In no other field of human endeavor are imagination and boldness so vital yet so rare as in warfare. It was for this reason that millions of men from Galicia and the Isonzo to Ypres, Flanders, and Verdun died in the no-man’s-land killing fields of World War I. The generals and field marshals who led the armies were the best-trained and experienced professionals that their respective nations had ever produced. Most of them had been veterans of earlier conflicts, primarily colonial wars and small-scale conflicts, in which the survival, or at least the great power status, of the nation was not at stake. The division and battalion commanders, at least in the beginning, were the graduates of national military academies where the lessons of the past had been absorbed, and the soldiers were mostly trained reservists from among the best young men of the civilian population or, in the case of Britain, long service professionals. They were the products of a system that rewarded conformity and cast a very jaundiced eye toward the unconventional, the unorthodox, and what today we would call out-of-the-box thinkers among them. No officer was regarded with such suspicion as one who might be considered “too intellectual” or “without clubland values,” which is why a lowly captain named T.E. Lawrence, an Arabist scholar with many years in the Middle East, spent the first two years of the war stuck in an office in Cairo. This was generally true among all the armies of the belligerent powers, but it held to be particularly true of those in the Allied or Entente camp.
As 2015 is the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign, a brilliant concept executed with much courage and so little brilliance, The Lyman Report will re-examine Winston Churchill’s grand strategy to break the deadlock of the Western Front by staging an end run around the Central Powers through the narrow waterway of the Dardanelles. But first, how did such a strange state of affairs come about to bring Turkey into the war as an ally of Germany and Austria against Great Britain, France, and Russia, certainly proof that war and politics do indeed produce strange bedfellows? During the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire of the Turks had been called by statesmen of the period “the sick man of Europe,” and it was an apt description of the cruel, often hapless, and endemically corrupt caliphate ruled by the Sublime Porte in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). From Waterloo in 1815 to the Marne in 1914, much of the geopolitical rivalry and conflicts in Europe had as their cause the retreat of the Ottoman Turks from their glory-day conquests of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. As late as 1683, just 90 years before the American Revolution, their armies stood at the gates of Vienna and threatened to extend Islam beyond the Danube. By 1800 the Christian West had put the weakened Ottoman Empire on the defensive and the long decline that started a century earlier turned the fate of the vast Ottoman domains, stretching from Morocco to Persia and from the Danube to the Arabian Sea, into what diplomats would call “the Eastern Question.”
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inston Spencer Churchill shown here in 1915 with fellow cabinet member David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer (and future prime minister). Churchill commanded the largest navy in the world as Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, and he intended to use this advantage to overcome the horrific stalemate of trench warfare. Born in 1974 as the son of a meteoric politician who died of a social disease and an American socialite mother, Churchill had been a Sandhurst cadet, army officer, war correspondent, escaped POW in the Boer War, prolific best-selling author, and member of parliament on both the Tory and Liberal benches. He was an unapologetic imperialist who believed the survival and success of the British Empire served the cause of civilization. His strategic vision was to use naval power to force open the Turkish Dardanelles, knock the Ottomans out of the war, and open a supply route to Russia.
For a hundred years, Great Britain, France, Austria, Russia, and later Italy contested for pieces of the Ottoman Empire and supported clients or factions within the empire that were seeking independence or self-rule from the Turkish yoke. In 1827 the Greeks won their independence from four centuries of rule by the Turks after a heroic guerrilla struggle and the great naval battle of Navarino Bay. This was the last of the age of fighting sail, in which a coalition fleet of British, French, and Russian warships blasted the Ottoman navy into so many splinters. A few years later the French seized Algeria from an Ottoman satrap, although they spent the rest of the century pacifying the country with a Foreign Legion created for just that purpose. In 1854 Great Britain and France joined Turkey in a war against Russia to keep the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, the straits that separate Europe and Asia, out of the Tsar’s grasp and Russia’s navy out of the Mediterranean Sea. The Allied forces invaded the Crimea and the resulting war became a hapless muddle in which more men died from disease and the elements than from Russian bullets. The only good thing to come out of the conflict was an increasing public concern in England for the plight of the common soldier, whose conditions and ordeal had been brought to light by that new breed of newspaperman known as the war correspondent.
