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....