The Gallipoli Campaign and the Strategy Employed by British Imperial - Essay Example

The Gallipoli Campaign and the Strategy Employed By the British Imperial The Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 was one of the most significant events that took place during the First World War because it showed the differences between strategic and wishful; military strategy. This was a campaign that had serious ramifications for the forces of the British Empire because they ended up suffering numerous losses without achieving their objectives. Despite dragging on for months, the Gallipoli Campaign proved not to have been worth the lives lost because although the Ottoman Empire was not well equipped and did not have the discipline of the forces from the British Empire, it still managed to stop the latter in their tracks. The strategic planning of the British Empire during this campaign was a serious blander that not only led to the loss of many men, but it also showed that it was not good policy to underestimate the enemy. The main point of the Gallipoli Campaign was by the British was to ensure that they captured the Dardanelles peninsula from the Ottoman Turks. The setting for this campaign was one of the most momentous events during the Great War because it involved a large scale naval assault against an enemy that was deemed to be much weaker. The main objective of capturing the Dardanelles was to ensure that the Turkish forts that were on the peninsula did not stop the allied forces from getting into the Sea of Marmara, which was a path that led directly to Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This campaign was given a lot of importance because Turkey had essentially joined the war on the side of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians and this created a situation where it was considered to be an obstacle to winning the war. It was believed that because the Ottoman Empire sat astride some of the most strategic regions in the war, it was essential for it to be subdued so that the allies could have access to these regions and utilise them against their enemies. The ability of the British to use the full strength of their forces against the Turks during this period was quite limited due to its commitments in the western front where it had fought against Germany to a stalemate and any large transfers of troops from Western Europe in an invasion of Turkey would have meant defeat. Therefore, Britain chose to utilise the forces from its extensive empire, specifically from Australia and New Zealand to ensure that not only were the Dardanelles subdued, but also that the Ottoman Turks were forced out of the war through the capture of Istanbul. Despite its being a declining power, the Ottoman Empire was still a serious threat to the allied initiative during the Great War and this is the reason why the British took the risk of attempting to capture the Dardanelles in order to achieve their objective of neutralising this threat. The first landings of this campaign were made in April 1915 as the Cape Helles and the ANZAC cove with the objective of ensuring that the upper ground of the peninsula was captured from the Ottoman Turks. If the British had captured the upper ground, the campaign could have been brought to a swift end but this turned out not to be the case because despite all of their efforts, the Ottomans were well prepared and they held their ground in the assault. One of the reasons why the British attempt to capture the upper ground failed was as a result of the terrain that they had to fight on during the assault. The terrain was essentially steep, with deeply incised slopes, as well as narrow beaches that made the landing of large numbers of men and their finding cover from Ottoman fire much difficult. Furthermore, the British were disadvantaged through a lack of sufficient water supplies which meant that many of them had to suffer from constant thirst while at the same time having to fight against the well-prepared Turks. A landing that was made four months later in August 1915 at Sulva Bay proved to have better advantages based on terrain because this area not only had wide landing beaches but it also had a readily available water supply that was of great strategic importance. The British forces, however, did not take advantage of the terrain at Sulva Bay and as a result, its strategic advantage was not exploited in order to ensure that they gained victory over the Ottoman Turks through the capture of the Dardanelles. The Gallipoli Campaign was only devised after the Ottoman Turks chose to join the Great War on the side of the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians. This campaign was one of the boldest to have been made in the twentieth century because it not only involved large numbers of men, but it was conducted in the belief that it was the best way to deal with the Ottoman problem finally. When the First World War broke out, it came during a period in Europe where the countries involved were either parts of alliances or neutral. Turkey was one of the neutral states but while this may have been the case, this country was most interested in an alliance with the British as a means of countering any threats to it from other European nations. However, the British during the period before the war were not interested in forming an alliance with the Ottomans because the former’s leadership believed that such an alliance would not have been viable. It was believed that an alliance with a declining empire would prove most costly because the British would have been forced to prop up a crumbling Ottoman Empire. Moreover, Britain had already formed an alliance with Russia and to involve the Ottomans in the same alliance would have created a lot of tension with Russia, especially considering that the latter and the Ottomans had been traditional enemies for centuries. Therefore, it was the rejection of an alliance with the Ottoman Empire