# Canonical recap data for Gallipoli Campaign Begins (1915)
# Source: https://recap.at/1915/gallipoli-campaign
# Format: YAML 1.2 (UTF-8). Generated at request time.
slug: gallipoli-campaign
canonicalUrl: "https://recap.at/1915/gallipoli-campaign"
title: Gallipoli Campaign Begins
subtitle: Churchill's gamble turned into eight months of trenches and blood.
recapType: global_event
eventStatus: concluded
startDate: 1915-01-01
datePrecision: year
year: 1915
decade: 1910
country:
name: Australia
slug: australia
summaryShort: In April 1915, Australian and New Zealand forces launched an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, beginning a costly eight-month campaign that would reshape national identity but ultimately end in withdrawal.
summaryLong: |-
  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.
lede: On April 25, 1915, Australian and New Zealand troops landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey as part of a British plan to knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I and open a supply route to Russia. A navigation error dropped them on the wrong beach under heavy fire, trapping them in a brutal stalemate that lasted eight months, killed tens of thousands, and became foundational to both nations' sense of themselves.
heroImageUrl: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/The_Chunuk_Bair_New_Zealand_National_memorial_%288709569618%29.jpg/1280px-The_Chunuk_Bair_New_Zealand_National_memorial_%288709569618%29.jpg"
heroImageCredit: "\"The Chunuk Bair New Zealand National memorial (8709569618)\" by Jorge Láscar from Australia is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/."
importance: 50
sourceConfidence: 50
keyFacts:
- label: Campaign duration
  value: 8 months (April 25 – December 20, 1915)
- label: Allied forces involved
  value: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), British, and French troops
- label: Initial ANZAC landing date
  value: April 25, 1915
- label: Landing location
  value: Gaba Tepe area, Gallipoli Peninsula, Ottoman Turkey
- label: Ottoman commander
  value: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
- label: ANZAC casualties
  value: ~7,600 killed, ~17,000 wounded
- label: Total Allied casualties
  value: ~44,000 killed; ~97,000 wounded
- label: Campaign outcome
  value: Allied withdrawal; Ottoman strategic victory
timeline:
- date: 1915-04-25
  title: ANZAC Landing
  description: Australian and New Zealand forces land at what becomes known as ANZAC Cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula; Ottoman forces under Mustafa Kemal counterattack the same day.
- date: 1915-05-19
  title: Ottoman Counteroffensive
  description: Kemal leads a major assault on ANZAC positions; fighting is intense but the assault is repelled with heavy losses on both sides.
- date: 1915-08-06
  title: Suvla Bay Landing
  description: British forces attempt a new landing at Suvla Bay to break the stalemate; initial surprise is squandered and momentum is lost.
- date: 1915-08-21
  title: Battle of Chunuk Bair
  description: ANZAC forces capture the high ground at Chunuk Bair but are unable to hold it against Ottoman counterattacks.
- date: 1915-12-20
  title: Final Evacuation Completed
  description: The last Allied troops withdraw from Gallipoli; the campaign ends in strategic failure without achieving its objective of capturing the peninsula.
sources: []
related: []
relationships:
- targetSlug: franz-ferdinand-assassination
  type: happened_during
  confidence: 100
  evidence: Gallipoli Campaign (April–December 1915) occurred as a direct military consequence of the Great War triggered by the June 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
  source: ai
- targetSlug: treaty-of-versailles
  type: evolved_into
  confidence: 85
  evidence: Gallipoli's outcome and Australia's WWI sacrifice directly enabled Australian independent representation at Versailles (1919), shifting the dominion from colonial status toward sovereign nation-state negotiating power.
  source: ai
- targetSlug: treaty-of-lausanne
  type: caused
  confidence: 80
  evidence: Gallipoli weakened Ottoman military capacity and morale. Combined with broader WWI defeats, the campaign accelerated Ottoman collapse, directly enabling the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that dissolved the empire.
  source: ai
gallery:
- url: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/G.C._18_March_1915_Gallipoli_Campaign_Article.jpg/1280px-G.C._18_March_1915_Gallipoli_Campaign_Article.jpg"
  thumbnailUrl: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/G.C._18_March_1915_Gallipoli_Campaign_Article.jpg/800px-G.C._18_March_1915_Gallipoli_Campaign_Article.jpg"
  caption: Gallipoli campaign
  credit: Wikipedia · "Gallipoli campaign"
  width: 330
  height: 449
- url: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Gallipoli%2C_Masefield%2C_1916.djvu/page1-1280px-Gallipoli%2C_Masefield%2C_1916.djvu.jpg"
  thumbnailUrl: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Gallipoli%2C_Masefield%2C_1916.djvu/page1-1280px-Gallipoli%2C_Masefield%2C_1916.djvu.jpg"
  caption: Gallipoli, Masefield, 1916
  credit: John Masefield
  width: 2275
  height: 3540
- url: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/With_the_Zionists_in_Gallipoli_%28Patterson%2C_1916%29.pdf/page1-500px-With_the_Zionists_in_Gallipoli_%28Patterson%2C_1916%29.pdf.jpg"
  thumbnailUrl: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/With_the_Zionists_in_Gallipoli_%28Patterson%2C_1916%29.pdf/page1-500px-With_the_Zionists_in_Gallipoli_%28Patterson%2C_1916%29.pdf.jpg"
  caption: With the Zionists in Gallipoli (Patterson, 1916)
  credit: John Henry Patterson
  width: 700
  height: 1122
- url: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/With_the_Twenty-ninth_division_in_Gallipoli%2C_a_chaplain%27s_experiences_%281916%29_%2814781965475%29.jpg/1280px-With_the_Twenty-ninth_division_in_Gallipoli%2C_a_chaplain%27s_experiences_%281916%29_%2814781965475%29.jpg"
  thumbnailUrl: "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/With_the_Twenty-ninth_division_in_Gallipoli%2C_a_chaplain%27s_experiences_%281916%29_%2814781965475%29.jpg/800px-With_the_Twenty-ninth_division_in_Gallipoli%2C_a_chaplain%27s_experiences_%281916%29_%2814781965475%29.jpg"
  caption: With the Twenty-ninth division in Gallipoli, a chaplain's experiences (1916) (14781965475)
  credit: Internet Archive Book Images
  width: 2336
  height: 1452
culturalContext:
topMusic:
- title: In Flanders Fields
  artist: Various (poem by John McCrae, 1915)
  year: 1915
  note: McCrae's poem, published in December 1915, became the defining literary response to trench warfare and Gallipoli-era losses. The poppy imagery saturated WWI remembrance culture.