At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, a summit of the leading European statesmen called by the German Chancellor Bismarck to mediate the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, the scale of the Turkish defeat with Russian armies almost at the gates of Constantinople accelerated the decline of the Empire. Serbia and Romania were recognized as independent states; Bulgaria won the right to self-rule, only nominally tied to the Sultan in Constantinople; the British annexed the island of Cyprus, where they still maintain bases, and four years later militarily occupied Egypt to protect the British-owned and -built Suez Canal; Austria occupied the Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a protectorate they formally annexed in 1908; and France added Tunisia to its North African empire, much to the chagrin of the Italians who had a sizable immigrant population settled in Tunis and Bizerte. Everyone came away from the Congress of Berlin with something, except for the Turks, who discovered that they had few friends in the world and only one potential ally, the rising power of Imperial Germany. The German Kaiser assured the Sultan that the Second Reich had no designs on any Ottoman territory and asked only for the privilege to sell Krupp cannon, steel warships, machine guns, and magazine-fed rifles to the antiquated Turkish military and to build the great railroad that would link Berlin to Baghdad.
The 20th century dawned with “the sick man of Europe” on his deathbed, beset by rebellions, restless minorities, and covetous neighboring states. In 1907, after a century of soldiers, spies, adventurers, explorers, and provocateurs playing “the great game” with the weapons of intrigue, subversion, and duplicity, Britain and Russia resolved most of their differences over respective spheres of influence in Central Asia and concluded an entente that linked both empires to France. Russia had been in a formal defensive alliance with France since 1894 and Britain in a less binding but still strong security commitment with the French since 1904. The Turks, particularly the young reformers, were not blind to what the Triple Entente meant for the Ottoman Empire. Unless Turkey joined the modern world and reformed its moribund bureaucracy, archaic, Koran-based educational system, rust-bucket navy, and outdated and under-equipped multinational army, the empire would be on the chopping block of the great powers. The next year, the reformers, known as the Young Turks (yes, that’s where the name originated), seized power and deposed the old sultan, Abdul Hamid II, known to history as Abdul the Damned for his dark record of massacres and suppression of minority populations within the empire. The Young Turks installed the more pliable Mohammed V as the Sublime Porte and set about trying, far too late in the day, to save the empire. They looked to Germany as their model and invited German military advisers to train and eventually command their armies in wartime.
In the years just before the outbreak of the Great War, Turkey moved closer to an alliance with Germany and farther from the Entente nations. As always, it was defeat and national humiliation that drove the Turks into seeking a German alliance and modernization of its armed forces by German technocrats and soldiers. In 1911 the Italians invaded the Turkish provinces of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania in North Africa and annexed the Turkish Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. The Italo-Turkish War — a short, nasty conflict with enormous consequences — is notable for being the first war in which military aircraft strafed and bombed men on the ground, proving to some, at least in Europe, that the newfangled contraptions first flown at Kitty Hawk eight years earlier had other uses than performing stunts at air shows and county fairs. The Senussi tribesmen of North Africa being bombed from the air, doubtless, were unable to appreciate this advance in military technology. Still, the Italians spent the next 30 years trying to pacify the primitive Senussi tribes, who carried out a stubborn and effective insurgency with German assistance during World War I in one of that war’s lesser-known and mostly forgotten sideshows. In 1951 the former Italian colonies in North Africa formed the modern state of Libya with a Senussi prince crowned King Idris I. That monarch was in turn overthrown in a coup staged by a young army colonel named Muammar Gaddafi in 1969.
The war with the Italians had hardly ended when a new war began in the Balkans, this one aimed at the very capital of the Ottoman Empire. In October 1912 the Balkan League — an alliance of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria — declared war against their hereditary Turkish enemies and pushed the Turks out of nearly all their European territory, leaving only a small enclave around Constantinople and the Sea of Marmara. Even the fortress city of Adrianople fell to the Bulgarians, a humiliating setback for the shattered Turkish forces. Fortunately for the Ottomans, the victors fell out among themselves in the fight over the spoils and turned on Bulgaria, which had become a fully independent state in 1908 under Tsar Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a former Austrian prince known to his contemporaries as Foxy Ferdinand for his shrewd diplomatic ability to play off the great powers against each other.
