AS Spring turned to Summer, however, little progress was made. Reinforcements arrived, but the Turkish barrier across the neck of the peninsula proved stubborn. By December, more than 44,000 Allied soldiers had died and the plan was evidently failing.* Moreover, Bulgaria had declared for Germany, meaning that Allied troops were needed to bolster Serbia and Greece’s Macedonian Front. From December 8th, a phased evacuation began, always by night; during daylight hours, the illusion of ordinary military operation was maintained so thoroughly that the watching Turks noticed nothing unusual, and in a matter of days tens of thousands of soldiers simply melted away.
The Dardanelles Campaign had been a miracle of courage, logistics and illusion, yet the plan had misfired;* amid the recriminations, Herbert Asquith was ousted by David Lloyd George as Prime Minister, and Winston Churchill was dismissed as First Lord of the Admiralty. No changes in command, however, would reopen the ‘back door’ that Turkey had shut, and after the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the War in 1917, European liberty depended on victory at the Western Front.
Statistics available from ‘Gallipoli casualties by country’, provided by the New Zealand History website.
Two of those close to the events, John Buchan and John Masefield, regarded the campaign as something of a triumph. For Buchan, it was an astonishing feat of military organisation and sleight-of-hand. Masefield believed that it had delayed Bulgaria’s entry into the War, weakened Turkish troops and tied them down well away from the Russian border, and helped to bring Italy in on the Allied side. The British and Commonwealth soldiers who died at Gallipoli saved lives and liberties and changed the course of the War — just not in the way the Admiralty planned.