Following the failure of the August Offensive, the Gallipoli campaign drifted. Ottoman success began to affect public opinion in the United Kingdom, with news discrediting Hamilton’s performance being smuggled out by journalists like Keith Murdoch and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Disaffected senior officers such as General Stopford also contributed to the overall air of gloom. The prospect of evacuation was raised on 11 October 1915 but Hamilton resisted the suggestion, fearing the damage to British prestige. He was dismissed as commander shortly afterwards and replaced by Lieutenant General Sir Charles Monro. Autumn and winter brought relief from the heat but also led to gales, blizzards and flooding, resulting in men drowning and freezing to death, while thousands suffered frostbite.
The situation at Gallipoli was complicated by the entry of Bulgaria into the war on the side of the Central Powers. In early October 1915 the British and French opened a second Mediterranean front at Salonika, by moving three divisions from Gallipoli, and reducing the flow of reinforcements. A land route between Germany and the Ottoman Empire through Bulgaria was opened, enabling Germany to supply heavy artillery to devastate the Allied trench network, especially on the confined front at Anzac, as well as modern aircraft and experienced crews.In late November an Ottoman crew in a German Albatros C.I shot down a French aircraft over Gaba Tepe and two Austro-Hungarian artillery units, the 36. Haubitzbatterie and 9. Motormörserbatterie arrived, providing a substantial reinforcement of the Ottoman artillery. Monro recommended evacuation to Kitchener who in early November visited the eastern Mediterranean. After consulting with the commanders of VIII Corps at Helles, IX Corps at Suvla, and Anzac, Kitchener agreed with Monro and passed his recommendation to the British Cabinet, who confirmed the decision to evacuate in early December.
W Beach, Helles, on 7 January 1916 just prior to the final evacuation
Due to the proximity of Ottoman forces and the harsh winter weather, many casualties were anticipated during the embarkation. The untenable nature of the Allied position was made apparent when a heavy rainstorm struck on 26 November 1915. It lasted three days and was followed by a blizzard at Suvla in early December. Rain flooded trenches, drowned soldiers and washed unburied corpses into the lines; the following snow killed more men from exposure.
The evacuation was the best-executed segment of the entire Allied campaign. Suvla and Anzac were to be evacuated in late December, the last troops leaving before dawn on 20 December 1915. Troop numbers had been slowly reduced since 7 December 1915 and ruses, such as William Scurry’s self-firing rifle, which had been rigged to fire by water dripped into a pan attached to the trigger, were used to disguise the Allied departure. At Anzac Cove troops maintained silence for an hour or more, until curious Ottoman troops ventured to inspect the trenches, whereupon the Anzacs opened fire. A mine was detonated at the Nek which killed 70 Ottoman soldiers. The Allied force was embarked, with the Australians suffering no casualties on the final night, but large quantities of supplies and stores fell into Ottoman hands.
Helles was retained for a period but a decision to evacuate the garrison was made on 28 December. Unlike the evacuation from Anzac Cove, Ottoman forces were looking for signs of withdrawal. Having used the intervening time to bring up reinforcements and supplies, Liman von Sanders mounted an attack on the British at “Gully Spur” on 7 January 1916 with infantry and artillery; the attack failed and heavy casualties were inflicted. Mines were laid with time fuzes and that night and on the night of 7/8 January, under the cover of a naval bombardment, the British troops began to fall back 5 miles (8.0 km) from their lines to the beaches, where makeshift piers were used to board boats. The final British troops departed from Lancashire Landing around 04:00 on 8 January 1916. Among the first to land, remnants of The Plymouth Battalion, Royal Marine Light Infantry were the last to leave the Peninsula. Despite predictions of up to 30,000 casualties, 35,268 troops, 3,689 horses and mules, 127 guns, 328 vehicles and 1,600 long tons (1,600 t) of equipment were removed. 508 mules which could not be embarked were killed so as not to fall into Turkish hands, and 1,590 vehicles were left behind with destroyed wheels. As at Anzac, large amounts of supplies (including 15 damaged British and six French artillery pieces which were destroyed), gun carriages and ammunition were left behind; hundreds of horses were also slaughtered, again to prevent them from being utilised by the Ottomans. One sailor was killed by débris from a magazine that exploded prematurely, and a lighter and a picket boat were lost. Shortly after dawn, the Ottoman forces retook Helles. In the final days of the campaign, the Ottoman air defences had been increased by a German-Ottoman fighter squadron which began operations over the peninsula and inflicted the first British flying losses a couple of days after the evacuation of Helles, when three Fokker Eindeckers shot down two RNAS aircraft.