that put in place events that led to the planning and execution of the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign. The Germans saw the strategic importance of the Ottoman Empire and allowed it into its alliance in order to take advantage of its unique position between Europe, Asia, and Africa during the battled that it conducted against the allies. As a result, the allies, especially the British, had to undertake a costly expedition in order to make sure that the Ottoman Empire, as a German ally, did not end up blocking the shipping routes that were crucial to its winning the war. Despite the great strategic goals of the Gallipoli Campaign, it ended in spectacular failure because the British forces lacked the necessary leadership as well as coordination to uproot the Ottomans from the Dardanelles.1 The lack of coordination can be attributed to the failure of communications that for the most part interfered with the efficient implementation of strategy which led to one defeat after the other. Moreover, it is essential to note that as a result of insufficient preparation, the British forces were not able to adequately prepare for possible Ottoman resistance in the Dardanelles and this brought about the loss of many lives because the Ottoman had taken up most of the defensive positions in the field. A lot of planning went into the Gallipoli Campaign put despite it, the British ended up being on the defensive because there were massive gaps in the planning. These gaps not only led to the development of insufficient information concerning the terrain of the battle, but it also to the unexpected way that most of the British forces that participated responded to the actions of Ottoman forces once they landed. The Gallipoli Campaign was conceived by British commanders, among them Winston Churchill, who believed that it would be an easy assault due to what they believed to be the weakness of the Ottoman Empire. This invasion was the cornerstone of the Dardanelles campaign and it was designed as an effort by the British forces to capture Istanbul, in order to force Turkey out of the Triple Alliance, so that a route could be opened to send reinforcements to Tsarist Russia. Winston Churchill believed that the Ottomans were a declining power whose military capability was based on the nineteenth century and whose land forces were poorly equipped when compared to those of the much superior British forces. Furthermore, Churchill saw an attack on the Ottoman Empire as a means of ensuring that the path would be open for the Russian Empire to take on a more active role in the war through opening up a path towards its getting into the Mediterranean and aiding the allies in their fight against the Germans. The desire to open up an eastern front of the war was believed to be essential in sapping the strength of Germany at a time when the western front had ended up in a stalemate. Therefore, the British admiralty came to base their campaign against the Ottoman Empire on the assumption that it was a weak power which was not only ill equipped, but also that it did not have a command structure that was efficient enough to coordinate efficiently against the British forces. It was the false assumption concerning the weakness of the Ottoman forces that led to the absolute failure of the Gallipoli Campaign because the British admiralty did not base its attack on fact or direct information from the ground. The failure to gather accurate intelligence and basing a campaign on assumption led to the British forces not being able to take advantage of the weaknesses presented by the Ottoman forces to defeat it. Instead, these forces came to face stiff resistance from the Ottomans as they landed and saw the reality of the situation. This was especially true concerning the false intelligence that the Ottoman forts in the Dardanelles were out of ammunition when in fact they were not, resulting in severe British casualties.2 Such was not the case with Germany, which from the beginning had seen the strategic importance of the Ottoman Empire, and worked towards forming an alliance with it so that Germany could be able to take advantage of its strategic position. Even before a formal alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire was made, Germany had undertaken a project to construct a railway line through the Ottoman Empire to Baghdad so that it could have access to the oil fields and ports of the Gulf region. Furthermore, because Turkey sat astride the Bosporus straits which connected the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, Germany would be able to keep the allies away from any means of helping Russia during the war. Therefore, while the Triple Alliance realised the strategic and military importance of the Ottoman Empire, the British seem not to have done the same and the belief in Ottoman military weakness proved to be its undoing. The Gallipoli Campaign not only ended up being a strategic blunder based on the imagined weakness of the enemy, but it also failed as a result of the able leadership of Ottoman commanders such as Mustafa Kemal. The Gallipoli Campaign was a failure because of a lack of proper planning as well as useful intelligence which could have helped in developing a strategy for defeating the Ottomans. 3 The strategic position of the Ottoman Empire came to be realised late and this was after it had already formed an alliance with Germany. As a result, in order to cover for this mistake, the Gallipoli Campaign was hastily organised to ensure that the empire was thrown out of the war. This hasty organisation, as well as the unwillingness of the British generals in the western front to release some of their more experienced men to fight in the planned campaign led to the development of a situation where British units from its vast empire were brought to the Gallipoli Campaign. Furthermore, after the Ottomans repelled an Anglo-French effort to storm the Dardanelles, the former came to the realisation that another attack was imminent and this made them prepare for it with the support of some German commanders. These preparations involved Ottoman troops drilling and training on a daily basis with defensive positions were being constructed along most of the critical positions in the Dardanelles Peninsula. Furthermore, the entire coastline was mined while those beaches where British troops were likely to land were fenced in such a manner that landing would be most difficult for a majority of them. In this way, despite the British admiralty underestimating them, the Ottoman forces on the Dardanelles Peninsula were well prepared for the assault. The invasion made by the British and their allies on the Dardanelles was aimed at ensuring that the Turkish forces were not only stretched out thinly, but also disoriented, and this was to be done through the bombardment of Ottoman defences using naval artillery. 4 Once this plan was carried out, it would have been followed by several coordinated landings, which would have ensured a swift victory for the allied forces. However, this plan tuned out not to be the case because despite their determination to hand a swift defeat to the Ottoman Turks, the British forces met stiffer resistance than they had anticipated when they landed. On some of the beaches where the British forces landed, they were met with heavy machine-gun fire, which made the landings most difficult because they had not prepared for the resistance that they received. Because the Ottomans had taken defensive positions on high ground and had put machine-guns to effective use, the British were quite overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity of their defence and this is one of the reasons why there were so many casualties. The landing forces, expecting resistance, landed on almost all designated beaches on the peninsula and were surprised to find little or no resistance from the Ottoman Turks. These surprising events led to many a landing party standing on the deserted coastline, wondering what to do because they did not have orders concerning how to handle such situations. One of the reasons for the failure of the Gallipoli Campaign was leadership and this was mainly because while the strategy was sound, the lack of effective leadership made it extremely difficult to achieve its objectives. This is especially the case when one considers that the biggest supporter of the campaign, namely Winston Churchill, pushed for it because of assumptions on Ottoman weakness rather than on sound information from the ground. Furthermore, when the order was given for the campaign to take place, the leadership did not provide enough men as well as adequate supplies that could be used for facilitating a swift victory. Instead, the first landings proved to be a disaster and the allied forces had to beat a hasty withdrawal because to continue fighting on this occasion would have resulted in numerous deaths. The retreat had to take place because of the massive resistance that was experienced from the Ottoman Turks despite the fact that the latter were few in numbers and if the allied forces had had enough ammunitions as well as numbers, they would have prevailed.5 The presumption of Ottoman weakness by the Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, made possible the creation of an attack strategy that resulted in failure. Even after other landings were made, the British Imperial had lost its advantage because the Ottomans had been able to set up a defence against any further campaigns against them. The decision to continue with a campaign that was futile can be blamed on a lack of proper leadership because it did not realised that to continue would lead to disaster. An alternative to the strategy adopted in the Gallipoli Campaign would have been not to underestimate the power of the Ottoman Empire and launch the campaign with the full strength that the allies could muster. In this way, it would have been possible to overwhelm the Ottomans before they could organise themselves sufficiently to ensure a protracted defence. Furthermore, the allied leadership should have ensured that it had accurate intelligence concerning the Ottoman forces in the Dardanelles before implementing the campaign because this would have ensured a swift victory and a lesser number of men lost. The British admiralty should not only have concentrated on the western from of the conflict in France and Belgium, but should have also taken into consideration opening a new front in the Dardanelles which would have ensured that the campaign was began early on in the war at a time when the Ottoman Empire was least prepared for the conflict. In this way, the objectives of the campaign, mainly putting the Ottomans out of the war as well as protecting Russian interests in the Caucasus region, would have been achieved. There was no overall balance between the ends, ways, and means during the campaign because despite the ends being stated clearly at the beginning, these were not followed up with concrete measures that would have ensured that they were achieved. The manner, in which the campaign was conducted, especially after the landings were made, showed a lack of leadership because the British Imperial was not able to take advantage of weaknesses in the Ottoman defence to overrun the entire Dardanelles Peninsula and force the Ottoman Empire out of the war. An alternative strategy would have been to launch the campaign with full reinforcements ready much earlier than it was launched in order to ensure that the Ottomans were caught unprepared and forced out of the war, an objective that would have gone well with domestic constituents. Leadership or lack of it, in this campaign is what made the difference because it led to the massive loss of life on both sides of the conflict without achieving the set objectives. Bibliography Travers, Tim. Gallipoli 1915. Stroud: The History Press, 2001. Read More