Empire: World History - 35. Gallipoli: Death at the Cliff Edge

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

The Great War has begun. The British want to open supply lines through the Black Sea to support their Russian allies. Therefore they must take the Gallipoli peninsula. Cue one of the most famous events of the First World War. Listen as William and Anita are again joined by Eugene Rogan to discuss the attempts to take Gallipoli and the brutal fighting that ensued. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. We heard them gathering on the hills again. They called and whistled. Bougals blue. Allah, they cried. Then feet came thudding on.

Allah. Up on the left the firing grew. In one gust it came down to us. Stand two. Here they come. Fire once more. We fire at shouts and shadows. And then gone. They are gone now. All melted as before. So that's a poem by the Australian war poet, Harley Matthews. And it describes the way he and his fellow soldiers were haunted for the rest of their lives by that Ottoman war cry of Allah. during the fighting at Gallipoli. That's the topic of this week's podcasts. And I'm delighted to say that we have tempted him back and really we're very grateful. Eugene Rogan, the fantastic Eugene Rogan, author of the Fall of the Ottomans,

The Great War in the Middle East, 1914 to 1920. And the man on the late Ottoman Empire. We are very, very lucky to have him here live from St. Anthony's. We are grateful. But the reason this is even more poignant than having a big brain, planetary brain, like yourself on this podcast, is because there is a personal connection to the Gallipoli story. Tell us a little bit about Lance Corporal John McDonald, would you?

Well, first off, thank you so much for having me back, William and Anita. And yes, I mean, as I started my book, so it's pointed to start our discussion of Gallipoli today with just one of those personal stories that I think is one of the reasons why everyone remains so fascinated by the First World War. We're so bound up to the suffering and survival of the veterans of that conflict. And for my family, it's really the story behind why the McDonald's left Scotland in the height of the First World War to go to America to make their lives. And it goes back to John McDonald, a young man from Dollar Scotland who had signed up in that fit of patriotic fervor that greet of the outbreak of the war in Glasgow, where he was then working in a locomotive factory with his best friend Charles Beveridge. And the two of them signed up thinking that they would soon be going for glory in the Flandersfields and the Western Front.

But instead, after months and months of training, found themselves boarding a ship in Devonport or in Plymouth to make their way not across the channel, but across the Mediterranean to the remote and exotic Turkish shores of the Dardanelles. Your uncle John, I mean, he was just, I mean, he was pretty much like all of these young, rosy-cheeked kids who really didn't know, you know, the ups and the upsets. from the downside of war, did they? None of them had any preparation for the kind of industrial conflict that they were entering. And you get a sense of that. After writing the book, my family sent me a copy of a postcard. The only thing I've gotten writing from John McDonnell, which he sent as he boarded ship in Plymouth in May of 1915,

it says just a postcard. He wrote this to his sister, Lillian, my grandmother. Landed here today in Plymouth. Expect to sail tonight. We're almost complete by now. We're all feeling a bit tired. We had a 16-hour journey. a train. Tell James Dixon, I'll write him. Don't write until you hear more word from me.

And of course, tragically, they never heard more word from him. He writes as though a schoolboy heading off on a field trip. He's instead a soldier heading off to death. And in his death, and our family tragedy will set off the flight of McDonald's from Scotland that will, you know, lead my grandmother to meet my paternal, my maternal grandfather, my mother was born. Without the death of John McDonald, I wouldn't be talking to you on the podcast today. And so I was brought back to his tragedy when in the early 2000s I took my mother and my son, so three generations, to go and pay our respects to John McDonald's graves at the Lancashire Landing Cemetery in Gallipoli. It was the first time any of the family had been to actually visit his grave. And it was obviously very poignant to see the beautiful fields around the Gallipoli Peninsula.

but most striking for me was to come across on our way to his graveyard, a monument that was raised by the Turkish authorities called the Nuriyamut Monument, which reflects on the 15,000 Ottoman soldiers who died in the very same battle that my great uncle died. And though I'm an Ottoman historian, I should know these things. I've been so filled by my family's stories of the loss and suffering of Scottish young men sent his cannon fodder to die and the machine guns of the Turks. that I'd never even looked into what that day meant.

And how many more Turkish families were bereaved on that day, all captured under one marble slab that says martyrdom, Shahidlik, 1915, in the Nurayamut monument in Gallipoli. We have a very similar story in my family, slightly less tragic. My wife's grandfather was there as a young man. And he literally got one testicle shot off by a Turkish sniper. and when the anniversary came around, the family decided to have the Gallipoli ball and to invite all the surviving members of the family of whom there were 200

who were the product of the surviving part of his equipage. And we danced Scottish reels with the Turks. And they were very emotional about it. And it was a very, very odd occasion, the Gallipoli ball. It was a good way of making up with former enemies as any, I suspect. Yeah, going back to Gallipoli as a relative of, an entente soldier, is to be received as a family member by the Turks. And everyone I told, they don't take great-uncle, they say grandfather. And the fact that I had a grandfather buried there,

had people really embrace the three of us as though we all had our sons buried in this soil. And I think it's very much part of Turkey's remembrance of Gallipoli. We found exactly the same, incredible warmth and an astonishing lack of bitterness. There's a, I mean, there's a poem that apparently is attributed to Ataturk, and we're going to talk a lot about Ataturk in this episode. But, I mean, there's a question mark whether he actually said it at the time or not, which encompasses exactly what you two are saying, which is that, you know, these are people, these are human beings united in grief and in bloodshed and orphaness. I'll just read a bit to you, and then we should really say why this was such an important chapter in the war.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country, therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the johnnies and the memmets to us, where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You the mothers who sent their sons far away, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are at peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.

Isn't that extraordinary? And it's an extraordinary poem that every time, I think there are often pilgrimages, particularly by Australian premiers, and that is read in commemoration. And it is attributed to Adatek, although, as I say, question marks over whether he actually did write it or say it. But anyway, it's beautiful. So tell us, first of all, shall we just start with the waterway itself between the Black Sea

and the East? Why was this so very important to everybody at this time? I think the first thing to remember, Anita, was that the origins of the campaign in Gallipoli comes from a Russian request of their British. allies to come to their resistance because their Caucasus army has just been attacked and nearly surrounded by the Ottoman Third Army in the Battle of Sarakamish, just around New Year's Day, of the turn from 1914 to 1915. And it's in the snow, it's a horrible cold campaign, isn't it, in the mountains of eastern Turkey now?

