The Gallipoli Campaign, also known as the Dardanelles Campaign, took place on the Gallipoli peninsula in the Ottoman Empire between 25 April 1915 and 9 January 1916.
The campaign was one of the greatest Ottoman victories during the war and is considered a major Allied failure and the casualties and losses on both sides amounted to some 250,000 each on both the Allied and Turkish sides.
My paternal grandfather, Ted Woods, was shipped out there as a member of the Norfolk Regiment and was thus part of the PBI – the poor bloody infantry – the cannon fodder for the mechanised slaughter that characterised the erroneously styled Great War. The only photograph I’ve seen of him depicted him in his uniform just before being shipped out there.
Conditions for the Allied troops during the campaign could hardly be described as luxurious, as the picture below shows.
In some parts of the peninsula, the front line trenches between the Allied and Turkish forces were only a handful of metres apart and in spite of the ferocity of the fighting, there were times when fraternisation took place.
Gallipoli by Robert Rhodes James, originally published in 1965 by BT Batsford Ltd., and republished in 1974 as Part of Illustrated Grand Strategy series by Pan Books Ltd. gives one instance of fraternisation between Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) forces and their Turkish opponents on p. 187 of the Pan edition:
The Anzacs sometimes threw tins of bully-beef into the Turk trenches, and once received the reply: “Envoyez milk. Bully-beef, non”; on one occasion a tin of cigarettes came flying over from the Turkish trenches, on which was written, “Prenez avec plesir a notre heros ennemis*”.
*To our heroic enemies, take these with pleasure.
This year marks the centenary of the start of the First World War and already at least one government minister, Education Secretary Michael Gove, is banging the jingoistic drum (warning: link to Daily Mail article. Ed.). Unfortunately, Gove later received support for his attack on ‘left wing academics’ from those experts on the First World War – Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson (warning: link to yet another Daily Mail article. Ed.).
People as ignorant as Mr Gove et al. should heed the words of the late Harry Patch (17th June 1898 – 25th July 2009), who was dubbed “the Last Fighting Tommy” in his later years and who very wisely said the following:
[The] politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.
Harry never spoke a word in public about WW1 until he was over 100 years old. Mr. Gove on the contrary approaches every subject with an open mouth and a closed mind.
We were fortunate to visit Gallipoli whilst on holiday a few years ago. We were shocked to learn of the vast numbers who lost their lives. The terrain was the last possible place you would want to fight a battle.
I did not realise that Grandad had been there too. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up!
I agree with Harry – the politicians should do the fighting. That way, there would be far fewer wars. It might even lead to proper dialogue!
Thanks for your comment Hilary.
Another factor that may be of interest to you is that Grandad and the rest of those enlisted working class men like him never voted for the politicians that actually declared war and ordered in the military.
Working class men only got the vote under the Representation of the People Act 1918. This widened suffrage by abolishing practically all property qualifications for men over 21 and by enfranchising women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications (full electoral equality for women wouldn’t occur until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928.).
The first general election in which he would have been entitled to vote was that of 14th December 1918.
After that date we know from his obituary that Ted was very active politically in his native Norfolk, both as a local councillor on the long vanished Mitford and Launditch Rural District Council (which disappeared when the provisions of the 1972 Local Government Act were implemented in 1974), as well as being a leading local member of the National Union of Agricultural Workers.
A well written article, by the way.
Thanks.
Another well written article that may be of interest was penned last year by Roger Ball for Bristol Radical History Group.
Entitled “Why Blackadder Goes Forth could have been a lot funnier“, Roger explains in great detail Tommy Atkins’ hidden tactics to avoid combat on the Western Front in WW1: unwritten ‘live and let live’ agreements between front-line troops, ‘search and ignore’ patrols, refusal of combatants to engage, shirking, deserting and so forth.
If Blackadder Goes Forth had been modelled more on what happened on the Western Front it might not only have been funnier, but also more subversive.