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Chapter 1: Why did the British continue to send troops to Gallipoli despite the bloodbath?
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Chapter 2: How did Churchill respond to his mistakes during the Gallipoli campaign?
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Chapter 3: What were the immediate consequences of the Gallipoli campaign for the Allies?
But my dear lad, it was a very great disappointment to me that you were not sent to either France or England as you expected. But I read later on that a fleet had been sent to the Dardanelles, and I made sure that it was the Australians, and I was right.
well my son the australians have done gloriously they have made england ring with their bravery mr asquith said in the house of commons that the australians had fought like heroes and that they had surpassed themselves in the annals of british warfare with their bravery Jack, my son, my heart is fairly bursting with sorrow and with pride to think that you are amongst such a lot of brave men.
Now, my dearest son, hoping and trusting that the Lord in his great mercy will guard and protect you in these terrible times and that he will hear my prayers for you from your ever-loving and affectionate mother. So that was Sarah Fitzpatrick, a widow who lived in South Shields in Tyne and Wear in Northern England.
Despite that, she was, as you could tell from my expert accent and artwork there, Scottish. And she was writing to her son Jack in May 1915. And this letter that she wrote to Jack was found on Jack's body after he was killed by machine gunfire at Anzac Cove on the 19th of May 1915. And he was one of perhaps 150,000 men who died on the killing fields of Glipoli. But he may well be the most famous.
And Dominic, why, for those who are not Australian, why is he so famous? So the answer is that even though he was born to Scottish parents and he grew up in the northeast of England, Jack Fitzpatrick, as he was born, became one of the most celebrated Australians of the century. When he was 17, he ran away and joined the Merchant Navy.
And then he deserted when he got to New South Wales and he became a coal miner and a gold digger and a ship stoker and all these kinds of odd jobs.
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Chapter 4: How did the Anzac identity emerge from the Gallipoli campaign?
And then when war broke out in 1914, he enlisted in the third field ambulance of the Australian Imperial Force, but under his mother's maiden name. So he called himself John Simpson. And he thought, as you can tell from his mother's letter, that he would be going back to England or to France. But as we heard last time, the Australians were in fact sent to Gallipoli.
And there, this guy, born Fitzpatrick, but now calling himself Simpson, He became famous for using donkeys to carry wounded Anzacs down from the ravines on the front line back down to the beach. And he became a kind of cult hero for the Anzacs with his donkeys. He was said to have rescued 300 men. And then a month into the operation, on the 19th of May, he is shot.
And he becomes a sort of patriotic martyr. So in Anzac mythology, he's a poor boy who's made good. He is an everyman who has sacrificed himself for his mates. And of course, this image of somebody with a donkey is... It kind of plays into the established images of saintly figures or martyrs or messiahs who are traveling by donkey or by mule or whatever.
And so he becomes the supreme embodiment, the incarnation of something that was created at Gallipoli, which is the Anzac spirit.
Chapter 5: What role did Mustafa Kemal play in the Gallipoli campaign?
So if you look him up in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, It says of him, Simpson and his donkey became a legend, the symbol of all that was pure, selfless and heroic on Gallipoli. So he is the Anzac spirit made flesh, Tom. That's why he's so celebrated. And Carlet. Exactly.
And we'll come back to the Anzac spirits and how that was created and what all this meant for Australian national identity later in this episode. But maybe first we should remind ourselves what on earth are tens of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders, as well as hundreds of thousands of British and Irish soldiers, and in total, almost 80,000 Frenchmen.
What are they doing on the coast of Turkey? in the spring of 1915. Nothing useful. Well, I mean, I don't want to diss their contribution, but they have been thrown away in a very misguided operation.
So an operation conceived by the first Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to force the Dardanelles, the straits between Europe and Asia, the straits that lead from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. He thinks he's going to force the straits with his ships. He's going to bombard Constantinople, knock the Ottomans out of the war.
Chapter 6: How did the campaign impact British and Anzac soldiers' morale?
The naval campaign doesn't work. The Asquith government doubles down. They send ground troops to take the European shore of the Strait. That's the peninsula of Gallipoli. As we heard last time, they landed at two points. They landed at Anzac Cove on the western side of the peninsula and at Cape Helles on the southern tip. The landing's much bloodier and much more difficult than they imagined.
The Turks have been rallied, not least by their young commander, Mustafa Kemal. And the Allies haven't come close to reaching their objectives. And so he left them with night falling on the 25th of April. They're clinging to these fragile footholds, these beachheads. And Sir Ian Hamilton, the commander, has told them, Dig yourselves right in and stick it out. Dig, dig, dig until you're safe.
And that's what they're doing.
Chapter 7: What were the long-term effects of the Gallipoli campaign on Australian national identity?
They're digging trenches. Even though it's kind of dust over rock, basically. Exactly. As we'll find out, very shallow and insalubrious trenches. So what now? Now remember that just two months ago, Winston Churchill told the War Council, we can make certain of taking Constantinople by the end of March and capturing or destroying all Turkish forces in Europe. Over-optimistic, right?
A little bit over-optimistic. Because they are not going forwards. Two days after the landings, the Ottomans launched a big attack on the Anzacs on Anzac Cove. They're trying to drive the Australians and New Zealanders back into the sea. And the Anzacs perform heroically. They managed to fight them off heroically. But they are definitely not going forward.
The British and French further south at Cape Helles, they do try to go a little bit further forward.
Chapter 8: How did the Gallipoli campaign shape Churchill's political future?
On the 28th of April, they make their first attempt to capture the next village in line, which is a village called Crithia. It's about five miles inland from their beaches. This time, the Ottomans hold them off. And by dusk, when the fighting dies down, the British and French have lost about 3,000 men for very little gain. And this basically is the pattern for the next few months.
It's very similar to the other fronts that we've talked about in this series. The Western Front in France and Flanders, or the Italian Front, where basically you have trenches, you have machine guns, you have barbed wire. If you attack these things... you will probably be killed.
Because that's been the pattern throughout the whole war, that the Germans, when they invade France, are putting a premium on speed. The Italians, when they try and knock out the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they're putting a premium on kind of dash and all of that. And Churchill is part of that continuum, isn't he? And that every attempt...
to deploy the kind of Napoleonic sense of speed and surprise runs into barbed wire and machine gun fire and slaughter. Completely does. And basically there are, I mean, this is what military historians always say about first world generals. They're on a massive learning curve, and it takes some of them longer than others to work it out.
So in Gallipoli, just over a week after the first battle of Crithia, the British and French have another go, a second battle. Two days of heavy fighting, and this time they lose almost 7,000 men, and they gain at most half a mile. Because this is the definition of insanity, isn't it? Just doing the same thing over and over again in the expectation that it will change, and of course it never does.
But the issue for them, of course, is if you don't do that, what do you do? I mean, they are stuck there. If they continue attacking at this rate, they will A, run out of shells and B, run out of men. I mean, they'll all be dead by midsummer if they carry on like this. And this is terrible because Britain needs its forces on the Western Front because that's where the war is going to be decided.
But on the other hand, the Turks can't get rid of them. They are too well dug in. So when the Turks later in May launch another attempt to push the Australians and New Zealanders into the sea, and they've got twice as many men, the Turks, at Anzac Cove, again, defence wins. Defence always wins. So this time it's the Anzac machine guns that are ripping through the Turkish attackers.
So on the 19th of May, the Anzacs lost fewer than 700 men, but the Turks lost probably 10,000 men. So basically, the Turks have launched this big attack. We'll drive them into the sea. It has not worked. And as night falls, the no man's land outside the Anzac lines is littered with thousands of dead bodies. And they are, you know, it's hot. It is hot in Turkey in the summer.
They are rotting in the summer heat. They are covered with flies. There's this dreadful stench of decomposing bodies. And it's a massive health hazard. And this actually is the cue for... for one of the most celebrated moments of the whole Gallipoli campaign. And this is, it's a little bit like the Christmas truce.
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