The Bulgarians under the foxy Ferdinand and his son Boris were always greedy for territory, a fault that led them to choose the wrong side in 1915 and again in 1941, and they thoroughly resented the fact that Greece and Serbia were devouring the lion’s share of Turkish Macedonia and leaving them with the scraps at the table. The exhausted Bulgarians lost the short Second Balkan War to Serbia, Greece, and Romania and ceded strips of territory to all three. The Turks jumped in during the last few weeks of the fighting in July 1913 and reclaimed Adrianople from the Bulgarians, who by this time had little fight left in them. Massacres, rape and plunder, and ethnic cleansing were common features of the Balkan Wars, as they were again when the conflicts resumed in the early 1990s. All the nations involved in these wars felt they were cheated at the peace table and denied their place in the sun by the great powers. This set the stage, probably irrevocably, for the outbreak of war between the Triple Entente and the Central Powers in August 1914, a European conflict that would eventually engulf most of the world.
At the height of the First Balkan War in January 1913, the Young Turks, spurred to greater reforms by the loss of Macedonia and Albania to the Balkan League, staged another coup in Constantinople, led by Enver Pasha, the Minister of War. Sultan Mohammed lost the last remnants of authority and became a figurehead for a triumvirate of reformers under Enver Pasha. Ottoman Turkey, in effect, was transformed into a military dictatorship, a caliphate that might still call for jihad against nonbelievers in time of war or insurrection, but in most other aspects a secular military state with an increasingly German flavor. In the aftermath of the Treaty of Bucharest that ended Second Balkan War, Enver Pasha signed a secret treaty of cooperation with Imperial Germany on 3 August 1914 in which both parties gave assurances that they would support the other against Russia in the event of a European crisis. It was not quite an alliance with a promise to go to war, but it was close enough to matter when the crisis did come in the weeks that followed.
The crisis of the summer of 1914, the terrorist assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, escalated beyond the control of diplomats and led to the outbreak of general war between the Entente nations and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria in late July and early August 1914. The Young Turks, who knew better than anyone that Turkey was not yet ready for another war, claimed neutrality, but that neutrality was curiously nullified by the actions of both Great Britain and Germany. In a move that might have been contrived to insult Turkish pride, two modern battleships being built in British shipyards for the Turkish navy were seized by for the Royal Navy, which would need every capital ship it could get for the world war. The Turks protested, much like the 21st-century Russian government over the refusal of France to deliver the Mistral-Class amphibious assault ships near completion and paid for in French shipyards, but they could do little but express resentment and feel cheated and insulted by the English. The battleships were desperately needed to counterbalance Russian naval strength in the Black Sea. It was Germany, or the Imperial German Navy rather, that came to the rescue with boldness and daring in one of history’s most consequential sea chases.
The opening of hostilities found German naval squadrons and the occasional lone ship scattered throughout the world from the Pacific and Indian Oceans to East Africa and the Mediterranean Sea. In a world where Britannia still ruled the waves with an overwhelming naval presence, German warships far from home waters faced daunting odds, and few escaped the British net and found safe harbors. The German naval squadron in the Mediterranean, based at the Austrian naval base at the port of Pola on the Adriatic Sea, found itself at sea before the Royal Navy could establish an effective blockade of the Adriatic bottleneck. The squadron consisted of the battle cruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau under the command of Admiral Wilhelm Souchon. Souchon knew that with superior British naval units at Gibraltar, Malta, and Alexandria, there was no way out of the Mediterranean and that his primary mission would be to do as much damage to the Entente as he was capable of, and that proved to be considerable. The Moltke-class battle cruiser Goeben, commissioned in 1912, was one of the most modern and formidable warships afloat. Mounted with ten 11.1-inch guns and capable of making 25 knots in open waters, the Goeben could outrun anything that it could not outfight.
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The German battle cruiser SMS Goeben was one of the most modern warships in the world in 1914. It was the ship that widened the war and brought Ottoman Turkey in as a belligerent. As the flagship of the Imperial German Navy Mediterranean squadron, she was capable of outrunning any warships that she was unable to outfight. This ship and her escort, the light cruiser Breslau, were transferred to the Turkish navy by German Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, who continued to command the squadron as an Ottoman admiral and used his powerful ships to strike the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea. Goeben survived the Great War and was so modern that she remained the flagship of the Turkish navy, as the Yavuz, until 1950, and was finally sold for scrap in 1970.
