Gallipoli Campaign: Churchill's Folly in World War I
The Gallipoli Campaign took place in Turkey in 1915-16 during the First World War (1914-18). This major expedition involved British, French, Australian, and New Zealand (ANZAC) troops and was launched to break through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea, thereby providing a new supply route to Russia. The Ottoman defences remained robust, and an eight-month-long trench battle of attrition ultimately ended in an Allied withdrawal. Infamous as a costly failure, the campaign resulted in 250,000 Allied casualties, and its staunchest promoter, Winston Churchill, was sacked from his role in the British Admiralty.
Campaign Objectives
In the First World War, the Entente powers of Britain, France, and Russia (plus their allies) fought against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire (and their allies). As the main theatre of action on the Western Front in France and Belgium became bogged down in trench warfare, the Allies searched for an alternative weak spot where the interests of the enemy could be damaged. One such spot could be the Gallipoli peninsula (which connects the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea), then controlled by the Ottoman Empire and a vital route for shipping. This route is a narrow passage just 30 miles (48 km) long and less than a mile (1.6 km) wide at its narrowest point. It has attracted many ambitious armies over the centuries, right back to the disaster of the Battle of Adrianople, when the Roman emperor Valens (reign 364-378) was killed. Indeed, this part of the eastern Mediterranean was fought over even in legend and is the site of the Trojan War.
It was hoped that the Gallipoli Campaign would ultimately secure Constantinople (modern Istanbul), which would then permit supplies to be freely sent to Russia. Indeed, the Russian Empire had requested its allies to open up a new front in the Dardanelles. Another advantageous outcome would be Germany removing troops from the Western Front to bolster its Ottoman ally. A more vague ambition was that by controlling this region, the Ottoman Empire might even collapse. Even more ambitiously, such a collapse would enable the Allies to open up a new front against Germany, possibly breaking the stalemate on the Western Front.
The plan for an attack in the Dardanelles was promoted by such prominent figures as Winston Churchill (1874-1965), then First Lord of the Admiralty, and Lord Herbert Kitchener (1850-1916), Secretary of State for War, as a way to both alter the Western Front and better involve the Royal Navy in the war. A joint British-French naval expedition of 20 Allied ships, the Dardanelles Operation (19 February to March 1915), was dispatched to capture the forts in the straits. This expedition failed to force its way through the Dardanelles due to intense fire from the main Turkish fortresses, which included very hard-to-hit mobile artillery guns, and the unexpected density of the mines that had been laid in these waters. Nine battleships were sunk or crippled in the expedition, and a Royal Marines attack on the Kum Kale fort ended in a costly failure.
What was now required, it was thought, was an amphibious landing using a much larger body of troops. This plan was fine on paper, but when it came to putting it into practice, it was let down by several operational deficiencies, the biggest being that not enough men were made available for an operation specifically designed, rather too hopefully, to achieve big results with small means. With the Ottoman guns all still intact and their gunners fully alerted to an incoming invasion by the failed naval assault, the Gallipoli expedition was launched on 25 April 1915.
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⇒ Gallipoli Campaign: Churchill's Folly in World War I
