Trenches sometimes had 8 meters difference between them so you couldn’t throw grenades from one to the other due to the chance of them being thrown back. Lice, ants, flies and other insects would bite the soldiers and the soldiers could get infected and die.
There were four main reasons for the failures of the Gallipoli campaign. These were inadequate forces and supplies from Britain, an ill thought out plan, poor command and bad organisation.
Britain did not have enough soldiers to carry out the plan leading to a stalemate and trench warfare. They needed 100,000 soldiers but only got 20,000. This shows the inadequate troops and supplies in Turkey, and also poor command because the commanders should have seen that 20,000 soldiers was not enough to carry out the plan and therefore they should not have allowed the campaign to happen. If there were enough soldiers Britain could have conquered Gallipoli and used it as a port to bring in more troops and supplies to use to invade the whole of Turkey and Austria. The equipment used was not very advanced. Soldiers made homemade bombs to throw at the enemy and sometimes they exploded in the soldier’s face. Britain did not send proper sweepers to sweep the mines out of the Dardanelles and due to this quite a lot of ships were blown up, taking a lot of troops with them. The radio communication equipment was not good either and therefore commanders could not communicate very well. Due to this sometimes there were inaccurate timings when attacks were supposed to happen due to different time settings on different commander’s watches. There were no good medical supplies either and therefore wounds and cuts could kill people if they were infected. There was no penicillin either and therefore infections were hard to cure. Out of 410,000 British and ANZAC troops who fought in the campaign 213,980 died, just under three quarters of them from disease.
There was an inadequate supply of clothes for the soldiers as well, the soldiers were prepared for hot weather, but like the Nazi’s in Russia in WWII, the soldiers did not have warm clothing and died of exposure. 15,000 troops died of exposure to the cold. This also limited the amount of soldiers that could be used and added to the problem of inadequate soldiers to carry out the plan. As well as dying of cold, there were a lot of soldiers that died of thirst. There was not a lot of water, since drinking water was hard to bring to the trenches. What made it worse for the soldiers was that they could see the sea water right behind them, but they could not distill this water, and therefore they couldn’t drink a lot of this water. In the Modern World History book on page 96 there is a quote showing how little there was to drink, “Salt beef today, hard biscuit and only one pint of tea for drink all day”. This quote shows how little food and drink there was.
The reason that there was such a lack of supplies was because of an ill thought out plan. If the plan were thought through better then the commanders would have noticed that this campaign was much harder then they thought and would take longer to take over Gallipoli. If they had noticed this then they would have maybe got more supplies to the trenches because they would have known how much was needed and prepared it earlier on. But because they didn’t plan out the campaign very well there was a lack of supply since Britain had to also supply all the other soldiers fighting elsewhere.
The commanders underestimated the Turks and therefore they thought the campaign would be so easy. Just like in Russia in WWII, there were many more Turkish soldiers then British soldiers. The Turks were simply “ordered to die” by their commanders. The Turks were of course more enthusiastic about the war and had a higher morale because they were fighting for their country. Of course it is much harder to invade then to defend because of this reason. The commanders were also too ambitious, the plan had no chance of success, even Churchill’s sidekicks, for example, Admiral Fisher, did not believe in the plan and resigned due to knowing the plan wouldn’t work.
If the commanders thought the plan through carefully they would have noticed that their plan to have an open sea route to supply Russia was much harder then they thought. Turkish forts covered the coast and mines left no spaces for battle ships to move in, as they found out when many of them sunk due to mines. They could not simply send in a few battleships and expect them to blow up the hundreds of forts along the coast. The British did not do enough reconnaissance to send in their troops. They should have found out exactly how many forts there were, how many soldiers there were defending them, how long it would take for the Turks to get reinforcements, and, around how many mines there were.
The British planned their attack on out of date maps so they should not have expected their plan to work. This shows both the poor command and the ill thought out plan as well as bad organisation because the poor command turned the plan into a bad plan not thought out well making the battlefield and landings very disorganised because the plan was too ill thought out to follow.
