The Gallipoli Campaign

Abstract

The Gallipoli Campaign began on 25 April 1915, when the British-French Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) attacked the Ottoman 5th Army on the Gallipoli peninsula in contemporary Turkey. The first MEF troops to land were the “Anzacs”, a nickname for the all-volunteer Australians and New Zealanders. The operation was one of the worst military disasters in history and ended in a humiliating withdrawal by the MEF January, 1916. Despite causing an estimated 142,000 Allied and 251,000 Turkish casualties, after more than a century, the campaign remains central to myths of Australian, New Zealand and Turkish nationhood. In this chapter, I argue the bungled MEF operations were inextricably entwined in a wider culture of “endemic disorder” in the British War Council in London and General Headquarters in Gallipoli. I maintain men in these organisations planned and executed the campaign with interlinked ideologies of imperial masculinity and racial superiority they thought would easily defeat culturally and militarily inferior Ottomans. Instead, a combination of these belief systems and outmoded military techniques foundered against a determined and adept enemy, and the campaign developed into a classic “fog of war”. This dispassionate perspective on military operations is vital for understanding the dissonant reactions to the Gallipoli battlefields by the Australian and New Zealand tourists I travelled with and interviewed for the book.