Gallipoli campaign

The Gallipoli campaign was the Entente’s most ambitious undertaking outside the Western Front. The British and French wanted to break through the Dardanelles, appear before Constantinople, knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, open a sea route to Russia and win over the wavering Balkan states. From February to March 1915 the fleet attempted this on its own, and when on 18 March it came to grief on Turkish mines, land forces went ashore on the Gallipoli peninsula from 25 April. For eight months British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian and French soldiers fought on three narrow beachheads, under fire from the hills that towered over them. Neither in April nor in August, when victory came closest, did they take the ridges commanding the Narrows. The campaign ended in an evacuation, carried out in December 1915 and January 1916 almost without loss, but it cost both sides hundreds of thousands of killed, wounded and sick.

Name and dates

In Britain it is called the Dardanelles campaign or the Gallipoli campaign, and in Australia and New Zealand simply Gallipoli. The Turks call it the battles of Çanakkale (Çanakkale Savaşları), after the town on the Narrows. Polish works also use the name Battle of Gallipoli, but it usually covers only the land fighting from 25 April 1915.

On this page we describe the naval attack and the land campaign together. We adopt the dates 19 February 1915 – 9 January 1916: from the first day of the bombardment of the forts at the entrance to the strait to the departure of the last soldiers from Cape Helles. The earlier, one-off bombardment of the forts on 3 November 1914 was a demonstration and was not part of the campaign. Times are given in local time, and place names on the peninsula mostly in the form given to them by the British, Australians and New Zealanders.

Background

The Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany’s side in the autumn of 1914. In August it concluded a secret alliance with Berlin, the German warships Goeben and Breslau took refuge in the Dardanelles, and at the end of October the Turkish fleet attacked Russian ports on the Black Sea. The closure of the straits cut Russia off from the supplies of its Western allies and from its grain exports. On 3 November British and French warships bombarded the forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles, and in December the British submarine B11 sank the old battleship Mesudiye in the strait.

At the turn of 1914 and 1915 the Turks attacked the Russians in the Caucasus. Grand Duke Nicholas, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army, asked the British for an action that would draw Turkish troops away. Although the offensive at Sarikamish ended in a Turkish defeat, in London the idea of attacking the straits had already taken on a life of its own. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, argued that the fleet alone could force them, using old battleships that the Royal Navy could spare from the North Sea. On 13 January the War Council instructed the Admiralty to prepare an expedition, and on 28 January gave it final approval, despite the doubts of the First Sea Lord, John Fisher. The Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, maintained that no troops were available. Only on 16 February did ministers decide to send the 29th Division to the island of Lemnos, although Kitchener held it back for several more weeks. The expedition was thus launched without a plan for a combined operation and without an army ready to land. The British official history later regarded this lack of preparation as the root of all the subsequent failures.

The Dardanelles is a strait about 60 kilometres long, little more than a kilometre wide at its narrowest point, the Narrows at Çanakkale. Its European shore is formed by the Gallipoli peninsula, cut by steep ridges and ravines. The defences were commanded by Cevat Pasha, and German officers and sailors took part in organising them. In the Middle East the Turks had just attacked the Suez Canal, and the Australian and New Zealand corps and Indian divisions were stationed in Egypt.

The naval attack: February–March 1915

On 19 February 1915 the squadron of Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden, eventually sixteen capital ships, including four French ones and the newest dreadnought, Queen Elizabeth, began bombarding the forts at the entrance to the strait. After a week’s pause caused by a gale, the forts fell silent on 25 February, and parties of sailors and marines blew up the abandoned guns. Further on it was much harder. The lines of mines deeper in the strait were covered by mobile howitzers and field batteries that the ships could not locate, and the minesweepers, converted fishing trawlers with civilian crews, could not work under their fire. Meanwhile the expedition’s base was taking shape on Lemnos, in Mudros bay. On 12 March Kitchener gave command of the land forces to General Ian Hamilton, who arrived at the Dardanelles on 17 March. In mid-March the sick Carden was replaced by Vice-Admiral John de Robeck.

On 18 March the whole fleet entered the strait and attacked the forts at the Narrows. In the afternoon, as the fire of the Turkish guns was weakening, the French battleship Bouvet struck a mine in Eren Köy bay and sank within minutes with more than 600 sailors. A line of 20 mines had been laid there secretly on the night of 7–8 March by the Turkish minelayer Nusret. On the same mines the British battleships Irresistible and Ocean were lost, and the battlecruiser Inflexible and two French battleships were badly damaged. The Turks lost about 120 killed and wounded. On 22 March de Robeck and Hamilton concluded that the strait could not be forced without occupying its shores. Historians still argue whether a renewed naval attack could have succeeded. The Turkish official history, quoted by the British one, held that one attack was too few and that with greater determination the fleet would probably have reached its objective.

