The Rest Is History - 676. The First World War: Churchill’s Calamity (Part 6)

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

After Gallipoli has descended into a bloodbath, why do the British pour in more troops? Does Churchill finally understand his fateful error? How do the allies escape the total mess they find themselves in? And, why has this failed campaign become the foundational moment of Anzac identity? Join Dominic and Tom as they bring an end to this disastrous Gallipoli campaign and the bloody year of 1915. _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. _______ Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠restishistory.com⁠ To read our new newsletter, sign up at: therestishistory.com/newsletters Advertise with us: [e-mail] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's business and commercial banking. One of the great things about finance is that it may result in you having to pay tax. And this was a constant grumble in Anglo-Saxon England, which was the most heavily taxed country in the whole of Christendom. And just when the Anglo-Saxons thought it couldn't get any worse, they got conquered by King Canute. And Canute imposed a tax rate that was effectively... 100%. Yeah, well, that was one very big change, Tom, but another tax change is upon us. And this is the advent of making tax digital for income tax. And if you're at all concerned about it, this is where Lloyd's come in, because they're here to help make that change much simpler for

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If dark beers aren't your thing, you can choose the light case instead. It's your squad after all. After the first box, it carries on as a subscription. That's £29.95 every 28 days. However, there's no minimum commitment, and you can cancel after your free box. So that's beer52.com slash football to claim your free case of beers. A.I was supposed to take over the parts of the job you hate. Turns out, it made your job even harder.

Instead of doing the work, it gave you homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists get work done from start to finish. Cases get resolved, loops get closed. With ServiceNow, you can do the parts of your job you're best at and delegate the rest. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. My dear son, I received a person. your very kind and welcome letter, dated April 23rd yesterday, and I was very thankful for it. 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 And 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 ye in these terrible times and that he will hear my prayers for ye from your ever-loving and affectionate mother so that was Sarah Fitzpatrick a widow who lived in South Shields in Tyne and Weir 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 Glippily, but he may well be the most famous. And 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. 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 Anzaks down from the ravines on the front line, back down to the beach. And he became a kind of cult hero for the Anzaks 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 becomes, he's a poor boy who's made good. He is an every man who has sacrificed himself for his mates.

And of course, this image of somebody with a donkey, it kind of plays into, you know, the established images of saintly figures or martyrs or messires 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. 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 Spiris 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,

is going to bombard Constantinople, knock the Ottomans out of the war. 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 a Cape Helles on the southern tip. The landing's much bloodier and much more difficult than they imagine. The Turks have been rallied, not least by their young commander Mustafa Kemmel. and the Allies haven't come close to reaching their objectives. And so we left them with night falling on the 25th of April. They're clinging to these fragile footholds, these beachheads. And Sirian 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. They're digging trenches. Even though it's kind of dust over rock, basically. Exactly. Well, as we'll find out, very shallow and insolubrious 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 Anzaks, on Anzac Cove. They're trying to drive the Australians and New Zealanders back into the sea. And the Aux perform heroically.

They managed to fight them off, but they are definitely not going forward. The British and French further south at Cape Hellies, they do try to go a little bit further forward. On the 28th of April, they made 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 Austrian and 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 gunfire and slaughter. Completely does.

And basically they're on, I mean, this is what military historians always say about first, we're all 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 be run out of men. I mean, they'll all be dead by midsummer if they're carrying 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. defense 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 Anzac's lost fewer than 700 men, but the Turks lost probably 10,000 men. So basically, the Turks have launched this big attack, will 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 one of the most celebrated moments of the whole Gallipoli campaign. And this is, it's a little bit like the Christmas truce. So this is a day-long ceasefire, a day-long truce between the Anzaks and the Turks. And the guy who organized this, or one of the main,

organizers were somebody we actually met in a previous First World War series about 1914. And he was a conservative MP and British officer called Aubrey Herbert. And he was an amazing character. I mean, he's basically you, isn't he? He's very similar. I was waiting for this, yeah. He went to Balliol, first class history degree, travelled through the Balkans, speaking every Balkan language, all the other major European languages,

Turkish, Arabic, Albanian. Yeah. He goes to Yemen dressed as a tramp, which you haven't done. No, I've not done that. But pretty much everything else. He's the model for the kind of the top spy in Green Mantel, which we talked about in the previous episode. Sandia Abuthnotts. And also, I hadn't twigged this.

He's the younger stepbrother of the Lord Knavan, who after the war will discover Tutankarman. Oh, I did not know that. Oh, that's interesting. So he's born at Highclair, which is downtown abbey. So it all links. He's just an absolutely amazing man. We had a description of him at the Battle of Mons being captured by. Germans. He ended up escaping from the Germans. Of course. Because he speaks Turkish and because

he's a master of tongues in the Balkans. He is you. He wangles the job as a staff officer and interpreter for the Australian commander, General Birdwood. So like me, he's very fond of Australians and Australia. So, and also, you know, he gets somewhere with Turks, as I do. So an Australophile Turkophile Balkan old hand who went to Balliol. I mean, this is just spooky. It's sound galley, isn't it? So he takes the lead in the negotiations with Mustafa Kemmel, and they'll have a formal ceasefire on the 24th of May so they can all bury their dead. And both of them sent out, the Turks and the Anzac sent out groups with white armbands. They'd marked a line down the middle of no man's land.

And there's a lovely description from Corporal Charles Livingston of the New South Wales Light Horse. He says, we stood together some 12 feet apart, quite friendly, exchanging coins and other articles. A Turk gave me a beautiful Sultan's guard belt buckle made of brass with a silver star and crescent embossed with the Sultan's scroll in Arabic. All I had to give him in exchange were a few coins. That's poor from the Australians. Our troops carried the dead Turkish bodies over the dividing line

and the Turkish troops did the same for our dead. So that's nice. Now people may be thinking, while they're bearing the bodies, what are the other Australians doing? Are they having a Barbie? We know how Australians behave. This is Private Victor Lederl,

wrote in a letter. Everybody's taking advantage of the armistice to do anything they want to do out of cover, a large number of down bathing. And you'd think today was Cup Day down at one of our seaside beaches. So basically, you'll just go on to the beach. So brilliant. So brilliant. But then as dusk falls, the Turks start firing again, as Corporal Livingston says,

we were once again enemies. And indeed they are. So the similarity there with the Western Front and the Christmas truce, the similarities go beyond the ceasefire, because actually what's happened now is the trenches have become institutionalized as they were in France and Flanders. So they've dug front lines, they've dug reserve lines, they've dug communications trenches. And when you look at the soldiers' accounts from Gallipoli, there are some things that are very familiar. So there's the thud of the guns.

The crump, I believe you are. You are required to say crumb. I knew you were going to say crump at that point. There's the threat of sniper fire. There's the knowledge that, you know, you poke your head up at the wrong moment. and you're dead, all of that. But veterans consistently said, if they did both, they said Gallipoli was worse than the Western Front.

The terrain is different, so the trenches are much shallower. The dugouts are much more primitive. The temperatures are more extreme, so hot in the summer, so cold in the winter, and everything is covered. You know, you're close to the sea, there's a sea wind, everything is covered with this layer of dust. Because of the terrain, there is a constant, problem of burying the dead.