It was, as it turns out, a self-inflicted wound from which the Ottoman Third Army was never to recover. and the memoirs of soldiers who fought in that campaign capture the horrors are being sent to do battle in two metres of snow without proper snow gear or equipment or food or heating. I have a cousin who was an agricultural engineer in Erzurum in Eastern Turkey up in the 1980s, and he used to walk in those hills. And he said he'd regularly come across military equipment left by frozen soldiers still there on the mountaintops of Eastern Turkey.

That's eerie. It also tells you how barren and isolated in a place, the Al-Hu-Aqbar mountains, God is greater mountains. I mean, just the name of the range tells you something of the awe with which they were viewed. And to try and drive soldiers over that mountain in deep winter snows was, as it turned out, a suicide mission. But the Russians didn't know that at the time. And they felt that they were at risk of having an army encircled by the enemy and a defeat in the opening weeks of the war and ask their allies to come to their request by diverting, by putting pressure on the Ottomans, somewhere else in the empire that would divert their troops.

By the time they launch, of course, Gallipoli has an entirely different logic. The Sutter-Kalmers campaign is over and Russia's fine. But there's a new logic which is about opening up access to the Black Sea, which will allow Britain and France to provision Russian forces to keep the pressure on Germany and Austria from the East as well as the West. It also is a way of getting grain from Russia and the Ukraine to feed the troops on the Western Front. Such a contemporary issue, getting grain through the Dardanelles. Yes, absolutely.

The breadbasket of the Ukraine was as important in 1914, 15 as it is in 2022, 23. I mean, I was looking at the statistics at the time, because you're right. It just feels like it could be a story that falls out of today's newspapers. But Britain at that time, do you know how much wheat it was importing? 85% of its wheat was imported. 85% of the wheat in Great Britain was imported. Therefore, you can see the imperative of these lords of the Admiralty, that we've got to keep this straight open.

Otherwise, how are we going to feed our people? How are they going to afford to buy bread? Eugene, at the last episode, we ended with Turkey joining the war and the whole thing being in the balance that, you know, in a sense, they could have gone either way. They could have remained neutral. They could have gone and joined the Allies. or they could have joined Germany. And it was almost an accident and really the fact that

the Enver Pasha, just one of the triumvirate, was so very, very keen on the Germans that tipped it in that direction. Is that a Saracamish campaign in Eastern Turkey the first moves after that? Is that the first thing that happens, Russia coming down from the Caucasus and trying to invade what is now Eastern Turkey? It was the first campaign launched by Ottoman ground troops. They obviously had engaged Russian fleets in the Black Sea, which, which was the trigger for the Ottoman entry into the First World War in late October, early November, 1914. But Germany was really aware of the limits of Ottoman war preparation. As we talked about last time, the Ottomans had been through wars in Libya and in the Balkans

before entering the First World War, and so needed a lot of rebuilding. But the Germans had been persuaded that the Ottomans were a kind of secret weapon, because the Sultan was not just the temporal leader of the Ottoman Empire. he was the caliph of Muslims. And if he could take the Ottoman Declaration of War and weaponize the religious fanaticism of the global Ummah, Muslims around the world by declaring a jihad, then they believe that the Ottoman entry in the war could pressure Britain, France, and Russia through their large Muslim populations, the Muslims of South Asia for Britain in North Africa and West Africa for France and in the Caucasus for Russia. And I think launching Sardukamish was to try and take the jihad

right into the Russian Caucasus Muslim territory and try and generate real trouble for the Russian war effort right at the outset and prove to the German allies that their Ottoman partners were real contributors to winning the First World War for the central powers. Back in London and the corridors of power, you get the impression, certainly looking back, that people didn't really take the Ottoman forces that seriously. They had lost a lot of wars, hadn't they, immediately before this? Exactly. They were on a losing streak. So did they right at the start, Eugene, just underestimate what the Ottomans were made of? I think critically they did, Anita, and this has been sort of the background to the very important Entente defeats against the Ottomans in the First World War. They underestimated, and with good cause. I mean, as William has already said, the Ottomans have been on a losing streak. They've been losing wars to much smaller, less significant powers like Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia, just in 19.

1912, 1913, what chance do they have against Russia, France, and Britain? So, you know, they were seen as the weakest link in the central powers chain, and that Gallipoli was a moment to knock them out of the war, to really begin momentum to break the central powers script. Do you think the arms transfers from Germany were an important part of the change around, that the Ottomans, in a sense, were always good fighters, but they were badly supplied and didn't have the cash before. While with the entry of Germany into the picture,

they're suddenly getting modern supplies, modern machine guns, and large amounts of cash from the German high command. Well, here again, the model of Ukraine leaps to mind. Without the regular flow of war material from Germany, the Ottoman war effort would have floundered. They simply didn't have the capacity, the industry at home, to make state-of-the-art weapons to fight against Britain, France, and Russia. But Germany did. And this will only enhance when Bulgaria joins the central power and suddenly a direct rail link between Burraniard. Berlin and Istanbul allows for the German supplying of Ottoman forces to really accelerate. So with German hardware, though, the Ottomans were themselves very capable of mobilizing their soldiers and of commanding them. And I think the one thing you'd wanted this thing was German hardware, but it was definitely

Ottoman commanders in the field that were responsible for the victories that they'd enjoy, none more so than Mustafa Kemal, Ataturk. And you know what? You form metal in fire. and this is a man who has been in the front line. I think the last time we spoke to you, he was following Enver Pasha, who's dressed in civilian garb,

who's waging war on the Italians in Libya, and there is Atatuck right behind him. And that is a really important campaign because it teaches Ataturk that actually you can be bombarded from the sea, and that's not where it ends. If you get bombarded by the sea, then troops come up, you need to dig in. And that will become a pivotal argument in Gallipoli,

but look, let's talk about it. Gallipoli Festival, we should say where exactly is it? And how exactly does this campaign begin? So Gallipoli is a peninsula stretching from the Marmarous Sea, which is basically where Istanbul is, leading down to the Mediterranean. And it divides Asia from Europe. So the Straits of the Dardanelles are of strategic importance because they are basically the gateway to Istanbul or Constantinople. This is not far from where Troy once was, huh? Troy is on the Asian shores of the Straits of the Dardanelles. So tourists to Gallipoli today will usually cross the straits to go and pay a visit to the ruins of Troy. So this is somewhere that has been strategically important for millennia?

