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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |