![]() ![]() *īut first, the Allies had to control the channel. It had been in decline for centuries, shrinking to a territory that was about twice the size of modern Turkey, before reluctantly joining the war on the side of the Germans. Known as “the sick man of Europe,” the empire was weak. He wanted to use the British navy to make a daring attack on Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. He was eager to use the British navy under his command to accomplish something that equaled his ambition.Ĭhurchill’s big idea was to ignore the Western Front entirely. ![]() Churchill, 40, had recently been given the dashing title First Lord of the Admiralty. On the so-called Western Front, millions of men faced off across a shell-scarred line of trenches, sandbags, bunkers, dugouts, and artillery positions that ran for 475 miles through France and Belgium.Īs the war bogged down, an ambitious British politician named Winston Churchill began dreaming up shortcuts to victory. Promised a weeks-long war, entire armies instead found themselves stalemated. Hundreds of thousands of men died in the first few months of the war alone. ![]() In the lead-up to the battle’s 100 th anniversary in April 2015, a team of archaeologists, historians, classicists, geographers, and government officials from Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey is using a combination of traditional archaeological methods and high-tech tools to map what’s left of the battlefield’s trenches, tunnels, and terraces. No systematic archaeological survey of Gallipoli has ever been conducted-until now. Yet thanks to its rugged terrain and remote location, the battlefield was nearly forgotten until the mid-1970s, when it was turned into a national park by the Turkish government. “It’s like the whole first world war in a cup of tea.” “Ships, submarines, mines, planes, war on the soil, balloons-almost everything humankind used in war was used in the Gallipoli campaign,” says Haluk Oral, a professor at Koç University in Istanbul and author of Gallipoli 1915: Through Turkish Eyes. Though Gallipoli was a small conflict compared with landmark battles of the first world war like the Somme, the battle for the narrow peninsula contains the story of the war in microcosm: the fatal bravado, the futile fighting, the error-prone assumptions made by politicians and generals, and the killing fields that decimated a generation of young men. ![]()
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