Gallipoli nearly ruined the career of Winston Churchill.
If I recall correctly, he left the Navy. He started back up from scratch in the Army, and worked his way up.
Yes it did. A horribly planned invasion. Tragic consequences.
and vice verse.
“Gallipoli nearly ruined the career of Winston Churchill.”
Indeed it did but undeservedly so, what ended up happening was the complete opposite of what Churchill had planned. Churchill was disgusted at the mass slaughter on the Western Front, as he described it: sending brave men against machine guns with no more protection than their shirt fronts. He was also frustrated at the fact that Britain’s key weapon, the Royal Navy, was sitting largely idle while the British Army was bleeding to death on barbed wire in No-Man’s land in France.
What Churchill saw was the imaginative use of the navy to smash the Dardanelles forts and then sweep into Constantinople, if a few old ships were lost along the way so be it, ships were tools to be used as needed. This last bit was anathema to the Royal Navy who treated their ships like gold. So when a mine layer struck lucky on the first morning of the shelling and sunk a number of British ships, the Royal Navy did something it had never done before, it turned tail and ran.
The Royal Navy, the pride of Britain left the poor bloody infantry high and dry to slug it out with the now well-warned Turks who were waiting for them.
It was the navy’s fault, Churchill was made the scapegoat.
However, in saying that in a wider sense Churchill was wrong, the war would only be won on the Western Front, and sideshows would not bring Germany to heel. In fact in almost every single political stance taken by Churchill in his long career he was almost without exception wrong in every single one, except appeasement, he got that right, but even then he nearly blew it.