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Chapter 1: Why was the Battle of Gallipoli such a disaster for the Allies?
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And the brilliant thing about this is that it is free for Lloyd's business account customers. So when it is time to digitize your income tax, you can bank on Lloyd's. Search Lloyd's business accounts to find out more. At dusk, all lights were put out and the troops rested for the ordeal at dawn. It was a beautiful calm night with a bright half moon.
As the moon waned, the boats were swung out, the Australians received their last instructions, and men who six months ago were living peaceful civilian lives began to disembark on a strange, unknown shore in a strange land to attack an enemy of different race. The boats had almost reached the beach when a party of Turks entrenched ashore opened a terrible fusillade.
The Australians rose to the occasion. They did not wait for orders or for the boats to reach the beach, but sprang into the sea, formed a sort of rough line and rushed the enemy's trenches. Their magazines were uncharged, so they just went in with cold steel. I have never seen anything like these wounded Australians in war before.
Though many were shot to bits, without hope of recovery, their cheers resounded throughout the night. They were happy because they knew they had been tried for the first time and had not been found wanting. There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and storming the heights, and, above all, holding on while the reinforcements were landing.
These raw colonial troops, in these desperate hours, proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres, and Nerve Chapelle. So that was the first report of the Allied landings at Gallipoli in Turkey on the 25th of April, 1915. And it was written by a chap called Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, and he was the war correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.
And when it was reproduced in the newspapers in Australia a couple of weeks later, it caused an absolute sensation. And his praise for the courage of the ANZAC troops, so the Australians and the New Zealanders, became a source of immense national pride down under. And it was all the sweeter because, as you could tell from my expert reproduction of his accent, Ashmead Bartlett wasn't Australian.
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Chapter 2: How did the Battle of Gallipoli shape national identity in Australia and New Zealand?
And of course, for Churchill, the great disappointment of the war. is that he is the first Lord of the Admiralty, but the German fleet, by and large, stays in port. So he doesn't get the great naval showdown that he's hoping for. Even so, Churchill seizes every opportunity to put himself at the centre of this stage.
So only a couple of months into the war, in October 1914, he sends what's basically a sort of private army that is cobbled together. of naval reservists, the Royal Naval Division, to Antwerp, which is still under siege by the Germans. He says, my Royal Naval Division will save Antwerp.
And he actually goes himself to Antwerp and he offers Asquith his resignation and says, I would like to take personal charge. Of the defense of Antwerp. This is refused. Antwerp promptly falls. And everybody back home says Churchill made an absolute fool of himself at Antwerp. He sent the Royal Naval Division for no reason.
The press, the Morning Post, for example, Tory paper slams him as an erratic amateur. The Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener, says it was a piratical adventure. Even Asquith, the Prime Minister, says it was wicked folly to have sent so many men to Antwerp and to have made such a hullabaloo about it when it was obvious it was going to fall. But the point about Churchill, Churchill loves Antwerp.
a gimmick. He loves a wheeze, a stunt. And he will do anything to put himself at the centre of the story.
Do you think, just to stick up for him, because we're going to dump on him quite a lot over the course of this, the next two episodes. I mean, in a sense, he is right, isn't he? That there is this stalemate and it's obvious on the Western front, but it is also apparent at sea.
And in a sense, if you're going to break the stalemate, perhaps you do need some left field thinking, some blue sky thinking. It's just that his blue sky thinking turns out not to be, well, a bit dark, really.
Yeah, the storm clouds of war are very much present in Churchill's blue sky thinking. But there is a problem. Of course. He's absolutely right that there's a stalemate on the Western Front and that it would be brilliant if they could break it.
But his idea, which is we will come up with sort of great distraction and displacement exercises that will somehow obviate the need for a nutritional campaign on the Western Front, he is deluded. The war is only ever going to be won on the Western Front.
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Chapter 3: What role did Winston Churchill play in the Gallipoli campaign?
Yes. They're not proposing that they destroy these fleets by landing soldiers to do it. They do it with the guns from their battleships.
At this stage, there is absolutely no suggestion of using ground troops at all. They are just going to do this with naval power. That is all that they're interested in doing. And so on the 13th of January, 1915, Churchill goes to Britain's War Council, as it is called. Now all the big names are there. Lots of people we've talked about in this and other Restors History series.
Herbert Henry Asquith, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, his chancellor, Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, Sir John French, the British commander on the Western Front.
Oh, well, I mean, if he's there, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, Asquith tells his girlfriend, Venetia Stanley, who is a fraction of his age, you won't often see a stranger collection of men around one table. Anyway, they sit there, they talk about the Western Front and the stalemate, and then Churchill unveils his plan. And as the civil servant Morris Hankey, who was there, wrote afterwards, "...the idea caught on at once, the whole atmosphere changed.
We turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a slogging match on the Western Front to brighter prospects as they seemed in the Mediterranean." And Churchill says, listen, this is going to take a few weeks max. The Turkish guns and forts, merely an inconvenience. Now, actually, Churchill is not being honest with them. His own admiralty experts have already told him.