Aftermath
Military repercussions
The memorial at Anzac Cove, commemorating the loss of thousands of Ottoman and Anzac soldiers on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
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 … You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
— Atatürk 1934
Historians are divided about how they summarise the campaign’s result. Broadbent describes the campaign as “a close-fought affair” that was a defeat for the Allies, while Carlyon views the overall result as a stalemate. Peter Hart disagrees, arguing that the Ottoman forces “held the Allies back from their real objectives with relative ease”, while Haythornthwaite calls it a “disaster for the Allies”. The campaign did cause “enormous damage to … [Ottoman] national resources”, and at that stage of the war the Allies were in a better position to replace their losses than the Ottomans, but ultimately the Allied attempt at securing a passage through the Dardanelles proved unsuccessful. While it diverted Ottoman forces away from other areas of conflict in the Middle East the campaign also consumed resources the Allies could have employed on the Western Front, and also resulted in heavy losses on the Allied side.
The Allied campaign was plagued by ill-defined goals, poor planning, insufficient artillery, inexperienced troops, inaccurate maps and intelligence, overconfidence, inadequate equipment and logistics, and tactical deficiencies at all levels. Geography also proved a significant factor. While the Allied forces possessed inaccurate maps and intelligence and proved unable to exploit the terrain to their advantage, the Ottoman commanders were able to utilise the high ground around the Allied landing beaches to position well-sited defences that limited the Allied forces’ ability to penetrate inland, confining them to narrow beaches. The campaign’s necessity remains the subject of debate, and the recriminations that followed were significant, highlighting the schism that had developed between military strategists who felt the Allies should focus on fighting on the Western Front and those that favoured trying to end the war by attacking Germany’s “soft underbelly”, its allies in the east.
British and French submarine operations in the Sea of Marmara were the one significant area of success of the Gallipoli Campaign, forcing the Ottomans to abandon the sea as a transport route. Between April and December 1915, a total of nine British and four French submarines had carried out 15 patrols, sinking one battleship, one destroyer, five gunboats, 11 troop transports, 44 supply ships, and 148 sailing vessels at a cost of eight Allied submarines which were sunk in the strait or in the Sea of Marmara. During the campaign there was always one British submarine in the Sea of Marmara, sometimes two; in October 1915, there were four Allied submarines in the region. E2 left the Sea of Marmara on 2 January 1916, the last British submarine in the region. Meanwhile, four E-class and five B-class submarines remained in the Mediterranean Sea following the evacuation of Helles. By this time the Ottoman navy had been all but forced to cease operations in the area, while merchant shipping had also been significantly curtailed. The official German naval historian, Admiral Eberhard von Mantey, later concluded that had the sea lanes of communication been completely severed the Ottoman 5th Army would likely have faced catastrophe. As it was these operations were a source of significant anxiety, posing a constant threat to shipping and causing heavy losses, effectively dislocating Ottoman attempts to reinforce their forces at Gallipoli, and shelling troop concentrations and railways.
Gallipoli marked the end for Hamilton and Stopford but Hunter-Weston went on to lead VIII Corps on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The competence of Australian brigade commanders, John Monash (4th Infantry Brigade) and Harry Chauvel (1st Light Horse Brigade, New Zealand and Australian Division), was recognised by promotion to divisional and corps command. The influence of Kitchener waned after the coalition government was formed in May 1915, partly because of the growing sense of failure in the Dardanelles and culminated in Kitchener being overruled on support for the French at Salonika in early December 1915, when his influence on the Cabinet was at its lowest. The campaign gave confidence to the Ottomans in their ability to defeat the Allies. In Mesopotamia, the Turks surrounded a British expedition at Kut Al Amara, forcing their surrender in April 1916. Ottoman forces in southern Palestine were poised to launch an attack against the Suez Canal and Egypt. Defeat at the Battle of Romani and lack of materials to complete the military railway, necessary for such an operation, marked the end of that ambition. The optimism which came from the victory at Gallipoli was replaced by a gathering sense of despair and the British remained on the offensive in the Middle East for the rest of the war.