The British Admiralty in London and the French Mediterranean fleet based at Toulon ordered every available ship from Gibraltar to Suez to seek out and destroy the Goeben and Breslau, but in an era before the invention of radar and when aviation was still in its infancy, that was not quite as easy as it would be only a few years later. Admiral Souchon wasted no time, striking hard and fast in furious bombardments of port facilities and military installation along the coast of French Algeria. These were pinprick attacks, but they had the effect of causing panic and a diversion of resources that were needed elsewhere. For more than a week Souchon led the British and French navies on a merry chase across the eastern Mediterranean, evading his pursuers all the way to the Dardanelles, the 35 miles of narrow strait that connected the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara. On 10 August 1914, the Goeben and Breslau steamed into the Marmara Sea and arrived at Constantinople to a tumultuous welcome, dropping anchor within easy sight of the British ambassador’s residence. On orders from Berlin, Admiral Souchon transferred his ships to the Ottoman navy. The Goeben was renamed the Yavuz Sultan Selim and the Breslau the Midilli, although the German officers and crews would still man the vessels. All that really changed was the flag. Even Admiral Souchon kept his job.
Enver Pasha and the Young Turks would have preferred to sit back and let the great powers of the Christian world destroy each other, but they also wanted to share in the fruits of a German victory. And as Admiral Souchon had done his best to prove to the Turkish government and people, Germany had the look of a war winner, with her armies on foreign soil everywhere and her navy compensating for inferior numbers with better gunnery, superior damage control, and more of a willingness to take risks. The traditional enemy of Ottoman Turkey had always been Russia, and the Young Turks blamed the Russians for most of Turkey’s decline, rather than the actual reasons, which were chronic misgovernment, cruel despotism, and brutal oppression of minorities. While still officially a neutral, Turkey closed the Bosporus and the Dardanelles to Russian shipping on 28 September, and they would remain closed for the next four years, isolating Russia from her allies and, as severe shortages of all kinds eroded the foundation of the Russian state, virtually guaranteeing a revolution if the war lasted long enough — and it did. Enver Pasha was also beginning to have dreams of crossing the Suez Canal and conquering Egypt and joining with pro-German Persia to invade British India. Such dreams are what wars are made of.
And as it turned out, it would be the Germans and Admiral Souchon, this time flying Turkish flags from the sterns of their ships, who would fire the first shots for the Ottoman Empire. On 29 October, Souchon’s squadron carried out raids at Odessa on the Black Sea coast and against the Russian Black Sea fleet based at Sevastopol in the Crimea in a Pearl Harbor–type strike. Turkey and Russia technically were still at peace, but that would have been small comfort for those on the receiving end of the Goeben’s 11.1-inch guns firing thousand-pound shells with a 15-mile range.
If anyone wants to understand why Russia annexed the Crimea in 2014, they need look no further than the Russian experience in World War I. Russia’s allies, Britain and France, responded on 3 November with a naval bombardment of the forts at the mouth of the Dardanelles, and the next day Ottoman Turkey exchanged declarations of war with Great Britain, France, Russia, and Serbia. Few empires have ever committed suicide so deliberately and in so cavalier a fashion.
The rapidly expanding war opened up new fronts and new opportunities for the belligerents. Turkish armies invaded the Caucasus region of Russia and sent a military expedition across the Sinai Desert to attack the Suez Canal and sever the British lifeline to India. In London, there was consternation in the war cabinet of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, but one member of the Liberal Party cabinet, Winston Churchill, welcomed the entry of Turkey into the war as an alternative to the stalemate on the Western Front. Churchill, a young up-and-coming politician at 40, had joined Asquith’s government in 1911, taking the cabinet post of First Lord of the Admiralty, to direct British naval affairs and strategy. A mercurial figure who had crossed the aisle from the Tories in 1904 to join the Liberals over social policy, Churchill had done much to prepare the Royal Navy for a war with Imperial Germany, and by the summer of 1914 the navy was better prepared than it had ever been on the eve of a war. As Churchill famously stated, the British admiral commanding Britain’s Grand Fleet, Sir John Jellicoe, “was the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon.” The Grand Fleet was Britain’s primary instrument for maintaining naval supremacy in the North Sea and the English Channel, and its ultimate defense against invasion. Churchill had done everything that could be done to make that fleet invincible.