The reason that Churchill might have thought that his plan was so ingenious was because he might have had cyclothemia. If he did have cyclothemia he must have been on a high at that moment so he pushed forward anything and would have thought it was good. This is because at a high, people with cyclothymia underestimate others and think that they are always right even though they could be terribly wrong. Churchill thought his plan would work, while Fisher, Wilson and Richard all had doubts in the plan. They thought the plan was badly co-ordinated, badly planned and did not have enough men.
The plan also was ill thought out because the training of the ANZAC soldiers landing on the beach took place in Egypt on sandy deserts, while they were going to land on rocky hills and had no training in trench warfare. The tactics used were also bad, showing the poor command, because they always used the same tactic. They shelled the enemy trenches until a specific time, then the ANZAC’s would attack. This took away every element of surprise, and it was no surprise to the British when the Turks started firing away at them with machine guns. Another case of bad tactics was when the ANZAC’s attacked the Turks as a diversion to keep the pressure of Suvla Bay where 20,000 British soldiers attacked. Instead of the soldiers over-running the forts and capturing them, the 20,000 soldiers dug themselves in and let the Turks get reinforcements. If they had kept going they would have surely taken that area over. This shows the poor command and bad organisation that took place in Gallipoli.
In Gallipoli, the commanders were ignorant and arrogant towards the lower rank’s needless dying. They sent wave after wave of soldiers over the trenches even though there was no realistic chance of them getting to the Turkish trenches before being gunned down. The commanders were too arrogant to retreat and lose face although the war was useless. The commanders did not give any serious thought about what was to happen after capturing Gallipoli, another show of an ill thought out plan and poor command. Fisher, Wilson and Richard – all admirals – resigned because they knew the plan would not work. This could have demoralised the other commanders and made them lose faith in the plan. There was a lack of communication between the commanding officers and therefore a lot of soldiers died, this is a sign of bad organisation and poor command. Churchill convinced the government that the plan would work whereas it got little support from the Armed Forces, this could have lead to poor command because commanders started to see that the plan would not work.
If the commanders were not as ignorant towards the lower ranks, then less soldiers would have died, and less soldiers would have been needed to be sent to Turkey. Then maybe their would not have been inadequate forces there.
There were other reasons for the failures of Gallipoli, for example the weather. This could not be controlled, but the commanders should have put more thought into what the weather would do. The weather made landing boats land at the wrong locations. The waves pushed the boats the wrong way and therefore they landed at the wrong place. If the commanders had thought about this they could have let the boats start at another position letting the waves bring them to the right landing place. The weather made the troops tired before the landings because it was very hard to control the boats. Also later on, the dust and dirt made it very difficult to fight in the trenches. Also the winter was very harsh towards the soldiers. If the commanders thought of all this then they could have avoided landing in the wrong places, and therefore spared a lot of troops dying.
The Turkish defenders were much more motivated then the British and ANZAC troops because it was their country and they were fighting in defence of their country. Also, it was a holy war towards them because it was a struggle to drive out the Christians from the Muslim Turkey. This led to more enthusiasm on the Turkish side.
All of these reasons are linked together; it is hard to say which reason was the most important for the failure of the Gallipoli campaign. The most obvious links are the links between poor command and bad organisation, and between the ill thought-out plan and the lack of soldiers and supplies. But I think the main reason for the failure of the Gallipoli campaign is poor command. I think that if there were better command, there would have been a much better thought-out plan because they would have given more thought to it and seen that their objectives were harder to do then they thought. Also if there was better command, they could maybe negotiated with other commanders and gotten more than 20,000 soldiers, which were not enough to take over Turkey. If the plan had been thought out better there would not have been soldiers dying needlessly, like the soldiers on the battleships hitting the mines, and therefore there would maybe not have been a lack of soldiers in Turkey. Also if there were better command, then there would have been better organisation. For example, if the commanders gave the soldiers better orders to follow then they might have been more successful. For example when the British troops dug in instead of over-running the Turks, which they could have done, the British troops did not know what exactly to do, and therefore they dug in. If the commanders gave orders not to dig in and keep going then they could have beaten the Turks in that battle.