The lessons of the campaign had a significant impact upon the development of amphibious operational planning, and have since been studied by military planners prior to operations such as the Normandy Landings in 1944 and during the Falklands War in 1982. The campaign also influenced US Marine Corps amphibious operations during the Pacific War, and continues to influence US amphibious doctrine.
According to authors such as Theodore Gatchel, during the interwar period the campaign “became a focal point for the study of amphibious warfare” in the United Kingdom and United States, because, as Glenn Wahlert points out, it involved “all four types of amphibious operations: the raid, demonstration, assault and withdrawal”. Russell Weigley has written that analysis of the campaign before World War II led to “a belief among most of the armed forces of the world” that amphibious assaults could not succeed against modern defences and that arguably this perception continued until the Normandy Landings in June 1944 despite some successful examples of amphibious operations earlier in the war, such as those in Italy, and at Tarawa and in the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific. Hart supports Weighley’s supposition, writing that although this negative perception prevailed amongst Allied planners in the interwar years, the war situation after 1940 meant that such operations had to be considered. He also argues that despite early successes in North Africa and Italy, it was not until Normandy that the belief that opposed landings could not succeed was completely excised.
The memory of Gallipoli also weighed heavily upon the Australians during the planning stages of the Huon Peninsula campaign in late 1943. In September 1943, Australian forces carried out their first opposed amphibious landing since Gallipoli, when they landed at Finschhafen in New Guinea. The landing was hampered by navigational errors and troops came ashore on the wrong beaches but they had been trained with the lessons of Gallipoli in mind, specifically the need to maintain momentum, and they quickly reorganised and pushed inland.
Political effects
The failure of the landings had significant political repercussions in Britain, which began during the battle. Fisher resigned in May after bitter conflict with Churchill over the campaign. The crisis that followed after the Conservatives learned that Churchill would be staying, forced the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, to end his Liberal Government and form a Coalition Government with the Conservative Party. The Asquith government responded to the disappointment and outrage over Gallipoli and Kut by establishing commissions of inquiry into both episodes which had done much to “destroy its faltering reputation for competence”. The Dardanelles Commission was set up to investigate the failure of the expedition, the first report being issued in 1917, with the final report published in 1919. Following the failure of the Dardanelles expedition, Sir Ian Hamilton, commander of the MEF, was recalled to London in October 1915, ending his military career. Churchill was demoted from First Lord of the Admiralty as a prerequisite for Conservative entry to the coalition but remained in the Cabinet in the sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, before resigning in November 1915 and departing for the Western Front, where he commanded an infantry battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers early in 1916.
Asquith was partly blamed for Gallipoli and other disasters and was overthrown in December 1916 when David Lloyd George proposed a war council under his authority, which led the Conservatives in the coalition to threaten to resign. Lloyd George and then Asquith resigned followed by Lloyd George becoming Prime Minister. Lloyd George formed a new government, in which Churchill, active again in the House of Commons from June 1916, was given the non-cabinet post of Minister of Munitions despite Conservative opposition. In this role he was later responsible for implementing a number of innovations, including the development of the tank. The Commission’s final report was issued in 1919, concluding that with the forces available, success was dependent on the government giving priority to the expedition and leaving the British Expeditionary Force in France to make do. The Commissioners found that Hamilton had been over-optimistic from the beginning and had added to Stopford’s difficulties on 8 August 1915; but he emerged from the investigation more favourably than perhaps was justified, partly because he made devious attempts to gain collusion from witnesses and obtain leaks from the Commission’s deliberations; Hamilton was never given another army appointment.
The enormous Gallipoli casualties among Irish soldiers who had volunteered to fight in the British Army was a causal factor in the Irish War of Independence; as balladeers sang, “Twas better to die ‘neath an Irish sky than in Suvla or Sedd el Bahr”.
