Welcome to this deep dive. Today we're looking
at a military campaign that is just, well, it's
overflowing with staggering contradictions. It
really is. It's a phenomenal stack of material
to go through. Right. And we are unpacking a
stack of sources detailing an ingenious mass
escape involving rifles rigged to fire using
dripping water, intelligence gathered from literal
tourist guidebooks, and a battlefield so utterly
brutal that sworn enemies actually pause the
war to swim together. Yeah, the Gallipoli Campaign
of 1915 and 1916 is one of those historical flashpoints
that completely rewrites how you understand the
mechanics of war. Exactly. So our mission today
is to distill the most important insights from
this massive clash between the Allied powers
and the Ottoman Empire. And we're bypassing the
dense military jargon to get straight to the
core of what happened. Skipping the dry stuff.
Yeah. We want to know why the strategic planning
fell apart so spectacularly and look at the incredibly
human stories buried in these trenches. And since
we are, you know, diving right into the deep
end here, let's skip the basic textbook recaps
of the Western Front and jump right to the strategic
paradox of the Dardanelles. Sounds good. The
Allies, so that's Britain, France and Russia,
they desperately needed a warm water supply route.
The Dardanelles Straits offered this direct path
to bombard the Ottoman capital of Constantinople
and ideally knock the empire out of the war entirely.
Okay, let's unpack this because the initial plan
to force those straits feels entirely built on
hubris. Oh, absolutely. The first Lord of the
Admiralty, Winston Churchill, genuinely believed
the British and French navies could just blast
their way through using a fleet of obsolete battleships.
It looks like pure hubris in hindsight. But at
the time, Churchill's logic regarding those older
ships made a grim sort of economic sense to the
Admiralty. Oh, so. Well, these aging vessel simply
couldn't survive in the North Sea against the
modern German high seas fleet. That was the cutting
edge naval force of the era. So the thinking
was, why not use these expendable assets to bully
the Ottoman coastal defenses? Expendable assets.
Exactly. They anticipated losses, but they believed
the sheer volume of Allied firepower would just
overwhelm the forts. Which brings us to the Grand
Naval Assault on March 18, 1915. And the sources
describe this as a total catastrophic failure
for the Allies. Catastrophic is almost an understatement
here. The Allied armada sailed straight into
a secret line of mines. What they didn't know
was that just 10 days prior, a small Ottoman
mine layer called the Nisrit had slipped out
and laid a fresh row of mines parallel to the
shore. Right where the Allied ships were expected
to turn around. Precisely. And the resulting
damage was devastating. The French battleship
Bouvet struck one of these mines and capsized
in just two minutes. Two minutes? That is horrifying.
It was. Out of the 718 men on board, there were
only 75. survivors. Wow. Yeah. The British battleships
Irresistible and Ocean were also sunk and several
other massive shifts were severely crippled.
The entire naval strategy evaporated in a single
afternoon. What's fascinating here is how this
disaster highlights a crucial takeaway from our
sources. This is a textbook case of how institutional
arrogance blinds military intelligence. Yes.
The intelligence or lack of it. Exactly. The
Allies assumed the Ottoman military was entirely
incompetent. That was an assumption heavily based
on earlier unrelated conflicts in the Balkans.
Because of this baked in arrogance, allied intelligence
was virtually nonexistent. It's wild. When planning
one of the most complex amphibious operations
in modern history, they were partially relying
on information pulled from Egyptian travel guides.
That detail is just staggering to me. They're
trying to navigate highly fortified hostile terrain
using peacetime tourist books. Travel guides.
It's unbelievable. So the ships are forced to
retreat and the Allies have to make a massive
tactical pivot They realize they can't just sail
through they need to land ground troops to physically
capture the forts and clear the mines, right?
But pivoting an entire military apparatus takes
time. It costs them a five -week delay. And in
the context of warfare, a five -week pause is
a massive operational failure. Because it gave
the Ottomans time. It handed the Ottoman Fifth
Army the one thing they needed most. The Ottoman
forces were commanded by the German general Otto
Lehmann von Sanders alongside a brilliant, highly
capable Ottoman lieutenant colonel named Mustafa
Kemal. And they didn't just sit around waiting.
No, during those five weeks, they heavily fortified
the high ground overlooking every viable landing
beach. They built roads, dug extensive trench
networks, and perfectly positioned their artillery.
And that completely sets the stage for the absolute
chaos of the landings on April 25, 1915. Chaos
is the right word. Let's look at the northern
landing site first, which became known as Anzakee
Cove. The Australian and New Zealand troops,
the ANZESCs, they're heading toward the shore
in the pitch black. but they don't land where
they're supposed to. Right. Due to a navigational
error in the dark, they end up landing about
1 .2 miles too far north. Which changes everything.
