Welcome. I want you to picture a scene with me
for a second. We are going to travel back in
time. It's the early hours of August 7th, 1915,
and we are standing on this narrow, really windswept,
utterly barren strip of land. Right, in the Ottoman
Empire. Exactly. And in the trenches all around
us, there are hundreds of men just silently waiting
in the dark. Just waiting for the whistle. Yeah.
Because in just a few moments, they're going
to climb out of those trenches and charge head
first into what history will record as an absolute
textbook military disaster. It really is one
of those moments in history where You find yourself
wanting to shout back through time. Like you're
trying to stop the inevitable from happening.
Because you can see all the terrible decisions
just lining up perfectly to create a catastrophe.
And that catastrophe is what we are focusing
on today. For this deep dive, we're pulling from
a remarkably detailed Wikipedia article covering
the Battle of the Neck. Which took place during
the Gallipoli campaign of World War I. Right.
But... We aren't just here to, you know, recite
the dates and the casualty numbers of a tragic
battle. Our mission today is to look at this
event as a master class in what goes wrong when
systems fail. A massive systemic failure. We
are dissecting a spectacular failure of leadership,
of communication and really the devastating cost
of inflexible decision making. OK, let's unpack
this, starting with the geography itself, because
you really can't understand the madness of this
battle. without understanding the ground they
were fighting on. The terrain is everything here.
It completely dictated the horrific mechanics
of how this tragedy would unfold. So the area
was called the neck. And looking through the
sources, there's a fascinating little linguistic
nugget here. The name actually comes from the
Africans word for mountain pass or neck. Which
is strange, right? Yeah, you might be wondering
why Australian and Ottoman Turkish troops in
World War One are using a South African Dutch
word for their battlefield. Right. It's because
many of the senior Australian officers had actually
previously fought in the Boer War in South Africa
about 15 years prior. They brought that vocabulary
with them. Which is actually a brilliant subtle
indicator of the mindset at play. here. These
commanders were bringing the vocabulary and more
importantly the tactical mindset of a completely
different older war into a modern mechanized
conflict. They were fighting the last war? Exactly.
That sets the stage perfectly. But calling it
a mountain pass almost sounds too grand. In reality,
it was just a perfect deadly bottleneck. Imagine
a strip of land only about 30 to 50 meters wide.
That's barely the width of a football field.
Right. And flanking this tiny strip on both sides
are these terrifying sheer drops 150 meters straight
down to deep valleys called Monash Valley and
Malone's Gully. And at the end of this incredibly
narrow, totally exposed land bridge, the Ottoman
defenders were holding the high ground. They
had the advantage. Huge advantage. They were
entrenched on a knoll, known as Baby 700. From
there, they had a perfect unobstructed view down
the slope. There was no vegetation, nowhere to
hide, just bare ground covered in potholes. It
was arguably the strongest defensive position
in the entire Anzac sector. Which makes you look
at the map and ask why on earth would any commander
launch an attack up a narrow, exposed slope directly
into fortified trenches? To understand that,
we need to look at the broader context of the
Gallipoli campaign at that exact moment. By August
1915, the Allied forces had been deadlocked there
since the initial landings in April. Three months.
three months of brutal grinding stalemate. The
high command was desperate to break the deadlock
and get off the beaches. So they planned a major
offensive to capture the high ground of the Saree
Bear Range. The attack at the neck wasn't even
meant to be the main event. It was designed as
a feint. A distraction. They were sending men
into a meat grinder just to look busy so the
enemy would look the other way. Essentially,
yes. The Australian troops were ordered to attack
across the neck to draw Ottoman fire and attention.
The theoretical goal was to support New Zealand
troops who were supposed to be assaulting a nearby
peak from the rear. Ah, like a pincer movement.
Think of it exactly like a coordinated pincer
movement. They were trying to catch the defenders
in a vice store. The Australians make a massive
loud distraction at the front door while the
New Zealanders sneak in and break down the back
door. But the back door team never showed up
on time and the orders given to the Australians
at the front door were just they're hard to even
comprehend. Keep in mind these were light horsemen.