I mean, I think between the Trojan War and the First World War, one could point to lapses of interest in Gallipoli, but there was certainly a strategic importance. And, you know, one of the first things the British do after the Ottomans enter the war in November of 1914 is they actually. actually send troops ashore to spike the cannons in the fortresses guarding the entrance to the strait, which is part of their underestimating the Ottoman's ability to fend the straits, with almost total impunity. They pretty well destroyed Ottoman defenses in Kunkale and in Settl-Bahar Fort, one lucky shell hitting a powder magazine that sets off a terrific explosion and they land marines on the shore to spike cannons. But the fact is, the Turks prove themselves very able to restore

fortifications and to replace broken guns. When you say spike cannons, do you literally mean just poke holes in the barrel of can? I don't know what that is to spike in a cannon. I think what you do is you actually seal off a cannon and then detonate a charge inside it and that just destroys it. You know, cigars the barrel so it's unusable. It's something like that. Right, right, right. We need a military man on the program to get these things straight at any time.

One of our fellow podcasts like Battlefield Ukraine would know the art of the others. Also, listeners are very, very quick to write in. So look, the plan is land. in the south of Gallipoli, move north, roll back the Ottoman defenders. And the British, in particular, pretty cocky that they can do this quite easily. And also, we should say, who comes up with the plan? I mean, there are many plans initially to engage and to have landings in Turkey. But some of the first plans are directed towards Alexandretta, close to where the earthquake took place tragically a fortnight ago. But it's Winston Churchill personally who pushes for Gallipoli,

isn't it? Well, and I think the important thing is that there's a real tension in the war commanders about how many troops you can afford to divert away from the Western Front without weakening what they all see as the essential conflict zone of the First World War. So Kitchener, as Minister of War, was determined not to divert any troops to secondary theaters like the Ottoman Empire. And Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had the idea that you could actually force the straits and take Constantinople without using ground force. just do it with the Navy. And so in the first instance, Gallipoli is conceived of as a naval campaign.

And the only thing that lies between the British Navy and their allies of French Navy, the fortresses along the Straits and the minefields that the Ottomans had been laying in the Dardanelles to try and deter entry and to try and protect their capital city from foreign attack. And I guess that's where the first real battle of the Dardanelles takes place. It's a naval campaign, not a ground campaign at all. And is one of the problems that Winston Churchill doesn't really understand the geography? I don't think anyone had sufficient maps to understand the geography.

And Churchill wasn't alone. In doing my research, I continually come across Kitchener's responsibility for sending troops ill-prepared to make landings on a coastline with currents that no one had really studied with the kind of precision that war planners would expect today. So it was an amateurish operation from the very beginning. So basically the problem that the British faced was they would send minesweepers into the Dardanelles to try and clear what they knew were intensely mined waters to make it safe for warships to penetrate. But the mine sweepers found themselves harried by mobile artillery as well as by the gun emplacements.

So they didn't have freedom to move around. And the Ottomans proved very cunning in hiding their minds in places where they would be most effective and maybe where the British had least detected them. And after two months of trying to sweep a path for dreadnots to sail through to strike Constantinople and knock the Ottomans out of the war, the Allies get impatient. So Churchill gives approval to force the straits come what may. And here in March, 1915, you get the first real engagement where a string of British dreadnoughts, supported by friendships, attempts to force their way past the cannons and, a way through the minefields and disaster strikes. And it's quite an impressive looking force. You see the black and white photographs of these lines of steamers with smoke billowing out

the funnels heading in this direction. I mean, I would have been anxious had I been a Turk on the coastline watching the slot coming for me. And as that line of dreadnoughts, which were some of the biggest ships of the time, and real instruments of shock and awe, this was meant to absolutely scare the Ottomans into submission. So the site of these ships and then the rate of fire they were capable of. They leveled their cannons against the batteries that were opposing them. And they just fired in a rapid stream that had everyone astonished that anyone would survive the batteries.

What is going on on the Turkish side then? I mean, if there is, you know, these things are meant to create shock and awe. Do we know what happens and what our pivotal character Ataturk is doing at this time? So Ataturk's really not involved at this point. The people who are trying to hold back the fleet are going to be the artillerymen, reinforced by the Germans, with newly installed cannons, and they are proving themselves as valorous in defense as the dreadnoughts were in attacking. You also had lines of mobile artillery that were hiding in the ridges behind Gallipoli,

that were able to do the real damage to the fleets, because the parabola of artillery shell that is fired, skywards will fall down and strike decks in a way, which is absolutely lethal to ships. Whereas ground batteries shoot cannon fire, that's more or less level with the sea and it's good at knocking funnels and things, but isn't going to strike the death blow to a ship. But between the two, batteries and mobile artillery, the ships were coming under fire that was absolutely devastating them. And then they were forced into turning maneuver where they began to strike.

a hidden string of Ottoman mines. And how many boats go down in that maneuver? Well, I mean, the first to strike a mine is a French ship, which capsizes within three minutes with all hands. I mean, out of 1100 men, I think 60 or 70 survive, the sinking of the bouvet, which immediately draws the other ships to its rescue. And in so doing, three more ships of the line strike mines and are so badly damaged that another three sink and another three are put out of operation, basically just to

able to limp out. So one third of the Entente's fleet was sunk or put out of action with the loss of thousands of sailors with virtually minimal losses on the Ottoman side of men or material. And in this process, the Allies gave the Ottomans their first victory of the Great War. And a great victory, it was indeed. But it was also to prove that you couldn't silence the guns from the sea. You needed to actually land troops to secure the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Asian shores so that you could then move ships through safely without being fired on by artillery or facing the mines. And that's the background to when Gallipoli goes from being a naval campaign to a ground war. Just before we leave the naval campaign, at what point do German U-boats turn up?

