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Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history?
Over two decades ago, a BBC poll named the wartime British prime minister as the Greatest Briton. Now, on the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth, David Reynolds ponders whether he deserves to remain as top dog in the pantheon of British history
In a much-publicised poll in 2002, the BBC asked viewers to rank figures from British history, as part of the television series 100 Greatest Britons. The poll was in no way scientific, but simply reflected votes – more than 1.6 million of them – from people who chose to contact the BBC, following presentations championing famous individuals ranging back in time from the 20th century to William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. As is well known, Winston Churchill came out a clear first, garnering close to 457,000 votes. Two decades later, as we mark 150 years since he was born, it’s interesting to revisit that moment, and to reflect on how perceptions of Churchill have changed over time – and also on what is meant by historical ‘greatness’. Because Churchill’s craving to make himself ‘great’ lies at the heart of his extraordinary story. In the run-up to the BBC poll, politician Mo Mowlam – Churchill’s advocate – insisted that “he was the greatest Briton because he showed the determination and courage to protect Britain from invasion, and without his inspiring leadership the outcome of World War II may have been very different”. Let’s unpack that claim a bit. Did Churchill really make such a difference in 1940 – and, if so, how? The answer to the first part is surely: yes – most of all through his energy and drive. Although the tempo in Whitehall would have intensified anyway with the end of the ‘Phoney War’ and the German invasion of France, Churchill’s appointment as prime minister had a galvanising effect, dramatically symbolised by his famous red labels stuck on urgent documents: ACTION THIS DAY. Equally important, Churchill took a firm grip on military strategy. Mindful of the confusion and infighting of 1914–18, he appointed himself minister of defence. There was no ministry – that did not come until the 1960s. Churchill simply wanted the authority to deal with the chiefs of staff directly rather than via their politician ministers. He yearned to be a war leader, unlike Neville Chamberlain – his predecessor as PM – or Lord Halifax, the alternative when Chamberlain lost the support of the Commons. Neither of them had any appetite for such a role, whereas Churchill – a soldier by training – had dreamed of it since childhood. Read more | Neville Chamberlain is underestimated, argues author Robert Harris Churchill was also an accomplished communicator. Often he’s remembered for his soundbites – ‘fight them on the beaches’, ‘finest hour’, ‘special relationship’ – but these were only the icing on the cake. Churchill regarded his speeches as tools of public education, helping the British population understand what became known as ‘the people’s war’. When Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Churchill gave a radio address on the BBC about what he called “the Fourth Climacteric”, connecting it to three earlier turning points in the war. He spent hours preparing his speeches in a way that may seem inconceivable now in the days of tweets and social media. There isn’t space here to do full justice to Churchill’s impact, but one other point should be mentioned. Most British premiers had received a classical education, informed by Latin, Greek and philosophy; few had any grasp of science and technology. By contrast, Churchill loathed the classics but was fascinated by gadgets and science fiction – by the world of HG Wells. That’s why he quickly grasped the value of Ultra – the operation to intercept enemy signals intelligence – and ensured that the codebreakers of Bletchley Park were provided with an abundance of money and gifted personnel. Read more | Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory The people’s war Yet there’s another side to the story of 1940 that was not voiced by Mo Mowlam. More important than Churchill’s “courage and determination” in protecting Britain from invasion after France fell were decisions during the 1930s by governments of which he was not a part. Key among these was the development of a new generation of fast monoplane fighters – Hurricanes and Spitfires – linked to the Chain Home system of radar stations giving crucial early warning of when and where enemy bombers were crossing the Channel. Churchill was aware of these developments, and contributed to some of the discussions, but these were his ‘Wilderness Years’ when he was out of office. The decisions were made while the ‘appeasers’ were in power – and they were vital in winning the Battle of Britain. That highlights a deeper point. Technological innovations such as radar and Ultra could have been developed only by an advanced industrial state – by what historian David Edgerton has called the ‘warfare state’ – often neglected in accounts of modern Britain because of a preoccupation with the welfare state. The war that Churchill waged was possible only because of a long series of decisions and developments going back to the industrial revolution. This provides a salutary reminder that an intense focus on individual leaders can blind us to structural factors that also shape historical change. Victory or bust Surviving 1940 was one thing; winning the war was very different. Three days into his premiership, Churchill told the Commons that his goal was “victory at all costs”. Yet after the French signed an armistice with Germany on 22 June, that sounded like fantasy. France had been Britain’s principal ally throughout the First World War, its army anchoring the western front. Britain was now alone – and there was no western front on the continent of Europe. Britain and its empire – from Canada to India, from the Caribbean to Australasia – made a major contribution to the war, but eventual victory over Hitler and the Axis depended substantially on the Soviet Union and the US. Put simply, the Soviets provided the manpower, the Americans the firepower. Read more | 1942: Churchill's darkest hour Between June 1941 and June 1944 – from the opening of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union until D-Day – more than 90 per cent of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army. The US was the ‘arsenal of democracy’, producing an abundance of munitions and supplies, much of which was shared with its allies through Lend-Lease aid. And the arrival of the US and Soviet armies in Germany in 1945 was a prelude to the Cold War division of Europe between these two superpowers. Read more | Churchill's evolving perspective on D-Day Of course, Churchill was no mere spectator in all of this. The stereotype of the ‘bulldog’ can easily blind us to his remarkable skills as improviser. Even before the fall of France, he was assiduously courting president Franklin D Roosevelt with messages, later followed by personal visits to the US. He did the same with Joseph Stalin from 1942, becoming the essential intermediary between the White House and the Kremlin. During a photo shoot at the Tehran conference in November 1943, when someone remarked that the ‘Big Three’ looked like the Holy Trinity, Stalin responded: “If that is so, Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.” The PM’s improvisations in shuttle diplomacy helped keep Britain in the diplomatic game – but by 1945, nothing could obscure the fact that the Big Three was more like the Big 2½. Strategy for greatness All that being so, the reason why he looms so large in accounts of the war, almost obscuring anyone and anything else, is because of Churchill the historian. We remember him in part because he was utterly determined not to be forgotten. That had been true all his life. Right from the start, he had a clear strategy for greatness: hit the headlines as a soldier or a politician, then be sure to write your own account. Deeds and words: both were essential to ensure that his story became history. That’s what he did in the Second World War – a hefty six-pack of volumes published between 1948 and 1954, less than a decade after victory was won. No other war leader was a serious competitor. Roosevelt died before the war ended; Stalin published no autobiography; and the trilogy of war memoirs by Charles de Gaulle did not appear until 1954–59. So Churchill got into print quickly and in formidable detail, determined to shape the public narrative before others could do so. He was careful to say that his work was not history but “a contribution to history which will be of service to the future”, told mainly from the vantage point of Number 10. But the heavy ballast of quotation from his own minutes, memos and telegrams, and the absence of replies (partly to avoid long wrangles about copyright), had the effect, as the cabinet secretary put it, of “creating the impression that no one but he ever took an initiative”. Read more | Did Churchill and Hitler ever meet? And the choice of title – The Second World War rather than War Memoirs – enhanced the sense that Churchill’s personal story enfolded the whole global conflict. The hardback sold 2 million copies in Britain and a similar number in the US. And Churchill’s take on the war reached even larger audiences around the world through book translations and newspaper