The Gallipoli Campaign and the ANZACs
The Gallipoli campaign of April 1915 to January 1916 was one of the most ambitious and most disastrous military undertakings of the First World War. Conceived by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, as a way of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front by forcing the Dardanelles and opening a sea route to Russia, the campaign became a costly, eight-month siege on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), which had been training in Egypt, was the principal Commonwealth formation involved. The campaign’s failure, and the high casualty rate of the Australian and New Zealand troops, has been the subject of intense historical and political work, and the ANZAC tradition established at Gallipoli became a central element of Australian and New Zealand national identity.
The Strategic Context
The strategic logic of the Gallipoli campaign was the product of a particular set of circumstances in the winter of 1914–1915. The Western Front had stabilised into trench warfare by the end of 1914, and the British were looking for a way of breaking the stalemate. The Dardanelles campaign, which would open the straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, would have allowed the British to send supplies to Russia, which was fighting the Central Powers on the Eastern Front, and to attack the Ottoman Empire, which had entered the war on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914.
The idea of forcing the Dardanelles was not new. The British had been considering the possibility of a naval expedition against the Dardanelles since at least the time of the Crimean War, and the strategy had been discussed in British naval circles in the early months of the war. The British naval expedition to the Dardanelles in February–March 1915, which attempted to force the straits by naval power alone, was repulsed by the Ottoman defences, and the British decided that a combined naval and military expedition would be necessary. The decision to land troops on the Gallipoli peninsula was taken in March 1915, and the landings took place on 25 April 1915.
The Landings
The Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915 were the central event of the campaign. The 29th Division, a regular British division, landed at five points around Cape Helles at the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, while the ANZAC Corps, under the command of Lieutenant General William Birdwood, landed at a small beach on the western side of the peninsula, which became known as ANZAC Cove. The ANZAC landing was the more difficult of the two: the troops were landed at a steep, narrow beach, under fire from the Ottoman defenders, and the terrain above the beach was much more difficult than the maps had suggested. The Australian and New Zealand troops, many of them raw recruits with little training, fought their way up the cliffs and established a small perimeter around the beach. By the end of the first day, the ANZAC forces had suffered 2,000 casualties and had established a foothold of perhaps two square miles.
The Ottoman response, under the command of Mustafa Kemal — later the founder of the Turkish Republic and known as Atatürk — was fierce. The Ottoman 19th Division, which had been stationed in the area, was committed to the defence of the peninsula, and the fighting around the ANZAC perimeter became a prolonged and deadly struggle. The British and ANZAC forces, having failed to break out of the beachhead, settled into a stalemate that lasted until the evacuation in January 1916.
The Stalemate
The Gallipoli campaign settled into a stalemate that lasted from May 1915 to January 1916. The British and ANZAC forces, established in their beachheads, attempted to break out of the perimeter, but they were repeatedly repulsed by the Ottoman defenders. The August Offensive of 1915, in which the British attempted to break out of the Helles beachhead and the ANZAC forces attempted to break out of the ANZAC beachhead, was repulsed with heavy casualties on both sides. The Suvla Bay landing of August 1915, in which the British IX Corps, under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford, attempted to break the stalemate by landing at Suvla Bay, north of the ANZAC beachhead, was also repulsed. The failure of the Suvla Bay landing was a serious blow to the British, and the subsequent stalemate made the evacuation of the peninsula inevitable.
The conditions at Gallipoli were terrible. The summer heat, the flies, the dysentery, the lack of fresh water, the constant danger of Ottoman snipers and shelling, and the unburied dead in no-man’s-land made life on the peninsula a continuing horror. The British and ANZAC forces, established in their trenches, fought a war of attrition that was, in many respects, a microcosm of the Western Front. The casualties, both from battle and from disease, were substantial. The Australian and New Zealand forces, in particular, suffered heavy casualties: the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) suffered some 26,000 casualties, of whom perhaps 7,600 were killed. The New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) suffered some 7,500 casualties, of whom perhaps 2,700 were killed. The British 29th Division suffered some 4,500 casualties on the first day alone, of whom perhaps 1,200 were killed.