Because it's not long before we get them engaging, is it? U-boats are a part of the naval warfare before, during, and after the naval campaign of Gallipoli. They are very important in making the eastern Mediterranean waters unsafe for allied shipping, supplying the troops once they are landed in Gallipoli. But also you have Australian and British submarines brought in to the action as well. One of the Ottomans dreadnots is a ship called the Mesudia, which was sunk by a British submarine and a very bold strike. The cannons of the Mesudia were recovered from the seabed and were used as well. one of the defensive batteries in the Dardanelles. And when in March the Ottomans drive the Allied fleet out of the Dardanelles with such terrific losses, one of that happiest crews in the gun

batteries are those manning the recovered guns of the Mesudia who were able to say their ship was able to get its revenge against the Allies. There's a very nice quote from General Hamilton at this point. The commander now realizes that it's going to be turning into a land campaign. And his remark, which bodes very badly for what's coming, is that the peninsula looks a much tougher nut to crack than it did on Lord Kitchener's small and featureless map. That's his first dispatch. And General Ian Hamilton, and you've just quoted, I mean, it is his job now to lead a ground force of colonial fighters. I mean, just tell us the makeup of the troops that he's going to be commanding. Well, going back to Kitchener's reluctance to divert troops from the Western Front,

if they were going to make a ground campaign in the Ottoman Empire, then the troops, are going to have to come from the colonies and from the white dominions. And this is why, to this day, Australians and New Zealanders really view Gallipoli as their battlefield. And the ANZACs, as they came to be known, played such a key role in every stage of the ground campaign. Also, this is when troops, such as the Scottish Rifles, my great-uncle's unit, would be dispatched instead of going to the Western Front to the Dardanelles campaign. You also had the French deployers. colonial troops. Tunisia, Algeria, West Africa. It was a veritable Tower of Babel, William. And, you know, the difficulties of command that result are something we shouldn't underestimate.

It's very important that men in the field are able to respond to the situation by communications that everyone understands. But it really was a challenge trying to command, you know, Senegalese, Moroccans, Indians, we say Indians, you know better than me, how many languages, the nationalities are involved in South Asia, and they're all present in Gallipoli. Even Muslim soldiers, so they will later be redeployed away from Gallipoli because they can't be counted on to fight against their Ottoman Sultan-Kalib. Exactly, because as we had in that opening poem, the war cry of the Ottomans is Allah. And if you're an Indian Muslim or you're a Tunisian or an Algerian or a Muslim West African,

all of which are being deployed at this point, you are going to feel complicated about fighting. And we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, but the Ottomans were quick to pick on to how much they resembled Indians. And we have fantastic stories of bold maneuvers by the Ottomans who would disguise themselves as Indian troopers, liaised with the British, asked for offers to come in and assist them. And we have one instance where a captain, a lieutenant, and two sergeants were taken prisoners by the Ottomans shortly after the landings by pretending to be Indian troopers. So, you know, the internationalism of the Gallipoli campaign, you know, was definitely a liability for the war planners on the Entente side. So you've got sort of babbling Babel that's not quite connecting up on the Allied side. On the Ottoman side, I mean, this is a vindication of what a quite junior man in the army, Ataturk at this time.

I mean, we're going to call him Attaic for the purposes, although he's not officially known as Attec until much later. Or is he Mustafa Kamal Bay at this point? Yes, he's a colonel in the army. That's what his position is. But he has all along, because of that Libyan experience, that you know what, it's not enough to do just straits of barbed wire on the beach, because if they get through that, we have to prepare further. And he's been arguing and arguing for it.

And he will be vindicated at this point, because that is what is going to help the Ottomans and give them a great upper hand, I suppose, over this Tower of Babel. There is, you know, no doubt that Mustafa Kemal was a key strategist in the defense that ultimately led to Ottoman victory in Gallipoli. But there is an element of luck, as always in war, because for the Ottomans, as they prepared, after the defeat of the naval campaign in March,

and the troop landings in April, they had three weeks going on four to try and get their trenches and lay their barbed wire. But if you look at the map of the Gallipoli Peninsula, you see how many different points of attack are possible, and the Ottomans had to try and second guess where the Allies would try and land. They knew a landing was coming, and the question is, where?

And so in that, in a sense, they fortified the right stretches of the straits. They second-guessed the British correctly, which meant that when the landings did begin, the Ottomans were actually in the right places to be able to mount a wall of fire that caused such intense casualties from the opening moments of the Gallupily Land campaign. Eugene, one person we haven't mentioned yet is the German commander, Otto Lehman von Sanders. Well, Lehman we encountered in our last podcast as the head of the German military mission to help the Ottomans after the two Balkan wars of 1912, 1913, with a refitting end and a rebuilding. And so Lehman was absolutely integral to the Ottoman war effort. He had great respect for his Ottoman officers. And he was committed to helping that front deliver. He had his own doubts of whether the Ottomans would be able to make a military.

contribution to the German war effort in World War I or whether they would be a drain. But from the moment the high command took the decision to draw the Ottomans into the war, then Lehman threw his back into making sure the Ottomans were the most valuable Allied Germany could have. And he succeeded in both the preparations for defending the straits and introducing modern technology like wireless communications to help them to communicate well with each other. And crucially, modern machine guns. Modern machine guns, the mobile artillery batteries we were talking about before, that were so effective because, you know, once you could trace where fire is coming from, you can return

it and destroy the cannons. So being able to shoot and move cannons quickly gives you an agility in attack, which was central to the success of the Ottoman defenders in their artillery campaign. And the Germans were central in providing those cannons and training the Ottoman soldiers and how to use them so effectively. Where do the Anzaks end up? Because for most people, Gallipoli will be Mel Gibson and will be Anzac Code. Can you describe where exactly they are and what they're doing? So Anzacob is on the northern end of the Gallipoli Peninsula. The British forces tended to the area around Cape Hellas, where the lighthouse is, and the French were concentrating their forces on the Asian shores on Kumkali. So you had a kind of division of the geography to try and stretch Ottoman