Right. Cavalry troops. Cavalry troops who had
left their horses behind in Egypt to fight as
infantry. They were eager, but they were not
highly trained, dedicated infantrymen. And for
this assault, the commanders ordered them to
attack the Ottoman trenches using bayonets and
grenades only. Only. Their rifles were ordered
to be completely unloaded. To modern ears, sending
men into heavy combat without the ability to
shoot back sounds like absolute madness. But
if we look at the psychology and the rigid military
doctrine of the time, The planners had a specific
rationale. Which was? They believed that if the
men had loaded rifles, their natural instinct
would be to stop, take cover, and return fire
the second they met resistance. And on a narrow
30 -meter strip, stopping means the momentum
dies. So by taking away their bullets, the commanders
were actively trying to remove human instinct
from the equation. They were forcing a behavior,
keep running at the enemy trenches no matter
what, because you literally have no other option.
That is the ultimate example of top -down theory
completely ignoring the bottom -up reality. It
looks perfectly logical on a piece of paper in
a headquarters tent a mile away. They think the
men will simply sprint across the gap. Right.
But it completely discounts the human element,
the terrain, and the fact that the enemy has
heavily fortified machine guns pointing right
at that specific gap. It's institutional arrogance.
And that clash between a rigid, abstract plan
and the messy, violent reality of the battlefield
is the core system failure we see unraveling
here. The planners assumed everything would go
exactly as scripted. But in conflict systems,
and especially in war, the script is usually
the first casualty. And this script fell apart
almost immediately because of a massive timing
failure. The attack was scheduled for 430 a .m.
on August 7th. It was supposed to be preceded
by an intense naval and artillery bombardment
designed to completely daze the Ottoman defenders
right before the Australians jumped out of their
trenches. And the bombardment did start. It did.
But then, inexplicably, the field artillery stopped
firing at 4 .23 a .m. seven minutes early. In
a coordinated assault, where your survival depends
on catching the enemy while their heads are down,
seven minutes is an absolute eternity. Put yourself
in those trenches for a second. You are standing
there in the dark. You are holding a rifle that
you've been ordered to empty. The bombardment,
which is supposed to be your only cover, suddenly
goes dead silent. You know the enemy is getting
back on their machine guns. What do you do? And
the military doctrine at the time didn't give
these local commanders the agency to adapt. Right.
The local commanders on the ground didn't adjust
their plans to account for the early cutoff.
They were supposed to attack as soon as the bombardment
lifted, but instead they just waited. The sources
point to unsynchronized watches between the artillery
officers and the assault officers. Wow. A simple
mechanical oversight, a failure to calibrate
before a major operation. So the attackers sat
in their trenches for seven agonizing minutes
waiting for the designated 430 a .m. Start time
while the enemy recovered and the Ottoman troops
were not amateurs This area was defended by the
Ottoman 19th Division under the command of Mustafa
Kemal, who would later become the founder of
modern Turkey. Exactly. Because the artillery
had stopped, they knew exactly what was coming.
Those seven minutes gave them ample time to leave
their dugouts, return to their trenches, which
were largely undamaged, and man their weapons.
They had at least 30 machine guns positioned
in depth across multiple tiers of trenches, all
trained perfectly on that tiny bottleneck. What's
fascinating here? we have to look at the analysis
from author Graham Wilson. in 2017. For a century,
the accepted historical narrative was that this
tragic seven -minute delay allowed the Ottomans
to recover and doomed the attack. But Wilson
argues that there actually wasn't a timing delay
at all. I was reading ahead in the notes about
this. He looked at the historical accounts and
realized that the artillery barrage wasn't early,
it was just completely ineffective. He contends
that the Allied artillerymen were terrified of
hitting their own troops massing in those forward
trenches. Remember how narrow the neck is? And
in some places the opposing trenches were only
20 to 70 meters apart. That's incredibly close.
Firing artillery into that tight of a window
is incredibly risky. So, to avoid friendly fire,
they deliberately aimed their guns too far behind
the Ottoman front lines. The shells were just
sailing harmlessly over the defenders' heads
and exploding in the rear. So even if the watches
had been perfectly synchronized, even if the
Australians had charged the very second the gun
stopped, they still would have been running into
fully conscious, fully prepared defenders. Exactly.