You can't, basically, it's very difficult to do. And because of snipers, you can't go and get bodies easily. So there's only that one day of a ceasefire, and then there aren't any more, or there's no formal ones. So the bodies by and large just lie there, rotting on the parapets or rotting in no man's land. Asquith's son, Arthur, who was called Ock. He was there at Gallipoli. And he wrote later, he said, bodies lay everywhere, unburied and half buried.

The weather was sweltering, the stench overwhelming, and many of our officers and men were sick again and again. I mean, they're vomiting because of the smell. Even more than on the western front, the bodies attract colossal quantities of flies. This is a private, looking back. The whole of the side of the trench used to be one black swarming mass. Anything you open, like a tin of bully beef, would be swarming with flies.

They were all around your mouth, on any cuts or sores that you got, which then turned septic, and immediately you bared any part of your. your body, you were smothered. It's the worst Mediterranean beach holiday ever. It is. It is. And it's actually, I mean, here's another thing. There is undoubtedly an aspect of misguided and unfortunate Mediterranean beach holidays. It's the issue of toilets. And it may seem odd to talk about this, but basically this is one thing that veterans always mentioned. They said, you know, when you look back at Gallipoli, of course, it's the Turks and there's machine guns and stuff,

but the toilet thing is huge. Because on the Western front, there's wood. There is spruce. There is space. There are supplies of disinfectants and whatnot. At Gallipoli, there are basically no toilet facilities worthy of the name and they don't have any toilet paper. So men would use letters from home. I mean, that must have been awful for them to do because the letters aren't so much to them. But then when they ran out of letters from home, they use their bare hands to wipe themselves. And then they would wipe their hands in the dirt or then wipe them on their clothes. And as a result of this, they're absolutely ravaged with dysentery. and this seems an odd thing again to talk about so much on a history podcast,

but it's a central element of the kind of the Gallipoli experience. Well, I mean, dysentery, you could do an entire history of the world in terms of dysentery. Most people who ever died died of diarrhea. Because we did that series with Carl Harper, and he made exactly this point. Yeah, that blew my mind that point. I've bored people with it ever since. There's so many people in history died of diarrhea. I mean, soldiers who survived Gallipoli said afterwards, you know, this was the defining aspect of the experience, that we would literally, and you would be sitting there with really hard men who were in tears sobbing with the kind of pain and humiliation. To quote one, we wept not because we were frightened, but because we were so dirty. So a good example of somebody who might seem the incarnation of kind of buttoned up dignity, and that's Clement Attlee, the future Labour, British Labour Prime Minister, a captain and a captain and a

South Lancashires he got dysentery at Cape Hellies he fainted because he was so weak from the dysentery he was taken back to the beach and invalided out to Malta and then incredibly I mean great credit to Attlee he was so keen to rejoin his comrades that he got himself sent back to Gallipoli and came back in the autumn he just was very laconic as was his way he said yes I had dysentery and then he just changed the subject but actually some of the stories are horrendous and this is one story or was stuck in my mind since I first read it. Ordinary seaman Joe Murray who was in the Royal Naval Division, and it goes

as follows. He says a couple of weeks before getting it, my old pal was as smart and upright as a guardsman. Yet after about ten days it was dreadful to see him crawling about, his trousers around his feet, his shirt all soiled, everything was soiled. He couldn't even walk. So I took him by one

arm and another pal got hold of him by another and we dragged him to the latrine. We tried to keep the flies off him and to turn him round to put his backside towards the trench. But he's simply rolled into this foot-wide trench, half-sideways, head-first into the slime. We couldn't pull him out. We didn't have enough strength, and he couldn't help himself at all. We did eventually get him out, but he was dead. He had drowned in his own excrement.

I mean, there are lots of stories like this. Not a good way to... It's not Achilles, isn't it? It's not a good way to die. It's not even Rupert Brooke. So, loads of English language accounts, actually in English language accounts, the Turks have barely mentioned, We know that their conditions were really grim as well. Mustafa Kemmel wrote to his Italian mistress, Our life here is truly hellish. But then he added,

Fortunately, my soldiers are very brave and they are tougher than the enemy. I mean, that sentence would have astounded the British planners before the campaign because they were convinced the Turks would run away. And Mustafa Kemmel then has this fantastic line. He says to his mistress, The great thing about my soldiers is so many of them are very devout Muslims. So they're not really frightened of death. They know they will, quote, go straight to heaven.

There the Hurries, God's most beautiful women, will meet them and will satisfy their desires for all eternity. What great happiness! I don't think he's being ironic there. He is being ironic, of course, because Mustafa Kemmel had a very semi-detached relationship with his own fate. To put it mildly. Exactly. But he's clearly been quite wry about this. Anyway, this is the general situation at Gallipoli.

It's a total stalemate, flies everywhere, excrement everywhere. It is horrendous. Now, what of the man who is responsible for all the... this, who came up with this great scheme, Winston Churchill. Back in London, Churchill is absolutely unrepentant. He's still telling everybody that the campaign can be won. But the newspapers are beginning to turn against him. So, for example, the Tory Morning Post calls him a danger to the country. And that is because his first sea lord, Jackie Fisher, is now actively briefing against him and leaking bad news about Gallipoli and basically telling everyone that Churchill's got to go.

So he's the kind of small guy who's yellow. He's yellow, he likes dancing, likes church, but he's also too old, and is very disputatious and difficult. Now, also, some of the people in the liberal government are beginning to lose faith in Churchill. So Lloyd George told Margo Asquith at the beginning of May, Churchill has not merely bad judgment, he has none. His Dardanelles expedition gave the Turk a frightfully long start. He got us at war with the Turk, which he need never have done. And so a few days after that, you have a... a succession of events which rock the Liberal government to put Churchill's own place in great

jeopardy. So the first of all, we already described her Asquith was distracted through all this because of his infatuation with Venetia Stanley. On the 11th of May, Venetia Stanley tells Asquith that she's going to marry one of his ministers, Edwin Montague. And Asquith is absolutely devastated. He is heartbroken. He is a wreck of a man once she's told him. this. It's almost as bad as suffering dysentery on an exposed hill in Gallipoli. Asquith's the real victim and all this stuff. Yeah, he really is. And that will run throughout the rest of this episode, that Asquith's basically a shadow of a man now. The very next day, the 12th of May, Jackie Fisher makes his seventh attempt to resign. And again, they have to persuade

him not to. And the newspapers are now full of rumours that the Asquith government, which doesn't have an overall majority, and they haven't had one, since the beginning of the war, and basically there'd been a sort of political truce since the beginning of the war, but now the conservatives are running out of patients. The rumours that the Asweth government is going to collapse. Two days after this, on the 14th of May, the Times publishes this, I mean, there's no other word but a bombshell, bombshell report, that the British troops on the Western Front are running out of high explosive shells, and that this is because of government incompetence.

