The Gallipoli Campaign, 1915: The Doomed Gamble for the Dardanelles

Before dawn on 25 April 1915, boats packed with soldiers were towed and rowed toward the dark coast of the Gallipoli peninsula. Enemy fire began as soon as the first men came ashore. The landing was meant to open the way to Constantinople and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war in a single stroke. It became eight and a half months of deadlock on a strip of coast, ended by one of the best organized withdrawals of the war, and it gave three nations, Australia, New Zealand and modern Turkey, a story they still tell about their own birth.³

Background: a way around the trenches

By the end of 1914 the Western Front had frozen into trenches, and some Allied leaders looked for a new front that might break the deadlock. The Ottoman Empire had entered the war on Germany's side in the autumn of 1914. Its capital, Constantinople, could be reached from the Mediterranean only through the long, narrow strait of the Dardanelles. If an Allied fleet could get through, it could threaten the city, perhaps knock the Ottomans out of the war and open a supply route through the Black Sea to Russia.⁴

The most energetic champion of the idea was Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. The Imperial War Museums list the hopes that rested on it: help for Russia, the weakest of the Allies, security for the Suez Canal and British oil interests in the Middle East, and a push for wavering Balkan states such as Bulgaria and Greece to join the Allies. In their judgment it was an alluring plan built on the mistaken belief that the Ottomans were weak and would quickly give way.⁵ › The greatest battles of the First World War

The naval attack

At first the British government decided to try ships alone. British and French warships began bombarding the forts of the strait on 19 February 1915. On 18 March the fleet made its great attempt to force the narrows. It lost several battleships, sunk or damaged, above all to mines, and the admirals broke off the attack, convinced that the fleet could not get through without help from the army. The naval operation had also warned the Ottomans that a landing was coming, so the army would go ashore without surprise.⁶

Armies and commanders

General Sir Ian Hamilton was given a force assembled in haste: the British 29th Division, the Royal Naval Division, the French Oriental Expeditionary Corps, the 29th Indian Brigade and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the Anzacs. The National Army Museum notes that Hamilton had no specialized landing craft, few of his troops had been trained for such an operation, and the plan underestimated the Ottoman defenses. Over the whole campaign the Gallipoli Association counts some 559,000 Allied personnel committed, about 420,000 of them British and Empire troops, 50,000 Australians, 13,000 New Zealanders and 80,000 French; the museum speaks of a force of nearly 500,000.⁷

The defense was in the hands of the Ottoman Fifth Army under Otto Liman von Sanders, a German general who had led the German military mission to the Ottoman army since 1913 and took command on the peninsula in 1915. One of his divisional commanders was Mustafa Kemal, who commanded the 19th Division on the peninsula and would later be known as Atatürk.⁸ › The greatest Ottoman commanders

The campaign in phases

The landings of 25 April

Early on 25 April the 29th Division landed on several beaches around Cape Helles, at the tip of the peninsula, while a French force made a diversionary landing at Kum Kale on the Asian shore. The British aimed to take the village of Krithia and the high ground beyond it and then push north to the forts above the strait. At several beaches the attackers met barbed wire and well defended positions and suffered appalling losses before they got a foothold.⁹

Farther north the Anzacs went ashore near Gaba Tepe, at the place soon called Anzac Cove. In the dark the boats drifted north of their intended landing point, and the men came ashore below steep hills, cliffs and ravines they had not been told to expect. They scrambled up and took the first ridges, but Ottoman reinforcements were arriving. Mustafa Kemal acted on his own initiative and led a counterattack that pinned the Anzacs to the heights just above the cove.¹⁰

Krithia and the summer deadlock

Hamilton tried to break out from Helles toward Krithia. Three successive attacks between 28 April and 4 June failed against the Ottoman lines, and the campaign stalled. Trench warfare, the very thing the expedition had been meant to escape, took hold on the peninsula as it had on the Western Front.¹¹

