Gallipoli Campaign Begins

On April 25, 1915, the 1st Australian Division and the New Zealand and Australian Division (ANZAC) landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula as part of a broader British strategy to knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I. The plan, championed by Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, aimed to secure a passage through the Dardanelles Strait to supply Russia and relieve pressure on the Western Front. Instead, the landings became one of the war's most grueling stalemates.

The initial assault went badly from the start. A navigation error placed the ANZACs about a mile north of their intended beach, depositing them at the base of steep cliffs held by Ottoman forces under Mustafa Kemal. The soldiers, many of them civilians in uniform just months earlier, found themselves pinned down almost immediately. Australian casualty rates on that first day approached 50 percent in some units. The British forces under General Ian Hamilton expected to push inland quickly; instead, they found themselves trapped in a narrow beachhead, unable to break through Ottoman defensive lines.

Over the following months, the campaign devolved into a grinding attritional struggle reminiscent of the trenches in France. Heat, disease, and ammunition shortages compounded the strategic stalemate. Supply ships regularly arrived under fire. By summer, dysentery and enteric fever were killing as many soldiers as Ottoman bullets. The Australians, in particular, developed a fierce reputation for aggression in the face of impossible odds—charging fixed positions across open ground in attacks that seemed, by any rational calculus, suicidal. These assaults became central to the emerging ANZAC legend, a mythology that would outlast the campaign itself.

By late 1915, it was clear that Gallipoli had failed. The campaign had cost the British and French combined roughly 200,000 casualties, with Commonwealth forces suffering around 75,000. Turkish losses exceeded 200,000. No breakthrough materialized. In December, Hamilton's successor, General Charles Monro, recommended withdrawal. The last Australian soldiers evacuated on December 19, 1915, in one of the few cleanly executed operations of the entire campaign.

The strategic impact was negligible. The Ottoman Empire remained in the war until 1918. Russia still collapsed into revolution. But the psychological impact was outsized. For Australians, Gallipoli became a founding myth—proof of national martial competence and courage, a rite of passage for the young nation. April 25 became Anzac Day, a national observance that persists today. Gallipoli demonstrated that ordinary Australians could stand against professional armies, that their nation mattered in global affairs. This sense of national identity, forged in defeat and tragedy, would define Australian culture for generations to come.