End of the evacuation of Gallipoli

The British chronology of the war records the end of the evacuation of the Gallipoli peninsula under 8 January 1916. The last stage of the withdrawal from Cape Helles began on the evening of that day and ended in the early hours of the next: according to the British official history of the land campaign, the last boat left the shore on 9 January at 3.45 a.m., and according to the history of naval operations the last destroyers sailed just before five. Not a single Allied soldier remained on the peninsula where the Allies had landed on 25 April 1915. Thus ended the Gallipoli campaign, the most ambitious undertaking of the Entente outside the Western Front.

The last day

On the morning of 8 January the commander of VIII Corps, General Francis Davies, reported that fewer than 17,000 men of the 13th, 29th and 52nd Divisions and the Royal Naval Division remained on the cape, and that he was ready for the final stage. The day before, his troops had repulsed a Turkish attack on Gully Spur, which lulled the enemy’s vigilance. Everything now depended on the weather, and the decision had to be taken by the navy, because the ships from Mudros had to be sent off soon after midday. The day was fine and windless, and the meteorologists expected no change for twenty-four hours. Admiral John de Robeck judged that it was possible to act and issued his orders. The British official history notes that the same admiral had waited for the weather in April 1915 before the great landing, when transports carrying 50,000 men confident of victory lay in Mudros harbour. Now it was only a matter of saving those who were left.

After dark two strings of ships set out for the cape from Mudros and Imbros: the old battleships Mars and Prince George, six destroyers, cross-Channel passenger steamers, the cruiser Talbot and two hospital ships. The troops were to embark in three trips from W and V Beaches, and the last detachment of the 13th Division from Gully Beach. The front-line trenches were to be abandoned at a quarter to midnight.

A night of storm

At about 7 p.m. a wind got up, and by nine in the evening it was blowing at more than 50 km/h. The rough sea battered the makeshift piers, and the boats and lighters had difficulty coming alongside the sunken hulks that served as landing stages. Even so, the sailors took off the second trip on time, together with all 37 guns that were to be saved. At about midnight disturbing news reached W Beach: the battleship Prince George, already on her way to Mudros with 2,000 troops, had been hit by a torpedo that failed to explode. It later turned out that there had been no submarine in the vicinity and that the battleship must have struck some drifting wreck. From Gully Beach, where a lighter had run aground, General Frederick Stanley Maude led the last 160 men on foot to W Beach. He himself was nearly late, because on the way he went back with a staff officer for the luggage left on the lighter.

At 3.45 a.m. the last boat left the shore. Lit fuses reached the main ammunition dump, and the abandoned stores went up in flames. The explosion came too early, and its debris killed one sailor in a hospital boat. According to the naval history this was the only casualty of the last night, while the history of the land campaign states that the evacuation of Helles was carried out “without the loss of a single life”. Only at this signal did the Turks realise what had happened. Along the whole line they fired hundreds of red rockets, and their artillery began shelling the empty beaches and piers. Soon after dawn Ottoman troops occupied the cape. General Otto Liman von Sanders, commander of the Ottoman Fifth Army, admitted in his memoirs that here too, “despite all our vigilance”, the enemy had managed to withdraw.

Since 28 December more than 35,000 men, 127 guns and more than 3,600 horses and mules had been taken off from Helles. Left behind on the shore were 508 mules that had been shot, 1,590 vehicles and great quantities of stores, as well as fifteen British and six old French guns, blown up. Together with the earlier evacuation of Suvla and Anzac, the Allies had withdrawn more than 118,000 men from the peninsula in a few weeks. The commanders had feared that the withdrawal might cost as much as 30–40 per cent of the men; instead, the losses were negligible.

The balance of the campaign

The campaign, which was to have opened the Straits, taken Constantinople, knocked Turkey out of the war and linked Russia with her Western allies, ended in defeat. According to the British official history, almost half a million men were sent to the peninsula in all, including about 410,000 British and about 79,000 French. British losses, including the Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops, amounted to about 205,000 men, of whom about 115,000 were killed, wounded and missing, and about 90,000 were evacuated sick. About 43,000 British soldiers were killed, died or were taken prisoner. The French lost about 47,000 men.

Ottoman losses are much less certain. The Turkish official history, cited by the British history, gives about 250,000, and other Turkish sources as many as 350,000. The American historian Edward Erickson, who studied the Ottoman archives, calculated about 56,600 dead from all causes, about 97,000 wounded and injured, and about 11,000 missing and taken prisoner. The literature often accepts that, through wounds and disease, each side lost about a quarter of a million men.

A Turkish victory

For the Ottoman Empire Gallipoli was one of the greatest victories of the whole war. An army that after its defeats in the Balkan Wars had been regarded in Europe as weak had defended the Straits against the fleets and armies of two great powers. In Turkey the campaign is remembered as the victory at Çanakkale (from the Turkish name for the Dardanelles), and its best-known hero was Mustafa Kemal, later the founder of the Republic of Turkey. The British official history does justice to the Turkish soldier, who did not excel in attack but defended himself “with grim courage”, and to the command of the Fifth Army.

The victory also had a practical dimension. The divisions from Gallipoli were freed to fight on other fronts. In 1916 veterans of the peninsula went to the Caucasus, where the Russians were just preparing an offensive on Erzurum, to Mesopotamia, and even to Galicia, where the Ottoman XV Corps fought alongside German and Austro-Hungarian troops. For the British, in turn, the end of the campaign meant that their forces would be concentrated in Egypt, where the Suez Canal had to be defended, and the Australian and New Zealand divisions, after reorganisation, sailed for France in the spring.