defenses to the maximum and seek the breakthrough wherever possible. The landing zones were chosen from where you had beaches where rowboats could pull in. And again, we have to remember, this was the largest landing by sea ever attempted with technology that was not fit for the purpose and in which the war planers had not fully briefed themselves on the conditions of the landing. So the first thing that the Anzac's realize is the nice beaches that they were supposed to land on, they were just swept away by currents they had not anticipated and found themselves landing about a mile south of where they should have been, they're confronting much higher cliffs and highlands. And so they found themselves, instead of marching across beaches to try and take defensible positions,

landing in places where they were very soon forced to go up very steep hills and where they faced enemy fire shooting down upon them. It's the most disadvantageous position an attacker could find themselves in. And of course, they were very quickly scattered. You had commanders separated from their troops, and you had the kind of chaos because soldiers, without commanding officers, are truly like ships without rudders. I was looking at pictures of the landings this morning, and many of them are arriving with bicycles. They're arriving at the bottom of the cliffs where there's no paths, and they've all been given their uniform bicycle. And there's pictures of these hundreds of these guys arriving with their push bikes. And then later pictures of these

push bikes blown to smithereens with broken frames and wheels in the air. It's a sort of tragic failure of reconnaissance and preparation. They hadn't a clue. You really come away with the sense that they were sent in with a certain amount of arrogance that, you know, through their valor and their numbers, they would prevail. And I'm afraid that when you're faced with industrial warfare, with artillery and machine guns, you know, you just can't do it on a bicycle. Yeah, and just to put a figure on this, and we'll take a break and we'll come back very shortly to look at the fallout. But is this right, Eugene, that just on the day of the landing itself, the Anzac's lost 2,000 men? You know, that sounds entirely right to me. Anita, it might even have been a higher figure than that. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but the casualties were just atrocious and their moments that stand out. But the River Clyde, for instance, as a landing craft. The idea was to take a ship full of British soldiers and ground it right opposite Ottoman positions and then land troops from there. And of course, it just became a charnel house because it was right in the line of fire and hundreds of troops where one landing ship were cut down. We are going to take a break now. Join us after the break when we hear the progress, or maybe that isn't the right word, of the Gallipoli campaign. How our bloodstained the sand and the water and how in that hell they call Sula Bay, we were butchered like lambs to the slaughter. Johnny Turk, he was waiting, he'd primed himself well, he showered us with bullets and he rained us with shell.

In five minutes flat, he'd blown us all to hell, nearly blew us right back to Australia. So that was the great Shane McGahn of the Pogs singing and the band played waltzing Matilda. Eugene, do you want to describe those landings? Well, I think the Pogues have done it poetically and I will do it prosaically, but certainly those images of the cobalt waters of the straits turning absolutely crimson with the blood of the fallen was something that Ottoman witnesses captured in their diaries as well as survivors from the British side. And we know that because the Ottomans had the opportunity to put the barbed wire in place, dig their trenches, and have their machine gun emplacements,

the moment that the ships moved to land, and you could see them coming from far off, it allowed the Ottomans time to really get in place. And they, rather like the American colonists in Lexington, they waited until they could see the whites of the landing troops' eyes. and then they opened fire and inflicted absolute maximum damage. So the numbers in certain of the landing beaches were survival rates of, you know, 10%, 20%, where you'd have 80% casualties between dead and wounded. And in a sense, the dead were the lucky ones because of the wounded were usually left where they fell with no one able to get to them to relieve them and the blood flowed and

the water's turned red. And what should have been, for the plan of eyes, a quick landing against. against an ill-prepared ottoman side, became a struggle for survival against a growing death toll. This again is the next verse of the Pogue Song. And it says, when I woke up in my hospital bed and saw what they'd done, I wished I was dead, never knew there were worse things than dying. Yeah. This is just such carnage that my brain is having difficulty just even imagining. Back in the places where campaigns are planned, is there nobody thinking, actually, this is abort?

abort. This is a terrible idea. This has not worked. We should abort. I mean, what is what is the strategic thinking on the Allied side? I mean, two, two reflections. Firstly, the context of Gallipoli is already, you've had carnage worse than this on the Western Front. This is the same time as IEP, isn't it? Almost exactly. And you know the kind of casualty figures that troops were suffering. And so in a sense, very early in the Great War, the combatants faced casualty figures that were unprecedented in human history, and that became the new normal. And so in Gallipoli, the fact that you saw thousands of troops dying to machine gun and artillery was, in a sense, normalized by what had already happened in the Western Front. But there's another thing,

which is, it was the irony of the British War on the Ottoman front, that the more they failed, the deeper they were drawn in, because they could not hand a weaker enemy, like the Ottomans of victory without it undermining war morale on the Western front or indeed enhancing the position of Germany and its allies. And so you'll find that the moment you reach adversity, the British are forced to redouble their efforts because they can't afford to lose. Yeah. And looking at India, I mean, you mentioned India. If you have, you know, the Caliph's forces are victorious against the British, that sends a very dangerous message back to India, an arrestive population where you've got people saying, actually, we've had enough of you here as well. And the irony is,

historians will reflect that the sultan's call for jihad fell on deaf ears, that there never was the massive Muslim uprising that Germany and its Ottoman allies had hoped would come from a call for jihad. But I argue that the people that responded most directly to the threat of jihad were actually British war planners for whom this played on their thinking right through the war. If they made a major, if they had a major loss to the Ottomans, would this encourage an uprising among Indian Muslims, or indeed in French, North Africa, that could lead them to, to fight a rearguard action in the empire that would undermine their war. So they were constantly preoccupied that defeat to the Ottomans would encourage the Jihad.

And in that, I think, British War Plans were more responsive to the jihad call than anybody in the Muslim world. The Ottoman casualty figures at this point are very high too, aren't they? It isn't just that the guys landing on the shores with their bicycles are being moaned down. No, absolutely. The Ottomans came to the battlefield understrength. They were about two-thirds of size of the landing force. I think it's about 50,000 defenders, about 70,000 attackers. Defense, as we know in World War I, was always the safer position.

