The invasion of Gallipoli, a peninsula squeezed between the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles in what is now western Turkey, was conceived by Allied commanders as a lightning strike against the Ottoman Empire to bring about a quick end to the Great War, which had bogged down into a bloody stalemate on the Western Front.
As the Germans and their European allies, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, faced the Allies in trenches extending miles from the North Sea to Switzerland, the Turks engaged the Russians on the eastern front, bombarding Russian ports and sealing off the Dardanelles. Allied generals and politicians expected their operation in Gallipoli to be over in a matter of days. Instead, by the time Allied forces withdrew in defeat in January , close to half a million soldiers—nearly , Allied troops, , Turks—had been killed or wounded.
Australia suffered 28, casualties at Gallipoli, including 8, dead, nearly one-sixth of the casualties it endured during the Great War. Turkish citizens and visitors from around the world will crowd the battlefield and cemeteries for memorials in March and April.
And a flurry of movies by Turkish directors has presented the Ottoman experience of the carnage. The nationalistic Gallipoli: End of the Road dramatizes the battlefield feats of Abdul the Terrible, a real-life Turkish sniper who gunned down a dozen Allied officers before he was shot dead by a Chinese-Australian sharpshooter named Billy Sing.
Children of Canakkale using the Turkish name for the Gallipoli campaign , by Turkish filmmaker Sinan Cetin, takes a starkly different approach, telling of two brothers who fight on opposite sides, British and Turkish, and meet face to face in a climactic bayonet charge.
The centennial will also mark the completion of an extraordinary effort by scholars to study the battlefield itself, especially the elaborate trench system. Since its initial forays in , a team of Turkish, Australian and New Zealand archaeologists and historians has spent between three and four weeks in the field each fall, hacking through dense brush, identifying depressions in the earth, marking their GPS coordinates and overlaying the new data on a highly detailed map compiled by Ottoman cartographers immediately after the Allied withdrawal.
But erosion caused by wind and rain, as well as the increasing popularity of the battlefield among both Turkish and foreign tourists, now threaten to destroy these last remaining traces. On a warm September morning, I join McGibbon and Simon Harrington, a retired Australian rear admiral and member of the field team, on a tour of Holly Ridge, the hillside where Australian troops faced Ottoman Army regiments for four months in Thickets of pine, holly and wattle gouge my legs as I follow a precipitous trail above the Aegean Sea.
The two historians spent much of September delineating this former front line, which ran roughly along both sides of a modern-day fire road. McGibbon, clad like his colleague in a bush hat and safari gear, points to depressions half hidden in the brush on the roadside, which he and Harrington tagged last year with orange ribbons. The trenches have eroded away, but the historians look for telltale clues—such as the heavy vegetation that tends to grow here because of rainfall accumulation in the depressions.
He picks up a fist-size chunk of shrapnel, one of countless fragments of materiel that still litter the battlefield. Most important relics were carted off long ago by second-hand dealers, relatives of veterans and private museum curators such as Ozay Gundogan, the great-grandson of a soldier who fought at Gallipoli and founder of a war museum in the village of Buyuk Anafarta.
For example, in the Australian trenches, the historians uncovered piles of tin cans containing bully beef—testifying to the monotony of the Anzac diet.
The Ottomans, by contrast, received deliveries of meat and vegetables from nearby villages and cooked in brick ovens inside the trenches. The team has recovered several bricks from these ovens. As trench warfare bogged down, the architecture of the trenches became more elaborate.
The Anzac forces brought in engineers who had learned their trade in the gold mines of western Australia: They constructed zigzagging frontline corridors with steps leading up to firing recesses—some of which can still be seen today. Most of the fighting took place from deep inside these bunkers, but soldiers sometimes emerged in waves—only to be cut down by fixed machine guns. The Allies had insufficient medical personnel in the field and few hospital ships, and thousands of injured were left for days in the sun, pleading for water until they perished.
The Turkish soldiers fought with a tenacity that the British—ingrained with colonial attitudes of racial superiority—had never anticipated. Carlyon wrote in his acclaimed study Gallipoli. The corpses piled up in the trenches and ravines, often remaining uncollected for weeks.
Percival Fenwick, a medical officer from New Zealand, who participated in a joint burial with Turkish forces during a rare ceasefire that spring. By August , after a three-month stalemate, the Allied commanders at Gallipoli were desperate to turn the tide.
The attack started on a plateau called Lone Pine, where Australians launched a charge at Turkish positions yards away. They captured their objective but suffered more than 2, casualties.
Australian engineer Sgt. Cyril Lawrence came upon a group of Australian injured, huddled inside a tunnel that they had just captured from the Turks. Dysentery and paratyphoid broke out in an environment where water and sanitation were rudimentary at best.
Swarms of flies carried infection from refuse, latrines, and rotting corpses to food being eaten in unwashed mess tins. Disease was just as much a threat to the troops as the enemy.
The combination of poor nutrition, unsanitary living conditions and lack of rest took their toll. By late July, hundreds of tired and poorly fed men were succumbing to sickness each day, though many refused to be evacuated.
Two unidentified soldiers stand amid boxes of bully beef stacked in a supply depot on the beach at Anzac Cove. The cans in the foreground were used for carrying kerosene or water. Sometimes the biscuits were grated or ground up to make porridge or thicken a stew made with bully beef and onions.
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