Anzac Cove will be officially named on April 25

Press, 2 April 1985, Page 18

Anzac Cove will be officially named on April 25

By

PAUL BOLDING

of Reuters (through NZPA) Gallipoli Pennnsula In April, 1915, British and Allied troops launched an invasion of Turkey that might have shortened World War I two years. Instead it was one of the most disastrous military operations of the centuiy, one still remembered bitterly by Australia and New Zealand, which lost about 10,000 of the estimated 46,000 Allied dead. On April 25, the seventieth anniversary of the Gallipoli invasion, the site referred to on campaign maps as Anzac Cove, after the Australian and New Zealand troops who landed there, will be given that name officially by Turkey. At a time when troops were bogged down in Europe on the western front, Britain’s aim in the invasion was to force Turkey out of the war, start a new front against Germany, and open a warm water route to its Russian ally by taking the Dardanelles. The sparsely populated peninsula, dotted with Commonwealth and French cemeteries and Turkish memorials, is a patchwork of pinewoods and farmlands, lush and green in spring.

In summer it is unbearably hot, a climate which in 1915 brought disease to Allied troops hit by a lack of water.

In spite of the recent construction of a road above the narrow beach at Anzac Cove, it is easy to see the steep hillside, covered in scrub and gorse, that greeted the troops. Much of the debris of battle has been cleared in recent years, but pieces of pottery water jugs and tins that held the soldiers’ staple diet of bully beef still lie about. The invasion was preceded by a naval attempt to force the heavily mined Dardanelles, which strait with the Bosphorus, links the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The action culminated on March 18 when 18 battleships, as well as cruisers and destroyers, shelled forts in the Narrows in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy Turkish guns. In his book “Gallipoli” a British historian and member of Parliament Robert Rhodes James, says: “For the loss of nearly 700 men killed, three battleships sunk, and three crippled, the Allied fleet had merely succeeded in making the Turks fire away almost all of their heavy ammunition.” For Turkey, whose modern history concentrates on its struggle for independence after the 1914-18 war, the campaign has little significance, except as a conflict in which Mustafa Kemal rose to prominence. Kemal, later dubbed Ataturk, or “Father of the

Turks,” was the Turkish commander at Gallipoli. He was to become the first president of the republic. Turkish history books illustrate his courage, leadership, and battle skills. “I do not order you to attack. I order you to die,” he is said to have told his men. For Turkey, March 18 is the date of the victory in what is called the Canakkale War. A newspaper, article marking the anniversary said, “The Allied powers ... made no allowance for the superiority of the Turkish soldier and. Turkish military leadership.”. At Anzac Cove, on the west of the Gallipoli peninsula, allied troops were landed about lVakm further north than planned and were unable to make rapid progress inland. A Turkish account says Kemal had calculated where they would land. The Anzacs moved only 650 metres. British and French troops who landed at Cape Helles, on the southern tip of the peninsula, fared little better. A break-out attempt in August failed, and both sides were bogged down in static trench warfare for much of their 814 months in combat. The only bright note for the Allies was that evacuations of the Anzac and Helles sectors, in December, 1915, and January, 1916,

were achieved without loss of life. Recriminations soon began, however. Rhodes James concurs with the late Australian historian, Alan Moorehead, that the campaign was “a mighty destroyer of reputations.” A British Royal Commission concluded it had been illconceived and ineptly executed. Most of the senior military men concerned resigned.

Among those whose reputations suffered were Lord Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for War, and Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty who had persuaded politicians and the military in favour of the naval and ground operations. Churchill lost his post in May, 1916, and has since been blamed in varying degrees for the debacle. After a long time in the political wilderness, he became Britain’s Prime Minister in World War 11. In 1934, a British historian, Roger Keyes, argued that, had it been successful, the campaign would have shortened World War I two years and spared millions of lives.

Turkish accounts say a forcing of the Dardanelles allowing the Allies to supply Russia might have prevented that country’s economic and social collapse and averted the Russian Revolution.