When you were in your trenches shooting against attackers, you've suffered lower casualty rates. But the amount of incoming artillery that Ottoman lines suffered from dreadnoughts anchored offshore, three, four, five miles away, just lobbing these massive shells into Ottoman lines. And then the kind of artillery fire they were encountering from British lines. and the machine gunfire and whatnot, meant that the Ottomans were themselves suffering, very, very high casualties. Again, going back to my great-uncle's experience

in Zendiri or Gully Ravine, you know, the official figures for British casualties are about 3 to 4,000, the Ottoman suffered 15,000 on the same day in the same battle. And I think that the casualty figures must have been in that order of magnitude right through the conflict. The Ottomans were bleeding to defend their land.

Tell us about the battles of Criteo, because there's three successive battles. And how much time has passed? I think we, you know, because at the moment, some people may be forgiven for thinking, you know, there's this one enormous battle at the landing point, but this is something now, these two parties are learning what stalemate feels like and what it looks like. They're learning exactly what those who are dug in on the Western front know that you can move two inches forward and two inches back, but you are stuck killing each other for an enormous amount

of time. How long does this drag on before these decisive movements happen? By the time the landings have completed, the bridge, tradition their allies were holding onto beachheads around the Gallipoli Peninsula on the Asian shores that were at no point deeper than a mile or a half. And the Ottomans continued to hold the high land. And from the high terrain, they were able to aim their artillery with lethal effectiveness on the attacking forces. So the battles of Crithia, which take you right through the summer of 1915, are attempts by the Allied forces to break through Ottoman lines and seize the high ground,

where they do reach the high ground, they could then make their way back towards the straits, attack the gun emplacements from behind, silence the defensive lines that were blocking British shipping from accessing Istanbul and complete the job. This whole campaign is about conquering Istanbul or Constantinople. And that's, you know, the target was always that. So they were just frustrated at how to move their troops from these beachheads, from these very vulnerable and exposed positions, to seize the high ground, complete the march onto the Dardanelles, and open the waterways to shipping. And the Ottomans stubbornly clung, and were able to drive back three British attempts in these battles of Crithia to get through to the high ground and confined the attacking forces to their positions within these coastal footholds.

And Enver Pasha all the time is screaming, push them back into the sea, just push them back into the sea. What are his juniors? I mean, again, in my head, I'm thinking of Ataturk, who makes his name at Gallipoli. How is he getting heart into his troops and making them fight? What for them as well is a devastating and endless battle? I think this is the point for the famous Ataturk quote, which defines the man. He says to his troops, I don't order you to attack. I order you to die.

And bombast, though it is, these words were so effective in mobilizing soldiers. And morale is everything in war. The mental commitment of soldiers to go berserk requires commanders who will put themselves in the line of fire, who will be there with them, and who order them to die. And it's just, it's very clear that certainly for Turkish Ottoman soldiers, this notion of defending their soil against attack and having brave and valorous commanders like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was absolutely fundamental. But it's also interesting because I distinguish, you know, Turkish Ottoman soldiers. there were a lot of soldiers recruited from the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire who'd been shipped to Gallipoli. I didn't know that. Again, in your impression, you get very much the fact that this is a sort of Turkish battle fought by Turks led by Ataturk. I had no idea there were Arabs there. Absolutely. There were, and Ataturk just never felt that they had the same commitment to defending the land that the little Mehmeds, as they're called the Mehmetchik, the Anatolian Turkish peasant stock soldier was the fighting stock.

that Ataturk really believed was delivering victory. And they saw the Arabs as they didn't speak Turkish. They didn't know the landscape, and they weren't really willing to give their lives for that. Looking forward to our next episode, are there Armenians in the Ottoman battle lines? Are they also caught up in this? There are Armenians posted to Gallip Lippeitho in very small numbers. They would be Armenians largely coming from the community around Constantinople. In your book, in the Eastern campaign, you make a very, very good point that already the Armenians are being pointed out in the battle against the Russians as being potential traitors and often being shot at from their own side, often in camp.

It's one of the tragic coincidences of history that the Allied landings and the date usually recognized by the Armenian community and by historians as the launch of the Armenian genocide are within 24 hours of each other. And so, gosh. Yeah, the Allied invasion after the defeat of Ottoman troops in Sarakamish on the Russian Caucasus front combined to put the Armenian population already suspected of double loyalties into a fatally compromised position that will then lead to policies to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. So Armenians in the Gallipoli front, the few as were there, would not have been trusted to frontline duty and were. and were, I'm sure, relegated to the rear. I have no diaries of an Armenian soldier that have survived fighting in Gallipoli front. I mean, what's significant about this? All the similarities that are drawn with the Western Front. But there are women who are operating on the Ottoman side. Anita, it's one of the mysteries of the Gallipoli campaign. There are so many accounts from the British of encounters with women combatants and particularly women snipers. but none of those accounts actually talk about a face-to-face encounter.

And what we get from the accounts, I have reports of women being taken to British hospital tents with gunshot wounds as having been shot as snipers and that the men hadn't realized that they were women. There are other accounts of soldiers coming across women in the battlefield that were shot dead and they were dressed in trousers with rifles and assumed to be snipers. it's just really hard because there is no record in the Ottoman side of women ever having been recruited to the army or trained in any way. So there's so many accounts you can't discount it. And that's why I wrote it into the book.

