The plan looked irresistible on a map. By early 1915 the Western Front had frozen into trenches, and Winston Churchill — at forty, First Lord of the Admiralty — championed a way around the deadlock: force the Dardanelles, the narrow strait guarding the sea road to Constantinople. Battleships would smash the Ottoman forts, the fleet would appear off the enemy capital, Turkey would tumble out of the war, and a warm-water supply route would open to Russia. No mass armies, no mud — victory by naval audacity. What followed instead was an eight-and-a-half-month catastrophe that produced roughly half a million casualties on the two sides, wrecked careers, and, strangely, forged national identities at both ends of the peninsula.
The naval gamble died on 18 March 1915. British and French battleships steamed into the strait to silence the forts, unaware that the small Ottoman minelayer Nusret had slipped out nights earlier and laid a fresh line of mines in a bay the Allies believed swept. In a single afternoon the French battleship Bouvet and the British Irresistible and Ocean were sunk, and other ships were crippled. The admirals declined to try again, and the decision to land soldiers instead handed the Ottomans five clear weeks to prepare their defences under the German general Otto Liman von Sanders.
The landings
On 25 April 1915 the British 29th Division went ashore at Cape Helles, at the peninsula's tip, while the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps — the Anzacs — landed further north. The Anzacs came ashore about a mile from where they were expected, at a cramped cove beneath ridges rather than on open ground; whether currents, misplaced marker buoys or navigational error was to blame is still argued. The spot became Anzac Cove. Above it waited a then-obscure Ottoman lieutenant-colonel, Mustafa Kemal, commanding the 19th Division, who told its 57th Regiment: "I do not order you to attack, I order you to die." His counter-attacks penned the invaders into a beachhead barely bigger than a farm.
The campaign then reproduced exactly the trench stalemate it was meant to bypass, with additions: dysentery, plagues of flies, savage heat, and in late November a blizzard and flood that caused thousands of frostbite and exposure cases. An August offensive, including a fresh landing at Suvla Bay, collapsed amid hesitation — the corps commander, Sir Frederick Stopford, became a byword for lethargy while the hills above the bay stood briefly undefended. In September the Australian journalist Keith Murdoch — father of Rupert — carried a blistering, partly exaggerated letter about the mismanagement back towards London; within weeks the commander-in-chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, was recalled, never to command in the field again.
The one unambiguously successful operation was leaving. Between December 1915 and 9 January 1916 the entire force was evacuated by night with barely a casualty, fooling the Ottomans with tricks such as the "drip rifle" — a self-firing rifle triggered by water dripping between two tins, devised by the Australian soldier William Scurry — which kept up sporadic fire from empty trenches.
What the defeat made
The bill was appalling: around 44,000 Allied dead, including roughly 8,700 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders, against some 86,000 Ottoman dead. Churchill was demoted, resigned from the government, and went to the Western Front to command a battalion; Gallipoli shadowed his reputation for a quarter of a century. Mustafa Kemal's star, by contrast, rose from the ridges above Anzac Cove towards the presidency of the Turkish Republic he founded in 1923 as Atatürk. For Turks, the defence of Çanakkale became a founding epic; for Australia and New Zealand, 25 April became Anzac Day, the solemn centre of both national calendars — commemoration of a defeat, which is part of its power. The poet Rupert Brooke, sailing with the expedition, never even arrived: he died of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.
One famous coda deserves a health warning. The words engraved at Anzac Cove — "Those heroes that shed their blood... your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace", addressed to grieving mothers and attributed to Atatürk in 1934 — have never been securely traced to anything he wrote or said; historians regard the attribution as doubtful. The sentiment did real diplomatic work between old enemies, but the record, as so often at Gallipoli, is messier than the myth. The campaign that was meant to shorten the war instead taught a bleak lesson: there were no shortcuts — only new places to dig trenches.
Quiz nuggets
- On 18 March 1915 mines laid by the Ottoman minelayer Nusret sank three Allied battleships — Bouvet, Irresistible and Ocean — in one afternoon.
- The Gallipoli landings began on 25 April 1915, now commemorated as Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand.
- Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, commanded the Ottoman 19th Division and ordered its 57th Regiment "to die" rather than merely attack.
- Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert Murdoch, wrote the 1915 letter that helped bring down commander Sir Ian Hamilton.
- The evacuation ending 9 January 1916 used self-firing "drip rifles" and was completed with barely a casualty.