Some of them have said specifically, it's not possible. It's an impossible task. But Churchill doesn't pass this on to his colleagues because he is now completely infatuated with the scheme. And so the War Council approves a plan for a naval expedition in February. We will bombard and take, and I quote, bombard and take the Gallipoli Peninsula with Constantinople as its objective.
Now at this point, just to reiterate, he's not talking about doing this with any soldiers. He's talking about doing it with naval power alone. And as even his hagiographer, Andrew Roberts, says, This is mad because ships cannot hold territory and ships cannot occupy cities. So if they get there and they bombard Constantinople and then the Turks just don't do anything, what are they going to do?
You know, this is the issue. Anyway, the question is why on earth the war council has approved a plan that, I mean, Tom, if you and I can see that there are issues, why can they not see it? Now, one reason we've already mentioned Asquith is Asquith is distracted. There is no question. Asquith has no greater defender in the world of podcasting than me.
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Chapter 4: How did the Turkish forces prepare for the Allied landings at Gallipoli?
Their officers have no experience with this kind of operation. Basically, because nobody has any experience with this kind of operation. It hasn't really been done before. I mean, the more you go on, the madder the whole scheme seems. But the rationale for it, obviously, is they say, yeah, but all that doesn't matter because it's only the Turks.
So as soon as we get ashore, the Turks will undoubtedly run away.
Because they're just hanging around smoking hookahs and drinking very thick coffee.
Well, this brings us to Johnny Turk, as the Tommies and the Anzacs called him. So... There's obviously a massive sense of racial superiority that underlies all this. I mean, the Turks, the Ottomans, are not a joke at all. They are battle-hardened. They have just fought two Balkan wars, and they fought the Italians in Libya.
This time, they will be fighting very clearly in defence of their native land, for their native soil. The idea that they're just going to run away is laughable. and they have been very busy so this german guy otto lehman von sanders he has been modernizing the ottoman army and he has now been moved specifically to the dartnells and told Take charge of the Fifth Army.
The Ottoman Fifth Army is going to defend the Straits from these blokes. And Lehman has been given 200,000 men. And he thinks, well, you know, he's not an idiot. He can see what's happened on the Western Front and whatnot. And he says, right, well, obviously what we're going to do is we're just going to wait for them to land and then we'll just kill them all. We'll let them approach us.
We'll establish trenches. We'll establish our barbed wire. We will lay mines. We will have supply roads ready to bring up more ammunition. We will prepare our positions on the high ground. When the Allies land, you know, we will basically just drive them into the sea or side them down with our machine guns. So we now get to mid-April.
On the 10th of April, Sir Ian Hamilton and his senior officers arrive on the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean. And two days later, they're joined there by the Anzacs from Egypt and then by the 29th Division of the British Army and also by the French. Meanwhile, Churchill's Royal Naval Division have been training on the island of Skiros, which is to the south of Lemnos.
And one of the men on the island is the Cambridge-educated poet Rupert Brooke. And Rupert Brooke is 27 years old. He was described by W.B. Yeats as the handsomest man in England. I always find that kind of ludicrous. Has Yeats seen every other man in England? No, he hasn't.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did the ANZAC troops face during their landing?
Do you? How does it go? Well, we'll find out. So they start bombarding the beach, and then they're gonna send up the Dublin Fusiliers first, and little rowing boats, and then this bloody big ship, the River Clyde. The Dublin Fusiliers make very slow progress, so unfortunately, they land out of order.
The River Clyde lands first or crashes aground, but it hasn't got as close to the beach as they hoped it would. It's still 80 yards away. So the men can't jump out and wade. They will just drown. So this is where your steam hopper little boat, which would act as a bridge, kind of a gangway, comes in.
Unfortunately, the steam hopper has also run aground, but on the wrong side of the ship and pointing the wrong way. So they can't use that at all. So they're all stuck on this boat offshore. How are we going to get off? At this point, the Dublin Fusiliers and their rowing boats come into land and they are absolute sitting ducks for the Turkish machine gunners who basically scythe through them.
Some of the Dublin blokes jump out and they try to wade ashore, but their packs are so heavy that they can't really make any progress. They end up being riddled with Turkish bullets and It's a terrible, terrible scene. Private Robert Martin. So that's... That's not great. No. And then what about this ship, the River Clyde? Yeah, I'm sure that comes to the rescue. It's just sitting there.
It's just sitting there, right? And the Turks are just hammering shells at it and bullets. Oh, it's a mad idea to have done that then.
Yeah, precisely, right? What a stupid idea.
Because the men can't jump off. They're in six feet of water. Their packs are so heavy, they would just be dragged down and drowned. And this guy who came up with the idea, Unwin, can see that it's all falling apart. And to his massive credit, he says, I will fix this. And he takes an able seaman with the excellent name of William Williams. They jump into the sea.
They've got all these barges with them. They lash together all the barges with ropes, and they literally hold them in place, these two guys, as a gangway. Okay, that is impressive. Right, and the Turks are firing at them, and they don't hit these two blokes, which is so impressive. that these guys, such courage.
And the men start jumping down from the ship onto the gangway, but they are being raked all the time with Turkish bullets. So the first 200 men, only 21 of them reached the beach alive. And there was a petty officer who was watching from the ship and he wrote in his diary, he said, one after another, the devoted fellows made the dash down the deadly gangways.
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