serialisations. That was not the end of Churchill’s history-making – only the end of the beginning. Before his death in 1965, he commissioned an official biography, based on privileged access to his papers. His son, Randolph, authored the first two volumes before his own death in 1968; the work was completed by the Oxford historian Martin Gilbert, with the eighth and final volume appearing in 1988. The furrows that Churchill had dug through the war were deepened further by 23 volumes of documents, a project started by Gilbert and rounded off by wealthy acolytes in the US. Screen portrayals of the 1930s and the war also kept him centre-stage, initiated by Robert Hardy in the ITV series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years in 1981, for which Gilbert was co-scriptwriter. Read more | Books interview with Boris Johnson: "Churchill was a tremendous bully in some ways, but we needed a bully" Later depictions featured Albert Finney (The Gathering Storm, 2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour, 2017). Popular biographies took the same approach, encapsulated by Boris Johnson’s entertaining contribution, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (2014). Creating an icon As historians Allen Packwood and Warren Dockter have observed: “Churchill the writer played a key role in creating Churchill the icon,” adding that “ironically, in doing so he also raised his own profile to such a level that challenges to his reputation became inevitable.” Even before Churchill died, an edited version of the diaries of Lord Alanbrooke, wartime chief of the Imperial General Staff, revealed some of the challenges of working with this volatile genius. Within a year of Churchill’s death his doctor, Lord Moran, went into print with Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, provoking a storm of controversy about the ethics of a physician writing about his patient. And in 1970, Robert Rhodes James, formerly one of Randolph’s research assistants, published a biography of Churchill up to the Second World War. In it he argued that, had Churchill died in 1939, his life would have been deemed A Study in Failure. Seen that way, the war premiership stood out as an aberration. Like any historical personage, over time Churchill was becoming a figure of controversy, and the mass of documents published by the Churchillians fed the debate, both for and against. In any case, historical perspectives inevitably shift with time. Mo Mowlam, his BBC champion in 2002, was born in 1949. For people of that generation, and for those who lived through the war, the conflict still seemed all too present – not least in the urban wastelands and prefab housing that bore witness to the Blitz in many cities, and in the emotional power of Remembrance Sunday. Yet for ‘Gen Z’, born in the late 1990s and 2000s, the Second World War can seem almost prehistoric. Britain today is far more ethnically diverse than the predominantly white country led by Churchill in 1940–45, largely the result of postwar immigration from the former British empire. Read more | “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation Earlier statistics are not precise, but census returns for the past few decades show that the proportion of people in England and Wales identifying themselves as ‘white’ fell from 91.3 per cent in 2001 to 81.7 per cent in 2021, by which time 9.3 per cent of residents described themselves as Asian, 4 per cent as black and 2.9 per cent as mixed race. Although many of these people had been born in Britain, they often had a different sense of their heritage from Mowlam’s generation, influenced by parents or grandparents who grew up in the Caribbean or south Asia. In recent years, there has been a passionate debate about India’s war. For that nation, the focal wartime trauma was not the Blitz but the Bengal Famine of 1943–44, which killed perhaps 3 million. Causes and contributing factors are complex and hard to balance, including floods, crop disease and wartime inflation in Bengal, the disastrous fall in rice imports after Japan’s conquest of Burma, the slow reaction of the British authorities, and the shortage of shipping in 1943–44 because of the Allied build-up for D-Day. But in Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (2010), Indian-American journalist Madhusree Mukerjee blamed much of the policy failure on the PM. Churchill’s contempt for what he called (privately) in February 1945 the “foul race” of Hindus was noted by many British politicians and officials of the time, and drove his conviction that Indians were not capable of self-government. Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war The debate was fanned anew by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and the UK after 2019. Accusations of genocide were levelled at Churchill, and his statue in London’s Parliament Square was daubed with “was a racist”. Churchillians offered robust defence, but the anti-Churchill polemics – often based on ignorance of the detailed story – remind us that heroes can easily be turned into villains as perspectives change. A rival perspective It’s often said that Churchill’s attitude to India was just part of the mental baggage of Victorian England. A glance at Clement Attlee, his successor as PM in 1945, offers a useful corrective. In fact, examining Attlee’s rise to power provides an intriguing perspective on Churchill’s world view. Born in 1883 – thus also a Victorian, though eight years younger than Churchill – Attlee grew up in a prosperous professional family in the south-west London suburb of Putney. Whereas Churchill’s imperialist ideology was shaped by service as a soldier on the frontiers of Victoria’s empire, Attlee’s crucible was London’s East End. Attlee lived in a social work settlement for nearly a decade before the First World War. This opened his eyes to urban deprivation, but also to the potential of many adolescents in London’s docklands if given discipline and motivation. He became a lifelong socialist. Read more | Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line Unlike many Labour men of that era, Major Attlee was no pacifist. He served as an officer in the Gallipoli campaign and on the western front. But he was not an imperial diehard like Churchill, who never set foot in India after the 1890s. Two extended tours around the Raj with a parliamentary delegation in 1928–29 convinced Attlee that India must follow Australia and New Zealand along the path to self-government and eventual independence. And he acted on that conviction as prime minister in 1945–51. With the death of Churchill in January 1965, Attlee penned a reflective tribute, judging him to have been “the greatest leader in war this country has ever known”. Not because he was the greatest warrior or strategist, but because “he was able to solve the problem that democratic countries in total war find crucial and may find fatal: relations between the civil and military leaders.” Attlee had in mind the 1914–18 feuds between ‘Frock Coats’ and ‘Brass Hats’, but maybe also the ‘Bonapartist’ tendency of successful war leaders to seize political power. When Churchill put himself before the electorate in 1945 and was resoundingly defeated, he accepted their verdict, despite deep resentment at being kicked out. Read more | Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero Attlee regretted the fact that Churchill did not retire from politics in 1945. “I had seen enough of him during the war to be sure that, unless there was a war on, he would not make much of a prime minister,” he wrote. Instead, “what Britain required when the war was over was an architect, somebody who could build new parts into our society, and repair damage.” Attlee was, of course, positioning himself as the architect trying to repair the damage of two world wars and rebuild British society on socialist lines. Both Churchill and Attlee were deeply patriotic, but they differed about the essence of national greatness. For Winston it was the empire, whereas Clem saw imperial overstretch as an outdated burden. Despite the eventual bloodbath over the partition of India, Attlee was proud of bringing the Raj to what he saw as a long-overdue end, and of helping transform empire into Commonwealth. At home, what mattered for him was the concept of social security he had evolved in the East End, and “the duty of the state to act as the coordinating factor in making all individual effort work for the good of the citizen”. Commonwealth and socialism defined his sense of what it meant for Britain to be great. In this piece I’ve emphasised the importance of seeing Churchill in context – against the wider dynamics of the Second World War and in relation to his contemporaries. Back in the 1890s, Rudyard Kipling rebuked those who held a myopic view of English history: “What should they know of England who only England know?” Adapting Kipling, we might ask today: “What should they know of Churchill who only Churchill know?” By definition, a biography tends to isolate its subject as good or bad. Placing a leader in context is surely the task of any historian. For me, the question of who was the greatest ever Briton makes no sense. But I’ve no doubt that, in his ‘finest hour’, Winston Churchill did win the immortality he craved. David Reynolds is emeritus professor of international history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him (William Collins, 2023) This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Gallipoli: 5 reasons why the First World War campaign was a failure
