Dominic Sandbrook

He's got a kind of quite a wry, sardonic sense of humor.

I like his line after the war.

He said, there is nothing certain about war, except that one side won't win.

And I think that suggests that he's not absurdly over-optimistic.

Hamilton, however, has been dealt a very rough hand.

He is being asked, as a reminder, he is being asked to carry out the first ever landing by sea on enemy territory facing modern technology.

He's been given a month to plan it.

So this is not D-Day, you know, months and months in the planning.

This is going to be much quicker.

Of course.

The Ottomans know what's coming.

I mean, they're not idiots.

And also, another contrast with, say, D-Day.

And his task is made harder because the Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener, gives him a very rag-tag collection of troops, many of them untested and untrained.

So to give people a sense, there's the 29th Division of the British Army, and that had basically been cobbled together by loads of colonial garrisons.

So people who'd been serving all over Asia or whatever are now told, you're going to come back and you're going to fight and you're going to be lumped in with these other blokes.

Then there is Churchill's Royal Naval Division.

Churchill's so proud of this, you know, his favorite child or whatever.

They're basically a load of naval reservists and volunteers who signed up to join the Navy when the war broke out, but there was nothing for them to do.

So they've been told, you know, you're going to be like a sort of little naval marine force fighting on land.