“Members of the 2nd Australian Field Ambulance practice boat drills off the island of Lemnos, Greece, in preparation for the landings at Gallipoli, April 1915.”
Gallipoli. With a single word, the caption to Australian War Memorial image C01632 transforms our understanding of the image it describes.
Unlike the men in the boat, volunteer stretcher bearers and medics recruited from the Australian state of Victoria, we know what history has in store.
One of the costliest phases of the First World War, the land phase of the Gallipoli Campaign started on April 25, 1915, when Allied troops landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula at the mouth of the Sea of Marmara in Ottoman Turkey.
"It was a front that no one had expected and no one had considered," explained the University of Oxford historian Eugene Rogan in a recent interview with The National's Faisal Al Yafai.
“As ANZAC [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] troops, Indian troops, French troops, British troops flooded the Eastern Mediterranean in a bid to achieve a quick victory over the Turks, knock one of the Central Powers out, maybe link up with Russia through the Black Sea, they did so thinking it would be a quick war, a quick victory, a morale booster.”
If that was the Gallipoli Campaign’s intention, the outcomes could not have been more different.
An Allied naval attack began on February 19, 1915, but was abandoned after three battleships were sunk, including HMS Goliath, and three others were damaged.
Allied troops began to land on April 25 but by this time the Ottoman forces had had ample time to prepare and the defending armies were six times larger than they had been when the campaign began.
Against determined opposition, Australian and New Zealand troops won a bridgehead at “Anzac Cove”, but a stalemate prevailed for the rest of the year until the operation was abandoned in January 1916. Some 130,000 soldiers died in the campaign, including more than 8,000 Australians and more than 2,700 New Zealanders.
On the Ottoman side, 87,000 troops were killed before the Turks, under German command, finally repulsed the enemy.
If the Gallipoli Campaign was a disaster, it proved to be a defining moment in the histories of Australia, New Zealand and Turkey.
“The fates of many peoples were determined in this strait, on this soil, but none more so than our fate as an empire collapsed,” said the Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu last week at the centenary commemoration of the Cannakale War, as the Gallipoli campaign is known in Turkey.
As the Australian National University historian Frank Bongiorno has explained, Gallipoli was also a defining moment in the forging of Australia’s modern national identity and the moment when the ANZAC legend was forged, one of the country’s most enduring national myths.
On April 25, crowds of Australians and New Zealanders, selected by a ballot, will gather to commemorate ANZAC Day and the centenary of the conflict that they call Gallipoli at the Anzac Commemorative Site on the battlefield overlooking the Dardanelles Straits.
At the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, the city’s grandest and oldest, an exhibition of 18 photographs, selected from a private archive belonging to the Australian Embassy in Ankara, is on display. They are mounted in the hotel’s Room 101, which Ataturk used repeatedly from 1917 onwards and which now houses a museum dedicated to his life.
Ataturk died in 1938, but his memories of the conflict in Gallipoli were recorded in 1934 and form the epitaph on the Ataturk Memorial at ANZAC Cove.
“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 faraway 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.”
Nick Leech is a features writer at The National.