The landings and the fighting at Helles: April–July 1915

Hamilton had about 75,000 men: the British 29th Division, the Royal Naval Division, the two divisions of General William Birdwood’s ANZAC corps and the French Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient. Because the transports had been loaded in haste, the army first had to sail to Egypt to repack the ships. The Turks gained a month. At the end of March Enver Pasha entrusted the defence of the strait to the new Fifth Army of General Otto Liman von Sanders, who placed his troops near the most suitable landing places, keeping strong reserves at the neck of the peninsula and on the Asian shore.

On 25 April the 29th Division landed on five beaches around Cape Helles, and the Australians and New Zealanders on the west coast, in the cove later named Anzac Cove. The French went ashore briefly at Kum Kale, on the Asian shore, and at Bulair warships feigned another landing. On V and W beaches at Helles the Turks inflicted enormous losses on the attackers. At Anzac a counter-attack led on his own initiative in the morning by Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal, commander of the 19th Division, halted the Australians on the first ridges. The Allies held on to the shore but took neither Achi Baba hill above Helles nor the Sarı Bair ridge above Anzac. On the same day the Australian submarine AE2 became the first to break through the strait into the Sea of Marmara. On 30 April she was sunk by a Turkish torpedo boat and her crew taken prisoner, but further British boats followed, among them E14 and the E11 of Lieutenant-Commander Martin Nasmith, who at the end of May torpedoed a ship in the very harbour of Constantinople. E11 alone sank more than 80 ships and smaller craft in three patrols. The submarines hampered Turkish movement of troops and supplies to the peninsula by sea, and according to the German naval history, in August the losses in tonnage began to cause the Turkish command serious anxiety.

On land, trench warfare set in. At Helles British and French troops tried three times to take the village of Krithia and Achi Baba hill: on 28 April, on 6–8 May and on 4 June. Each time there was a shortage of high-explosive shells, howitzers and fresh battalions, and the gains were measured in hundreds of metres. The Turks, too, failed to drive the invaders into the sea. Their night attacks at Helles in early May collapsed with heavy losses, and the great attack on the Anzac beachhead on 19 May cost them, according to their own official history, about 10,000 men, against about 600 killed and wounded on the Australian and New Zealand side. On 24 May the two sides agreed a truce of several hours to bury the thousands of dead lying in front of the trenches. At sea the Allied position worsened. In May a Turkish destroyer sank the battleship Goliath, and the German submarine U-21 two more, Triumph and Majestic. The heavy ships were withdrawn to sheltered harbours and the soldiers ashore lost much of their fire support.

The failures at the Dardanelles caused a political crisis in London. On 15 May Fisher resigned, and on 25 May Prime Minister Herbert Asquith formed a coalition government in which Churchill lost the Admiralty. The new Dardanelles Committee decided in June to send Hamilton three divisions of the volunteer New Army, and later two more Territorial divisions. Before they arrived, two more battles were fought at Helles on narrow sectors, with the fire of all the available artillery. On 21 June the French took the Haricot redoubt above the Kereves Dere ravine, and from 28 June to 5 July the British and Gurkhas took and held the trenches above Gully Ravine. At the end of June the commander of the French corps, General Henri Gouraud, was badly wounded.

The August offensive

Hamilton decided to shift the weight of the fighting to the north. The main blow was to come from the Anzac beachhead, secretly reinforced with about 25,000 fresh troops. On the afternoon of 6 August the Australians took the Turkish trenches at Lone Pine to draw the reserves there, and after dark the assault columns set off through wild ravines towards the summits of the Sari Bair ridge. At the same time, on the night of 6–7 August, the newly formed IX Corps of General Frederick Stopford landed a few kilometres further north, at Suvla Bay, where the Turks had only about 1,500 men. At Helles the British feigned an attack on Krithia.

The night columns at Anzac lost their way and fell behind, and the soldiers, exhausted by dysentery and heat, failed to reach the ridge before dawn. On the morning of 7 August the Australian Light Horse lost hundreds of men in a hopeless charge at the Nek. On 8 August New Zealanders of the Wellington Battalion reached Chunuk Bair and saw the waters of the Narrows for the first time, and on 9 August Major Cecil Allanson’s Gurkhas briefly stood on the ridge before they were driven off by the fire of heavy shells whose origin has never been established. Meanwhile at Suvla IX Corps, despite its enormous superiority, barely moved for two days. Liman von Sanders had time to bring up reinforcements from Bulair and entrusted the defence of the whole sector to Mustafa Kemal. On 9 August the Turks beat the British to the Tekke Tepe ridge by less than half an hour, and on 10 August Kemal’s counter-attack drove the Allies off Chunuk Bair. The British official history regarded the two wasted days at Suvla as a turning point in the history of the whole war.

On 15 August Hamilton removed Stopford. The last great attack, on Scimitar Hill and the W Hills at Suvla and on Hill 60 where the beachheads met, collapsed on 21 August in the fire of the Turkish artillery and in the burning scrub. The fighting for Hill 60 went on until 29 August, but the hills surrounding the Anzac and Suvla beachheads remained in Turkish hands. On 17 August Hamilton admitted in a telegram to Kitchener that his plan had failed for the time being, and asked for 95,000 men as reinforcements. He did not get them.

