 Do you need Troy & Gallipoli Tours ?
GALLIPOLI“Damn the Dardanelles ! They will be our grave!”
wrote Admiral Fisher to Winston Churchill in a letter dated 5 April 1915
. Those words were to haunt the Allied Naval Forces. Under the control
of Churchill, in his first major role as First Lord of the Admiralty, a
combined Allied force of nearly half a million men tried to force a passage
through the Dardanelles to Istanbul in order to knock Turkey out of the
war. After nine months of fierce fighting on both sides, the number of
the dead and wounded was staggering, with an estimated 500,000 casualties.
Some 86,000 Turks and 160,000 Allied troops lay dead.
It was one of the bloodiest and most tragic campaigns of the Great War,
characterised by hopelessly heroic bayonet charges against trenches defended
by machine guns. General von Sanders, the German commander of the Ottoman
armies, could not have guessed what forces he had set in motion when he
ceded command to Mustafa Kemal, his junior officer. Kemal climbed to the
top of the Conkbayir mountain range from where he could observe the activities
of the entire Allied fleet. During one of the many desperate struggles
that followed, he gave his exhausted soldiers the historic command: “I
am not ordering you to attack, I am ordering you to die.” They
did so and won the campaign.
Start at the Kabatepe Military Museum , then visit the Lone Pine Cemetery and Anzac Cove, where Australian and New Zealand troops lie, a moving testimony to the waste that is war. The actual battlefields are marked by explanation plaques. The Turkish Memorial at Anzac Cove, unveiled on Anzac Day, 25 April 1985 , bears and eloquent message of reconciliation written by Ataturk.
There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us,
Where they lie side by side here in this country of ours,
You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears;
Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace after having lost their lives on this land,
They have become our sons as well.
Every year on 25 April, surviving Anzac and Turkish veterans return to this historic place to remember their dead and renew their friendship.
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