The plan was mechanically doomed before anyone
even blew a whistle. Which brings us to the actual
charge. It was organized into four waves of 150
men each. At exactly 430 a .m., the first wave
went over the top. They hopped the bags as the
slang went. And the reality of what happened
next is difficult to even process. They were
met with an absolute wall of lead. Within 30
seconds, the commander of that first wave and
almost all 150 of his men were gunned down. 30
seconds. 30 seconds. The machine gun and rifle
fire was so dense that most of them barely made
it a few steps out of the trench. A handful of
men miraculously reached the Ottoman trenches
and threw some grenades, but they were immediately
overwhelmed. It was a complete massacre. And
this is where the inflexibility we've been tracking
becomes genuinely criminal. The futility of the
attack was instantly obvious to anyone with eyes
on the back. The men in the second wave were
standing right there. They saw exactly what had
just happened to their friends. But two minutes
later, at 4 .32 a .m., the second wave of 150
men followed the first. without question, and
they met the exact same fate, cut down before
they even got halfway across the neck. It's a
staggering display of bravery by the soldiers,
but an equally staggering failure of command
by the leadership. The officers in charge of
the assault saw two entire ways obliterated in
under three minutes, yet the machinery of the
plan just kept grinding forward. Here's where
it gets really interesting, because we have a
direct point of comparison happening at the exact
same time, just down the line. Over at a nearby
position called Quinn's Post, another regiment
was also launching a simultaneous attack. Right.
They set 50 men over the top, and 49 became casualties
almost instantly. But in that case, the local
commander on the ground recognized the reality
of the situation immediately. He saw the futility,
he used his brain, and he made the crucial decision
to cancel all further waves. He stopped the slaughter.
That contrast. perfectly highlights the complete
collapse of communication and leadership at the
NAIC. Before the third wave was scheduled to
go, you had the local commander of the regiment
in the trenches, a man named Brezier, actively
trying to halt the attack. He knew it was suicide.
He went looking for his commanding officer to
call it off. But his commander had moved to an
observation post and couldn't be found. So instead
of finding the man who could actually authorize
a retreat, Brezier runs into the brigade major.
a man named Antil. And the sources point out
a really toxic dynamic here. Antil was a very
strong personality, a Boer war veteran who exerted
a lot of influence over the brigade. And he personally
disliked Brésier. He felt Brésier was just being
insubordinate by questioning the grand plan.
Yeah. And this clash of personalities happens
at the worst possible moment in the worst possible
place. And Hill had just received a fragmented,
unverified report claiming that someone had seen
red and yellow marker flags flying in the enemy
trenches. The flags? Right. The standard operating
procedure was that if a trench was captured,
the attackers would raise these flags to signal
success to the rear echelons. We know now from
post -war Turkish accounts that a couple of incredibly
brave Australian soldiers from that very first
wave actually did manage to survive the sprint,
reach the trench, raise a flag, and were immediately
killed. But Antille didn't know that context.
He didn't go up to the line to verify the situation.
He didn't check to see if the flags were still
there or if anyone was actually holding ground.
He sat in his bunker, heard the word flags, and
decided his plan was working perfectly. Despite
Brazier standing right in front of him, covered
in the dust of the battlefield, telling him his
men were being massacred, Antil refused to adapt.
He ordered the third wave to proceed. He didn't
even try to escalate the matter up the chain
of command. It was a decision made in a vacuum
based on phantom flags and sheer personal stubbornness.
Without the ability to reach the general on the
beach, Rizier had to go back to his men in the
trenches. The quote that survives from that moment
is just heartbreaking. He looked at the men of
the third wave who had been sitting there listening
to the gunfire that killed the first two waves,
knowing exactly what was waiting for them, and
he simply said, sorry lads, but the order is
to go. And so, at 4 .45 a .m., the third wave
goes over the top. And the result is identical.
They are cut to pieces in seconds. Brezier makes
another desperate attempt to reason with Antil.
Another officer tries to intervene as well. Antilus
still blindly orders the men forward. Finally,
Brezier manages to locate his actual commanding
officer, who eventually realizes the sheer scale
of the disaster and calls it off. But it was
too late. Amidst the chaos and the broken communication
lines, parts of the fourth wave had already begun
to charge. Some men stayed low, trying to be
cautious, but the damage was already done. In
a matter of minutes, the charge at the neck was
over. The speed of the destruction is what makes
it so chilling. Hundreds of lives ended not because
of a brilliant enemy maneuver, but because a
plan dictated they must advance regardless of
the physical evidence screaming at them to stop.
Looking at the numbers here in the sources, it's
just staggering. Am I reading this right? Out
of the 600 Australian light horsemen who took
part in the attack, 372 were killed or wounded.