But for the achievement of the Australian and New Zealander Army Corps (Anzac) in carving out a small bridgehead at Anzac Cove, the WW1 campaign to seize the Gallipoli peninsula was a disaster, says Peter Hart. Writing for BBC History Magazine, the author of a 2011 book on the disastrous First World War campaign offers his explanations for the Allies' failure in 1915
What happened at Gallipoli? The Gallipoli campaign was a terrible tragedy. The attempt by the Allies to seize the Gallipoli peninsula from the Ottoman empire and gain control over the strategically-important Dardanelles failed in a welter of hubris, blood and suffering. Located just across the Dardanelles straits from the fabled city of Troy, its classical undertones have helped create a rich mythology of ‘the terrible ifs’; of what might have been achieved with ‘a bit more luck’. The beach landings at Helles – the first made against modern weapons systems – saw incredible heroism and turned the sea at V Beach red with blood. Gallipoli is today synonymous with the achievement of the Australian and New Zealander Army Corps (ANZAC) in carving out a small bridgehead at Anzac Cove. That maze of tangled gullies and ridges is still sacred for Australians. But for all that the campaign was an utter failure. The question is why? Here are five possible reasons... The Gallipoli campaign was poorly conceived The First World War stalled when the huge armies of Germany and France fought themselves to a standstill on the Western Front in 1914. When the Ottoman Turks attacked Russians in the Caucasus mountains in December 1914, Russia went to her allies requesting help. The British were fully committed elsewhere but a group of politicians led by Winston Churchill, then at the Admiralty, sought to help Russia with an attack on the Gallipoli peninsula that aimed to gain control of the Dardanelles straits that separated Asia and Europe. This, it was boasted, would remove one of the allies ‘propping up’ Germany, influence wavering Balkan states and open the sea route to Russian Black Sea ports for the export of munitions to feed Russian guns on the Eastern Front. Read more | 10 WW1 generals you should know about Much of this was nonsense. There was no backdoor to Germany; no easy route to victory, no allies that propped her up. Germany operated on interior lines of communications and even in the event of a Turkish defeat would merely have rushed reinforcements to bolster her Austro–Hungarian allies. Finally Britain did not have sufficient munitions for her own armies. Britain had to fight the war as it was; not how visionaries dreamt it might be. German armies were deep in France, and Britain could not just abandon her ally to her fate. The priority of the Western Front meant that the Gallipoli expedition could never be given sufficient men and guns to have any chance of success. As such it should never have been started. The myths of the battle of Gallipoli Professor Gary Sheffield challenges some commonly held assumptions about this failed attempt to change the course of the First World War... The British Army wasn't ready The British Army of 1915 was not yet ready for war. There were not enough guns or shells for the Gallipoli campaign to have any chance against Turkish troops once they were well dug in, with barbed wire, machine guns and artillery. Success demanded hundreds of guns that did not exist, fired by gunners not yet trained, using complex artillery techniques that had not been invented, firing hundreds of thousands of shells as yet not manufactured. It required infantry tactics not yet painfully developed in the heat of battle and support weapons not yet imagined. Gallipoli shared the failings of every campaign launched in that benighted year: a lack of realistic goals, no coherent plan, the use of inexperienced troops for whom this would be the first campaign, a failure to comprehend or properly disseminate maps and intelligence, negligible artillery support, totally inadequate logistical and medical arrangements, a gross underestimation of the enemy, incompetent local commanders – all of which was overlaid with lashings of misplaced over-confidence leading to inexorable disaster. Gallipoli was damned before it started. Every day merely prolonged the agony and it ended in such catastrophe that it could only be disguised by vainglorious bluster. Inferior leadership The British commander was General Sir Ian Hamilton who was one of Britain’s greatest soldiers. He was no fool, but his plans for Gallipoli were fatally overcomplicated. He launched multiple attacks, each dependent on each other’s success, but left isolated when things went wrong. Taken as a whole, his schemes were utterly unrealistic. Everything had to go right, but his plans demanded incredible feats of heroism, raw troops would have to perform like veterans and incompetent subordinates lead like Napoleon. Above all, his plans demanded that the Turks put up little resistance. When the landings failed he blamed everyone but himself. "Behind us we had a swarm of adverse influences: our own General Headquarters in France, the chief of the imperial general staff of the War Office, the first sea lord of the Admiralty, the French cabinet and the best organised part of the British press. Fate willed it so. Faint hearts and feeble wills seemed for a while to succeed in making vain the sacrifices of Anzac, Helles and Suvla. Only the dead men stuck it out to the last." – General Sir Ian Hamilton Opposing Hamilton was a German, General Otto Liman von Sanders. A steady professional, Liman husbanded his reserves until he knew what the British were doing before committing them to devastating effect. He was fortunate indeed in one of his Turkish subordinates Colonel Mustafa Kemal. As Kemal led his 57th Regiment into action against the Anzacs on 25 April his chilling words have gone down in legend: "I don't order you to attack – I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can take our places." This unflinching martial spirit inspired the Turkish troops to victory. The Turks were experienced and well led Colonel Mustafa Kemal, who became President Kemal Atatürk after the war, summed up the grit and determination his countrymen demonstrated at Gallipoli. A good proportion of the Turkish soldiers had recent experience fighting in the Balkan wars of 1912–13. But all of them came from a country where life was hard. They made tough, well-disciplined soldiers when fighting in defence of their homeland. "But think about the enemy which landed at Ari Burnu shores equipped with the most advanced war machinery, [they] were, by and large, forced to remain on these shores. Our officers and soldiers who with love for their motherland and religion and heroism protected the doors of their capital Constantinople against such a strong enemy, won the right to a status which we can be proud of. I congratulate all the members of the fighting units under my command. I remember with deep and eternal respect, all the ones who sacrificed their lives..." – Colonel Mustafa Kemal In contrast, with the exception of the British 29th Division and two French divisions, most of the Allied troops committed to battle were inadequately trained. It was not that the Anzacs, the reservists of the Royal Naval Division, the Territorials and the first of Kitchener’s New Armies raised in 1914 were not keen; it was just that they were not yet ready for war in such an unforgiving environment as Gallipoli. The Turks were experienced and well led. They were determined to win – and they did. It was a logistical nightmare The United Kingdom was some 2,000 miles away and the nearest ‘real’ base was that of Alexandria back in Egypt with its spacious quays, cranes, lighters, tugboats and plentiful labour. Yet it was nearly 700 miles from Alexandria to Gallipoli. The advanced base of Mudros on the island of Lemnos, some 60 miles from Helles, had a good natural anchorage. But that was all it offered – there were no port facilities. A phenomenal amount of work was required to build it up into a military supply base. There was an advanced supply depot at Imbros, but even then there were still 15 miles of open sea to the Gallipoli peninsula where all the thousands of tonnes of necessary foodstuffs and munitions had to be landed on open beaches. Makeshift piers were all they had and these were ephemeral in the face of the raw power of the sea. Every day of the campaign Turkish shells crashed down on the beaches while soon U-boats lurked offshore. Gallipoli was a logistical nightmare that would make any responsible staff officer tear his hair out. As a method of waging warfare, it was insanity. Peter Hart is a military historian specialising in the First World War. He is the author of Gallipoli (Profile, 2011) This article was first published in the February 2011 edition of BBC History Magazine
First World War: beyond the western front
Modern views of the First World War largely focus on the battles in western Europe. In this feature written for BBC World Histories ahead of the centenary of the conflict's end, David Olusoga shines a light on forgotten clashes in distant lands, and on the extensive contributions of Africans and Asians