And again, rather like the Jackie Fisher stories, this is the result of leaks and briefings from within the government. So it's come particularly from Sir John French, the commander on the Western Front, who's in cahoots. Is it true? Yes, they were running out of shells. Everyone was running out of shells. I don't think it was that Britain was peculiar incompetent. Every combatant by the spring of summer of 1915 is basically running out of shells because they've used all their pre-war supplies. But in Britain, this is used as a weapon to expose what the critics of the government see as its kind of lassitude.

And Asquith is reading the classics and having his hair cut and going to society parties. And they think he should be chairing munitions meetings and being more serious. So the same day the Shell story breaks, the war council meets in what Churchill later called a sulfurous atmosphere. And they discuss, are we going to pull out of Gallipoli? And Lord Kitchener, the war secretary, repeats his point. He says, no, we cannot pull out even now. It will destroy Britain's prestige in the Muslim world. It will lose us the possible support of the Balkan neutrals, people like Romania, Bulgaria, whoever.

We just have to keep going. To what end? Well, this is the point. I mean, don't ask me, I'm not Lord Kitchener. I put it to you. This is nonsense. It is nonsense. I wouldn't have gone in the first place.

Let me be absolutely clear. I'm going to put it on the right. I do not have as distinguished a military record as Lord Kitchener. Yeah. But it seems to me madness. Because even if you push the Turks, if you, the Turk, sorry, off Gallipoli, so what? Yeah, well, exactly, that's the whole point.

So what? Then you still got that. I don't forget, this is a side quest. It's not even the main quest. It's mad. It is mad. So the next day, 15th of May, Fisher finally does resign and in pleasingly bizarre and ludicrous circumstances. He sends a resignation letter to Ascuit. He says, I was against Gallipoli from the start.

It's mad. You've made fools of yourselves. I'm off. And then he vanishes. He leaves the ambrality and disappears. And some historians think because he was very religious, he went to pray at Westminster Abbey, whatever it takes. Anyway, Asquith sends men after him to try to persuade him out of resigning. I mean, again, it's rather like the Kitchener. They've employed these sort of old war horses who are useless. But then they don't want them to resign because it would look really bad. the sort of PR would be really bad. Yeah. So it's like Kitchner doesn't want to withdraw from Glippley because it would look bad.

They don't want to attack Fisher because that would look bad. So they just nail to these mad appointments and strategies. Exactly. So Asquith sends men to track. They track Fisher down at the Charing Cross Hotel. And they hand him a letter from Asquith. And Asquith commands him to return to his post in the name of the king, which is a great thing to write. Fisher says, well, I'll only return on the following conditions,

you will withdraw from the Dardanelles and you will sack Churchill, quote, a bigger danger than the Germans. And Asquith says, oh, no, no, that's too much. And Asquith then says to the king, Fisher's gone mad, I'm going to accept Fisher's resignation. But this turns out to be the trigger for the fall of the government. Because as we said, until now there's been a truce between the two parties, but the Tory leader, Bono Law, he says to Ashton, Look, fish are going, my backbenchers, the ordinary Tories will no longer accept Churchill at the Admiralty.

And so the next few days in Westminster were dominated by these serpentine machinations. It's got a very long story short. Asquith, Lloyd George and Bono-Law, the Tory leader, agreed to form a coalition government. And Asquith can stay on as Prime Minister, but he has to make two sacrifices. One of them, he has to sack one of his closest friends, Lord Haldane, the man who had modernised Britain's army before the war, who's now Lord Chancellor, Haldane has been smeared by the press as pro-German

because he had the effrontery to have studied philosophy at the University of Göttingen. Can't trust a man who studied philosophy in Germany. So basically, this is a terrible... I mean, I'm a big Asgwick fan, but this is very, very bad behaviour from Asgweth. Asgweth Sax, one of his closest friends... No greater love hath a man

than to lay down his life for a friend. Yeah. And then the Tories say, we want to get rid of Churchill. We hate Churchill. Churchill used to be one of us. He's a traitor. He's a snake.

He goes around making mad speeches. He's a braggot. He's totally unreliable and mad. Get rid. And the funny thing is, you know, Churchill obviously, you know, the greatest Britain, whatever.

He is at this point unbelievably unpopular across the political spectrum. So Asquith, when he's debating this, with his wife Margo, he said, Churchill is by far the most disliked man in my cabinet by his colleagues. Oh, he's intolerable, noisy, long-winded and full of perforations.

Lloyd George said to his mistress, this is Churchill's own fault. He saw in the war the chance for glory for himself, and he's entered on a risky campaign without caring a straw for the misery and hardship that it would bring to thousands. I mean, Lord George is quite right about that, by the way. George V wrote in his diary. He said it'd be brilliant to get rid of Churchill from the average,

Admiralty, he is the real danger. So basically the deal is they'll get rid of Churchill. They'll also get rid of Fisher, all of this. Asgith will stay on as Prime Minister of a coalition government. I mean, presumably now they've got rid of Churchill. That's brilliant. They can say it's all been a disaster, pin the blame on him, and, you know, cut your losses. This is the insane thing, right?

This is absolutely bonkers. The same day as all this is going on the 17th of May, Sir Ian Hamilton sends a cable to the war office from the Aegean. He says, we've tried to break out of our beachheads. The Turks have resisted much more stubbornly than we expected. The troops have done well, but they are absolutely exhausted. We need, if you're going to keep us here, we absolutely need reinforcing as soon as possible. But because of the political crisis, no one answers. And in fact, they don't answer for weeks.

The War Council doesn't meet again until the 7th of June, which is almost a month later. and then if they do decide to send reinforcements, it would take weeks to get them there. So basically for the next six weeks, these poor blocs at Gallipoli with dysentery are stuck in their trenches, the Turks shooting at them, and they're waiting to find out what happens at Westminster

for the politicians to sort themselves out and to get their act together. And what makes that worse is that Churchill won't go? So he's still fighting to cling on to office. He drafts a public letter, saying none of this is his fault, it's all 50s. vicious fault. He has a massive strop and a tantrum with Lord George, had once

been one of his closest friends. Churchill's so self-regarding. You don't care what becomes of me. You don't care for my personal reputation. Lord George says, no, I don't. I only care about winning the war. And then this brilliant thing. He gets Clemmy to write Ask With a letter.

You know, tear-stained letter. Why would you part with Winston? You will be committing an act of weakness. Your coalition government will be, you know, rubbish and all this kind of thing. Asquith, there's some excellent cat in us now. Asquith shows this letter to his wife, Margo. And Margo is, what's your expression? A baggage. And Margo's a massive baggage. She is like the world's most, she makes Virginia Woolf look democratic and open-minded. So a baggage, not a spitfire. She's both a baggage and a spitfire. She's... The worst kind of baggage. Yeah,

and the worst kind of spitfire. Asclus shows Marco this letter from Clementine Churchill. And Marco says, It shows the soul of a servant. That touch of black male and insolence and the revelation of black ingratitude and want of affection justifies everything I've thought of this shallow couple. And Asquist says, basically, that's going a bit far, isn't it? It's the letter of her wife. And Margot says, a fishwife, you mean?

