Dominic Sandbrook

And if it doesn't work, we can just pull the plug and we won't have lost very much.

And lots of historians who've written about this say this was incredibly irresponsible of them.

So the historian Peter Hart wrote a great book about Gallipoli.

A serious operation of war should not be undertaken in such a casual fashion.

Hundreds of men's lives cast away on a whim, as if in a mere game of sport that could be abandoned at halftime.

At this point, it's entirely naval.

And one reason for that is, of course, if you do have soldiers hanging around, where do you want to send them?

There is an urgent, desperate need for soldiers on the Western Front.

Right, right.

Remember, the pre-war army is effectively being destroyed, the British Expeditionary Force.

Kitchener is now raising a so-called new army, a volunteer army, to replace them.

The idea that you will send 150,000, 200,000 soldiers across Europe to some mad scheme, I mean, that would appall Kitchener and Sir John French and so on.

And that's where the war is going to be won or lost.

This is exactly the point, that this is a massive, massive distraction.

And what is more, the great rationale for this, which is we're going to help out the Russians, has now disappeared.

Because even as they are having these meetings...

In mid-January, it becomes clear that actually this encirclement at Salakamish has actually worked out in the Russians' favour, not the Ottomans.

Enver has made a terrible mess of things.

Of his 100,000 men, about 80,000 of them are killed.

They die of frostbite or freezing to death or typhus or whatever.