The 25 of April is ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. It is our equivalent to Remembrance Day or Memorial Day.
In 1915, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp landed at Gallipoli, a rugged cliff faced area in modern day Turkey. The Ottoman Empire had allied with Germany in World War 1, and heavily mined the Dardanelles, a narrow strait between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. As anyone with a petroleum powered car knows, if a rival controls an important waterway, you’re going to have a bad time.
Winston Churchill, long before he won a Nobel Peace Prize or became Prime Minister, was the Lord Admiral of the British Navy. His mission was to conduct a beach landing in the straits, take control of the waterway, and allow Allied ships to pass through. Sadly, it was his greatest failure.
There is an urban legend that a Turkish soldier swam out and moved some signals, so that when the allied boats landed, instead of arriving at a gentle beach head, they landed at the wrong place, a few miles away. This wrong place was hilly, steep, and surrounded by Turkish machine gunners. If you have seen the intro of Saving Private Ryan, you’ll have a fair idea of what it was like. Of the 16k men who were part of the mission on April 25th, two thousand of them were dead within the first 24 hours.
After eight months of complete and utter failure, where the Allied forces were unable to get more than a few hundred feet up the cliffs, the decision was made to evacuate. Amazingly, the evacuation was considered one of the most effective military manoeuvres by either side in the entire conflict, with almost zero casualties sustained.
Tomorrow I’ll finish off the rest of the story, and how we commemorated the day today in Denver.