In the early hours of 5 August 1914, the CS [cable ship] Alert arrived at the Varne Bank in the English Channel. Dropping grappling hooks, her British crew dredged up the five underwater telegraph cables umbilically linking Germany with France, Spain, the Azores and, ultimately, the United States. Having hauled up the cables, the men severed them with hatchets, one by one. During the operation the Alert was approached by a flotilla of French destroyers, one of which signalled: “What are you doing?” When the Alert’s captain replied: “Cutting German cables”, the cheers of the French sailors could be heard ringing across the water. This was the first British offensive against Germany and her allies, undertaken just hours after Britain had declared war at 11pm on 4 August. Neither the army nor the navy were involved. Instead, the task was tackled by a rather less glamorous branch of the ‘services’: the Alert was owned and operated by the British General Post Office. That this almost mundane action was the first of the war might seem surprising. But it’s only one of many aspects of the conflict that have faded into the margins of general consciousness – not least the truly global scope of the war. Seven days after the Alert’s endeavour, on 12 August, the first land engagement of the First World War took place, and the first shot was fired by a member of the British forces – but not in Europe. On the same day that forts surrounding the Belgian city of Liège were bombarded by the German 420mm super-heavy howitzer nicknamed ‘Big Bertha’, Regimental Sergeant Major Alhaji Grunshi – a Muslim African who served in the British West African Frontier Force – levelled his rifle and fired at the enemy. Far from the battlefields of Europe, Grunshi was part of the force then invading the German colony of Togoland (roughly speaking, modern Togo). It was not until ten days later, on 22 August 1914, that Edward Thomas of the 4th Irish Dragoon Guards became the first British-born soldier to fire his rifle in anger. Both Grunshi and Thomas survived the war. In the weeks and months that followed, the conflict became ever more global. That was arguably inevitable in a war that pitted empires against one another. France, Germany, Britain and even ‘little’ Belgium had vast colonial holdings, while both Russia and Austria-Hungary were huge realms of a different sort – multi-ethnic continental empires. In the moment London declared war on Germany and her allies, the peoples of India, Nigeria, distant islands in the Pacific and countless other territories of the sprawling empire – their names obscure to the average Briton – also found themselves at war. The same was true for the millions of African and Asian subjects of the French colonial empire. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-463973523_cmyk-3553c57.jpg" width="2126" height="1554" alt="A camel trooper of the British Indian Army in Baghdad, 1915. At the time of the war, the volunteer army numbered 240,000 men. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="A camel trooper of the British Indian Army in Baghdad, 1915. At the time of the war, the volunteer army numbered 240,000 men. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> The British dubbed this conflict the ‘Great War’, and at first the French concurred, calling it La Grande Guerre. The term Weltkrieg (World War) was first coined in Germany in 1904, but wasn’t widely used to describe this specific conflict until long after the fighting was over. Yet with each passing month, that German phrase proved to be the most accurate and appropriate. The First World War was global in a way that previous wars had not been. Not only were battles fought in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and naval engagements across the world’s oceans, but men (and some women) from every continent were drawn into Europe to fight in the trenches, to labour in the militarised zones behind the lines, and to populate the factories that fed the great war machine of the Entente Powers. The French led the way in this, but the British were not far behind. The great misconceptions of the First World War Involving India in Europe Just four days after Britain declared war, the cabinet at Downing Street made the decision to deploy units of the British Indian Army in the European theatre of operations. This move was without precedent in the history of the empire but was deemed essential, given the scale of the enemy force that had crossed the German border and surged into France. At 240,000 men, the British Indian Army was the largest volunteer army in the world – larger by far than the British Expeditionary Force, which numbered a mere 70,000 soldiers. By early October 1914, the first of those Indians had landed in France. By 22 October they were in combat in northern France and Belgium, plugging gaps in what was rapidly becoming the western front. In the ports and railway stations through which they had passed on their way north, they had met west Africans and north Africans – soldiers of the French empire – who by October were engaged in similarly desperate operations in other sectors of the line. In geographic as well as demographic terms, the scope and scale of the conflict was breathtaking. As well as Brussels, Liège and Antwerp, Jerusalem and Baghdad fell to invading armies. At one point in 1918, it looked as if Venice might fall to the armies of Austria-Hungary. Who was involved in the First World War? Who was on each side? The fighting had begun with Alhaji Grunshi in Africa, but after Ottoman Turkey declared not just war but holy Jihad in autumn 1914, it spilled over into the Middle East. In Asia, Britain’s ally Japan reasserted its place among world powers by playing a key role in the capture of the German territory of Tsingtao (Qingdao) in China. In the South Pacific, the scattered island colonies, coaling stations and strategic outposts assembled by Germany in the 19th century were invaded. German New Guinea was taken by Australian forces in September 1914, effectively snuffing out German dreams of a colonial empire and naval presence in the Pacific. In Africa, all four of Germany’s colonies – German South-West Africa (modern Namibia), German East Africa (roughly modern Tanzania), Kamerun (roughly, Cameroon) and Togoland (roughly, Togo) – were invaded and captured by British, French, Belgian and South African forces, though the ‘British’ force included Indian troops and Africans from across the continent. After German troops in German East Africa repelled an invasion of British and Indian forces, a war of hit-and-run lasted until 1918, these soldiers living off the land (with deadly consequences for the Africans they encountered). In that protracted campaign, around millions of Africans served as soldiers or ‘carriers’ – carrying the supplies of the rival forces vast distances to remote battlefields. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-557701791_cmyk-e6b0eb9.jpg" width="699" height="990" alt="General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, leader of the German east African force, was the last German commander to surrender in November 1918. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, leader of the German east African force, was the last German commander to surrender in November 1918. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Strangers in a strange land In many of these conflicts, ‘native’ troops found themselves thousands of miles from home. To take on the rag-tag German East African force led by the famous General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the British gathered troops of the Gold Coast Regiment (from what’s now Ghana), four regiments of the West African Frontier Force from Nigeria, and the King’s African Rifles recruited in Sudan, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Ethiopia and Nyasaland (Malawi). These soldiers, drawn from the Yoruba, Ibo, Hausa, Ashanti, Fante and Grunshi ethnic groups, left their homelands to fight in east and south Africa. Though on the continent of their birth, they were as displaced and disorientated as any British soldier in the sands of Mesopotamia or the trenches of Gallipoli. Even the list of combatant nations involved in the war fails to fully convey the range of peoples and ethnicities who took part. Consider the theatre of operations in eastern Europe, so often obscured by our focus on the western front; here, between 1914 and 1917, another complex and ethnically diverse conflict raged. The German army – and, even more so, the forces of their Austro-Hungarian allies – was, in a different way, as multi-ethnic as the armies of Britain and France. Within the ranks of the Kaiser’s army were Poles, Serbs, Lithuanians, Danes from Schleswig, and Frenchmen from Alsace- Lorraine. The Austro-Hungarian army was led largely by German-speaking Austrians but among the rank and file were Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Czechs, ethnic Italians, Magyars, Croats, Serbs and Bosnians. The Russian army they confronted was just as diverse. As well as ethnic Russians, there were Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Armenians, Finns, Poles, Jews and ethnic Germans, Muslims from the Caucasus and men of Mongol origin from the far east of the Tsar’s vast empire. In short, the conflict transplanted countless people from their home lands to fight and work in distant theatres. Last surrender General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, leader of the German east African force, was the last German commander to surrender in November 1918 <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-79659755_cmyk-b18ac5e.jpg" width="3012" height="2004" alt="Native ‘carriers’ at work in Togoland, c1914. In east Africa in particular, some two million Africans served as soldiers or ‘carriers’ during a protracted campaign that lasted until the very end of the war. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Native ‘carriers’ at work in Togoland, c1914. In east Africa in particular, some two million Africans served as soldiers or ‘carriers’ during a protracted campaign that lasted until the very end of the war. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> On the margins of memory The human impact of the conflict was, then, enormous. So how is it that, a century later, and even after four years of centenary remembrance, our image of the war often fails to take in the scale and the international nature of the conflict? In our historical imagination, the First World War has come to be remembered as an essentially European feud (at least until the entry of the United States) – a war dominated by the western front. The conflict in Africa is a footnote, at best. The costly struggle fought against Ottoman forces in Mesopotamia – in which three-quarters of a million Indians served as soldiers and labourers, fighting on battlefields to which British forces would return in our own times – is set firmly on the margins of popular memory. As the historian David Reynolds has observed, the powerful poetry of a few dozen European officers has misshaped our understanding of a war in which more Britons died than in any other conflict. The work of those poets, for all their visceral language and illuminating observations, has had the effect of narrowing further the aperture through which we view this vast struggle. Even events we understand as international, occurring beyond the western front, were often far more international than we have come to imagine them. The Gallipoli campaign was not simply a clash between the forces of Ottoman Turkey on one side and the Anzacs on the other. It was a struggle involving an Anglo-French force in which British troops outnumbered Anzacs. The French, for their part, fielded north Africans and units of Tirailleurs Sénégalais from the French colonies in west Africa. Within the ranks of the Anzacs were Māori, and in the British columns were volunteers of the Jewish Legion. Supporting the front line were men drawn from across the Middle East and beyond. The truly panoramic scale of the war is revealed only when we look beyond familiar theatres at moments that have been almost completely forgotten rather than merely misremembered. One such was Britain’s campaign in Egypt’s Western Desert against the Senussi sect, a Sufi religious order in Libya. The Senussi were funded and armed by German and Ottoman agents who sought to inspire them to march against British interests under the authority of the Ottoman-issued Jihad. The campaign against the Senussi (1915–17) was well reported at the time, in part because of the exploits of Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster and commander of the Light Armoured Car Brigade, a unit equipped with six bulletproof Rolls-Royce vehicles armed with machine guns. Today, this campaign is obscure in the extreme. Equally forgotten are operations undertaken against the forces of Ali Dinar, sultan of Darfur, now in western Sudan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-52208918_cmyk-3a23413.jpg" width="2356" height="1782" alt="German officers recruiting in c1914 in Togoland, where the first shot was fired by a British soldier in the First World War. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="German officers recruiting in c1914 in Togoland, where the first shot was fired by a British soldier in the First World War. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Yet the idea of the war as a great panorama, spreading across the world and involving peoples of innumerable ethnicities and races, was apparent to many at the time – even celebrated. At the end of 1917, The Times of London dispatched one of its correspondents to the militarised zones behind the western front to report on the men. His account – what journalists today would call a ‘colour piece’ – ran under the headline ‘An Army of Labour, Workers from Distant Shores’. “It is strange to drive for an hour or two along the winding roads past the quiet villages… and to come suddenly upon a scene that carries you half the world away from the clouded northern skies and the Channel mists. Perhaps it may be a group of Punjab coolies sitting on their heels round the thin smoke of a wood fire on which the chapattis are baking; perhaps a squad of Chinamen in blue or terra-cotta blouses and flat hats, hauling logs or loading trucks always with that inscrutable smile of the Far East upon their smooth yellow faces; perhaps a party of sturdy negroes or Kaffirs, singing and chattering as they march back from their work for the midday rest and meal: perhaps some squat and swarthy Nagas with their long black hair bunched fantastically above their bullet heads, gazing in childlike wonderment at a train of great Army lorries grinding by… It is like a cinema show for the village children, who will dream of it, one fancies when they are old, and remember how men came from Asia and Africa to work for France in her dire need under the English.” Raj nostalgia: reconsidering the stories through which we view empire The Times journalist believed that the people of northern France would remember the international, multiracial army of labourers and auxiliaries they had seen in their towns and villages as a brief and exotic aberration. Yet within the lifetime of those who were children in 1914–18, most of the great cities of western Europe thronged with populations that, in their ethnic make-up and diversity, more resembled the rear zones of the western front than they did Paris and London in 1914. After the deluge Arab men prepare a site for a camp for British Indian troops after flooding in Mesopotamia, January 1917. Three-quarters of a million Indians served as soldiers and labourers in the Middle East theatre Home cooking Indian troops in Marseilles in the early weeks of the war. A journalist for The Times reported seeing “Punjab coolies sitting on their heels round the thin smoke of a wood fire on which the chapattis are baking” The art of war The global nature of the conflict was also recognised by French artists Pierre Carrier-Belleuse and Auguste François-Marie Gorguet who, in the aftermath of the first battle of the Marne in September 1914, embarked upon one of the most ambitious artistic projects of all time. Working throughout the war, they produced the monumental circular panorama Panthéon de la Guerre – believed at the time to be the largest painting ever created, now largely lost. At nearly 14 metres high and with a 122.5-metre circumference, it featured 6,000 life-size portraits of the heroes of the war. Although it inevitably focused on French involvement, the artists made a determined effort to depict the war as a global conflict, including images of political leaders, generals, combatants and auxiliaries from across the globe. The vast painting showed a contingent of north African Goumiers, among the more exotic of the French colonial units. Often favouring political leaders over ordinary soldiers, within the British section of the painting it depicted Indian maharajas who had helped recruit soldiers and labourers from their principalities. The leaders of Republican China also appeared, alongside the now-defunct flag of that disappeared state. The Panthéon would have been even more representative had it not been for the decision made in 1917 to make space to record American participation. Lamentably, this meant painting over the section featuring people from Asia, including Chinese labourers – 130,000 of whom worked for the Allies in France and Belgium. Among the Asian figures that did survive this purge were representatives of the Siamese Expeditionary Force. The tiny contingent sent by the King of Thailand included a number of trained pilots and surgeons – evidence of the technological leaps his nation was attempting to make. Fittingly for a global conflict, the First World War came to an end on one of its more remote battlefields, thousands of miles away from the western front. On 14 November 1918, a local magistrate approached German forces gathered by the Chambeshi river (now in north-east Zambia). He was carrying both a white flag and news that an armistice had been signed. General Lettow-Vorbeck became the last German commander of that war to surrender – but not before he had led his men on a four-year-long ‘dark safari’ that had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans. David Olusoga is an award-winning historian, BBC broadcaster and author of Black and British: A Forgotten History (Macmillan, 2016). The BBC is showing a raft of programmes commemorating the end of the First World War. For details, see bbc.co.uk This article was first published in issue 12 of BBC World Histories Magazine
The Gallipoli campaign: a defining moment in Australian history
On 25 April 1915, Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) landed at Gallipoli in Turkey during the First World War. Here, Australian writer Peter FitzSimons talks to Rob Attar about the experiences of his compatriots in the ensuing battle and explains why it has become such a defining moment in the country's history, commemorated each year on Anzac Day...
