Before dawn on 25 April 1915, small boats slid toward a dark shore on the far edge of Europe. Thousands of young men from Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand crouched in the swell, rifles wet with spray, as the cliffs of the Gallipoli peninsula loomed ahead. Within minutes the water was churned by Ottoman machine guns firing down from the heights. What planners in London had imagined as a swift knockout blow against the Ottoman Empire was about to become one of the longest and most tragic deadlocks of the First World War.
A Bold Plan on the Map
The idea was seductive on paper. By 1915 the Western Front had frozen into trenches, and the Allies looked for a way around the stalemate. If a fleet could force the narrow Dardanelles strait, it might sail up to Constantinople, knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and open a warm-water supply route to hard-pressed Russia. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was the plan's most energetic champion. The first attempt was purely naval, but in March 1915 the great warships ran into mines and shore batteries in the strait and several were sunk or crippled. The navy could not do it alone, so the decision was made to land an army on the peninsula and take the guns from behind.
The Landings and the ANZAC Beaches
On 25 April the Allies came ashore at several points. British and French forces landed near Cape Helles at the tip of the peninsula, while the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the ANZACs, went in farther north at a cove that would forever bear their name. Almost everywhere the defenders held the high ground. Men were cut down as they crossed the beaches, and those who survived clawed out shallow footholds beneath the cliffs. Ottoman resistance, stiffened by a determined officer named Mustafa Kemal who would later be known as Ataturk, was fiercer than the Allies had ever expected. Within days the invaders were pinned to narrow strips of coast, unable to break inland.
Stalemate Under a Burning Sun
What followed was months of misery. The same trench warfare the Allies had hoped to escape reappeared on the peninsula, only now under a scorching Mediterranean sun and among steep, waterless ridges. Flies swarmed over unburied dead, dysentery spread through the ranks, and fresh water had to be shipped in. A major new landing at Suvla Bay in August aimed to break the deadlock but bogged down as badly as the first. Both sides suffered terribly. Casualties across the whole campaign are commonly estimated at around half a million, killed, wounded and sick, roughly divided between the Allies and the Ottoman defenders. For all the sacrifice, the front barely moved, and the trench lines lay almost where the first days of fighting had drawn them.
The Evacuation and the Legend
By late 1915 Allied commanders admitted the campaign could not succeed. The one operation carried out almost flawlessly was the withdrawal. Over the winter, in December 1915 and January 1916, the troops were quietly evacuated under cover of darkness, using ruses to disguise their departure, and slipped away with remarkably few losses. Gallipoli was a strategic failure that damaged reputations, Churchill among them, and it left a bitter mark on every nation involved. Yet from the ordeal grew something enduring. For Australia and New Zealand the courage and suffering of their soldiers became a founding national story, and ANZAC Day is still commemorated each year on 25 April. For modern Turkey, the defense of the peninsula became a moment of national pride and the making of Ataturk.