Completely. Instead of a relatively open, manageable
beach, they are dropped into a geographical nightmare.
The terrain there is a labyrinth of steep ravines,
sheer cliffs, and incredibly dense scrub. And
the physical landscape essentially shatters their
chain of command immediately, right? Precisely.
The geography breaks up their formations, the
troops lose contact with each other in the dark,
and almost instantly they start taking fierce
targeted fire from the entrenched Ottoman defenders
looking down on them from the heights. But the
geography wasn't the only nightmare. Because
down south at Cape Hellas, the British tried
a completely different tactical approach, and
the sources show it ended just as disastrously.
The River Clyde. Yes, they tried to use a converted
coal ship called the SS River Clyde as a modern
-day Trojan horse. The concept was to intentionally
run the ship aground right at the beach, designated
V -booch. The idea was that troops could safely
wait inside the armored hull and then run down
specially constructed ramps directly onto the
shore. But the Ottoman defenders were completely
dug in, just waiting for them. They had a clear
line of sight. As the British soldiers tried
to emerge from the sally ports, those side doors
cut into the hull of the ship, they stepped right
into a wall of machine gun fire. It was an absolute
slaughter. It really was. The statistics here
are incredibly grim. Out of the first 200 British
soldiers to run down those ramps, only 21 men
actually made it to the sand. The sheer determination
and discipline of the Ottoman defenders cannot
be overstated here. They were fighting for their
homeland and their leadership demanded the ultimate
sacrifice. Yeah, the sources talk about that
specific mindset. There is a legendary quote
in our sources from Mustafa Kemal, directed at
the men of the 57th Infantry Regiment as the
ANZACs were trying to push up the slopes. He
told them, I do not order you to fight, I order
you to die. In the time which passes until we
die, other troops and commanders can come forward
and take our places. And the sources confirm
that every single man of the 57th Regiment was
either killed elder wounded holding that line.
Every single one. Just imagine you are a listener
putting yourself in those shoes. Imagine being
young soldier in this environment. You're packed
into a wooden boat in the dark. You are dropped
onto the wrong beach with totally inaccurate
maps and you are suddenly staring up at a cliff
face where a fiercely determined enemy is raining
down artillery. The result was a tactical stalemate
from day one. The Allies couldn't push inland.
The Ottomans couldn't push them back into the
sea. And the campaign immediately devolved into
the exact same grueling trench warfare the Allies
had come to the Mediterranean to escape. Here's
where it gets really interesting, though. Because
while the land campaign was completely bogged
down, the sources highlight a massive tactical
success happening entirely underwater. Ah, the
submarine campaign. Exactly, the only real Allied
success. Yes, specifically the Australian submarine
AE -2, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Henry
Stoker. As the disastrous landings were happening
at dawn on April 25th, the AE -2 was attempting
something incredibly daring. They managed to
sneak right through the heavily mined Dardanelles
Straits. Which raises the question, how do you
even navigate a submarine through a minefield
in 1915? With immense difficulty and a lot of
nerve. At one point, to avoid detection by Ottoman
patrol ships on the surface, Stoker literally
rested the submarine on the seabed. Just sat
there. They just sat there in the dark, completely
silent, for hours until nightfall. Once they
finally slaked through and surfaced to report
their success, Stoker was given orders to generally
run amok in the Sea of Marmara. I love that official
military phrasing. Just go run amok. And they
did. The AE -2, along with other British and
French submarines, effectively shut down the
Ottoman Sea supply routes. They sank battleships,
transports, and crucial supply vessels. A huge
operational win. It was a brilliant tactical
execution, but unfortunately, it was the only
bright spot in the broader allied strategy. Because
back on land, the reality of attrition was setting
in. And according to the sources, the combat
wasn't even the deadliest part of being at Gallipoli.
Not by a long shot. As summer arrived, the heat
became oppressive. The trenches were incredibly
close together, meaning no man's land was littered
with thousands of unburied corpses. Which led
to the flies. Yes, a biblical explosion in the
fly population. The accounts of the flies are
just stomach churning. The soldiers wrote that
just trying to eat a piece of bread was nearly
impossible. because it would be instantly covered
in swarms of flies the moment you opened a tent.
And with those unsanitary conditions came a devastating
dysentery epidemic. Sickness swept through the
camps so severely that over 90 ,000 British Empire
soldiers alone had to be evacuated purely for
illness. The conditions were universally horrific
for both sides. But it's in the midst of that
unimaginable suffering that the sources detail
a truly remarkable moment. The May 24th truce.
Yes. The stench of the dead in the summer heat
had become so unbearable that the two armies
formally agreed to a temporary armistice just
to bury the bodies. It was a practical necessity.
