THE FAILURE AT GALLIPOLI

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 638, 15 April 1929, Page 8

THE FAILURE AT GALLIPOLI

THOUGH there is nothing very new in what he says, the story told by Brigadier C. F. Aspinall-Oglander in his “Official History of the-Gallipoli Campaign” makes bitter reading for New Zealanders. The disclosures of diplomatic bungling and incompetence in high places do not dim the glory won by the unblooded colonial troops. Nor is it conceivable that they will affect the response of a patriotic people should another call to service ever be sounded. But too many Anzacs perished in the campaign for the exposure of its futility to be accepted with the equanimity of an unshaken faith.

From the day of Russia’s appeal for help to that on which the trembling British Cabinet determined to end the hopeless slaughter was just under twelve months. Into that space had been compressed the miseries of one of the most disastrous campaigns in ancient or modern warfare. Exploits of brilliant courage by the attacking forces were expended on operations in which every principle of naval and military strategy was defied. The preliminary'naval onslaught had not been followed up when the way lay open. The next was met with strengthened defences that caused heavy losses of men and ships. Kitchener’s idea that one British submarine could force the Narrows and strike panic into the heart of Turkey proved a fatal chimera. And the upshot of the Navy’s attention to the mouth of the Dardanelles in March and April was that, when the military operations began, they faced an organised defence and a line of strongly fortified positions. Hope of success dwindled when the guns of the men-o’-war gave the secret away, and it vanished as the campaign progressed, when synchronisation of effort was unheard of, when supplies and ammunition were short, communications and staffwork defective, and the arrival of reinforcements governed by some piecemeal system that never gave .the officers in the field a ehanee.

Meanwhile the immediate Russian need had long since passed. The appeal was made on January 2. On January 3 the Turkish attack in the Caucasus failed, and Russia’s urgent interest in a diversion elsewhere faded, at once. Yet, nearly four months later, the Gallipoli campaign based on the original appeal was begun. Any element of surprise that would have been of value to the Russians had long since been vitiated by delay. Sir lan Hamilton, of course, was censured for his conduct of the campaign, but the chief fault lay in higher places than his, and every new book upon Gallipoli shows that grim reproach in more tragic outline.