7 – Churchill created one of the biggest disasters of the First World War

“The price to be paid in taking Gallipoli would no doubt be heavy, but there would be no more war with Turkey. A good army of 50,000 and sea-power – that is the end of the Turkish menace.”

Long before the heroics of the Second World War, there was the shame of the First. In the film Darkest Hour, it is briefly alluded to that there was a great mistake in the past that precluded Churchill from ever retaining any leadership role in a wartime government and the time has come to discuss it. That disgrace was the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 and in particular, the defeat at Gallipoli.

This catastrophe – arguably the worst British expedition of the First World War, in a war filled with horrendously ill-thought out expeditions – would hang over Churchill for the next two decades. The Dardanelles Strait is found in modern-day Turkey, in what was previously the Ottoman Empire, and was seen as a key route to supplying the British ally of Russia via sea. With the Western Front of the war a stalemate, it was seen as potential breakthrough, but few thought it possible. Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty and in charge of the Navy, thought otherwise.

Churchill drummed up support for a sea campaign in the Dardanelles, but was unable to gain the number of troops that he wanted. Nevertheless, he tried to break the stalemate anyway, with disastrous results. A planned naval assault on February 19, 1915, failed spectacularly in the heavily mined straits, and the Admiral in charge at a nervous breakdown. A second attempt failed again on March 18, losing half the fleet. Undeterred, Churchill ordered a land assault, with the first troops landing on the morning of April 25.

3,000 men were lost on the first day alone, and the Allies lost over 45,000 men in the first month, barely advancing up the beachhead. A stalemate then ensued, in which disease ran rife throughout the Allied lines and caused untold suffering. “The general health is bad with as many as 50 per cent of the men unfit for duty and unless relieved there will be, to a certainty, a severe epidemic of pneumonia, dysentery and enteric fever as the resisting power to disease is practically nil,” wrote on solider of the 12th Infantry. The forces fighting for the Crown at Gallipoli included huge numbers of Australians and New Zealanders, Irish, Indians, Canadians and Nepali Gurkhas, as well as French colonial troops. Six months after the invasion, and after nearly 90,000 people had been evacuated sick, the Allies withdrew.

Churchill, the architect of the Gallipoli Campaign, was roundly criticised. There had been no clear goals, inadequate support, poor maps, troops who had never seen combat before and a bevvy of poor strategic decisions. A commission was set up to investigate what had gone so horrendously wrong, while Churchill was demoted from his position at the head of the Navy and excluded from the Cabinet.

The experience should have been chastening for Churchill, but instead, he tried to extricate himself from the blame. He went on fighting in France, having resought an officer’s commission with the Army. He would later be made Minister for Munitions, in charge of supplying the forces, eventually ending the war there.

When the war ended, however, plenty of other conflicts would result. There had been an uprising in Ireland in 1916 (partly as a reaction to the amount of Irish killed unnecessarily at Gallipoli) and almost as soon as the war was over, another independence struggle sprang up. Churchill, so intransigently opposed to any British imperial loss, would have a large role to play in Ireland as well.