We have this incredible firsthand account from
the diary of Private Victor Laidlaw. He was an
Australian stretcher bear. He describes the absolute
surrealness of the shooting stopping. Men step
out of their trenches and suddenly they're face
to face with the enemy. But Laidlaw writes that
troops from both sides actually went down to
the water and bathed together. He compared it
to Cup Day at the beach. Soldiers were throwing
gifts across no man's land, dates and sweets
from the Ottomans, canned beef and cigarettes
from the Allies. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, it's a profound observation on human
nature. You have these men who have been subjected
to intense dehumanizing nationalistic propaganda,
slaughtering each other for weeks. Right, sworn
enemies. Yet when the guns pause, they instantly
recognize their shared suffering. That shared
misery created a deeply genuine camaraderie that
completely stripped away the politics of the
war, leaving just the raw human experience. Of
course, the truce couldn't last. The high commands
needed a victory to justify the mounting losses.
This leads to August 1915, and the Allies launch
a massive, desperate offensive designed to finally
break the stalemate. A final push. They bring
in fresh divisions, launch completely new landings
at Suvla Bay, and mount ferocious attacks at
positions like Lone Pine and Chunuk Bear. The
August Offensive is incredibly complex, but if
you look at the broad strokes and the sources,
it is entirely defined by tragic miscommunications,
a rigid adherence to doctrine, and an agonizing
breakdown in command structure. There's no better
example of that breakdown than the tragedy at
a narrow ridge called the Neck. Yes, a devastating
moment. The plan was for the Australian 3rd Light
Horse Brigade to charge the Ottoman trenches.
but it was supposed to be perfectly coordinated
with a heavy naval artillery bombardment to keep
the defenders pinned down. Coordination was everything,
but the artillery barrage lifted exactly seven
minutes too early. Seven minutes? Yes, due to
synchronization issues between the Navy and the
ground forces. Seven minutes might sound trivial,
but in trench warfare, it's an eternity. It gave
the Ottoman defenders all the time they needed
to leave their bunkers, return to the firing
line, and load their weapons. And the Australian
commanders on the ground knew the bombardment
had stopped early. They could see the enemy waiting.
But they ordered the charge anyway. This is where
that rigid adherence to doctrine becomes fatal.
The commanders felt they couldn't deviate from
the established timetable, regardless of the
reality in front of them. Wave after wave of
men climbed out of the trenches and were immediately
cut down in a completely futile loss of life.
And that lack of adaptability wasn't just happening
at the neck. Down at the new landings at Suvla
Bay, the British forces actually managed to land
against very light opposition. It should have
been a turning point. It should have been, but
the operations stalled entirely due to command
inertia. The British commander, General Stotford,
essentially froze. He just stopped. But it wasn't
just a simple hesitation. The sources point to
a severe breakdown in command. You had elderly,
exhausted commanders leading troops with unclear
objectives and incredibly poor communication
lines. And they didn't exploit the advantage.
Exactly. Instead of aggressively pushing inland
to secure the surrounding high ground, they stayed
on the beach. This failure of leadership gave
the Ottomans precious time to rush reinforcements
to the hills and trap the British forces on the
sand. And even when troops did achieve their
objectives, like the New Zealanders who actually
managed to take the vital summit at Chenwick
Bear, They couldn't hold it. Right. They were
exhausted and lacked reinforcements. A massive
Ottoman counterattack led personally by Mustafa
Kemal once again swept them off the heights.
That recapture essentially ended any realistic
hope the allies had of breaking out and winning
the campaign. So the August defensive fails and
the men are stuck in the trenches as winter arrives.
And the sources describe the winter as a completely
different kind of hell. a literal freeze. Blizzards
hit the peninsula. Massive rainstorms flooded
the trenches, literally washing unburied corpses
right into the defensive lines. Men were drowning
in the mud and thousands suffered from frostbite
or froze to death. It was the final straw. Even
the most stubborn military commanders in London
finally realized the position was completely
untenable. The agonizing decision was made to
evacuate the peninsula. But evacuating tens of
thousands of men from beaches that are perfectly
zeroed in by enemy artillery is a terrifying
prospect. The Allied command expected up to 50
% casualties just trying to retreat. They needed
a miracle. They had to figure out how to sneak
an entire army away right under the Ottomans'
noses. To pull off an evacuation of that scale,
they needed to make the Ottomans believe the
trenches were still fully manned, even as the
troop numbers dwindled night by night down to
a skeleton crew. And this is where we get to
the absolute master class in deception. The star
of this retreat is an ingenious invention by
an Australian soldier named William Scurry. He
created something called the drip rifle. It was
a brilliantly simple piece of battlefield engineering.