Churchill had been enthusiastic about Britain’s declaration of war against Germany on 4 August 1914. Directly descended from Sir John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, Winston had longed for the day when he could serve King George V in a great conflict in the same way that his illustrious ancestor had served Queen Anne. In the first weeks of the war, he had rushed off to Antwerp with the Royal Marines in a desperate effort to save that great port city from the Germans. It was a hopeless effort, but characteristic of the manner in which Winston liked to wage war and his view of war as a romantic enterprise, which it may still have been to some small extent in his youth. Churchill tried to stir the cabinet and army to action with all sorts of ideas, some impractical and ill conceived and others innovative and brilliant. He proposed landing a British expeditionary force on the German Pomeranian coast and making a lightning strike for Berlin before the Kaiser could bring troops home from the Western and Eastern Fronts. The British Army under Minister of War Lord Kitchener found the idea appalling and quite impossible. Then in January 1915 he wrote a letter to Asquith proposing that the Army build armored tractors mounted with machine guns and light guns to overrun enemy trenches. The Army, commanded by horse cavalry officers, thought the idea ludicrous. So Churchill developed the idea as a naval project, which is why you enter a tank through a hatch and the main body of an armored vehicle is called the hull.
Nothing so frustrated Winston as the terrible stalemate on the Western Front, where 400 miles of trenches and field fortifications cut across Western Europe from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier like some hideous scar. During quiet periods in the frontline trenches, an average of 500 British Empire soldiers were killed or wounded each day. That number went up by a factor of 10, sometimes 20, during offensives. By year’s end, some 90,000 British and Imperial soldiers had been listed on the casualty roles, along with more than half a million for the French, and this was only the beginning. Compared to the losses in 1915, 1916, and 1917, these early losses were trivial, but it was still more men than Britain had lost in all her previous wars over the preceding hundred years. There had to be another way to win the war that would not drain the Empire of a generation of young men and all of its financial reserves. With the entry of Turkey into the war, Winston thought that he had found it.
Naval supremacy provides the nation that has it with a host of strategic options, the capability to strike anywhere on the map where there is blue water and a coastline. It forces the enemy to defend everywhere, which no one has ever done successfully, and it is the reason that the United States, for all its recent foreign policy failures, still dominates the world as its sole superpower, as Britain was a mere hundred years ago. Winston proposed to use that naval supremacy to knock Turkey out of the war and invade the heart of the Central Powers through their presumably vulnerable backdoor. It was an audacious idea, and the plan was sound or at least seemed workable. There were no troops available, as the Western Front was an inexorable sausage grinder that devoured men on an industrial scale and the new volunteer armies of millions being raised by Lord Kitchener were still in the training camps without enough rifles to go around. Great Britain would not introduce conscription until 1916, when volunteers understandably started to become scarce. Churchill argued that it could all be done with the British and French navies, which would force their way through the Dardanelles, silencing the land forts with naval bombardment, and capture the prize of Constantinople, bringing down the government of the Young Turks and quite possibly the entire Ottoman Empire.
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The fortified Dardanelles are the 35 miles of narrow strait that connect the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara, leading to the capital and most important city of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople. Churchill reasoned that if the land forts protecting the strait could be silenced, Allied battleships could open the waterway to shipping and give Russia a link to the outside world with access to the industrial powerhouses of Britain and the United States. Grain shipments from the American heartland and shells from American factories could feed the millions of soldiers, workers, and peasants in the Russian empire and prevent the famines and munitions shortages that would cause the collapse of that empire. The ultimate failure of the Allied effort to open the Dardanelles led just two years later to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution with Lenin’s appealing promise of bread and peace to a demoralized nation.
