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.
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Notes
- 1.
For maps of the Triple Entente and the Central Powers, see Olson-Raymer (2014).
- 2.
For maps of the Ottoman Empire, see Engül (2017).
- 3.
For maps of the Dardanelles region, see Wikimedia Commons (2015).
- 4.
For a map of the Ottoman defences, see Wikimedia Commons (2014).
- 5.
A brigade normally had a total of 4000 troops from four battalions with four companies of 250.
- 6.
For a map of Hamilton’s plan, see New Zealand History (2014a).
- 7.
For a map of the movements of covering force, see Department of Veterans’ Affairs (2017).
- 8.
For a 3D map simulating the terrain of the invasion area on 25 April, see Macleod (2011).
- 9.
Members of the MEF nicknamed places after individual soldiers, events or conspicuous geographical features.
- 10.
For a simulation of the battle between the Anzacs and Ottomans on the first day, see ABC (2015).
- 11.
- 12.
For a map of Allied and Ottoman lines on 6 August, see Wikimedia Commons (2017).
- 13.
For a map of the Sari Bair offensive, see New Zealand History (2014b).
- 14.
Many graphic examples of endemic disorder by American military and political leaders in Vietnam are evident in the documentary, The Vietnam War, by Burns and Novick (Thomson 2017).
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McKay, J. (2018). The Gallipoli Campaign. In: Transnational Tourism Experiences at Gallipoli. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0026-4_1
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