A failure, and a crime

Submitted by Matthew on 13 January, 2016 - 10:57 Author: Janine Booth

Janine Booth continues describing the history of what took place at Gallipoli. Part one can be found in Solidarity 388.


Guy Dawnay, one of Hamilton’s staff officers, went to London to tell the truth about what was happening. On 14 October, Britain’s Dardanelles committee sacked Hamilton, replacing him with Sir Charles Monro. By this time, the Allies were evacuating 600 men per day due to sickness and injury.

Monro studied the situation, and recommended abandoning the campaign and evacuating Gallipoli by the end of October. But Churchill denounced Monro with the words ‘He came, he saw, he capitulated’. Despite everything that had happened, Churchill was still prepared to sacrifice more blood on the altar of his political ambition.

The War Council sent Kitchener to investigate. He pondered the situation while men around him continued to suffer and die. On 22 November, he recommended a partial evacuation, of Anzac and Suvla bays, but not of Helles. Five days later, a three-day storm set in, killing hundreds and causing frostbite to thousands more – men whose own leaders had said that they should not have been there any more, who had no prospect of ‘winning’ anything, who just needed to get out.

Still the Cabinet could not make its mind up, and Kitchener changed his view. Eventually, the Cabinet decided on 7 December to evacuate Suvla and Anzac. The evacuation was achieved without any casualties, managed with greater competence than the campaign ever had been.

Turkey had won. It was defending its territory, and was not the aggressor in this particular campaign. But the “big picture”saw it not just supporting Germany’s imperial ambitions, but also fighting for its national power from the ashes of the Ottoman empire.

As the same time as it was winning in the Dardanelles (known as Çanakkale), Turkey was also massacring the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman empire. It killed up to 1.5 million in a genocide that began with rounding up 250 Armenians in Constantinople on the same day that the Allies set out to land on Gallipoli’s beaches. Last year, Turkey’s brutal and unpopular Erdogan government moved the annual Çanakkale commemoration from its usual date of 18 March to 24 April. Many suspect that one hundred years on from both, Erdogan wanted the Çanakkale centenary to obscure that of the Armenian massacre.

After Ottoman’s defeat in World War I, in the 1920s the Young Turks waged a war of independence led by Mustafa Kemal, who became the first President of Turkey, known as Kemal Atatürk, ‘father of the Turks’.

Australia and New Zealand were both British dominions, loyal to the ‘mother country’. When Britain advised it that war was looming in 1914, Australia was in the throes of an election. Both the existing Prime Minister and his Labor challenger (and soon-to-be successor) Andrew Fisher gave immediate support.

However, some in the labour movement opposed the war, and their numbers swelled as the truth of Gallipoli reached home. The labour movement successfully campaigned against conscription in referenda in 1916 and 1917, the Australian Labor Party expelling pro-conscription leaders such as Billy Hughes.

Some Gallipoli veterans returned disgusted with war and refused to attend Anzac ceremonies. Hugo Throssell won the Victoria Cross for supreme bravery at Gallipoli, then declared in 1919 that ‘the war has made me a socialist’. The last Australian Gallipoli veteran, Alec Campbell, who died in 2002, was a republican, peace activist and trade union supporter.

New Zealand imposed conscription in 1916. Those who refused, including several prominent Maori leaders, were either imprisoned or sent to war regardless. New Zealand left-winger Matt McCarten argues that ‘Much of the bravery shown was by people who refused to join this insanity and suffered mightily for it. It’s a reflection of the real mood of New Zealanders when, after the war, they elected these war opponents to Government.’

Perhaps Gallipoli persuaded Australians and New Zealanders that being outposts of imperial Britain was no longer acceptable, that Britain’s blundering and vicious rulers were not worthy of Australia’s deference. But the official Anzac narrative of nation-building adds more. Its attempt to unearth glory from a blood-soaked, stinking killing field has several problems:

Gallipoli was not a war of national liberation, but an imperialist invasion. While other countries mark a national day on a date when they achieved self-governance or independence, Anzac Day falls on the anniversary of an attempted military conquest.

Anzacs were sent to their purposeless deaths not just by British commanders, but by cruel and inadequate home-grown commanders too.

The narrative often mentions ‘manhood’ alongside ‘nationhood’, constructing masculinity as killing, dying, following ludicrous orders, putting up with mass slaughter, staying tough as you and your mates die and rot around you.

On resigning from the Government in November 1915, Winston Churchill said that in his view, “if there were any operations in the history of the world which, having been begun, it was worth while to carry through with the utmost vigour and fury, with a constant flow of reinforcements, and utter disregard for life, it was the operations so daringly and brilliantly begun by Sir Ian Hamilton in the immortal landing of the 25th April.” He remained a champion of the campaign with a self-confessed indifference to the lives lost.

In 1917, the British government’s Dardanelles Commission published its report, with gentle criticism of Hamilton, Stopford, Churchill, Kitchener and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Reading the detail of Gallipoli will add several names to your personal list of Great Scumbags of History, but as H N Brailsford cautioned in The Herald, ‘We shall go astray if we allow ourselves to pass a purely personal censure’.

History cannot help but remember Gallipoli as a bloodbath and an embarrassing defeat for Britain and its allies. It is usually presented as a defeat born of incompetence and bad judgement. Those were certainly important factors, but to blame them alone disguises what else Gallipoli represents – proof of the utter brutality of war and of the ruling class’s:

• contempt for working-class life

• forgiveness of its leaders’ disgraces • undemocratic military hierarchies

• worthless causes for which it will spill working-class blood.

Establishment history in the ‘Allied’ countries records Gallipoli as a failure: it asks why we lost. As socialists, we dig deeper, and reveal Gallipoli as not just a military miscalculation, but as a particularly murderous episode in a war in which neither side deserved our support – two competing imperial line-ups battling out ruling-class interests with working-class suffering and death.

To the Warlords

By William Kean Seymour

A slaughterous and wanton year is past,
Yet Carnage is not glutted; horror still
Upon red horror piled declares your will,
And moans no stricken soul “I am the last.”
Death’s self before his victims is aghast
And loth your impious folly to fulfil;
Terror is wearied, and its echoes shrill
Protest above your cannon’s belch and blast.

Yea, as this lone and desolate Christmastide,
Brown earth and white snow crimson for your pride.
Yea, at this feast of Him your lips profess
Moloch is sickened with his long excess,
And his pathetic legions slowlier ride
For pity of the world’s immense distress.
(Published in The Herald, 4 December 1915)

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