Yeah, she is a bit far, and a baggage. No question. Anyway, Churchill's basically dragged out of the Admiralty on the 25th of May. is fobbed off with a kind of non-job, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Most offices in the Navy were delighted that Churchill had gone.

Admiral Jellico wrote to Fisher, We owe you a debt of gratitude for having saved the Navy from a continuance in office of Mr. Churchill. Admiral Beattie, the Navy breathes freer now that it is rid of the succorpus Churchill.

Churchill has gutted. I mean, Churchill goes around saying to everybody, you know, I'm finished, I've been totally humiliated and all this. and Clemy said later on to one of his biographers, I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles. I thought he would die of grief.

And there were some people who thought that Churchill might actually take his own life, that he was so crushed and depressed by his public humiliation. But he signs up and goes off and fights. He does indeed. And we'll just, we'll come to that a little bit later. Now, Callipoli, they're still waiting for news. They launch a third battle of Crithia under Sir Eilmer. Hunter Western with his excellent mustache.

Classic kind of first world war behavior, bombardment, over the top. They get about 200 yards and then... And then basically, yeah, the Turks kill them all. They lose about 6,000 men. The Australian writer Les Carlian said that General Hunter Western, he was one of the Great Wars spectacular incompetence. He threw away men the way that other men tossed away, socks. And is that fair?

I mean, I get the sense that it is probably. I think it's actually a bit harsh. I think blaming the generals for this is too harsh. They're in an impossible situation and it's, you know, it's Churchill's fault. It's not their fault. I think they, what do they do? I mean, they can't just sit there and do nothing. So, yeah, I think they're in an impossible situation, and it's the politician's fault for putting them there, frankly.

But they are throwing away men, the way other men toss their ourselves. I mean, they was throwing away men. Yeah, but I mean, they keep thinking to themselves, well, maybe next time. No. And never. Yeah, of course. I mean, the bonkers thing is Churchill still won't shut up, even though he's been booted out. So the day after this battle, he was in Dundee addressing his constituents. And he said, through the narrows of the Dardanelles along the ridges of the Gallipoli Peninsula lies some of the shortest paths to a triumphant peace. Beyond those few miles of ridge and scrub on which our soldiers, our French comrades, our gallant Australians and our New Zealand fellow subjects, are now back. lie the downfall of a hostile empire, the destruction of an enemy's fleet and army, the fall of a world-famous capital, and probably the accession of powerful allies. And that's just bonkers from him. When he's coming out with that kind of stuff in the Second World War, it's great. And your heart sores and you feel a great patriotic glow.

When he's coming out with that stuff in the face of a disaster like this, you just think that's mad. Of course you do. It's kind of bogus. the language is overinflated. Yeah. You know who it reminds me of there? And this will, I mean, who he undoubtedly is like, he is Boris Johnson at this point.

Yeah. Talking about Ukraine and everything that Britain should be doing for Ukraine, we haven't actually got any arms because his government has failed to invest in him. He's making wild promises and claims in the most grandiose rhetoric, while back in the office, the people working with him,

in tears of frustration and rage because he's embarked on a course that's just utterly self-destructive and suicidal. But he's not the only one because two days later the new coalition, they've set up a sort of new war cabinet which they call the Dardanelles Committee, a sign of how important

the Dardanelles now is to them. And they said, well, what will we do? Shall we finally cut our losses? No, we won't. We'll actually send more men. So they say, we will send Serrian Hamilton his reinforcements. We will send four new divisions of Lord Kitchener's new army. And the generals on the Western front say, are you mad?

When we need men so desperately against the Germans, why would you waste men on this mad lunatic scheme? So Douglas Haig, not an uncontroversial general himself, said at the time, he said, you could send the entire British army to Gallipoli, and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. You're never going to get a fleet through those straits. You're never going to capture Constantinople. You're never going to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war.

You are deluding yourselves. And I quote, I think it is fatal to pour more troops in ammunition down the Dardanelles sink. But maybe he's wrong. Yeah, maybe. Maybe it'll work. Maybe one more heave will do the trick. Yeah. The date for the reinforcements to land is set for the 6th of August.

Hamilton is planning to land almost 30,000 fresh troops, at Sovlar Bay, which is just up the Gallipoli coast, and at the same time, the Anzaks will launch a massive breakout to capture the high ground in the centre of the peninsula. Well, I think when you put it like that, that might work. Yeah, I mean, that's sounding promising. These are the stakes. If this works, I think this could change the course of the Gallipoli campaign.

Which you know what it would result in? It would result in the downfall of a hostile empire, the destruction of an enemy's fleeting army, the fall of a world famous capital, and possibly the exertion of powerful allies. I think this could be the moment that wins the war. First World War, as everyone knows, ended in 1915. We'll be giving the details of that after the break.

Brilliant. This episode is brought to you by Disclosure Day. The new movie Disclosure Day is directed by legendary filmmaker Stephen Spielberg. And now with Disclosure Day, Spielberg is back with another movie which asks the fascinating question, what would you do if you found out that we here on planet Earth were not alone? See, I feel quite good about it because I've actually been. prepping for some years. So I've laid up stores. I've got weaponry. I'm ready. When the aliens

attack, I will be able to fight back with the arsenal at my disposal. So I'm excited about it. But Dominic, you are not actually appearing in this cast because the cast is a really extraordinary one. And clearly Spielberg didn't need you because he's got Emily Blunt. He has got Colin Firth. He's got Josh O'Connor. He's got Coleman Domingo. And it's a completely gripping and original story and absolutely it demands to be seen not on TV but on the big screen Disclosure Day is in cinemas

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Yeah, that's right. We're excited too. See you soon. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins? In over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case, is caused by HPV, the human papilloma virus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible.

Indeed, it did by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in younger women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer researchuk.org forward slash rest is science. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the rest is history. It is now the late summer of 1915. Glippily's been a

total mess, but it's okay because the British government are sending reinforcements and this will undoubtedly enable the Allies to take Constantinople and to end the war in triumphant circumstances. Isn't that right, Dominic? That's what history tells us happened. It is indeed. So to remind people about the plan, they're going to land 27,000 fresh troops at Sovlar Bay, which is on the western side of the Gallipoli Peninsula, so the Aegean side. Meanwhile, those allied forces who are already on the peninsula, so Cape Helles, and at Anzac Cove, they will launch a series of attacks from their beachheads. This is known as the August defensive, and they will push the Turks back. They'll capture the Turkish trenches,

and they will seize the hills and the ridges that are further inland, so the commanding heights of the Gallipoli Peninsula. And all this is scheduled to begin on the evening of the 6th of August. And a big spoiler alert now, it doesn't go entirely according to plan. So if we begin with the landings at Sovlar Bay, the same old story. Basically, they do get the troops ashore, but they're under punishing Turkish fire. It's all a bit chaotic. Some of them arrive at the wrong point or the timings are wrong.

they take very heavy casualties and they don't make much progress at all. Basically, like before, all these blokes get stuck at their beachhead. They're pinned down as baking heat. They don't have supplies. They don't have any fresh water. And when they try to get inland, the Turks drive them back with their machine guns and with bayonet charges and things. I mean, I suppose to be fair to them, there's no way they could have worked out that that's what was going to happen. Because it's not like anyone's tried that before.

