In execution the campaign suffered from the mismanagement of General Sir Ian Hamilton, whose complacence and unnecessarily complex planning all but guaranteed failure. The war’s outcome almost solely depended on events on the Western Front, and the attempt to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war by landing troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula was a useless diversion of resources. Gallipoli, he states early on, “was a lunacy that never could have succeeded, an idiocy generated by muddled thinking.” In conception the campaign was rank stupidity on the part of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. Hart, oral historian at London’s Imperial War Museum, is an expert on British participation in World War I and combines the scholar’s devotion to solid research with the oral historian’s appreciation for personal perspective. Peter Hart’s new study nevertheless merits attention.
Gallipoli, by Peter Hart, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, $34.95īooks on the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign have been quite common in recent years, and more will inevitably emerge as its centennial approaches. Gu�prette recalls the damage to the French ship Suffen during a naval battle in 1915.Book Review: Gallipoli, by Peter Hart Close As for our young men, a few minutes ago, so alert, so self-confident, all now lying dead on the bare deck, blackened burned skeletons, twisted in all directions, no trace of any clothing, the fire having devoured all.' Vice Admiral P. 'The scene was tragically macabre: the image of desolation, the flames spared nothing. It had begun as a bold move led by the British to ultimately capture Constantinople, but this definitive new history explains that from the initial landings - which ended with so much blood in the sea it could be seen from aircraft overhead - to the desperate attacks of early summer and the battle of attrition that followed, it was a lunacy that was never going to succeed.ĭrawing on unpublished personal accounts by individuals at all levels and from all sides - not only from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, but unusually from Turkey and France too - Peter Hart combines his trademark eye for vivid personal stories with a strong narrative to bring a modern view of this military disaster to a popular audience.
One of the most famous battles in history, Gallipoli forced Churchill from office, established Turkey's iconic founder Mustafa Kemal ('Ataturk') and marked Australia's emergence as a nation in its own right.
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