Gallipoli – A Campaign
Written by Marcia R. Stevens and Malcolm P. Stevens
Historians generally agree that if the Gallipoli campaign of World War I had been an Allied success, it might have changed history.


By late 1914 the Western Front had already settled into the grim stalemate of trench warfare and the Allies' casualties were approaching an unprecedented one million men. Influential voices in the British government and military, notably First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and First Sea Lord Fisher were convinced that the appalling loss of life would continue indefinitely unless the Allies undertook a decisive military thrust through Turkey, a German ally, to relieve the pressure, and, above all, open a supply route to Russia so that Russian troops would stay in the war.


It was thus that at 8:00 a.m. on February 19, 1915, British battleships began a long-range bombardment of Turkish forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles - the strait giving access to Istanbul - and sent minesweepers into the strait to clear the way for battleships to shell Chanak (Canakkale). It soon became obvious, however, that the battle was not going to be won with the fleet alone. Accordingly, a heterogenous expeditionary force of British, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, French and Senegalese - some 120,000 strong - was assembled to land on both sides of the strait. But the British loaded their transport ships in such a way that guns and munitions, needed immediately upon landing, were buried beneath tents and other supplies, and while the ships were sent back to Egypt for reloading, with a subsequent delay of six weeks, the Turks were able to reorganize their defenses.


Troops were finally committed on April 25: British troops at five places in the Cape Helles area, a Trench force at Kum Kale, and Australian and New Zealand troops (the Anzacs) - swept off course by uncharted currents - at An Burnu where they had to scale steep cliffs to establish a foothold.


Ironically, General Liman Von Sanders, the German commander in charge of the Turks, had not expected the attacks to come where they did; rather he was convinced the Allies would land at Bolayir at the narrow neck of the peninsula, and he had deployed his forces accordingly. But a relatively obscure Turkish lieutenant-colonel named Mustafa Kemal, correctly predicted the Allies' strategy, and halted the Anzac advance at An Burnu.


When it became clear they could not take the peninsula with the forces at hand, the British decided on a new assault further north. In August, reinforcements were landed on the Anzac beachhead and fresh landings took place at Suvla Bay. But again the commanders failed to follow up their initial advantage, and Kemal's forces retained control.


Both sides eventually tired of the brutal campaign. Conditions were appalling: poor food, lack of water, plagues of flies, disease, intense heat during day and, as autumn gave way to winter, bitter cold at night; and always the deadly shrapnel from artillery barrages. At last the British did one of the few things in the entire campaign well - they withdrew. In mid-December the Suvla and Anzac beachheads were evacuated under cover of darkness over a period of several days. It was a remarkable accomplishment, thousands evacuated without a single casualty, and without the knowledge of the Turkish defenders. Incredibly, they accomplished the same feat again in early January, 1916, at Cape Helles. After 10 months and 500,000 Allied and Turkish casualties, the campaign was over.


In the west, the inquiries into the disaster tarnished or destroyed reputations. Churchill, for example, went into political obscurity until World War II. And in Russia, anger against the war inflamed by the Gallipoli failure continued to grow, culminating, at last, in the Russian Revolution.


In the Middle East, the Gallipoli campaign raised Mustafa Kemal to a position of prominence and set the stage for his meteoric rise to power. Within a few short years he had cemented the territorial integrity of modern Turkey and, as Kemal Ataturk, became one of the great leaders in the Middle East, and, on the world stage, one of the giants of the 20th century