Gallipoli campaign
The Gallipoli campaign, the Dardanelles campaign, the Defence of Gallipoli or the Battle of Gallipoli was a military campaign in the First World War on the Gallipoli Peninsula from 19 February 1915 to 9 January 1916. The Allied powers, Britain, France and the Russian Empire, sought to weaken the Ottoman Empire, one of the Central Powers, by taking control of the Turkish straits. This would expose the Ottoman capital at Constantinople to bombardment by Entente battleships and cut it off from the Asian part of the empire. With the Ottoman Empire defeated, the Suez Canal would be safe and the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits would be open to Entente supplies to the Black Sea and warm-water ports in Russia.
In February 1915, the Allied fleet failed to force a passage through the Dardanelles. An amphibious landing on the Gallipoli peninsula began in April 1915. In January 1916, after eight months' fighting, with approximately 250,000 casualties on each side, the land campaign was abandoned and the invasion force was withdrawn. It was a costly campaign for the Entente powers and the Ottoman Empire as well as for the sponsors of the expedition, especially the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. The campaign was considered a great Ottoman victory. In Turkey, it is regarded as a defining moment in the history of the state, a final surge in the defence of the motherland as the Ottoman Empire retreated.
The campaign became the basis for the Turkish War of Independence and the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who rose to prominence as a commander at Gallipoli, as founder and president. The campaign is considered by some to be the beginning of Australian and New Zealand national consciousness. The anniversary of the landings, 25 April, is known as Anzac Day, the most significant commemoration of military casualties and veterans in the two countries, surpassing Remembrance Day.
Background
Black Sea raid
On 29 October 1914, two former German warships, the Ottoman and, conducted the Black Sea raid, in which they bombarded the Russian port of Odessa and sank several ships. On 31 October, the Ottomans entered the war and began the Caucasus campaign against Russia. The British briefly bombarded forts in Gallipoli, invaded Mesopotamia and studied the possibility of forcing the Dardanelles.Entente strategy and the Dardanelles
Before the Dardanelles operation was conceived, the British had planned to conduct an amphibious invasion near Alexandretta on the Mediterranean, an idea originally presented by Boghos Nubar in 1914. This plan was made by the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, to sever the Ottoman capital from Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Alexandretta was an area with a Christian population and was the strategic centre of the Ottoman railway network; its capture would cut the empire in two. Vice Admiral Sir Richard Peirse, Commander-in-Chief, East Indies, ordered Captain Frank Larkin of to Alexandretta on 13 December 1914. The and the French cruiser were also present. Kitchener was working on the plan in March 1915, the beginning of the British attempt to incite an Arab Revolt. The Alexandretta landing was abandoned because militarily it would have required more resources than France could allocate and politically France did not want the British operating in their sphere of influence, a position to which Britain had agreed in 1912.By late 1914, on the Western Front, the Franco–British counter-offensive of the First Battle of the Marne had ended and the Belgians, British and French had suffered many casualties in the First Battle of Ypres in Flanders. The war of manoeuvre had evolved into trench warfare. The German Empire and Austria-Hungary closed the overland trade routes between Britain and France in the west and Russia in the east. The White Sea in the Arctic and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Far East were icebound in winter and distant from the Eastern Front; the Baltic Sea was blockaded by the Kaiserliche Marine and the entrance to the Black Sea through the Dardanelles was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. While the Ottomans remained neutral, supplies could be sent to Russia through the Dardanelles but prior to the Ottoman entry into the war, the straits had been closed; in November the Ottomans began to mine the waterway.
The French politician, Aristide Briand, proposed in November to attack the Ottoman Empire but this was rejected and an attempt by the British to bribe the Ottomans to join the Entente side also failed. Later that month, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a naval attack on the Dardanelles, based in part on erroneous reports of Ottoman troop strength. Churchill wanted to use a large number of obsolete battleships, which could not operate against the German High Seas Fleet, in a Dardanelles operation, with a small occupation force provided by the army. It was hoped that an attack on the Ottomans would also draw Bulgaria and Greece into the war on the Entente side. On 2 January 1915, Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia appealed to Britain for assistance against the Ottomans, who were campaigning in the Caucasus. Planning began for a naval demonstration in the Dardanelles, to divert Ottoman troops from Caucasia.
