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The Gallipoli Campaig
The Gallipoli campaign, in which New Zealand made its first major effort during the First World War, had its origins in the stalemate which had developed on the Western Front by the end of 1914. Following the initial free-flowing operations, the opposing sides found themselves facing each other along a line of trenches which stretched from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. The power of the defence having already made its impact felt, statesmen in both camps were at a loss as to how to proceed. In these circumstances the need for an alternative approach was patent.
On the Allied side the search for an alternative was encouraged by the opportunities presented by superior seapower. With the German High Seas Fleet contained in the North Sea, the possibility of launching amphibious attacks on the enemy was particularly evident to the British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Impatient to use British naval resources, he advanced a series of proposals, among them an assault on the Dardanelles–the nearly fifty-kilometre-long strait separating the Aegean Sea from the Sea of Marmara, which at its narrowest point, the Narrows, was less than two kilometres wide. The object would be to pass a force into the Sea of Marmara and threaten the capital of Germany's ally the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople, which guarded another narrow waterway, the Bosphorus, into the Black Sea, was very vulnerable to seaward attack. Such action had precedents: in 1807 a British squadron had forced the Narrows only to be becalmed and eventually forced to retreat before it could attack Constantinople. As recently as the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12, an Italian force had attacked the Dardanelles and penetrated as far as the defences of the Narrows. Even before the Ottoman Empire entered the war on 31 October 1914, the possibility of a Greek&8212;Russian assault on the Dardanelles had been canvassed. Once hostilities began, Churchill had wasted no time in ordering a bombardment of the forts guarding the Narrows. This operation, carried out before Great Britain formally declared war on the Ottoman Empire, merely reminded the Turks of the threat to the Dardanelles, and impelled them to improve the defences, especially by the laying of minefields.
In London strategic issues were from November 1914 in the hands of the War Council, whose chief members were the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, the Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener, and Churchill. The last-named urged an attack on Gallipoli at its first meeting on 25 November. This was rejected—pre-war studies had indicated that such an operation would be too risky—but the issue was soon brought back to the foreground by developments in the war. With the Turks advancing northwards in the Caucasus, Russia appealed for action to relieve the pressure. The need was fleeting—Russian forces soon drove the Turks back—but impetus had been given to Churchill's concept of an attack on Turkey. The tempting idea of inducing the Balkan states to join the Allies and attack Austria-Hungary from the south-east, never more than an illusion, was also influential. [next page]