The failures of Gallipoli

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The failures of Gallipoli

The objectives of the campaign were to capture Gallipoli, and then invade Constantinople. This would knock Turkey out of the war and encourage Turkey’s neighbours to join on the allied side. Then they would invade Austria through the South and leave Germany isolated and unable to continue the war.

The allies failed these objectives due to many reasons. The first reason for failure was due to lack of training and training in the wrong terrain. The allied and ANZAC troops were trained in the desert for a short period while Gallipoli was rocky with hills and trenches. They were not trained for landings on enemy beaches and therefore a lot of soldiers died. This shows the ill thought out plan, they should have trained the soldiers in similar terrain and also trained them for landings, which they didn’t.

The equipment was also very bad. ANZAC troops would make homemade bombs and use them as grenades due to lack of equipment and ammo. The allied tactics were also very bad, they would always shell the trenches and then attack so there was no element of surprise. Also they used stupid tactics which were to send men over no mans land knowing that there was hardly a chance that they would make it and even if they did it would be maybe one or two men against 100. This is also a sign of the ill thought out plan and also lack of supplies. I think that if the plan was thought out better then there would have been more supplies because it would have been obvious to the commanders that the amount of supplies they had would run out because it would take longer then they thought.

Also the communication was very bad, there were no lines of communication and they had to use runners who wasted a lot of time. This shows a sign of poor command and bad organisation, if there is no communication then, of course, there will be bad command since they can’t pass down orders very fast, or talk between commanders etc.

The initial attack and the second attack had four months difference giving the Turks time to get ready for the next attack. There were also rough seas a lot of the time and it was difficult to wait for the right weather due to the decrease of morale in the soldiers. This gave the Turks to restore order and get ready. This is also a sign of bad planning because they should have planned everything out much better and then attacked without pauses so that the Turks didn’t have a chance to rearm and train their men etc.

Turkish soldiers were “ordered to die” by their superiors and not to fight or retreat. An other big problem was the lack of water. There was no way to get desalinated water to the soldiers and therefore it was hard for them to drink water and therefore couldn’t fight very well. This also is a sign of bad planning leading to inadequate supplies because they should have seen that it would be hard to get water to the troops and therefore thought about how to get it to them easily so they don’t die of thirst. If they thought about this maybe less troops would have died and therefore maybe there would not have been a lack of troops. Dust and dirt also made life very difficult.

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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 ...

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