Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
If ever the true mettle and temper of a people were tried and exemplified in the crucible of battle, that battle was the naval and land engagement embracing Gallipoli and the Dardanelles and the people so tested, the British race.
Gallipoli lies by the Sea of Marmora, and looks out across it to the green hills of Asia, just where the blue Marmora narrows into the Dardanelles.
Early in 1916, the Turks, relieved from imminent danger near home by our evacuation of Gallipoli, came down again in force through Syria, Palestine and the Desert, to attack us in Egypt. Our construction gangs, engaged upon the new railway and upon the development of local water supplies, were at this time covered by escorts, mainly of cavalry, spread out upon a wide front.
In the operations around Constantinople both sides employed aeroplanes for various purposes. On the Gallipoli front on December 20, 1915, it was reported that the Allies had a seaplane shot down and its occupants made prisoners, while on December 23, 1915, an ally aeroplane was shot down at Birheba.
For during the Armenian massacres, the Dardanelles expedition was still on the shores of Gallipoli, and the menace to Constantinople acute. It was possible that if she opposed a firm front to the Armenian massacres, the Turks, already on the verge of despair with regard to saving the capital from capture, might have made terms with the Allies.
No less inspiring was the revival of the Sentry on the 1st March 1917. Of its staff of fifteen when published at Khartum, nine had died on Gallipoli. Their places were filled by new enthusiasts, and one genuine poet was discovered in T.G. King. Our one lasting loss while at Shallufa was the departure of nearly all the time-expired Territorials to England.
Men who were in the Gallipoli forts during the bombardment told me that, though they were prevented by the rocky ridge which forms the spine of the peninsula from seeing the British warships, and though, for the same reason, the gunners on the ships could not see the forts, the great steel calling-cards of the British Empire came falling out of nowhere as regularly and with as deadly precision as though they were being fired at point-blank range.
It is a peculiar thing that during the Gallipoli campaign, and in fact throughout most of the war, that the attacks in which the Battalion took part were carried out on a Sunday, which we were accustomed to regard as a day of rest. Whether this was done with the object of deceiving the Turk is uncertain. The final orders issued by Battalion Headquarters were on the following lines.
No attempt was made to land an army on German territory, and complete command of the Ægean did not avail for the capture of Gallipoli. It could not turn sea into land nor enable a navy to do an army's work, and command of the sea while a more extensive is a less intensive kind of power than command of the land.
The objects of the Army were simply to hold the ground so hardly won in the first two months of the expedition, and to contain as large as possible a Turkish force on Gallipoli for the benefit of our Russian Allies in the Caucasus and elsewhere.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking