HISTORY: Gallipoli: The End of the MythBy Robin PriorYale University Press, 304pp. £25
GALLIPOLI HAS particular poignancy for Australians and New Zealanders, but few people have a clear idea where it is (a location map in this book would be useful). The campaign was a sideshow to the first World War, a diversionary tactic to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the western front.
Its main purpose was to eliminate Turkey from the conflict, open a sea route to Russia and shorten the war. In all these aims it failed, as this book makes clear. Although Britannia’s navy did indeed rule the waves in 1915, the fleet sent to Turkey was ancient and under-furnished with guns. The naval bombardment was so ineffective the author estimates only two out of every 100 shells reached their target, leaving the Turkish defences almost untouched.
Churchill, a navy man to his toes, has traditionally been blamed, but the multiple paternity of success and the orphan status of failure are well known. The author places Churchill within a wider group including Kitchener, Fisher, Lloyd George and Asquith, all of whom displayed dazzling incompetence. Admiral Henry Oliver, for example, harboured the notion that the mere appearance of a British fleet would cause the Turks to drop their weapons and flee.
Among the invading troops who met stiff resistance were the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, while Capt GW Geddes of the Munster Fusiliers describes vividly how his company was pinned down by machine-gun fire and suffered heavy casualties. Like the US troops who landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day 30 years later, many died before they reached the shore, some drowning under the weight of their equipment. Less well recorded up to now is the involvement of 16,000 French troops at Gallipoli, some from colonies such as Senegal, yet the French suffered almost as many casualties as the Anzacs.
This book focuses on military strategy and the role of the various commanders, but only to a lesser extent on the experiences of ordinary soldiers, whose accounts of terror, boredom, misery and death often convey the full horror of war. Occasionally they came close to mutiny, such as the Highland Light Infantry, who were sent on a particularly hare-brained assault against the Turkish lines. Their reluctance to be slaughtered pointlessly drew accusations of cowardice.
By December 1915, the British cabinet realised the Gallipoli campaign had failed and it ordered the evacuation. The field commanders displayed rather more flair and efficiency in executing the withdrawal than other parts of the campaign. Prior describes the creation of elaborate defences and soldiers who ran up and down the lines, firing from different points to create the illusion that invaders were still there in force. The retreat was successful, but to paraphrase a later comment by Churchill, evacuations do not win wars.
Although victors normally write the history, the Gallipoli campaign is an exception. The author notes that Turkish military sources are sparse and hard to access so the Turkish version of events is largely unknown. It is unsure, for instance, whether the Turks knew about the withdrawal until they wandered down from the hills to discover the abandoned positions.
This is a detailed account, with excellent photos, of a failed military expedition that took the lives of 46,000 Allied soldiers and left another 86,000 wounded. Non-battle casualties bring the figures close to 400,000. Prior states Gallipoli was not a close-run thing nor a glorious failure, it was just a failure, and with inadequate planning, resources and leaders (some were cautious to the point of paralysis, he says) it had no hope of success. With reason, the Gallipoli campaign is recognised as a supreme military disaster.
Fergus Mulligan is the author of
The Trinity Year,
to be published by Trinity College Dublin and Gill Macmillan in May and a forthcoming biography of William Dargan