Q: Why does the battle of Gallipoli seem to have so much more importance for Australians than for people in Britain? A: In 1901 all the colonies of Australia came together to become a country but there was a view at the time that you weren’t a serious nation until you had shed blood – both your own and that of your enemies. Our great revered poet, Banjo Paterson, wrote a poem when the news came through of the Gallipoli landings: “…We’re not State children any more/We’re all Australians now…!/The mettle that a race can show/Is proved with shot and steel,/And now we know what nations know/And feel what nations feel…” There in that poem you have got the exultation that took place in Australia; our diggers (slang for Antipodean soldiers) had fought for the British empire and they had done well. There is a pretty strong argument – which I have come to believe in – that while Australians went to that war as loyal sons of Great Britain, they came back as Australians. The myths of the battle of Gallipoli Who was involved in the First World War? Who was on each side? First World War: beyond the western front Q: Why do you think that so many Australians volunteered to fight in the war in Europe? A: The romantic reason was to fight for Britain – and that was certainly true of many of them. Andrew Fisher, who became Australian prime minister (for a third time) soon after the war began, proclaimed to great acclaim: We will fight for Great Britain to the “last man and the last shilling”. There were lots of patriots who left accounts saying that the mother country had called on her lion cubs to come to her aid and that’s what they were doing. Others joined for adventure and still others joined – and this was not an insignificant reason – for “six shillings a day, mate”. It wasn’t bad pay. The British soldier was getting paid just one shilling a day. In my book I tell the story of the Australians who went absolutely crazy in the red light district of Cairo. Our soldiers were very well known in the city and all the ladies of the night wanted an Australian because they had six shillings in their pocket every night, so they were the first in line. Tragically a lot of soldiers got venereal disease and were sent home in disgrace. Q: Were the Australian troops surprised by the ferocity of the fighting that they encountered at Gallipoli? A: I think so. It was certainly hell on earth. At the battle of the Nek [on 7 August] you had Australian soldiers charging about 50 yards across open ground with no bullets in their rifles into open machine gun fire and artillery. And yet the veterans of Gallipoli who then went on to the western front all said: “Look, we thought Gallipoli was bad but we’ve got to the western front and realised we didn’t know anything.” There, the German artillery was so overwhelming and so precise that some Australians almost looked back on Gallipoli with nostalgia. We lost 46,000 killed on the western front, which almost makes the 9,000 lost at Gallipoli pale into insignificance. But still Gallipoli is writ so large in the Australian psyche. I think if you tapped most Australians for their military knowledge, 90 per cent of it would start and finish at Gallipoli and 90 per cent of that would centre on the first day. Trouble in paradise: how the arrival of Europeans rocked the native cultures of Tahiti and Australia Convicts and colonisers: the early history of Australia Q: How did the Australians view the Turks they were fighting? A: Early on they had little respect for them: “Let us at these Turks and we’ll sort them out.” Yet, even though the Ottoman empire was on its knees by this time, it was nevertheless an empire with hundreds of years of martial tradition. These men knew what they were doing; they believed in their cause; they were very courageous and fought very hard. The story I most love in my book concerns an incident on 24 May 1915. After one month of fighting, no man’s land at Anzac Cove was filled with stinking dead bodies, and a truce was arranged. Both sides came up waving flags and the Turks and Australians began to talk to each other. The Turks had one particular question for the Australians, which was: “Who are you?” The Australians would explain: “We’re from Australia.” “Yes, yes we know that,” the Turks would reply, “we looked in the atlas, but why are you here?” And then the Australians would have to explain about being part of the British empire. The Turks had a respect for the Australians because they knew the punishment they had taken and still held on. And the Australians had a respect for the Turks because they saw the way they kept charging onto their guns, which was extremely courageous. From then on there was empathy between the two sides. Three days after that meeting, something thumped in front of the Australian trenches and for the first time it didn’t explode. It was a package with a note that said: “To our heroic enemies.” Inside were Turkish cigarettes, which our blokes smoked and thought were pretty good. They wanted to send something back and all they could find were cans of bully beef – some dating back to the Boer War, reputedly. They threw some over to the Turks and a minute later it came back with a note: “No more bully beef!” Recently I was speaking to our former prime minister Bob Hawke and I asked him what was the most moving time in his period of office. He said that it was the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, in 1990. They flew back 53 diggers – most of whom were 90 or 95 years old – and when they got there, who should pull up, but 100-odd Turkish soldiers of the same vintage? These two groups of very old men walked towards each other across the same no man’s land where they had first met 75 years earlier. Our blokes put out their hands – let bygones be bygones – but that wasn’t good enough for the Turks. They pushed away their hands and gave them bear hugs, kissing them on both cheeks. There was still this extraordinary respect between the Turks and Australians. Q: That’s a remarkable story, considering that the Australians had originally come to invade their country... A: It’s very interesting you use that phrase. In my introduction, I explain how, like most Australians, I took Gallipoli in with my mother’s milk. I studied it at school and at university. It’s in my bones, part of the Australian birthright. Then, in 1999, I was listening to ABC Radio in the car and a historian said, “when Australia invaded Turkey” and I just about ran off the road! ‘Invaded’ seemed like such an ugly word but then thinking about it that’s what it was, really. But in Australia we just didn’t think of it as an invasion – I dare say similar to the fact that we still don’t think of our dispossession of the indigenous people as an invasion. But what else would you call it if you were an indigenous person and you saw the big ships arrive? Why we should celebrate the First World War as well as commemorate it Opinion: “The First World War centenary has been a lost opportunity” (exclusive to The Library) Q: One debate you bring out in the book is the question of how heroic the Australian troops really were at Gallipoli. Have you formed a view about that issue? A: Cecil Aspinall-Oglander was on the staff of [Gallipoli commander] General Hamilton and became a British war historian afterwards. He wrote that some of the Australians had run away on that first day – which does not fit with our national image – but I imagine that some of it was true. I often wonder what I would have done if I had been in the third wave at the battle of the Nek. The first wave of 150 Australian soldiers was just completely slaughtered, as was the second one. If I would have been in the third wave, would I have given in to civilian sanity and said: “I’m not going to do that. My job is not to give my life for my country, my job is to make some other poor bastard give his life for his country”? Had I landed on the shores of Gallipoli, looked up and seen machine guns firing and shrapnel coming down at me, what would I have done? The numbers are disputed, but certainly some Australians gave in to that and refused to fight – just as I dare say some Brits did at Cape Helles – but the majority went forwards. Against all the accusations of cowardice, when I go to Anzac Cove and see that beach, I look up and think: “God help me, how the hell did those bastards hold on for as long as they did? They never had the higher ground, never had sufficient supplies, never had as many machine gun bullets, or as much artillery, or as many men.” There is no doubt the Australians did very well, as did the Kiwis and the Brits, to hold on against overwhelming numbers. Listen | Professor Lawrence Goldman explores the issues surrounding monuments to controversial historical figures Q: How do you think we should remember the Gallipoli campaign now? A: I strongly believe that we should commemorate, not celebrate, this centenary. When I wander through the graveyards and see the ages of those who died and read about the circumstances of their deaths, I feel that we need to understand their world, what they did and why it happened. As that great line from Rudyard Kipling says: “Lest we forget.” Peter FitzSimons is an Australian journalist and author whose work includes several history books. This article was first published in the April 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
A century after the disastrous campaign in the Dardanelles, Gary Sheffield challenges some commonly held assumptions about this failed attempt to change the course of the First World War...