The potential advantages of such a scheme appealed to soldiers, sailors, and politicians in the capitals of Britain, France, and Russia, not least because there was an opportunity for imperial gains on a grand scale when the victors dismembered the Ottoman territories. France had already been promised Syria and Lebanon, while Britain planned to annex or govern through regional clients the oil-rich region around the Persian Gulf and all of what is today Iraq and Jordan. If the Entente allies were going to spend the lives of an entire generation of their youth to win this war, at least they would be able to show their anguished populations when it was all over that it had not been for nothing. The politicians could say on the stump, “See, you may have lost your sons and husbands, but England now owns the oil fields of Mesopotamia and Persia.” On 20 March 1915 a secret treaty was signed, promising Russia Constantinople and the Dardanelles to the Tsar. Possession of the former Byzantine capital and warm-water access to the Mediterranean Sea was something the Russians had coveted since the days of Peter the Great, and it had always been British policy to keep that from happening. Now, in the midst of a world war, traditional grand strategy had been turned on its head, and anything would be promised to anybody to win the war.
There was also an expectation that the capture of Constantinople would bring neutral countries into the war on the Allied side, as the Entente powers were now being called. The Greeks would have to be given a province in Turkish Anatolia (Asia Minor), where there still lived a sizable Greek population, and the Italians would be presented with another province of Anatolia to augment their empire. Bulgaria would be promised a large slice of Turkish Thrace, and something would have to be found for the Romanians as well. There was even a proposal to reserve the province of Palestine with its Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holy sites for the Americans — no one asking the United States or its voters if they were interested in governing Jerusalem. And no one asked the Turks how they would feel about their country ceasing to exist and being sold off to the highest bidders. In the event, the Turks would fight like demons to keep the heartland of their nation intact and develop a sense of strong nationalism that makes them one of the most powerful regional players in the 21st century.
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As shown here, the Ottoman Empire had a multinational army that reflected the diversity of its many nationalities. This conscript army comprised Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Palestinian Jews, Maronite Christians, Circassians, and assorted others from the various minorities of the empire. The British political and military leadership did not hold the Ottoman Turkish army in very high regard and fully expected that it would be incapable of holding ground against Northern European soldiers. Much of this underestimation is due to the racist attitudes of the time, in which Turks and Arabs were seen as lesser types of humanity. The Allied generals and admirals found it inexplicable that the Turks would fight so hard and so effectively and die so willingly for their country, but the infantry fighting the Turks referred to the enemy, with great respect, as Johnny Turk.
All this was hypothetical until the Dardanelles could be forced open and a supply route to Russia secured. Then perhaps an Anglo-French-Balkan army could advance up the Danube River into the heart of the Central Powers and link up with Russians. In February 1915 the Anglo-French naval forces assembled, shelling the forts on the Gallipoli Peninsula and on the Asian side of the Dardanelles on the 19th of that month. They turned some old forts into rubble but were driven off by the Turks, who fought harder than anyone expected. Another more organized and formidable attempt would be made to force the straits in mid-March, but it was beginning to look like land forces, boots on the ground, would be needed to occupy Gallipoli. Churchill as head of the Admiralty had a Royal Marine division available, and the French offered a corps, and somehow a single British army division, the 29th, was scrambled together from various far-flung imperial garrisons. This would hardly be enough to handle Johnny Turk’s six divisions defending Gallipoli under the German General Liman von Sanders and 500 other German officers. Those additional men would have to come from the dominions of the Empire, from India and especially from Australia and New Zealand, where tens of thousands of enthusiastic young volunteers had come forward to fight for the British Empire. Before it was all over, they would come see themselves as Australians and New Zealanders and less as English settlers living overseas.
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Australia’s army boarding transports to defend the British Empire in Europe and the Middle East. None of the Commonwealth Dominions responded with such enthusiastic volunteerism as Australia, which had only been an independent nation since 1901. Most Australians still feel a cultural and historical attachment to Britain and overwhelmingly supported the Australian declaration of war against Germany and Austria-Hungary only hours after her mother country had done so. These Australians expected that they were headed to the battlefields of Western Europe and had no idea that their destination would be diverted by the fortunes of war to a rocky, pestilential peninsula jutting into the Aegean Sea called Gallipoli. Nearly 8,000 Australians in the ANZAC Corps would never return from Gallipoli, with another 17,000 wounded. It is where Australian nationalism was born and the day of the landings, 25 April, is celebrated to this day in Australia as ANZAC Day.
Part 2 will cover the Gallipoli campaign, its results and legacy, and why the lessons learned still matter today.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.