Casualties
Gallipoli casualties (not including illness)
|
Dead |
Wounded |
Missing
&
Prisoners |
Total |
| Ottoman Empire |
56,643 |
107,007 |
11,178 |
174,828 |
| United Kingdom |
34,072 |
78,520 |
7,654 |
120,246 |
| France |
9,798 |
17,371 |
– |
27,169 |
| Australia |
8,709 |
19,441 |
– |
28,150 |
| New Zealand |
2,721 |
4,752 |
– |
7,473 |
| British India |
1,358 |
3,421 |
– |
4,779 |
| Newfoundland |
49 |
93 |
– |
142 |
| Total Allies |
56,707 |
123,598 |
7,654 |
187,959 |
Casualty figures for the campaign vary between sources, but it is believed that by the time the Gallipoli Campaign ended over 100,000 men were dead, including 56,000–68,000 Turkish and around 53,000 British and French soldiers. Carlyon gives 43,000 British killed or missing, including 8,709 Australians. Among the dead were 2,721 New Zealanders, about a quarter of those who had landed on the peninsula. In total there were nearly half a million casualties during the campaign, with the British Official History listing total losses, including sick, as 205,000 British, 47,000 French and 251,000 Turkish. Yet Turkish casualties have been disputed and were likely higher, with another source listing 2,160 officers and 287,000 other ranks. Included among this may be as many as 87,000 killed. Many soldiers became sick due to the unsanitary conditions, especially from typhoid, dysentery and diarrhoea. It is estimated that at least 145,000 British soldiers became ill during the campaign. Turkish sick are given as 64,000.
In November 1918, the Canterbury Mounted Rifles and the 7th Light Horse Regiments, from the Anzac Mounted Division, were sent from Rafa to Gallipoli to “monitor Turkish compliance with the terms of the Armistice”. The 900 troopers, sailed from Kantara in the transport ship Huntscastle to Chanak, camping at Camburnu near Kilid Bahr during three winter months when they reconnoitred the Peninsula, identifying graves and inspecting the Ottoman positions. The troopers returned to Egypt on 19 January 1919 less 11 who had died and 110 who were sick in hospital. Author Lindsay Baly later wrote that it was “a sad mistake to take worn-out men there in such a season”.
There were allegations that Allied forces had attacked or bombarded Ottoman hospitals and hospital ships on several occasions between the start of the campaign and September 1915. By July 1915, there were 25 Ottoman hospitals with a total of 10,700 beds and three hospital ships in the area. The French Government disputed these complaints through the Red Cross and the British response was that if it happened then it was accidental. Russia in turn claimed that the Ottomans had attacked two of their hospital ships, the Portugal and the Vperiod, but the Ottoman Government responded that the vessels had been the victims of mines. No chemical weapons were used at Gallipoli, although the Allies debated their use throughout the campaign and transported quantities of gas to the theatre, which were used against Ottoman troops in the Middle Eastern theatre two years later, during the second and third battles of Gaza in 1917.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) is responsible for developing and maintaining permanent cemeteries for all Commonwealth forces—United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, Newfoundland and others. There are 31 CWGC cemeteries on the Gallipoli peninsula: six at Helles (plus the only solitary grave, that of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Doughty-Wylie VC, Royal Welch Fusiliers), four at Suvla and 21 at Anzac. For many of those killed, and those who died on hospital ships and were buried at sea, there is no known grave. These men’s names are recorded on one of five “memorials to the missing”; the Lone Pine Memorial commemorates Australians killed in the Anzac sector, as well as New Zealanders with no known grave or who were buried at sea, while the Lone Pine, Hill 60, and Chunuk Bair Memorials commemorate New Zealanders killed at Anzac. The Twelve Tree Copse Memorial commemorates the New Zealanders killed in the Helles sector, while British, Indian and Australian troops who died there are commemorated on the Helles Memorial at Cape Helles. British naval casualties who were lost or buried at sea are not recorded on these memorials but are listed on memorials in the United Kingdom. There are two more CWGC cemeteries on the Greek island of Limnos, the first in the town of Moudros and the second in the village of Portianou. Limnos was the hospital base for the Allied forces and most of the buried were among the men who died of their wounds. There is only one French cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula, located at Seddulbahir.