Conditions were dreadful. The beachheads were overlooked by Ottoman-held high ground and under constant shellfire and sniping. In the summer heat food spoiled, water was short, swarms of flies spread over the unburied dead and disease ran through the trenches, overwhelming the inadequate medical services. Sickness accounted for a large share of all the casualties.¹²

The August offensive

Reinforced, Hamilton tried again on 6 August. A diversionary attack was made at Helles, a drive was launched from Anzac toward the Sari Bair heights, and new divisions landed at Suvla Bay to the north. The Suvla landing caught the Ottomans by surprise, but the troops of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford's IX Corps moved inland too slowly, and the chance was lost. The Australian attack at Lone Pine is counted by the National Army Museum among the few local successes, while the Australian War Memorial lists it among the August attempts that failed to break through.¹³

The attack on Sari Bair came closest to success. Early on 8 August New Zealand troops took the summit of Chunuk Bair. They held it under constant counterattacks, and two days later the hill was lost again to the Ottomans. By 10 August the offensive had run out of momentum.¹⁴

Turning point

The August offensive was the last real chance. After it failed, a last attempt to link Suvla with Anzac at Scimitar Hill and Hill 60, on 21 and 22 August, also broke down, and the Allies were left holding three beachheads at Helles, Anzac and Suvla, each overlooked by the enemy. By September it was clear in London that nothing decisive could be won without large new reinforcements.¹⁵

The cost at home was already political. Admiral Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, who disagreed with Churchill over the operation, resigned in May 1915. Churchill fell from power and later left the government to command an infantry battalion in France.¹⁶

Aftermath

Hamilton was recalled and replaced in October; his successor, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Monro, recommended evacuation, and Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, confirmed it after visiting the peninsula in November. The withdrawal was the best managed operation of the campaign. Under cover of careful deception the troops left Anzac and Suvla on the nights of 19 and 20 December 1915 and Cape Helles on 8 and 9 January 1916, with very few losses.¹⁷

The losses were enormous, and the sources count them differently. The Gallipoli Association gives over 250,000 Allied casualties, more than 58,000 of them dead, and over 300,000 Ottoman casualties with more than 87,000 dead, and calls its figures approximate. The National Army Museum gives over 220,000 Allied casualties and says the Ottomans lost almost as many; the Imperial War Museums put the total for the campaign at more than half a million, and Britannica counts 213,980 British Commonwealth casualties. Among the dead, the Australian War Memorial counts 8,141 Australians, and the Gallipoli Association some 11,000 Australians and New Zealanders together.¹⁸

For the Allies the campaign was a disaster; Britannica sees its one success in drawing large Ottoman forces away from the Russians. For the Ottomans it was a major achievement, though the Imperial War Museums call it only a brief respite in the decline of their empire. Less than three years later, on 30 October 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed the armistice of Mudros on the island of Lemnos, and under its terms Allied forces were to occupy the Dardanelles, the strait they had failed to take in 1915.¹⁹ › How World War One ended

Legacy and memory

Gallipoli became a defining moment for Australia and New Zealand. What became known as the Anzac legend became part of how both nations see themselves. Anzac Day, 25 April, the anniversary of the landing, is one of Australia's most important national occasions.²⁰

In New Zealand the brief capture of Chunuk Bair holds a special place. The Polish turkologist Piotr Nykiel calls it the greatest success of New Zealand arms, and in 2009 the Governor-General of New Zealand told a ceremony on the hill that its story had become part of what it means to be a New Zealander.²¹

For Turkey the defense of the peninsula is a founding story of a different kind. Mustafa Kemal's success there made his name, and he went on to lead the struggle that created the Turkish republic. In Nykiel's view the Turks lost the flower of their young educated class at Gallipoli, yet a new nation, modern Turkey, was born there.²² › The greatest battles of the Ottoman Empire

There is a Polish thread too. Ludomił Rayski fought in the Ottoman army in the Dardanelles and began his flying career there; after the war he led Polish military aviation until 1939 and built up Poland's modern aircraft industry.²³