There is also the possibility that these were justifications by men who had done violence to women in the battlefield, something which is always a horrific side consequence of war. But, you know, I'd like to think that there were some. some amazing Marx women hiding in the trees that were demonstrating their ability to defend their homeland against invaders and that there was something of a gender barrier being broken here, I just would need to have a reliable Ottoman source to confirm that one. Until then, the reports that we have are all uniquely secondhand from the... Is it unlikely, if you're looking from what you know as an Ottoman historian, are there any other

accounts of women on the battlefield? I mean, we know accounts of Greek women in the Greek resistance, for example, against the Ottomans. But I've never heard of Ottoman troops who are anything other than men. It would be completely unprecedented in my knowledge that women would have been officially drawn into the war effort as, let's say, uniformed snipers. But what could be conceivable is that women from the area,

so villagers from the area around Gallipoli, you know, volunteered to take up arms to help with the movement and did so from the relative security as snipers. Many who served on both fronts said the Turkish front was worse, infinitely worse than serving on the Western fronts. They were facing artillery fire, as you've said, constant sniping. Comparing Galluply to the Western Front, you have to keep remembering that the British and French and their Allied troops were holding just very shallow beachheads. There was no back to retreat to for a bit of R&R. There was no rotation of troops. The best thing that

could happen to you is you'd get wounded and be taken to a hospital in Mudros and a Gian island off the the coast. But there was no, as it were, backcountry to fall onto. And so they were confronted 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with nonstop machine gun fire and artillery fire, which just played havoc with the nerves of the troops. And so you have a very high instance of shell shock and of mental illness coming out of this. And a lot of the medics diaries describe soldiers collapsing under the strain in ways that we would now talk about as post-traumatic stress disorder, but it was a condition that hadn't really been defined at the time. So in that sense, soldiers who served on both the Western Front and in Gallipoli, said they found it just so much

easier being in the Western Front. Yeah. And what was, I mean, one of the beautiful things I saw in your book, which was, I thought, was very touching, is that you find comfort where you can when your situation is that dire. They named their trenches after things in London. There was Regent Street, Oxford Street, Clapham Junction. I mean, that breaks my heart. You know, if that's the only solace you can have, the closest you can get to home is to

all these muddy, filthy urine and feces infested trenches, because you can't really move to separate your human conditions, are called after these streets at home. Eugene, you talk very movingly about some instances of extraordinary compassion amid all this carnage of moments of decency and humanity amid this slaughter. There's no denying it was total warfare in Gallipoli. But in a sense, Turks and Brits had no fight with each other. You could talk about a hatred of the Germans that had been provoked in the lead-up to the war

and was encouraged so that people would volunteer to fight. But those who found themselves fighting against the Ottomans, you know, Johnny Turk wasn't really their enemy. Or Abdul was the other name they gave. They gave them kind of nicknames and whatnot. And when you'd have lulls in the trench warfare, the bored soldiers could hear each other across enemy lines. They were often separated by a couple hundred yards no more. And so when there weren't hostilities going on, they'd often send treats flying over the trenches instead of grenades. And you have accounts of cigarettes, pasta jam, fruit.

Just being chucked to each other. And what the Turks noticed, and again, one of the great sources I had in the book was just a vast number of war diaries that had been published from Ottoman soldiers on all the fronts. And one of the Turkish soldiers just remarked that when gifts were exchanged in this way, there was never a viciousness to it. So you never hid razor blades in the fruit or, you know, poisoned or it was what was exchanged was exchanged in goodwill. And yet when the call to battle was made, they would then put the bayonets on and go kill each other. And one of the most touching was a British soldier who was himself in a charge in one of the battles of Crithia. and he makes it to the enemy lines and rescues an Ottoman wounded soldier from being killed by a Brit. This is Private Erdley.

You write about this so beautifully in your book. Yes. Yes, go on. I love this story. Well, Private Erdley then finds himself defending a line from an Ottoman counterattack when the British are themselves overwhelmed. He is himself bayoneted and he passes out under his wound, but he doesn't die. And when he comes to the Turks have retaken his line, he's circled by a hostile crowd. and they're about to kill him.

When the man that he had saved in the first onslaught, who he had bandaged, he'd given a sip of his water to set him up with a cigarette and put him in a safe place, leaps up. These two men can't speak to each other, but the Turkish soldier obviously says that this was his rescuer and they must not kill him. And he's handed over to captivity.

And then the rest of his diary recounts his captivity. But before they part these two men kiss in a way which bonded them forevermore and writing years later for the benefit of his grandchildren, he remembers the warmth of the fellow feeling and of that kiss as something that would make him want to see that man again, whatever. But we never know if, you know, the Ottoman survived. We do have a record of Erdly in the Ottoman archives.

So, I mean, his capture is something of Ottoman record as well as his own diary. I have never cried in a war book except that one, because to me, that felt very much like, almost like a Bollywood film, where you have this scenario of enemies becoming humans and, oh no, I just found it utterly moving. Amid all this carnage and these moving instances of humanity, politics is going on in Britain. And this is a disaster politically, isn't it? Particularly for Winston Churchill, who's not only, in a sense, caused the Ottomans to enter the war by seizing the dreadnoughts, he's then directed these troops to a place they can't take.

Well, here again, I'm going to bring Kitchener in and share the responsibility around. Because I think from the moment the naval campaign failed, it did become a ground campaign, and really it's Kitchener's strangling the troops needed for victory. So that, in a sense, Gallipoli was always undermanned. There were never enough soldiers in the field to achieve the victory that they wanted. And that was Kitchener's doing. But that this was an embarrassment for the British government. There is no doubt. And ultimately, it will lead to a parliamentary commission of inquiry to find out just what went wrong in Gallipoli. By the time, Kitchener dies in a shipwreck in the North Sea. Some might argue it was a good career move because there were answers to the failings in Gallipoli that would ultimately be laid to his desk. Kitchener had been before this in Egypt, hadn't he? Was there some element of Kitchener's disdain for this campaign to do with a sort of racist dislike for the east that he gathered in Egypt? Because his record in Cairo wasn't great, was it? I mean, I wouldn't come to the defensive Kitchener against charges of racism. He was a committed imperialist, with all that implies about the distinction between the British and Asians and Africans. But I don't see those racialist views in any way influencing his priorities. I think it always

comes down really to the imperative of keeping troop numbers up in the Western Front and not diverting more troops than necessary, really trying to keep it to a minimum. And I think there were probably commanders who said, you know what, General, we can do this with fewer troops. You know, we've got the technology, we have the training, we have better soldiers, I'm sure we'll be able to make it work. And of course, they were wrong each and every time. They came up against a determined defense and they were losing. So, Eugene, I mean, you painted such a vivid picture of how ghastly and awful it was and how futile in the end. How does Gallipoli come to an end and how does this affect the rest of the war? By the autumn of 1915, British War Plans recognized that their position in

