Why was it important that the Gallipoli Campaign should succeed?

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Question 1: Why was it important that the Gallipoli Campaign should succeed?

When the government went to war. They went in with a lot of public support. In the Christmas of 1914 there were uniforms of the soldiers fighting on sale for 6 to 12 year olds. This shows that the public were taking the war very lightly. Everyone was expecting it to be over the winter anyway. The War Council believed that they would win and get the war finished quicker by attacking other places. Admiral Fisher from the Baltic, Lloyd George from the Adriatic Sea against Austria and Kitchener advocated and attack from Palestine against the Turks.

The year of 1915 was the centenary of the Battle of Waterloo when the great Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated. This to the public would have seemed like good luck. Only a hundred years ago, a great battle was won and so they probably would have expected the same with Gallipoli.

        Eventually, when the bloody stalemate that had developed on the Western Front was made known, the public were annoyed that it was taking so long for the Allies to defeat the enemy. Soon, pressure was beginning to build up on the War Council to break the stalemate and to make some more progress but because of what the military was facing, a break through in the near future didn’t look like it was going to happen. Then, the war cabinet decided to open a new front somewhere to try and draw the enemy troops as thin as possible.

        

Then, on the 2nd January 1915, the Allies received a call for military help from the Russians, who by this point were a great ally to the Allied fighters, in the east. This meant that the war cabinet had to find a way to open a new front that would relieve pressure on the Russians, open a supply route to the Russians and that would knock out Allies of their enemy. This made the selection of places to open a new front smaller. ½ of Russia exports came through the Dardanelle Straits and the Turks had managed to close off the Dardanelles in 1914, stopping any of the supplies that Russia needed from getting through. Because the Dardanelles were vital supply routes for the Russians, it became imperative that the Russians re-opened them. One way to try and the Russian ports would take the Allies right past Germany, which would be too big a risk to take for the allied ships because of Submarines so the allies decided that this would be a good place to break through. If they managed to break through here, then they would have made a direct supply route to Russia, they would have managed to successfully take Turkey, one of the allies of the Germans, out of the war. This would then mean that they could march through the Balkans. This would then enable the Allies to attack one of Germany’s key allies, Austria-Hungry. This would also open a new front, which the war cabinet wanted and so they would take some pressure off the Russian troops by causing more troops to be diverted to protect this new front from progressing any further.

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If the Allies also managed to successfully break through then they stood the chance of gaining some of the independent states in an alliance against the Turks and Austro-Hungarians. Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and other such states didn’t like Turkey or the Austro-Hungarians. If the Allies broke through then they hoped to be able to convince these states to fight with them. If they won then the Allies would, as payment almost, give them parts of the Ottoman and Austro Hungarian Empire as it would belong to them and they would do with it what they wanted.

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