Scurry rigged a standard issue rifle with two
empty tins. The top tin was filled with water
and had a small hole punched in it. The water
would slowly drip into the bottom tin, which
was attached to the rifle's trigger by a piece
of string. So as the bottom tin gets heavier
and heavier with water, it eventually pulls the
trigger and fires the gun entirely on its own.
Exactly. They set these drip rifles up all along
the trench lines, carefully varying the drip
rates. To the Ottomans listening in the dark,
it sounded like random sporadic sentry fire.
That's Bryant. The trenches sounded alive and
guarded, even when there was almost no one left
in them. They also used psychological conditioning.
Right. For weeks leading up to the evacuation,
the ANZ -XCs would enforce periods of absolute
total silence for hours at a time. To confuse
the enemy. Right. The Ottomans would get curious,
poke their heads up to see if the Allies had
finally retreated, and the ANZ -XCs would immediately
open fire. They trained the Ottomans to think
that silence meant a deadly trap. a lethal conditioned
response. So on the final nights when the trenches
actually were silent because the men were finally
boarding the ships, the Ottomans stayed safely
hidden in their bunkers. The plan worked perfectly.
The results of this deception. On the final night
of the ANZAC evacuation, there were zero Australian
casualties. A flawless, miraculous escape from
an absolute disaster. As we look at the aftermath
of all this, the scale of the loss is genuinely
difficult to comprehend. The Gallipoli campaign
lasted roughly 10 months. In that time, there
were roughly half a million casualties combined
between the two sides. Half a million. Tens of
thousands of young men were dead, with massive
numbers wounded or evacuated sick. So what does
this all mean? Beyond the staggering human tragedy,
this campaign caused a massive political earthquake.
In Britain, the disaster of Gallipoli contributed
heavily to the fall of the Liberal government.
Heads had to roll. Winston Churchill The primary
architect of the naval plan was heavily blamed
and demoted. He actually resigned from the government
entirely and went to fight on the Western Front
as an infantry officer. The military career of
the overall allied commander, Sir Ian Hamilton,
was effectively ruined. This raises an important
question, though. How do nations process a trauma
on this scale? What is truly remarkable about
Gallipoli is that a profound military failure
effectively birthed new national identities.
A crucible moment. For Australia and New Zealand,
the incredible courage and the shared suffering
of their troops forged what became known as the
Anzac Spirit. It was a brutal baptism of fire
on the world stage for these young nations, and
April 25th Anzac Day remains their most solemn
and significant day of national remembrance.
And for the Ottomans, it was a defining moment
of fierce national pride. The phrase, Sanikhal
is impassable, became a powerful rallying cry.
They had successfully defended their homeland
against the world's most powerful empires. And
it changed their political trajectory forever.
Crucially, the campaign launched the career of
Mustafa Kemal. The tactical genius he displayed
at Gallipoli propelled him forward to lead the
Turkish War of Independence, eventually becoming
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder and
first president of the modern Republic of Turkey.
It's incredible how much history hinged on these
beaches. We've covered some incredible ground
today unpacking these sources. We started with
the sheer institutional arrogance of empires
relying on Egyptian travel guides to plan an
invasion. A surreal detail. We walked through
the tactical horrors of the wrong beaches, the
raw human connection of sworn enemies swimming
together during a summer truce, and we ended
with a desperate brilliant engineering of tripping
water rifles covering a silent escape. I want
to leave you with one final fascinating thought
pulled directly from our research. The painful,
bloody lessons of Gallipoli did not go to waste.
They actually learned from it. They did. Military
planners studied this disaster obsessively, and
it heavily influenced future amphibious doctrines.
Fast forward 28 years to World War II. At the
Battle of Finchhofen in 1943, Australian troops
once again found themselves conducting an amphibious
assault. And just like at Gallipoli, Navigational
errors in the dark meant they were coming ashore
on the wrong beaches. Oh, wow. History literally
repeating itself. It was the exact same setup
for disaster. But this time, the outcome is different.
Because the memory and the hard -won tactical
lessons of Gallipoli had been baked into their
training, those Australian soldiers didn't freeze.
They dapped it. Yes, they didn't get pinned down
waiting for orders that would never come. They
rapidly reorganized in the chaos, aggressively
pushed inland and turned what could have been
another catastrophe into a decisive military
success. That is an incredible full circle moment.
The ghosts of Gallipoli saving lives decades
later because they finally learned how to adapt.
Thank you so much for joining us on this deep
dive into the sources today. We hope this look
at the tragedy, the humanity, and the lasting
legacy of the Gallipoli Campaign has given you
a new, nuanced perspective on this piece of history.
Keep asking questions, keep exploring the complexities
of the past, and we wish you well until the next
deep dive.