How are they to know? And it's the same bloke who drives them back As drove them back before, Mustafa Kemmel. So he wasn't the initial commander at Suvler. There was another bloke, another Turk. He was sacked after a few days because of inertia. Mustafa Kemmel was sent in. Mustafa Kemal had been in the trenches all this time.

He was delighted to be leading the counterattack. He said, for four months, I'd live 300 metres away from the firing line, breathing the fetid smell of corpses. Having left in dungeon-like darkness at 11 o'clock that night, I was able to breathe clean air for the first time. So he's having a tremendous time. Although history might have been very different because at one point he's hit by a piece of shrapnel in the chest.

And the story goes, if you read in admiring biographies of Mustafa Kemal by Turkish historians, that he was saved by his watch. How did that work? Because the shrapnel hit him and he had his watch in his pocket. Oh, I see. Oh, right. Had that not happened, then who knows? Turkey might not exist.

Huge swathes of Turkey would be speaking Greek. The other big story of the day is the Australians and the New Zealanders attempt to break out of the Anzac Cove beachhead. I mean, you say there is another story that follows this, but we'll come to that when you've told this bit. So they're trying to break out of Anzac Cove. There's a whole series of battles that some of our Australian listeners will be very familiar with all these places called Lone Pine, Dead Man's Ridge, or the Neck. and they go down an Australian kind of legend basically they charge out and their machine gunned by Turks

Sergeant Cliff Pinnock of the Victoria Light Horse said they were waiting ready for us and they simply gave us a solid wall of lead I was in the first line to advance and we didn't get 10 yards every one of those felt like lumps of meat all your pals that have been with you

for months and months blown and shot out of all recognition so to cut a very long story short this breakout attempt lasts four days. The Australians, you know, they fight heroically, but they lose more than 12,000 men killed or wounded. And it's, you know, they're basically pushed back into their beachhead. And in the film Gallipoli, the Peter Weir film that made Mel Gibson's name,

it is claimed in this film that while the Australians are fighting and dying like lions, the British are playing in the sea and drinking tea on the beaches. This is a lie, a shameful lie. It's astonishing that Mel Gibson would associate himself with. Well, I'll tell you. Anglphobic propaganda. Mel Gibson really does hate Britain, doesn't he? He absolutely hates Britain.

Well, let's be more precise. England. Yes, he does. I mean, can I tell you why he's wrong? Yeah, I do. He is overlooking what is the most significant episode in the whole Gallipoli campaign. I'm amazed you left this out. And this is the fate of the Sandringham Company.

And these were basically a state, workers recruited from the royal estate in Norfolk in Sandringham. And they get that, you know, they're going off to serve King and Country in Gallipoli. And they get sent to, as part of this kind of attack to try and force the Turkish lines. And they march into a wooded, heavily defended area. And as they're pushing towards the Turks, they are lost to sight and sound. and a New Zealand forces engineer watches them go and he says that a low-hanging cloud

which is loaf-shaped descends and it envelops the battalion and then it kind of goes up and when the cloud has gone, the battalion has gone as well. So there are two theories as to this. One is that it's, you know, hallucination, encourage, you know,

a result of the mist and the gunfire and the shell smoke and everything. think. Yeah. Also, sure you're driven mad by dysentery. Yeah, oh, they're dropping dead of dysentery or whatever. They just, they are kind of wiped out and they're never found. But the other theory, which I think is much more plausible, is that this is a UFO, a flying saucer that has descended and is interested in picking up human specimens for a future study. And they've come down and they've kind of picked up all the Sandringham estate workers who are now in the army and gone off whatever. and this was my introduction at the age of nine to the Gallipoli campaign.

I read a whole book about it. Wow. It was a New Zealander who came up with this. Yeah, basically. The people from New Zealand are usually very level-headed. Well, I don't think he said that it was a flying saucer, because obviously people didn't know about flying saucers until after the Second World War, but it's a retrospective interpretation, this peculiar loaf-shaped cloud.

Right. And actually, there was a BBC drama about it with David Jason as the commander of the Sandringham. Wow. He was like Carson in Downton Abbey going to war. So anyway, I just throw that out. All right, flying sources aside, where are we now? So Hamilton has got his reinforcements ashore. On the other hand, he hasn't made any dent in the Turkish defences, really.

The tactical balance hasn't changed. Basically, everybody now knows this is an unbreakable stalemate. And it's, you know, this is basically trench warfare at its most tedious, at its most gruelling and attritional. We're into the summer. It's swelteringly hot, blistering sunshine, so they're all incredibly bad, the sunburned. The flies everywhere, the body's rotting, the dysentery is actually worse than ever. As Peter Hart says in his brilliant book, you know, they can look out, they can see the hospital ships at night with the lights twinkling in the darkness,

but all Gallipoli had to offer them was unending misery, disease and the threat of death. So after the Sovlar landings, two other important things happen. So number one is there has been another of these bidding wars with the Ottoman Empire's neighbor, Bulgaria. And the Bulgarians have been shopping around as the Italians and the Ottomans had before them. They were, the Bulgarians felt very cheated because they'd fought the first Balkan war with their neighbors against the Ottomans. But then their neighbors, Serbia, Greece and Romania, had all ganged up on them and basically taken the Bulgarians gains. So the Bulgarians are very cross and they want to get a better deal. They decide by the late summer, early autumn of 1915, that the Allies are a complete shambles and the central powers are going to win.

And they sign a secret treaty with the Germans and then they enter the war and attack Serbia. I mean, I'm sad about that. I'm sad about that because I'm very, very fond of Bulgaria. thanks to Simon, my Bulgarian personal trainer, to who might owe so much three wickets at the weekend, just mentioning that. But I can understand it. So two things. First of all, I myself am a massive Bulgarophile because I've been travelling backpacking twice around Bulgaria. Okay, okay.

So it's a meeting of mines. That's unexpected. Yeah. I love Bulgaria. I've been to Provdiv. I've been to Voliko Tarnvo, all kinds of tremendous places in Bulgaria. Oh, we had a great time in Plovtiv. Saw Nick Cave in the...

Roman theatre there. It was brilliant. Right. I didn't see Nick Cave. I saw a, it was in late 1990s. It was a strange folk dancing festival in which the stage literally collapsed under the feet of a Serbian pantomime horse. God, what a great country. Also, actually, talking of toilets, some of the worst toilets I've ever seen are on the Turkish-Bulgarian border. Anyway, that's by the bye. So it's sad, but...

But the Bulgarians are not on the wrong side. Britain is on the wrong side. You want to be with the... Come on. You want to be with the Ottoman Empire. the Bulgarians, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and our friends, the Germans, we've made a massive, we've had a shocker. Anyway, so essentially, Bulgaria's entered the war against us, and so that's now a problem, right?

