Ekins - Gallipoli : a ridge too far

Gallipoli remains contested ground. No single military campaign of modern times has been the subject of such intense and prolonged attention and controversy as the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915, observed British historian Robert Rhodes James. While writing his classic history, Gallipoli, first published in 1965, James found that many of the political, military and historical disputes generated by the campaign still continued to rumble sulphurously half a century later.[1] As the centenary of the events of 1915 now approaches, interest in Gallipoli seems undiminished. Although the passionate invective of the earlier disputes has largely dissipated, controversy and debate continues over the campaigns origins and its strategic basis, its tactical shortcomings and outcomes, the supposed lost opportunities, and the responsibility for failure.

Criticism of the political and military mismanagement of the campaign first erupted in the British parliament in mid - 1915 as allied operations stalled on the peninsula. By July 1916, six months after the evacuation from Gallipoli, the British government succumbed to pressure and announced an official commission of inquiry. Over the following twelve months, the Dardanelles Special Commission received evidence from some 200 witnesses, many of whom testified to the confused strategic planning, chaotic administrative arrangements, inadequate logistics support and bungled operations that had led to the futile expenditure of tens of thousands of lives. The commissions final report was not published until after the war; the evidence was to remain classified and closed to historians for decades.[2] Although the report avoided directly attributing blame to individuals or criticising the actual conduct of operations, its findings contained the restrained conclusion that: from the outset the risks of failure [of] the expedition outweighed its chances of success.[3]

Over time, however, a romantic nostalgia pervaded the memory of the Gallipoli campaign. Many refused to accept the pragmatic verdict that it had been disastrously conceived and offered no realistic shortcut to victory. Proponents would claim that, with its failure, many larger opportunities had been lost. Typical was the conclusion of Australian war correspondent and author of an influential, popular history of the campaign, Alan Moorehead, who claimed Gallipoli was the most imaginative conception of the war and its potentialities were almost beyond reckoning. The campaign had been vindicated by many former commanders, he believed, and although there was general criticism of the tactics, no serious student now questioned the wisdom of the Allies going to the Dardanelles. To supporters, the campaign offered a viable alternative strategy to the trench warfare deadlock and terrible slaughter on the Western Front. It could have succeeded in defeating Turkey and drawing the neutral Balkan states into the war on the allied side to assist an allied advance on Austria-Hungary. An allied victory in the Dardanelles would also have opened a warm-water sea route to Russia to allow Britain to supply its decaying Entente partner with munitions and matriel and to transport Russian grain shipments to Britain. Some even claimed that this in turn may have averted the collapse of the Russian armies in 1917 and forestalled the Bolshevik Revolution.[4]

Later assessments, based on extensive research into the now available records, are more sober in their conclusions. Historians such as Robin Prior, for example, have argued that the Gallipoli campaign actually had no influence on the course of the war as a whole. Even if the expedition had been successful, he concludes, it is doubtful if the war would have been shortened by a single day. Notwithstanding the bravery of allied troops who fought on the peninsula, the campaign was fought in vain. There is no evidence to suggest that Turkey would have surrendered under the pressure of a naval attack on Constantinople; an assault on Austria-Hungary from the south had little chance of success, with or without the unlikely assistance of the fractious Balkan states; Britain was proving unable to supply sufficient munitions to its own armies in the field in 1915 and could not have produced a surplus of arms and ammunition to send to Russia; in fact, Britain had neither the shipping nor the war matriel to assist Russia until at least 1917. In any event, the unavoidable reality was that the German army would still have to be defeated in northern France and Belgium before the war could possibly end.[5]

Given such widely diverging views over the significance and impact of the campaign, it seems hardly surprising that Gallipoli remains the subject of intense debate and scrutiny. Attention has generally focused on the overall strategy, the amphibious landings and the protracted occupation of the peninsula. Often overlooked are the largest and most sustained battles of the entire campaign, those of the August offensive that became the pivotal turning point of the struggle.

In early August 1915, after three long months of stalemate in the Gallipoli trenches, British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops launched a series of assaults in an all-out attempt to break the deadlock on the peninsula and force a decisive victory. The August offensive resulted in heartbreaking failure and costly losses on both sides. Many of the sites of the bloody struggle, places such as Lone Pine (Turkish: