Posted on 04/25/2018 7:15:49 AM PDT by harpygoddess
April 25th is celebrated in Australia and New Zealand as ANZAC Day, commemorating the key participation of the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) in the ill-fated Allied assault on the Turkish-held Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915 during World War I. This was one of the first large-scale amphibious invasion of modern times and the first major military operation in which Australia and New Zealand participated on behalf of the British Empire. As a result, the Gallipoli campaign was perhaps the key defining event for Australia's nationhood, as it was in a sense for Turkey's also. Turkish Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli's successful defense, later became the founder of modern Turkey, adopting the name "Atatürk" - father of the Turks.
Today much of the Gallipoli Peninsula is a Turkish national park with over 20 cemeteries lovingly tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. We visited there several years ago on ANZAC Day, taking a bus with a dozen or so others, mostly Aussies, from the nearby town of Canakkale to tour the cemeteries and battlefields. The tour guide read the Ataturk quotation above, along with, as is typical, the fourth stanza of Lawrence Binyon's For The Fallen:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Followed, as is also typical, by "Lest we forget..."
(Excerpt) Read more at vaviper.blogspot.com ...
"It is not possible to fight beyond your strength, even if you strive."
Terrible, just terrible battle. Horrifying.
A lot of the blame is squarely on Churchill’s soldiers.
It would have been the ruin of a lesser man’s career.
UGGGGGH!
That should be A lot of the blame is squarely on Churchill’s shoulders.
I had never heard of it until I took a WWI class in college. We watched the movie-it was eye opening for me.
The Battle of Gallipoli saw young physicist Henry Moseley (age 27), who corrected Mendeleev version of the Periodic Table of the Elements, killed by a muslim sniper with a bullet through the head. Mendeleev’s arrangement of the elements in his periodic table was in order of increasing atomic mass. Mendeleev didn’t know that the atoms of each element contain a unique number of protons. Moseley’s arrangement (the one used today) is based on atomic number not mass.
Thanks for posting the link to the Pogues.
That is possibly the greatest anti-war ballad ever - it never fails to move me.
At least Mel Gibson survived to make more films. Whatever happened to Mark Lee?
Another good one is “1916” by Motorhead.
Force landings are a roll of the dice. We had a rough time of it at Anzio.
I have read a bit about it and watched the movie (and a few documentaries as well)
It was sad. I fully appreciate what the British/Australians/New Zealanders were trying to accomplish strategically, but...it demonstrated fully as an object lesson what happens when you make assumptions about an enemy, their will to fight, their capabilities, and overestimating your own.
They thought the defenders would all melt away in the onslaught, and to their credit (and the ANZAK forces detriment...they didn’t...and fought hard.
Churchill took a beating for that for the rest of his life.
It did indeed ruin him for many years, and he carried that around, no doubt.
But thank GOD he was the man he was. He was so stubborn that he refused to let that define him.
Many a lesser man has worn an albatross like that around his neck, helped by the bottle all the way to the grave.
But he did think about it, in much the same way Halsey did think on his performance at Leyte Gulf and in Typhoon Cobra in WWII.
Churchill and Halsey, both great men, with flaws. I find them both fascinating including their flaws.
When I say it ruined Churchill, it ruined him in the eyes of many others...not himself.
“I am the victim of a political intrigue,” he lamented to a friend. “I am finished!” Displaying the steely determination that would serve him well in World War II, however, the marginalized Churchill did not slink from the fight. In November 1915, the statesman turned soldier. Churchill resigned from the government, picked up a gun and headed to the front lines in France as an infantry officer with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. After several brushes with death, he returned to politics in 1917 as the munitions minister in a new coalition government headed by Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
Churchill, however, remained haunted by Gallipoli for decades. “Remember the Dardanelles,” his political opponents taunted when he stood up to speak in the House of Commons. When running for Parliament in 1923, hecklers called out, “What about the Dardanelles?” The “British Bulldog” embraced Gallipoli as a brilliant failure. “The Dardanelles might have saved millions of lives. Don’t imagine I am running away from the Dardanelles. I glory in it,” he responded.
Although many shared the views of a political insider who in 1931 speculated that “the ghosts of Gallipoli will always rise up to damn him anew,” Churchill became prime minister in 1940 with Britain once again embroiled in war. Upon taking office, he wrote, “All my past life had been a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” That included Gallipoli.
https://www.history.com/news/winston-churchills-world-war-disaster
He was quite a man.
I have always felt that the bad things and misfortunes in life contribute to who we are, if we are open enough to accept and deal with them in a positive way where possible.
I have worked with a lot of cancer patients, and an oddly recurring theme is survivors who say they wouldn’t trade it because it changed them in a positive way, and is part of who they are.
The Dardanelles would never go away, and the ghosts of a lot of those men had to be on his mind, but as the last quote from him states...it was one of the things that made him ready.
I thought the movie was heartbreaking. My British husband will not watch it due to the way the British officers were portrayed. I used to find that annoying, but then realized I would be unhappy to see American officers portrayed as cold and uncaring.
I believe this is the finest version of “waltzingMatilda”- Liam Clancy’s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFCekeoSTwg
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