Sunday, November 28, 2010

Gallipoli

We spent much of Friday touring the Gallipoli peninsula, the northern side of the Hellespont and thus the traditional water gateway to Instanbul and beyond. In WWI, the British, under their First Sea Lord Winston Churchill, elected to try what no other navy had ever done--force the Dardanelles, proceed to Istanbul, and take the Ottoman Empire out of the war, thus relieving ally Russia. The combined British and French fleet was driven back from the Hellespont by shore batteries and mines. Later, the Allies landed on both Gallipoli and at Canakkale, across the strait. Gruesome WWI trench warfare ensued. A second landing, of Australian and New Zealand Commonwealth troops, took place in April, 1915, but had the very bad luck of arriving at just the place that a divisional commander named Mustafa Kemal--later Ataturk--had expected them. Four months later he led the counter-attack that eventually drove the Allies from the Dardanelles. Churchill resigned as First Sea Lord, and the war went on another three years, in other theatres. There were 500,000 casualties in the Dardanelles campaign.
From our campsite Thursday night, near the narrowest part
of the straits















The great monument at Abide, near the end of the Gallipoli
peninsula















In the Abide memorial courtyard














It is a huge cemetery for Turkish soldiers killed in the
Gallipoli campaign, some 86,000 of them















Gallipoli was largely a matter of trench
warfare and the attendant terror, rot, and
disease; Bernieres' Birds Without Wings
captures it as well as any of us can imagine





















With lines and trenches literally within ear-
shot of one another, the "Johnnies and
Mehmets" (Ataturk's expression) had other
relations than enmity alone





















ANZAC Cove; in defending this area, Kemal gave his
famous order to the 57th Infantry Regiment: "I am not
ordering you to attack, I am ordering you to die. In the time
it takes us to die, other troops and other commanders will
arrive to take our places." They held their ground, were
wiped out to the man, but the Allied assault failed. A
national hero was born, and it might be said, Turkey's
war of independence had begun.




















At the Ataturk statue, near the spot where he
was hit in the chest by shrapnel, the blow
stopped by his pocket watch, in the August
counter-attack; there are many, many
memorials and cemeteries, some Turkish,
many British, French, Australian, and New
Zealand; the area is reminiscent of
Gettysburg, with so many memorials; the
monuments themselves are more on the scale
one sees in the great WWI battefields in
France and Belgium


























Vicki takes a picture for some Jandarma in the area; this must
be holy ground for them















I am so proud: she has gotten really good at identifying
gun emplacements, tank obstacles, pill-boxes, etc., and often
sees them before I do....

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