In a decidedly unglamorous war, Gallipoli provides a splash of colour. It was a dramatic strategic stroke, originating in the imagination of Winston Churchill, which sent soldiers and sailors far from the drab trenches of Flanders to a romantic country – familiar, from the pages of Homer, to the classically educated officers who served there. Conceived at a time when Britain’s leaders grappled with the unpalatable reality of deadlock on the western front, the Dardanelles campaign utilised Britain’s major asset, seapower. A British-French fleet would force its way through the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that separate the Gallipoli peninsula in Europe from Asia, and reach Constantinople, capital of Germany’s ally Ottoman Turkey. With Turkey out of the war, this would aid Russia and allow a large army provided by Balkan states such as Romania and Greece to be unleashed in the Balkans. This would tilt the odds decisively in the favour of the Allies. The reality was to be very different. Throwing away strategic surprise by bombarding Turkish coastal defences in February 1915, the fleet suffered heavy losses from mines and shore batteries when on 18 March it attempted to force the straits. The campaign moved into a new phase on 25 April when the British 29th Division landed on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, at Cape Helles; the untried Australian and New Zealand Corps (ANZAC) landed at what became known as Anzac Cove; and a French force landed, as a diversion, on the Asiatic shore. While the French re-embarked, according to plan, the men of 29th Division were pinned down at the water’s edge on the two main landing beaches. By the end of the day, the 29th had established a precarious toehold, but at the cost of terrible casualties. At Anzac Cove, the Australasians pushed inland only to be counterattacked by the Turks and pushed back almost to the beach – again, losses were heavy. Just like on the western front, trench warfare ensued. Conditions were even more primitive, and fighting took place under a burning sun. Over the next few months the Allies and the Turks launched attacks to try to break the deadlock, but all met with bloody failure. On 6 August the British made fresh landings at Suvla Bay and a major effort was made to break out of the Anzac Cove beachhead. Like the earlier pushes, the August offensive was a failure. Deciding not to throw good money after bad, the Allies evacuated Gallipoli in two stages, in December 1915 and the following January. The Dardanelles campaign, which had promised so much, ended in disaster. Yet, for all that, it has earned near iconic status. An avalanche of books, films and newspaper articles have given it a colourful afterlife – one in which facts have had to share space with myth and legend. Here, I will attempt to distinguish the former from the latter. Myth 1: The campaign was a good idea let down by poor execution Was it really a strategic masterpiece – or just wishful thinking? In 1930 General Sir George MacMunn wrote of Gallipoli that: “Mr Winston Churchill’s conception was magnificent.” However, he went on to say it was also “the most damnable folly that ever amateurs were enticed into”. Today, it is still believed by many that Churchill had produced a strategic masterstroke that was only let down by the poor execution of naval and military commanders. However the weight of recent historical scholarship has come to a very different conclusion: that the concept (for which Churchill was not wholly to blame) was vastly overambitious, that planning and intelligence were defective, that the resilience and fighting ability of the Turks was grossly underestimated, and that the operation was poorly resourced. In short, far from being a brilliant, potentially war-winning strategy, it was a piece of folly that was always likely to fail. Initially, the plan was based on British and French warships forcing their way through the Dardanelles, and eventually arriving off the Ottoman capital, Constantinople. This ‘ships alone’ plan failed. Even if a military force had been sent initially to support the fleet, it would have needed to be significantly larger than the one that was actually deployed, as it would have had to operate on both shores of the straits, to clear the coastal defences. Such a force was simply not available in March 1915. Even if the mines in the straits had been cleared and the battleships had got through (and it was not a given that the fleet would arrive at Constantinople unscathed) the question remains: what would happen next? The foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, admitted it was hoped that the presence of a hostile fleet would bring about a coup d’état that would lead to Turkey dropping out of the war. There is no credible evidence that such a coup would have been triggered. If that didn’t happen, and lacking soldiers to fight a ground campaign, the fleet would have had little choice but to turn tail and retrace its steps, humiliated. The whole concept was founded, to a remarkable degree, on wishful thinking. Myth 2: The fighting at Gallipoli was mainly an Anzac affair It may be the Australian casualties that are remembered in popular history, but the conflict was a multinational campaign... Largely because of the importance of the campaign in the shaping of Australian and New Zealand identity, the participation of troops of other nationalities has been marginalised in popular memory. An even more extreme view is that it was an Australian campaign: it is worth remembering that the ‘NZ’ in Anzac stands for ‘New Zealand’. In reality, Gallipoli was a multinational operation, involving troops from the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and undivided Ireland), Newfoundland, British India (including Gurkhas from Nepal), France, the French empire (including north Africans and Senegalese), Russian Jews (who wanted to fight the Ottomans as a first step to establishing a homeland in Palestine), as well as Australians and New Zealanders, the latter including Maori. Anzacs formed a relatively modest proportion of the total. The initial landing force on 25 April 1915 consisted of 18,100 men in the ANZAC Corps, 16,800 French, and 27,500 British. The total number of British soldiers that served at Gallipoli far outnumbered Australians. Indeed more French troops fought on the peninsula than did Australians. However, the Australians had the second highest casualties. The figures for Allied killed and wounded make sobering reading. The British suffered 70,700 casualties (of which 26,000 were killed); Australians, 25,700 (7,800 killed); French, 23,000 (8,000 killed); New Zealanders, 7,100 (2,445 killed) and Indians, 5,500 (including 1,682 killed). Aside from the fighting at Anzac Cove, some actions involved sizeable numbers of troops from particular countries. The landing at V Beach at Cape Helles on 25 April involved two Irish battalions, 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers and 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers. However, two English County regiments, 2nd Hampshires and 4th Worcestershires, fought there too. England, the largest and most populous part of the UK, not surprisingly provided the backbone of the Allied force on the peninsula. The defending forces were commonly referred to as ‘Turks’ but this was not entirely accurate. Formally, they belonged to the army of the Ottoman empire. Like its British and French counterparts, this was a polyglot entity which encompassed many different peoples. Greeks, Turks, Jews, Arabs and Armenian troops, and German officers, served with