 3rd Light Horse Brigade attacked on a narrow front, timed to coincide with the New Zealand advance. The opening artillery barrage lifted seven minutes too early, which alerted the Ottomans. The attack was a costly failure. Meanwhile the Australian 4th Infantry Brigade and an Indian brigade lost direction in the night, so the attack on Hill 971 never happened.

  The New Zealanders held Chunuk Bair for two days before two New Army battalions relieved them. On the 10th of August, an Ottoman counter-attack led by Kemal swept the new arrivals off the heights. Of 760 men in the Wellington Battalion who reached the summit, 711 became casualties. With that ground lost, the Entente's best chance of victory was gone.

  Further efforts failed. The 54th Division crossed the Anafarta Plain on the 12th of August without success, and Hamilton briefly considered evacuating Suvla and Anzac. The Battle of Scimitar Hill and the Battle of Hill 60 on the 21st of August also failed. On the 17th of August, Hamilton had requested another 95,000 troops. But the French had announced an autumn offensive in France, and a meeting of the Dardanelles Committee on the 20th of August gave that offensive priority. Only about 25,000 reinforcements were left for Gallipoli.

  The summer heat brought swarms of flies, and unburied corpses made eating difficult. Dysentery spread through the Entente trenches at Anzac and Helles, and the Ottomans suffered heavily from disease too. Yet the writer Alan Moorehead described an old Ottoman batman who was allowed to hang his platoon's washing on the barbed wire unmolested. Gifts of dates and sweets were thrown across no man's land in exchange for tinned beef and cigarettes. On the 25th of September, Kitchener proposed sending two British divisions and one French division to Salonika, which began the end of the campaign.

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• 7. Leaving the Peninsula

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  Reporters including Keith Murdoch and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett smuggled out criticism of Hamilton's performance, and British opinion turned. The idea of evacuation was raised on the 11th of October 1915. Hamilton resisted, fearing damage to British prestige, but he was sacked soon afterwards and replaced by Lieutenant General Sir Charles Monro.

  Bulgaria's entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers changed the strategic picture. A land route opened between Germany and the Ottoman Empire, and the Germans rearmed the Ottomans with heavy artillery, modern aircraft and experienced crews. Austro-Hungarian howitzer and mortar batteries arrived as well. This was especially dangerous on the confined front at Anzac. Monro recommended evacuation, Kitchener visited the region in early November and agreed, and the British Cabinet confirmed the decision in early December.

  A rainstorm that began on the 26th of November showed how untenable the Allied position had become. The downpour lasted three days at Suvla and flooded trenches, drowned soldiers and washed unburied bodies into the lines. A blizzard in early December killed more men from exposure, and thousands suffered frostbite.

  Troop numbers at Suvla and Anzac had been reduced since the 7th of December, and the last men left before dawn on the 20th of December. Ruses covered the departure. William Scurry rigged a rifle to fire by itself, using water dripping into a pan attached to the trigger. At Anzac Cove, the troops stayed silent for an hour or more, until curious Ottoman soldiers came to inspect the trenches. The Anzacs then opened fire, which discouraged further inspections. A mine detonated at the Nek killed 70 Ottoman soldiers, and the Australians suffered no casualties on the final night.

  Helles was held a little longer. The decision to leave was made on the 28th of December, and this time the Ottomans were watching for signs. Sanders attacked at Gully Spur on the 7th of January 1916 and was repulsed with heavy losses. That night, under cover of naval fire, the British fell back 5 mi to the beaches and boarded boats from makeshift piers. The last British troops left Lancashire Landing around 04:00 on the 8th of January. The Newfoundland Regiment, part of the rearguard, withdrew on the 9th. The Plymouth Battalion, Royal Marine Light Infantry, among the first to land, were the last to leave.

  Planners had feared as many as 30,000 casualties. Instead 35,268 troops, 3,689 horses and mules, 127 guns and 328 vehicles were taken off. Some 508 mules that could not be embarked were killed, and 1,590 vehicles were left behind with smashed wheels. Shortly after dawn the Ottomans retook Helles. A couple of days later, three Fokker Eindeckers shot down two RNAS aircraft, the first British flying losses of the campaign.

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• 8. Verdicts and Legacy

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  Historians have not agreed on a label. Harvey Broadbent called the campaign a close-fought Allied defeat, and Les Carlyon saw a stalemate. Peter Hart argued the Ottomans held the Entente away from its real objectives with relative ease, and Philip Haythornthwaite called it a disaster for the Allies. The list of Allied failings is long, including unclear goals, poor maps, weak intelligence, too little artillery, inexperienced troops and overconfidence. The campaign also deepened a split between strategists who wanted to concentrate on the Western Front and those who wanted to strike Germany's allies in the east.

  The submarines were the Allies' one significant success. Between April and December 1915, nine British and four French submarines carried out 15 patrols in the Sea of Marmara. They sank a battleship, a destroyer, five gunboats, 11 troop transports, 44 supply ships and 148 sailing vessels. Eight Allied submarines were lost. The German naval historian Admiral Eberhard von Mantey later concluded that had the sea-lanes been completely cut, the Ottoman 5th Army would likely have faced catastrophe.

  Careers rose and fell. Gallipoli marked the end for Hamilton and Stopford. Hunter-Weston went on to lead VIII Corps on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. John Monash and Harry Chauvel, the Australian brigade commanders, were promoted to divisional and corps command. Kitchener's influence waned after the coalition government formed in May 1915, and in early December he was overruled on support for the French at Salonika.

  In Britain, Fisher resigned in May 1915 after a bitter dispute with Churchill. The Conservatives learned that Churchill would be staying, and the resulting crisis forced Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to end his Liberal government and form a coalition. His government then set up commissions of inquiry into Gallipoli and into the defeat at Kut. The Dardanelles Commission issued its first report in 1917 and its final report in 1919.

  The Ottomans took heart from their victory. In April 1916, they forced a British expedition to surrender at Kut Al Amara, and troops in southern Palestine prepared to strike at the Suez Canal. Defeat at the Battle of Romani and a shortage of materials to finish a military railway ended that ambition.

  Military planners studied the lessons of Gallipoli before the Normandy Landings of 1944 and again during the Falklands War in 1982. In 1996, Theodore Gatchel wrote that between the wars it became a focal point for the study of amphibious warfare. Russell Weigley argued that this analysis left much of the world's military believing assaults from the sea could not succeed against modern defences. In September 1943 at Finschhafen in New Guinea, Australians made their first opposed amphibious landing since Gallipoli. Troops came ashore on wrong beaches, but their training drew on Gallipoli's lessons and they reorganised quickly.

  In Turkey, the campaign is regarded as a defining moment in the nation's history. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rose to prominence as a commander there, and in 1923 he became the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. Some consider the campaign the beginning of Australian and New Zealand national consciousness. Every the 25th of April, the anniversary of the landings, the two countries observe Anzac Day, which has become their most significant commemoration of military casualties and veterans, surpassing Remembrance Day.

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