Lippily was untenable, that they could find their positions overwhelmed by an Ottoman offensive that would drive them into the sea, and that the only way they'd be able to retain, even the narrow footholds they'd established, would be by reinforcing troop numbers, and that would have been at the expense of troop deployment on the Western Front. And so they came to terms with the growing necessity of contemplating a retreat, a withdrawal. But war planners were very concerned that if the Ottomans got the slightest whiff that the British were pulling out, that they would open fire in a way that would make absolute carnage of the withdrawal. And so the real question was how and when to affect a withdrawal to try and

achieve maximum safety of the troops pulling out. And here, I think the one victory that the Allies could claim in the course of the Gallip League campaign was that they were able to pull off by cloak and dagger, by stealth, by a totally successful withdrawal in two steps, completely surprising the Ottomans by doing so. They did so in the winter months when nighttime hours were longer, so a lot of this is done on the cover of darkness. And they did so by creating decoys that gave the impression that troops were still active in places where they had already long since been withdrawn. And you have these wonderful moments where, you know, the British finally having completely evacuated an area, the Ottomans then realized that there's a ghost army and they can

go and move into the territory that had previously been held. And they find there are both tricks and treats awaiting them. So the British were very cunning and left behind many booby traps and I'm afraid many of the Ottoman defenders fell victim to, you know, hidden bombs and guns that fired on them as they moved in. But the treats were, there were far more stores than the British were able to recover from the battlefield. And so you have these stories of these incredible feasts where the hungry little Mehmeds found themselves, you know, with cartons of overcoats and pots of jam and canned meats and butter. And they describe eating. to the gorging point on the most unlikely feast of butter and meat and jam and, you know,

recreating theater and conversations between the ghost army and celebrating. And Eugene, we should say this is at a time when, if you're thinking of Irfanoga's memoir, people are starving to death in even middle class Constantinople. Yes, I mean, the hardships of war were felt not just by the soldiers at the front, but right across civilians in the Ottoman Empire, because you take the men out of the fields, the harvesters don't come in. The harvest that do come in,

a requisition to feed the troops. And you had a series of locust plagues, illnesses, typhus and typhoids sweep through regions creating epidemics that devastate the civilian population. So this is a time of hardship all around. And I think in recovering first the northern shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula, after a successful British retreat.

And then in January of 1916, the area around Cape Hellas and the southern points of the peninsula, that the Ottoman soldiers who survived that conflict celebrated victory, celebrated survival, with bizarre feasts in captured enemy stores. We should say that, you know, this is the Gallipoli experience spawns a great many commanders, fighting commanders on the Ottoman sides,

who would then go off and wreak havoc again in battles against the British. But also, very importantly, it raises this idea of an Australian New Zealand consciousness, that you know what, we have to stand up for ourselves because we cannot be pawns in the game anymore. I think that explains so much the celebration of Anzac Day, which brings Australians and New Zealanders to Turkey each year. For them, this was a coming-of-age moment as they went from dominions to becoming increasingly assertive nation-states in their country. own right. They rallied to the cause of the Emperor King, but they wouldn't do so again as

cannon fodder. And I think that they really rethought their role in the world. And I think for the Ottomans, you know, Gallipoli was a victory. And when we see the generosity, the Turks show to their defeated friends, the Australians and New Zealanders, the British, that is the generosity of a victor. And had Gallipoli gone a different way, I think we'd remember it differently as well. But politically, it's catastrophic for the Allied war effort. Bulgaria now comes in and having hovered onto neutrality, it suddenly joins the Germans and the Ottoman side. So now suddenly, instead of knocking out the weakest member of the central powers, the Gallipoli campaign has encouraged a further country, smaller, weaker yet, but nonetheless, geographically

important to reinforce the central powers with the adhesion of Bulgaria to that alliance. The Ottomans had proven themselves to be valorous in the battlefield and to deliver a victory, not just a jihad, but an actual trench warfare victory against the British and the French. This, if anything, confirmed Germany's decision to ally with the Ottoman Empire to bring them in onto the war. And it's leaving the British and French scrambling to try and contain the damage that the defeat they suffered at the hands of the Sultan Caliph's forces not lead to the jihad. They've all dreaded. And we should say just quickly, before we wrap this up, that this also leads to a second campaign,

which has never had movies made about it and no Pogue songs sung about it, which is many, many Indians, many from close to where I'm speaking from now in Meroli, there's even a little plaque to the 1,000 men that went to cut Alamarna from the area where I live in Delhi, who find themselves under siege and also facing a very strong Ottoman resistance. The battle of Kuta Lamar would be engaged in earnest in the immediate aftermath of the Allied withdrawal from Gallipoli that the British found themselves facing double defeat in such quick sequence. And basically, Kut is reduced to a siege conflict. This is Indian troops being landed in Iraq.

This is, you know, the Indian army headed by British commanders, in their hundreds of thousands, being deployed in Mesopotamia as another way to try and weaken and defeat the Ottomans from another vulnerable front. But the victory in Gallipoli will allow the Ottomans to deploy soldiers defending Gallipoli to reinforce the siege of Kut, and no sooner is Gallipoli over than the British are faced with a second catastrophic defeat when their officers are forced to, General Townshend is forced to give total unconditional surrender in Mesopotamia at Kutalamara. And a thousand Indians die from my little village on the edge of Delhi.

It's a measure of the casualties of this disastrous campaign. War is hell. At the same time as this is going on, and this is what we're going to be talking about. Next episode, the Armenian genocide begins in the war. in earnest. And Eugene, we'd love to come back to you for a unique third time. The only guest we've ever gone. Yeah, the only one. We can't get enough Rogan. I mean, honestly, I was going to make a Rogan Joe joke, but I can't work it out properly in my head. But honestly, we have been so delighted in your company, and we can't think of anyone else to take us into really this very

dark and dismal part of history. Eugene Rogan, his book is The Fall of the Ottomans. We'll be back next week. And it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durimpool.