Yeah, a massive problem, because they're in the Balkans. Your whole Constantinople scheme now looks ridiculous. It's looking even, I mean, it's looking ridiculous now. Yeah, yeah, it's looking bad before. It's looking really bad now the Bulgarians, who are the Ottoman Empire's northern neighbours, have also entered. and the other thing is after the Sovlar landings

there's a shift in public opinion in Britain so for the first time people are now openly saying this campaign they're openly saying it in the newspapers this campaign's not going according to plan

and the most famous example of somebody who says this is a young reporter from Melbourne called Keith Murdoch and he is the father of Rupert Murdoch so that's where it all originates It is. Well, this is a big moment in, so this is a very well-known moment in Australian history, and particularly Australian media history. So Keith Murdoch worked for the Sun, a newspaper in Sydney. And in the late summer of 1915, he went to Anzac Cove, and then he went on to Allied headquarters on the island of Imbros. And there, he was befriended by the bloat we mentioned last time, Ellis Ashmead Bartlett of the Daily Telegraph.

So here's the bloke who had written the first reports of the Anzac landing and had basically created the idea of exceptional Australian New Zealand heroism. And Ashmead Bartlett, who's British, says to Keith Murdoch, this campaign is a total disaster. Hamilton is useless, they're all useless. And because of wartime censorship, people in London aren't getting the truth. And he gives Keith Murdoch a letter, basically a report, and he says, I want you to take this to London and give it to Askwith personally.

Murdoch goes off by ship. When he gets to Marseille, he's intercepted by British military police. The top brass are found out about this letter, and the letter is confiscated from Keith Murdoch. So he goes on, and he gets to London, and now he writes a report of his own for the Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, who is a friend of Keith Murdox.

And Murdoch, it will amaze people familiar with journalism, and the way that some elements of the press behave, that Keith Murdoch writes this incredibly exaggerated, embellished version of the previous report. He says, the entire operation, I mean, this bit's not wrong at all, has been one of the most terrible chapters in our history, a series of disastrous underestimations. Now, this is sad from Keith Murdoch, and he lets himself down. He's very rude about the British soldiers.

He says they're not to be compared with the Australians, and their physique is very much below that of the Turks. Pie-chuckers. They are merely a lot of childlike youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their lot. I mean, this is such sledging from the Australians. Yeah, it really is. It's very ashes punditory, isn't it?

David Boone. He goes on to say, the real fault, though, the British soldiers are useless, feckless, weak, stupid, but the British officers are worse. The continuous and ghastly bungling over the Dardanelles Enterprise was to be expected. from such a general staff as the British army possesses,

the conceit and self-complacency of the red-feather men are equaled only by their incapacity. Anyway, Keith Murdoch has become pals with David Lloyd George, and he tells David Lloyd George this, and Lloyd George says, I want you to send a copy of this to ask with. And meanwhile, the telegraph bloke, Ashmead Bartlett, he's now arrived in London too.

He's been sent home from Gallipoli, and he goes and he meets Lord Northcliff, the most powerful press baron of the day, and he says the operation is a shambles. So thanks to Murdoch and Ashmead Bartlett, all kind of London high society, political kind of classes, all those kind of people in the kind of salons of Westminster and Whitehall, they're talking about what a nightmare the campaign has become. And so by early October, instead of saying, are we going to call it off, people are actually saying, well, when are we going to call it off? Do they accept any kind of responsibility?

The politicians. Or do they just blame the officers and the commanders? I think they blame Winston Churchill. They have an excellent scapegoats. They have an excellent scapegoat. But they start sacking everybody, don't they? All the kind of military top brass. They do?

They keep changing all the generals, of course. But when they do that, do they say, actually, we're complicit in this? We've really screwed up here. No. No one ever does that. No, I guess not. So Kitchener, who definitely is complicit in it, by the way, Kitchener said to Ian Hamilton, sort of early October,

I want you to think about an evacuation. How many men do you think you would lose? And Hamilton says, you know, an evacuation is a terrible idea. We would lose half our men. I mean, this is one reason why they don't get off, by the way, because a lot of the top brass think, if we start evacuating, we'll be sitting ducks on the beaches and the Turks will just kill us all.

So we're stuck. Anyway, after Hamilton said that, the war council said, okay, Hamilton's got to go. His career is basically over. They sack him. and they send a guy called Charles Monroe who'd been on the western front near Eap. Monroe went to Gallipoli.

He spent three days touring the beachheads. After three days he said, OK, I've had a look. This is madness. We've got to get out of here. This is hopeless. When the word gets back to London, Churchill, who's still actually in the government

with this kind of non-job, Churchill went absolutely ballistic. He said, this would be the greatest disaster since the loss of the American coloners. And they said, well, what would you do? And he said, maybe you have another crack at the straits with some ships and some more men. I mean, that's, that's ridiculous at that point. So he's lost the plot. The war council says no. Churchill flounces out of the government completely.

He sends a resignation letter to Asquith and says, I have a clear conscience, time will vindicate my administration of the Admiralty, which is not true at all. But then to his credit, remember, he's only 41. Churchill then tries to redeem himself. He goes to the Western Front. He becomes the lieutenant colonel and the Scots fuseliers and he serves, you know, he doesn't really see that much action. There's constant bombardment and he is almost killed, I think, by a shell

at one point. So he does put himself in harm's way and I think this is the point where the comparison with, yeah, Boris Johnson evaporates and indeed, I mean, you think about all those disgraced ministers in the last government, sort of Matt Hancock or whatever. I mean, they did not do anything like this. They did

reality TV programs. Matt Hancock went off and got trained by the SAS, I think. Yeah, there's a brilliant clip online of an SAS man shouting at him. You're a, I can't say the word, what are you? And a miserable Matt Hancock, the man who'd been in charge of our COVID response, standing there on Channel 5 or whatever, being berated by the SAS. I mean, what you can't say about Churchill is that he was ever a coward.

No. I mean, he was insanely brave. And when he said that he loved war, I mean, he genuinely meant it. He did. I mean, he. this has not been his finest hour by any means. No. It's always been the great blot on his escutcheon, hasn't it?

Yeah, yeah. And we'll maybe talk about that. It's right at the end. The men at Gallipoli. Back to them. You can't evacuate people overnight. And that means that they are going to have to stay there for a few more weeks. They're basically going to have to stay there into the winter.

At the end of November, the weather turns. It's really cold. It's rainy. It's windy. And then it starts to snow. Tragically, many of the British and Anzaks are still in their thursday. thin summer uniforms. So thousands of them get frostbite

and a lot of them literally freeze to death. I mean, there are stories about when it starts raining in the trenches filled with rainwater and some of them are so weak with dysentery that they can't pull themselves out and they just lie there and they drown. Oh dear. So there's a story lieutenant in the field ambulance. He describes

seeing an officer, his feet were frozen and he was making his way to our dressing station. He asked two others who were with him to go on and he sat down in the mud. They went on, and they sent back stretcher bearers. But when the bearers reached him, he was dead of cold and exhaustion.

And this is a very, very common story. So the first evacuations, which are at Suvler and at Anzac Cove, are scheduled for late December. Hamilton had said he would lose half his men. And in this he was actually quite wrong. I mean, this is the one example of being too pessimistic. This is the one bit of the operation.

It really is a spectacular success. They do it over several nights, so the Turks don't detect them. They do lots of clever things with their guns, so the guns will keep firing. They set them, they rig them, so they'll fire regular intervals. Never. So that the Turks won't realize they're running away.