There are no large Turkish military cemeteries on the peninsula but there are numerous memorials, the main ones being the Çanakkale Martyrs’ Memorial at Morto Bay, Cape Helles (near ‘S’ Beach), the Turkish Soldier’s Memorial on Chunuk Bair and the memorial and open-air mosque for the 57th Regiment near Quinn’s Post (Bomba Sirt). There are a number of Turkish memorials and cemeteries on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, demonstrating the greater emphasis that Turkish historians place on the victory of 18 March over the subsequent fighting on the peninsula.
Subsequent operations
Allied troops were withdrawn to Lemnos and then to Egypt. French forces (renamed the “Corps Expeditionnaire des Dardanelles” in late October) were subsumed into the Army of the Orient and later employed at Salonika. In Egypt, the British Imperial and Dominion troops from the Dardanelles along with fresh divisions from the United Kingdom and those at Salonika, became the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF), commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Murray. They joined the Force in Egypt to become the strategic reserve for the British Empire, consisting of 13 infantry and mounted divisions with 400,000 men. In March 1916, Murray took command of both these forces, forming them into the new Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), and reorganising the units for service in Europe, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. While the ANZAC was disbanded, the AIF was expanded with three new Australian divisions being raised, and a New Zealand Division was also formed. These units moved to the Western Front in mid-1916. The British yeomanry units that had fought dismounted at Gallipoli were reinforced and reorganised, forming the 74th (Yeomanry) Division and a portion of the 75th Division. Along with the Australian Light Horsemen and New Zealand Mounted Rifles remounted and reorganised into the Anzac Mounted Division, infantry from the 52nd (Lowland) Division, 42nd (East Lancashire) Division, 53rd (Welsh) Division and 54th (East Anglian) Division, later joined by additional remounted Australian Light Horsemen and British yeomanry from the Australian Mounted Division, participated in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign. The Egyptian Sinai was reoccupied in 1916, while Palestine and the northern Levant were captured from the Ottoman Empire during 1917 and 1918, before the Armistice of Mudros ended hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre on 31 October. The Allies subsequently occupied Gallipoli and Constantinople and partitioned the Ottoman Empire. The occupation ended in 1923.
Legacy
Gallipoli campaign epitaph at Lone Pine Cemetery
The significance of the Gallipoli Campaign is felt strongly in both New Zealand and Australia. Within popular historiography, the campaign is referred to as both nations’ “baptism of fire” and linked to their emergence as independent nations. It has been argued that the campaign proved significant in the emergence of a unique Australian identity following the war, which has been closely linked to popular conceptualisations of the qualities of the soldiers that fought during the campaign, which became embodied in the notion of an “
Anzac spirit“.
The landing on 25 April is commemorated every year in both countries as “Anzac Day“. The first iteration was celebrated unofficially in 1916, at churches in Melbourne, Brisbane and London, before being officially recognised as a public holiday in all Australian states in 1923. The day also became a national holiday in New Zealand in the 1920s. Organised marches by veterans began in 1925, in the same year a service was held on the beach at Gallipoli; two years later the first official dawn service took place at the Sydney Cenotaph. During the 1980s it became popular for Australian and New Zealand tourists to visit Gallipoli to attend the dawn service there and since then thousands have attended services every year. Over 10,000 people attended the 75th anniversary along with political leaders from Turkey, New Zealand, Britain and Australia. Dawn services are also held in Australia; in New Zealand, dawn services are the most popular form of observance of this day. Anzac Day remains the most significant commemoration of military casualties and veterans in Australia and New Zealand, surpassing Remembrance Day (Armistice Day).
In Turkey the battle is also thought of as a significant event in the nation’s emergence, although it is primarily remembered for the fighting that took place around the port of Çanakkale where the Royal Navy was repulsed in March 1915. For the Turks, 18 March has a similar significance as 25 April to Australians and New Zealanders, and although it is not a public holiday, it is commemorated with special ceremonies. The campaign’s main significance to the Turkish people lies in the role it played in the emergence of Mustafa Kemal, who became the first president of the Republic of Turkey after the war. “Çanakkale geçilmez” (Çanakkale is impassable) became a common phrase to express the nation’s pride at stopping the massive assault. The song “Çanakkale içinde” (A Ballad for Chanakkale) commemorates the Turkish youth who fell during the battle.
(Edited from Wikipedia)
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