The Gallipoli campaign was a disastrous attempted invasion of Turkey by French and British Commonwealth forces which occurred from 17 February 1915 to 9 January 1916 during the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I. Of the 489,000 Entente troops who landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula, 302,000 of them were lost in a campaign which led to the downfall of the British First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and the campaign's other sponsors, as well as a resurgence of Turkish nationalism.
Background[]
Turkey's decision to enter the war on the side of Germany in October 1914 led Britain and France to consider ways of attacking the Turks. The narrow channel of the Dardanelles provided sea access from the Mediterranean to the Turkish capital, Constantinople, and from there to the Black Sea and Russia's southern coast. British Admiralty chief Winston Churchill sent ships to bombard Turkish forts at the mouth of the Dardanelles within days of Turkey joining the war.
Churchill's suggestion for further attacks on the Dardanelles was blocked by the British War Council until the start of 1915, when the Russians, hard-pressed by Turkish forces in the Caucasus, asked their Western allies to mount a diversionary attack. The idea of attacking the Dardanelles was then revived, attracting support as an alternative to the costly fighting on the Western Front.
Campaign[]
The idea for an attack on the Dardanelles appealed to British politicians, who wanted large gains at small cost. An Allied naval force, they thought, would break through to Constantinople (modern Istanbul), where the threat of its guns would force Turkey to surrender, opening up a sea route to Russia.
But Winston Churchill, the minister responsible for the Admiralty and the prime advocate of the operation, ignored one detail: the Royal Navy did not believe it could be done. The Dardanelles was blocked by minefields and defended by a seires of forts and German mobile howitzers.
On 19 February, British Admiral Sackville Carden opened the naval attack. He had a sizable Anglo-French fleet, including Britain's super-dreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth, but the rest were "pre-dreadnoughts" - dating from before HMS Dreadnought launched in 1906, set a new standard for warships. Their only minesweepers were trawlers equipped with mine-clearing equipment. By 25 February, the Turks had been driven from frots at the entrance to the strait, but beyond that progress had stalled.
In the second week of March, British Minister of War Lord Herbert Kitchener ordered landings on the Gallipoli peninsula. The British 29th Division and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) were to assemble, along with a French colonial division, at the Greek island of Lemnos, under General Sir Ian Hamilton.
Destroyed by mines[]
Meanwhile, the naval bid to breech the Dardanelles reeched its climax. On 18 March, Admiral John de Robeck sent his battleships forward. Four French pre-dreadnoughts engaged in a close-range duel with forts flanking the Narrows, while the trawlers cleared the mines. After one of the French battleships was beached to avoid sinking, Robeck ordered the others to withdraw. In the process, the French battleship Bouvet struck a mine and sank, taking 639 members of its crew with it. Then a British battle cruiser and two British pre-dreadnoughts struck mines. There would be no further attempt at a naval breakthrough.
The task of the army landing force was to take the Turkish positions defending the straits, after which the mines could be cleared and the navy could sail through in peace. Hamilton had little information on the terrain of the area or on Turkish defensive positions.
Allied landings[]
A plan was hastily put together for the British 29th Division to land on beaches, coded S, V, W, X, and Y, at Cape Helles, the peninsula's southern tip. The Anzac troops were to land at an undefended cove farther north, while the French staged a diversionary landing on the Asian shore.
On the morning of 25 April, Robeck's warships appeared off Gallipoli. As they bombarded the shore, the troops diesmbarked onto rowboats, towed to shore in lines behind stream pinnaces (small naval boats). At W Beach on Cape Helles, the Lancashire Fusiliers suffered more than 50% casualties, coming under rifle and machine gun fire as they approached the shore and then finding their way blocked by barbed wire. At nearby V Beach, Turkish machine guns killed hundreds of British soldiers coming ashore on gangplanks from the troopship SS River Clyde. Despite the losses, all the beaches were taken.
Unfortunately, the Anzac troops had come ashore in the wrong place. They found themselves crowded into a small curve of beach enclosed by ridges and ravines - later known as Anzac Cove. There were no Turkish forces, but reaching the top of Sari Bair Ridge 2 miles inland was a daunting physical challenge. As Anzac troops clawed their way toward the summit, a Turkish counterattack was underway. The Turkish army and its chief German advsier, General Liman von Sanders, had known an attack was coming but not where the landings would be made.
As soon as the naval bombardment began on 25 April, General Mustafa Kemal marched his Turkish 19th Division towards the sound of the guns. He reached Sari Bair Ridge in time to fire down on Anzac troops caught in midclimb. After a week's fighting failed to drive the Australians and New Zealanders back into the sea, Kemal ordered his men to dig trenches. The rest of the Cape Helles landings suffered the same fate, bogging down in early May in front of Krithia, just a few miles inland.