Naval operations
On 17 February 1915, a British seaplane from flew a reconnaissance sortie over the Straits. Two days later, the first attack on the Dardanelles began when an Anglo-French flotilla, including the British dreadnought, began a long-range bombardment of Ottoman coastal artillery batteries. The British had intended to use eight aircraft from Ark Royal to spot for the bombardment but only a Short Type 136, was serviceable. A period of bad weather slowed the attack but by 25 February the outer forts had been reduced and the entrance cleared of mines. Royal Marines were landed to destroy guns at Kum Kale and Seddülbahir, while the naval bombardment shifted to batteries between Kum Kale and Kephez.Frustrated by the mobility of the Ottoman batteries, sited on the instructions of General Otto Liman von Sanders, which evaded the Entente bombardments and threatened the minesweepers sent to clear the Straits, Churchill pressed the naval commander, Admiral Sackville Carden, to increase the fleet's efforts. Carden drew up fresh plans and on 4 March sent a cable to Churchill, stating that the fleet could expect to arrive in Istanbul within 14 days. A sense of impending victory was heightened by the interception of a German wireless message that revealed the Ottoman Dardanelles forts were running out of ammunition. When the message was relayed to Carden, it was agreed the main attack would be launched on or around 17 March. Carden, suffering from stress, was placed on the sick list by the medical officer and command was taken over by Admiral John de Robeck.
18 March 1915
On the morning of 18 March 1915, the Entente fleet, comprising with an array of cruisers and destroyers, began the main attack against the narrowest point of the Dardanelles, where the straits are wide. Despite some damage to the Entente ships by Ottoman return fire, minesweepers were ordered along the straits. In the Ottoman official account, by 2:00 p.m. "all telephone wires were cut, all communications with the forts were interrupted, some of the guns had been knocked out ... in consequence the artillery fire of the defence had slackened considerably". The struck a mine, causing her to capsize in two minutes, with just 75 survivors out of 718 men. Minesweepers, manned by civilians, retreated under Ottoman artillery fire, leaving the minefields largely intact. and struck mines and Irresistible was sunk, with most of her crew rescued; Inflexible was badly damaged and withdrawn. There was confusion during the battle about the cause of the damage; some participants blaming torpedoes. was sent to rescue Irresistible but was disabled by a shell, struck a mine and was abandoned, eventually sinking.The French battleships and sailed through a new line of mines placed secretly by the ten days before and were also damaged. The losses forced de Robeck to sound the "general recall" to protect what remained of his force. During the planning of the campaign, naval losses had been anticipated and mainly obsolete battleships, unfit to face the German fleet, had been sent. Some of the senior naval officers like the commander of Queen Elizabeth, Commodore Roger Keyes, felt that they had come close to victory, believing that the Ottoman guns had almost run out of ammunition but the views of de Robeck, the First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher and others prevailed. Entente attempts to force the straits using naval power were terminated, due to the losses and bad weather. Planning to capture the Ottoman defences by land, to open the way for the ships, began. Two Entente submarines tried to traverse the Dardanelles but were lost to mines and the strong currents.
Prelude
Entente preparations
After the failure of the naval attacks, troops were assembled to eliminate the Ottoman mobile artillery, which was preventing the Entente minesweepers from clearing the way for the larger vessels. Kitchener appointed General Sir Ian Hamilton to command the of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. Soldiers from the Australian Imperial Force and New Zealand Expeditionary Force were encamped in Egypt, undergoing training prior to being sent to France. The Australian and New Zealand troops were formed into the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, comprising the volunteer 1st Australian Division and the New Zealand and Australian Division. The ANZAC troops were joined by the regular 29th Division and the Royal Naval Division. The French Corps expéditionnaire d'Orient, initially consisting of two brigades within one division, was subsequently placed under Hamilton's command.Over the following month, Hamilton prepared his plan and the British and French divisions joined the Australians in Egypt. Hamilton chose to concentrate on the southern part of the Gallipoli peninsula at Cape Helles and Seddülbahir, where an unopposed landing was expected. The Entente initially discounted the fighting ability of the Ottoman soldiers. The naïveté of the Entente planners was illustrated by a leaflet that was issued to the British and Australians while they were still in Egypt,
The underestimation of Ottoman military potential stemmed from a "sense of superiority" among the Allies, because of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and its poor performance in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Entente intelligence failed to adequately prepare for the campaign, in some cases relying on information gained from Egyptian travel guides. The troops for the assault were loaded on transports in the order they were to disembark, causing a long delay which meant that many troops, including the French at Mudros, were forced to detour to Alexandria to embark on the ships that would take them into battle. A five-week delay until the end of April ensued, during which the Ottomans strengthened their defences on the peninsula, although bad weather during March and April might have delayed the landings anyway, preventing supply and reinforcement.
Following preparations in Egypt, Hamilton and his headquarters staff arrived at Mudros on 10 April. The ANZAC Corps departed Egypt in early April and assembled on the island of Lemnos in Greece on 12 April, where a small garrison had been established in early March and practice landings were undertaken. The British 29th Division departed for Mudros on 7 April and the Royal Naval Division rehearsed on the island of Skyros, after arriving there on 17 April. That day, the British submarine tried to run the straits but hit a submarine net, ran aground and was shelled by an Ottoman fort, killing its commander, Lieutenant Commander Theodore S. Brodie and six of his crew; the survivors were forced to surrender. The Entente fleet and British and French troops assembled at Mudros, ready for the landings but poor weather from 19 March grounded Entente aircraft for nine days and in 24 days only a partial programme of reconnaissance flights was possible.