Neumann, Paul Gallipoli

The Last Battle of the Victorian Era

Since childhood, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill had been prone to dangerous adventures and completely lacking in military talent. In 1915, he decided to break through the Dardanelles with a single powerful blow, occupy Constantinople and throw the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War. However, ill-considered planning and mediocre execution led to a bloody disaster: within a single day, the Anglo-French fleet lost three battleships and several heavily damaged ships to mines and artillery fire and was saved only by a miracle. Another bloodbath awaited the amphibious operation on the Gallipoli Peninsula, where the Allied offensive stalled and the Allies sacrificed thousands of lives in bloody trench warfare without achieving any results. This defeat was all the more humiliating as the Allies had more troops and weapons at their disposal, while the Turks often fought with outdated weapons, such as the lack of machine guns with mitrailleuses, which had already been phased out in other armies. The final straw was the loss of three battleships to a German submarine and a Turkish torpedo boat, which forced the Allied naval forces to retreat, leaving the fighting troops without artillery support. It was then decided to abandon the entire operation and evacuate the Gallipoli bridgeheads. This book is an attempt to reconstruct all the circumstances surrounding the greatest military disaster in British history, the bloodiest defeat of the first strategic sea landing in modern history, and the most shameful failure in the career of Winston Churchill, who was forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty and was relegated to minor posts in British politics for many years. The book is based on British, French, Russian, Turkish and German sources.