So this was book #75 in my WW1 project, and is easily one of my favorites. It was a rewarding rabbit hole adventure in itselfĥ stars. Secondly the maps in this book are inadequate so upon reading I regularly referenced Google maps to better understand the geography of western Turkey. This book is written from a western perspective and while it makes note of the bravery of the Ottoman forces, the author’s sympathies clearly lie with the Allies. Moorehead turned to writing and became a well known WW2 war correspondent and wrote this book some forty years later in 1956. It is no surprise that the veterans who returned home from Gallipoli had a profound effect on him. Moorehead was just a young boy in Australia when the disaster in the Dardanelles unfolded. Many men also succumbed from dysentery and other related diseases. Many infantry died right there in the trenches from sniper or artillery fire or from the occasionally ill-advised frontal assaults against the Turkish front lines.
Nearly 10,000 soldiers and sailors died, a shockingly high casualty rate even by WW1 standards. Of the 50,000 Australians who landed on the beaches at Anzac Cove and the other beachheads near Gallipoli. Supporting the British in Gallipoli were large Australian, French and New Zealand land forces. Enver Pasha, the enigmatic leader of the Young Turks, and Mustafa Kemal, who later became Kemal Atatürk the creator of modern Turkey, both figure prominently. It was last victory of any importance for the doomed Ottoman empire.Ĭhurchill, Lord Kitchener, the poet Rupert Brooke and the intriguing General Ian Hamilton are all found in the pages here. Eleven months later the British led forces fled Gallipoli utterly humiliated. The disastrous campaign was dreamt up by Churchill in the early months of the war - ostensibly to protect British interests in the Middle East by seizing the straights which would also free up Russia to wage war in the Balkans and on the Eastern front. It took place on that sliver of geography between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
Gallipoli, by Australian Alan Moorehead, is an engaging narrative history about the famous WW1 naval and land campaign. Of the sunken battleships nothing was to be seen. It was the silence of the Gallipoli peninsula which most surprised and awed the survivors of the campaign who returned there after the war, the stillness of the cliffs and beaches where nothing much remained of the battle except the awful sight of the white bones of unburied soldiers and the rusting guns along the shore.
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