The Evacuation
The evacuation of Gallipoli in December 1915 and January 1916 was a remarkable military achievement. The decision to evacuate was taken in November 1915, after the failure of the August Offensive and the Suvla Bay landing, and the evacuation was carried out with great care and skill. The troops were withdrawn in small parties, the guns and stores were salvaged, and the Ottoman forces were kept in ignorance of the evacuation until it was complete. The last British and ANZAC troops left the peninsula on 9 January 1916, and the Ottoman forces, who discovered that the positions had been abandoned, were unable to inflict any further casualties on the British.
The evacuation was a major tactical success, but the campaign as a whole was a strategic failure. The British and ANZAC forces had failed to achieve their objectives, the casualties had been substantial, and the campaign had contributed little to the British war effort. The campaign was, in this respect, a disaster.
The ANZAC Tradition
The Gallipoli campaign, despite its failure, became a central element of Australian and New Zealand national identity. The ANZAC tradition — the myth of the Australian and New Zealand soldier as a brave, laconic, irreverent figure who fought in a foreign war for the British Empire and was transformed by the experience — has been the subject of a substantial literature. The 25th of April, ANZAC Day, is the principal national day of commemoration in both Australia and New Zealand, and the Gallipoli landings are commemorated at dawn services across the two countries.
The ANZAC tradition has been the subject of substantial historical revisionism. The older tradition, of which the work of C. E. W. Bean, the official Australian war historian, is the most distinguished representative, treated the Gallipoli campaign as a noble but failed campaign that produced the ANZAC tradition. The more recent scholarship, of which the work of Christopher Pugsley, Jenny Macleod, and the contributors to the Oxford History of Australia is representative, has produced a more nuanced picture. The campaign, on this more recent view, was a disaster that was, in many respects, the consequence of British strategic miscalculation and Australian political naivety. The ANZAC tradition, on this more recent view, was a product of the post-war political needs of the Australian and New Zealand states, and the actual experience of the troops at Gallipoli was a mixture of heroism, fear, incompetence, and suffering.
The most famous statement of the ANZAC tradition, the speech of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to the Australian and New Zealand mothers in 1934 — “Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives… you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours…” — now constitutes a central element of the ANZAC commemorative culture. The speech is widely quoted at ANZAC Day services, and it is a reminder that the experience of Gallipoli was shared by the Ottoman and the ANZAC troops.
The Gallipoli Campaign in the Longer View
The Gallipoli campaign, in the longer view, was a turning point in the history of the British Empire. The campaign marked the emergence of the Australian and New Zealand national identities, which had been developing throughout the nineteenth century, into something more serious. The campaign, in that sense, was the moment when the dominion troops of the British Empire developed a strong sense of national identity, and the post-war political developments — the Australian and New Zealand campaigns in the Western Front, the ANZAC tradition, the Statute of Westminster — were, in important ways, the political consequences of the experience of the dominion troops in the war.
The campaign was also a turning point in the career of Winston Churchill. Churchill, who had been the principal architect of the Dardanelles campaign, was forced to resign from the government in May 1915, and the Dardanelles Commission, which inquired into the campaign, was a serious political embarrassment. Churchill’s subsequent political career — his return to government in 1917, his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s, his warnings about the German rearmament in the 1930s, his leadership of Britain in the Second World War — was, in many ways, an attempt to recover from the political damage of the Gallipoli campaign. The campaign, in this context, was a formative event in the career of one of the most significant British political figures of the twentieth century.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the Gallipoli campaign has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older tradition, of which the work of C. E. W. Bean and Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli (1956) is representative, treated the campaign as a noble but failed campaign that produced the ANZAC tradition. The more recent scholarship, of which the work of Jenny Macleod, Christopher Pugsley, and the contributors to the Oxford History of Australia is the most distinguished representative, has produced a more nuanced picture. The campaign, on this more recent view, was a disaster that was, in many respects, the consequence of British strategic miscalculation and Australian political naivety. The current generation of historians, of whom the work of Robin Prior, Peter Hart, and the contributors to the Cambridge History of the First World War (the relevant volume) are representative, has produced a more integrated picture. The Gallipoli campaign, on this most recent view, is a central event in the history of the British Empire and the First World War, and it is the moment when the Australian and New Zealand national identities emerged as serious political forces.