the Ottoman army. Nonetheless, British empire troops called their adversary ‘Johnny Turk’. Myth 3: The fiasco turned Australia from a British colony into a nation Did one event really forge Australia’s identity? Australia emerged as a nation on 25 April 1915. On this first Anzac Day, nationhood was baptised with the blood of young Australians sacrificed by incompetent British commanders – or so a crude version of the origins of Australian nationalism argues. The reality was more complex. April 1915 was an important moment in the emergence of an Australian identity, in particular in Australians defining themselves in opposition to the English. However, most Australians throughout the First World War, and long after, regarded themselves as in some sense ‘British’. A critical figure in the emergence of Australian identity was Charles Bean. He served as official Australian war correspondent at Gallipoli and on the western front, and after the war wrote influential volumes of official history. Bean celebrated the ordinary ‘digger’ (slang for soldier), highlighting the values of ‘mateship’, courage, ‘larrikinism’ (spirited irreverence) and disrespect for authority, and the fact that Australians were natural soldiers. He drew a clear comparison with English troops, and, in Jenny Macleod’s words (in her book Gallipoli: Making History), helped “codify what it was to be an Australian”. Gallipoli thus became a key point in the transformation from British colony to nation. Historians have critiqued this ‘Anzac Legend’: the supposedly egalitarian nature of the Australian Imperial Force has been exaggerated, while larrikinism shaded into racism and criminality. As for the idea of natural soldiers, Anzac forces were poorly trained and badly disciplined, which told against them when faced with determined Turks on 25 April. Australian troops in time became highly effective, but this was largely the product of experience, training, and tactical and technological improvements common to British empire armies. Nonetheless, a crude version of the Anzac legend has embedded itself in Australian popular culture – Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli is an example – and in the late 20th and early 21st centuries helped fuel Australian nationalism. Myth 4: The August Offensive nearly succeeded in breaking the deadlock on the peninsula In fact the so-called ‘lost victory’ never stood a chance... On the night of 6/7 August 1915 British IX Corps was landed at Suvla Bay as part of a major effort to break the deadlock on the Gallipoli peninsula. Legend has it that it failed by a narrow margin, and that a wonderful opportunity to win the campaign was missed. British troops, despite facing minimal opposition, failed to push on boldly off the beaches. As a result the Ottomans were able to move troops to seal off the potential breakthrough. Worse, while the British were, according to one version, brewing tea on the beaches, Australian soldiers were fighting and dying in a diversion at Lone Pine and a major attack on Sari Bair ridge. The failure at Suvla ensured the Anzac assault would also fail. Thus was lost the chance of the Allies finally breaking through the Turkish trenches, reaching the west bank of the Dardanelles and commencing the clearance of the coastal defences prior to the fleet finally forcing its way through the straits and heading for Constantinople. This ‘lost victory’ view is a fantasy. The main attack was launched from Anzac Cove, not Suvla. Britain’s IX Corps was put ashore not to carry out some great Napoleonic masterstroke, aiming deep at the Ottoman rear, but to secure the bay as a logistic base for the operations against Sari Bair and beyond. Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford was clearly not the most dynamic of commanders, but he cannot be blamed for failing to convert an operation intended to do one thing into something entirely different. What happened at Suvla had no bearing on the bitter struggle for Sari Bair. The attack failed there because the plan was deeply flawed and immediately went awry. Even if Sari Bair had been taken and held, as Australian historian Rhys Crawley has shown in meticulous detail, the obstacles that remained were formidable: punishing terrain to be crossed, insufficient numbers of troops and guns, woefully inadequate logistic support, and a determined and tenacious enemy. These factors meant that, far from the August Offensive failing narrowly, the plan was horribly overambitious and effectively doomed from the beginning. Myth 5: It was a heroic-romantic campaign Early historians glamorised Gallipoli, but fighting there differed little from the western front... The experience of the ordinary British soldier at Gallipoli did not differ in essentials from his counterpart on the western front. However, in contrast to the Somme and Passchendaele, the British have constructed what historian Jenny Macleod has called a “heroic-romantic myth” around the fighting at the Dardanelles. It joins a select band of aspects of the First World War that have received this treatment – the exploits of air aces over the trenches and TE Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt are two others. The bloody attritional battles on the western front simply did not lend themselves to being romanticised, although heroic acts by individuals were plentiful. Why Gallipoli was treated this way is a complex question. Some, at least ex-public school officers, were thrilled to be fighting almost within sight of the ruins of Troy, an area which had a glamour absent from, say, the slag heaps and mining cottages of the Loos area of northern France. Perhaps looking back on glorious defeat in an enterprise that apparently came close to shortening the war offered some psychological compensation for veterans of the campaign and for the bereaved. Certainly some of the key figures in romanticising Gallipoli through their writings, men such as General Sir Ian Hamilton, who commanded the Allied forces, and Winston Churchill, had good reason to rewrite history to defend their reputations. For the ordinary soldier the campaign was bereft of glory and romance. Instead there were primitive trenches that were so close to the beaches that even in rear areas it was impossible ever to be completely free of danger, vermin, dust that got into food and tea, and the ever-present flies: “They were all around your mouth and on any cuts or sores you’d got, which all turned septic through it,” Private Harold Boughton remembered. Above all there was the fear of death and wounding, the strain of combat, and of course the awful sights and sounds produced by 20th-century industrialised warfare. Private Ernest Lye wrote of “the cries of the wounded and see[ing corpses] rotting in the glare of the sun”. These were the aspects of Gallipoli that have been airbrushed out of the potent heroic-romantic myth. Gary Sheffield is professor of war studies at the University of Wolverhampton. His books on the First World War include A Short History of the First World War (Oneworld, 2014). You can follow Prof Sheffield on Twitter @ProfGSheffield. This article was first published in the April 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
Peter FitzSimons discusses the disastrous World War One campaign from an Australian perspective, while Cormac Ó Gráda talks about the history of hunger.
On the centenary of the Battle of Gallipoli, Australian writer Peter FitzSimons describes the disastrous Allied campaign of 1915. Meanwhile, historian Cormac Ó Gráda, author of Eating People Is Wrong, explains how famines occasionally resulted in cannibalism.