Yes, well over half the force wiped out in minutes.
And the Ottoman losses for repelling this entire
assault were roughly 12 dead. 12. It wasn't a
battle, it was an execution. And because of the
tactical situation, the ridge was just covered
in bodies. Most of those men lay exactly where
they fell for the entire rest of the war. They
couldn't be recovered safely. Just left there.
There's a particularly famous epitaph for a trooper
named Harold Rush. He died in that third wave.
His body was one of the very few that was actually
identified later. His grave marker reads His
last words, goodbye, Cobber. God bless you. It's
a gut punch. It takes these grand, terrible systems
failures and makes the statistics intensely human.
And inevitably, after a tragedy of this scale,
the organizational blame game began. The surviving
soldiers were furious. They started calling the
battlefield Godley's Abattoir, placing the blame
squarely on Major General Alexander Godley, who
was the tactical commander of the entire offensive.
It's the ultimate corporate a failing upward
scenario just with infinitely higher deadlier
stakes. You orchestrate a disaster and what happens
to Godly? A few months later, shortly before
the Allies withdrew entirely from Gallipoli,
he was temporarily promoted to Lieutenant General.
Unbelievable. And after the evacuation, he was
made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath.
He got a promotion and a knighthood. Meanwhile,
the guys who actually realized the plan was broken
were treated like insubordinate employees. It's
a bitter pill to swallow. when you contrast the
knighthood of the commander safe on the beach
with the unrecovered bones of the men left on
the ridge. While the sources note that local
commanders like Antill were chiefly responsible
for failing to stop the localized slaughter,
the higher -level conceptual errors rested with
the generals who designed a flawed plan, stripped
their men of agency by unloading their rifles,
and failed to establish functional communication
lines. So what does this all mean? We promised
at the start that we weren't just reciting a
grim history lesson. We're looking at why the
mechanics of this disaster matter to you listening
right now. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
the battle of the neck is a terrifyingly clear
extreme example of the sunk cost fallacy combined
with blind obedience to authority. The commanders
had invested so much time, prestige, and eventually
blood into this specific plan. When the prerequisite
conditions failed, when the artillery proved
ineffective, when the New Zealanders didn't reach
their target to create the backdoor pressure,
the logical rational choice was to abort. But
the institutional momentum was simply too strong.
They felt they had to do something, even if that
something was clearly demonstrably fatal. They
couldn't deviate from the script. They had their
orders. They had literally unloaded their rifles
and they just push the button over and over again,
sacrificing wave after wave, expecting a different
result. This raises an important question for
all of us. Obviously, the stakes in our daily
lives are rarely life and death. But how often
in our own professional or personal lives do
we continue a doomed charge simply because the
plan was already set? Too often. How often do
you ignore the reality right in front of you,
the project that is clearly failing? the business
strategy that isn't working, the investment that's
bleeding money because changing course would
mean admitting the initial plan was flawed, or
defying a superior who refuses to look at the
ground truth. It's so much easier to just say,
well, those were the orders or that's how we've
always done it in this industry than it is to
stand up and say, stop, this isn't working. Look
at the data. The local commander at Quinn's Post
did it. Yes, he did. He looked at reality and
saved his men. The commanders at the neck didn't.
And that made all the difference. The tragedy
of the neck is a profound enduring lesson in
the absolute necessity of critical thinking,
adaptability, and the courage to challenge a
failing system before it destroys everything
it touches. It's a stark reminder that loyalty
to a theoretical plan should never supersede
loyalty to actual reality. I want to leave you
with one final provocative thought to mull over.
We mentioned earlier that the Allies ultimately
evacuated Gallipoli. That happened in December
1915 as winter set in and the stalemate became
unbearable. But right before they completely
withdrew, they finally managed to breach the
Ottoman defenses at the neck. They did. Do you
know how they did it? They didn't order another
brave, futile frontal charge with unloaded rifles.
They didn't send waves of men into machine gun
fire to prove a point. Instead, Allied troops
quietly tunneled deep under that narrow ridge,
planted a massive mine directly underneath the
Ottoman trenches, and detonated it. It killed
70 defenders in an absolute instant, and the
Allies simply walked away to their ships. It
forces you to wonder, is the most effective way
to win an unwinnable battle not to push harder,
but to completely rewrite the rules of engagement
just as you decide to walk away? Think about
it. We'll catch you on the next Deep Dive.