National Museum of the Royal Navy curator Nick Hewitt explores five myths of the Gallipoli campaign

© NMRN

© IWM (Q 42037)

© IWM (Q 13337)

© NMRN

© IWM (Q 13593)

Gallipoli: Myth and Memory is at the National Museum of the Royal Navy until January 31 2015.

is the second in the National Museum of the Royal Navy’s series of exhibitions about The Great War at Sea 1914-1918.Designed to put the Royal Navy "back at the heart of the Gallipoli story", the exhibition uses the Museum's magnificent collections to re-tell the misunderstood story of a brutal struggle that left over 100,000 dead and helped define the fledgling independent nations of Australia, New Zealand and Turkey.Here the museum's historian and curator Nick Hewitt outlinesthat have grown around the disastrous Allied campaign that began on April 25 1915 and ended in a withdrawal on January 9 1916.Gallipoli began as an attempt to shorten the war using Britain’s sea power alone. The idea was to use ‘spare’ older battleships to force a way through the Straits to Istanbul.Even after 18 March, when it became obvious an army would be needed to destroy Turkish gun batteries, the Navy still provided heavy gunfire support; brought in reinforcements and evacuated wounded; moved troops around the battlefield; attacked Turkish supply ships using submarines and aircraft and protected the anchorage from German submarines. And in the end the Army was only there to open a route for the fleet!The entire plan was nonsense. The theory was that the Royal Navy would pass through the Dardanelles, bombard Istanbul (Constantinople), and knock Turkey out of the war, which would strengthen Russia and weaken Germany, and shorten the war. But:• Turkey was propped up by Germany not the other way round.• The Ottoman Empire was huge and there was no guarantee that taking the capital would knock it out of the war.• Even if a supply route could be opened to Russia, Britain had no spare weapons and munitions to send it and the Russian railway system was too primitive for that country to send grain the other way."The whole scheme has been conceived by men ignorant of war." Captain Godfrey Oppenheim, Royal Marine Light Infantry.Turkey’s military performance during the Balkan Wars (1912-13) had been very poor. But since then the Turks had embarked on a programme of military reforms, helped by the Germans. The Turkish Army was well led, and its equipment and training were improving all the time. And the Turks would also be defending their homeland, and supplying their army would be far easier."At the outset all decisions were taken… on the assumption that… resistance would be slight [but] there was no reason to think that [the Turks] would not fight well." General Conclusions of the Dardanelles Commission, 1917.The summer weather was indeed awful. Heat and flies coupled with poor sanitary conditions and a very congested battlefield meant that disease was rife, especially dysentery. But in the winter the peninsula experienced sub-zero temperatures, heavy snow and flash floods. Hypothermia was common and there were cases of soldiers freezing to death in their trenches or even drowning."I found six men had crawled back and were huddled together on a firing step frozen to death." Second Lieutenant Philip Gething, 9th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Suvla Bay on 28 November.Quality of leadership really didn’t matter, except on April 25 had the plan for the landings been better victory might just have been possible. Afterwards, Gallipoli always came second to the ‘Western Front’ in France and Flanders, and never received enough men, equipment, ammunition or supplies for success to be possible once the element of surprise had been lost."Success in the Dardanelles, if possible, was only possible on condition that the Government concentrated their efforts up on the enterprise and limited their expenditure of men and material in the Western theatre of war." General Conclusions of the Dardanelles Commission, 1917.

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