I think withdrawing, Dominic. They're not running away. They're withdrawing. Withdrawing. Okay. Yeah, running away is too harsh. So they are taken off the beaches on the night of the 20th of December, about 80,000 of them.

They leave a load of their kit behind, but they lose almost no lives at all. It's a remarkable achievement. And it was later said of Clement Attlee, who has come back to Gallipoli, after his bout of dysentery, that he was the second to last man off the beach, Savler, or something like that. I don't know how anyone would ever be able to prove this or calculate it. But anyway, he's one of the last to leave. I guess it's a reflection of kind of a sense of his courage. Yeah, exactly.

You know, how well he's performed. Exactly. The men at Cape Hellies, so mainly British, they had to wait another couple of weeks. The operation started on the 7th of January. There's a huge bombardment by the ships. That gives them, allows them to pull back. They're a little bit inland by this point, about five miles in land. So they pull back to the beaches.

And then the very last troops to leave, which are the Newfoundland Regiment, they left at 4 a.m. on the 9th of January. And again, they didn't really suffer any casualties at all. And for a lot of the men, this was obviously a bittersweet, even traumatic moment to leave behind after so much had been sacrificed. So I quoted earlier a guy called Joe Murray, who was an ordinary seaman in the Royal Naval Division. He was looking back later on. He said, as we got further from the line, I remember the advance we'd had on May the 6th, when more of my pals died, such as Petty Officer Warren and Young Yates. I could still hear young Horton crying for his mother as he died.

And I remembered Colonel Quilter leading the advance and going to his death armed with a huge walking stick, very British behaviour. The tears were streaming down my cheeks, I just couldn't restrain them. My eyes were smarting so much I think I walked the rest of the way with my eyes closed. I knew it so well, though, I couldn't go wrong. So it was all for nothing. One of the great British military disasters, and you actually made this point a little bit earlier. The plans were unrealistic. They were incoherent. They were poorly organized, all of this kind of thing. But the mad thing is, even if the Gallipoli campaign had worked. So what? So what? Does no guarantee they could have got the fleet through the straits

because they've only secured one side of the straits. There's still all the forts on the other side. Yeah. And imagine they've got their fleet through. They don't have enough men to occupy Constantinople. So the fleet arrives outside Constantinople and they fire at the Constantinople

and the Turks just fire back at them. Greek fire. Yeah, then what? What do they do then? The Ottomans aren't going to change sides. As Peter Hart says in his brilliant book on Gallipoli, the whole thing was just a complete distraction from the Western Front because basically they couldn't accept,

they got themselves into a war that was going to be a really grueling war of attrition and it would take years to win it. There were no shortcuts. Yeah, there's no shortcuts. And Churchill is definitely the primary culprit. Even Andrew Roberts in his biography says, you know, he's the scapegoat in chief

but he deserves to be the scapegoat in chief. It's not just that it's his idea originally. I mean, people often come up with ideas that don't work in politics or in war. It's the fact that even after it is demonstrably failing, he will not give it up and he's still vigorously campaigning for it at a point when other people, you know, have woken up to the reality of it. It's the very worst side of Churchill, the irresponsibility, the recklessness, the kind of stubbornness. In the commons, when he was defending himself in his resignation statement, he said he thought it was a legitimate.

legitimate war gamble with stakes that we could afford to lose for a prize of inestimable value. And people slammed him afterwards. They said that is classic Churchill. He's a gambler. But then the shocking thing about that to me is not the word gamble. It's the stakes we could afford to lose because the stakes, he's talking about people. Yeah. And a lot of people. Well, he's talking about all those people dying in puddles of their own excrement. Exactly. So to give people a sense, in total casualties, so that includes wounded, sing and so on sick British and Anzac's

200,000 men, the French 47,000 the Turks, a quarter of a million. In deaths alone, the British and Irish troops lost 30,000, the French 12,000, Ansax's 11,000. Again, the Turks, who are always forgotten in accounts, I mean, not in Turkey, but in allied kind of English language accounts,

they lost 86,000 men killed, which is a lot. So that surprises me It's a bit like with the Italians and the Austrians that actually the Turks, even though they were defending, they lost more. Yeah. Well, don't forget they're not always defending because sometimes they are on the,

they're trying to push them back into the sea. And of course, the Turks are, you know, they are on home ground, but they are technologically industrially behind. So their equipment's not as good. Yeah. You know, it's not like the British and the Anzaks and whatnot and the French aren't good of fighting.

They are good of fighting and they kill a lot of Turks. But yeah, you're right. I think it's precisely because they are not, they're not just sitting there waiting for them to come onto them. They're actively trying to drive them back. For Churchill, you said it was the great stain on his reputation, and you're right. It took years for the humiliation to fade. People would shout at him at public meetings well into the 1930s.

What about the Dardanelles? You know, when he's talking about Hitler, for example, there are still people who won't forgive him for Gallipoli. There were people, posh people in London, kind of society hostesses and whatnot, who would walk into a room and they would see Churchill there or even just his wife, Clemmy, and they would walk out again. I will not be in a room with the man who sent my husband, my son, my brother to die for his own vanity in this mad scheme. Do you think he learns lessons from it? Well, to a degree. You know, Andrew Roberts in his biography says of Churchill, he's more cautious about Mission Creek.

He is quicker to sack generals who are no good. He is quicker to cut his losses. That said, he still loves a mad scheme, doesn't he? He does. In the Second World War, his generals are still having to argue him out of mad, lunatic schemes and whatnot. So did he really learn from it? I don't think he did, actually. I think it's always part of his character.

And perhaps one of the remarkable things is that in the Second World War, when he's at his best, he is constrained by circumstance because Britain is at bay and so he can't get up to mad lunatic schemes but I think left to him he never loses that sort of boyish that boyish fondness for a stunt but unfortunately a stunt that could cost thousands and thousands of lives as it did in this case

the big winner obviously is Mustafa Kemmel in his brilliant book on Ataturk, Andrew Mango his biographer says, you know, it's the foundation of his career. It makes his name in the army, and it means that when the Ottoman Empire collapses in 1990, and it looks as though Turkey itself kind of at the Anatolian heartland is going to be completely dismembered. It's to Mustafa Kemmel that the army turns as its savior, and people remember him saying at Anzac Cove, I don't order you to attack, I order you to die. And people say, God, what a brilliant line this is. What Churchillian, I suppose.