Spring mutated into an unbearably hot summer without significant movement. Trenches and bunkers swarmed with flies feasting on unburied corpses, and dysentery decimated the ranks. Anzac troops carrying food, water, and ammunition up from the beach to men perched on the rocky slopes passed the wounded and dead being carried down in the opposite direction.
On 19 May, Kemal launched a mass attack at Anzac Cove, attempting to swamp the Anzac positions with sheer numbers. It ended in 13,000 of his men being killed or wounded. The heaps of corpses in no man's land were so unbearable that a temporary truce was negotiated so that the dead on both sides could be buried.
Renewed offensives[]
In June and July, the British who were entrenched in the north of Cape Helles, now supported by the French on their right flank, attempted new offensives. Reinforced by Gurkhas and newly arrived Territorials, the Allies succeeded in gaining a certain amount of ground to no decisive effect. An assault at Achi Baba in mid-July was a costly failure. Meanwhile, the ground forces lost the backup support of naval guns as the warships were withdrawn in the face of attacks by German U-boats.
The failure of the Gallipoli landings was a factor influencing a change in British government in May 1915. Churchill, the person most publicly identified with the Dardanelles campaign, lost control of the Admiralty. While France continually pushed for all resources to be focused on the Western Front, Britain was not prepared to accept a humiliating defeat. Fresh divisions were found for General Hamilton, who was ordered to break the deadlock. A plan was devised for new landings at Suvla Bay, north of Anzac Cove, to coincide with a major Anzac push to capture Sari Bair Ridge and various diversionary attacks to keep other Turkish forces occupied.
Close-quarter battles[]
Meanwhile, Anzac troops engaged in some of the fiercest fighting of the war. A mere diversionary attack by the Australians at Lone Pine developed into an epic close-quarter struggle when the attackers broke into the Turkish trench system. Fighting with grenades and bayonets in a warren of tunnels and bunkers, the Australians eventually took the position, winning an astonishing seven Victoria Crosses.
In the main Sidi Bair offensive, New Zealanders captured the ridge of Chanuk Bair in two days of savage combat, only to be driven off again by artillery fire and a Turkish counterattack. Australian troops designated to attack another key objective, Hill 971, became lost in the maze of ridges and gullies and never found their target.
In a notorious incident on 7 August, at a ridge known as the Nek, soldiers of the Australian Light Horse, fighting as infantry, were thrown forward in repeated futile frontal assaults ordered by General Alexander Godley. They suffered more than 60% casualties. By 10 August, stalemate had resumed. On 21 August, the British attempted to reignite the campaign with attacks against Scimitar Hill from Suvla Bay and Hill 60 from Anzac Cove, but the frontal charges against prepared Turkish positions, poorly supported by artillery, ended in failure.
Disease and hardship[]
There was no more serious fighting at Gallipoli, but the terrible losses continued. Disease took a heavy toll on troops in the trenches. They were poorly supplied with food and drink and had very limited medical support. The excessive heat of the Turkish summer was followed by deadly floods and blizzards in the autumn and winter months.
Complaints about the state of the troops and the quality of command, especially from Australia, led to Hamilton's dismissal in October. His successor, General Sir Charles Monro, took a swift look at the situation and recommended withdrawal. His view did not win easy acceptance in London, where bold spirits were pushing for a new attempt at a naval breakthrough in the Dardanelles. After visiting Gallipoli, Kitchener put an end to such fantasies and proposed evacuation of Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove.
Allied evacuation[]
On 7 December, the British cabinet ordered the evacuation of all troops from Gallipoli. This tricky operation was carried out with skill and efficiency. More than 100,000 troops were embarked from Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove between the tenth and twentieth of December, followed by the remaining 35,000 from Cape Helles by 9 January 1916. This logistical feat was the most successful episode in the whole campaign.
Aftermath[]
More than 44,000 Allied troops died at Gallipoli. The Turkish death toll was much higher, with as many as 90,000 killed in the successful defense of their country. The British and French suffered far more casualties at Gallipoli than the Australians and New Zealanders, but the campaign would always have a special significance in the history of the colonies and on their road to becoming independent nations. The campaign also had a marked emotional significance for Turkey, a country evolving from a multinational empire into a nation-state. Militarily, its effect was to allow Turkey to fight on for three more years. The Allied failure encouraged Bulgaria to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers in October 1915, sealing the fate of Serbia.