Autumn and evacuation

From September the fate of the campaign was decided away from the peninsula. The French command, which was preparing an autumn offensive on the Western Front, opposed sending further divisions to the Dardanelles. In September Bulgaria concluded an alliance with the Central Powers, and in October it joined the attack on Serbia. The Entente sent divisions to Salonika, some of which, including the British 10th Division and one French division, were taken from Gallipoli. When Serbia fell in November, the Germans gained a direct rail link with Constantinople and could send the Turks ammunition and guns. In mid-October the government recalled Hamilton. His successor, General Charles Monro, took command on 28 October and three days later recommended evacuation. The staff on Imbros calculated at that time that capturing the forts at the Narrows would require an army of 250,000 men and could not take place before the spring of 1916.

Kitchener, who opposed a withdrawal, came to the Dardanelles himself in November and, after inspecting the beachheads, recommended withdrawing the troops from Suvla and Anzac. The cabinet hesitated for several more weeks, and at the end of November a downpour swept over the peninsula, followed by a blizzard and frost. Soldiers drowned and froze to death in the flooded trenches, and at Suvla alone thousands of cases of frostbite were recorded. On 7 December the government decided to evacuate Suvla and Anzac and to hold Cape Helles for the time being. The commanders feared that a withdrawal under the enemy’s nose would cost tens of thousands of men. Instead, thanks to carefully prepared ruses, discipline and exceptionally calm weather, the last units left both beachheads on the nights of 18–19 and 19–20 December almost without loss, and the Turks realised it only afterwards. On 28 December the order to evacuate Helles arrived. This time the Turks were alert and on 7 January 1916 they attacked on the Gully Spur ridge, but were repulsed. On the night of 8–9 January the last fewer than 17,000 soldiers left the cape, and towards morning the main ammunition dump was blown up.

Casualties

According to Aspinall-Oglander’s British official history, almost half a million soldiers were sent to the peninsula in the course of the campaign, about 410,000 British, including the troops of the dominions and India, and 79,000 French. British casualties, counting the sick evacuated, amounted to about 205,000 men, including about 115,000 killed, wounded and missing and about 90,000 sick. About 43,000 British and dominion soldiers were killed, died of wounds or disease, or went missing. French casualties amounted, according to the same source, to about 47,000. Tables based on the data of the individual countries give about 34,000 dead from Great Britain and Ireland, nearly 10,000 French, from about 8,100 to 8,700 Australians, about 2,700 New Zealanders, about 1,400 soldiers from India and several dozen from Newfoundland. According to the Australian War Memorial, Australian casualties totalled about 26,000 men.

Turkish losses are less certain. The Turkish official history put them at about 253,000 men, almost the same as the Allied casualties, but other Turkish works spoke of as many as 350,000, and the British official historian noted that Turkish records were kept very loosely. Various works estimate the number of Ottoman killed and dead at about 57,000–87,000. At sea the Allies lost six battleships, sunk by mines, a Turkish destroyer and a German submarine, as well as several submarines. The Turks lost, among others, the battleship Barbaros Hayreddin, torpedoed by E11 in the Sea of Marmara on 8 August. All these figures should be treated as approximate.

Significance

The Gallipoli campaign ended in defeat for the Entente. The straits remained closed, Russia was still cut off from its allies, and Bulgaria, which had been watching the fighting for the straits closely, joined the Central Powers in the autumn of 1915. The British official history regarded the idea of attacking the Dardanelles as one of the few great strategic conceptions of the war, and judged that in the spring of 1915 a carefully prepared combined operation of the fleet and the army had a chance of success. It saw the causes of failure above all in the lack of preparation: in the separate naval attack that warned the Turks, in sending reinforcements in small instalments and too late, in the shortage of artillery and ammunition, and in the indecision of commanders at crucial moments, especially at Suvla. It also stressed the courage of the Turkish soldier in defence and the able leadership of the Fifth Army. Nor did the evacuation bring the expected relief. In mid-1916 more than 400,000 Allied soldiers were stationed in Salonika and Egypt combined.

In Britain the campaign cost Fisher and Churchill their posts and contributed to the end of the purely Liberal government. Hamilton never received another command. A parliamentary commission set up in 1916 concluded in its final report of 1919 that the expedition had been badly planned and executed and its difficulties underestimated. For the Ottoman Empire the defence of the Dardanelles was one of the greatest victories of its last war and allowed it to send seasoned divisions to other fronts. It also became the source of the legend of Mustafa Kemal, the future founder of the Turkish Republic. In Turkey 18 March is celebrated as the day of the victory at Çanakkale. In Australia and New Zealand the anniversary of the landing, Anzac Day, became one of the most important days of national remembrance, and many see Gallipoli as the moment when both countries’ sense of a separate national identity was born. The Australian and New Zealand divisions withdrawn from the peninsula fought in France from 1916.