this is the kind of spirit we need now when we're all falling apart. And so it becomes part of his legend, I guess, and allows him to turn himself into Ataturk, kind of the father, father Turk or whatever, which is his nickname. I mean, I suppose to, because what he goes on to do is essentially to kind of cut Turkey's losses. Yeah. He has the military reputation that enables him to do that. People, except this is a guy who defended the homeland and threw the great imperial power back into the sea. So we can

trust him to do what he thinks is necessary. And if he hadn't had that, it might not have been possible. I think it's also important with Mustafa Kemmel that he'd lost his own birthplace and never got it back. Yeah, of course. I mean, Solonica, Thessaloniki. Anyway, we'll

end with, since we love our Australian listeners, we should end with what it meant for Australia. And we were talking beforehand, weren't we, how some listeners would be surprised that three times as many British and Irish soldiers died at Gallipoli as Australians. Proportionately, is that the same, though? I imagine it's pretty similar. I would imagine it's pretty similar, but I'd have to check. The reason it's such a big deal in Australia and

in New Zealand is that, first of all, it's the first time Australians have fought and died in such numbers. So it's not the first time they fought. Australians were in the Boer War, 20,000 of them, but only about 500 of them died. 250 from disease, 250 from Boer bullets or whatever. So to lose 8,000, if you're Australia, it's a really big deal. I mean, it's unprecedented in Australia's short history. The timing, the political context is really important because the Commonwealth of Australia, the Federation of the Colonies, had only happened in 1901. So the 1900s and 1910s were an age of basically inventing a nation, creating an Australian political and cultural identity distinct from British. So that's why Gallipoli plays such a big part in that, and people like Keith Murdoch,

the first reports I think mattered because they created this idea of Australian heroism and manhood and then it's such a shock when a few months later you have reports saying actually it's not all going according to plan and our boys who have been so heroic when they landed are actually being you know they're suffering horrendously and they're being cut down by Turkish machine guns and whatnot and then obviously in the years after the war people like Keith Murdoch they turn it, they turn Gallipoli into this kind of populist, patriotic fable. So you have brave, innocent, strapping, Anzax, and then you have effete,

snobbish, arrogant, useless British officers. And that obviously is a stereotype that persists to this day, doesn't it? Well, I mean, you could say the other great kind of myth-building episode in Australian history is the bodyline tour when England and sends a cricket team to Australia. And they unleash this body line, so targeting the body with the cricket ball. And they win, England wins 4-1. But the Australians see this as absolutely kind of treacherous behavior.

And they're captained by, he's actually Scottish, but Douglas Jardine, he becomes the kind of emblematic figure of a kind of uncaring, heedless, British ruthlessness that is simultaneously a feat. Yeah. And I think the kind of the sense of that with the notion of the British High Command at Gallipoli being incompetent and kind of heedless of slaughter is very kind of damaging for Britain's reputation in Australia. Definitely is. And it's an image that is carefully created by, for example, Australia's official war historian who is a man called Charles Bean, massive figure in kind of Australian historiography. Bean was the only war correspondent to be at Gallipoli throughout the whole campaign. And in the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote all these books and articles, saying that basically Gallipoli was the foundation of Australian identity.

The big thing and the war for Australia was the discovery of the character of Australian men. It was character which rushed the hills at Gallipoli and held on there during the long afternoon and night when everything seemed to have gone wrong and there was only the barest hope of success. Anzac stood and still stands for reckless valour and a good cause for enterprise resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance that will never own defeat. So it's this idea that Australians, they have the culture of mateship, of comradeship,

you never let your mates down, they have a sort of a fighting spirit, a simplicity, an honesty, a courage that the British have lost. and that's why I think there's such an appetite for that in this new country in the 1910s and 1920s and that's why it becomes completely enshrined

and of course the 25th of April the day of the landings becomes a public holiday in Australia and New Zealand which it remains to this day so I had a look at the most recent Anzac Day 25th of April 2026

just a couple of weeks ago Anthony Albanese the Prime Minister of Australia issued a statement he said Anzac still stands for the courage, selflessness and mateship that define our national character. So it's basically exactly the message from the 1910s and 1920s. But Tom, we love our Australian and New Zealand listeners, don't we?

We absolutely do. We absolutely do. So we wouldn't dream of disagreeing or undermining their sense of themselves? No. Just one kind of postscript to this. And again, it touches on cricket because cricket is so important as a metaphor for Anglo-Australian relations. But one guy who completely bought into this and weaponized it was Steve War, who was the remorseless captain of Australia's greatest test team. It just kind of repeatedly murdered

England through the 1990s and the 2000s. And in May 2001, before the Ashes tour of that summer, he took the Australian team to the graves at Gallipoli to ponder the lessons of mateship. But of course, subliminally because they're then going on to play the England team, it's kind of buying into the idea of the British having been enfeebled in a feat and kind of faintly treacherous that puts the image of Australian mateship into a kind of even more heroic perspective, I think. It's not just about Australian mateship, it is also about how the British were useless. And I think that that is unfair on the British record of the, certainly of the men who were fighting there, because they seem to have been just as brave as the, as the Anzax.

I mean, totally. If you'd said that to the guys at Cape Hellies or at Suffler or whatever, you know, the Lancashire Fusiliers or the Munster Fusiliers or the Dublin's or any of these other people. Well, the Sandringham guys, you got abducted by aliens. Yeah. If you said to these guys, did you know that you were a feat and you're useless and you're weak and all this kind of thing? I mean, they would have been so shocked and offended that that would be their reputation after the war.

And it's completely undeserved. I mean, they died in massive numbers. They were just as brave. But thanks to things like the Mel Gibson film, it's very hard for them now to escape, you know, because there's nobody batting for them, as it were. I mean, it goes back to Churchill. It's the idea of patrician British figures.

Yeah. Just being heedless. Kind of, you know, Churchill and Douglas Jardine kind of blur into a single toxic image of British Imperial Command. Well, so that's glippily. That's the end of our series about the first.

First World War in 1915 and next year we will go on to 1916 and there's some very dramatic stuff in 1960. So there's a Battle of Jutland at sea and then the two Titanic battles of Verdun and the Somme and those of other stuff as well. But Tom, we've got a total change of pace and tone next week, don't we? Because the World Cup is upon us. Yeah. I mean, war by other means. So we are actually going to be focusing on something that has all. always been emblematic of nationalism, and that is the national anthems that are played at the start of each match. So it's not, I suppose, completely divorced from the spirit that drove the European Nations to war in the First World War. We might be looking at some of that,

because we're going to be looking at the star-spank or banner, at God Save the King, a host of other national anthems, and looking at how they emerged, what they tell us about the countries for which they're the anthem. So I think a really, really interesting way of celebrating the World Cup and of looking at some deep history. Yeah, it should be really fun. And Restus History Club members can hear those episodes first. So if you want to join them, sign up at the rest is history.com, which is, of course, the only way that you can access all the unbelievable benefits. Oh, they're unbelievable, aren't they? I mean, they're genuinely incredible. They're just literally unbelievable. But anyway, thank you, Dominic. That was, I mean, it was grueling,

but brilliant series. Well, I mean, it is tough, isn't it, I think, the First World War? I do think it's tough. I mean, you kind of said at the beginning of this series, oh, it's kind of dramatic and it is dramatic, but it is, I share in Churchill's frustration. You know, I quite like it to be over. Oh, no.

Don't worry, there's only about three more, four more years of this to go. It is just people kind of, you know, maybe this will work out and they all end up dead on Bob. wire. Some people love that, some people don't. What can I say? Well, it's, I mean, it's, it's been a gripping series, a really gripping series. So thank you very much. And thank you everyone for listening. So, Alas Maladik. Goodbye. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you

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