  referenceCard:
  status: not_found
  checkedAt: "2026-05-27T07:36:16.067Z"
- title: The Trooper
  artist: Traditional Australian folk / military song
  year: 1915
  note: Soldier verses and marching songs were primary cultural expressions during and after the campaign; formal recorded music came later.
  referenceCard:
  status: not_found
  checkedAt: "2026-05-27T07:36:16.067Z"
topFilms: []
topTVShows: []
zeitgeistNote: In 1915, popular culture in Britain and the dominions was saturated with war patriotism, recruitment posters, and casualty lists. Gallipoli arrived amid growing disillusionment with static trench warfare on the Western Front; the campaign's failure at sea and in the hills marked a turning point toward darker realism about industrial warfare. Australian newspapers ran daily casualty lists and heroic dispatches that fed both patriotic fervor and, by mid-1915, creeping dread.
comparisonThenNow:
- metric: Australian Military Personnel Engaged
  thenValue: ~60,000 troops deployed
  thenYear: 1915
  nowValue: ~58,000 active military personnel (total armed forces)
  nowYear: 2024
  note: A single campaign then roughly equals today's entire active-duty force.
- metric: Casualty Rate per Day (Gallipoli Phase)
  thenValue: ~100 killed per day over 8 months
  thenYear: 1915
  nowValue: ~0.5 killed per day (annual average across all ADF operations)
  nowYear: 2024
  note: Modern military medicine and doctrine have radically lowered attrition.
- metric: ANZAC Day Global Recognition
  thenValue: Observed in Australia and New Zealand only
  thenYear: 1916
  nowValue: Observed in 16+ nations including UK, Canada, South Africa, Fiji
  nowYear: 2024
  note: The commemoration expanded well beyond the original participants.
impactStatement: The Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 marked Australia's first major military engagement as a nation and its first catastrophic defeat. The eight-month assault on Ottoman positions transformed a fledgling dominion into a battle-hardened power while leaving 8,700 Australian soldiers dead and shaping the country's national identity around the ideal of the ANZAC-a mythology that persists today.
consequences:
- title: ANZAC Legend Solidifies
  year: 1915
  description: The Gallipoli campaign forged the ANZAC identity-the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps-despite military failure. The April 25 landing became a defining national moment, eventually celebrated as ANZAC Day, Australia's most solemn commemoration.
- title: Ottoman Empire's Final Decline Accelerates
  year: 1918
  description: Gallipoli weakened Ottoman military capacity and morale. Combined with defeats elsewhere during WWI, the empire formally dissolved by 1923, ending 600 years of rule across three continents.
- title: Australia Gains International Standing
  year: 1919
  description: Australia's participation at Gallipoli and subsequent WWI service earned the dominion independent representation at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations, elevating it from colonial dependency toward sovereign nation status.
- title: British Military Strategy Discredited
  year: 1916
  description: Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and architect of the campaign, was forced to resign. The failure demonstrated the limits of cavalry-era tactics against modern entrenchment, influencing military doctrine for decades.
- title: Anzac Day Established as National Holiday
  year: 1927
  description: April 25 became a public holiday across Australia, cementing Gallipoli's sacrifice as the founding myth of Australian nationhood and military service.
archiveSnapshots: []
categories:
- war
metaDescription: Allied forces launch amphibious assault on Ottoman Turkey. Thousands of soldiers storm beaches in doomed attempt to knock Turkey out of WWI. Strategic disaster unfolds.
originSignals:
- "wikipedia:gallipoli-campaign"
aliases:
- Gallipoli
- Dardanelles Campaign
- Gelibolu
- ANZAC Landing
relatedQueries:
- Mustafa Kemal Gallipoli 1915
- ANZAC Cove landing April 25
- Ottoman defense Gallipoli campaign
- Dardanelles Strait World War 1
- Australian losses Gallipoli Peninsula
- British naval strategy Gallipoli 1915
- Suvla Bay landing failure
- ANZAC Day origin Gallipoli
geo:
lat: -24.7761086
lng: 134.755
place: Australia
note: Location inferred from recap.country via OSM Nominatim.
significance: 25
